What Cries Out

The conclusion, “What Cries Out,” argues that there is no relation without atopia. Here the book unfolds the implications of its analysis for translation, ecology, and political life. When each philosophical concept and each living being contains an out-of-place, then the world is a relational field composed of out-of-fields. The metaphysical propositions of philosophy make liveable the space between the immemorial and the end of time, restoring a sense of wonder about the existence of the universe.

Theory of the Trans-ject

This chapter considers the problem of thinking singular existences as they are formed from the outside. Existence can only be encountered by the mechanism of the double advance, a dual motion that depends on the relations of existences in an existential field. In a central polyvocal section called “Coalitions,” the concept of the adventurous coalition is proposed to explain the creation of trans-jects, or subjective trajectories, through relation. This chapter also considers the implications of this new atopian trans-ject for both freedom and language. Finally, this chapter takes up the question of the trans-ject in the case of animals: Posing the subject as the repetition of an existential trans-ject, Neyrat argues, offers a way of thinking existence in its multiplicity, unpredictability, and eccentricity.

Toposophy

This chapter begins by taking stock of today’s hydroglobe, in which all varieties of global flux tend toward the inertia that produces saturated immanence. This immanence is temporal as well as spatial, produced by clairvoyance societies that do not punish deviation or alterity but seek to prevent it. This drive toward prevention is defined as the immunological drive of societies, structures, and individuals to remain undamaged in the face of forms of contagion which they at once produce and ward off. The task of philosophy is to carve out space for existence under these conditions. Yet Neyrat specifies that only a certain type of transcendence is useful: transcendence ≈ x, or the motion of a pluralized world of beings toward an outside. Finally, this chapter introduces the idea of a divergence internal to philosophy itself, through the figure of Socrates, who contains within him a split, a space, and the atopia necessary for philosophy.

The Metaphysical Proposition

Chapter three examines the construction of philosophical concepts. The chapter offers a defense of the imagination in the formation of metaphysical propositions. Arguing for a return to metaphysics, Neyrat distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines by bringing attention to the out-of-place that drives philosophical thinking. What separates philosophy is its definition as a reflexive practice of atopia. At the same time, the madness of philosophical atopia leads philosophy toward its others: Chapter three concludes by investigating philosophical atopia as it inflects the sciences, art, religion, and politics.

Critique of Pure Madness

This chapter proposes the necessity of a radicalized existentialism for a world in which both philosophy and existence are denied the possibility of an outside. Outlining the situation of contemporary thought, in which both poststructuralism and Object-Oriented Ontology have tended to deny binary difference and hierarchy at the expense of reproducing those hierarchies or of flattening everything onto a single plane of existence, Neyrat defines a new version of transcendence, transcendence ≈ x, which does not delimit a transcendent entity so much as set up a motion toward the outside. In the face of this contemporary ontological regime of saturated immanence, which is both philosophical and practical, Neyrat argues that philosophy’s task is to re-think existence in all its eccentricity, starting from the category of the trans-ject, and to stake out an atopia, an inside-outside space for thought and being.