Life in-the-Last-Humanity:

On the ‘Speculative’ Ecology of Man, Animal, and Plant

François Laruelle

Translated by Sven Läwen, with John Mullarkey

I seek a very narrow passage between biology and philosophy, which is controlled neither by

spontaneous philosophy nor by positive molecular biology but which, however, uses both, once

they have been modeled in a new combination. The philosophy of life is the philosophy of the

immanence of life (Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Henry) but it suffers from its usual

‘sufficiency’. The science of life, molecular biology, eventually gave rise to a first quantum

formalisation (Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger). A novel ontic theory of life, of course, cannot be

our object. On the other hand, the knowledge of life, in so far as it concerns humanity, is our only

and unique ‘ontological’ object. Our project has a ‘transcendental’ aspect and is about the

knowledge of life. We are situated in neither of these two types of solution (science and ontical-

ontology) which are, each in its own way, antithetical and positive. Yet we are almost

simultaneously going to require – both as productive forces of knowledge – a certain non-positive

quantum modeling of life, and a certain philosophy of life which, however, is no longer dominant

and sufficient.

Why this complicated strategy, what is its challenge? It is double: reformulating a problematic of

ecology as a context for the knowledge of life, and in particular for human life. On the first point,

can ecology become a competing project of philosophy? What are the conditions of a rigorous

thought of life that offers life its full ecological range? On the second point, at stake is the

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knowledge of universal life in human life, but also the human life and knowledge in all animal and

plant life. How is it possible, for instance, to break with deterministic causality, without the risk of

returning to the Great Whole of a universal ecology? It is about suspending this other antithetic

causality between determinism and a vicious causality and about establishing a new Anthropic

Principle upon the ruins of the ecological anthropology. On the condition, however, of a decisive

nuance that the Anthropic Principle is ‘of-the-last-instance’ and that the ecology is a thought ‘in-

the-last-humanity’.

Among all the aporias which obstruct thought, few have been as insistent as the difference

between man and animal and, more generally (by adding plant-life) as the circular and vicious

conception of the MAP system (Man, Animal, Plant). This abstract generality, suitable for daily

conversation as much as for philosophers, requires a radical clearing out of thought but in no way

a tabula rasa. It is not about effacing any differences by a summary rejection of metaphysics but

only about finding a non-sufficient principle of distribution of the living within the life. The

indefinite asymptotic rapprochement of man and animal seems to us as unthought as their

absolute difference and comes within the same philosophy of ‘conversation’. We oppose the

‘being-in-the-last-humanity’ of all life as much to the circularity of a hermeneutic ecology as to its

causal linearity and we say that ‘in-the-last-humanity’ can be said as well as ‘pre-priority of man’

over animal and plant. From the point of view of causality, this is a paradox since the two senses

seem to be opposite but each of the two is provided with a nuance making them compatible. At

any rate, what is excluded is the metaphysical priority of man over the two other genera of life,

man’s supposed superiority and sufficiency of measurement for the others. There is a plane of

immanence of life where each of the three genera is equal to the two others and this plane is

defined by the univocity of the lived such as it is imposed by the quantum postulate of its
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discreetness as a minimal threshold under which it is impossible for life to descend. This threshold

has only been approached by molecular biology (in the form of a code of life) for a positive

science of life. But we pose the quantum of lived experience as the threshold which makes life

accessible to a science which is generic this time. Of course, this discreetness of the minimal of

lived which conforms to the quantum spirit is contrary to speculation and renders impossible what

I was announcing as ‘speculative ecology’ in an excessive sense, but then I aimed at a

formalisation in-the-last-humanity of life rather than at a speculation à la Hegel on the great circle

of life.

The concealed fundamentals of traditional ecology are differential and naturalistic, enclosed in

eco-logical difference. They go back at least to Aristotle and continue to legitimate outbursts

within politics and the media. The aggravated criticisms of ecological ‘movements’, and of those

whose basis is less in thought than in a celebrated ‘empathy’, is hardly sufficient. We would still

have to update the possibility for ecology to come within the immanence of life in these three

paradigmatic forms: human, animal, and plant; and we would still have to elucidate the role –

both deadly and protective – which humans play in this ecological triangle. The mass of non-

clarified presuppositions are justified by a theoretical bric-a-brac, philosophical approximations

and habitual ignorances about man that philosophy, being devoted to the world’s inertia,

maintains in good conscience. If eco-logical difference is encompassing, if its modalities and its

dimensions are various, such difference as a structure is meant to efface itself. It shows little real

range and effective work, preferring instead to speculate about technology, being, climate, or the

exploitation of nature. Reduced to the denunciation of the devastating relationships of man and

animal in the plant arena of the earth, or the problems of the survival of humanity, it provides

political, ideological, and mediatised agitation against which abstract speculations about man and

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man’s being in the world, about body and spirit, about matter and memory, are in constant strife.

A dissociation affects it, supported at the extreme, by, on the one hand, a Darwinian scientific

naturalism leading onto an animal culture and pathos, and , on the other, a religious and

creationist nostalgia that is identifiable in a too short, ready-made comprehension of the

indivisible essence of man.

Philosophical Unification and Generic Unification of the Living

A unification of life is presupposed by philosophy as a maximal hierarchy of absolute Life over the

living (and of man over animal) as a minimal or asymptotic hierarchy (grounded in evolutionist or

biological science).

To the MAP relations (Man-Animal-Plant) we can apply the principles of the unification of theories

as exemplified by quantum physics since, as a matter of fact, there are traditionally three possible

theories or at least three major fields of biology. They are also the three a priori forms which we

draw and receive our relation to life, that is, ultimately, to the lived. This is an entirely possible

extension and a functional easing of the a priori which is no longer a form of intuition in the

rationalist sense, but a ‘formal intuition’ (Kant) or an onto-vectorial materiality. The layer of the a

priori is important in transcendental quanta. Yet the issue here is not an objectivation of life along

the model of rationalistic, transcendental objectivation of the hard sciences. We shall return to this

point.

The generic unifications are based on constants that assure the discreetness of the Real and, hence,

a subtraction and an under-determination. On the contrary, the biologico-philosophical

unifications are based on sufficient reason or sufficient life, and, therefore, on transcendence. They
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proceed by the overdetermination of individuals by the a priori living and then, of these latter,

either by theology (creation following the divine plan of salvation), or by the history of life leading

to man (natural evolution). Darwin represents a first biological, unitary and positive unification

which might be interpreted as a matrix inclining toward the animal side; while we will re-orient or

make it tilt to the human, but via algebra rather than theology. Creationism and Darwinism are

two opposite theories which must be suspended. Aristotle, Descartes (the modern problem of body

and soul, then of the spirit), and Darwin are the three key milestones of unification. Among the

raw givens that every science of life has to take into account, MAP are neighbours or related in a

Darwinian continuity: the continuum of life which nourishes philosophy. From this point of view,

they form the chain of the living as its properties or variables. So each represents packets of

communicating properties, exchanged and mixed with differences in degrees but not in nature.

The biologico-positive Darwinian chain and its junctions therefore imposes the tendential

effacement of any difference, first and foremost of any difference of theological origin. But a

matricial theory of a quantum spirit imposes the reduction of these macroscopic data to the state of

variables and their formalisation as a priori productive forces or conjugatable variables.

The continuism of most of these hypotheses, including the ‘differential’ one, tolerates macroscopic

distances (the pilot on his ship, the soul, and the body) or asymptotic approximations with animal

culture: the nearly symbolic and near-language, near-affectivity, near-technology of the animal,

etc., without counting conversely the decidedly or desperately animal character of man. Hence,

hence, we have a whole culture of encounter between man and animal by affectivity, language,

and concern. We enter little by little an animal culture which is a post-modern way to respond to

the old problems of body and spirit and to abandon their speculative character for circular

descriptions that demonstrate all that one wants to demonstrate, that validate one’s prejudices.
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In a generic perspective, on the contrary, we will consider life from a triple point of view: as a

relatively autonomous and specific experience between physics and psychology (which border it);

as a real content in the form of a triad of living or of genera of life (MAP), and finally as defined by

a system of material and formal constants, the most important of which are the quantum of lived

rather than the molecular quantum, the onto-vectorial materiality of the living, that is, ultimately,

the algebraic rule of idempotency that provides life with its generic and ‘subjective’ style. The

approach is that of a certain scientific rigour which is not that of the human sciences, but of a new

type of objectivation of common, philosophical and even positive scientific statements: a new

objectivation oriented by and for the ‘in-the-last-humanity’ and modeled by quantum thought. A

radical posture requires us to suspend, in one go (for lack of a rigorous and human form),

culturalist, linguistic, psychological, or even epistemological approaches in order to focus the

MAP system yet more on itself, and to multiply the common performances and mixtures, in order

to affirm the sufficiency of the unity of life. We propose to change the type of criteria and to

entrust to a generic theory of physical inspiration the concern of determining an ultimate but non-

sufficient criterion of distinction which will put the protection of man, of animal, and of plant

down to human responsibility of-the-last-instance. It is no longer about making either a materialist

or theological metaphysics of life but about inventing a theory of knowledge of life through itself.

The function of the a priori and, more generally, of the constants of life is the constitution of an

ecology-oriented discipline in a broad sense which exceeds the uniquely human concerns about

economical survival and spreads the ecological concern to the ensemble of nature and perhaps,

who knows, to the cosmos. The ideal of a humanisation of nature, of the animal and man himself

alike, is on the verge of being abandoned in favour of the ethical, otherwise universalist ideal: the

ideal of protection and of a good, durable economical and epistemological use of nature.
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However, on pain of an ideological vicious circle, we have to keep certain means of raising or the

self-domestication of life as productive forces, that is, to keep ‘the bathwater’ (which can always

be used again) for we certainly won’t be able to keep it if we throw the baby (or man) out at the

same time. It is urgent to test the knowledge we can have about life with new principles, and to

realign ethics and epistemology on the ‘encounter’, as we say now, with the animal and the plant.

This encounter requires a new concept of the MAP equality, a re-evaluation of the notion of

‘human nature’ and of his degree of destruction. How to abandon or to modify the metaphysical

concept of nature in order to establish at least three principles, that of the protection of man, a

decreased suffering for animals, and a moderate use of the plant?

The crucial problem is this: how to combine the indivisibility of life with its discreetness? How to

register the destruction of human nature achieved through the biological sciences, the radical

inclusion of man within the equality of life, yet not efface completely the fundamental trait which

has been misinterpreted by philosophy as a separate human nature: a very small irreducible

distinction that functions neither as a privilege nor as an exception, but as a ‘last-instance’; that is,

that man alone has this power that is entirely intelligible (though uncertain in its application to life),

to be open to a scientific and generic constant of humanity that does not in any way exclude the

complete affiliation of humans to animal nature and the problem of their common survival? It is

certainly not about a transcendent indivisibility of a thing, a concept, an essence or even a

molecular nature. There is no doubt that we will have lost every notion of a human nature in the

classical and metaphysical sense – where man serves as a model and as a measurement for the yet

deficient animal. But, with what will we replace it? The ‘in-the-last-humanity’ requires to build up

like a quadriparty of constants suitable for a discrete but impartible or indivisible humanity. To

solve this problem, it will be necessary to admit that life, far from being a continuous growth, is
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marked by a collapse or a general breakdown that is revealed by the discreetness of quanta of

lived.

A Transcendental Science of Life as Self-awareness

The framework of the problem will thus be that of life and not that of man and animal that is too

narrow and has become specular or circular. It is also necessary to add to this the plant and to

consider the triad of the living. In order to open up this attempt in its ecological, thus worldly and

maybe cosmological dimensions. We will try, in a phenomenological but also microscopic spirit,

to treat life, on the one hand, as an indivisible phenomenon by affirming its relative autonomy and

the specificity of its phenomenon as an environment of existence that is suitable for the living. We

will also endeavor to escape its immediate confusion with physics and psychology, with

materialism and psychologism. It is different from the matter and the soul of human sciences,

though it borrows from both of them (that is its relativity). Yet, we will also to register the echo of

the principle of the quantum as a quantum of discrete lived. We assume that the ontology of the

knowledge of life is very real but fundamentally unstable and that it can be known (albeit in a

probable way) through a model used in physics. And, secondly, that it is without a doubt because

of the intervention of man as a principle of-the-last-instance or as a generic factor, a second

manifestation coming from psychology, that life is partially intelligible.

As regards life, we are, without a doubt, particularly condemned to oscillate between science and

philosophy, rather than physics and psychology, when we have access to a layer of lived and

rigorous experience while trying to comply with its phenomenon. More than in physics, less than

in psychology, the intervention of man is always decisive but equivocal and due to rushed

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decisions. Bergson and Darwin are the two main thinkers of the essence of life in a way that

combines science and philosophy. The first thinker deploys philosophical means just as the

second deploys scientific means. But this fusion of differential and continuous means stays under a

philosophical domination or orientation (be it materialist or spiritualist) and hardly enters the

phenomenal and indivisible specificity of life. On the contrary, Marx is a great generic rather than

philosophical thinker and orients the knowledge of life altogether differently than Darwin and

Bergson. Our thesis is apparently paradoxical: man is without a doubt an ordinary animal, yet at

the same time (though perhaps not exactly at the same time), this very factor requires that life, in

order to become thinkable, is relative separate from physics and psychology, as well as having

recourse to both of them. The generic is not the pure or positive physical or psychological: it is the

human or anthropic principle (not the anthropo-logical principle) that provides us with a use of

positive physics and psychology, as well as their philosophical interpretation with a new range

and also a limitation.

The fight against reductionism, against the physical and psychological over-interpretation of life is

difficult to estimate. For, physics and psychology cannot be totally be evacuated, they can serve as

modelings and not as reductions of life and of its intelligence. On the one hand, life borrows from

physics (rather than from the positive biologies) a modeling of the problem in a weak and reduced

form of its knowledge and refuses to lose itself in positivity. One may recall Neils Bohr who tried

to expand quantum thought to biology (which we will do in our own but less positivist way). In

addition, life borrows from a psychological modeling, for its object or ontology this time, as will

soon be seen with the quantum of life or lived. Here, one may recall Aristotle and Bergson. But we

will do it in a less spiritualistic way. Finally, one may recall Marx who understood this autonomy

of life in a generic way, man as a natural being that makes nature human. Especially in his early
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writings before the Communist Manifesto, he tried to bind together physics and psychology in the

generic human; we will also do that, though with certain nuances. The physico-psychological

synthesis operates in the subjects of life, that is, the three types of living (MAP) who are the three

stages or modalities of life: the living as types or a priori forms of life experience.

Once the sufficiency of these philosophical interpretations of life is rejected, how do we justify a

theory which proceeds by a combination that is apparently similar to science and philosophy but

altogether differently oriented? A scientific interpretation is in any case necessary: here it is

quantum thought that is the most operative because it allows us to integrate and to limit the

philosophy of life as a variable, which suspends any interpretations in terms of entirely

philosophical means, which then makes a generic interpretation of the matrix possible. Hence a

double movement towards philosophy: 1. its suspension through its reduction to the status of a

variable and thus its relative conservation as a given or a dimension of life; 2. its substitution

through the generic that brings this science back to humanity of-the-last-instance, that is, without

humanism.

Since physics and psychology are here required not as experimentations but as possible modelings

of the science of life, how do they operate? Quantum modeling requires a form of the ‘quantum

principle’, a discrete constant which can be entirely expanded beyond the quantum of action, but

which is suitable to life. Its psychological modeling requires that this quantum of life is a quantum

of lived, thus indivisible and discrete. Life is no ordinary or self-encompassing general milieu, a

generality, it is distinguished from that by its constant, which is discrete and specific. It is a milieu

for the MAP system, the three living; and yet, by virtue of its discreetness, it is not all-

encompassing in the sense of the philosophical whole at the same time. This antinomy is the same

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as that of the indivisible and discrete quantum. We enter into the sphere of life by the lived that is

no more reduced to the psyche than it is to nature. The lived must be understood as an objective

entity derived from the psychological realm, but is irreducible to it. It is the substance of life, even

in the plant. The ‘lived of consciousness’ (Husserl and the phenomenologies) is only a

transcendent and irreal restriction. Here, the constant is an epistemological and transcendental

tool, not a substance: rather, it defines a relatively accessible sphere of phenomena for a restrictive

scientific attitude. This quantum of lived means that we do not search for the being or the

consciousness of life but for its last or its prior-to-primary humanity. We do not immediately tack

an ontology onto life, neither a Darwinian evolutionistic materialism nor a Bergsonian spiritualism.

Philosophical ontology will be properly included and used as a necessary variable, though

reduced or without sufficiency.

But why shall we search for a physical plane? It is less a question of a modeling of life in its ontic

specificity than of a modeling of the knowledge of life in its generality. Without achieving self-

awareness or being a pure positive exteriority, the living is defined by a certain self-awareness

even though the lived is not the generic itself such as it will depend on what I call the ‘algebra of

idempotency’ in the form of ‘being-in-the-last-humanity’ (as will be seen during the examination

of the constants of this knowledge).

The ecological knowledge of life is a set of theoretical operations which combines two orders: the

generic order (one) which gives meaning to the analytic construction (two) while providing it with

a base or infrastructure. These two orders meet in each of the phases, in the three givens (MAP)

which are the base materials or which respectively serve as variables in the matrix. In each of

these encounters they are considered as the formal a priori of life and serve, by an inversion of

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meaning, as a formal or onto-vectorial intuition of life. Finally, they unite with generic unity, that

is, with an idempotent and immanental rather than transcendental identity. The order of analytic

construction that stretches from the experience of life to its knowledge in-the-last-humanity across

the onto-vectorial architecture of the three a prioris, supposes that the three givens are under-

determined in a quantum and generic manner by the concreteness of the generic matrix that

determines its functional status in all phases or pieces of the matrix.

The Quadriparty of the Constants Constituting ‘Being-in-the-Last-Humanity’

Our point of view is not to establish a new ontic theory of life, something we are incapable of

doing, but a theory of knowledge of life. This point of view, therefore, has something

transcendental about it without being that completely. However, we will not cynically confuse the

two planes. The knowledge of life is itself a scientific object and, like every scientific object, it is

structured by constants that form a quadriparty and which must first be determined in order to

frame and to limit its process. A generic science of life is a duality of entangled structures: 1. on

the one hand, the quantum model applied to the living (who host life) implies its interpretation as

onto-vectorial and (lived) materiality forming an onto-material a priori for life such as it is given-as-

represented, that is, the quantum wing of this theory; 2. on the other hand, a generic re-orientation

of this science that corrects its positivity which is too easily offered to philosophy and conditions it

in a way that we are going to call immanental rather than transcendental, whilst taking the place

of the One of philosophical sufficiency that crosses the great evolutionistic interpretations we have

talked about.

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These two structures, which are like infrastructure and superstructure contain four constants. The

constants of a science of life (hence a generic science of life) are multiple types, though crossed in

a matrix, and cannot have the simplicity of a positive science of a scientific object. They are

formal and algebraic with the ‘imaginary number’ implying the vectoriality of the real and

idempotency (which is a substitute for the One of sufficiency, thus ensuring the generic character

of the quantum matrix). But they are also material by the quantum postulate of the discrete lived or

quantum of lived, and by the three types of living (MAP) which are material, quasi-physical and

biological constants. Two formal ones of mathematical essence, and two typically material ones of

life and of biology.

1. The ‘quantum postulate’ can be extended to life and not just to its molecular form as a code of

life. Molecular biology only knows amino acids and must make a quantum leap to intervene at the

level of chemistry. However, the quantum postulate is also decisive in the knowledge of life and

not just in its chemistry: it is constitutive and not just a regulator of the discrete and indivisible

lived. It is the material constant that is the basis of a quantum thought of life (which will persist in

a constant of formal as well as material humanity). The quantum matrix thus supposes the

quantum of lived replacing physical matter: it is the equivalent of the quantum of action or energy

and thus it is a lived in a broad sense. The lived is the substance of life, its point of departure and

what limits every physical, psychological or philosophical control over it.

Against continuist theories, we will oppose, as a priority, the discreetness of the quantum of lived

which imposes limits on the philosophical interpretations of life (for Bohr, discreetness is what

limits classical physics and its concepts), and frees the vectoriality of life as a project. The quantum

of lived (not yet exactly of humanity) is the non-quantitative equivalent of energy or action: it is

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the threshold from which life begins for the living (even for the plant). Under the impression of the

vague character of the lived – just like an indeterminate and unarticulated energy – it is necessary

to set out that the lived is not continuous but discrete. We are far away from Bergson (at least

according appearances, since he does employ the differential calculus), in particular by this return

to discreetness (though it is uncertain whether or not it is spatial). The experienced constant is

discrete, despite being treatable in a scientific, microscopic and non-macroscopic manner, like a

continuum. The energy is discrete — so why not, too, the lived experience which replaces it? The

Deleuzian ‘liveds’ are very multiple or molecular...

It is important not to confuse the lived with consciousness and the flow of macroscopic or

ecological consciousness; the difference is less a substantial representation than a method and an

access to the real. And even if one identifies, through reciprocal exclusion or complementarity, the

flow and the particle (as authorized by quantum thought), it is no longer the flow of consciousness

but the discrete lived. There is a knowledge of life which is not the consciousness of life. Neither

Darwin and naturalism nor Bergson and spiritualism, which are philosophical positions derived

either from biology or from spirituality and which reply to another constant. We search for a

scientific constant of life that is neither naturalistic or materialistic nor spiritualistic, but proper to

the living. The constant of lived guarantees a position of the problem of life that is at the same time

scientific, human, and not theological, creationist, nor materialist.

2. A second material but contingent constant, that of the three types of living (the contingent MAP

system) which express the lived. But this material constant can be included in several levels, as an

empirical and contingent given, and is inside the matrix as constituting three relatively universal

and necessary a prioris that allow us to objectify the lived.

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3. A constitutive, formal and intuitive constant, vectoriality, thus the imaginary number, registered

in a Hilbert configuration space. A constant, at the same time geometric and algebraic, that

contributes to the definition of the real object, that is life, and to distinguish it from any

representation.

4. Another formal constant suitable for the generic dimension is idempotency as an algebraic

property that maintains a close relationship with the imaginary number and the vectoriality across

the philosophical variable. The onto-material lived, removed from physical and psychological

experience, but provided by philosophy, is treated at first in a quantum way in the matrix. But it

passes into the generic status (though not related to itself in human reflection in the manner of a

philosophical subject). It is indexed to the algebraic factor of idempotency. From this point of view,

we will carefully distinguish between Kantianism (original synthetic unity of apperception = I

think) and the algebraic solution of idempotency, here its successor as a generic factor.

Together, they form the generic constant of in-the-last-humanity. We won’t confuse the scientific

constant of the lived which holds for the MAP system, and the generic such as we understand it

here, as non-commutative with the content of the matrix, as what rescinds philosophical

sufficiency and its scientific modalities. It only directly concerns man alone and passes from man

to animal and to plant, but only in-the-last-humanity. Man in the strict sense, what we still call as

such, maintains ambiguous relations of identity and communication with the animal or the plant;

so much so that one will also distinguish man in the metaphysical and/or animal sense in the MAP

system and its being-in-the-last-instance.

[…]

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Generic Science of Life and its Phases

There are three types of living or three contingent stases of life, equal and without any hierarchy

(the MAP system). Yet they each form five phases in the becoming of their reality in accordance

with their knowledge. The three living can be considered under five angles or ascending phases,

from the empirical to the last-humanity. These are those of their knowledge and these phases are

going to be distinguished from every philosophical hierarchy: 1. As represented, or in themselves

(as Newtonian, if you wish), 2. As variables in the matrix or VM for the knowledge of life or even

as forms of the intuition of life, 3. As an a priori that is not formal anymore, but a formal intuition

determined as an a priori of a quantum type, forms of intuition that are themselves onto-material

and onto-vectorial, 4. And so under their ultimate condition of reality, being ‘in-the-last-humanity’,

or a priori under a generic condition, 5. Finally, the last phase of the knowledge of life, the reality

that is not the individual but the clone of the individual, a clone of the individual representation, a

last known condition of life.

1 As empirical givens. MAP are at first simple entities in themselves of the representation,

separable, localisable and mixible givens, and correspond at best to a classical philosophy

or to a Newtonian state of the problem. It is the place of hierarchy of the living, their war

and their excesses.

2 As variables, Productive Forces (PF), or forms of the intuition of life. Two combined with

two in the matrix of life, the three living MAP become variables; in particular, man is not

more than a variable next to others and is without privilege. These are all matricial

variables (retroactively), properties or PF or the future quantum knowledge of life. For there

to be a universal and necessary science of life, a science modeled by quantum thought and

psychology, a theoretical quasi-transcendental device is needed. The a priori is needed, and

the quantum thought is needed, as known to have definite distended but real relationships
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 with transcendental philosophy. The three types of living, MAP, are the first level of still

formal transcendental aesthetics.

3 As a formal intuition and not forms of intuition anymore. For this science to be generic,

neither philosophical nor positive (yet including these two disciplines through its variables),

we will have to pass from the formal a priori to the formal intuition that is onto-vectorially

constituted. Among themselves, they form inverse, unequal products: they are non-

separable, non-localisable in a totally different sense than in representation. One cannot

mix these two or three planes, that of the philosophical representation of classical ecology,

nor that of their matricial use. This transformation of the givens de facto into a real non-

formal a priori is the effect of the quantum matrix that retroacts on its givens and transforms

them into simple variables without sufficiency. That is one or another plane. In a way, man

has no exorbitant or metaphysical privilege in quantum thought, even when it is about life;

it is an a priori of the lived like other combined variables. We obtain inverse products, MA

(Man as Animal) and AH (Animal as Humanized), but also MP [Man as Plant] and PM

[Plant as Man] which form unequal and above all non-commutative products for the

knowledge of life. The variables must be treated as non-rigid and non-formal a priori, onto-

material a priori which are suitable forms of the onto-vectorial experience of life and by

means of which the knowledge of life is given to us.

The a priori go by dualities or pairs, either space/time or wave/corpuscle. But it is more

complex still: the ‘transcendental’ aesthetics that, in general, controls the intuition (here of

represented life), and only asks, as we know since Kant, to surpass itself, is therefore always

a redoubling. The forms of intuition are replaced by formal intuition, the couple wave-

corpuscle is unified by their equivalence, so much so that this redoubling is also a dividing
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 into two of one of the terms. We have to pass to another level, that of the transcendental

imagination or even that of a mathematical system. We should pose the problem of a

generic schematisation, that is, of idempotency (as Original Generic Unity) in vectoriality.

4 As means of cloning. From the matter of the representation in itself of the three living givens,

the three living themselves that are as the a priori but generic of life across which life

experiments on itself and knows itself, we have to distinguish a fourth order of reality, what

these a priori determine of the representation in itself, taken as a matter. As PF, which are

within the hands of generic humanity, they get from this matter of beings a new type, that is

‘us’, the MAP that has come straight from philosophy or even from theology. What they get

or subtract from the physico-biological representation, is what we will call, for lack of

anything better, the ‘clones of individuals’, human, animal, and plant: represented clones of

the three types of living. That does not mean returning to the representation as an in-itself: it

is about the generation of clones that correspond to the three givens of the representation.

So we have the matter for three clones, in accordance with the three stases of the living: the

clone derived from the matter of the animal-man represented or named ‘Man’ who

populates the cities; the one derived from the man-animal represented or named ‘Animal’

who populates the earth; finally, the one derived from the man-plant and named ‘Plant’,

who populates the forests. The ordinary man, the ordinary animal, the ordinary plant are

obviously represented under a philosophical condition, but also and more profoundly as

clones, that is, as livings deprived this time of philosophical or macroscopical properties.

These clones (from the operation of under-determination of the a priori over matter) do not

form any hierarchy because they are connected in an onto-vectorial and generic rather than

philosophical and biological manner. There is no hierarchy between generic and quantum.

In particular, since the man-in-the-last-humanity globally under-determines philosophy, he

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 or she also globally under-determines the philosophical individual or subject as an animal

and as a plant, and thus clone in-the-last-humanity, for instance, of the plant, (before the

clone of the Cosmos in-the-last-humanity? a simple hypothesis... of SF) which loses its

composition of absolute and empirical subjectivity in order to become a clone, that is, the

true, ‘ordinary’, plant-animal-man. The ordinary man is not a biologico-philosophical

individual but a clone of the one that has been lowered and re-oriented in its

transcendence. The being-in-the-last-humanity or being generic is not an exception to life

as immanent, it is the power of life to know itself across all types of livings. It is a power that

in a way does not exceed the ordinary man as an under-determined clone.

5 As a deduction of the in-itself. This deduction must make an experimental verification

possible in the nearly inverse form of the procedure. The clones make us understand that a

confusion is always possible amongst them and the illusions of representation – and thus of

life by itself and its apparent or illusory knowledge. This genealogy of the animal or human

appearance as the in-itself is a characteristic that belongs to the status of clones. That is

why in philosophy man and animal are models for one another. There is a problem of

symmetry or of invariance between them in the positive science of biology which

encompasses the two notions, with some adjustments or regulations of givens. Indeed, this

is so much so that biology and culture tend to efface differences and to reabsorb being-in-

the-last-humanity in an asymptotic vision. The ethical dimension of ecology lies in

maintaining the break of the symmetry or of the positive invariance of the living. Without

saying that man is not a kingdom within a kingdom, ethics require us to refuse this

naturalism.

[…]

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