BB: But wouldn't you still think of the work of Duchamp as something relative rather than some kind of transhistorical value?

JFL: Well, really, both yes and no, since that's the way it always is with art: it always has a value as an expression of its time, but there's also a way in which it can always be perceived as lying outside of the time that produced it. There's always something that turns art into a transhistorical truth, and that's the part of the art that I think of as "philosophical". It's within this part of art that it poses the question of what it has at stake. Art, after all, is a relatively modern notion. Even Greek tragedy couldn't have been said to be art for the Greeks - it was still something else, and it's clear that we have to wait at least until the close of the Middle Ages to discover the emergence of an art that isn't simply an expression, for instance, of metaphysics or religion, or political praise. What strikes me, if we can start out from Duchamp, is the way it can seem, from a certain point of view, to be difficult to be an artist if one isn't a philosopher as well. I don't mean that the artist will have to read Plato or Aristotle, I mean that he has to posit the question of what he has at stake, he has to ask himself about the nature of what he's involved in doing. Precisely this question is the most interesting thing to be found in the works of art that are strongest today, it's the thing in which these works are most interested. What's at stake is something that's extraordinarily serious, and it’s not at all a question of pleasure, and not even of the way the pleasure of the sublime is intermixed with pain; it's a question instead of a relationship to time and space and sensibility, even though I don't like to make use of that word. What I mean to say is that certain works have a structure that keeps them from being concerned with their existence as events; they do something entirely different as an attentive observer comes away with the feeling that their engagement with the senses, if any such engagement exists at all, is of far less importance than a primary interest in the most fundamental philosophical question of all, "Why does something happen, rather than nothing?"

BB: And that is the point where we find a lack of differentiation between technological experimentation and the questions posed by art?

JFL: Even the most modest tinkler with software has an attitude that's somehow "artistic" - an attitude of a kind of astonishment. And what that means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes into crisis at much the same time as the rest of classical philosophy and that there's away n which it is going under as a result of a decline in the capacity it can have for the creation of wide-ranging global systems that include the great and final issues for which we feel a need. If there's a decline of metaphysics, there's also a decline of everything that people in general call philosophy. And this decline - which is something that Adorno grasped quite clearly - shows us the history of the diaspora of philosophy as it wanders through domains that can't be properly defined as philosophical, even though the domain that can be properly defined as philosophical continues to exist. What this means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes under, along with classical philosophy, even though certain people continue to practice it as though it weren't in crisis at all.

BB: Aside from your desire to investigate modalities of knowledge other than the book, it seems to me that the very concept of the exhibition you want to realise is concerned with an attempt to appeal to all of the most various human sciences and to reappropriate all of the various things that they've given us: linguistics, science, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so forth.

JFL: That's quite right. Our attempt, as you've put it, is to reappropriate a whole series of things and to try to see the problems they pose from a philosophical point of view; we'll look at them within a context where they don't begin by positing what the human sciences or liberal arts always begin by positing, which is to say, the Human Being. It seems to me that these technologies are interesting, and at the same time troubling, to the extent that they force us to reconsider the position of the human being in relation to the universe, in relationship to himself, in relationship to his traditional purposes, his recognised abilities, his identity.

BB: Is this what you mean when you speak of "general interaction"?

JFL: Yes, that's what that means, and it will be one of the two major themes of the exhibition. It's the first theme, and I see it as the basis of the entire discussion of the postmodern, which is a subject the French don't yet know very well, since they're always turned so completely in upon themselves. Even though the field of the postmodern is very very vast, and even though the word can sometimes be applied to things that are diametrically opposed to one another, it's based fundamentally upon the perception of the existence of a Modern Era that dates from the time of the Enlightenment and that has now run its course; and this modern era was predicated on a notion of progress in knowledge, in the arts, in technology, and in human freedom as well, all of which was thought of as leading to a truly emancipated society: a society emancipated from poverty, despotism, and ignorance. But all of us can see that development continues to take place without leading to the realisation of any of these dreams of emancipation. So, today, one no longer feels guilty about being ignorant.