What does it mean to write philosophy in an epoch characterized by the complete domination of refinement? What does it mean to confront refinement as both the pinnacle of modernity and its primary concern? And, beyond these questions, what does it mean to even begin a discussion about the refinement of the human being? It is a discussion which has been left aside, even in critiques of eugenics. Discussions that are set aside, things that are left on the back burner of philosophical, so-called critical, discourses are not merely objects that are “unthought;” some hidden or excluded component of a trajectory of thought that must be brought into the light as the “unsaid.” As Foucault contended in The Punitive Society, staking out the differences between his position and Derrida’s: “[t]he problem therefore is not to seek in the lacunae of a text the force or effect of an unsaid” (Foucault 2013, 165). To write in the wake of refinement is to not simply write “against” it, nor to take a simple “critical” stance (like so much “philosophy of technology”).

II

With this demand, where must the inquiry begin when eugenics is the object? It must start at the uncomfortable middle point of presupposition, at the level of the givenness of the object itself, and how this object is isolated. We are not here to uncover what is unsaid, but instead to gnaw at the roots of what remains uncontested. The uncontested is always said, loudly—over and over—and its refusal is akin to the casting oneself into the theoretical wilderness. The condition of the present lacks nothing – especially not an entire cavalcade of philosophers seeking not only to ground power, but to ground the necessity of power. We are not seeking an alternative constituent point of view.

III

As Deleuze in his monumental formation and critique of the “dogmatic Image of thought” in Difference and Repetition attested, it is precisely what “everyone” reduces to a simple and necessary presupposition which must be the target of a ruthless examination. “When philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential…” (Deleuze 1994, 150). The essential is precisely what is left aside in essentialist discourse. However, it must be made clear it is not only in nominal humanisms that this anxious ground or produced reality of the “irrefutable necessity” of refinement in found. For example, take the post-humanist or political-social-ecological works of the last twenty years and note that while the authors who act as the discursive founders of these respective movements resist the human being, but keep in place the necessity of the capacities that have historically defined its exclusivity and given it its species-being.

IV

A genealogy of eugenics that limits itself to its manifestation in language, treating Francis Galton as its “origin” will necessarily fail at grasping the conditions that make the refinement of the human being possible. Eugenics is not a project made possible at a particular culminating point in the history of technology, nor is it simply a worldview. It is the basis of the production of a unified world picture, of a planetary scale. It does not arrive after a particular mode of production (Bourdieu must once again be asked to sit at the back of the class). A genealogy of eugenics must seek out avenues of attack not just on its discursive founders, but the wasteland of metaphysics from which it supposedly arrived in a mendacious singularity. If modernity has been defined by the victory of the logic of equivalence, biopolitics, and the domination of the commodity, we must contend that quiet persistence of eugenics must accompany this conceptual outline of horrors.

V

An investigation into eugenics must not cede any territory, this includes metaphysics which is always a strategy of organizing a mode of disclosure that then presents itself as a “reality”. Any testament to reality must be treated as nothing other than the bemoaning of the enemy; an enemy who can only recognize philosophy or even being of it is consigned to a principle of power or capacity.

VI

By setting its sights on the eugenic in the history of philosophy, this genealogy will inevitably reveal itself to be no friend philosophy understood as metaphysics. If Tiqqun was correct to attest that their goal was to “fight cybernetics, instead of being a critical cybernetician[s]”, we will, in turn, show our dissatisfaction with their “critical metaphysics”. Metaphysics is always that which isolates a constituent core in beings based in their capacities and then seeks to refine and maximize those capacities. We do not need a new epoch, a new danger, we are already firmly within the implications of Heidegger’s “Supreme Danger”. It has revealed itself to be nothing other than eugenic modernity. The history of metaphysics is eugenic for no other reason than it desperately pursues the isolation of a series of foci as a constituent principle of being that is either processual, measurable, comparable, or manipulable. If Heidegger’s “question concerning technology” is ultimately a question of the final achievement of metaphysics, we must distinguish our position as one that looks to the transepochal claim about metaphysics itself. For Heidegger it is the quiet accompaniment of the Danger in every epoch. Eugenics, we contest, must be understood as the kernel of the Supreme Danger one finds in all metaphysics – as the dictatorship of thought that imposes the necessity of human capacity as the basis of its species-being. The very utterability of species-being, of some Aristotelian circumscriptive essence, is what an engagement with the eugenic of philosophy puts into question. We are no friend to the young Karl Marx, or to the naïve romantic humanists.

VII

The great trick of metaphysics is both its false esotericism, and its self-attested innocence. Metaphysical doctrines do not have ableist secondary implications. Metaphysics is not just something that carries an “inductive risk.” Its premise is, itself, eugenic. It is a series of strategies to produce, define, isolate, dominate, and mobilize beings. Of course, this is war. A war on aberrance, on “degeneration,” on that which reduces the power of actualization – all that refuses its reality. To philosophers it is merely a set of strategies not tied to any war – but instead to intelligibility. We know they are wrong.

VIII

The moment “thought” and “being human” becomes a capacity or power, and reason a circumscriptive threshold of the human political animal, the disaster of history is set in motion. Such an investigation would have to make an intervention. Our endeavor belongs to history, but it cannot be beholden to it.

Will Conway