Act I. The World Before the I
There was no interruption, only order, and order was not an imposed form but a natural bond, a mineral chain of presences unaware of their own separateness, as if the world breathed in layers without ever wondering where the breath came from that passed through them all. The sun did not shine for anyone, yet it shone. The stars moved along orbits no eye needed to understand. Their passage alone was enough to structure time, and everything that appeared on Earth was already positioned, named, wrapped in a destiny that did not summon but descended softly upon whatever it encountered, like dew that does not choose yet moistens.
The word was an echo, and every echo led back to the origin; the origin was not an object of conquest but of reverence. One did not dig in order to know: one bowed to receive the shape of a law that came not from the mind but from the most fixed star. Even bodies, if they could already be called that, were not identities but functions. The question was never “who are you,” but “where are you in the design,” because every being was a diagram, every birth an inlay in the filigree of creation. Thought, even before it spoke, moved along currents that preceded it, contained it, and emptied it of the temptation to say I.
There was no I, because there was no rupture. The I only emerges where a cut has already operated, where the wound is recognized as one’s own. But here, everything happened because it had to, not by imposition but by excess, like water that overflows not from punishment but because it exceeds. Time was circular, but not yet spiral; it was an eternal return not of what wants to be new, but of what wants to be just. Justice was not calculated; it was received, like one receives a color in the sky, or accepts a pain that carries no meaning but belongs.
In this pre-Cartesian scene, nothing is yet subjective, and subjectivity is unthinkable not because it is rejected, but because it is unnecessary. Who would see the world as something other, when everything vibrates in the same body of light? Every concept is participation, every name is consecration, and language does not build but evokes. Words are not formed to describe but to attune, like strings that tune themselves to the note of the heavens.
In the physis, being is intensity without dialectic. Grass grows, wind bends, stone supports, and each of these acts is already full of meaning. Meaning is not a value, but a posture, a mode of resonance. The ordo is architecture without architect: proportion that does not derive from number but founds it. Aristotle maps a world where essence shines before existence, not with cruelty, but with the patience of a farmer who knows every seed is already law and future intertwined.
Augustine, whose burning heart seeks God within, does not seek an alterity to possess but an unattainable dwelling, a presence that only the soul may hear, like a sound that is not emitted but received, an echo that answers before the question even forms. Augustine’s interiority is not a subject; it is a window onto the beyond, a slit that does not illuminate the self but lets pass a light that does not belong. The I, for Augustine, is only a place of prayer, never a factory of meaning.
The medieval era does not correct this; it reinforces it. Knowledge is order, and order is care, not possession. Knowledge is not investigation, but custodianship. One knows in order to preserve the order, to prolong what is already known to be eternal. Truth is not discovered; it is safeguarded. The book is sacred not because it says what is true, but because it is already the trace of a truth that precedes all writing.
The monk does not interpret but transcribes. The theologian does not assert but remembers. The scribe does not sign but disappears. The I is not an author but a conduit. The author, if there is one, is God. God is not represented. God is reflected in everything created, multiplied in details, repeated in daily gestures that ask not for identity but for obedience.
Transcendence, a word that now may seem remote or perhaps threatening, was then a fertile distance, a vertigo that did not bring one down but lifted one up. To transcend was not to surpass, but to belong to an elsewhere that includes you, that wants you exactly where you are. There is no error in your position if the world has been arranged by an intelligence that does not question itself but generates.
Conformity was not passivity; it was rootedness. The real was not an object to be explained but a field to inhabit. No one asked why the world was as it was. The world was. Being was the verb that did not need conjugation.
Logos was not argument but active principle. It shaped matter without violence, guided without the need for will. Humanity, within this configuration, was neither servant nor master. It was creature. It was image. Not a consciousness that observed, but a figure that participated.
The pre-Cartesian scene was a choreography without center. Everything danced. Nothing was subject. The I had not yet claimed the right to say “I think,” and perhaps for this very reason, everything could still happen as pure event, as existence that needed no explanation.
There was no doubt, no conflict, only the depth of an order that did not demand comprehension but attunement. In a time that made thought its idol, what remains is the distant resonance of a world that never needed the I to be real.
Act II. The Centrality of the I
The scene opens, not upward, but inward. The theater is no longer cosmic; it is Cartesian. The backdrop has been withdrawn, the wings dismantled. Only one actor remains, and it has no body, no history, no place. It has thought. “I think, therefore I am” is not a discovery, but a performative act. The world no longer precedes the I; it is thought by it. Order is not given; it is derived. Truth is not received; it is produced within thought itself, which is no longer an echo but a source.
Descartes does not establish the subject. He isolates it. He cuts away everything that can be doubted, senses, body, world, and leaves a glowing, inarguable residue. This residue is not a thing. It is an act. Thinking becomes the new substance. The ego becomes the support, the arch, the fulcrum upon which the world is constructed. Doubt does not destroy; it clears the scene. What remains is the subject.
It is not merely an I that thinks, but a thought that knows itself as I. Identity emerges in the reflective curvature, where thought bends back upon itself and recognizes itself as foundation. The cogito is not one thought among others. It is the point of origin for all possible knowledge. Time, here, alters its structure. It no longer turns around the eternal, but projects itself forward as the progressive construction of understanding.
With Kant, the I ceases to be substance and becomes function. No longer what is, but what conditions the power of being for me. The subject is not in the world; it is what organizes the world as possible experience. The pure forms of intuition – space and time – are not external, not given. They are structures of appearance. Sensibility is not passive. It is configurational. The intellect does not receive. It synthesizes.
The world is no longer what shows itself. It is what can be thought under conditions. The object is not one entity among others. It is a correlate of transcendental consciousness. Reality is co-produced. The noumenon remains off-stage, a silent specter, but everything else – phenomenon, law, science – takes form within the apparatus of the subject.
Transcendence has not vanished. It has migrated into the subject. It is no longer God, nor the cosmos, nor being itself. It is the structure that makes the world possible. The subject is now transcendent with respect to the empirical world, not by superiority but by function. The world, as such, is only accessible through the categories. Reason, thus conceived, is a legislator. It does not interpret nature. It prescribes it.
In Hegel, this same I multiplies, historicizes itself, contradicts itself. The subject is not only empty form but process. It is spirit that alienates itself, fragments into the world, and then returns to itself, not as identity but as self-consciousness. Dialectic becomes the organ of this reconquest. Every negation is already the beginning of mediation. Every estrangement is a moment in the return. The absolute is not given. It is the totality that generates itself in the immanence of becoming.
The Hegelian I is the opposite of the Cartesian one. It does not isolate. It unfolds. It is not founded in pure thought, but in the historicity of consciousness crossing itself as alterity. The other is not an obstacle. It is necessity. The I realizes itself only in recognition, in mediation, in conflict that does not destroy but elevates. Each historical moment is a reflection of consciousness taking form. Each people is a stage of the spirit seeking itself.
Then comes Husserl, the final purity. The gesture of phenomenological reduction is the most radical act: to suspend the world, place it in brackets, in order to see what remains. And what remains is consciousness. Not as substance, nor as empirical function, but as intentionality. All of reality reveals itself as given to consciousness, and consciousness is never empty. It is always consciousness of something.
Here, the I becomes the zero point. An empty point, but indispensable. The transcendental I does not feel, does not act, does not will. It constitutes. Every sense, every object, every time, every world is co-founded through correlation with the pure I. Consciousness is field, horizon, source of all possible appearing. And yet, it remains invisible. No act can place it entirely on stage. It is what allows every scene, without ever becoming figure.
Modernity, then, is the time of the I becoming world. Transcendence becomes immanent, but as structure. No longer do we seek God, but the condition under which God may be spoken. No longer do we seek truth, but the a priori of its possibility. The subject is sovereign, not because it rules, but because it grounds. The centrality of the I is not vanity. It is architecture.
Yet already within this architectural fullness of the subject, a fracture begins. In Fichte, in Schelling, in Nietzsche, the tension begins to strain. The subject is too pure, too empty, too constructive: every construction that does not creak is suspect. Absolute reason becomes a fever. Identity becomes a nightmare. Immanent transcendence folds upon itself and generates phantoms.
The subject, from foundation, risks becoming fetish. No longer what makes experience possible, but what prevents all alterity. The world no longer speaks. It is spoken. Nature no longer vibrates. It is catalogued. The other no longer appears. It is constituted. This is the great prison of the I: to be everything from which all depends. But this is not yet known. It is still celebrated. The modern scene is full. The I stands at the center. Reason triumphs. Philosophy builds systems. Science liberates itself. The subject is sovereign.
Act III. The Disappearance of the I and the Emergence of the Plane
No actor enters. No light narrows its focus. No point declares itself. The theater is empty, and it is precisely in this emptiness that something begins to vibrate, something that is no longer scene, backdrop, or plot. It is a plane. A plane of immanence, a plane without hierarchies, without commands, without vertical thresholds. A surface, though not flat, rather, differential. Every point holds power. Every passage is variation. Nothing precedes. Nothing justifies. Nothing needs to be grounded. One is in the midst, and the midst is not a center: it is a zone.
The I is already dissolved. Not as loss, but as redefinition. There is no longer a subject that sees, but a seeing that connects to flows that see through. The subject is no longer origin: it is interface. It begins nothing, produces nothing on its own. It is produced, traversed, modulated. Any I takes form whenever a constellation of intensities temporarily links, compacts, inscribes itself for a moment, and then dissolves.
Thought is no longer tied to consciousness. It exists before. It exists outside. It exists between. Thought is a vibration of the real that does not ask who thinks it. It thinks itself. Not as a totality reflected, but as a force that propagates. The concept is not a representation: it is a machine. It works, connects, mutates. Every event of thought is a cut, a zone, a pulse.
Writing, then, does not occur from a point of view, but from a point without a name. It arises from a zone of emergence, a node of interference. The I has not disappeared; it has become a collateral effect. Every sentence that forms brushes against it, but does not return to it. The subject never reappears. It is only a pattern of resurfacing, a provisional condition, a mask that no longer clings to a face. The face itself is a configuration of forces, not an identity.
The body is not representation, nor boundary. It is a field of flows. Skin is only a selective membrane. A hand is not a tool, but a vibration. An organ is not a function, but an interface. One moves through the world as resonance, and every resonance is already a thought, not a representation, but a difference that insists. A desire that does not ask, but traces.
Subjectivity has become noisy, excessive, unlocatable. It is not an I that possesses a world, but a world that generates, each time, configurations of subject. There is no transcendental subject. There are subjectivations, captures, zones of intensity. Every language that names a subject is already a secondary translation. The true language is the one that works without a subject. The true time is the one that does not conjugate as “I have lived,” but as “something has happened.”
What is it that happens? A life. Not mine. Not yours. A life, in the most radical sense. An impersonal vibration that does not require a pronoun. It is a threshold between events. A duration without form. A fold that has no subject, only torsion. Rimbaud sensed this well: Je est un autre (cfr. Lettre du voyant, 15 May 1871, to Paul Demeny) is not enough. One must say, “I is an instant written by an other without name.” And this other is not a person. It is a field. It is a machine.
The theater, therefore, is not abolished, it is rewritten. There is no longer a leading actor, but a network of functions that alternate, take form, and empty themselves. The stage becomes a plane of registration. The script is not a text: it is a diagram. The diagram does not represent: it produces. Each act is not a scene to be played, but an intensity to be crossed.
And the author? It does not exist. Or rather, it is dispersed. The author is a parasitic function of the dispositif. Writing occurs, but not by the author. It is written. By what? By a conceptual machine. By an affective field. By an epistemic cut. There is no will, only torsion. No intention, only tracing.
Absolute immanence is not a poverty of meaning. It is a saturation of possibility. Every sense that emerges is not a content, but a deviation. One no longer says, “this is the meaning.” One says, “this is what happens when the word passes through here.” Language becomes an operational field. It is not used to communicate; it is crossed in order to modify. Every sentence is a flow. Every word is a scratch.
Knowledge is no longer property. It is shared intensity. A cognitive topology with no center. Every concept is a ridge. Every knowledge is a leap. And error? It is not error. It is fertile deviation. It is the point where the plane curves to generate something else. There is no epistemology without drift. There is no knowledge that is not a threshold.
The dream of modernity was to found. The dream of immanence is to deactivate foundation. To operate without ground. Not anarchy, but heterarchy. A regime of mobile relations. A becoming without cause. A proliferation ungoverned by any subject.
And so, anything can become concept. A gesture. A noise. A diagram. A scar. Anything that leaves a mark is a machine of sense. Every fold of reality is an act of thought. One no longer needs to think in order to be. One only needs to be seized by a flow.
Thought is already in the world. It is one of its functions. It does not precede it. It does not follow it. It inhabits it. It contorts it. It exposes it. Every time an event ruptures sequence, there is thought. Every time a line deviates, there is philosophy. Not because it is said, but because it happens.
The I no longer writes. It is written by the plane. The gesture is not authored. It is traced. It is no longer a matter of naming. It is a matter of letting things occur. There is no longer a scene. Only the surface remains. And it pulses.
Conclusion. Genealogy on Stage
There is no end. Only a curve that folds back onto its own origin in order to reveal its inconsistency. Genealogy does not narrate, does not order, does not systematize. It exposes. It exposes thought as a force that stratifies into three major configurations, three theaters that are not periods but regimes of reality. The first is the world without the I, in which the subject is a secondary function. The second is the world centered on the I, where the subject becomes origin, axis, and foundation. The third is the world without center, where the subject dissolves into a plane of becoming.
Each theater generates its own bodies, its own voices, its own gestures. Every ontology is also a choreography. The trajectory moves from the ordered subject to the founding subject, and then to the dispersed subject. But this dispersion is not decline: it is the liberation of power. The subject does not die: it is reconfigured as an effect of a field. The I, once the indisputable protagonist, is revealed as a secondary character, an episodic function, an actor without a part. The entire Cartesian framework is disarmed not by a new philosophy of consciousness, but by a practice of thought that refuses identity as a criterion.
This tripartition operates effectively. The ontology of being: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas – presents being as principle, totality, and hierarchy. The subject is not excluded, but subordinated. Knowledge is adequation, and understanding is a return to the origin. Everything has its place, and place does not depend on the subject but on the order of the world. Ontology here is participation. Truth is received, not invented. The I is a part, never the center. Identity is not constructed, it is recognized within the eternal design.
Then comes the ontology of the subject : Descartes, Kant, Husserl. The world is filtered, synthesized, constituted by the subject. Thought does not receive: it generates. The object is not out there: it is correlated. Being does not precede: it is conditioned within consciousness. Truth is not manifestation: it is production. All knowledge is positional. The subject becomes the new transcendence, disembodied yet omnipresent. Not God, but the a priori. Not the soul, but the synthetic unity. The I is ordering power. Every experience passes through it. Interior subjectivity becomes the criterion.
Finally, the ontology of becoming : Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and beyond. Here there is no longer God, nor subject, nor foundation. There is flow. There is affect. There is rhythm. Reality does not reflect: it is traversed. Thought does not represent: it follows forces. It is no longer constitutive: it is cartographic. Every concept is an interface, every knowledge a drift. Life cannot be enclosed within an identity. It is not substance, nor subject, nor relation. It is impersonal power. A life – as Deleuze puts it – not my life. The subject is not a who, but a when. Not an I, but an occurrence.
Within this third regime, thought does not seek to understand, but to feel. It does not ask “what is this?” but “what can this do?” Every configuration is contingent. Every threshold is productive. Thought is a field. It has no beginning. No center. No guarantee. It is a map, but a map without origin. A cartography not of reality, but of its potentialities.
The decisive shift is to think an absolute immanence that can never be subsumed by a subject, not even a transcendental one. This is the turning point. The subject, even when emptied out, even when reduced to function, still retains a residue of dominion. It always remains the organizer, the arranger, the giver of meaning. But this is no longer about meaning. It is about tension. About curvature. About movement.
To think absolute immanence is to withdraw from the binary structure that opposes immanence and transcendence. It is to construct a plane that does not oppose, does not negate, but exceeds every foundation. The very notion of foundation becomes a suspicious practice. Each time something is founded, something else is excluded. Each time a principle is enunciated, a flow is silenced. Thought, then, ceases to be a guarantor. It becomes passage. Crossing. Vibration.
The diagram is the instrument of this new operation. It does not describe. It does not represent. It indicates relations, force, directions. A diagram is unstable. It shifts as it is read. It has no definitive interpretation. It never closes. It is a machine of capture, but also of escape. A cartography without center, but densely articulated. Every point is a threshold. Every line a vector. Every node an event.
The subject has not vanished. It has become one point among many. A transitional function. Consciousness is no longer transparent glass: it is one of many layers. Life is no longer lived from the center, but through transit. Thought emerges not through recognition, but deviation. Writing no longer serves to say, but to distribute intensity.
To align oneself with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson is not to take position but to enter a line. The I invoked here is not a signature, but a gesture. Not an identity, but an inclusion. It is a segment within a writing difference. Genealogy does not conclude with knowledge, but with an affirmation: the subject is an effect. And this effect is not weakness. It is decentered power. It does not possess: it traverses.
The knowledge that arises from this is not systematic. It is affective. Not construction, but variation. Every concept is an act. Every text an operational field. Every writing an event. Philosophy is no longer reflection. It is execution. And each time one thinks, something in the world transforms. Not because it is understood. But because it is activated.
This is the final scene. The theater is empty. But the emptiness is full of forces. There is no actor, only trajectories. No author, only differences. Thought no longer inhabits the subject. It produces it, deviates it, deactivates it, reactivates it. Genealogy is on stage, not as narrative, but as field. It is no longer observed. It is inhabited.