09 August 2021 16:00
Expensive alien,
I am addressing you from planet Earth through writing, a semiotic-linguistic communication technology invented by my species about six thousand years ago. I use this technology in the French language, a dialect variant with which some 280 million human beings can communicate and which, I imagine, is foreign to you. However, I hope that the cosmological, biochemical and physical bases that we share will allow you to carry out a translation, a transfer, a translation of the graph capable of producing another sign that can be decoded by your sensitive apparatus. I hope that if you cannot read this letter, you will at least be able to breathe it in, inject it, download it, absorb it or pick it up.
Forgive my lack of subtlety: I am just a small, warm-blooded multicellular being whose life expectancy is between 75 and 95 revolutions of the planet earth around the Sun, and I have a cognitive capacity that although it is the result of millions of years of evolution on this planet, is also the consequence (curious fate) of the violence wrought by my species on itself. What I can perceive, as a result, is not much. I have five senses (some say there are six) but most have undergone such specialization over the past millennia that I can barely see, barely hear, and barely perceive. I do nothing but make a fiction. This is because, perhaps, making up stories is the best and most prescient means of getting in touch with you.
With the certainty that gives me the sense of the invention, I turn to you knowing that you are already among us. I feel your presence. Far away. Intense. Radiant. Close. Quiet. Despite the impenetrability of my conscience, I know you exist. My whole body perceives it, as a sensitive living being and thanks to the collection of data that allows me to specialize my cognitive apparatus as a philosopher. To give you an idea, I will tell you that philosophers, beings located very low in the contemporary terrestrial social pyramid, are like plumbers of the concept or tailors of the code: they invent new apparatuses of representation with which they disassemble and repair the apparatuses of truth production that do not work no longer, or whose operation consumes excessive energy or destroys those that use them or those on which they are used. As the seamstress has long known that other threads are woven in the cosmos, so the plumber knows that all the tubes connect at a given moment.
I speak to you as if you were an individual consciousness embodied in a binary body, because the social technology of the French language does not yet admit disindividualizing and non-binary syntax, but I imagine that you are neither individual nor binary, that you are regulated by another logic, from another music, from another vibration. I would like to address you without having to use, to imagine yourself, the noise produced by the categories of animality, class, race, sex, sexuality. I don’t want to use the category of extraneousness either. These categories are the fruit of the history of energetic and semiotic-technical supremacy that my species has built over the last few centuries. And the consequences of this supremacy are precisely what I want to tell you about.
Forgive me, I am not writing to you for altruistic reasons or to build a friendship (although this gift would be splendid) but because the technologies of extraction, distribution and division of energy invented by my species throughout the history of human beings (and especially in the over the last five hundred years) call into question the continuity of life of most terrestrial species, including (curiously fatality) ours.
These lethal steering technologies include, among other things:
- A production system based on the destruction, depredation, privatization and accumulation of vital resources, together with the production and consumption of toxic materials. This production system has historically been called “capitalism”, but today it extends to almost the entire planet in a limitless digital world-market.
- The branding of a part of the human species through technologies of exploitation, racialization or sexualization that ensure the energetic and semiotic sovereignty of some at the expense of others.
- The management of reproduction by a binary and hierarchical classification system in which bodies that possess a potentially reproductive uterine cavity are subjected to bodies that produce a liquid highly rich in genetic material that we call sperm. In this regime, any body that goes beyond the binary or threatens this semiotic or reproductive order is the object of violence and extermination.
- The inability of our species to establish symbiotic relationships with others, always preferring objectification, consumption and death to relationship.
You are probably wondering why I invite you to this necropolitical festival. If this were our only reality I would not have written to you. Instead I am writing to you, because we human beings, however besieged by our own death techniques, are experiencing a revolution. We begin to understand that we will have to make profound changes. We have begun to change. For this reason, and because we need a fresh look, if by any chance you ever speculated about coming to Earth, this would be a good time to do it.
If you can understand me, I ask you to urgently communicate with human space.
A te,
an earthling.
This article appeared in the French newspaper Libération.
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