Call for Papers (International Sociological Association)

My panel session proposal has been approved by the organizers of the ISA which will hold its annual conference (2014) in Yokohama, Japan. Those interested to submit a themed proposal for presentation please check out the poster here. The panel I will be chairing in the conference is on “Religion in the Era of Climate Entropy.”

On Zizek

Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism

What I am going to argue about may already seem a pointless remake of post-9/11 critiques. After a series of careful examinations of the phenomenon of terror, drawing on religious extremism, neoliberal capitalist democracy, and Western imperialism, such as Habermas’ and Derrida’s influential dialogue in Philosophy in a Time of Terror and Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, among others, any attempt to re-insert terror into the landscape of contemporary theory would seem to be reviving a topic already past its prime.

But only, I guess, if terror is an object of fashion. But certainly, terror can be revived as a specular image; an image that does not mind whether terror happens or not, or whether it happened or not. As Zizek would have it utilizing Lacan’s psychoanalytic lens, the point about the image is that it has the power to effectuate the Real. An image can either be imaginary or symbolic depending on one’s psychic maturity. All the same, an image is always attracted to the Real, like the real object of desire that cannot be had except by way of a substitute. It is the substitute that always does it for us: we desire because a substitute makes us capable of pushing our drives toward the object of desire.

Let me continue by stating that terror might have already exhausted its energy that fueled Western discourse—Western theorists are now composing theirs on themes of posthumanism, or climate entropy, arguably a new face of terror posed by Nature—still we may have missed the point that terror is always ready for an encounter and as such is the prototype of the Event.  Here, we digress into Alain Badiou to make sense of the relation of the Real to the Event. We are talking about Badiou’s description of the key feature of the twentieth century, namely, its passion for the Real (The Century, 32). Slavoj Zizek describes this aspect of Badiou’s conceptual diagram as follows:

“In contrast to the nineteenth century’s utopian and scientific projects and ideals … the twentieth century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longed-for New order. The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp. 5-6).

We all know that for Badiou the Event is unpredictable, unlike Zizek’s notion of it about which we will discuss later. Because it is unpredictable the only recourse to make sense of the Event is to exercise fidelity to it but by way of a substitute, a substitute for the Event and its unpredictability by making it somehow predictable. In Badiou’s formulation, our fidelity to the Event or its unpredictability has to be matched by its complement in a deeply personal commitment to the impossible continuity of a choice or an act.  One must continue to be loyal to the unpredictable by becoming unpredictable which in a nutshell makes unpredictability an axiom of choice. Perhaps, we can make sense of this axiom of choice by making reference to Deleuze and Guattari who warned us in A Thousand Plateaus that chaos can chaoticize and can undo every kind of consistency. (Whether D&G made their point well about putting chaos in a little order is another matter).

In other words, there is a way to negotiate with chaos. And it is not without its global implications that during the last 19^th and 20^th centuries negotiating with chaos was defined by a choice between socialism and capitalism, or socialism and barbarism, whichever you prefer.

Socialism or Barbarism

In the early years of the 20^th century the Bolsheviks, inspired by the publication of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, set out to establish the first socialist state in history anchored on highly centralized planning. Incidentally, it was also premised on a highly personalized regime, driving the cult of personality that energized the Soviet Union well until its fall. When the Soviet Union collapsed it seemed then that decentralization and the impersonal rule of market forces, the opposite of central and highly personalized administration of things, held the right key to negotiating with unpredictability.

But the crisis that global capitalism confronts time and again belies the assumption that history has ended in the smooth rule of capital, especially after the collapse of Eastern socialist regimes when capitalism suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. The financial crisis that hit the Asian economies in the 1990s, on the up again just recently which took the European economy by surprise, altogether illustrate how chaos remains untamed (because given a free rein), typical of the capitalist mantra that competition is superior to central planning, individualism to the abstract collective, chaos to rigid organization.

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to grasp how chaos can still be tamed by taking it as a principle of organization. We can make sense of how chaos organizes a space of consistency, something akin to human resource management and development paradigm typical of corporate modernity, in terms of treating chaos both as presence and absence. This is especially true in a Lacanian space of individual determination defined by the logic of substitution that we earlier mentioned. Robert Lander, a student of Lacan, summarizes this logic of substitution anchored on the experience of anxiety, arguably what every conscious human being today feels about the future under global capitalism:

“When Lacan affirms that anxiety is the only subjective way to search for the lost object, he defines a paradox. What is sought is not the object but its absence, because its present absence introduces the signifier of lack. The phallus (as the signifier of lack) changes from a metaphoric to a metonymic signifier, for the lack (as phallic signifier) moves, circulates. It is everywhere and nowhere. Everyone may bear it and, at the same time, nobody does” (Subjectivity and the Experience of the Other, 27).

Let us try to unpack this Lacanian formulation in relation to chaos. We can initially state here that negotiating with chaos or unpredictability is taken up by the subject. But bear in mind that in Lacan the subject is an invention, that is, an invention of the subject by the subject out of the fundamental lack of self of the subject itself. Thus, we can speak of the subject as a substitute for an absent reference under which it can be placed. In Badiouan formulation it is equivalent to the act of voiding the Void. In any case, the Void when voided does not cease to be voidal. It continues to be voidal through the presence of lack, the presence of a substitute for lack. In the same manner by taming it through a substitute, chaos becomes chaotic.

 And how else can we describe the chaotic other than through an organized operation that releases chaos from its absolute indifference to all forms of human signification? Before the invention of a substitute for it, chaos ‘chaoticizes’ without design. The substitution of a non-presentable presence (chaos before human signification) by a presentable absence (describing the principle of chaos through scientific or philosophical means) inaugurates the beginning of human history. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels knew how to frame this substitution within concrete historical struggles by stating that ‘individuals have always proceeded from themselves’, not from the outside, not from the untamed outside where chaos reigns. Obviously, they were able to state this logic of substitution in concrete terms after the fact, post factum, that is, after folding the outside in the inside, which in Deleuzian terms is called ‘memory’, more correctly, historical memory, the memory of the Void.

Voiding the Void

 Throughout the course of human history, negotiating with chaos has to involve designing for human purposes how it ought to run its course. We are now properly entering the domain of human history which true to its fundamental sexual foundation has been hitherto defined by oedipal forms of asserting memory, of asserting a certain form of voidal dominance.

Again, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels state that the first sexual division of labor inaugurates not only the beginning of the division of labor, later perfected by capitalism, but above all, the birth of History. Expressed in terms of the Lacanian concept of subject formation history can then amount to a plane of composition that is already pre-defined by a ‘genetic axis’ or an ‘overcoding structure’ in which Oedipus, or the Name-of-the-Father, the supervising agency of the division of labor, is everywhere inscribed on the plane.

The plane is self-composed by Oedipus, a plane where no exit to non-Oedipal, non-historical, non-patriarchal, non-sexist, therefore non-human consistency is possible, which also explains by the logic of difference the frequency of rebellions from within. But these rebellions are already pre-defined by Oedipus: the plane of consistency is already saturated through constant oedipal act of voiding the void, of creating a vacuum from a vacuum, that is, of creating his story, whose ultimate form is Capital.

Let us continue here by adding that with the collapse of the communist project the Oedipal agency of Capital has proclaimed absolute victory over another oedipal rival. This only illustrates that anywhere there is history there is an exacting agency always ready to prove its mettle by voiding the void relative to its capacity for totality and homogeneity whose victims are always the other of Oedipus, mother, sister, brother or son and daughter whose figures take various historical and genetic forms such as the weak, the vulnerable, the malleable, the poor, the uncultivated, the savage, the East. The larger void this oedipal agency could void the larger its voidal dominion.

 In this sense, the victory of Western capitalism over communism illustrates how aggressive its oedipal machine of voiding the Void is by totalizing all forms of voidal affirmation of existence. Yet, the defeat of the Eastern communist model has also deprived Western capitalism of an important part of its oedipal self-composition, namely, an Other to which the West gives the “privilege,” as Emile Cioran remarks in History and Utopia, “of realizing the unrealizable, of deriving power and prestige from the finest of its modern illusions” (14).

Hence, the plane of consistency composed by oedipal capitalism becomes threatened by mediocrity, banality, and loss of creative impulse, no less the mechanical life of everyday consumerist culture. We can argue here that this situation invites an opening up to an Event in the form of terror; in Freudo-Lacanian terms, the violent return of the repressed.

Whose return?

But whose return? Is it the return of communism? Or the return of the East, perhaps, exemplified by China and the threat of North Korea? Or the return of a humiliated Oedipus who wanted to repeat the process of desiring, in the same way a child longs to return to the mother’s womb, by ignoring concrete historical changes passing between him and the rest of the world, so he could play out without distraction his neurotic impulses where only his consistency is at stake, the absolute right of Oedipus to the object of his own desire, his delusion as the most important person ruling an imagined kingdom atop an oil-rich Sabah? 1. You will not be surprised to find out that it will be the same oedipal drive that would make this dreaded return.

As Zizek argues in his by now irritable treatment of the Lacanian formula for anxiety anchored on the death-drive, it is better to proceed here in a circular way for economic reasons than embrace a Nirvanic or Easterly return to pre-organic or pre-linguistic solitude of actual terror. He says in his recent work, roughly a decade after the 9/11 attack: “Nirvana as a return to pre-organic peace is a false vacuum, since it costs more (in terms of energy expenditure) than the circular movement of the drive” (Less Than Nothing, 945).

Zizek recently makes an interesting observation: “Every normality is a secondary normalization of the primordial dislocation that is the death drive, and it is only through the terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of every positive order of normality that a space is opened up for the Event” (Ibid., 835).

The question is, “Is not the bombing of the Twin Towers an example of a ‘terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of the positive (global) order’ in which the West claims absolute superiority after the collapse of the Eastern model?” Indeed, it has opened up a space for the Event, namely, in Zizekian terms, a return to normality. A certain normality is achieved when the return of the repressed guarantees that the Event does not fall into a trap, when it does not consciously mimic the death-drive. Instead, the death drive has to be obscured by the Event opened up by terror, by the attack on the towers, or the invasion of Sabah, in terms of transforming itself into a confused “semblance” of a void that preceded all voids” (Ticklish Subject, 154). It goes without saying that a preceding Void is the void of all Voids, which can never be voided.

The shape of today’s Marxism

This contrasts with Badiou’s formulation of the Event that attempts to go beyond oedipal capitalism by opposing the Event of Truth to the death-drive. For Zizek, there can never be a genuine passage from old to new as the Badiouan Event otherwise entails. What Zizek rather advocates is a violent enforcement of a passage: “no longer follow the pattern of an evental explosion followed by a return to normality” (“The Communist Hypothesis,” 130), something we can associate to the attacks on the Towers which gave capitalism the opportunity to stabilize itself  rather as Zizek concludes: “Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order” (Ibid.). Jamalul Kiram III must have learned so much from Zizek. 2.

Here we are seeing the shape of today’s fantastic Marxism, with a Hegelo-dialectical Lacanian twist. While he at times denounces the fetishism of capitalism, the fetishism being its obsession toward an absent presence, its fascination for chaos as a principle of finality, as when he declares that “fetishism reaches its acme precisely when the fetish itself becomes dematerialized” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 36) we need to emphasize the point that for whatever it is worth Zizek’s critique conceals an apologetic tone.

The exposition of the dangers of dematerializing the fetish, which can be related to the passion for the Real or the Thing itself, or the ultimate object of desire, such as Kiram’s claim to Sabah, does not for purposes of psychoanalytic education prevent terror, rather, it does the opposite by rationalizing terror as a necessary violent return of the repressed, the necessary circularity of the drives in terms of avoiding the Ur-drive, the death drive, which nonetheless must be satisfied so as not to overwhelm the subject by transforming the push toward the object into a confused and unconscious semblance of death.

What can psychoanalysis teach us across the spectrum of global hegemony and forms of resistance if, on the one hand, the oedipal capitalist system of global subject-formation accommodates terror for it serves as the ontological buffer for the positivity of its normality, and if, on the other hand, global resistance to capitalism is having difficulty escaping a predefined space of determination where exit to nonhistoricality, to a body without organs, is still fraught with dangers, especially the danger of being co-opted by the oedipal war machine, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari? As far as Zizek is concerned, the only way is to repeat the same process that normalizes capitalism and the desire of Oedipus.

Having said these, I take it that left Lacanianism, the one exemplified by Zizek’s works, is the most promising shape of today’s Marxism, the form of communist utopia that alone can save global capitalism from diving into chaos.

Notes

1. http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/gross-power-of-the-false-on-crisis-in-borneo/

2.  See Rhizomes and Consequences (‘Mapping a people to come’ available on this blog).

Related articles:

1. http://darkecologies.com/2013/04/18/zizek-on-thatcher-do-we-need-a-leftwing-demigoddess/

2. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher

On Rhizomes and Consequences

Mapping a people to come: On rhizomes and consequences

Full paper version of my paper presentation in the First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference to be held at Tamkang University, Taiwan from May 31 to June 2, 2013.

 

Other Than The Other Side

Psychoanalysis and Its Conjurations

Charles Stivale, commenting on structuralism and psychoanalysis, once observed:

“Structuralism cannot be separated from a new transcendental philosophy in which the sites prevail over whatever fills them. Father, mother, etc. are first of all sites in a structure; and if we are mortal, it is by moving into the line, by coming to a particular site, marked in the structure following this topological order of proximities (even when we do so ahead of our turn).”[1]

Deleuze and Guattari are more straightforward while giving psychoanalysis its due:

“Psychoanalysis undoes them (myth and tragedy) as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a subjective universal libido; but it reanimates them, and promotes them as subjective representations that extend the mythic and tragic contents to infinity….Oedipus is the fallen despot—banished, deterritorialized—but a reterritorialization is engineered, using the Oedipus complex conceived of as the daddy-mommy-me of today’s everyman.”[2]

A reterritorialized existence is here correlated to the somewhat “lesser dangerous symptoms of psychosis” of today’s everyman.[3] Teresa Brennan in her work History After Lacan tersely observes: “One of the lesser symptoms of psychosis, like neurosis, is the inability to concentrate for very long, to constitute memories in a temporal sequence or to follow an argument.”[4] Seemingly, this succinctly describes the kind of subjective existence in modernity; rightly put—the “psychotic era” (as Brennan emphasized). One of the objective symptoms of this era is its fixation on subject-object schema that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to replace with the subject-concept schema or what they associate with “diagram.”

Diagram in turn is associated with “lines of flight” and “absolute deterritorialization.”[5] Diagram deterritorializes “presignifying regime”[6] or what can amount to “topological proximities” (Stivale) into which the subject comes if only to freely express its subjectification to certain “proceedings and assignations of subjects in language.”[7] “In this sense, psychoanalysis, with its mixed semiotics, fully participates in a line of subjectification.”[8] Thus echoing their critique of psychoanalytic ‘tracing’ or its topological redundancy, Deleuze and Guattari further assert, “The psychoanalyst does not have to speak anymore, the analysand assumes the burden of interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient, the more he or she thinks about his or her next session, or the preceding one, the better a subject he or she is.”[9]

The psychotic era of involuntary, pretraced, presignified given strata of subjectification “carries desire to such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself in a black hole or change planes.”[10] When this “black hole of involuntary memory”[11] is reterritorialized as a form of pretraced memory, that is, as an organism, the subject becomes un-diagrammatically one with, in the sense of its voluntary submission (sealing the lines of flight or exits to creations), the pure untamed vitality of chaos that “undoes every consistency”[12] in the sense of impatiently “emptying [oneself] of [one’s] organs instead of looking for a point (a line of flight by means of diagramming) at which [one] could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call organism.”[13]

Deleuze and Guattari unequivocally warn against this kind of subjectification that risks “[dragging itself] toward catastrophe” by “not taking precautions”:

“Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous plane on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment….Connect, conjugate, continue…“[14]

As François Zourabichvili suggests in his commentary on Deleuze, staying stratified can amount to being “coextensive with oneself” in a manner that has since Descartes takes subjectification as a reflection of “autonomous and pre-existent inner life” as well as the “external reality” it reflects in the form of reterritorialized subjectivity.[15] But if Zourabichvili later speaks of a process of becoming “when the subject is no longer coextensive with itself[16] the rhetoric changes its effects. If we can juxtapose this process of becoming to the Lacanian notion of extimacy where, in an analytic situation, “the analysand at the end of his trajectory attains the question of being,”[17] at the same time that “the analysand finds there his or her entry into … the analyst’s discourse,”[18] his or her entry into the “analytic solitude… into a breach… where he or she is supposed to remain” [19] as a consequence of the paradox of psychoanalytic practice, then it is not so difficult to see that the question of being is either one of living in a permanent liminal landscape or that which offers a way out of the landscape in terms of becoming another subject, that is, as reterritorialized in the analyst.”[20] Against the whole analytic process itself Zourabichvili offers the following words: “the subjective form is inadequate when faced with the unformedness of becoming.” [21]

The kind of reterritorialization we spoke of concerning the analyst is best described in the following observations by Pierre-Gilles Guégen, commenting on Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII, by relating the “question of being” to the Lacanian notion of extimacy:

“From this perspective, extimacy refers to the analyst after analysis, no longer the placeholder of the Other that lacks, but as the positive remainder of the analytic operation. In other words, extimacy refers to the manner in which the analyst has been the partner of the drive.”[22]

The “analyst discourse” into which the “analysand finds his or her point of entry” after analysis is precisely where the analysand, having lost the analyst as a placeholder of the Other, is introduced not only into the question of being but also of the competence of the analyst who has pushed the analytic situation into that of a realization on the part of the analysand that the analyst is neither the Other that lacks nor does he possess the Other’s desire. The analysand is caught in a limbo after analysis but fortunately finds a point of entry, perhaps, an escape from the analytic situation which legitimates his liminal existence in the first place, into the difficult paradoxical situation of the analyst stripped of the trappings of the Other. Guégen adds:

“The Analyst of the School, once appointed, sees an open door leading onto a tightrope: ‘Will he be up to the task, or will he take a false step? Will he know how to tread the path? Here, experience is of no avail, but nothing can be done without having previously benefited from the accomplishment of an analysis and from the training that follows in its wake. How will he be able to walk the tightrope? As Lacan stressed, “It is not sufficient for a duty to be self-evident for it to be fulfilled?”[23]

We can easily relate Zourabichvili’s notion of unformedness to the Lacanian psychotic era. As an “inter-assemblage” of “lines of impoverishment and fixation,” Lacan’s psychotic era describes the “closure of the assemblage” itself, what could precisely create “states of inhibitions” that can “release crossroads behaviours,” unable to procure “an opening into consistency” where, as Deleuze and Guattari originally suggest, “blackholes resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other.”[24]

[END]

NB: In our next post (which may take some time after this one as I am currently engaged in completing a number of research papers) I will relate this Deleuzean concept of resonating blackholes to OOO’s obsession with objects, units, etc. Simply put, the logic of OOO is implicated in the kind of schema (subject-object) that Deleuze and Guattari sought to overcome. Despite its emphasis on objectality, OOO is still very much a part of this schema.

Also, there are quite a number of interesting discussions on the blogosphere on, among others, to what extent psychoanalysis can be utilized to advance the logic of OOO. This post is in part a response to this aspect of psychoanalysis.

Levi Bryant’s recent post deserves a fair hearing; see http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/questions-about-epicureanism-the-borromean-knot-again/ but also Terence Blake’s criticism of Bryant at http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/a-quick-response-to-an-impatient-and-unruly-questioner-my-preliminary-response-to-levi-bryants-questions/ which started at R.S. Bakker’s post; see http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/the-ptolemaic-restoration-object-oriented-whatevery-and-kants-copernican-revolution/ .

Meanwhile, Steven Hickman has written a number of excellent posts on psychoanalysis, particularly its Zizekean intonations, most recent is this post– http://darkecologies.com/2013/03/15/alenka-zupancic-quote-of-the-day/

Though I differ with his position on Deleuze’s relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis, I recommend Cengiz Erdem’s recent foray into psychoanalysis in relation to Deleuze. See his post: http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/melancholia-and-the-cartesian-subject/

Also check out a recent discussion of the limitations of OOO, in part, as I see it, questioning Levi Bryant’s deployment of psychoanalysis to articulate a new OOO perspective. See his post http://supposednone.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/the-failure-of-ooo/

---

Notes

[1] See Charles Stivale, “Appendix: ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism’,” in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1998), 263.

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 304.

[3] See Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

[6] Ibid., 136.

[7] Ibid., 78.

[8] Ibid., 131.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 134.

[11] Ibid., 186.

[12] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 42.

[13] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 161.

[14] Ibid.

[15] See François Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation Between the Critical and the Clinical),” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996), 196.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., 200.

[18] See Piere-Gilles Guégen, “The Intimate, the Extimate and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 271.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, 196. Ibid., 272.

[22] Guégen, “The Intimate, the Extimate and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, 271.

[23] Ibid., 272.

[24] All quotes are from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 334.

Gross power of the false: On Crisis in Borneo

Spate of killings in North Borneo has reached a proportion when a supposed nationalist-minded Filipino is expected to take sides, invoking the spirit of a nation that has had a long history of being suppressed by colonial powers and continues to endure a new form of global colonialism courtesy of finance capital whose chief benefactor is the West. Killings that no matter how you look at the extra-genealogies that lead to this crisis (in the sense that the origins of the crisis are far from enabling our sense of historical awareness and sensitivity), or regardless of the moral infamy of invading a sovereign territory, are enough to arouse the noble passion of defending the ideals for which this country is created whose people belong to the Malay race, and yes, by the blood of her martyrs, the wisdom of her intelligentsia, the resilience of her commoners, above all, the collective imagination of ‘a people to come’ with full machinic ’power of the false’ that once, and for all eternity, as it is incumbent upon this race to glorify the first blood it drew from the invaders, humbled the imperial truth of the Spanish Crown.

Unfortunately, at the risk of being perceived as a traitor to the ideals of this country, I must say I am one with the Malaysian people for consistently urging their government to carry out the laws of its land provided restraint is strictly observed, or to put it rather obliquely, consistent with how enemies, especially, those who do not know what they are fighting for, the kind of enemies that no sovereign country deserves, that no war machine deserves to defeat, should be treated in a time of war. The conspirators who plotted the invasion of a sovereign territory in North Borneo are not only risking a full-scale regional war but more crucially the integrity of the collective imagination of our people who have long been used to being colonized rather than the reverse. The gross miseducated act of the few, literally very few but whose nomadic power of the false is equally capable of deterritorializing the dogma of our official racial power to falsify colonialism and its war machines (as written in our history books peopled by celebrity revolutionaries most of whom belonged to the elite), now threatens to belie this collective imagination by exposing its utter confectionary nature, its invented-ness, its fabrication, the lie of all lies.

An isolated ruler in Mindanao, south of the Philippines, who declared his persona, this time we can give the affordance he needs, the true ruler of the Sulu Sultanate at a point when practically no one is contesting his position, ordered his royal army to settle in Sabah.  This part of North Borneo has since then become the center of a historical crisis, a Deleuzean case of a vital assemblage, a geographical congregation of the molecular borne of deep geological time, becoming-other than itself in the sense that it has, more than ever, since the invasion broke out, actualized a line of flight, an exit into creation. Meanwhile, the nomadic machine of this anti-oedipal modern-day penurious monarch, or more precisely, a humiliated Oedipus who has an axe to grind (he was excluded from the peace treaty between the Philippine government and Muslim insurgents in the south, and mind you, brokered by the Malaysian government!) has by the way managed to enjoy the accolades courtesy of the din of the anemic multiple, the mediatized multiple, those without blood, “those emptied and dreary bodies,”1 those of pure organism, a carelessly recombinant BwO, a body without organs, those who do not “reach the BwO and its plane of consistency by wildly destratifying” (Ibid.).

If, granting the truth of the argument courtesy of Delanda, “our bodies act upon strata through our subjectivity for an empirically objective duration, and while we can deterritorialize/destratify while we are upon them by all kinds of means, these means do not occur solely devoid of subjectivity”2, then the invaders of Sabah can destratify a part of North Borneo only by completely taking subjectivity out of the picture. If, ideally speaking, subjectivity means empirically objectified by historical duration, in this case, greatly knowledgeable of the empirical history of the sovereignty of the people of Sabah who long ago decided that they are the people of Malaysia, then the invaders can be judged to be acting “devoid of subjectivity” if not extravagantly poor in ideals.

If it is the people who decided, right or wrong but certainly informed by the power of the false, it is then when geography is decided, period. Conversely, the nomadic machine of a humiliated Oedipus wishes to radicalize the plane of consistency by invoking its absolute right to be false. But as D&G put it, the problem of desire (in this case, the Oedipal desire of a ruler for absolute obtainment of the object of desire itself, namely, the land of Sabah) is strictly correlated to “peopling, population.”3 Peter Canning identifies in the body of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative writings several important homologous series that describe this notion of peopling, that is, to a decisional affirmation of subjectivity, collective at best, as against the individualism of a subject that is properly devoid of subjectivity, to wit: “multiple-cities swarming with “social Ideas,” of crowds and gangs, the mob, riots and assemblies, packs or bundles of intensities, emotional turning points, the variable moods of neighborhoods.”4

Interestingly, in Freudian terms, solipsism is dangerous. In strict psychoanalytic language, a voided subjectivity needs a professional advice. 

——————–

Notes

1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 160.

2. Charles Stivale, Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, 93.

3. A Thousand Plateaus, 30.

4. “Crack of Time and the Ideal Game,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, 97. 

Autonomy in the Age of Anthropocene

 

Instead of reacting to Latour’s lectures which still need time to organize themselves into a level where Latour’s positions can be objectively appraised, therefore we need to wait for the lectures to finish, I have gathered some thoughts about Latour’s unique place in contemporary speculation concerning the advent of anthropocene vis-à-vis his concept of Gaia, and decided to put them here. But I have also decided to skip a detailed comparison between the two terms, anthropocene and Gaia. Certainly, there are semantic similarities they share from which can take off a philosophical comparison, which is, nonetheless, not my aim here. My aim is rather modest, in fact, regressive. I wish to trace the background of what I think informs Latour’s stance on human autonomy.

Certainly, we owe it to Marx and the tradition of ideology critique–the awareness that human privilege is only formally or topologically universal or that humanity is a privileged creature. It is rather a concrete advantage of individuation especially those who have the means (social, political, cultural and economic capital) to transcend the local demands of life. In all known history those who have these means are responsible for creating  a paradigm of human privilege, through apparatuses of instruction, communication and circular exchange of priority knowledge, or through “the noble lie,” the lie that there are natural differences between and among humans, such that the ordering of society for purposes of achieving balance and management of entropy has to take these differences into account.

Evolutionarily wise, there is truth in natural differences. (The ‘uninformed’ lie in the noble lie goes to the ‘lie’ that can assume for itself a level of truth not to the other-than exploitative kernel of the purpose of lying, presumably noble). But possibilities for overcoming these differences in terms of their effects on individuation across the social spectrum have become rigidified. Those who have been made to consistently belong to differentiated classes (differentiated by the mechanism of identifying natural differences replicative throughout time in which, as it is the case, the differenciator is exempted from the subjectification process) are reduced to the bareness of life, deprivation and helplessness. The anthropocentric bias therefore only serves the interest of the differenciator, plain and simple. But as this bias has to be sustained in and through an economy of differences the great differentiated has to be convinced of their privilege as humans too.

Simply put, economy depends on concrete production that only the differentiated can perform. But it is never that simple. The produce, as they are circulated, exchanged and consumed by both the great differentiated and the differenciator, become understood as the labor of humanity, including the differenciator whose privilege is symbolically extended to the great differentiated. We can therefore arrive at how a certain universality is achieved—such as the idea of humanity as one—by means of an ideological procedure mediated by the commodity. If humanity is simply an effect of this procedure, certainly we can say that humanity does not exist except in and through a forcing of the indiscernible (we take cue from Badiou), that is, by non-natural and therefore arbitrary means.

But how about humanity as the irreducible dignity of every human being? Are we to say it is also a construct? Far from it. I believe that there is a universal humanity. The universalization of humanity depends on a pre-defined essence of givenness, that which is irreducible to any formal concept or forcing of the indiscernible, namely, that the human is a triumph of the impossible—that despite innumerable conditions of non-existence (not to mention its natural end in death) it rises forth as a possibility that the process of evolution could never anticipate. The human is itself a delicate parcel of life that deserves care and respect. By whom? By the other who also deserves care and respect and whose existence, whose rising forth on the plane of creation is just as accidental as you and me and anybody else. In contrast, all processes of ascribing the human the privilege of creation or the design for which its existence makes sense, in other words, all non-evolutionary thinking that elects this human as the custodian of creation and the universe, disrespect the utter contingency from which this human draws its sustaining power as well as the possibility for novelty, individuation and transcendence. These take the place of the awareness of the horror that, as we are contingently thrown into the world without rhyme or reason, our extinction is just as fairly deducible from the premise of chance.

Still, we are of the opinion that humanity must be redefined. To redefine humanitas is a process that involves a de-universalization of humanity on the level of differentiation in favor of the universalization of contingency on the level of the true universal, among other true universals whose properties lie unexplored from the depths of representation , the underworld or the subatomic, to the great Outdoors (a position similar to Meillasoux). Taking a cue from Meillasoux, a true universal is such that it possesses a knowable property. 

The result can be the democracy of beings, not the democracy of things. We disagree with the chief orientation of OOO that accords things pre-symbolic equilibrant character that generates a co-equal status between humans and non-humans on the level of pure ontology. We believe there is much to explore in the emancipatory possibilities of the symbolic, as Latour declares that we have never been modern, that is, never been symbolic in the sense of fulfilling its human character, such that it becomes too defeatist to consign the quest to be human to the un-willed anorganicity of creation. It just kills conatus on which necessary fictions like human existence depends. Needless to say, there has never been an honest appraisal of how we need this fiction.

But Derrida is a remarkable exception. Humanity needs this fiction to sustain the conatus for justice. Justice is the Derridean fiction that once consigned to the anorganicity of the conditions of its emergence robs humanity off of the will to live, not to mention, the will to love. It does not mean Derrida was unaware of the dynamics of evolution. It is simply for him taken for granted as the necessary condition of possibility of emergent things, beings, and events. The danger of consigning an effect, such as human life as we know it, to anorganicity which is pre-elected (by science and philosophy) to be the absent cause of creation lies in what Schopenhauer feared, namely, the consequent forcing of the death of willing. For his part, Nietzsche embraced the educative kernel of Schopenhauer by appropriating the emancipatory character of pessimism in terms of declaring that pessimism (the necessary awareness that existence conceals no reason or purpose) is also a will to live in the sense that it is a reaction to the reality that nothing is. The conatus lies in repeating the nothingness that reality reveals until repetition becomes a necessity that reality can no longer control. The difference is simple: it is in the interest of humans to repeat. As Laruelle would have it, the Real in contrast is unilaterally indifferent. In Badiou, somehow repetition is making destiny out of chance (in In Praise of Love). But we have never been modern in the sense that this destiny will always remain a construction, a compossibility. We have never been human because we must continually seek justice.

A new universalization of humanity can also result in cooperation in the name of the ‘noble’ of the noble lie, not its lie anymore which means the wanton use of noble lie for purposes of supremacy and control. This lie (the noble) exposes itself to be no less the power of the false (we take cue from Deleuze), or, in Nietzsche, false or fictional or willingly oblivious, yet life-enabling.

…

NB: For those interested in the summaries of Latour’s Gifford Lectures I recommend Terence Blake’s superb journalistic accounts of the lectures so far. See terenceblake.wordpress.com

…

Few words on Terence’s recent observations on Laruelle’s anti-vitalism:

I certainly doubt that Laruelle is exempted from the charge of vitalism, if not the whole of his project, then at least a few strands of his thoughts which leave his readers with the impression that like Agamben he is somehow privileging weakness as a catapult to transcendence. Just as Agamben silently accommodates a new theology, Laruelle embraces a non-theology by virtue of the intensive image of the suppressed. The heretic is certainly the closest image of this weakness who in Laruelle has a unique mission (not in the historical sense but as a bare reminder of the crimes of philosophy in general which we can argue works for Laruelle as the persecutor of difference that the heretic champions). The weakness of the heretic becomes a unique image of strength but a strength that is other-than, a future, understood in the sense of the last instance. It is a strength precisely because it possesses a promise. It possesses a promise for the heretic alone can provoke the crimes of the World against it. All this world’s strengths are used up in the persecution of the heretic. The heretic undermines the World, leaves it vulnerable to emancipation. 

Here, I take vitalism to mean a certain privileging of weakness (of the heretic), of bare life, a life that can be killed but not sacrificed for the heretic, who represents this bareness, possesses the secret whose essence is that it sustains the lie of the church. (Benjamin Noys’s critique of Laruelle’s vitalism is worth reading on this point. Check him out at academia.edu) Its presence is just as necessary to sustain the difference against which the priestly class nominates its privilege. In India, the sutras (the children of God), the untouchables are not sacrificed by the state in the sense that they are allowed to exist. We can argue here that the untouchables are the closest representation of the heretic, those who possess the secret that sustains the lie of the privilege of the few. In other words, it is the duty of the state to sustain their poverty.

Lastly, Laruelle is bound by the historicity of the image of the heretic, an image deeply entrenched in Western Christianity, which makes Future Christ Eurocentric.

Check out:

http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/laruelle-against-nihilism-for-a-vitalism-of-the-lived-without-life/

The throes of Non-philosophy

Or, Why Are We Still In Mourning?

 

On whether Laruelle has to wait for Derrida or Deleuze to complete their thought-experiments before he could achieve a solid critique of philosophical sufficiency that the two represent in terms of which non-philosophy could then officially usher in the contemporary landscape of thought,  I think it is pretty clear that Laruelle pursued his project independent of them, not to mention that realistically speaking these experiments would never find completion. That is the whole point of Laruelle’s critique of the sufficiency of philosophy. It mistakes its ecstases as completed junctures, as saturated phenomena or fields of fulfillability where philosophy validates its self-prophetic visions.

Sufficiency is inherent in all philosophies. From what Laruelle has so far said of the development of his thought, it was from Marx through Althusser that he learned to develop the tenets of non-philosophy, especially, the method of dualysis and the determination-in-the-last-instance without which non-philosophy would not usher into contemporary thought. But the decisive moment of his critique comes with Deleuze announcing a break with philosophy’s circularity, or what could amount to a non-philosophical critique of philosophy. Yet in Deleuze the non-philosophical is always already the ability of philosophy to critique itself, its self-reflexivity. Philosophy’s sufficiency fully exposes itself without qualms in Deleuze (with Guattari in What is Philosophy?). There the task of philosophy is reduced to concept-making/engendering. No longer of discovering transcendence, God, or substance (since Spinoza philosophy has weaned away from uninformed theologism); no longer of grounding causality in a metaphysics beyond immanence for it is easy to see that immanence alone has the motive to think ‘transcendence’. After the mask of immanence is cast off immanence has no choice but to pursue its radical direction, to pursue its origin in transcendence but as a fold of immanence, the fold as the forgetful essence of metaphysics (of thinking transcendence). Here, the task of philosophy is defined with finality. The exposition of the lie of transcendence practically imposes the eternal embargo against causal thinking in favor of the same eternality required of thinking in terms of effects and surfaces, concepts that embody in themselves the proper motive for thinking transcendence. All the while what was lacking was a proper motive for transcendence, the motive being what is proper to transcendence, namely, a consistent exposition of the immanence of its claim that applies much to the subject that by its very finitude is prone to the excesses of immanence as immanence is practically an excess. When the motive was finally revealed, transcendence leaks out, makes itself available to all subjects. It loses its mystery. It can be practically lived. Yet all these take cue from philosophy being able to finally realize its true task.

In Derrida, deconstruction also supposes a sufficiency, a sufficient sense of history that ironically even without deconstruction is deconstructing itself in a manner of auto-poeticism. There philosophy is reduced to witnessing the deconstruction of the object-cause of history by the object itself, namely, the foldedness of immanence, its ahistorical origin because needless to say it takes a decision to begin history, to proceed from oneself as self-nomination, as Marx and Nietzsche exposed. One need not needlessly wonder how this foldedness of immanence becomes historical. Deleuze says the fold is the memory and it is memory that we live out until superseded by another institution of memory, of course, in the span of a lifetime. Beyond Deleuze, the self-folding automatism of history is reduced by Derrida into the capacity of the trace (the object) of memory as only its trace not memory in itself can be meaningfully understood (memory is a trace of the trace, etc.) to take the place of history itself. Even without deconstruction, this trace de-constructs itself by revealing its other origin, which consistent with his Heideggerianism Derrida translates into pursuing other beginnings within the margins of history.

These margins by the way already touch the dimension of the future.They lie outside the circle of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Derrida’s powerful reinterpretation of Heidegger’s Ereignis is truly revolutionary except that even this revolutionary gesture relies on a sense of completion (which also explains Heidegger’s self-referential futurity, otherwise his inability to break with the ideology of the death of God, ‘the death’ being the ultimate sufficient cause of philosophy that cannot move beyond the present whose temporal integrity relies on the infinite capacity of God to die eternally, that is, in the present). This sense of completion is guaranteed by the sufficiency of philosophy–that only philosophy can see and pursue these other beginnings, that only philosophy can take the initiative for other disciplines to take on these other beginnings.

Taken in the above light, we can tolerate the sufficiencies of Badiou, Zizek or Meillasoux and even OOO for we see in them what Derrida, sans the sufficiency that motivates his deconstruction, also see in Heidegger, that is, the pursuit of other beginnings. Even for Laruelle these pursuits are permissible for they afford non-philosophy materials for dualysis. And yes, Laruelle also relies on a sense of sufficiency, but not constitutive of non-philosophy, rather parasitic to philosophy. Sufficiency is philosophy’s own making, not of non-philosophy’s. There lies the difference. At the end of the day, Laruelle teaches us to witness all these with openness and releasement to the wonder they never fail to evoke.

Still, I have issues with non-philosophy and it is motivated, among others, by the conviction of some that Laruelle’s time has come. That his time has come only makes sense if we agree that Laruelle took Derrida and Deleuze’s works as incomplete at the time he was critiquing them. I can only wonder just exactly when can their works be completed and by whom. The way I see it is this: as long as we make non-philosophy dependent on philosophy’s completion we can never get over the throes of experiencing the death of God. I also believe this is what psychoanalysis teaches us. I cannot expand on this further for I intended this to be a short post. Other chores are beckoning. But suffice it to say that we will never cease mourning for the death of God until we allow other beginnings to redefine God, say, as an immanent Real as, for instance, in Lacan. Seemingly, in Philosophies of Difference, Laruelle takes great pain to expose Lacan’s psychoanalysis just to see to it that he agrees with Lacan, sans Lacan’s anti-philosophical (not non-philosophical) sufficiency, otherwise a philosophy biting its own tail.

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This post is in part a response to Terence Blake. See   http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/why-laruelle-why-now-reflections-on-some-recent-trends-in-continental-philosophy/

The Unchanging Form of the Everyday

This is a comment on Steven Hickman’s post on J.G. Ballard; see–

http://darkecologies.com/2013/02/22/j-g-ballard-the-fragile-world/

I like the way dmfant, in one of his comments to Steven, is provoking philosophy to reflect upon on its way with “idle chatter,” or the way the practice of philosophy is itself wedged between critique and vision, between autonomy and reflexivity. I say this in light of what I see as philosophy’s spontaneous slippage into the everyday, the everyday as the very dimension that sutures rather indifferently these two obverse faces of philosophical practice (whichever strand it represents, continental or analytic), regardless whether philosophy allows such a fall into the abyss (this everyday that is foreclosed to autonomy and reflection). It is both a saving grace and an anathema to philosophy. On the one hand, it affords philosophy an automatic inclusion in reality whether it deliberately invokes it or not. On the other hand, it opposes philosophy’s obverse faces, deflects their gazes back to philosophy’s self-reflection (which guarantees its continuity). Philosophy can re-conceive those deflections in different ways as Narcissus would see different images of himself.

But the “idle chatter” that I speak of here can only make sense if upon exhausting its phenomenological signification for Heidegger we reach an awareness of a rather disquieting precondition for thinking philosophically. First, philosophy must be necessarily stung by the idleness of reality, its ultimate indifferent posture. Second, this indifference is treated as problematic. The ancient question ‘why there is being rather than nothing’ is precisely the kind of question that indifference provokes (but without interest on its part, to belabor the point). Hence, the bare form of chatter, procured by the idleness of reality. Parmenides made this point when he spoke of the goddess telling him that reason is the obverse side of opinion, that ultimately they are One and the Same.

The everyday is no less the bare form of the non-philosophical. Unfortunately, even for Laruelle, or what I have understood so far, the non-philosophical can only take its cue from the autonomy and reflexivity of philosophical practice (in Steven’s words, “the slumbers of ideology”). It becomes parasitic to philosophy. The turn to non-standard philosophy, presumably a philosophy that has managed to escape the circularity of philosophy (or ideology) by reversing the order of priority–now from non-philosophy to the philosophizability of philosophy, meaning, its reducibility to a ‘material’ where philosophy loses its integrity as ‘first’–only ascertains in a ‘less problematic manner’ the primacy of the philosophical-without-philosophy. Less problematic because, presumably, it brings forth the pure form of the philosophical as a fall, a slip into the abyss, a dive into withdrawal, mystery and fiction.

But as Freud and Lacan would interpolate here, a ‘discharge’ (a release, say, from philosophy to non-philosophy) that can take the form of ending the tensions of philosophy, as it also happens in the sexual act, is only necessary to the extent that it allows for “changing the discourse” in a cathartic release. It amounts to de-philosophizing the everyday by liberating the everyday from the everyday of pure non-philosophy–the universal site of the nameless multiple, the poor, the common, the masses. The poor is either a person or a state of things.

Unfortunately, as philosophy changes its discourse by saturating the philosophizability of the everyday, the poor is left to its pure unchanging form.  The non-philosophical to which alone the poor can approve itself is now silently appropriated by the self-changing terms of the concept-making machine of the philosophical, from standard to non-standard, from decision to heresy, from Badiou to Saint Paul-without-Badiou. Ah, the Deleuzean century!

Non-philosophy and The Specter of the Full Turn

What ghosts tell

 

Laruelle offers to describe a state of philosophy after the determination-in-the-last-instance leaves it without a life to harass, without a shadow of itself to receive the masochistic blows of its decisional intoxication: “There is no longer any relation but only an alterity of the One, which is an immanence without relation to philosophy—even though it gives or manifests philosophy while separating itself from it” (The Non-philosophy Project, 129).

Such condition of separation is necessary for non-philosophy that takes philosophy, or its death, for that matter, as its material for fiction. One can say here that philosophy has now turned into a ghost. Yet a ghost that is authentically proper to its existence. This ghost now roams the World that has ceased offering a placement to philosophical binding, of self-returning reflexivity. Philosophy needs to feel threatened by its own ghost, its alterity, its other-than, its future (needless to say, philosophy has no concept of the future), its non-philosophical trajectory that it desires to suppress even as that which it stifles responds by offering a true hospitality by taking its name (non-philosophy) as the name that dies in philosophy. For what?

The ghost, suddenly devoid of the World that it used to engender, can tell something in this respect in the manner of a philo-fiction. In the meantime–”Left to itself the World contains many specters and many simulacra and it becomes both one and the other” (Struggle and Utopia At The End Times of Philosophy, 104).

 …

They must tell something or it would be totally unreasonable to believe they exist in some way. That’s the way they exist, or must exist. On the one hand, they exist on account of giving their presence a distinct voice. On the other hand, they must exist and exist they do on that account.

And that’s why ghosts exist: they must exist. In fact, we cannot freely imagine existence itself without its double, its shadow, the antinomic exteriority of existence. It is the curse of existence, if at all it can be said of human life which is already ontologically bereft.

 §

Already in mourning of a true unconditioned purpose, human life must cling to the unimaginable to sustain its troubled existence, its rather proxy existence, an essence without the full credentials of existence, a soul without a proper nourishing body. A pure soul but not the soul as a pre-existent entity, rather the pure exteriority of being. As pure exteriority a being exists without a substitutable double, without connections, without a proxy body which is what a body is to the human soul. Thus, a pure body, a perfectly essential body is a pure exteriority, an atomic structure to say the least, existing as an independent physical reality. But since, as we emphasized, human life is in mourning, the pure essential body is a thing of the past as the first gesture of creation where a certain death was already achieved, a de-naturing, displacement and separation of the pure body (the state of being as an improbable being) from an active, present being-ness in the manner of proxy existence (the birth of being in culture),engendering a living human being, by all accounts a post-atomic being, a real being that as real is unrepeatable. Indeed, life can only exist once.

Nonetheless, the price of earning a culture is the quiet, discreet dependence of being on the memory of pure exteriority. That is how it sustains its troubled existence—by nourishing the ghostly exteriority of the past to the degree that we can only exist as proxy beings, surrogate atomics mourning of metaphysical purpose.

 §

Ghosts tells us some fundamental facts about existence. We mean facts as the outward evidence of a lie, a fabrication which on account of its powerful historical character it will be difficult to tell a lie from a fact. History is presence and to that degree the absentee character of existence in the ghostly exteriority of being is either tolerated or suppressed.

On the one hand, history tolerates ghosts if only to say that here ghosts are considered a fault, a conditionality of being subject to the examination of history utilizing the categories of reason.

On the other hand, history suppresses the memory of pure exteriority due to its liberating force, but most of all its natural violence against all forms of system or regime. In any case, history does not have complete metaphysical power to suppress pure exteriority, its subaltern challenge to the interiorization of being in common existence, with respect to the ghosts’ obligatory existence even within presence, by all accounts the co-habitation of common existence as a livable structure of being and the suprasensuous within the time of being.

Ghosts tell us that only ‘they’ are real. In this regard they pose a challenge to objective realism. They demand an impossible attention by according them a presence which gratifies the ‘Real’ but in the sense of an inversion, in the sense of epistemic falsehood, of a negativist celebration of ontological grief, mourning of the ghost of Being, the chimera of pure exteriority, the pure soul.  Meanwhile, common existence subsists as an essence without the full credentials of being. Its subsistence already betrays a transcendental act of deprivation. Existence is forced to comply with unrealistic demands one of which is to render existence to presence in one’s individual capacity as a being, to outward categorial appearance, to an appearance of truth and individual integrity, in short, to-the-World that the ‘act’ has previously engendered, at the same time that it (common existence or just existence) must persist (with or without the threat of deprivation) as a being forced to imagine it has those credentials. In this sense, there is no such common existence. Existence is uncommon, strange, ghostly, suspicious across the board.

To imagine one has the credentials of existence outside the hegemony of fate, of the destiny of common existence to live a life of difficult ontology by which we mean the necessary life of conceptuality—the practical even the rational, moral, religious, and political conception of beings according to predefined essences, living according to the effectuations of the thought-world or philosophy—it will take as much lie as to imagine oneself existing as a be-ing within an embodied essence, its fullest credential, so to speak. In this sense to philosophize is already to lie.

It is to ecstatically imagine oneself as a be-ing having those credentials, a being freely conscious of itself imagining itself for-itself, hence, the heuristic value of its self-grounding in the meanings it fabricates. Add to this complication the demand of transcendental existence to render one’s being to the evidentiality of time and space but where evidence of existence escapes all forms of ontological validation. In any case, the life of a be-ing is loaned by the pure exteriority of its past, its ghost which gives/hosts its temporal ground in the sense of giving it an authority to ex-ist. But not every human being is a be-ing. It takes a decision to-be. It takes an impossible leap, from being to be-ing, from existence to ekstasis. To give oneself to this leap is to listen to the ghostly voice of freedom. Where freedom is, there the possibility of ghostly existence haunts the living. And since ‘every-where’ there is freedom, which does not mean it is essentially realized, anywhere there are ghosts. They tell of the same thing.

Once more: to ex-ist is to occupy a realizable condition of being outside the realism of the objective, hence, be-ing. It is ekstasis. It is to exist as a be-ing, a being in pursuit of the credentials of existence, seeking credence, self-respect, autonomy and dignity. A be-ing in pursuit of a true unconditioned purpose which is the goal of every human freedom.

And here is where the process makes a full turn: As unconditioned, this purpose is no longer of the world. As a goal it does not have anything to do with the present. The process is completed in a non-philosophical simplification of philosophical fictionality (unaware of its behavioral structure). But if this simplification is also other-than the self-enclosing turn then rightly so it can only be achieved out of the future, the other-than (as Laruelle would emphasize) whose character is also simplified. It has a human character but not of the world and presence, rather of the last-instance of the world and presence, which is the ghostly presence of the what is to come, Man in the last-determining-instance, what could be the purity of the post-atomic being, the promise of every immanence where nothing can ever take place “save matter,” to parody Kant.

But are we not post-atomic already since the birth of time in the World? Are we seeing a repeat performance? Philosophy, encore. It has all the same cinematic elements assembled within the World that has not aged. Philosophy has not aged. One may wonder if philosophy has a concept of the planet, for what ages is the other-than-the-World. We can ask non-philosophy of the same thing. Does non-philosophy have a concept of the planet other than a non-planet like Pluto?

Once again, this is another way to say that ghosts must exist, or we don’t exist at all. Or, what amounts to the same thing: philosophies must exist, or humans don’t exist at all.

Deleuze and Ecological Peace?

In this short thought-piece I wish to frame the islands’ disputes in the South East Asia (my place in the planet) by invoking Deleuze’s concept of Desert Island (part of my otherwise moratorious approach to the Deleuzean century, I should say) within the context of producing myths of vital materialities as an alternative arena of conflict. An island is a geographic force that has the power to push a desert around it, its desert being the ocean around it. Yet Deleuze is quick to clarify that such power is imaginary and mythological rather than actual and geographical.

In dispute is a scattered group of islands in the China Sea which threatens to escalate into a regional war. Not without historical merits concerning the mythological status of these islands, most nation claimants resort to local myths fleshed out by cultural and economic linkages among the people of the South East, to ancient people’s literature as indisputable records of early settlements to prove cultural birthright to their soil, their flora and fauna, their river streams and lakes, etc.

Though myths are bound to cultures what is rather crucial that can arise out of the saturation of fields of rhetorical enunciation of ownership is a kind of metaculture–no longer human, but rather ecological–that weaves their local formations, and ultimately, frames the contingency of the ocean that surrounds them, a metanarrative as a myth of the formation of continents. Continents are where people live. Rightly so, literary cultures surround the islands. By radicalizing the contingency of the oceans in terms of saturating the ecological limits of literature, we can hope that the islands will stay in their vital assemblages free of hallucinations of state ownership.  It is better that way than the molar machines of war. 

(As always molar aggregations have the power to deterritorialize molecular assemblages that have freely structured themselves into virtual democracy between and among vital materialities, such as islands, in the case of a war to decide sovereignty).

In whose words language breathes

I felt defenseless in a thoroughly inspiring way when I read this post:

http://darkecologies.com/2013/01/25/heidegger-poetic-dwelling-and-escaping-the-literal-minded-gnosis/

Φ

It takes me back to my former somewhat delirious fascination with Heidegger, and yet, and perhaps this is what a homecoming feels like after a long difficult attempt to mature into a self-image I always wanted to become, it touches me in a way that I felt I am killing him wrongly.

This Heidegger, the equivalent of an obsession that never has once faltered even as I take shelter in newfound theories announcing the truths of the times–truths that announce their breaks with the past, with master frames like his–despite my attempts to renounce the youth that he claimed;

Least to say, its propensity for abyssal thinking, no less its desire to mimic his voice, his enviable life of contemplation, at the expense of ignoring the disturbances of history in whose belly his name resonates in echoes of praise and contempt;

Seemingly this Heidegger–this flicker of a shadow that refuses to be outshone by anyone who takes advantage of the ‘unvoiced’ that only the dead have the right to consign to anywhere but the living tongue, just so to protect the tranquility of their unrepeatable echoes, the utter contingency of their rhythms,  the way they threw themselves into the pit of becoming without guarantee of rescue–even now wishes to see that “the greatest danger” lies behind him.

Like Zarathustra he envisions the poetic nobility of “listening to the promise,” the promise of the destining of Being without history to tamper with its path.

But, as he once rued in light of Holderlin, “Hard it is, For what dwells near the origin, to leave its place”

(from Heidegger’s translation of Holderlin’s Die Wanderung).

Φ

Of the gravest danger I can say, it is the earth like the dead leaving its place to us.

Φ

As I complete this post Jeremy Schmidt made me feel like he never wanted me to recover from Steven’s fascinating post. See

http://jeremyjschmidt.com/2013/01/25/earthmasters-clive-hamiltons-latest-on-playing-god-with-the-climate/

Vital Materialities

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Thought pieces I wish to write about this weekend

(1) From Matthew Segall

“The Sun remained a hero undescended and unrisen; an invincible god unburdened by (e)motion of any kind; a distant, objective observer. This provides a telling analogy for the hubris of the newly empowered solar ego whose great flash of insight had lead (sic) it to forget or repress its shadow by pushing the death-rebirth mystery into unconsciousness.”

http://footnotes2plato.com/2011/10/14/the-post-copernican-odyssey-from-the-kantian-psyche-to-the-tarnasian-cosmos/

My Platonic Bataillean non-philosophy (by morotarious Deleuze) is aching to expand the above passages. There is something in them that I envy. I wish I could have written them. 

(2) From Steven Hickman

“[A] naturalist perspective onto religion – yet, not one that is reductionary, and derogatory toward religious practices; but, one that sees in these practices deep seated human needs, both ethical and political, that have bound humans and the natural world together in a material cultural matrix that we should incorporated into our philosophical spectrum rather than anathematizing if we are ever to find a path forward”

http://darkecologies.com/2013/01/20/wild-empiricism-deleuze-and-the-hermetic-turn/

Material-cultural-matrix. Acronym, M-C-M. Anyone familiar with Marx’s equation? This is it! 

(3) Miscellaneous

So as not to burden myself of additional writing tasks, I’m unloading few words about Matthew Segall’s reply to my earlier post “Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos.” His words:

“I’ve given some thought to the effects of the Internet, especially blogging/vlogging, on neuro-cognitive evolution. The Global Network of Capitalized Information is fast at work relieving us of our own private subjectivity. Our very selves are being gobbled up through our MacBooks onto the corporate-owned harddrives of Twitter, FaceBook, WordPress, and Google (Google is even gobbling up our apartment buildings, the continents and the oceans, even the stars and the sky by way of their satellization of the elements into a virtual Google Earth!).” (See comments, Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos)

Elsewhere I wrote:

“The moment one seeks information, visibility follows. For one is also a bit of information that others seek. By becoming visible one helps the social order increase its knowledge base for global computation in terms of mapping, mining and analyzing psycho-social coordinates necessary for systems to widen their scope, which means high return of investment. To encourage visibility and hence to increase the knowledge base, systems resort to the psycho-social dynamics of combating anonymity, reification and obscurity by providing accessible thus therapeutic platforms for coming out into the world, venues for expressibility and collective recognition, promoting the dictum that opacity is specious, that the darkness it promotes is suspiciously evil” (unpublished essay)

Global systems demand visibility, and always challenge our capacity for self-reification. Self-reification is a mode of existence which guarantees a temporary hermetic space that systems cannot penetrate. Systems aim to shatter these spaces to extract information necessary for global computation. Global computation is the arrangement of plateaus, grids, lines of flights, scales and axes transformed into codes, which in essence are mechanics to delay the fullest deleterious effects of chaos or entropy that is indifferent to human interests. But here’s the catch. Once systems successfully shattered these spaces they lost vital computational resources. In other words, system collapse is avoided by preserving the very spaces it wishes to totalize.

Is this called capitalist realism?

But we have reached a point where self-reification is challenged by the limit of computational resources, namely, the anthropocene. Self-reification is increasingly losing a cause.

Once, this technology of the self was directed at systems and human and natural aggregates–the concealment of self vis-à-vis the rise of systems.

Today while humanity’s influence over the geophysical evolution of the planet could no longer be downplayed as just another myth of the Overman, self-reification is confronting the constrained spatiality (the living planet) of the reflexive loop that once emboldened its freedom cause.

As Terence Blake would quip, “No fixed roads, no stable frameworks…”

(http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/feyerabend-and-laruelle-2/)

Or, instead of self-reification “what is needed here is a de-organ-ization of thought.” Thus spoke David.

(http://inthesaltmine.com/fragmented-body/)

…

Here, the universe is rehearsing the big crunch.

This will entail transparency, once and for all. Making oneself available for the service of humanity that is facing a new entropic war. But, will systems take the bait?

Did I hear it right? Google earth?

The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos

Is time explainable as an unchanging structure or a movement that can be described in terms of change which is not without an illusory apprehension of its otherwise more inexplicable nature? Substance or vitality? Or the combination of the two? In this sense Difference and Repetition is an unfinished work for the rich nuances it leaves behind. The answer rather lies somewhere. To my mind, Nathan Widder (check out his page at academia.edu) is one of the few Deleuzeans who problematizes this aspect.

In his work on Kant Deleuze exposes how invagination becomes the undeclared premise of the Critique of Judgment. The folding of the Void is first of all a matter of taste. This explains the aesthetic precursor of any form of ontology. If Zourabichvili argues that Deleuze has no ontology, that is precisely the case why. Foucault pursues the same path with Kant in terms of his “critical ontology of the self.” But by such an act the question of time is sidelined in favor of ex nihilo folding as creative snatching of the Void/One.

Time ceases to be a structure and begins to be an act. The Void is reduced to judgments. This is already a counter-naturalistic move via the aesthetic as against the sciences which do not see that acts, foldings, invaginations of the sort that nonetheless make possible the creation of history as we know it, are strong enough to punctuate a hole in the Void. Something is missing in the picture.

For science it is a matter of describing a world devoid of subjectivity. The eliminative materialism of Brassier to which I subscribe, granting that elimination is the work of the last instance in the manner of nonphilosophy, fully cognizant of the hallucinatory material invoked by materialism. There the subject is ultimately reduced to the erotic enjoyment of knowing. One way to “eat well,” in the Derridean sense.

Though it is correct to argue that somehow science is blind to the absurdity of the model of accounting for time where subjects do not matter, for they are subjects after all, the ideal that it pursues I think remains valid. My bias for Plato is at work here. Plato who established the Greek ideal of science saw the Forms as the aggregate of not-selves. (In their very essence as inhuman anorganic threat to human ambitions of order the Platonic Forms are Chaos, otherwise stated). For Plato it is the Forms accidentally descending on the terrestrial plane not humans unpacking the Forms that made possible the creation of the world. When Plato starting in the middle dialogues took a political turn in the Republic and in the Laws, he was simply stating the obvious, that any attempt to install order will simply be offering a fodder to chaos, the Forms which can invalidate human creative assemblages by challenging their certainties. He prescribed political alternatives but with only one thing in mind. The improvement of the human order is what Chaos/Forms would want the plane of immanence to transform itself to, to be thus eaten.The naturalist pluralists of the Presocratic world already understood this. There is simply no human in their framework of accounting for the birth of the world. But Plato would wish that before the great feast comes we have made our lives quite satisfactorily, that we have eaten well, which explains his emphasis on human flourishing as succeeding philosophers would build on.

For his part, Deleuze subtly incorporates the idiom of the subject, the rhizome, in explaining the birth of creative assemblages which makes him a hesitant humanist through and through. (Badiou rather translates this subtle humanism into an “autonym for an empty idiom.”). As for Bataille, he ignored the Greek ideal of science by extracting transcendence from within the transcended, the religious. Religion for Bataille is the only source of transcendence (played by aesthetics in Deleuze). Both affirmations celebrate the power of the subject to void, unpack the Void. The tenacity of these affirmations lies in its historicality. The voiding of the Void by subjects have created a plane of immanence capable of accommodating temporalization of discovered immanence, newfound lives, at least, for an indefinite period of time (read: forgetting there ever was a void).

Nietzsche was once our best reference. The eternal recurrence of the Same is the necessity of history, a steely necessity to hold off the arrival of entropy by a process of repeating history over and over again, a refashioning enough to convince the brain it is a conscious immortal entity. Or, perhaps, Derrida with his autoimmunity where the absolute future, entropy, is held off, a messianism without messiah, rightly so because the messiah is a destroyer, through a self-negating process that simply deprives entropy of its own power to negate the species, which has its own illusory advantages.

History was once the best weapon against Chaos. But it has already reached a point where its arrival in the evolutionary scene has become irreversible. The anthropocene motions a new cycle of entropic wars, food and energy wars, biopolitical wars issuing from health, security issues, etc, which can rekindle the dreams of strong AI. The question now is are we ready to become fuller machines in order to surpass the challenge of entropy on organic life? Incidentally philosophy is now making a turn to objectality, machinicity, etc. But Deleuze has already oriented us towards embracing the steely necessity of becoming-other.

How then can we account for time? Does time descend or we ascend to time?

…

Between waiting for entropy to descend (“waiting for Godot” is an excellent metaphorization on the part of Beckett, and good heavens Godot hasn’t arrived yet) and hastening its arrival (the ascension that post-singularity dreams of, the notorious “evolution by other means” of Kurzweil), there is a rather difficult choice to make, to neutralize the speed of progress.

There is a middle ground between embracing religion in a post-secular age and exposing our bodies to the visibility of global computational systems which have been preparing humanity to the singularity age of non-organicity, courtesy of physical symbolic networks, smart machines and knowledge intensive goods which increasingly alter our neural capacities for self-reification against the totalizing machine of capital that always demands transparency and visibility (Metzinger’s argument).

That ground is the ground of obscurity, anonymity and self-reification.

The middle ground is the anesthetization of Chaos which will entail the dispersion of Chaos from its concentration as realizable creative assemblages in selected spaces and geographies of the world into open spaces and plateaus. This will mean sacrificing profits and reshifting of knowledge culture from centers to peripheries; from continents to islands, from oceans to river tributaries; from galaxies to planets, from Milky Way to the solar system (which will have tremendous consequences for science). This is perhaps the clue to the hermetic turn.

By anesthetizing Chaos we deprive ourselves of the knowledge of End which hopefully will suppress the drive to outsmart time by racing against time. For how else can we explain the frenzy of progress that has been responsible for the birth of the anthropocene if not for the rather undeniable fact that All will come to end. Some of us want to eat well ahead of others. Some of us would wish to take advantage of the opportunities for self-fashioning, for invagination of multiplicities that lie in wait to be enfolded into fuller subjectivities, before Godot arrives.

Should we say then that in these capital times there has to be a qualified moratorium on Deleuzean folding?

______________________

See also Steven Hickman commenting on Joshua Ramey’s recent publication, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal http://darkecologies.com/2013/01/20/wild-empiricism-deleuze-and-the-hermetic-turn/ 

P.S. As I was completing this post my wordpress reader directed me to footnotes2plato asking “Is the Universe Alive?” http://footnotes2plato.com/2013/01/20/is-the-universe-alive/. I haven’t yet seen the clip that he attached to his post, but out of the blue I whispered to myself, “Yes, it is. It is coming to eat you (I mean all of us). And it wants you to eat well enough before you get eaten.”

To he who understood the meaning of Bataille

  

When an internet activist decided to hang himself, did he hang himself out of sheet pressure of acephalous drives, impersonal rhizomes that desire no end except to replicate the Ur-drive of the great Spinozan universe? Or, did he do it because his was an act to apply the breaks on infinite becomings of germs at least on his side of existing, granting it is still right to call it existing when conatus is all there is to it?

Indeed, it can be everything until a human decides to die, quash an intense flux to live free, or run fast ahead of light.

A blasphemous inversion follows.

Nature is belched out. And back she goes to a dark precursor of any new beginning, any new chasing after germs.

She becomes artificial and death laughs like a cheerful soul.

On most occasions, still, when there is grave incapacity for suicide belching is a tough choice to make where nature is at its best, hungry for likeness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ride of Your Life

To prove his case, when Einstein insisted against Bergson that time is an illusion, the physicist had to extend relativity theory to the metaphysics of perception.

Perception operates on the field of phenomena, and only in such realm, where situations can exercise totalitarian influence over knowing. Rightly so, phenomenology renders perception problematic.

But all the more knowledge can thrive. Finitude heralds the joy of the infinite.

§

It is rather the best illustration of how perspectivalism culminates in pragmatism: knowledge is made possible by the absence of foundations that could have preceded it.

No doubt pragmatists are the most trained nihilists. And the rather poorly trained ones in terms of belaboring the obvious: Marx and Engels stating that individuals have always proceeded from themselves. Or, at least how they were understood by Marxist ontographers if such label is pertinent.

If it can be said that modern Marxist ontographers differ from their nihilist predecessors one can wonder if their modern graphs, grids, and charts, simply illustrate a change of tactic, from subject to object. The task is to change how history ought to proceed.

Because it is not passive, history reads along: times are changing. Period doubling, if you may. The subjects of history have taken the exact time for them to reach their original states. It will always be the case. The becoming transparent of their plasticity, their renewed objectality, their being-there, the thereness of their undecidable situations, which can challenge forth whatever is challenged enough to suffer an attraction and cause the suffering of others in the over-all machinic drill of a Spinozan universe.

By this performativity machine one can also explain the arrival of the singular time of Man. But not without capitalism investing in creativity, the production of machinic phyla, rhizomatic assemblages, or anything Deleuze could name. The desire to become-other by Capital, to end its historical differentiation in quest of Happiness, this uncanny double of Capital; to become the very replicator of life as pure immanence, chaos resistant to molar aggregations triggering the rush to replicate bodies that can suffer and bodies insufferable as well, and yes, hastening the advent of the anthropocene, the course of evolution now dominantly steered by Man.

Do we not owe these thick concentrations to Deleuze? Does Capital not owe it to him, this great prophet of creation? The Deleuzean century unlocking the secret of Capital more comprehensive than the accomplishment of Marx’s labor theory of value.

Doubtless, one had to begin as a subject, and double itself in a hazy molecular process unperceived by the naked eye—even by its host, the unwitting person of the Metzingerian ego-tunnel, or what have you—until the irreversibility of growth, its culmination in decay, can testify to the undecidable status of original statehood, namely, the void of Chaos.

Irreversibility—but Einstein denied it.

§§

Perception is the essence of this self-proceeding, an individuation of the Void in the situationism of the Event, the relativity (situation) that is perception (the impossibility of observation) itself.

Here, one decides to assume a position extrinsic to perception for reasons that are obvious to even the primitive—perception is stubborn; it chooses not to perceive itself—when this one that is also a non-one to itself in light of the impossibility of catching up with perception (the reason the modern is no better than the primitive) starts to perceive-without-perception, that is, not minding the speed by which things are returning to their original state.

Oh, yes. Did someone say ‘they withdraw’?

Perception is faster than that which perceives. It is rather always the case of belated ownership, which makes ownership suspect; of doubling, which makes singularity suspect; a period doubling as said of thermodynamics, which makes democracy, pace the Marxist, irrespective of the kind of ontography he makes, a passage and not an end in itself.

When Albert refuted Henri the physicist simply resorted to the metaphysics of perception, its situationism, which is already impossible as an event if one is to say that it is ‘there’.

…

It can only be in a certain location from a relative standpoint. From all available standpoints which can be infinite, it cannot be in any location. It always doubles its location to the absolute infinity of assuming a standpoint, which, simply put, must also take time.

How tiresome and boring it is to be an infinite. How unlucky for it to be so and so with time always challenging it to prove itself.

But the infinite can be such a terrific spoiler of curiosity, the most selfish of construct that has mobilized inflationary armies of truth that has only managed to create its double, the finite. The finite–no less deflationary owing to its irreversible nature.

The tug of war between the two has made possible the idea that there is time. Time is the site of this war. And this war? It has created an economy. The name for the great balancing act of time.

…

Take the universe as an example. There is a universe because it is in a certain location in space. One cannot simply arrive at a statement that the universe is the whole of space. The All is the end of phenomenology. The end of statement. From all available standpoints, which, again, can be infinite, the universe cannot exist today in all its modalities, past, present, future.

Today’ is an abduction of time as space, a particular status of the universe-space, which as abducted is already relative. Given the premise, there is simply no opportunity for the universe to exist as time. But as an economy it does.

This is the miracle of the Deleuzean century where everything is an actant, a body, insufferable or otherwise. An economy of exchange. A democracy through and through. A Derridean cannibalism. To eat and be eaten. The last extended orgy of the planet feeding on solar lottery.

§§§

Still, it will take time for the universe to exist from all standpoints, its wholeness reaching the singularity of perception, granting that perception, the impossibility of observation, can be saved by the Spinozan universe governed by untiring conatus.

We can wonder if this is already the gnostic precondition for Meillasoux’s kenotype. Singularity must be eternal enough to accommodate the arrival of the wholeness of the universe whose meaning is a non-meaning (because taken from all standpoints). True to form, Meillasoux’s rather gnostic indifference to the irreversibility of time in view of the impossible operation of Chaos (“Contingency is such that anything might happen, even nothing at all, so what what is remains as it is,” After Finitude, 57) supports the view that time is reversible.

Time is not an illusion. This could well be the perfect pragmatist illusion.

What Meillasoux could logically insist is that the singularity that can perceive the whole of the reversibility of time, the universe arriving with all and from all its standpoints, must have already doubled itself. To that extent he is no longer thinking of humans (no doubt, one can talk about the democracy of things, bodies, objects, quasars, and lonely chairs), rather, from among the available philosophical influences of this philosopher in the making, the Spinozan bodies that are capable of suffering eternity and causing the suffering of eternity of other bodies.

Postscript

But one cannot inhibit oneself to think that humans will be born again from their period-doubled ashes, because time is not an illusion, because it is reversible. Born-again-X’ers. But such is the democracy of things.

And such newness. Such brilliant metaphysics.

Such conflation of difference and sameness, of agreement and disagreement, of intentions and nuances, between philosophers and physicists, between impatience and impatience.

Such is democracy. Such hope, after all.

Oh, yes. But brace for a ride.

The Multiplication of Innocence

“Why do we need a “negative” word to say what is primary? (Agent Swarm)

Hobbes, Turing and the Child

A certain humanistic fatigue has of late taken measure in a nonhuman perspectival turn; an indication of what philosophy is going through which the turn to a posthuman framework has been providing a rather disputable voice. It is simply a prolepsis, I should say, which only philosophy can feel about its own doing. Laruelle is therefore right when he castigates philosophy’s auto-performativity, “its deeply ingrained fetishism (Non-Philosophy Project, 88), among others.

Philosophy confronts a vacuum after saturating, let us borrow from the lessons of arithmetic, the function and computability of its truths, which rightly so has to entertain the unpredictable. Obviously this encounter does not strictly inform a purely philosophical search for a new voice; mathematics also has its history of looking for a new voice, a new function, etc. When a perfectly consistent system, one whose propositions are said to be true, is confronted with its own incapability to prove its negations, the challenge of Entscheidungsproblem, the decision problem, is set in motion.

Hilbert was among the first few to set this problem in motion by arguing in favor of the formalism of completeness, later challenged by Gödel. Gödel became the foster child not only of mathematicians but also philosophers who had much to benefit from his incompleteness theorem (we shall see why). Badiou is the most contemporary example of this philosophical embrace of incompleteness though he would radicalize the decision problem further into the Event.We all know that Badiou relies on set theory, the most fundamental system of mathematics. We also know that in light of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem mathematics met its serious challenge–there is the ‘unsolvable” contrary to Hilbert’s claim. The solution to the decision problem lies outside mathematics. But Gödel had no alternative in mind, that is, outside mathematics, except to embrace set theory’s infinity of infinities, and its many related axioms (of continuum, etc.), which extends the life of the Entscheidungsproblem to such an extent that the undecidable strictly becomes a mathematical business. In popular terms it only confirmed the perception that mathematics was not giving up its dream of mastery. It should not however cease to be mathematics. Doing mathematics is one thing; taking mathematics as something of an incorruptible property of existence is another. Overall, the controversy that Entscheidungsproblem sparked simply raised the curtain that mathematics is not an invincible discipline. This is rather an odd case of an extra-mathematical Event catching mathematics unawares.

§

Alan Turing was able to show that the problem of Entscheidungsproblem can be solved by extra-mathematical intervention but still using the very tools of mathematics, this time on a parallel relation (similar to the dualysis of nonphilosophy when it treats philosophy as an excess material or something to that effect).

After an attempt at mechanology (the famous experiment after his namesake), Turing wrote of the incompleteness theorem of Gödel: “The argument from Gödel’s and other theorems rests essentially on the condition that the machine must not make mistakes” (“Intelligent Machinery,” in Donald Michie, Machine Intelligence, vol 5 [1970], 3 ). He adds: “if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent” (Turing ACE Report). Hence, the incompleteness theorem and other theorems are psychologically at fault. They find their measure in a familiar humanistic orientation of thought that is premised on superiority, mastery and greatness.But mathematics is not the problem, rather its orientation, certainly the affective adult orientation of mathematicians with metaphysical and religious prejudices. The same problem in orientation applies to philosophy.

§

The above example of Turing may suggest that the extra-mathematical can provide philosophy the inspiration to get around its decisional problems (in Laruellean terms), already reeling from Wittgenstein’s scathing attack which is not without its merits. Philosophy was becoming increasingly metaphysical and humanistic, and stubbornly classical in the Greco-Judaic sense. The poststructuralist and postmodern turns which arrived later as critiques of metaphysics simply recast humanism in an operational play of difference that relies on identity, its concealed metaphysical substratum.

But let me digress for a while.

Hobbes and Leibniz were at odds with one another over many issues in philosophy, but the single most controversial issue that divided their positions is the question whether God is a substance or a mind. Hobbes took the question to be asking whether the universe was intelligently designed or simply a result of random organization of things which eventually produced the Leviathan (the Substance, the artificial soul). Leibniz, for his part, took the critique of design to be simply a question whether God (who has a mind, let us not forget, according to Leibniz) allows random organization in and through the things themselves. Now let us go back to Turing.

The mathematician seemed to have favored Hobbes not only for the mechanical bias of Turing’s mathematics but also for Hobbes’ insinuation that the universe was not formed by intelligence, that is, a computable One. Leibniz took a different direction. He says: “there must be in the simple substance a plurality of conditions and relations, even though it has no parts” (Monadology). What is Leibniz saying here? He is simply stating that the incompleteness of Hobbesian cosmological framework allows for the organization of the cosmos by an act of Supreme Mind, capable of making computable absent parts or functions ready for creation (computable: ready for the sufficiency of the entire cosmos). By the simple axiom of the plurality of conditions for creation parts are forced to emerge (which are already decided to be computable in the first place) that cannot stand as parts without their relation. Hence, they have nothing else to do than to become parts! Once again, the requirement is a certain idea of infallibility. But it is more than that.

Infallibility is the tip of the problem because it is premised on the assumption of incompleteness that itself is premised on the belief that no extra-mathematical intervention is possible to show mathematics how to prove its negations. The crux of Entscheidungsproblem is the celebration of the mathematical supremacy, the pure humanist ambition of Man. To digress further, it is in this sense that Da Vinci, with his mechanics that had no ‘ends’ , which did not demand negations, is anti-humanist at heart.

So Hobbes’ Leviathan is possible only if mathematical supremacy preconditions the artificial soul to manifest itself. It is a direct insult to Hobbes who was no mathematician. But Hobbes found an ally in Turing, the gnostic at heart, the heretic mathematician, who opposed the Leibnizian design and its modern incarnations. Defending a certain idea of quasi-emergence, he proposed the ‘unorganized machines’ (Da Vinci’s mechanics without ‘ends’) which, as Turing put it, are modeled “after the nervous system” (“Intelligent Machinery”). These machines, for their wider philosophical implications, allow us to look beyond ourselves as humans. I mean as humans with individual factory warranties. We are in good condition. The infallibility of our Maker is ours by extension. Yet, there is an idea of the human that resists this ‘goodness ‘. Neither evil, nor monster.

…

On hindsight  although Turing proved that replication is the logic of any machine the fact that it cannot prove its negation (can life trace its origin in replication or reproduction?) without outside orientation (genes need organisms to replicate) belies the naive belief that he is in favor of strong Artificial Intelligence (AI), or the consistency of self-replication within a system foreclosed to the outside. The machine must make mistakes or it is no machine, meaning, it needs fallible (reproducible) instructions just as genes need organisms which can reproduce in order to replicate themselves. But that is not exactly our point here, though we can relish our heretic achievement so far, which may be enough to belie the flat ontologist’s claim of flatness, so to speak.

Might not our point be, replication and reproduction have to be logically separable for life to persist? Such is the heretic claim of Freeman Dyson against the prevailing view that replication writes or encodes the origin of life. By his extra-mathematical intervention, such hereticism may also be ascribed to Turing.  The point is organisms, programs, and machines must exist all at once but differentially, yet no one instance is sufficient to overwhelm the other (Dyson uses the description ‘error-tolerance’) leading to homeostasis, for replication and reproduction to be possible, for life to continue. Reproduction (organisms) and replication (machines and programs as genes) are then free to communicate and exchange, even interbreed and cross-fertilize. But this gets trickier. Dyson writes in Origins of Life:

“Error tolerance is the hallmark of natural ecological communities, of free market economies, and of open societies. I believe it must have been the primary quality of life from the very beginning. But replication and error tolerance are naturally antagonistic principles” (87).

Hence, error-tolerance must be a recent phenomenon. The source of error is simplification, or extra-mathematically put, computable enough to desire a proof of its negation, its desire to become itself uncomputable. And it certainly carries a tyrannical agenda as the genes for 3 and more eons would dictate individual organisms. “Every species is a prisoner of its genes and is compelled to develop and to behave in such a way as to maximize their (organisms) chances for survival” (Ibid., 88).

Proximally, the ‘event’ that would prove the negation of mathematical truths lies outside mathematics. Evolutionarily speaking, it is something else. Towards the end of his book, Dyson observes:

“Life by its very nature is resistant to simplification, whether on the level of single cells or ecological systems or human societies. Life could tolerate a precisely self-replicating molecular apparatus only by incorporating it into a translation system that allowed the complexity of the molecular web to be expressed in the form of software. After the transfer of complication from hardware to software, life continued to be a complicated interlocking web in which the replicators were only one component…The tyranny of the replicators was always mitigated by the more ancient cooperative structure of homeostasis that was inherent in every organism. The rule of the genes was like the government of the old Hapsburg empire: Despotismus gemildert durch Schlamperei, or “despotism tempered by sloppiness” (Ibid., 89).

Without mincing words, this government might prove to be a fallible incarnation of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the artificial soul that is most tolerant of messiness but not of simplification.

Today, simplification has taken a new form in the guise of asserting that replication is All. There is a certain ingenuity to it, a provability, a computability. Replicators do replicate almost in a linear fashion as replication is about producing exact copies of a copy. If ever replication finds disturbance such as threatens its linearity it is almost certainly because  uncomputability overwhelms its simplification.  The only advantage of replication over the fallibility of organism is that the latter is almost certainly not going to outlast replication; as Freeman’s son George put it,  it is “not so much a consequence of the origins of life as a consequence of the origins of death” (Darwin Among the Machines, 31). Nick Land is powerful in this aspect: “Because we can die.”  Also almost certainly our power to die is our advantage over replication. Reality is never flat. There is always the uncomputable. Because we can die replication’s ambition of eternity is at risk. It needs to negotiate. We have the power to offer death if replication demands permanence. Its ambition is always threatening life to follow its agenda, especially in the modern technological age. (This is our minor case against Deleuze: What kind of life is he talking about when he talks of pure immanence?)  But we have a power that is more ancient than any ancient, the “deep formerity” Levinas would add (Otherwise Than Being, 19), as shown by our success so far over the tyranny of replication. Can we not describe this success as the hereticism of death? E. Cioran would have thrown at doubters of this power these terse lines: “I strive to conceive the cosmos…without myself. Fortunately, death is here to remedy my imagination’s inadequacy” (Anathemas and Admirations, 118).

Turing is so careful to preserve the uncomputable if only for mathematics, his discipline, to save its integrity. And the uncomputable is intuition which ingenuity must always prove as valid by concealing it under the blanket of formal rules. Turing notes: “The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings. It is intended that when these are really well arranged the validity of the intuitive steps which are required cannot be seriously doubted” (The Essential Turing, 135).

…

Intelligence is a product of developmental process and it is still evolving. It is not a product of a single infallible design but of randomness, modification, and collectivity (Simondon senses it with his ‘transindividuation’ but so does Bachelard with his idea of the poetic image as transubjective, which, as I put it elsewhere, has no obligation to stay in the self). Dyson summarizes Turing’s contribution in a rather journalistic way: “All intelligence is collective. The truth that escaped Leibniz, but captured Turing, is that this intelligence—whether that of a billion neurons, a billion microprocessors, or a billion molecules forming a single cell—arises not from the unfolding of a predetermined master plan, but by the accumulation of random bits of wisdom through the power of small mistakes” (Darwin Among the Machines,72 ).

Well said.

As with Nietzsche, we are one of those machines which can explode! (Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche).

§

Turing’s extra-mathematical intimations are helpful for us here in our attempt to situate the posthuman turn. We would like to measure this turn against the gnostic precondition of refusal. We mean refusal as the non-precedence of the human (with ontological warranty) in favor of the human whose impossible attitude of tolerance (we will clarify this later) allows any ‘turn’ with respect to the idea of the human autonomy (the humanist mathematical ambition) to rather expose itself as a ‘refuse’. I am grateful to Terence’s notation: the noun conceals an act, a verb, refuse; the idea is captured in ‘refuse-All’, or simply refusal. Yet, refusal is either assumed by the subject or refused again. Leibniz is the epitome of the first; the heretic the second sense. The heretic rejects the refusal of the mathematician who refuses the gnosis of mechanics, of randomness and collectivity, so to speak. The heretic exposes the refuse of the humanist, ironically, by being tolerant of doctrinal illusions. To refuse is not to Negate. As with Laruelle, “The One is tolerant of doctrines.”

Rightly so, as a refuse the ‘turn’ of the human is by default of its cosmic origin in large combinatorial processes a needless repetition. Yet, the human turn in light of a certain disabused mind regarding, again, a certain notion of uncomputability takes a form of insistence. Insistence of autonomy, computability, in mathematical terms; evolutionary wise, coveting replication. The human autonomy: Always ‘of’ the humanist who is also in all likelihood a religious, metaphysical mathematician of incompleteness, a philosopher who is more of a poet than a child (we will see why). The humanist: Always ‘of’ his (the humanist) fetishised self-image.

Meanwhile, the precedence of large combinatorial processes, the self-creation of the cosmos, at first glance may seem to support the Leibnizian design. But the cosmos is; Leibniz is not.

The cosmos is un-Leibnizian. It is without design for a design anticipates appreciation, reflection, and calculation. Rightly so, it is appreciated and received by the humanist, like Leibniz. Not by a disbelieving mathematician like Turing, but only half-heretic. Not like the child who appreciates, reflects and calculates without ‘ends’. Only a child can shatter the sufficiency of the cosmos, the complete heretic!

Who needs a Meillasoux? We need more Da Vincis and Turings.

§

Yet the child also allows the cosmos to display its comedy, its magic to which s/he offers affection in return, an emotion, a smile, a curiosity, laughter, wink, a wow, even so, indifference, all on behalf of his/her innocence. (Michel Henry ‘affectivity’ is also an important turn for the heretic with the proviso that it is a child’s world that he had in mind).

Turing observes of the child, the unorganized machine:

“Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? (“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 [1940], 456)

He adds on another occasion: “Bit by bit one would be able to allow the machine to make more and more ‘choices’ or decisions. One would eventually find it possible to program it so as to make its behavior the result of a comparatively small number of general principles. When these became sufficiently general, interference would no longer be necessary, and the machine would have ‘grown up’” (“Intelligent Machinery,” 9)

Isn’t the world organized by grown-ups? Don’t we need innocence to shatter the sufficiency of this world?

Not by the multiplication of objects, the world’s refuse—the mathematician’s and the humanist’s refuse, his refuse-All of gnosis, the mechanical, the extra-mathematical, the uncomputable that awaits recognition, concealed under the blanket of knowledge, beneath which it is patiently waiting to be known but without the passion and interest a philosopher normally invests in fathoming nothing but an image of himself, which is also the humanistic way of testing his mastery by challenging the non-mathematical to prove its negations.

Or, if you may, the refuse is the very proliferation of the non-parts of Leibnizian universe which have needlessly preoccupied the most vocal critics of ontology today. Ah! the hypocritical refusal of the humanist that it his waste after all that sustains his refuse-All. This humanist has a pledge, the pledge of the humanistic anti-humanist—to rid the world of waste. But not of his right to the refuse. It can be salvaged. Bataille has always sensed the whiff of Konigsberg. This absurd creature is dear to Sisyphus, his model of taking all the pains of humanism—Come see how I suffer for your sins, but remember me, remember me! 

Cioran is bewildered: “‘The end of humanity will come when everyone is like me,’ I declared one day in a fit I have no right to identify” (Anathemas and Admirations, 20).

…

This humanist also happens to condemn hereticism, dismisses its polarizing figure—the figure of Heresy.

Might his goal not also be to rid the world of plurality of conditions and relations?

Oh, you Leibniz! Why did you return? To declare that there are parts after all, that the parts were there but you refused the Leviathan? How the after-life had changed you!

We all know the Inquisitor’s next step. The banishment of the born-again Heretic.

§

To shatter the sufficiency of the world, we do not need the multiplication of the humanist refuse, rather of children, these complete heretics, the multiplication of their innocence which we can only hope will pave the way for real intelligence, the Leviathan.

The Leviathan: it is indifferent. It can change at the behest of mistakes. The artificial soul. Real sovereignty.

The refusal of infallibility, one which relies only on non-sufficiency, of children at play.

{Excerpts from an unpublished essay of mine with the title Hobbes, Turing and the Child. The essay is still in its inchoate form by academic standards. I will be posting the full version of the essay here and in my academia account the sooner I can imagine I can have the right to it]

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I’m grateful to Terence Blake (terenceblake.wordpress.com) and to Dave of inthesaltmine.wordpress.com for their previous comments on my post “Quiet Power of Actuality” of which this post is an elaboration, needless to say, an elaboration of my idea of gnosis that I still have no right, quoting Cioran, to identify as my knowledge or idea of gnosis. This reply is also inspired by Steven Hickman’s comments of darkecologies.com on my previous posts on ‘gnosis’.

See:

http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/quiet-power-of-actuality/#comments

http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/the-non-religious-essence-of-gnosis/#comments

Quiet Power of Actuality

…

To William and Terence Blake; To Steven Hickman (Noir-Realism); To Bill Benzon; To Joseph Weismann (Fractal Ontology); To Anthony Paul Smith; To speculativeheresy; To Jordan Peacock and reastudent (my online classmates at Stranger Thought); To Simple Pleasures; To inthesaltmine; To larvarsubjects (for replying to my comment); To my students; To readers; To followers (of this blog for cruising with Kafka); To Adam Kotsko (for at least misreading my words); To the Hobbesian sovereignty as an artificial soul that anticipated the internet; To Katerina Kolosova,

To Francois Laruelle

______________________________________________

My way of thanking people and technical objects for keeping thinking alive between work and duty, between being and being-more.

…

As the Blake I met expressed it in his provocative syntax, gnosis has always resisted totalization in the sense of falling into expert hands. It has always been the privileged knowledge of the heretic whose indifference to Life rather affords her the simplest understanding of the Real, indifferent to any kind of objectification, including this one we have achieved so far, but much more to a kind that betrays a motive to totalize, such as making it a part of official narrative.

If Deleuze has successfully historicized this great enfolding of human narrative by singularizing the flux into struggles to differ, to enfold, to measure productivity against the throw of the dice, it only shows that in the beginning DIFFERENCE has always been aimed at silencing the already quiet power of actuality. If  enfolding is to proceed at all, it must already be there, what Terence–Stiegler’s works in mind–describes as “default of origin.”

Gnosis is this default, the lived, no less the impossibility of imposing a precedence, a sign that an offer of totalization is refused. The default is a ‘non-precedence’ which simply means ‘refusal’.

…

Perhaps, matched only by a replicator, self-forming, auto-catalytic, the heretic is already burdened by thrownness, by gameness to metabolize. Thrownness is the probability that life is not just one but two, even more. Yet the ‘One’ is tolerant of doctrines, replication or reproduction, it doesn’t matter.

…

The history of a thousand plateaus, a thousand potential Folds yet to be enfolded into territories is pitted against the right knowledge that all folds are disbursements, neologisms, facsimiles,  exits to creations, all on behalf of Life, the creative process itself whose mystery started with making explicit a certain kind of refusal. Brandom may refuse this.

…

Yet, true knowledge is this quiet power of refusal.

The Non-religious Essence of Gnosis

Indeed, we can only infer from an immanent excess, a certain image, icon, or notion of Being; Other, or Void, all set down as plastic facsimiles of transcendence. But that already involves a double operation: 1) a gaze, 2) a return gaze, all from the position of the subject. Contentiously, it is in itself another distinct operation, this very positionality of the subject, yet not counted as such. Here, some kind of subtractive ontology is at work.

Refusal of Creation

It is always a decision on its part. As is always the case, a decision invokes the null in the last instance. Why?

Because the subject, if it desires to persist, cannot make its position totally accessible to the chaos of the Outside, which contrary to Meillasoux’s opinion does not actually destroy, rather, it really does the opposite. It creates as it throws everything into the unbreakable consistency of contingency.

The subject is the very refusal of creation, needless to say. Its positionality is its en-owning, ultimately, its right to die vis-à-vis the Void that promises life via the creative process. Incidentally, philosophy would later embrace this Void, for different reasons, as its foster child, having lost the poetic and the Open after its falling out with Heideggerianism. You are right if you recall Deleuze.

Minority principle

Let us state the definitive position of this nullity: The (sub)ject has to keep something to itself (the ‘sub’ entails that it is a minority principle), something by which it can retain its integrity despite its lack of integrity. The minority principle (we are extending Laruelle’s minority principle) is the last bastion of the self, digging in trenches to be protected from the outside. The Outside: one is free to call it the majority principle.

The subject of this null operation has continuously decided to grow in the sense of expanding its superfluity, and not just to live. To live without the benefit of excess, or the Bataillean waste, would be to accept the offer of life, of a certain totalization, or to sacrifice the gnosis to the creative redundancy of Chaos. It decides to grow even in the absence of a natural image of itself by way of othering itself into an image, already a practice of growing ‘in excess’. But as an alterity this image or excess has no obligation to stay in the subject.

The most basic alterity/image/excess would be the poetic. Without a doubt, as Bachelard says of this image, “it is transubjective” (Poetics of Space). We can take it from there that the poetic image is an alterity that, once again, has no obligation to stay.

Gnostic basis of emergence

On this limited basis alone, the immanent excess, the gnosis, first intuited by poetry, is originally non-religious, that is, by contrast, if we mean religious as an invocation of either a/cosmic God or cosmic God, both characteristically esoteric. (But this is already quite un-Durkheimian). It is rather the monotheistic God, always challenged by the pangs of solitude, that invokes an alterity. God, who else but the saddest of all solitary beings, its sadness bordering on animality–its lack of world (Heidegger).

By claiming omniscience, God also claims to have no need of alterity, no need of gnosis, which means vis-à-vis the poetic image that the image has no right to flee. Yet this very claim will turn on itself. God learns that its self-image is no less its own alterity, its possessiveness. He is His own gnosis. At this point, He believes the image chooses to stay.

By that He becomes His own claim to ownership of an image (Marx was thinking of the priest-ideologist), but also His own unlearned knowledge in His state of obliviousness to the transiency of the image, which He has to learn/remember anyhow. Alterity always demands attention. It can hold one hostage as Levinas would agree. It demands attention according to its natural tendency to withdraw, to flee; the object of the Heideggerian pointing-towards-what-withdraws is precisely this alterity.

God learns by rediscovering the very process of self-learning via the ekstatic, also as self-oblivion. As He learns He transforms all the more into delusional, but more than that. He cannot transform His positionality as the ground of History. He would not allow His hallucination to leak into the clinic, hence, His ekstasis, His standing-apart from Man/History/Knowledge, His murmuring words, His unwritten speeches, the heart of His true revelations.

For any poetic being this ground is absolutely private. I mean the poetic as the original gnostic that has its own hallucinatory history.

…

Once His speeches reached the immanence of the other in History, or Man, Knowledge, the gnosis that is His alterity becomes doubly removed from the immanence of the absolute ground, hence, the business of interpreting the Gospels.

Already untouched by the process of immanent/historical learning insofar as it remains a null operation where all interpretations fall flat, and by all hallucinatory rights that He grants to this ground, the gnosis starts to dictate the direction of learning/remembering via the ekstatic. In this sense exegesis is a process of remembering, on behalf of He whose words are now scarcely understood, the absolute ground that is His that has all along resisted interpretation.

We can cite Zizek’s words for all their worth: “You know why I do it? Because I’m terribly afraid that if people were to see me, to put it naively, how I really am, they would be terribly bored” (Interview with Salon).

NB: This interview has become viral. Check it out at I am not the world’s hippest philosopher! – Salon.com . But also check out a critical review of Zizek’s Less than Nothing at http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/more-than-everything

…

Learning is thus operationalized from the void, again, the gnostic precondition of knowledge. Yet this time the gnosis is dictated by the nihilism of the ekstatic, a creative territorialization of Chaos, the great triumph of Life! The poet turning into a philosopher.

The same case applies to the Hindu poet of the pre-Vedic and Vedic traditions down to Upanishads. Already driven to the excess of gnosis to the point of dyslexia in the guise of Knowledge, in the universal guise of Light, the light serving as his state of self-learning, the Hindu poet confuses his poetry with the Real that is nothing less than the simplicity of emergence. The poet is ignorant of this  simplicity that the Real (Meillasoux’s Great Outdoors) is emptying itself of light as it offers the poet a life, the same life that reaches the Hindu poet, what reaches any poetry, what has reached the language of poetry as ‘emergence’, what philosophy has turned into Reason.

In the meantime, we can state here that Deleuze’s Fold has historicized this process in terms of affirming a realist commitment to Creation. The theological Deleuze.

…

It is on this basis that gnosis as ‘unlearned’ knowledge does not arise as a plastic form of transcendence (a/cosmic God or God’s cosmos, both hermetic to knowledge) after the most basic operation of first-order immanence, the enowning of a position; rather, gnosis is the very operation that guarantees emergence, including that of God, and not to mention, philosophy.

In lieu of conclusion

It always takes language to capture a mystery, but since language is for the most part bound to a culture, it is always a matter of cultural transcription, not without an effective expansion of power. In this case, Christianity has been successful in operationalizing the term gnosis, either for stigmatic purposes or with a certain accommodation in mind.

Lastly, it is not at all bad to affirm that this knowledge can only be achieved via the affective (M. Henry). The affective is a good starting point on the assumption that one is restricted to a limited world. As I can infer from the phenomenological directions of Henry’s works, a limited world has certain advantages. In fact, a limited world is what originally philosophy envisioned itself to be dwelling in, a world where real friendship (philia) could flourish. A limited world is a world where the subject can most ably refuse Life. We cannot say however that it has ever proven itself successful.

Rightly so, almost everyone would agree that Life cannot be defeated.

__________________________________________

NB:

This is my long reply to Noir-Realism (http://darkecologies.com/). See his comments on the comment section of my post entry “Flush Thoughts: Laruelle’s Gnosticism,” http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/flush-thoughts-on-laruelles-gnosticism/. Needless to say, I’m grateful to Steven’s comments.

Flush Thoughts: On Laruelle’s Gnosticism

These are quick observations. There’s an interesting exchange happening at terenceblake.wordpress.com regarding, in part, Laruelle’s possible intervention in today’s philosophical debates. See http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/pluralist-critique-of-critique-vs-naive-lacanianism/#comments

I think Laruelle is also not afraid to reduce, in a nonphilosophical way, all forms of knowledge quest as gnostic in principle. Zizek is close to intuiting this same Laruellean gnosis in his parallax, and yet, due to his ambivalent commitment, his politically Lacanised non-committal to realism, his conception of the real remains otherwise committed to Kantianism which in the great Western tradition established a formalistic conception of gnosis in the sense of a problematic as outside of thought.

The gnostic requirement of knowing is not new to non-West but perhaps stranger to Western episteme, which proves problematic for it. The Oriental philosophical scriptures abound in such gnostic preconditions. This requirement is rather unproblematic for most of the Oriental scriptures from the pre-Vedic to the Vedas and to their pragmatic appropriations in Chinese philosophy. (Even the gnosis of things is relatively unproblematic for the Orient).

What the West has contributed to the exposition of the ‘unlearned’, the gnosis, is to codify it in such a way as to master the unlearned and put it to use, which formally inaugurates “the-philosophy” that incidentally Laruelle criticizes. Here, Plato is a good example of learning the gnostic requirement from non-Western scriptures that kicked off the formal philosophical preoccupation of the West, not without the political motivation to spread the new Gospel, in Laruellean terms–that everything is philosophisable. Before Laruelle thematized this use of philosophy, Boeder, a student of Heidegger who had a falling out with his master, argued that philosophy is always about the quest to establish its difference, both as a discipline in the formal sense and as a proper subject of existence, that is to say, from nonphilosophical alterities. Here, alterities roughly mean the nonphilosophical (person and conviction) that generally endorsed the doxa that all is One, with varying homological interpretations, proof of the tenacity of the Homeric culture then. To counter this Homeric doxa Plato established the Academy.

Unsurprisingly, the putting-to-use (the techne) of the unlearned, the gnosis, has justifiably conditioned the kind of Western preoccupation with truth as that which stands apart, the differential, the ecstatic, that which is cut off from thought which fair enough establishes the ‘cut’, the scission, the chora of the great Western speculation, the rush to justify that the World is really not what it seems (the non-All of the World, but also, not discounting the psychoanalytic incursions of Lacan, the non-All of the Real, the World, or the Void that seduces the philosopher to measure his existence against, or the non-All of the subject which encourages it to turn to things and objects). This already illustrates that the Western episteme is preconditioned by its own discovered immanence, its gnosis, that of the dualism of the Real. (The-philosophy is of course a Western invention, much like ”truth” is, which Aristotle successfully established by placing Plato secondary to truth, amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas).

In the contemporary, Badiou’s Cartesianism is the finest example of stipulating the dualistic gnosis in his appropriation of belonging and inclusion in set theory. The gnostic in this appropriation is the rarity of the Event itself as the paradoxicality of belonging and inclusion informs the ambivalence and the paradoxicality of this Event, which only a mathematical subject can decide to punctuate by disengaging from a certain predictability of the situation in which the subject belongs yet is also ‘included’ in another unpresentable situation in such a way that it provokes a crisis of membership and exposes subsequently the anomaly of the situation itself.

Badiou positions this subject within a historical context where the Western episteme is greatly challenged both from within (against which Badiou re-affirms the commitment of philosophy to Truth) and from the non-West (its taken for granted alterity that is now becoming like it). It is precisely at this strange time for the West that most of its vocal thinkers today are pursuing a more sophisticated concealment of its gnosis under the pretext that previous speculations on the Real can no longer hold up or remain the same vis-a-vis the changing times, especially in the post-colonial era where the global presence of the West is increasingly becoming superfluous to the point that the West has become too everyday for its non-Western imitators (courtesy of the culture industry), too accessible for a deleuzean reterritorialization. The West has unduly exposed its gnosis, the various speculative orientations of the ‘subject’ toward the Real that Derrida summed up as ‘presence’, the tele-visibility of its operations, its kenotypes, at the risk of exposing the secret of its gnostic claim to universality, but also, and most importantly, its claim to absolute contingency.

We are liberally extrapolating this Meillasouxian concept of absolute contingency but not without a significant warranty. Meillasoux cannot represent the entire World (hence, the contingency value). This I take from Laruelle’s notion of the World as already philosophical, Western in the beginning on the level of historical representation. Still, Meillasoux typically desires vis-a-vis his predecessors (one is free to interpret it psychoanalytically) to represent that World by differentially invoking the same purity, which also means its absolute irreplaceability as a specific outcome of the throw of the dice of Time that the West has historically taken advantage of.

In the meantime, one can notice how Meillasoux takes great pain to hide the gnosis of the Real in the paradoxical manner of re-instituting the privilege of its absolute contingency (the-philosophy or the-West) against the background of its banalization, the tele-transparency of its jouissance (no longer restricted to the Master’s bedroom), at the same time making an excellent case for its reader to be convinced that the gnosis, any gnosis, all forms of gnosticism existing in the planet, is axiomatically transparent. Meillasoux panders to this paradox, referring to the trajectory of his own speculations on the meaningless sign, the kenotype:

“The new puzzle that appears before us is the following: how can a meaningless sign allow us to describe the world, without becoming again a meaningful sign, and thereby capable of referring to a world outside of it?”

(NB: Steven Hickman has a link to Meillasoux’s article bits of which I quoted above. See http://darkecologies.com/2012/12/21/meillassoux-problematique-factial-speculation/)

Where does this lead us? Certainly, to the absolute contingency of the Western gnosis, to protect it from being duplicated anew, but more than this, to the substratum of the argument of the kenotype which is familiarly Kantian, namely, the confidence that the human (no less the Western subject) will survive His own mistake of making the Real meaningful. The trick is to discourage meaning:

“Resolving one problem, we find within it yet another, which seems more difficult than that which preceded it. Such is the philosophical journey par excellence. ‘where thinking we had reached port, we are carried back into the open sea.”

One cannot help wondering if Meillasoux sincerely desires a solution. But that is not where the problem lies. In Laruellean terms this is of course the heart of the decisional structure of philosophy. As if summarizing the essence of the philosophically immanent Figures of Meillasoux, in Laruellean terms, read: DLI or simply cloning the Real (Figures however are simply deutero-absolute for Meillasoux, meaning, not the-last-instance determination of Man, rather the only absolute but secondary resolution Man can have of the Real that must not cease being meaningless, perhaps, it is simply a matter of forcing the Real to remain meaningless, the ‘transcendent’ value that Meillasoux invokes of the Real), Laruelle offers the following observation: “The One… is tolerant of any material, any particular doctrinal position whatsoever”(Non-Philosophy Project, 31).

Let’s just say, the One (Western Continental Real) is tolerant of her post-Derridean disseminatory flush. But what is it for the non-West? Shall I say, among its voyeuristic pastimes, anticipating a Laruellean end to the Greekness of its rebellion? But, given its disposition, having attained a certain level of indifference to the-philosophy and the-World, this is no longer the non-West that the-philosophy has annexed to the-World.

Perhaps a stranger-subject of the non-world.

Of Eating Well, part 2

“Why Gnosticism? And, what does this shift toward heretical religions mean in our strange philosophical times?”
(From Noir-Realism)

“Through our commemoration of Christ’s incarnation we feebly accept God’s assurance that, not anything–not our flesh nor its death–could possibly avert our onward journey to roost in God!
(From a Jesuit mentor of mine)

_____________________________

Why Gnosticism? A good question yet one that has already haunted knowledge ever since the human of the World (Laruelle’s notion of the World as always already capitalistic in the beginning) has acquired the know-how to stand-apart from ‘immanence.’ Where immanence has become indifferent to its own work, the work of occasioning immanence, be it ecstatic (Heidegger) or pathetic (M. Henry), the kenotypes that have always and ‘in all historical circumstances’ offered themselves to some sort of isolation also always take a life of their own.

Is there anything clearer, more novel in this destinal appropriation of immanence, in terms of reversibility and convertibility, other than to re-conceive a beginning? Already seductive for thought, it is in view of this becoming-plastic of the beginning that Malabou would insist rethinking our relation to our brains as the very site of historical tension between the neuron and the mental, the site of Thought as the unlikelihood of everything that we are now.

One may recall Leibniz’s attempt at universal calculus in order to resolve the crisis of communication, a crisis no less of Thought whose plasticity is next to bad karma, always enfolding belatedly. But for all the gospel of seduction it is still very much like the effect of untutored male speed on an octopus. Madame Edwarda would have asked the same of the flush of youth as of the unworldliness of the narrator of Bataille, That’s all there is to it?

§

What is seduction if not a function of alterity. The Deleuzean becoming-animal, the becoming-other of seduction itself? The becoming-flower of an absentee in Mallarmean bouquet? Perhaps, at this point we should be asking if this already signals the becoming-virtual of the future in light of the singular manifest plasticity of the kenotype, the non-type? And what of the non-type? Does it illustrate the proper expression of seduction that demands absolute futurality?

That the absolute of the future is the cold stunning vacuity of the real/death, stigmatized by Freud but glorified by Heidegger in the fullest sublimation of philosophy, would still surprise many to be too naive.

§

Notwithstanding Leibniz has become virtual in the sense of philosophical sublimation, of triumphal ignorance of persisting against the background of Desire that endows philosophy the drive and the youthful push to sublimate but not before an encounter with the feminine, the Madame Edwardas of the World, there is this other of sublimation, a human-other (compared to the sprightliness of philosophy it is infinitely old ) that points towards what withdraws, that is to say, irrespective of philosophy.

What withdraws is presentable but unpresentable as being-one, in Badiou, always being-multiple, expressing itself in the non-singularity, the proper non-expressibility, of its humanity. This must be the It, the gnosis that withdraws! But we are running the race so fast.

§

In Laruelle, it is the in-One that philosophy always without fail fails to point at whose ways, whose pointing, this in-One that is a stranger, remains irreducible to any form of ontology. At its most incorrigible fashion,  in mute derision of philosophy that makes itself unheard, all the more that philosophy seeks to silence the unheard (what philosophy is since the beginning of the World), the in-One takes to task the-philosophy and all its ‘goods’, its goodness not to mention, the normalities of the difference that the-human makes, the human as thought-word of the-World, or precisely the difference that philosophy invents for the World, the world that is nothing but its world.

§

Everything is non-differential for this humanity which explains its non-competitive spirit, but also, so much for the obvious, its malleability.

§

When Spartacus revolted against the Romans, not his enemies but simply responsible for the murder of his family, they who must likewise be murdered, the gnosis was spelled out. No philosophy was up to the task of spelling the dreaded word, the most individualistic word, the most an-archic. Spartacus was secretly giving birth to a new humanity, one-without-hope, without official direction. For the interest of the World, this hero must be killed. Agamben is right about the non-sacrificial logic of his murder–the revolt of Spartacus approaches the thin line between the code and the exposed. The code, gnosis: a seven-letter word, freedom that exposes the unilateral an-arche of the Real. The exposed: the power to die as Bataille originally intoned. Spartacus exposed the gnosis of the power of death which is the secret to defying the force of the Void to come.

The gnosis is exposed and it is not coded: Because we can die, the language of the gnosis, that which protects our existence from being protected by something more than zero, the zero-plus as the code that spells total imprisonment by the Void, yet also the zero-plus that for this eternal imprisonment to take place also spells the possibility of living an eternal life, death cannot perfectly imprison us. Death is not-All, otherwise, we must also be capable of living in eternity, an imagined logical necessity that is absolutely prohibited by the logic of absolute contingency.

Isn’t this what Meillasoux has so far asserted?

§

Because everyone can die, no one can sacrifice the code. This is the absolute of not-All, of death. Death demands that the code not be sacrificed. At least, it is an absolute demand on the human. Once the code is sacrificed (when resurrection is deemed impossible, when all Spartacuses are legitimated by laws, when individual freedom is rendered incontestable,  when murder no longer solves anything) it will be the death of the absolute, this time death takes the form of All, leaving no window for life. Absolute contingency therefore also means that death is not-All, even for the executioners, that it is simply a terminus of necessity.

§

It would seem then that the cosmos demands despite itself an other necessity, other than its own blind necessity, the absolute contingency that destroys everything, that is to say, the necessity of the illusion of life as resurrection. It is the correlation that cannot be sacrificed, to say the least.

§

One can see perfectly where all these amount to. Meillasoux is saving the necessity of this illusion against nonphilosophy, against Laruelle who like Pascal has refuted the illusion that the Real imposes a demand. On the one hand, it is simply the demand of philosophy on Meillasoux (Laruelle). On the other hand, it is nonetheless a continuation of articulating, in bizarre display of the syntax of the Real, the Pascalian thought-at-the-back.

Bertrand Ogilvie writes of Pascal:

“….Pascal suggests that we make use of the “thought from behind,” a process of elucidation which (…) progresses to the point of bringing out in return their basis…To think true, therefore, is to bring out the meaning of the false…This idea is fraught with consequences, since it leads to the discovery that every truth… is a falsehood full of meaning” (from “Truth in France,” in Keywords [Alliance of Independent Publishers: France, 2004], 1240.

Meillasoux has intuited this ‘thought’ in terms of ancestrality and arche-fossil (After Finitude), which in Pascalian terms should rightly make him a “clever one.” Ogilvie adds:

“The clever one is not a hypocrite; he does not say anything other than what he thinks. He is the one who succeeds in thinking of two things at the same time, illusion and its necessity…It is this network of illusions and conventions that goes into the making of the world (in Laruelle, hallucinations but real in-the-last-instance), making it function, through which he finds legitimacy. This legitimacy that reveals the thought at the back has nothing absolute about it. It does not have a basis by right” (Ibid., 126; parenthetical emphasis mine).

The last two propositions would certainly not fit with Meillasoux.

§

Laruelle must have Meillasoux in mind when he issued a challenge–Invent philosophy! And Pascal–he prefers really clever ones.

But that is another matter.

Postscript

See an interesting discussion on Meillasoux at http://darkecologies.com/2012/12/24/kenotype-meillasoux-and-the-meaningless-sign/

Of Eating Well, In lieu of critique

We agree that Bourdieu is right about the scholastic fallacy but so is Laruelle who renamed this fallacy as the sufficiency of philosophy. The quest for a new mode of critique is first of all borne by philosophy’s failure to abandon its decisional structure, its failure to account not only of the finitude of the subject (of philosophy) but also of the way philosophy thinks about its relation to the World. We can see the extent to which the various meanings that philosophy has deduced of the World (subject or object-oriented) has only worsened our relation to it, not much because we have a basic problem of philosophical digestion, of eating as well as digesting Man and Thing or Object, of cannibalism or what have you. The thing is we have a problem with how to eat well, how to become better cannibals or a machine-eating machine.

But how we eat is different from some form of flesh-eating, what we were already (already a lived ‘us’) before we even think about how a general economy works. About this non-decisional lived life cum flesh-eating (a flesh that can eat well without being formally taught how to eat!) Laruelle says to the point:”…the Lived is without purpose or ecstacy” (Future Christ, 29). Some radical concepts are at work here. Some ways to critique a critique. But not as radical as Derrida who (in his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy) regarding the non-decisional structure of a certain type of cannibalism proposed:

“Everything that happens on the edge of the orifices (of orality but also of the ear, the eye–all the senses in general) the metonymy of eating well would always be the rule…The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good how for goodness sake should one eat well? And what does it imply?…”(“Eating Well”: An Interview, in Who Comes After The Subject?, 114-15)

Derrida proposes a mode of eating that is not up to the ‘subject’ of philosophy but one that is already revealed to the human-without-life, without the truth of life–

“‘One must eat well” does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement “One must eat well.” It is a rule offering infinite hospitality.” (Ibid, 115)

Laruelle and Derrida may not be good eaters to one another. But Laruelle has eaten an odd flesh of hospitality in terms of situating anthropophagy within the immanence of a radical past that is absolutely indifferent to the dictum ‘one must eat well’, granting hospitality may also be eaten, as with Derrida, even the Good can be eaten. It may suffice to say here that this radical past is the ‘in-past’ of Man, his being already suffering from a non-decisional separation from the World, which determines the historical fate (read: eating) of humanity.

Bourdieu may be averse to Heidegger’s scholastic disposition but Heidegger has more intelligible words to spare to describe this already-ness, the non-decisional form of the howness of the instancing of Man (as cannibal): thrownness. Here we can champion Heidegger against Bourdieu for Heidegger’s non-thetic conception of the universality of thrownness. The non-thetic is not up to Heidegger or Heideggerian scholarship. It is up to the human-in-the-last-instance who has come to a realization that thrownness can also afford us horrible potentials (cannibalism is one; machinicism another). The point is: thrownness is the unmasterable past “that which is never disclosed by the world, but can only suffer in the world” (Ramey, in Laruelle and Non-philosophy, 89). With Laruelle this appropriation of Heidegger is beyond the question of collaborationism. Derrida is even harsher–Who has not eaten a flesh? It is rather a question of eating well.

And what is thrownness other than its being fundamentally derivative of  solar economy as Bataille would have us understood the finitude of human digestion? For Bataille this form of reappropriating a waste is an act of transcendence. But it is an act that is not guaranteed of redemption. If anything redemption is an illusion to which we are condemned to relate. And yet redemption is not strictly confined to theological musing. There is also an illusory redemption like a Nietzschean steely necessity of objectifying a non-value in repetitive differential ways if only to suspend the full force of the unknown that is already arriving anyhow, to protect the species against Chaos while it has not reached our time yet. To this end Nietzsche proposed a constant reinvention of one’s values as values compel the self to reinvent itself in the sameness of difference.

What a way to eat.

And yes, there is an illusory redemption in a kind of thinking which proposes the end of anthropophagy.

Adam Kotsko on “Zizek and Meillasoux”

He said my comments got under his skin:

“In the bits Virgilio is quoting, he’s talking about human experience and saying that the most fundamental problem isn’t that our experience (the Symbolic) “can’t reach” the Real, it’s that the Symbolic can’t reach itself — it is inherently incomplete, which is precisely the point where itdoes reach the Real. This doesn’t mean that the Symbolic “creates” the Real or (even stupider) that language comes first and the external world is a consequence of its incompleteness.”

Out of respect for his blog I decided not to comment further. But I think I deserve to counter his views on my particular view of Zizek which I think he misunderstood. The bits he is referring are the following comments I made:

“In his lecture held at Bonn University, he emphasized the following (Bonn has compiled reading materials from its Summer School Program this year; the title of Zizek’s essay is “How to break out of correlationism”):

“The Real is the point at which the external opposition between the symbolic order and reality is immanent to the symbolic itself, mutilating it from within: It is the non-All of the symbolic. There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp the external real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself” (pagination not available).

I take his words to be consistent with his Lacanian orientation. Zizek, at some point in the transcribed lecture, has additional words to spare:

“[Why] this constitutive withdrawal from reality of a part of the Real? Precisely because the subject is part of reality, because it emerges out of it….We can also see in what way two lacks overlap in this impossible object (the Real): the constitutive lack of the subject (what the subject has to lose in order to emerge as the subject…) and the lack in the Other itself (what has to be excluded from reality so that reality can appear)…. So the Real is not some kind of primordial Being which is lost with the opposition of subject and object (as Hölderlin put it in his famous Ur-Fragment of German Idealism); the Real is, on the contrary, a product (of the overlapping two lacks)… (pagination not available).

As to the Hegelian connection of this notion of the Real (which Zizek broadly exhibits in Less Than Nothing), Jean Hyppolite can help us draw the connection regarding its relation to the opposition between being and nothing: “That is due to the fact that it is the self that has posited itself as being and that this positing is not tenable; it engenders a dialectic. The self is absolute negativity and this negativity shows through in its positing itself as being. If the self is being, that is because being as such negates itself, and if being is the self that is because it is in-itself this negation of itself” (Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology, trans. Samuel Chernak and John Heckman [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974], 590).

This ‘being’ is the active subject, or simply the subject. And I humbly think this is the resting point of the Real for Zizek whose Hegelianism is no longer news.”

For some reasons I decided not to include a follow-up thread before Kotsko made his last comment, which runs as follows:

I think Laruelle is more to the point when he states that the Real is the Man-in-Man (contrary to Žižek’s subject-in-Real, or Man-in-Real): the in-Man being the product of the doubling of Man’s self-objectification of the Real in which the doubling proceeds from Man to the Real whose foreclosure deflects the objectification.

Now to Kotsko’s points regarding my view.

First, it was Zizek’s views not mine. Kotsko seems to attribute to my view the proposition “the Symbolic “creates” the Real or (even stupider) that language comes first and the external world is a consequence of its incompleteness.” Where did he get this attribution? Precisely where we can locate Zizek saying “There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp the external real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself.” But why attribute it to me? Earlier in the discussions I made the following comments:

“…But if only for a fully symbolic leap we can properly make the necessary leap to infinity or absolute knowledge relative to what can be temporally ex-posed as knowable by the Universe that as Real unilaterizes objective reality by affecting it through the throw of the dice. One simply has to radicalize or accentuate the full symbolic or speculative direction of thinking.

Rather than the principle of sufficient reason inscribed by the correlation of subject and object (in Žižek, always from the standpoint of an incomplete subject, yet a subject in the last instance that must decide to be a subject vis-a-vis the Real) Meillasoux’s contingency or unreason allows what ‘is’ to be what it is. The very contingency of the Real allows the subject to either objectify the Real or negate the autonomous persistence of the Real ala Žižek. The ‘symbolic failure’ of the symbolic order only comes later, as a unilateral excess of the Real. The subject has never been in the Real contra Žižek.”

(NB: Before I laid out those views I issued an apology for gatecrashing). But, in fairness to Adam, his post on “Zizek on Meillasoux” is a careful analysis of Zizek’s views on After Finitude and its many controversial claims. I admire Kotsko. His book Zizek and Theology has been of valuable help to me as I am working, among others, on philosophy of religion. Meillasoux is not only a controversial thinker but full of ambivalence. His ambivalence nonetheless challenges us to rethink our philosophical ways. And we are grateful Zizek has handed out his initial verdict which will continue to provoke discussions in the academe and the para-academic.

See itself.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/zizek-on-meillassoux/ for your fair assessment of the discussions.

Btw, happy holidays to everyone!

Reading “Poverty” through Laruelle

Almost done reading Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (ed. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith). But so far I keep coming back to Marjorie Gracieuse’s essay “Laruelle Facing Deleuze” who has laid out so well what I was hoping would validate my earlier thoughts (in an unpublished essay) on non-philosophy. Anthony Paul Smith was so kind to share some pdfs on Laruelle through his online seminar (at about that time Anthony was still at De Paul University) before I bought some of Laruelle’s major works in English. Starting then, I was already privately annotating Laruelle and was eager to find validations of my own thoughts on this intriguing trend in post-continental philosophy. Graciuese’s expository piece (on the difference between Deleuze’s and Laruelle’s concept of immanence) is so far the closest (to my taste).

Gracieuse writes:

“The One…is strictly human and does not need to presuppose a transcendent principle such as life or difference to think. The ‘dark thought of the One’, Laruelle says, does not need any mirror and is not a plane of absolute survey (contra Deleuze), for it is capable of enlightening itself from within and by its own means” (p. 50; underscoring mine).

In my essay (Axioms of Choice) I found myself writing (apologies for the narcissism this might suggest):

“The ordinary Man is the hypothetical axiom of expressive nullity—who has nothing to lose but her chain, the chain being a falsely abstracted condition of poverty that is not the poverty proper to human existence. The poverty she is forced to experience is not radical enough; it is a kind of poverty alien to her. The true, hence, axiomatic experience of poverty is the source of all human freedom—poverty before the Void whose richness is unbearable, whose wealth to offer is too huge to accommodate. The ordinary Man alone is in possession of this knowledge, the absolute knowledge that Socrates only discovered later…”

Elsewhere, trying to make sense of Negri’s and Hardt’s concept of the poor from a Laruellean perspective, I did quite a hasty survey:

“Negri and Hardt’s rendition of the notion of the poor as definable in terms of ‘possibility’ rather than of ‘lack’ is closer to our preference for the use of Ordinary Man. (See also Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth [Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009], xi). “The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order or property” (40). The ‘wide multiplicity’ here can be further radicalized in terms of the unilaterality of the Real. From the standpoint of the Real, humanity is a subject-in-struggle regardless of differences in class which defines poverty and richness in terms of property relations.

“More radically expressed, humanity is poor relative to the foreclosed essence of the Real whose unilaterality nonetheless is the source of infinite wealth (as we mentioned in a short passage from Bataille, cf. n. 22). One may not be surprised if we hear more of Negri and Hardt, stating: “In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently, around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and the rich: they are merely partial and localised figures, quantitae signatae. The only non-localisable “common name” of pure difference in all eras is the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living” (Ibid., 156)! Laruelle has a similar quantum of thought in which the poor is rendered generic, nay, as the ordinary, the last instance knowledge of the human/subject-in-struggle through the vision-in-One/Real.

Towards the last section, I made mention of the role of the University in educating humankind in light of the unilaterality of the Real:

“This inimitable power of the ordinary man nonetheless always risks itself being made into an object-cause of the politics of truth by the non-ordinary subject of non-axiomatic politics, by contrast a subject who is deeply involved in truth, the activist of truth, one whose self-proclaimed mission is to represent the genericity of the non-truth subject by means of exhausting his concept of truth to the last political instance. In contrast the University risks representing the ordinary Man by reclaiming her ordinariness from non-axiomatic truths through re-training the soul in the autonomous light of the Real. It is in this sense that the absolute goal of the University is to redeem ordinary humans, make them reproduce their authentic radical possibilities.”

The Future of SR/OOO?Galloway’s controversy Encore

I have only to say the following in light of Laruelle’s provocative non-standard philosophy:

Knowledge started with the Heraclitean maxim that “nature loves to hide herself” to which Laruelle, our ambivalent guide here, responds by stating the obvious: “Because it (physis) is foreclosed to thought, the Real or Man loves to open itself.” The Real is Man herself. Her generic character is already present for acknowledgement in the ancients but was obscured by historical denials of the questionable status of Man (the illusion of anthropocentrism) vis-a-vis the unilateralizing power of the One. The knowledge of this genericity in the last instance is raised to its idempotent character, its capacity to remain unchanged even when already needlessly multiplied in terms of diverse multiplication of the powers of Man, from the objectifier of stone to the subject that replaces the position of God who is dead, a subject who is hailed as the subject for Truth, who has so much interest in Truth. But as Laruelle wonderfully puts it, this subject-in-subject, the Man-in-Man has the property of genericity, “the property of being able to communicate truth or rather the True-without-truth that does not want it.”

Human Rights and Ecology

Are Human Rights the Last Utopia?

The very concept of human rights can be traced to the Roman Stoics who were the first to coin the term humanitas. From the inauguration of the term that gave a universal description to a nameless assemblage of beings, walking on two feet, and are said to be capable of speech, humanity was officially born. And so with the thinking that those humans have natural rights, that they have rights to be humans, the rights of difference. Humanity was thinking of the right code, a language to separate itself from the nonhuman. This only exhibits that language is a potent tool of differentiation. To differentiate is, among others, to officially exist. Quite intriguingly, it was a time when Man was beginning to recognize resemblances between him and the primate until it led to Darwin some one thousand five hundred years later.

Humanity was officially born in the sense that it became a part of international language at the time the Roman Empire was about to crumble. We can detect some ironies here. First, humanity was starting to be internationalized when the very power that started to internationalize language was just about to fall. We can guess that the internationalization of humanity which coincided with the universal use of the term humanitas in parts of the known world then could only happen in terms of the internationalization of individuality. It was a precarious phenomenon because the invention of humanitas coincided with the destruction of an empire that claimed superiority over individuals.  You can rightly guess that the term humanitas was anarchistic in form.

But as the Stoics had seen the noblest of our spirits arise at a time when hopes are vanishing, when existence is threatened by some kind of extinction, and the future uncertain. Centuries after, the German philosopher Hegel described this ascension of the human spirit in times of trouble in terms of the image of the Owl of Minerva which spreads its wings only at the turn of dusk, and when darkness gets deeper all cows turn black. These wonderful words of wisdom only means in practical terms that we only see the light of day when the day is about to end, when the day will no longer be the same tomorrow. Quite a subject for poetry. But in the language of the Enlightenment that changed Europe, this means that we only see the light of reason when reason is already gasping in its last breath.

The same irony applies to how we understand human rights today. I emphasize ‘today’ in the sense of the global crisis we are facing as a single humanity, the crisis of ecology. In more technical language, the ecological crisis we have is part of the natural process of death and decay, which can be expedited by the intervention of humans whose ways have not altered substantially since the start of the Industrial revolution. These humans I refer to were largely Westerns and are today the largest consumer of world’s energy resources. Non-Westerns were introduced into these ways by the historical process of colonization that violated human rights and along with it the rights of Nature. Where colonization did not apply non-Westerns would eventually copy the image of the West. I am not saying that non-Westerns were originally the caring types. It is just that they had no political meaning for Nature unlike their counterparts in the West.

As the Stoics had intriguingly revealed, for something to officially exist it has to be expressed in language, and, for language to express official existence, it has to be willed by humans. In modern history, these humans were colonizers, violators of human rights, and plunderers of Nature, all in the name of their right to create, which means the right to industry, hence, the industrial revolution. But we have seen how this right to create, in which case, the right to create natura and humanitas, also involves the right to destroy them. One can wonder if there would be Nature to destroy had it not been invented.

But it came to a point when the West could no longer hold its imagined ground. We have seen the emergence of non-Western powers which only proves that the decline of the West brings with it the decline of its international language, and by that I mean the language that gave sense to humanitas and human rights. Today we are talking about human rights, and rightly, we should mean the decline of Western values. But how can human rights make sense if what is proper to it is to talk about their decline, their waning significance? Should we not talk about human rights as a celebration of the noblest of humanity instead of its decline? Or are we talking about a dead language, the language of human rights, the language that once invented, not without benefits, our right to have rights?

On some occasions, talk of human rights can be utterly hypocritical. Behind the talk of the right to food and water security is the obvious fact that energy sources are getting scarce, not only because the world economy is controlling them but also because Nature is undergoing a tremendous process of change that affects food production and water supply, change that capitalism does not make but worsen it does. Behind the talk of the right to decent work is the fact that labor is increasingly becoming immaterial such that work demands to be redefined.

Behind the talk of the right to decent shelter is the fact that world powers are now thinking of building space colonies. Behind the talk of gender rights is the fact that gender is increasingly giving way to a redefinition of sexuality, to an understanding of sexuality as performance rather than possession of identity. Behind the talk of civil and political rights is the issue of the antinomy between freedom and control, cautiously settled in modern political contract, a mutual suspicion between the natural and the artificial that can never reach closure and will always challenge the imagination of humanity at the risk of exploding as long as it lives.

Behind the talk of the right to self-determination is the fact that the very existence of sovereign space, big or small, is threatened by population, urbanization, and climate change. Behind the talk of the right to religion is the fact that the right to disbelief and unbelief has never been widely acknowledged. Behind the right of indigenous peoples to self-preservation is the fact that the one thing they hold as sacred, Nature, which must be preserved, is facilitating the process of extinction, with or without capitalism whose only business is to hasten this process.

While there is still time, while Nature is allowing us to live, why not champion instead the right to violate some of the rights that only deepen the divide between those who have and those who struggle to have them? Why not violate some of those rights that are no longer relevant to the changing needs of the times? It is also our right to not have those rights.

For this to be possible we need to redefine the humanitas. To this end we need a new revolution, one of reviving the virtues of Enlightenment. Yet it is going to be Enlightenment without a promise, unlike the Enlightenment of Europe that promised abundance and happiness but also brought miseries to millions of lives. Karl Marx once said to the effect that we need to stop interpreting the world because it is time to change it. On the contrary, we need to reinterpret the world if we want to change it. There is no world that is not already interpreted. The demand to change it can only mean the demand to reconceive it. This is the new war machine of the new revolution of our time.

The new revolution however is not without paradoxes to solve. Let me situate this claim within a more historical view.

Human rights were introduced into international political lexicon after World War II, ironically to honor the victims of the war. Human rights then meant that humanity must be protected from a war of such kind. Until about three decades the lexicon did not gain popular attention except within non-Western nations held by despotic regimes that ushered in the aftermath of emancipation from Western colonial powers. Human rights at least gained a political meaning, to emancipate humanity from the vestiges of colonization. Ironically, it was championed by Western-educated scumbags who had no respect for human rights, like the dictatorship of Iran in the late part of the 60s. The downfall of Mubarak in the middle of this year is not the end of this episode. There are still autocrats in the Middle East but are now challenged by the new war machine.

At about this period of the 60s progressive peoples of Europe were redefining human rights, such as shown by the May student revolt in Paris. French students clamored for individual human rights, the rights of individuals to be protected from state apparatuses that in truth were really meant to check individual freedom. The student revolt of France which spread in the US and Asia came at a time when the world was also divided between Capitalism and Socialism, between defenders of democracy and vanguards of socialism. The French revolt attempted to introduce a middle-way, and that is the assertion of the inalienability of individual human rights. As expected, capitalism and socialism were in unison to denounce the student revolt. These two strange enemies and friends as well were united in their disdain for individual human rights in favor of the right of the corporation or the collective, which are both against individual autonomy.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, human rights gained a slight shift in political lexicon. It was a time when the world was also undergoing environmental shifts, like population explosion, the detection of ozone layer depletion that would impact on food and human security a decade after, coupled with a renewed drive for capital as a consequence of the fall of socialism. The world was starting to deal with a lone superpower, the US that had enjoyed tremendous advantage over world economy and geopolitical relations. But it was not to last long. The world on the side of its physical dimension was also undergoing change that no superpower could avoid, as Rome didn’t escape the ecological crisis of her time, worsened by lack of ecological foresight, which led to her downfall.

Global experts agree that climate change could also redefine humanitas. Conditions of scarcity could force humans to adapt to extreme conditions where maximization of resources can be more efficient if they pattern their existence after the efficiency of machines. If we become machines, assuming we still want to survive in this planet despite the conditions of scarcity, and there is no other way to do it than to become machines, certainly we do not need human rights. We need the rights of machines to continue performing, relatively protected from the elements of Nature that can easily wipe away organic elements like humans.

You may counter this claim as wistful thinking. We can only rebut with a counterfactual claim.

In the 1990s human rights only existed as a political lexicon. Without a name for what they were doing, humans were exercising their rights without official state sanctions, without robust international agreement that could define what human rights were. This explained the reform movements in Eastern Europe, and later, the revolutionary tide that swept Latin America, all underscored by the clamor for human dignity outside of the dignity defined for them by the global elite. Today this same clamor is swamping the Arab region and the Middle East. The case of Egypt is remarkable. One revolution succeeds another in a span of months. Like a machine freedom does not rest except when death closes all possibilities. It will not rest because it is no longer human; it is more than human. It is more than talk of human rights. It is the right to be impossible. It is not in the lexicon of human rights. It is the ghost that haunts 21^st century humanity.

A specter is haunting humanity. It is not just the Egyptian revolution; it is the revolution of humanity. The masses leading the Egyptian revolution protest injustice, lack of basic needs, which are all the result of the global system of production and consumption, of concentration of wealth and exploitation of labor in which we are all implicated. The clearest indication of this indifference is our belief that we have rights to have rights, which conceals a metaphysical desire, the desire for others to not have what we have. It is the belief that we are humans who deserve to have rights, human rights—the rights to be different, to be different from other humans, better if difference is something we can maximize for as long as time allows. But the ecological crisis we are facing is telling us that time is not eternal. Like an economic law, time will reach a point of saturation.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that the cry of Enlightenment—liberte, egalite, fraternite—was a cry that invoked all humanity regardless of race, gender, and status in life. Unfortunately at that time there was no perfect condition to lump humanity under one category as there were evident territorial, sexual, and racial differences. At that time the planet was abundant; it was rather stable so there was no reason to reduce humanity to a singular category at the expense of differences, and the multiplicity and diversity of life. But the Enlightenment later produced the terror of Europe, culminating in Hitler’s Catholic dream of a thousand year reign in the name of uniformity.

But there has never been a perfect time to invoke humanity as a single category. That time is now as the crisis of ecology affects us regardless of differences. Like a night when all cows turn black. There has never been a time when the term humanity has really existed. That time is now as we all face a challenge of survival against the threat of extinction that is totally indifferent to difference.

Humanity is approaching the dusk when the Owl of Minerva will spread its wings, and there is no turning back. Indeed, there has never been a time when human rights really exist. That time is now when our very definition of humanity is challenged by the laws of the universe in which our rights, human rights, are no less accidental quanta of the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of its mystery.

Talk delivered during the celebration of the International Human Rights Declaration at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Bulwagang Balagtas, Main Library/December 13, 2012

Reference consulted:

Samuel Moyn. The Last Utopia.Human Rights in History. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2010.

World Philosophy Day

PHILOSOPHY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GOOD

Virgilio A. Rivas

 

Paper delivered during the World Philosophy Day celebration sponsored by the Polytechnic University of the Philippines–Institute of Cultural Studies on November 27, 2012.

On November 15, 2012, philosophy was celebrated around the world to honor philosophical reflections, in corners of the world where philosophy has made its mark. Ten years ago, we were told by UNESCO to mark the third Thursday of the 11^th month of the year as the day of philosophy.

Unfortunately, when an event like this is marked in the calendar rest assured that event is officially dead. Philosophy has officially died in the common era of 2002, the year the celebration began. The red mark in the calendar becomes a tomb, and the lapidary, in whatever way it is written, indicates that an event that has died can only be remembered through an appeal. This year’s appeal is addressed to the youth whose future ought to be philosophic. The ‘ought’ is not a command, rather, as I mentioned, an appeal.

Perhaps, Hegel is right that regardless of official date we are already in a state of mourning, mourning for the death of philosophy; or, following Heidegger, unable to admit that philosophy had died long ago.^[1] On the one hand, mourning results from a painful admission that something has died; on the other hand, melancholia proceeds from our non-acceptance, still clinging to hope, that something is never coming back. For Hegel and Heidegger, philosophy died in the hands of modernity.

We can only remember philosophy and by doing so we are doing philosophy, the only way to do philosophy.

§

In retrospect, the ancient Greeks started the tradition of criticism and self-criticism that was to become the building block of what today we call ‘love of wisdom’.^[2] Thales opened his mind to the scrutiny of his students and contemporaries who then continued the practice he initiated. For this alone Nietzsche described the ancient period from Thales to Socrates as a ‘republic of geniuses’.^[3] To be a genius means that a thinker must be a willing servant of criticism—criticism as the god of knowledge, if we can put it that way. Criticism, especially that which is directed at oneself, started philosophy. Without criticism, and without a god in the sense we have spoken, philosophy would not be born.

In the East, the same applied to the beginnings of speculative thought, yet in a different context. Criticism may not be a dominant virtue of Oriental thinking. Nonetheless, it was compensated by the appeal to intuition. Intuition gave the Orient a special structure of time which allowed them to peer through the veil of reality. If the West utilized criticism as a way of relating to what they were unable to comprehend completely, the Orient found refuge in the mode of revealing of time, slow but imposing in terms of its power to humble our claim to mortal greatness. Intuition preserves the mystery of time, its power to destroy as much as nurture our existence.

Centuries passed, Heidegger describes our mode of relation to time, among others, in terms of the idea of being in the draft. Ultimately, a being in the draft is the Human controlled by the current of time; a being who cannot change the course of time.^[4] This concept of time resonates in both Oriental and Western modes of thinking. The Orient preferred intuition over concept, mystery over logic, time over the conquest of space that the Western rather excelled in. But both share something in common—they chose different methods to reach the same destiny. The destiny is the awareness that Man is not the starting point. The proper starting point is the Real; the Real that precedes the emergence of the human condition; the reality that has the ultimate capacity to withdraw from human access. It is wrong to even suppose that if reality can’t be completely thought it can instead be adequately experienced.

We can wonder then if one can really have a self as the center of experience.^[5] Is there a thinker of the think, the dreamer of the dream, the conceiver of the concept? Thomas Metzinger, an emerging German philosopher who is working on the fringes of  speculative realism that began in 2007, says, no! Gilles Deleuze would rather tweak the question like this–isn’t it that there are tiny selves rather than a single permanent Self? Or, a thousand tiny sexes rather than a fixed sexuality?^[6] Descartes is right when he doubts the existence of the self. Where he gets it wrong is in assuming that thinking can only discover a single indubitable self. The point is while we cannot answer these questions for now it doesn’t prohibit us from assuming there is a self, a single permanent self. The self is therefore a compelling postulate, which does not mean it is real.

As Alain Badiou would have it, humans are inconsistent nothings, unpresentable zeroes.^[7] The fact that we are zeroes illustrates that something magical happened before the emergence of the human species. But magical does not mean to presuppose a magician, much less a superhuman transcendent magician. Again, there is no self as there is no doer behind the deed. Nietzsche said it before. The magical that led to our emergence in the planet is a result of pure accident.

Reality is still largely unknown. Yet it is still unknown because we have been trained to utilize logic instead of creative imagination. To be logical does not mean to be philosophical. Quite the contrary because philosophy is for the most part the business of defying logic. In philosophy, we study logic in order to identify its limitations, in order to identify the options to exercise more freedom.

To this end, philosophy teaches us that reality is difficult to pin down. Logic can only scratch the surface. But Socrates was more direct. He knew that no concept can perfectly describe the essence of the real, all the more the kind that precedes our emergence in the prehistory of time. In the same manner, no concept can survive the future when humans will be things of the past. The only absolute future of our species is extinction.

Having said these, we seem to be looking into the future with unnecessary haste. A future is always given birth by its infancy, the age of its childhood, its youth, or what Sigmund Freud associates with the feeling of being adrift in the sea.^[8] Roughly, oceanic feeling is a feeling that one encounters when confronted with the question of one’s past. Freud’s oceanic feeling and Heidegger’s being-in-the-draft both point to the idea of being that is swayed by the course of something unpredictable and volatile.

True enough, Heidegger would describe the origin of the human as thrownness (Geworfenheit). Thrownness is the past of humanity. Yet any living entity will reach its end, its future. Even so, we believe that between past and future there is wisdom. There is the possibility of standing apart, which the Greeks call ekstasis, making a clearing between old and new, past and future. Wisdom in this sense is the present, the only desirable present. Intriguingly, what enunciates this desirability is the love of the impossible, the impossible being the attainment of wisdom.

Several thinkers put in their share of this impossible love.

In Spinoza, it is love for the absolute pleasure of being; despite the lack of sufficient reason for being, the lack of sufficiency of being becomes the sufficient reason to enjoy being to the fullest;

In Nietzsche, it is love for the death of false humanity;

In Marx, love for being-multiple;

In Deleuze, love of the body without organs, where organs are defined according to political semiotics, sexual and economic jargons that the body resistant to definitions internally rejects,

In Derrida, it is love of justice to come without the guarantee of the future;

In Foucault, love of oneself in terms of inventing a self;

In Badiou, love of truth without conditions;

In Laruelle, love of the true without truth.

In Harman, love for the mystery of objects, their quiet self-translations; their power to humble our claim to privilege, we being allegedly created in the likeness of God, because they preceded our emergence and will certainly survive our extinction.

Or, the love of the eternal by Mallarme; the love of whatever-space in Deleuzean terms by Gabriel Garcia Marquez;

Or, the impossible romance of Neruda; the incredible ambition of the spiders of Vallejo to become other than spiders, to become-human, to become-tourists, the becoming-other of whatever is and is not;

The love of the impossible by revolutionaries who are called revolutionaries because they have not won a revolution!

In general, love of wisdom takes the form of tragic awareness.

This is where Slavoj Žižek comes in. Žižek is known for his parallactic idea of reality, meaning, reality is not independent of us. In this sense efforts to understand the Real will always be thwarted by the same efforts to understand it because we are those efforts. All the while we are trying to understand ourselves, and in vain. Reality is the sum total of the failures of previous generations to understand the real that we inherit and reproduce.

Truly, reality is to be found within us. Yet it is within us not as a graspable item, but as a ghost, a phantom. Consistent with his Lacanian background, Žižek understands reality as a fantasy. Life is a fantasy. Similarly, knowledge is a fantasy.

All these do not mean that scientific knowledge is a fantasy-laden discipline. But yes, we actually mean it is fantasy with a necessary shift in semantics. Fantasy is more real than reality, the reality that we traditionally conceive as logical and rational. The way philosophy has been taught since the West began to dominate the planet has something to do with this standard orientation towards the real.

§

The keyword is the Greek term Logos. It is true that in Plato the Logos is associated with reason. What is rather ignored is that the Logos is not-all. There is the beyond of the Logos, which is the Good itself. Beyond our achievements in the realm of reason and the arts, the true and the beautiful, logic and aesthetics, is ethics. Nonetheless, it is not the kind of ethics traditionally taught in schools. It is the kind that I think Levinas was the first to recognize.

The ethical emerges out of the awareness that beyond knowledge, logical or artistic, is a real dimension to which humans have no access. Levinas describes it in French as il y a, there is. What is in il y a is the chaotic echo of silence, which is silent only because all words that describe it fall flat. It is also in this sense that Plato described the beyond of the Logos as the Good. It is the Good in the sense that the only thing left of us to pursue, after accomplishing much in knowing and creating, in logic and the arts, is to protect the species against Chaos, the absolute contingency that governs the known cosmos. Incidentally, Plato knew of an extinct civilization that lies beneath the Atlantis.

It is well thought out by science—given all things equal, the planet has only about 7 billion years to last. Granting that there will be humans 7 billion years from now, Plato urges us to continue creating myths, or noble lies to protect the species from the collapse of sanity. Ultimately, sanity means the awareness that there is no one to help us except us. This knowledge will be sustained by aristocracy. Yet bear in mind that Plato understood aristocracy as the rule of virtues, from the word arête which means virtue or excellence in Greek.

All in all, virtue is the knowledge that there is only the Good, that it is good knowledge to profess that we alone are capable of creating truths, necessary lies that sustain our tenacity as a species. For Plato noble lies have the function of telling lies to people, at the same time making them aware that these are lies but have social utility. Social utility in its highest sense means the mechanism to protect humanity from entropy, which may arrive earlier than its appointed time. It may arrive earlier if we continue to make life more complex. We all know how the Mayan civilization died by introducing complex patterns of life that required destroying Nature. In physics entropy is hastened by the introduction of more complex patterns of determination within a closed system. Imagine this closed system as the planet itself.

The more complex we choose life to be the earlier we invite extinction. Here, complexity means our inclination to believe that there is truth, that there is truth other than extinction, such as life after death. This standard knowledge led to crimes against humanity—the massacre of human population, also, destruction of ecological domains resulting from conquest, all in the name of the belief in life after death. Yet it doesn’t only apply to sacred religion. Secular religions such as National Socialism, social realism and militant forms of national democracy have tried to duplicate the passion of the crimes of religion.

Nowadays, we have seen less propensity of humanity for genocide. Nonetheless, it has been replaced by consumerism that attracts entropy more economically, which means more favorable to extinction. We see how technology, sustained by market economy, has increasingly made our lives more complex: More cell phones and ipads, high tech-savvy consciousness without acquiring the knowledge proper to 21^st century existence. Our century teaches us that ecological disaster can only be properly handled by the right kind of scientific consciousness, not religious consciousness, sacred or secular, not the new religion in the guise of the technological industry. The right kind of knowledge is the knowledge that celebrates mortality, at the same time prepares the better part of existence towards embracing extinction, with happiness and contentment, and better, with enlightenment, equality and the desire for justice.

In retrospect, Plato urges a return to proper fantasy, the knowledge that there is no reality worthy of knowing other than our givenness to the laws of extinction and entropy. This means the necessity for science and philosophy, but more so, the necessity for an ethical kind of knowledge that teaches us to embrace extinction. For Plato the tragic relation between science and philosophy, between myth-making and truth-telling, constitutes the key to enlightened humanity. Nietzsche inherited it from Plato despite his claim to overcome him. He calls it tragic consciousness.

Nowadays, we see the extent to which science is being made hostage by religion by lobbying against the teaching of evolution, the only science that makes us aware that we are not a privileged species. Nowadays, we see the extent to which philosophy is being made hostage by religion, that which ironically supports philosophy degree programs. In these institutions philosophy becomes an apparatus of scholarship, of logic and the arts, of aristocracy without knowledge of the Good, the knowledge that all knowledge is nothing, without ontological merit, without a Creator, without the guarantee of redemption in the face of the Real.

Granting we can still see our mistakes, we are already seeing the extent to which this mistake is threatening humanity with extinction, but first with escalating ignorance and apathy, with climate change that imperils food and human security, which adds more to the burden of the global poor.

Humanity is endangered with ecological disasters whose pure chaotic silence it seems only things can hear besides Levinas.

May he truly rest in peace.

NOTES

[1] Brent Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

[2] Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

[3] R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and his philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[4] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

[5] Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et. al. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983).

[7] Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York and London: Continuum, 2005).

[8] Sigmund Freud, The Future of An Illusion (New York: Classic House Books, 2009).

On Legacy Lecture

The text that follows belongs to Plan B of our tribute to Prof. Amable Tuibeo during the Legacy Lectures organized by the Philosophical Association of the Philippines held at De La Salle University. Plan A is a video interview of him that to the last minute had us teetering on our nerves because of serious technical error. But it went through courtesy of Jayson Jimenez, our Lacanian tech guy. I am posting Plan B nonetheless. Ka Abe’s legacy is too irresistible not to tell.

Postscript to Ka Abe Tuibeo

From his activism as a teacher of philosophy to an administrator of humans and things Ka Abe Tuibeo has taught us in PUP the enduring virtue of engagement.(Before Prof. Tuibeo retired from the service he was the Director of a PUP branch in Bicol, right at the heart of one of the poorest regions in the country but rich in natural resources—we can probably emphasize here the irony of things he confronted every day until he retired, but not from contemplating on this irony).

As a partisan of materialist philosophy he is of the opinion that philosophy is not just about scholarship of ideas, but for the most part a form of engagement. And it is a sort of engagement that is not for the weak heart.

As a young student of philosophy in a university touted by many as the last bastion of student activism, I encountered Ka Abe’s radical insights, in the classroom, in public places where he used to lead faculty protests against what he saw as a radical failure of the system to address the needs of the human condition. Before he entered PUP he was expelled from the University of the East for inciting to sedition. PUP then was also reeling from martial law, but Ka Abe found other expelled comrades in the PUP faculty, and together they dreamt of PUP to become a commune. When the late Dr. Prudente was appointed by the first Aquino administration as President of the largest state university in the country then and now, Ka Abe was tapped to create a philosophy curriculum that would reflect the tradition of PUP as an intellectual academe with strong bias for the poor.

With inspiration coming from him, activists like me were full of expectations that philosophy can change the world, if not the limited world I dwell in that was already in many ways in crisis. One of the reasons I myself was driven to activism when I was student is the fact that being raised in a poor family, I and others who were as poor as me felt what Ka Abe saw as the injustice of the system.

I mean injustice here as the responsibility of the system for the most part—the system whose function is not only to organize things as language does, but to ensure that things are not violated of their innocence. The poor are largely innocent of the injustice done to them or why they are poor in the first place. There are various reasons why they are poor—not all of them are economic—but the fact that their poverty is taken advantage by others constitutes the most serious injustice against them. It is there where injustice takes on a deliberate, conscious form, an ideological shape, conveyed in and through a system of language. If the violation of language results into grammatical errors, the violation of things by language often leads to irreversible consequences that have tremendous effect on human lives.

It is in this light that Ka Abe Tuibeo holds strong opinion against the linguistic turn of philosophy. I do not exactly share his views on this but I agree with some of his reasons. For one thing, there is always the tendency to view language as an immutable structure. As Roman Jakobson would put it, language is the site of the separation between Man and animal, but the separation is never complete in the sense that language continues to articulate the separation. On the advent of capitalism this separation has been systematically extended to humans who are internally divided by many linguistic categories—man and woman, master and slave, homo and hetero, human and non-human, West and non-West, elite and pedestrian, rich and poor, etc. As a phylogenetic reference for tracing our human origins, language may be had as truly irreversible and thus permanent. But as we emphasized language extends this separation. There is no denying that those who take advantage of the linguistic turn are united on the premise that language can make or unmake human lives. This explains the underlying reason why in analytic philosophy the objective is to achieve correct usage of propositions—because wrong propositions can send people to jail if not to their graves.

Incidentally, for all his Marxist orientation, Ka Abe Tuibeo is also a partisan of Spinoza, perhaps an offshoot of his unorthodox views on religion. He was an ex-seminarian. His Spinoza is the materialist philosopher whose ethics Ka Abe preferred over what preoccupies analytic philosophy, influenced by Leibniz, namely, the correct ways by which we can speak of things. Ka Abe’s Spinoza is centered on what sort of things we can think of, rather than the ways we can speak of them. It is what we think of things that matters most. By things we mean those that are not us, those that are not part of our internal consciousness. These we can ask—Are things passive? Or, are they active?

Ka Abe once told me that if you think of things as passive, you are actually privileging an elite standpoint, which takes inspiration from the standpoint that humans are privileged, which we learned from religion. This is exactly the point I talked about earlier—the separation of Man from the animal, as propelled by language, puts the human at the center of things. From there and as human history can attest this privileging of the human has been extended to the arrogation of natural and metaphysical privileges for the few. It is here where Spinoza can be linked to Marx. This is not unusual for Marxists. Modern-day Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri, Louis Althusser, and even to a certain degree, Alain Badiou have been attracted to Spinoza’s materialism. Like Ka Abe these Marxists concentrate on the legacy of Spinoza—that what we say about things conveys an ideology, and this ideology, paraphrasing Nietzsche, can be either life-enabling or life-negating.

It all begins with what we think of things; afterwards, we can think of how we can speak of things that we choose to be things. In other words, there are things that we can dismiss as worthy of thinking. In history, the things usually ignored are those that are rather being thought of in the margins of thinking, in the margins of philosophy—that is to say, in the everyday unpredictability of human acts, in the street, in the slums, in the darkest corners of society; in a charity ward, in places where the only thing philosophy can describe is the bare life that people experience, between life and death, between being and nothing, if not between nothing and nothing again where the rays of hope do not penetrate.

But, as Ka Abe would add, if you think like Spinoza that things are active if not really mysterious, that they stand apart from any humanistic claims, then we are taking a least chosen path.  Let me clarify that Ka Abe is a deep humanist, but his humanism stands apart from the bourgeois, the elite, and the middle class hypocrisy of representing the best of the human simply by occupying the middle strata of society. In philosophy this hypocrisy is called virtue. Again, let me clarify that Ka Abe is not anti-virtue but a partisan of the virtue of radical human emancipation. This emancipation does not translate into the emancipation of the human from the animal, even from Nature, which is what Kant’s Copernican revolution amounts to, rather this emancipation is historical—namely, the emancipation of the many from the false hegemony of the few.

Like Gramsci Ka Abe champions a moral hegemony of the poor, the lower class, yet a class that has first emancipated itself from its self-defeating virtues, which are also invested on them by those that do not believe they are capable of emancipation, namely, the rich and the elite. And it is only to the best interest of the rich and the elite that some poor sections of our society are too stubborn to learn. The elite in fact support this kind of stubbornness by not supporting the creation of a People’s University against which some untutored activists react violently; or, by supporting people in Congress who do not agree that PUP should be given higher government subsidy; also, by supporting that PUP should be reduced into a vocational institution—there are in fact clamors to abolish PUP.

Yet, as Ka Abe Tuibeo would say, “but we are many, and we are armed by a philosophy that is not for the weak heart.”

Nonetheless, for all his Marxism Ka Abe is fierce critic of dogmatic Marxism, a kind of Marxism that, as in Hegel’s dialectic, strives to repeat the error of the master.

What exactly is the error of the master that we spoke of? Here, I would need to go beyond the influence of Ka Abe on my chosen field of study.

For Jacques Lacan as for Slavoj Zizek, the error of the master lies in his illusion that there is an ultimate source of happiness, which explains the master’s insatiable desire to desire for more. In psychoanalysis, the desire of the master flies in the face of reality. There is no reality beyond reality; if at all, the beyond is a fantasy that sustains the master’s idea of what qualifies as real. In short, the master’s desire for ultimate happiness is displaced into his fantasy—he desires fantasy. This is different with the fantasy of the slave. Rather than by desire, the slave is led by drives, Trieb in Freud—the drive to become a master whose desire cannot be satisfied. When the slave aims to occupy the position of the master, it is there that the slave aims for something really existing—the position of the master. The master in contrast desires a position that cannot be achieved. The master is insatiable. It is in this context that Ka Abe’s Marxism articulates the position of Gramsci. In virtue of the incapability of the master to comprehend what is realistic and what is not, only the slave, the poor, the lower class can have the moral capability to lead society.

But it is a kind of society that tries to block the reality of the master from influencing the desire of the slave—to influence the slave to desire what the master desires. In Marx, this society is a communistic society, a society governed by drives, governed by concrete aims, aims that can change and vary in the sense that humans are no longer amused by an ultimate desire for ultimate happiness, rather, as in Marcuse, by a multi-dimensional habit of creating and recreating oneself, as in Foucault, a critical ontology of oneself.

Abstracts of my plenary lecture (local) and paper presentation (international)

For my plenary lecture at Lyceum of the Philippines, Aparri (September 2012)–
THE BODY AND ITS PLACE IN ONTOLOGY

For my paper presentation at the First International Deleuze Conference in Asia 2013 (Taiwan)–
A Thousand Sexes and the New War Machine

These research papers reflect my current interest in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, fusing them with my lingering passion for Deleuze (and Guattari). In all these papers Francois Laruelle, the originator of non-philosophy, serves as a unifying thread, reflective of my still on-going difficult engagement with Laruelle’s texts.

Post-torrential lassen-sein

To Jayson and His youth

_____________________________________

It is the way he let that phrase dance with his unique folding of the Latin, a new line of assemblage, the way he brought that phrase into new plateaus of compossibility, exiting into a unique plane of immanence that even he did not expect…

Here, I was wondering if translation is also a way of speaking why not use for its sole intellectual effect the Latin expression ‘res ipsa loquitur’ that my poet-mentor Al Cuenca, Jr. had made the most of in his recent essay for the next issue of The Mabini Review.

The becoming-other of the Latin expression that he laboured to concoct to produce a powerful piece is the reason I am staying away from his spinning linguistic machine. I may be unaware I am already as good as entombed in his web, like a fly attracted to the radial threads, the threads that have the power to imitate a blank space that in turn imitates a plane of creation that in turn imitates the ‘nothing’ that imitates a space untouched by danger. But as Rilke would have said of the value of danger to creation, “the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

Ø

‘Things translate themselves.’

These are just the words I would have meant to console my friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are as of this writing bracing the monsoon torrents in whatever way they can. I should add, those words also go to anonymous ‘human others’ in a fringe horizon of anthropic assemblage where Berkeley would partly fail his own solipsistic test. There are humans out there, they may be absent in our visual range, but they are here and there, scattered, spread out in territorial planes, geological layers and plateaus, regardless whether you can find them in urban and rural lines of assemblages.

Humans are passim not because their textual imprints are everywhere (the use of passim in footnotes is partly meant here) but rather because they exceed the ‘kinds of texts’ they were made to assume. I can risk assuming here beyond the ‘texts’ I can be made to take responsibility for by a certain regime of signs that regulates human behaviour, say, the semiotic machine that today forces me not without some enabling effects to consume the new media, that in light of the enduring age of the spectacle since the invention of the TV there is nowhere anymore untouched by the human, unseen in Google maps, or uncovered by an orbiting satellite.

With the invention of the internet humans have learned to become extra-textual, and yes, extra-terrestrial like the aliens we can imagine. They have learned to become engineers of their own difference.

They have ceased to be humans simply by being able to assume hyperreal personages, posthuman assemblages that bring to light the efficiency of molecular grids of communication that shatter the distinctively organic privilege of the human once dependent on non-organic transcendence (God?). In the same way humans have ceased to be the kind of animals that they once were. In any case, this is not to illustrate that humans have once and for all proved their superiority over nonhuman animals and things as well. The point, which we are about to see, is that the post-human evolution of what Nietzsche laments as ‘this sickness’ called the human reveals a positive transcendence in the sense that this planetary sickness can no longer assume the privilege it had nominated for itself.

This evolution is unilateral. It shows that ‘all are things’, humans, animals, the things themselves, all are objects without warranties, especially of redemption, hence the equation objects = x. Thus the human imprints that the internet can globally distribute and redistribute in fluctuating lines of flight and reterritorialization exceed the homocentric phenomenological grid, which makes this transcendence positive.

It is not the human that is everywhere but the ‘alien phenomenology’, to borrow from Ian Bogost, of which the human is only a part, the post-human molecular imprint which the new media consistently betray as they are also being continually redesigned to conceal it. Indeed, the homo-passim reveals the transitory nature of the human all-too-human. In a similar vein, as Heidegger would say of the pre-ontic horizon of being that is dependent on the prior existence of the world whose future nonetheless is not guaranteed by time, the being of the human Dasein is not guaranteed of permanence in the world, also its dignity and rank compared to nonhuman beings of other Daseins, other beings-in-the-world—animals, objects and things. In fact humans are already betraying the post-humans that they are today by embracing the tools of a mode of existence that thrives on molecular planes of consistency. The one absolute point about this progression of the molecular as it relates to human existence is that this trend is irreversible (about which more will be discussed later).

Ø

Before the event called the ‘internet’ Alan Turing did not only spoil the Berkeleyan limelight, which is nothing but the extension of the Cartesian cogito, the compliant res extensa of the “I think” by means of the spatialization of the internal time of reason later perfected by Kant, when his notorious Turing machine belied that intelligence is unique to humans, once the privileged owner of a jargon of authenticity that bore a not so indelible mark—their power of perception and thinking. Contra Berkeley, even in the absence of a human, especially the phallic employer of the concept, any sound is good as heard.

True enough machines are infinitely better at computing. But the heart of the matter is that things themselves, whose power of assemblage can be regionalised in a computer, can also perceive as much as humans can, provided we admit certain levels of intensive differences. Through their own unique capacity for translating the outside world, things that have molecular structures which mutually cause one another in their own compossible ways (Harman said it better, ‘vicarious causation’), things can mobilize their powers of effectuation that are differentially constituted, courtesy of a much powerful machine of difference, what we normally understand as life, what Deleuze would prefer to describe as pure immanence. Things are machines too in this respect.

But humans are also made of things, of molecular assemblages. The human is not the soul but the creel, the cartridge that holds the real assemblages of power inside. The real soul is the machine.

Ø

In the meantime, as the seinlassen-ing of torrents wreaks havoc on human landscapes, their poor creators and labourers, the poor whose machinic potential is employed by Capital to build the infrastructures of modern civilization, are clenching the monsoon rains in their unstylish hands.  What for but in their unique ways of asserting the humanly in themselves, trying to defeat the unpredictable.

By doing so they are acting out their best as machinic assemblages, extremely irrational (if we mean by irrational as risking a decision in the absence of a metaphysical guarantee of survival, such as a decision to stay or flee). For its part, only death can terminate the human will to live. This is perhaps the best analytic statement we can offer to explain, that which is self-defining, such as death terminates life, how impossibly great the greatness of the human spirit is, the human who alone is conscious of the power of termination, who alone can own it. Who says the human is irreducible to the analyticity of what is otherwise its untold machinic grammatology?

And what can best describe this spirit if not the human defiance of determinism? What is determinism if not the indifferent will of a pure outside imposing its interest on us? The will of the outside may be human or nonhuman unplugging us from an energy source, from a source of consistency capable of aborting a local process of singularization, of survival as a continuing exit to creation, as such a local dramaturgy of inconsistencies, a pure expression of freedom, that is to say, a ‘will’ impinging upon a creature whose only strength lies in its impossibility, its capacity for the anomalous.

The creature we are talking about does not hope for redemption. This ens creatum—the human animal, but also the nonhuman animal, and the thing itself that has the power to ignore a humanistic forcing of value upon its regional or singular determinations.

Ø

One also has to consider the metaphysical seduction of the ‘unpopulated’. It promises of a new beginning. They say the islands are paradisiacal. They seethe with minerals; wealth embedded underground and on sea beds by billions of years of geological evolution, all sparked by the equanimous beginning of solar decay when the sun ceased to grow beyond what gravity can allow, with what transpired in the fringe of the solar horizon and beyond contributing to the goldilocks assemblage sufficient for the emergence of life, besides what were already formed beforehand, the things themselves.

What are we saying?

It all started with the radio reporting on the power of the rosary; people were asking God to spare the nation from the torrents that made Noah a household name. Or, should I blame the Chinese government, with all the gossiping around about how it stole the technology from Pentagon that could produce storms to punish rival nations? The prize is the undisputed sovereignty over a cluster of islands northwest of the Philippines still unpopulated by humans, or so they say.

Ø

How do things translate themselves? An eager student, in a flood of insights, which happens when an obvious becomes so intuitively unfamiliar, declared: the rains translate into floods. But the ‘floods’ are more controversial.

Since when have the rains started to translate into floods as a correlate to human lives and properties that may be put out and damaged in the process? Rainfalls are natural; the floods are not, relative to a human population that they threaten to displace. Take out a sufficient quantum of human population in the ecological algebra and it will be just rains having their field day.

We can radicalize this point further. In the time when humans were not around, the rains are just rains. In the time of human explosion buttressed by the ideology of human privilege where economics and theology join hands to develop the greatest bombshell ever designed against natural geology, the homocentrism it unabashedly promotes, capitalism has increasingly mastered the technology of putting everything in place exactly where the ‘human population’ is concentrated. This translates into the market flooding the stock exchange with futures and speculations. Population translates into market, rains translate into floods.

Ø

This correlation may be examined as a type of discursive play around the Heideggerian correlation between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandensein, ready-to-hand and presence-at-hand.

On the one hand, as a demographic and statistical value ‘population’ is the outward evidence of a particular assemblage that provides reference for decision-making; on the other hand, the uncertain metaphysical value of what underlies the population, the human essence (what is it?), is the unstated presence that is made to constitute the sufficiency of statistics, and as unstated is forced to provide a background for a certain decision that is made possible by ignoring it, the ‘ready-to-hand’ character of the uncertainty that is the human, unstated precisely because it has not been defined yet with certainty and precision, or because it cannot be defined, being itself an anomalous rupture in the order of things.

Here, the inalienability of the ready-to-hand (the indefinable human essence of the human population, the zuhandenheit of the human, its partially disclosed essence through the appearance of a speaking-animal) is forced to constitute the presence-at-hand (the statistical or measurable value of the population, hence, a forcibly ‘defined’ essence, the vorhandensein of the presumably fully disclosed Human ).

Whereas population is being forced to translate itself into market despite its internal inconsistency, the rains translate into floods whose target is not the population (its metaphysical value is equal to zero) but the ‘essence’ withheld in the statistical determination of things. One may wonder how can this un-stated, undefined because anomalous essence be withheld. The realism this question evokes is familiar: How can you touch an intangible? But isn’t it that on account of the absence of anything like a substratum belaboured by the barrenness of definitions that have been predicated of it, the human essence, makes this impossible essence itself all the more manipulable?

The bare life that is the human, irreducible to any form of deconstruction other than to consistently stoke the fire of the deconstructive machine that is the human itself in search of its own definition, its own signs, its marks (like animals do with their faeces marking out their territories against the stranger, the intruder, or a sex rival), a machine that constantly annihilates the positive terms assigned to the inconstancy of its essence that have the power to reterritorialize what the human machine has already cast away—remarkable, indeed, yet restricted to the ekstatic wandering of the pilgrim, the philosopher, the poet, the metaphysical naturalist, the lover, the thespian, the Deleuzean auteur, the atheist in the midst of people, objects and things—aren’t these enough for capital to proceed to the totalization of the unstated?

Isn’t it also the case that capitalism is the biggest audience to the lassen-sein-ing of the rains translating into floods?

Ø

The monsoon rains that had submerged half of the entire metropolis tested not the population (does it exist?) but rather the human essence (it too does not exist as far as the human defiance of categories is concerned; more on this later) in a way our machinic nature is tested by the rationality that the rains imposed. Once again, it is capital that provides the widest and largest geological coverage for the unfolding of this rationality.

What is this rationality? No other than the certainty of the extinction of the human species that the cycle of rains and deaths unilaterally teach us. If one still believes that the human species will live forever let him enjoy the negative symptom of the rest of humanity, the humanity that still denies the ongoing process of entropy that may not be threateningly felt as even today when we are facing an ecological crisis.

Things translate themselves; rains into floods; floods into dislocation and death. Things are ably asserting that this world is not our world, that we are transient tenants of this planet. This world is their world.

But capitalism does not allow humanity to see through the image of an absolute geological clock; instead it feeds us with images that can be quantified, such as deaths and the ruins, which encourage us to halt the wheel of time and ‘pay attention’ (especially to death). Capitalism encourages us to break the flow of time through which it becomes possible to ignore the uninterrupted unfolding of things, the lassen-ing of time. What is not shown us is that which exceeds the range of intelligibility that is time; instead capital supports ways of seeing being in the pure horizon of intelligibility. But nothing is closer to the truth.

‘Being’ always has the character of a passage, contingent, subject to the law of extinction. Being is intelligible precisely because one can see in the horizon how much everything that it holds it holds against time. But ‘Being’ cannot hold off entropy for good. Unquestionably the human whose being is understood to be a temporal constituent of a more primordial time of Being that precedes mereness, mere being (or, the world formed out of time that is anterior to the possibility of being to dwell in the world), cannot thus have an essence other than what is transitional, other than what exits and escapes.

Ø

It is this essence that is being tested by entropy: How long can capitalism hold up the second law of thermodynamics in terms of withholding the human essence, concealing its essenceless nature from being exposed to the radiation of cosmic decay as if the universe can be had by a cunning maneuver?

The trick is to withdraw something that is not existing, to conceal the anomaly that is the human to secure a plane of existence from being enfolded differently other than what capital sanctions, that the human exists in terms of the dignity and rank of its essence vis-à-vis the over-all ecology of things. Refusing the anomaly to rise up from the depths of Hades, the capitalist machine (that has joined with the theology industry, churches, schools, even households) blocks the sun from penetrating into the human core. The sun here is the negative light, negative as all illuminations are in the sense that they do not expose all. Yet they leave traces of the unlit assemblages that withdraw from illumination even by a machine as powerful as the sun. It does wonderful things for capital. What withdraws is being made to indicate that the human is great! It can defeat the sun by delaying entropy.

The sun is also the physical figure of the kind of ‘cosmic rationality’ increasingly discovered by science. Science unlocks the cosmic handiwork of entropy as it winds down from stellar formations to planetary assemblages. Fortunately it takes time for entropy to reach our place despite the infinite speed of light. In the meantime there is reason to conceal the anomaly. The sun has not successfully penetrated the human core yet. By the time it reaches that core all the factories of negative transcendence (capital and religion) may have found new lands to operate among our nearest stellar neighbours.

Ø

One may wonder if I am not already contradicting myself by seemingly defining the human as a machinic anomaly. We can only ask: “Can a machine tell you its nature?” To bring the matter as close to one’s being as possible: “Can you define yourself?” What difference human speech and intelligence can make when it cannot achieve the ultimate definition for itself. Both the machine and the uncertain human have one thing in common. They always proceed from themselves. They have only themselves to proceed from, especially, in the face of danger.

Humans defied the torrents without the guarantee of redemption, without thinking of the metaphysical boundary that separates them from animals and things. They saved their dogs, their cats, real or stuffed, other objects and things, including the structures of their molecular consistencies; their fantasies, their dreams, the latency of their repressed desires that they carry in waking life, their ambitions, their sickness, the secrets they keep from the same people they were joining hands with to create an optimistic chain of humans, objects, and things, all that have formed part of human consistencies which can be stuffed in the plasticity of their mind-body assemblage that no science and philosophy has ever successfully defined. Each human, animal and thing creates a common line of flight into a new possibility of creation, of survival as a continuing defiance of definitions that the rains consistently impose. The rains are imposing a rational timeline relative to future extinction.

It is rational in the sense that it is guaranteed to happen. It is happening already as the cosmos lavishes its waste on the terrestrial plane. The sun is the key to understanding the intention of the universe. As Deleuze would advise you, read your zodiacs. The stars know all. Our sun-star lavishes its waste, pours out its excrement to keep the earth within the orbit of extinction. A certain Bataillean economy is in operation here. The sun rids itself off of its waste to sustain its own negentropy (negating entropy), its way of slowing down the process of its own molecular dissolution. Its way of keeping alive. Our local planetary negentropy is therefore dependent on a higher deterritorizaling negentropy of the sun which humans reterritorialize in the guise of recycling solar waste. Unfortunately our own earthly negentropy would not survive the last dying phase of the sun.

Ø

We can also recall here how Zeus couldn’t do anything in his power to save his own son (whom he fathered from a mortal woman) from being murdered by the enemies at the height of the Trojan War. As a god he contributed to each destiny of the human race. If he would save his son he would change the rest.  Chaos would ensue; entropy would set in where gods and mortals would stand no chance of perpetuating themselves. The moment Zeus saved his son he would ruin the basis for being god. A god is the originator and enforcer of destiny which is also his destiny, a common destiny of gods and mortals in their attempts to slow down the cosmic machine of dissolution. In the end Zeus submitted to the negative reason of terrestrial existence (the negentropy that Greek mythology is all about). What else could he do as god? This question is pertinent to all forms of negative transcendence, to theistic religions in the planet. Even gods have delicate entropic destinies. They have their own ways of keeping themselves alive by keeping us alive. One cannot miss here the correlation between the sun and our planet. Or did he?

Meanwhile a machine performs without having to worry about its destiny. The same applies to humans who are different from the gods on the basis of their capacity to defy reason and entropy, but only up to a certain extent. Even a galaxy as large as the Milky Way will not be able to reverse the cosmic process of its eventual collision with Andromeda. A machine that loses an energy source will cease to produce.

Still, as Nietzsche says, we can choose to live dangerously as the machinic anomalies that we are. That’s what machines are for. To live in positive alienation. To produce the means of im/possible existence. To break out into creation, without hoping to be redeemed.

Ø

Things translate themselves—this was the point I raised in a recent talk on environmentalism, echoing my current research interest in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. But the heart of the matter was more challenging, I guess. Things do not only translate themselves but have the ability to withdraw completely from human access (the kernel of Harman’s ontology). Their greatest power lies in their capacity to withdraw into their tiniest impenetrable domains that no molecular science can follow as they go deeper into the unlit regions of their lines of assemblages where the real Real happens. As they withdraw they nonetheless leave traces of light which allows us, as Heidegger would put it, to “point towards that which withdraws.” But it is a light that is of no use in the last instance, a kind of unemployed negativity, a negativity that positivizes our only reasonable place in the cosmos—that we are here only by accident, that our existence here has the “character of a passage,” that this world is not our world. It belongs to things themselves.

We are the real aliens of this planet, as I stressed to a female thinking machine wondering about the coming of the night while the torrents are enjoying their own cosmic symptom.

Would she be able to glimpse the stars?

August 7, 2012

 

 

 

 

Does religion obstruct rational discussion?

Reply to an Event Invitation from the University of the Philippines’ Philosophy Community in its founding anniversary with the theme Catch-22

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Henceforth, I am clarifying my initial positions and why I think mine would complement the argument that religion does not obstruct rational discussion.

First, my concept of religion is secular. In fact all religions are secular. The conditions under which religion becomes possible are those ‘of the world’. All religions have the tendency to claim that they secure ontological warranty from a certain dimension of transcendence, hence, otherworldly, but that only matters as an ‘effect’ of a more immanent kind of operation. It is what religion denies, and it is an efficient form of denial, one that sustains the otherworldly claim of religion. This may also be explained in terms of Badiou’s axiomatic concept of decision, something to the effect of claiming that the ‘world’ becomes a world after some radical form of decision is made, namely, a decision to invent on the side of the void. As soon as a decision is forced, the void becomes no more, and everything becomes ‘is’.

In Nietzsche this is described as the necessity of forgetfulness which builds on the usefulness of necessary fiction such as the origin of Man. This is what religion goes through, except that it denies this radical form of operation that is essential to its creation in the first place. We can also marshal the theory of quantum mechanics to explain this–reality emerges as soon as it is observed. Something real emerges when an efficient form of observation disturbs reality’s taken for granted structures. The inverse of this would be something like–there is no reality to begin with in the absence of a human observer. Let it be noted here that observation is not passive. In quantum mechanics all observations are efficient as well as active in the extent to which it directs reality to behave in a unilateral direction dictated by the human gaze. Kierkegaard would not hesitate to describe this as a leap of faith, a radical decision on the part of the human to proceed from herself in the absence of a pre-subjective reality to begin with. It is also in this sense that reality is subjective, what Zizek would rather condense into a parallax conception of reality, the so-called subject-in-the-Real. In short, there is no reality other than that which the subject donates to an absent meaning, or denotes from an empty structure of existence.

From axioms to quantum theory, to the existential theology of Kierkegaard and to Zizek’s parallax, it becomes understandable now that religion underlies all structures of human decision. But it is a religion that is immanent, subjective and radically finite. Any decision that makes a claim on the side of the Real when there is no ‘real’ to begin with is religious in the ontological sense. This therefore makes us–we humans capable of enfolding a radical outside devoid of meaning into a workable sense of reality–religious. We must also take note that the very decision to enfold a nonsense into a sense that works, a theory, a hypothesis, even a belief (as it too makes a claim on the side of the Real) is rational, but rational only insofar as we have taken it upon ourselves that human history ought to begin with reason (the Greeks called it the Logos). Nonetheless, as I hope I have made it clear, this rationality is nothing rational (to paraphrase Heidegger’s famous saying that technology is nothing technological). What lies at the root of this decision is in fact opposite to reason precisely because one decides on the side of the Real with no reference to begin with other than one’s very decision, a nihilism, so to speak. We can also understand now what provokes Nietzsche to declare that God is dead. Indeed, God is dead as soon as reason’s core is exposed to be ontologically irrational. It is reason that made God possible through the historical forcing of the indiscernible from the Greek Logos, to Aristotle’s uncaused cause, to Plotinus’s One, to Christianity’s God, and to Capitalism’s rule of Money. Wherever reason lays its hands on it is always with certainty that its consequences are irrational (perhaps, another way to put it).

Even science is a religion of sort, but only to an ontological degree in terms of forcing a decision on the side of the Real. Of course scientific discoveries are not religious in the commonsense realism of the term but the condition of possibility for these discoveries to be made has to depend on a point of origin that must be forced, or what we have previously mentioned, something like the ‘forcing of the indiscernible’. This is demonstrable in terms of set-theory (which Badiou extended in his work Being and Event). No wonder why Badiou, the atheist that he is, elects Saint Paul as his hero. Saint Paul as the arch-atheist, the truth of the matter, by having demonstrated that reality could be forced to ex-ist (the vector is towards the outside, the external that makes ‘whatness’ possible, ist).

Even the political is also religious. Especially the political as it involves a radical forcing of the indiscernible, forcing reality to behave according to a prescription, a formula, an agenda. The same principle is at work in the practice of art: as Heidegger would say, art brings forth truth but only to the extent that truth lies in the bringing-forth not in the end result. In other words truth is an act, not a result. Finally, as Badiou would have it, this goes for our everyday existence in which our decisions are almost certainly defined by our ‘more than rational’ comportment (erotic or the activity of everyday jouissance, love, in short) towards the Real. Every day we exceed the Real. What else can this explain other than the fact the Real is not independent of our decisions.

Having said all these, I wonder now how religion becomes an obstruction to rational discussion. If we take the Church to be the representative of religion, I have only to repeat my previous claim by way of expressing it that the Church is an instance of the political. Have we any doubt that the Church is strictly a political if not an economic body?

It is clear where I stand, as I hope I have clearly illustrated: Religion is nothing religious. It is its very non-religious nature that allows reason to proliferate. What is reason, then, for me? It is nothing less than a decision to justify human existence against the background of an empty meaning. The Church, as a political decision, is only one instance of that justification, right or wrong.

For these, I have reasons to agree with the argument that religion does not obstruct rational discussion. I hope you can see my point here. You are hoping to find an affirmative speaker relative to the proposition “Does religion obstruct rational discussion?” I am afraid that speaker is not me. My atheism, if anything, is not directed against religion in the commonsense realism of the term, but rather towards the objective void called the Real.

Philosophy and the Continuing Quest for Being (Excerpts MA Thesis)

chapter-three-of-philosophy-and-the-continuing-quest-for-being-ma-thesis-ateneo-de-manila-university-copyrighted

I have been mulling for quite some time whether to post here (also at http://pup.academia.edu/virgiliorivas)  what I consider to be the most important chapter of my thesis, and this is it. I just wonder how it is going to be contextualized within the contemporary turn to speculative realism that I am beginning to take seriously to the extent of relinquishing some of the assumptions that I painfully embraced.

For readers and followers of speculative realism Heidegger is no longer a key player in today’s most intriguing trend in Western philosophy (in contrast to the omnipresence of Heidegger in the thesis) in light of its post-phenomenological turn away from the subject. What is surprising is that Heidegger was among the first, among many important thinkers who preceded him, notably Nietzsche, to develop a critique of the subject and/or humanism that to him characterized the failure of Western philosophy to understand what is at stake in understanding the essence of Being. In the end Heidegger consigned the radical intuitive potential of this critique to the ‘releasement’ of understanding Being, to the mysterious work of Ereignis which instantiates itself, manifests itself as Event, the sudden arrival of an unanticipated ‘twist, turn (Kehre) to the structure of the given or determined situation (history) that to him can fundamentally alter the way we think of Being. This is nonetheless consistent with what Heidegger also said of the  ‘ontological difference’ that has a character of a passage, that is, ephemeral and transitional, in respect of the great unknown that is said to be ultimately foreclosed to the human mind’s power of anticipation. If the ontological difference has been a key factor in understanding Being, if it has been the chief guiding force of thought that has shaped the way we think of Being, then its transitory character already suggests that Being is historical or temporal. Our understanding of Being can also change in the extent to which the ontological difference can historically mutate. This means that the dominance of the way of thinking Being may cease to be determinant of Dasein.

In post-continental philosophy Francois Laruelle would go as far as to claim that Being can mutate into something more fundamental, more singular in its status as the last instance of the destiny of Being, its being finally made available to human witnessing how it is transcendentally unilateralized, originally occasioned by something inimitable and unobjectifiable. This transcendental process is not a pure transcendental operation, but is rather the radical act of immanence in the form of axiomatic objectification that transcends the limitations (in the sense of interminable circularity) of significative language (where resistance to hegemonic definitions is high) in its quest to name the real Real in contrast to the determinable circularity of axioms, such as the axiom of choice that decides where the boundary of language lies. It decides from the standpoint of objectivity possible in set theory where no infinity escapes being enclosed in a set. The boundary is boundless after all, and this decision meets less resistance (expert population is comparably small vis-a-vis the multitude of untutored masses); if at all resistance is confined to non-antagonistic plane of self-determination where only a change of orientation is required without risking bloodshed. In its last determining instance, this is how set theory supposes of the non-set thinking multitude, those, needless to say, who cannot think of the Real through non-antagonistic rational sets, also, and most importantly, those whose emancipation does not lie in freeing themselves from sets, but rather from their own un-thinking set as a class of non-experts.

Laruelle contra Badiou would save the appearance of set-thinking humanism, an axiomatic humanism, if only to save the integrity of axiomatic thinking overall, by asserting that the goal of set-thinking is to extract from its own mathematicality its definitive use for Man. The opposition to Badiou is subtle for indeed Badiou offers a radical form of humanism (in the form of antihumanism known to followers of Badiou). Yet the radical difference between the two lies in their concept of the subject. For Badiou the subject is beholden to an axiomatic decision if it desires liberation in the form of seizing the Event for whatever it is worth. (Recall here that the Event is an aleatory disruption of the present state of things whose force erupts from a non-determinable movement of Ereignis, which Badiou solves by axiomatic decisionality compared to the Heideggerian sigesis, to the surrender of Being to time that alone has the potential to change the present state of things). This refers to the ‘conditions’ of decision for Badiou (there are four: scientific, erotic, artistic, and political). These conditions immanently precede the subject, so to speak. For Laruelle the subject is itself the force of thought that in the last instance of understanding the Real finally makes available to its own form of radical witnessing how the Real is truly occasioned by itself.  Thus the Real is Man himself, but Man understood in its post-phenomenological sense as the subject that has already freed itself from the correlationism of phenomenology in which the subject is beholden to the anxiety-inducing conditionality of its finitude. This fixation to finitude is responsible for electing a deceptive form of infinity that it posits as unknowable (God, noumenon, absolute).

Suffice it to say that this is the sickness that has afflicted Heidegger’s obsession with finitude which is responsible for his formulation of Ereignis that ultimately delivers the destiny of Dasein to the immortalization of the correlationism of the subject in relation to the world. The influence of Kant is reworked in such a way that in place of the premise of the existence of God from which is deducible the immortality of the soul and the facticity of human freedom Heidegger proposed a more structural category, namely, the self-same instancing of Ereignis, sadistically testing Dasein in terms of throwing dice, translatable into Events. But unlike the Laruellean and Badiouian subject the Heideggerian subject (Dasein) is discouraged to seize the event. For Heidegger the decision to seize the Event is sure to meet an old challenge: how to break the circularity of self-inflicting violence that has characterized the history of correlationism that has instituted the ontological difference (the correlationism of thought and being, of subject and the world). Here, Heidegger immortalizes the correlation in terms of a caveat—thou shall not intervene in Ereignis.  But the pure absence of subjectivity in Ereignis already guarantees the immortality of the correlation (no subject to perform intervention) that is by all accounts nonetheless supervised by a subject who decides that the correlation as it has decided to be must continue for eternity. Zizek’s joke about the last ‘last’ cannibal who declares that cannibalism is defeated because he ate the last cannibal is an apt description of this suspension of human activity in the Heideggerian version of correlationism. Heidegger was not ignorant of the history of violence (that has defined the essence of Being) and yet he chose to deliver its resolution to time, which for him, is also a being of sort (his essay on On Time and Being is a case in point) yet a being that has already synthesized itself internally with the unpredictability of time (as time is simply an inner intuition, hence, an internal variable for the subject indeed). This is the near equivalent of the axiomatic alternative: the silent decision to synthesize being and time in being is a step closer to the abstraction of being, its reducibility to its highest paradoxical state, as a thinkable non-being, both as a set and an empty set, a power-set.

Whereas Kant was reluctant to say that it is the subject that is truly unknowable, Heidegger raised the stakes of self-understanding into an unattainable summit. In its last determining instance the unknowable is thereby exposed as Man himself.  Still, Heidegger had a powerful intuition of the final determining instance of the subject as the creator of the world, as the constituting agent of the Real itself in his decision to hyphenate Dasein into Da-sein—the hyphen is made to correspond to a function of radical separation from the world.  But the separation is left to its weak radical point and is made to stay in its correlation to the world—the hyphen functions as a reminder that the world in its structural bareness as the thereness (da-) of being (the empirical human being) refuses to be constituted by sein (the subject). The paradoxical stability of disjunctive relation between da- and sein constitutes the immortal correlation of thinking and being, of subject and the world. Their immortality is guaranteed by time. But if time is radically posited, as is posited by Heidegger, as being of the higher synthesis, the guarantee that time gives to the correlation is in the final analysis the guarantee that a sein makes to itself and its relationality. No wonder Heidegger believes that only a god can save us. This god-ding is the function of time that is assumed by being, by a being that like time, indifferent, and sometimes sadistic, is reluctant to participate in the affairs of men. Simply put, Heidegger failed to theorize a radical subject that in Laruelle becomes possible by means of an axiomatic decision that is purely the work of a founding subject (unlike Badiou’s conservative surrender of human act to ‘conditions’).

Still, my thesis attempts to show that Heidegger’s destructive retrieval of Being, despite its plasticity that has made it susceptible to an exacerbated dismissal of his fundamental ontology as itself an uncanny discharging of philosophy while defending its universal merits, an arduous defense of philosophy ironically occasioned by the increasing irrelevance of its method vis-a-vis the quest to understand the Real (Being for Heidegger), creates an important opening for speculative realism, as well as for a Laruellean non-philosophy.  Heidegger says of philosophy (symptomatic of a certain form of non-philosophy):

“The misinterpretations by which philosophy remains constantly besieged are mainly promoted by what people like us do, that is, by professors of philosophy. Their customary, and also legitimate and even useful business is to transmit a certain educationally appropriated acquaintance with philosophy as it has presented itself so far. This then looks as though it itself were philosophy, whereas at most, it is scholarship about philosophy” (Introduction to Metaphysics, 12).

In the thesis I wrote an annotation of the quotation from Heidegger immediately following the passages:

“By its inability to interrogate its own presuppositions, philosophy in its unmindful state helps set to work the historical oblivion of Being. This is where the ecstatic alternative of Heidegger offers itself: To think beyond philosophy” (“Revisiting Being,” in Philosophy and the Continuing Quest for Being, 172).

For his part Laruelle has the following explosive passages to offer:

“Humans are without philosophy–not just men without qualities but men who are primarily without essence, yet all the more destined-for-the-world and philosophy without having decided or willed it. Philosophy has always wanted us and we have been obliged to consent to it–but have we ever wanted philosophy?” (See Ray Brassier, “What Can Non-philosophy Do?” in Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8, (2003), 2: 188).

Known to scholars of Heidegger the ecstatic alternative to philosophy is poetry as a form of dwelling, building and thinking.  The poetic alternative of Heidegger is opposed to the axiomatic, post-phenomenological alternative proposed by Laruelle (and also Badiou). We can take it from here that the poetic alternative is an example of how Heidegger left the radical intuitive potential of his project to wallow at its weak radical point. With helpful encouragement from post-phenomenological dismissal of poetry as an alternative to philosophy we can radicalize the intuitive strength of ekstasis to its last determining instance as Laruelle proposed in terms of radicalizing philosophy’s inability to interrogate itself by means of occupying a position (non-philosophy) radically alongside philosophy. This means that non-philosophy thinks alongside philosophy, not within it, hence, thinking beyond philosophy. The notion of the beyond should not mislead us here: the beyond has no permanent vertical vector. The beyond can also be horizontally opposite or diagonal. In contrast Heidegger thinks non-philosophically from within philosophy as proven by his reluctance to relinquish the correlational circle from thinking to being and back to thinking where the circle is operational from the outside, that is, the thinking correlation sufficient to itself which Ereignis is designed to perform.  In other words, the thinking of non-philosophy from within philosophy produces the opposite of what it claims to achieve, that is, to think beyond philosophy. Instead it has produced a new correlation that should be held independent of the correlation that exists between thinking and being. Another way of stating this is this: the Heideggerian alternative of philosophizing by other means succumbs to the temptation of embracing a false, reified form of transcendence. This failure of Heideggerian form of non-philosophy returns to itself with a vengeful rejoinder–who needs this kind of philosophy?

Against this kind of helpless philosophy (because ultimately consigned to the anxiety-inducing condition of finitude that is by necessity compelled to embrace a false transcendence) Laruelle raised the question of the necessity of philosophy for Man. If Heidegger’s philosophy is supposed to liberate Man from the oblivion of Being then how can Man find a use for this philosophy when this philosophy ties Him to a practice of circularity that constitutes His forgetfulness of Being in terms of being forced to embrace a higher circularity in the form of repeatable transcendence?

Laruelle seeks the way out of the correlation in terms of the following alternative:

“The problem is not to intervene in the world of philosophy… or how to transform it from within. The problem is how to use philosophy so as to effect a real transformation of the subject in such a way as to allow it to break the spell of its bewitchment by the world and enable it to constitute itself through a struggle with the latter” (Francois Laruelle, “What Can Non-Philosophy Do?”, in Angelaki, Vol, 8, No. 2, 2003, p. 179).

An equivalent suspension of the use of philosophy is the suspension of the time of the present (the destining-for-the-world in the sense of philosophical sufficiency) which is already at work in Heidegger (but the elimination of poetry is preferred). For Laruelle the radical suspension of the use of philosophy aims in the last instance to uncover the real form of immanence that is concealed in the oblivion of Being, that Being is itself an oblivious name for the Real, and lastly, to expose the privileged name of the Real itself, the Man-in-Man from whose radical practice of immanence in terms of exhibiting the radical immanence of the Real, its singularity, of occasioning the manifestation of the Real in terms of provoking it (by ex-isting, by standing-apart from it) to unilaterize or affect Man without return (that is, the Real affects Man irreversibly with no possibility of redemption to offer on the part of the Real; it is all up to Man, that is to say, in the final analysis, the Real is Man-in-Man) is finally exposed the real first name of the Real, namely, the One. It is in this context where Laruelle also describes the practice of the radical immanence of Man as a vision-in-One, as thinking (vision) in terms of ex-istence transposed to its radical expression as existing in the One. This form of suspension of philosophy therefore allows Being “to return to its presuppositionless bare essence,” what else but, and we have just come to realize after thinking alongside non-philosophy through Laruelle, belated as it is, the radical essence of freedom (Philosophy and the Continuing Quest for Being, 173).

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Singularity and Post-Humanity

Click title.  Singularity and Posthumanity.Towards a non-political economy

Above is a short version of my paper (designed for 20-minute talk) I delivered for the 35th PHAVISMINDA conference held at Xavier University, south of the country.

I hope to do in my next post a reaction to Dr. Jade Principle’s question on my take at non-philosophy and the concept of undecidability. (Dr. Principle is teaching at Ateneo De Manila University, perhaps, the only Platonic scholar in the country). Mainly due to time constraints I was not able to substantiate my reaction to his question, which is really difficult relative to my initial understanding of non-philosophy. After some mulling about, I was not satisfied with the answer I’d given to the question. I was on board a plane 37,000 feet above sea level (on my way to Manila) when it occurred to my mind the answer I should have given to his question.

Also, I hope to do a reaction to the paper delivered by one of the plenary speakers of the conference, Dr. Martin Agustin, on planetary collapse (a theme that is closer to the work I am pursuing).

To the Fish

HERE

Non-Philosophy and the Technicity of Reduction

Or is it too early to attempt a non-non-philosophy? Questions in lieu of non-philosophizing

I. On the status of life

While it sounds consistent to say that the Real can only be inscribed within radical immanence which opens itself to a subject’s recognition (in a mode available to cloning) and thus opens itself up to an immanent reduction of the One to a duality that folds on itself (the one-in-One), it must be the case that the subject that performs this reduction (this Laruellean stranger-subject) is somehow forced to imagine a certain notion of immanence that dictates its mode of relation to something it cannot absolutely know, the Real. In this sense, the Real cannot be radically immanent unless what is immanent is taken as the object of a certain practice of radicality. Obviously, it takes a decision to reduce the Real into a radically immanent kind regardless of the Real itself. One simply has to recognize that he or she is an aleatory subject, and as such can proceed from something toward anything. For Laruelle, this kind of decisionality belongs to the sufficiency of philosophy, sufficient to its decision to remain paradoxical. The decision ex hypothesi is the reflexive paradoxicality of human decision that since Kant, as Meillasoux has shown, has taken philosophy hostage. Arguing from this decisional logic, the Real becomes a relational category that promises to be inexhaustible if we agree that relations operate on a certain notion of desire.

II. On the goal of incomprehensibility

This promise is also decisionality, ultimately a fractal decision whose aim is to exhibit the aleatory nature of Man, as aleatory as the lack of permanent geometrical shapes of clouds, mountain landscapes and coastlines, or what have you. The more he desires knowledge the more sophisticated this knowledge has to become for him until it becomes absolutely incomprehensible, such as how science began and is poised to become; an example is how the language of physics is increasingly alienating physics itself.

Incomprehensibility is therefore the necessary affirmation of the absolute, the knowledge that Man is aleatory. His search for wisdom is therefore not an innocent undertaking. It is rather timing one’s death. It is taking on the last instance of finitude—the challenge of embracing the pure dark side of the pre-aleatory eventuation of Man (by seeking the ultimate answer to the question why there is being rather than nothing). There is therefore nothing extraordinary and brilliant in Nietzsche’s intuition of Man’s would-be death. The death of God prefigures a more innocent death which is the infinite assertion of life that Schelling had announced in German idealism. This God is the displaced figure of the suicide of philosophy that has effectuated the belief that man has to assume this suicide, that is, man as the subject of philosophy; according to Laruelle “Philosophy is what constructs God and the Subject, and philosophy fells them in one direction” [Theorems and the Good News).

A word on Schelling (courtesy of Iain Hamilton Grant’s wonderful essay “Does Nature Stay What-it-is? Dynamics and the Antecedence Criterion,” in Speculative Turn): Life resists change. It resists being reduced into non-life as it already is reduced to that extent by the emergence of Man. What could we then make of Laruelle’s reduction of philosophy to non-philosophy assuming this comparatively minor form of reduction belongs by any means to a radical reduction of the sort that alters life into non-life? What could we make of man-in-man, the last instance of Man, vehicularizing this reduction as a cloned subject? Could it be that this subject of non-philosophy is simply made to announce a fresh hermeneutic of stipulating that Man can be immortal and thus by a forceful implication life can be made to provide the stage for this infinite reduction? Does it not make non-philosophy the most anti-scientific discipline ever to be conceived by Man? Non-philosophy does not believe that Man is forever trapped in finitude. The more intense and self-absorbed Man performs this reduction the less life becomes in relation to itself; the more life can be aleatory to itself. Nietzsche had seen this before. He called it the metaphysics of subjectivity imputing a doer behind every deed, human, or, if it can be said at all, esoteric to the non-human (for instance, the obsession of object-oriented ontology, specifically in the style of Harman, that attributes autonomy to the thing that things.

III. On the goal of extraction in the last instance

To break its reflexive circularity philosophy has come to a point where it has to make another decision, this time to extract its last determining instance, as Laruelle puts it. But this is where I find non-philosophy problematic, at least in this aspect. As I see it this decision cannot render itself to a certain practice of extraction in the last instance. For, as Laruelle also raised it, because Man is too innocent (in our interpellation of this concept, too knowledgeable about his immanent being as a cloned subject—he knows he is too innocent, he knows he is a transcending immanent, knows the extent to which he can manipulate the listener, Socratic innocence?), extraction cannot be not too innocent if only to save Man in the last instance, in the instance of radicalizing his being a unilaterized duality, a one-in-One, the singularized (individually cloning) being that is in-one (note that the ‘one’ in in-one is already cloned), a cloned subject (of the One), or what is better expressed in Camus, the figure of the absurd. This is to say that to save philosophy is to extract its innocence, its innocence being the subject of philosophy itself, the too innocent and therefore supra-rational subject, ultimately a non-subject to itself, which connotes a certain level of self-mastery (but mastery in the form of cloning). To save Man by saving philosophy however cannot guarantee that this Man will not repeat the mistakes he made for Man as the son of Man, those mistakes that make claims otherwise to his non-aleatory nature. Isn’t this already a desire to sacrifice life in favor of a certain notion of immortality?

The proper decision, I think, is earlier suggested by Deleuze—to reduce desire to a machinic anomaly, something akin to the Greek notion of phusis, hence, an extraction of what is already there but ignored by philosophy, and, let us not forget, its ultimate radical expression in non-philosophy. To a certain extent Deleuze strongly suggested a return to this kind of radical immanence, phusis, which may be linked to his concept of BwO (with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus). What makes this machinic anomaly attributable to phusis can be immediately grasped: phusis reacts to the investment of truth-values to bodies and it reacts in a way that reactivates the immanent aleatory kernel of all bodies, namely, in Sartrean language, freedom. By reducing desire to its machinic anomalous nature, the expressive capacity of the aleatory capable of resisting truth (which makes it anomalous: what kind of being is that which resists closure?) desire is rescued from an invested circularity. Perhaps, in the language proper (this time) to non-non-philosophy, desire is rescued from the investment of philosophy (and non-philosophy as well). Nonetheless, it cannot mean that after this rescue desire is totally silenced unless life is sacrificed for immortality which means the total destruction of phusis.

Indeed, as Laruelle would agree, non-philosophy is not the end of philosophy. It is otherwise the beginning of the determination of a too innocent philosophy, a non-philosophy, a supra-rational innocence, which could only expressly mean the immortalization of the Logos through the extraction of all its radical conceivability in history, already practiced or imagined, the only reason, ne plus ultra. Derrida appeared too benevolent if not chic when at one point he accused Laruelle of espousing philosophical terror. I think Laruelle is more than that.

Machine object little-a (a cloned version-in-A)

“It seems I am talking to an artificial intelligence.”

What better way to describe this unwitting mischief than to describe it as an orphan’s mischief who told me exactly the words in quotation marks. Am I supposed to answer that? Heck, yes. Here’s my take on that jibe which I am more than enthusiastic to express into this title:

Machinic Indifference: The Anomaly of the Subject

Yet the idea of machinic indifference that is at stake here does not have to be proposed outside of the human subject itself.

As subjects (male or female) we are machinic in nature capable of transcending the global organization of value-formations that invests truths to subjects, a sort of organ-investment. That is why this process is called organization with a global character—the manufacturing of subjects as organs, as organic units of an administrable whole. What can defy this process of organization and subject constructions is what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call a body-without-organs, BwO, or simply body.

“The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body. … The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu­mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.”[1]

This body-anomaly Deleuze and Guattari also describe as our own little machine, “a connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities.”[2] Lacan had his eyesight on this anomaly except that in the end even this portentous kind of anomaly could not be radicalized to a point of seizing the absolute because of the ontological bar of the Real that “bears more on the subject’s relationship to what one cannot know.”[3] He managed just the same to leave a trace of this anomaly that we can exploit in the margins of his texts in his concept of extimacy (a contraction of two terms, exteriority and intimacy[4]), in short, an existent kind of inexistence within a habitable structure that traverses two points: self-discovery and self-transcendence. A fitting description of this extimacy is what the non-psychoanalytic mind of François Laruelle calls a one-in-One, assuming the One (the latter ‘one’) is the anterior that owns our past histories (the former one that can take a plural sense, ones) as subjects irreducible to organizations, truth values and organ-investments, even irreducible to philosophy insofar as, to express it in layman’s language, each one of us is one to our own, only one to the me that I can own and also disown; or, the One as the singular anterior point, a point from which life self-replicates. Anyone can however appropriate his or her own ontologico-narrative beginning, his or her own one-tological oneness (the homophonic association with wantonness, a wantonology, to pun the pun, is very much welcome here), or his or her own One as far and as deep as one’s sexual preference. This may well be what Plato was advocating all along, a one-in-One, the expressive onomatopoeia of the One that escapes the language of philosophy but which can also be supposed to be already at work, and therefore philosophy finds itself useful (you can also find your ‘yearning‘ useful, even your desire for others’ approval), in the homoeroticism (the Laruellean man-in-man[5]) of the male guardians who personify, two steps short, however, the One, the Word, the AUM (Ohm, as the Hindus had expressed well before the Greeks), and what could better express this beautiful anomaly than–that is to say, the Logos!

_____________________________________

[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 159.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Willy Apollon, Daniele Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, After Lacan.Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, ed. Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 4.

[4] Jacques Alain-Miller, “Extimity.” Symptom 9 (June 2008), http://www.lacan.com/symptom/ (Accessed April 9, 2012).

[5] See Ray Brassier, “What Can Non-philosophy Do?” in Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8, (2003), 2: 169-89.). In Laruellean non-philosophical scheme the ‘man-in-man’ determines “non-philosophical thought and its theoretical practice.” Counterpoised to philosophy this ‘man-in-man’, conclusively “without a determining essence, without consistency; dispossessed of nothingness as much as being, dispossessed of substance as much as presence-to-itself” radicalizes the immanent reality that, as Laruelle passionately emphasized: “Humans are without philosophy—not just men without qualities but men who are primarily without essence, yet all the more destined-for-the-world or philosophy without having decided or willed it. Philosophy has always wanted us and we have been obliged to consent to it—but have we ever wanted philosophy” . The philosophy in question here is its theoretical practice of paradoxicality. Everyday humans make decisions, and thus transcend the paradoxicality that philosophy has always wanted them to exhibit.

Machinic Anomalies

1. [What a way to have lived out yesterday, April 4, 2012 with people who might have hated me
2. and yet cared so much to listen]
3. I owe a poetic inspiration to the Sea 
4. http://aca2687.wordpress.com/
5. and to the annexing thought of Eman 
6. http://theannexmatters.wordpress.com/
7. whose beautiful work of objectal ontology where humans or lovers cant seem to locate themselves in the swirl of things has surprisingly located me somewhere where the sea begins to ask: Am I a tourist?
8. Here’s what came out of a solitary fishing by the bay at wordpress republic:
9. “Schopenhauer fooled himself when he started believing in a cosmos that wills itself in a paradoxical loop that humans clone with their endless willing and desiring. But it is the cosmos that clones us…
10. “We are the anomalies that the cosmos wishes to defeat by assembling the power of the universe to totalize us into an irremediable alien. But we are more than the sum of the parts. There is no human that the cosmos can totalize…
11. “The human exists between an organism and a mind, a half-life, an untranscendable auto-function, a body-without-organs which can replicate itself outside of organic life…
12. “Who says then that we are not aliens? Do not look far into the cosmos. The human is the incorporeal expressivity of what constitutes the cosmos in the first place. We are the aliens that the cosmos worries about. Without our power to become-alien, the cosmos would be reduced to its own autism. What could express this mischief of the alien better than the untimely revenge of Ptolemy!”
13. The thing that dies is absence. The only thing. Presence does not because it lacks a condition of possibility of dying. It lacks matter and by matter I mean the possibility of entering a world and after some time leaving its premises. Presence lacks matter because as transparent nothing really enters it. Presence is pure thought and as such it is an orphan, homeless, and needy. This pure thought that has provoked the establishment of philanthropy! And the philanthropist—this other of pure thought is nothing but pure matter: everything enters it and yet it cannot enter itself…
14. “It does not understand itself!”
15. I owe an inspiration to Jason. This youth that’s starting to embrace the aleatory life of Nietzschean gayness sans the Lacanian blackmail of the unattainability of the phallus. Here’s what came out of that rare shot at an invincible machine called death (Jason was watching the Wrath of the Titans):
16. “Death is the pure determinacy of absence. But even in a roll call absence is marked. That mark of absence is the trace of a once present, thus past. The past lives on so long as we mark absences. I wonder who can mark us in our absences. But perhaps there is a book, a novel, a collection of poetry, perhaps, an unrequited love which can mark our absences. Let us hope we live long enough to earn many marked absences.”
17. The only absolutely correct truth that Levinas has spoken of is this
18. —philosophy is an intersubjective intrigue whose resolution if at all is the impossible gesture of friendship. This is for Jason.
19. There is no relationality in Lacan; his othering thingamajig thing, he the kingofjig, is a lip service to the vagina that he hated so much! He didn’t like to hear a vagina monologue. One should hear Eve Ensler’s exotic rant!
20. There will be no rules once the phallus disappears into the colony of ants. There will no free sex as long as there is a phallus. Nietzsche thus pointed out the solution: To be free is to be a machinic anomaly! To be more than a human subject capable of enjoyment without jouissance! Indeed, an anomaly for Lacan.
21. Take a look at the sexual life of insects. Insects enjoy sex without desire. There is a way to enjoy sex without desire. Without desire: the reduction of desire to the function of a machine, of efficiency and performativity, of capacity and expressivity, rather than to something imperceptible even to insects. This is for Ms. President.
22. Another inspiration from Jason, the machinic-Lacanian. Here’s what came out: “It is even debatable if jouissance is phallic or if one would agree with the radical limit of Lacan’s view. If as he said there is no sexual relation then only the phallus remains in an extimate (the Lacanian contraction of exteriority and intimacy: whew!) relationship with enjoyment. But one can only recognize the phallus from a non-standpoint on account of the absolute lack of relationality…
23. “But whose standpoint is the non-standpoint?”
24. A new non-human alien standpoint can be attained outside of the paradoxical loop of the male subject, which for Lacan is the only subject, the subject who knows.  Yet this will require not only the erasure of the symbolic tenacity of the phallus. It requires the reduction of the symbolic machine to an artificial auto-functionality of the subject. The Laruellean cloned subject, the uni-maton.
25. Every thought counts, n’importe quoi.

Non-Philosophy and Artificial Philosophy (Turing 2012 Conference paper)

The following is the paper I read at the International Turing Conference provisionally titled “The Equation of Primitive Intelligence” which forms a sub-theme to the original paper I submitted for the conference titled “Traditionalism of Post-singularity.” The paper makes use of Francois Laruelle’s concept of non-philosophy and its relation to artificial intelligence. Perhaps, this paper is the first to articulate in the Philippines the otherwise difficult theory of Laruelle that is now slowly gaining popularity.

The International Turing Conference with its theme Turing 2012: International Conference on Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science was held at the De La Salle University, Manila from March 27 to 28, 2012.

Non-philosophy and Artificial Philosophy

International Turing Conference

THE TRADITIONALISM OF POST-SINGULARITY

Full paper of my talk at the Turing 2012: International Conference on Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science

See http://turing.pilosopiya.com for details of the conference.

On Kafka and Marx

Rutilant. That is what they were.
Until the passion was lost into the empty space of meaning.

She took off her undies and delighted in the meaning
He gave with the look of a hungry child;

His innocent hands were like those
That once made her lips lisped the juju cry

Defying her tightness,
Her lifeless autonomy in the shape of things.

But never her true words, the roundness of her mental acoustics.

Still, those hands never accomplished more than
Taking her by surprise…

Discussion Papers on Contemporary Philosophy

Fidelity to the matter and method of phenomenology

On Heidegger and the Paradox of Human Decision and an essay on Vattimo

Memory of Iligan

Let us think again of being young,
This time, if it can be said at all,
Without time bothering us.
It’s useless if we have our timepieces
Tick-a-tocking a juju we knew best,
The sound of a creaking bed.

For once in the life of a leaf a stem
Has no purpose but an aid to magic
With which a river becomes mouthful,
Night becomes day, dullness a playhouse,
Wit a baby, whisper a creation.

It happens when a tree sheds its tears,
When the leaves meet their fate above the torrent,
Knowing too well they have lost their hearts.

…

Think of the breeze while we drift across the waters,
Make it noble this time, imperfectly immaculate.
Imagine ourselves carrying refugees in our arms,
The sick, the dying, the homeless and wounded.

Not the tourists we used to dream up with leaves,
Not the poets we cared about becoming;

Not the words with which to glide without wings,
The conceits our nimble hands can craft in darkness.

Not the spiders on deserted rocks, not the shadows
We cast on shores only us knew where.

Prelim to A Therapy Session

What becomes of the face of the sun when it starts to age?
It is like asking a tree to die. And die without
Leaving a trace of sorrow. A tree that doesn’t show
A face, or because its lack of face beats any sorrow.
Pity the living that shows so much face.

I don’t expect you to understand me.
I came from a far-flung place only children believe exists.
There sorrow is everything, too familiar to count as truth.

What is truth but of pulling one’s feet off the ground?

Is it sound to ask a tree its gender? The sun if it ever tried
Cooling its feet on a stream? A watercourse breaking
The ramparts of poetry that knows too much about what
Is human and so what a face is all about?

Come with me.
I can show you what you can’t imagine.

Just tell me everything you need to show.
A tree shall be the witness.
I have only two things to ask of you.

Bring me that tree.
Try to make it sing.
Then, as I hope to satisfy you, I shall make you cry.

I shall make you wipe your face,
Make you more capable of poetry,
Of your “full monty and the holy grail.”

In the meantime try hard not to open your eyes.
It’s “monty python” by the way.
But I can keep a secret.

(inspired by “Donnie Darko”)

Mantra of the Apolitical: On Zizek and ‘Ramona’

Zizek’s mantra of the apolitical

For all his credentials as a theorist of social change Slavoj Zizeks’ uncanny take on the real culprit behind the capitalist debacle on managing a deepening crisis of global economy is like crapping out a game we thought he knew how to play and play better.

In his usual display of Marxist sensibility by quoting an ex-Maoist Alain Badiou, Zizek proudly claims that questions of political democracy are better left to the everyday non-discursive play of human freedom (Zizek described it as an “apolitical network of social relations”: see “Democracy is the Real Enemy,” London Review of Books, October 28, 2011), not to the political mechanisms of liberal capitalist democracy that ironical indeed encourages peaceful protests. Zizek observes: “Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation, or anything of the kind but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.”

Zizek is at lost here especially when he extended his observations on how the protesters of Occupy Wall Street can demand change from global capitalist system. To all likelihood Zizek wants the protesters to draw the fine line between illusion and a manageable phantasmagoric relation to the Real (the uncanny provenance of human freedom). The experience of this kind of freedom has a counterpart in Marxist literature, namely, ‘political democracy’. Zizek concludes his essay via a trademark recourse to his familiar Lacanian lens, warning the protesters not to demand the Real (as did, he argued, by the failed revolutionaries of May 1968 in France) for demanding even a taste of it is sure to fall into a trap disguised as enjoyment. Sure enough, the term he would have brandished though he must have realized it’s too omnipresent in his texts and speeches to call attention to, jouissance. Roughly speaking it means enjoying too much that enjoyment only strengthens the structural (social) and natural prohibition against its own expression.

By warning the protesters not to provoke the master (the global capitalist system) Zizek is arguing more or less that any unnecessary provocation can further deepen the crisis against which the protests were organized. For all its proverbial dependence on chaotic mode of production, capitalism cannot tolerate more disturbing protests. The most dangerous provocation lies in demanding a change of subjective space in the collective social domain between the master and the slave, between the 1 percent and the 99 percent relative to the income and wealth distribution pie. It must have occurred to Zizek that he sounds more Hegelian than Marxist especially in terms of his proximate warning against provoking another historical shift into nihilism where the only thing that changes is the subjective space, an extended internal time consciousness (realistically speaking, a ‘class’) inhabited and run by a triumphant subject-agency that has taken possession of a historical Geist, in the case of Zizek’s warning, the prospect of the working class or the 99 percent of the world’s population, discriminated by property ownership, keeping a tight rein on capital. But he sounds more Lacanian when he conclusively shifts his argument from caution to prescription: “the formal gesture of rejection…is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content.” In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is no way one can acquire the full comforts of the Real in terms of positive enjoyment that does not in any way reincribe the Real in its very essence as unfulfillable as an object of human desire. But where does Zizek want to see the protests leading?

He takes up Lacan to remind the protesters not to demand real transformation (as hysterics always do) through changing the subjective position of the master into that of the triumphant slave, recalling Lacan’s words to the revolutionaries of May 1968: “As revolutionaries you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one” (Democracy is The Real Enemy).

Zizek fires a shot at proverbial Marxist slogans of direct empowerment (such as workers’ council, etc.) in terms of brandishing a totem called political democracy that has seen better days. Zizek warns us against believing that democracy in capitalism can offer opportunities for empowerment which Marxism, from the First International to Lenin, had taken advantage of in the interest of pursuing tactical goals for the working class though Marx and Lenin did not harbor any illusion that bourgeois democracy can put an end to the exploitative system of division of labor, property ownership and capital accumulation. Drawing on Louis Althusser the Slovenian thinker argues that bourgeois democracy is an integral part of the Ideological State Apparatuses, a type of public empowerment that guarantees freedom to own property and invest, and freedom to assemble and demand improvements of labor (at least in modern times), whereupon the tenacity of the new global capitalism rests. It suffices to say that the protesters themselves should make an effort to block the logical movement of history from political democracy (such as benefiting from higher wages, advantageous capital-labor compromises that help delay the pace of capitalist plunder of national and global economy, labor-related benefits, etc.) to direct ownership and control of the means of production, from capitalism to socialism. Zizek simply argues that any sense of freedom in capitalist order is false and illusory, that political democracy in capitalism is not historically transitory rather permanently inauspicious. More to the point, he argues against any sense of historical dialectics. History does not move. It is resistant to change.

But Zizek also argues that freedom can flourish within the “apolitical network of social relations,” outside of the sphere of the political, such as the family. Here, Zizek betrays his poor grasp of Marx. He believes that the family is impermeable to capital. The family plays an important role for Zizek, and unfortunately he likes to impress for Marxism as well—it ensures radical change needed to transform capitalism by transforming the ‘social relations of production’ which he mistakenly associates with the emancipatory apolitical promise of the family. But what family is he talking about? Is it the biological structure in which natural selection plays the game of the survival of the species or the modern social act of reproduction in the interest of one’s birthright, heirloom or legacy, defined by juridical terms of property ownership? None of these structures will satisfy the Zizekean alternative of the apolitical in terms of transforming the transcendent, that is, social relations of production precisely because these structures, the genetic and the social, are already inscribed within a specific economy which is always accompanied by the political as any potential to build and expand on a given material condition. It matters less if the political has been perfected by the human species: As long as there is culture pervasive in higher presumably reflexive life forms (which is rooted in self-preservation) the political is always a given possibility. The crux of the matter is that any effort to transcend the sociality of economic relations is bound to repeat the transcendentality of the political. This time it sounds totally deterministic.

But that is the closest thing to Zizek’s Lacanian hang-over (after taking an insufficient dose of Marxism, he must have gone on a free Lacanian binge). For Lacan the Real takes the place of the evolutionary bind which holds life hostage to the death instinct. Any sense of comfort that life takes in between is only a false illusion of freedom or enjoyment. But even that is suspect and Zizek should be the first one to deny that enjoyment (all the more, a false one) is attainable even in the synthetic landscape of experience where, if Kant was right, it is achievable by means of correct judgements. Nonetheless, it is also the ability to form correct judgement that Zizek to all appearances aimed to make a pitch for by warning the protesters of Wall Street not to demand the Master to relinquish his position. The best thing to do is to remain sufficiently hysteric, no more than that. That’s the correct judgement.

But let us give Zizek the benefit of doubt. Let us say he is imagining something close to the ancient understanding of social relations which flourished in friendship, in philia. But he can hardly be imagined imagining Plato, the Marxist that he claims himself to be, or the Lacanian that stands for his credentials (his mastery of the case studies and clinical experiences of Lacan who did a Humean trick to him, who awakened him from his Marxist slumber, the Lacan who had a very low opinion of philosophy as meaningless sophistry).

What can we still imagine of Zizek imagining he is a Marxist?

Surprisingly, this leads us to Ramona Bautista, named co-conspirator to the gruesome murder of his brother Ramgen Bautista apparently in a conflict over monetary support.

Ramona and her Zizekean alibis

We mean a Zizekean alibi as the pitch for truth and nothing but the truth. But there is more to that. Zizek, for all his twist and turn as a Marxist, a Leninist and a Lacanian, has come to embody an alibi best suited for a defense before the bar of public opinion. The alibi, as we had mentioned earlier, is to remain sufficiently hysteric before the indifferent face of the Real which this time is supposed to hold a secret. In the case of Ramgen’s murder the secret is the mastermind behind the crime.

Ramona’s retraction and her latest taped message are clear examples of a Zizekean alibi, taking advantage of the postmodern turn into the virtual power of the Real. The more virtual the Real the more real the Real becomes. That is what it’s supposed to mean—that the Real is not so real to begin with. But that is also what the Real likes to show by unshowing itself. It shows, yet shy of showing its secret which keeps its secret a mystery to ponder and especulate on, that it contains no less than nothing. To all symbolic intents and purposes, the Real is playing hard to get.

Ramona was of course lying judging by the fact that she retracted her statements. She issued a third statement recorded on a video earlier before she fled to Hongkong the reason for which, according to her fat mother (I am trying to be objectively descriptive), was to escape being unduly judged by public opinion. In the video (it was so stupid not to cut out the portion where she was caught bungling a scripted message) she denounced what she claimed to be a mistake by the police for implicating her as co-conspirator of her younger brother in the killing of their elder sibling. In the video she appeared sufficiently hysterical, something Zizek would be happy about. Of course, no one would expect Ramona to admit she did it or was part of the crime. If she did it would be the end of entertainment industry. The public would have maligned Ramona’s lie. What the public expected was for Ramona to sufficiently lie and she did what was expected. She satisfied public expectation about the crime that many also expect to become one of the hottest reality shows on TV, replete with twists and turns that pander to public taste. The public now considers Ramona a hot property, regardless whether she was part of the crime or not, regardless whether her version of the crime was real or not. With Ramona’s latest alibi she satisfied a Zizekean observation regarding virtual reality in which “reality is experienced as reality without being one.” The most crucial thing about this is that the public knows that something is wrong with Ramona and we are happy about it.  We don’t expect Ramona to spoil the Real.

In this case the worst thing Ramona can do is to insult the public by telling what the public doesn’t expect her to tell, that is, to tell a lie insufficiently. Let us hazard an alibi to that effect. What about drawing attention to the necessary pure monetary angle of the crime that only those who are sufficiently poor can commit. Is Ramona sufficiently poor? Nah. The poor majority of the public can start an endless tit for tat. Only those who are sufficiently rich (the poor wonders why a rich man wants more riches?) can be dissatisfied with what they have. To be sufficient in life means to become more capable of getting richer. But Zizek’s warning resonates here in a similar fashion as does concerning the question of provoking global capitalism. Do not unnecessarily disturb the system of riches which literally depends on literal deprivation of others. It spoils the Real by being too realistic about one’s poverty such as to make a stupid claim (intended to unmask the stupidity of the sufficiently rich) that one can be satisfied with being poor that is why he cannot kill his brother for money.

Either side is as good as nothing because the Real, or any claim to the effect of getting to the bottom of it, is nothing. Ramona (and the public as well, but the challenge falls more heavily on the former who awakened the public from the slumber of having to make do with consuming a flurry of crimes shown on TV, all irrational and senseless, that is, devoid of pure human interest!) should not be allowed under all circumstances to reveal the void there is beyond the face of truth. This approximates what Zizek describes as a “reversal [which] resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real).

Even if Ramona changes her mind and confesses to the crime as a co-conspirator her admission will not amount to the absolute resolution of the crime precisely because, if Zizek is right, the Real is no less than nothing.  The Real is more than itself. As nothing the Real is ‘more’ than its appearance as the repository of truth, its ultimate witness. Hegel got it correct when he said that “the real is rational,” the rational being the more of the real. This more of the real is the product of reason, of the rational rationalizing itself. This form of self-mimicry produces a simulacrum of the Same. Nonetheless, it is not perfectly the same, only a simulacrum. Now, if Ramona acted as a co-conspirator then she is part of the rational structure of the crime, not its physical structure such as the actual execution of a plot to murder her brother. She did not kill her brother, she only thought of killing him, so to speak. But the Real is rational. For a plotter who denied involvement in the crime the rational, nonetheless, is less culpable if not completely independent of the crime itself. For she must have understood what Zizek means when the Slovenian thinker said that the Real is no other than the name for the Void. Building on this assumption, the plotter therefore made a correct judgement when she chose to play the hysteric and sufficiently so by rationalizing her alibi. The more rational the Real is the more it is real. Nothing more is Real than the more into which it shows its emptiness. We have learned another thing here: the best discoverer of the noble lie is not the guardians of Plato rather those with criminal minds. What is the noble lie? For one, the lie that the real is rational. What is noble about this lie is that no one in her right mind can conspire to kill one’s kin. Blood is thicker than water. That’s another noble lie.

But what is Zizek’s moral stance on the Real, if we may ask?

Zizek has paradoxical answers to everything that falls under his Lacanian lens. Take note of his following observations:

“The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real).

We have reasons to suppose that for Zizek the Real is not totally omnipresent. He did in fact point out the apolitical promise of changing our understanding of how to demand of the Real, beyond the market, beyond the political structure of capital, the family.

In Ramona’s latest alibi she lamented the perception of the public that she could betray her own family that stemmed from conflict over money that Ramgen was alleged to have hoarded for his own sake at the expense of his other eight siblings. The monthly financial support came from their father, now bound to the wheelchair due to sickness and old age, a former action star and senator of the Republic who is known to have fathered 72 children from 16 women, lean and stout.

It is textbook knowledge already that movies and politics have become the true semblance of the Real where total annihilation and violence are tempered by the virtuality of a narrative that the screen brings to life, which, if critics of film violence are right, contributes to real violence out there by inciting sadistic passion among the viewers. This is the case where the semblance of the Real produces a real effect which if anything is the Real itself. Nothing is more real than the effect of nothing, the Real.

Would it therefore make sense to say that the promise of the apolitical to escape the absurdity of the Real is to nourish a family? The family as the opposite of the Real where everything nurtured by the personal can be destroyed by the political and the economics of life support? Is there such thing as a family impervious to capital?

To all appearances Zizek doesn’t know the answers. Ah, the Marxist that he is.

Back to Ramona. A netizen, reacting on her version of the crime has the following words to say:”Tanungin niyo si Gloria at Mike if nagsasabi ng totoo si Ramona” (Ask former President Gloria Arroyo and her husband Mike if Ramona was telling the truth/my translation).

It may be recalled that former President Arroyo once admitted on television her guilt over the alleged massive electoral fraud in Mindanao that ensured her victory in the 2004 national elections. She successfully completed her term as if admitting guilt amounted to nothing.

To Hermione and a wannabe

 

This thoughtless anoesis of yours can very well
Disambiguate

A history of fiction—
A relapse

Into sickness by any means—even Nietzsche
Would balk at if he were alive:

How he hates that recipe for ruin, this self-transparency!

Your tasteless Manichean twofold.
Ah! That cunning confession of poverty

Behind which a desire of yours slinks
Like a guilty spider
Imagining herself as a tourist.

And heaven forbid!

This desire to be helped. This showmanship
More dreadful than autocracy!

One would suppose Vallejo knew Nietzsche—

A meeting between a communist
And a confused armadillo
Staring in awe at the pangolins of savanna.

Come then and take this insult.
Where did you get those tough plates?
Did you ask the stars why can’t you
Even recognize your face?

But it’s not your ferly face.

It’s not even those hideous eyebrows.
It is rather this—

The face of your nightfall isn’t Diotima’s.

Business Matters

The past months had been too pointless for Godot and whatever in Beckett this thing is named it is certainly useless. Useless for everything it stands for beyond the culpability of language. What then is a juju?

With magical powers it is thought to possess a juju can fire a gun even if God is watching. On one side of the moon, a stranger, too close to God, utters a wish that He can’t refuse.

One can wonder now who occupies the other side of the moon. What use is “The Night When Abraham Called to the Stars?”

Was it Bly? Was it everything that truth mistakes for sadness, for solemnity?

Did he ask God for justice? How much did he pay Him?

Did He issue a receipt?

Remembering the times of Kafka and Jesenská

 

Just for now, let’s set off into a time
When just about everything was old.

Old enough to recall if
It was a time
In a pipe dream of tourists
Thinking
They were spiders.

Was it like you once told me?
Was it credible enough

To tell someone his age?
Was it just a while telling us to love and forget?

Ah! Let’s set off a tune that we alone can hear.
“Help me remember your time.
Take me deep into your space.”

Was it like you once whispered in my ear?
Did you like how it made you sing a juju?

Is Kafka a place called shore?

(To Eve Ensler)

How to fill you?
That bothers my pen.
If only you were the darkness I crave.
Your parity can make all truths simmer

Before they boil,
Before Nietzsche’s eyes
Turn bleary
From everything that sizzles.

This tickles your fancy.
Must be your teddy
Guarding the gaffe
That’s called your unspoiled state?

How to sadden your ulcers?
That bothers my night.
They have never known the solitude
Of the king-size, home to your impeccable
Virginity, was it your poetry?

How to gag your lips?
How do elephants vanish in the sea?
How to make you end yourself
Like night gives way to day?

‘Kafka’ and the weight of lingering sands

UN Avenue Encore

“That evening

everyone was gripped by
the traffic of clouds above.
By the book, this happens
every time an angel arrives…”

 

How is it that she’s not sure if the sands are dry?

Do they ever get dry? Do they ever want to speak of oceans?

Of angels darting above the breakers cresting in silence?

Of secrets buried in the seabed where all gods repose?

 

Can the moon carry the weight of their destiny

Like a man carries the weight of his pocket?

Can angels swim like the fish?

 

 

How to remember the lines an orphan would mistake for a beer: Encore

Behind your pale terms
there are vibrant shadows composing their realities;

each as lively as the other,

but also as unpredictable

as the other gazing at you.

Was it the sharp glare of a leopard, or
the unsure sight of a chicken deciding
whether it saw you on its left, or on its right?
It was a long way from the kitchen to Being.

What is Reflexivity? A reply to a student (Encore)

Reflexivity means self-referentiality.

 

The truth is that we can only start understanding reality from the standpoint of our own accumulated and learned experiences, and for the most part, our preconception of things. In this sense reality is something we can ‘create’ for ourselves—for ourselves, precisely because we would normally wish reality to satisfy our needs. It is therefore out of the question if we would want reality to resist us, or challenge our preconception of things.  We may describe this process as subjective ontology, viewing things or beings from the point of view of our prejudices and biases as to how we want reality to be.  Ontology is a term that denotes study of things, or broadly speaking, a conception of what things or beings are. (Ontos in Greek language means ‘things or beings’).

Self-referentiality or subjective ontology (reflexivity in general) is understandably positive for self-empowerment.  Not only does this endorse a view of reality that is in the hands of individuals to make or break, but also broadly and philosophically unmasks the ultimate nature of reality, namely, that humans are the creators of reality, their destiny, their future. There is no reality that humans cannot create and shape according to their needs, goals and interests. Reality is therefore something that does not come from outside of us, rather, it comes, arrives out of us.

This, however, as much as it draws an ideal picture of reality based on the assumption that humans are responsible enough to take advantage of their creative powers—that is to say, their power to create a world out of the different realities they weave together in light of their shifting wants and needs—may risk overriding, not without self-deception and self-promotion, the limitations intrinsic to self-referentiality to the point of believing in the illusion of the supremacy of the self. And because there are as much realities as there are different selves capable of crafting their own, this illusion no sooner would contribute to a social phenomenon in which everyone is equally right and wrong, rivaling one another for supremacy.  The battle would ensue, and after much conflict would give way to the most supreme conception of reality, hence, to a vastly superior ‘self’ that is the efficient cause of that reality.

The self as the efficient cause of reality, an extremely superior self, is nothing less than a hegemonic reality. We are not simply talking of the self as pure individual; rather the ‘self’ can assume a collective shape in terms, for instance, of class character. In this sense, we can talk of the individuality of the capitalist, the industrialist, the politician as part of the economic power class.  That class in itself is the self of the capitalist, the industrialist, the politician; it is from that class and power orientation that he/she draws a political, social, cultural, and juridical identity or self. It is easy to understand why a given social condition would remain static or unaltered to the extent that it has become impervious to change or anything that might suggest the need for reform. The truth is that the social condition perpetuates those in power who would normally hold on to the gains and privilege of having created a reality that satisfy their goals and interests.

But no social condition can perpetuate itself forever. There is nothing mysterious, mystical nor providential about this. The point is anything that humans have created are contingent to the degree of reflexivity or self-referentiality they have invested on it. No self, individual or collective, can have a perfect view of the reality it creates. The best it can do is to observe and practice discretion, rationality and judiciousness in shaping the world according to well-defined, meaningful interests, interests that do not exceed the modest aims of self-empowerment or self-improvement. Self-referentiality undergoes a process of substantial self-deprivation, the self that may feel well satisfied and contented with simple provisions of life.  The simpler the self is, the more others, or other selves, can acquire opportunities for relative self-improvement, thereby determining the extent to which society achieves equity and justice.

This aspect of the practice of self-referentiality or reflexivity challenges the subjectivism intrinsic to the first form of ontology I mentioned above.  A society that is slowly becoming reflexive in terms of pursuing equity and justice vis-à-vis the nonreciprocity of individual and collective needs and interests may be said to be a society whose individuals, especially those fortunate in life, are performing substantial sacrifices for the common good.  There is nothing more commendable than sacrificing one’s power, privilege, and opportunities so that others may have a chance to live decently: the point is one pursues equity and eventually justice even if reality itself does not ultimately allow reciprocity.  Sadly, as we emphasized, reality has only one and ultimate structure: it is that humans are nonreciprocal, in good or worse.

But that is ontology, which means, what things are. It is true that humans create things. Only they can do so.  However, humans have also the power to destroy things, and for the better, those things that do not help the human condition release itself from a false necessity that is wrongly understood as what things are, no more, no less. At some point, the nonreciprocity of the human condition becomes understood as the ultimate necessity itself, suggesting, among other things, that one cannot change the fact that he is born poor and his neighbor in a silver platter. This shape of necessity is no longer strictly ontological. The necessity of poverty may hover between the accidental and the one forcefully fabricated to perpetuate the conditions of power. The latter must be the handiwork of a subjective ontology that has completely absorbed the illusion of supremacy, if not self-importance, and having triumphed over others whose circumstances are no match to its power to shape things, would rather ensure that things are systematically regulated, measured, or constituted to the satisfaction of power. Innumerable lies and deceptive maneuvers must be at work. For one, the lie that poverty is predetermined, that it is a fate that one can only uselessly recriminate.  On the other hand, there is plenty to offer to the bounties of the rich, the privileged class, and more if the cycle continues unabated. At most religion perpetuates this lie, but also the politics of possession; the economics of accumulation and industry, etc, which altogether are handiworks of subjective ontology, or more correctly this time, of the uncaring ontology of power, whether we speak of religion or the secular.

Self-referentiality as ontology must give way to a form of reflexivity that may be properly termed, as suggested in ethical philosophy today, as deontological, more correctly, ethical, hence, ethical self-referentiality.  In the most contemporary parlance, this is referred to as a process of self-emptying, a sublation, and a critical ontology of the self, altogether endorsing a weak form of self-ontology. This creates a divide: weak ontology versus the hard ontology of the prevailing reflexivity of society that is premised on an individualistic pursuit of goals and interests.

Self-ontology in its unassuming form encourages the pursuit of knowing oneself; knowing the ontology of oneself in the ultimate sense would mean discovering to what extent one has unwittingly and consciously contributed to the perpetuation of social injustice, or to the prolonging of the suffering of the ‘other’. While the practice of self-ontology does not entertain the illusion that human nonreciprocity can ever be rehabilitated, nor the hope that this reality can ever be cured in one’s individual or even generational lifetime, the truth is there is no question whether the ‘need’ for change is illusory or just simply a waste of time committing oneself to. If one ever feels this need seriously, then we may fairly judge that he/she has shorn his/her participation in the realm of false necessity, and is now prepared to ex-ist in the sense the premodern ancient understood it, namely, to exist is to stand outside, both in terms of time and space. From the Greek word ekstasis, or ecstasy in English: this means, to become otherwise than being; to become, to a certain degree, impossible. One becomes im-possible if one becomes an essence in contrast to being a mere appearance in the world of things, incapable of becoming something other than being a part of the spectacle. In other words, to ex-ist is to stand outside the realm of appearances, of prearranged possibilities, to be-come free of the common influence of time, of society, of history which is nothing but a spectacle of the subjective and for the most part, utterly insensitive creations of Man. It is the insensitivity of subjective ontology—which invests the meaning of the term Man with conceit and pride—that has since the fall of the premodern hitherto defined the soul, the nature, and the destiny of human existence. This time the call is unmistakable.  The summons to become impossible.

The call of conscience, otherwise. For the knowledge that one has unwittingly or deliberately contributed to the misery of humanity in sundry forms is the first step to heeding the voice of the other who is deprived, naked, unfortunate, incapable of challenging the powerful pressures of existence, and worst, dying in hunger, caught in the crossfire of conflicting subjectivities accentuated by canons, altogether liquidating the possibility that they have a chance to become impossible, and then, to become free of misery, of exploitation and alienation from the sweet promise of life despite its imperfections.

Indeed, it may be said, human life trails on the actual—yet discreet—impossibility of achieving love—for all it connotes to different individuals, colors, etc., which means that the impossible is actually happening yet, given the common pressures of social existence, and even more, in the present, not afforded the proper hearing it deserves, the attention it surely wants if only that for all its minor and often accidental occasioning within the interstices of our personal and interpersonal lives the impossible can become widespread in its rather most preferred manner: slow, discreet, not aggressive, devoid of competitive urges that normally induce the will of the ambitious, and lastly, of the motivation to proclaim one’s righteousness.

The impossible—love and justice—is always at work in small ways, the gods working within us secretly, the conscience nudged, but not enough to transform reality. It is at work in a teacher, a writer, a social worker, a poet, a thinker, a soldier, a nurse, the street sweeper, the pedestrian who spares a coin for the beggar, the child who is deeply hurt and cries for all his innocence when he sees a dog slaughtered, or hears an unexplainable racket, a bomb exploded in the near bus station or the busy market, that disturbs his sweet time surveying the peacefulness of the landscape, of good-natured people crowding his curiosity, of things exuding in colors that enhance all the more his faultless conception of reality—how he would wish it would stay the same when he comes of age.

But then, this child, or the child that is retained in us and is now working behind our conscience, is waiting for the world to follow suit.  This child hankers for love, for the most impossible one of all, namely, justice. He would try to convince the world by eliciting its affection: for all his innocence, he thinks the world is capable of loving back, through the amiable gestures of the people around him, through their kind-hearted deeds, through the small sacrifices they make, through the wisdom his teacher imparts, the playful schemes he learns from his playmates that are as innocent as the winding landscape of his dreams, through the concern of a lover to the beloved that he sees from his parents, his guardians, his baby-sitters, through the way his wounds are tended by his seniors, his sister, his brother, the caring shoulders he leans on when he cries, through the fondle and caress of a representative of humanity that touches his heart. Ah, these impossible people that shape his world!