Permutation. An idea, an axiom, and especially a supposedly universal system, cannot help but attach to what is readily available. A finite stock; an endless and chaotic assemblage of variations, as Levi-Strauss’ famous bricoleurs: scientists, artists, philosophers, revolutionaries — what but psychosocial handy-men, making use of what is both close by and useful, what is already and what can be quickly assembled? How could we create new machines, except by utilizing the stock which remains from previous constructions (and deconstructions)?

Michale Brun, A Moment of Silence (1/3)

Novel. The event is rare — is this not an inherently tragic proposition? Would not the souls to witness it  discover the event branded upon them indelibly, or else lost forever? For the new can indeed induce joy; yet under different conditions it is capable of producing a strain under which a break is nearly unavoidable. –Is there breakthrough, novelty, only in extraordinary cases? Deleuze reminds us that Spinoza kept for years the coat he wore the day a young man attempted to take his life, in order to remind himself that human beings do not always love thought. That the event is rare seems a platitude; yet it can be an opening for gloomy passions, for a creeping cynicism and an uncanny piety: in short the belief that there are few beings in the world capable of the creation of new capacities – new concepts, new passions, new perceptions… But we do not know the thresholds, we are groping in the dark: the event is an event, they come in bursts, and their frequency depends on the associated rates of flow. An event is indeed infinite, but to seek a living, transcendent meaning in the pure rate of innovation is to fall prey to one of the most dangerous lures for thought today. –An infinite number of effects is not a cause; nonetheless we believe in extracting the cause from ‘within’ the effect, thinking we are ‘objective’ by thus subtracting the true cause from the field of the question, all the while we are actually subtracting the thought itself from the consciousness of thought.

Vocality. A particle of dream; this cyclonic voice, whose element was never pure breath, but extremely pressurized breath as it flows violently throughout the vocal assemblage — the dangerous and elusive voice, always and already a kind of non-figure, a non-sign strangely parallel with spirit, is not air alone but the intricate disjunction of innumerable micro-movements and a concerted series of infinitesimal resistances. A voice arises without transcendent cause or teleology; yet despite, and in a sense precisely because of this, it engineers an immense and dangerous collision with the outside, with the other. Alterity cannot be taken to indicate a fundamental or direct correlation; the perplexing condition is that every single bit of transmission is indirect, effective only because it is redundant, always and ultimately carried out through an absent third, a medium, whose abstract structure matters much less than the integrity of its encoding and decoding functions. Of course in the last instance direct and indirect channels of transmission cannot really be so readily distinguished; but what matters here is that transitivity, transmissivity logically precedes the  movement of the signifier. The voice is not a sign of the spirit, not a representation of mediation, but more like the material and a-signifying “core” of the sign — an eventfulness, a material whirlwind, a blockade and a line of flight.

The world is hollow. In-itself anything is precisely nothing. 

A thing exists positively only in the precise sense that it exhibits certain forces, that it forms connections or disjunctions with other things, or assemblages of things, in such and such a way. 

Moreover, is it not necessary that at some point in the process of any machine, there is something that may and must become reduced to a generic and redundant unit? 

It may indeed be said that the machine presents us with the most spectacular and dangerous breakthrough in all of history, a breakthrough written into our desires themselves.

Love is not a question of signals, but of production. Not words but noise. The word is hollow: in itself everything means precisely nothing. Yet no thought is ever without its heretical dimension, its strange and apocalyptic promise — the dangerous promise of possible knowledge. 

Not only does nothing “exist,” but it is the essence of existence itself, and so all knowledge is a kind of nothingness: a rigorous silence, a selective and critical passivity, a dangerous and misunderstood weakness. 

Truth is a parasite, we are infected: knowledge is never without this vertigo dimension of being self-imposed, like a sickness which you acquire simply by imagining it. 

I emphasize this point precisely because it is all too clearly understood by the creature within. and is it not so that when its roaring becomes imperceptible, we encounter an ancient silence, without limits? 

Yet everything begins in noise.

The outside, or Other, is accorded an incomparable eminence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In his penetrating account, metaphysics desires an elsewhere. It persists within an alibi, in which we assert true life as absent. But then our idea of the other would seem to hinge upon the imperceptible — that is, upon an Other which is not other like the bread I eat, or the land in which I dwell. It is not a question of this “I,” and that “other,” but of an absolutely other. In its most recognizable (historical) form it appears as a passionate movement or turn towards an Other, which goes forth from the world of the familiar. Metaphysics turns from an at-home to an exteriority.

Metaphysics yearns to become outside-of-oneself, its desire tends towards the absolutely other — something entirely different than a need: “The customary analysis of desire can not explain away its singular pretension. As commonly interpreted need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from its past grandeur. It would coincide with the consciousness of what has been lost; it would be essentially a nostalgia, a longing for return. But thus it would not even suspect what the veritably other is.” (T&I 33) What is the mode of desire whose essence is exteriority?

But what could be a subject of such a desire or such a thinking, whose force would consist in destroying the possibility of subordinating desire to a modality, or of rupturing the very image of thought — overturning its model and smashing its reproductions? The desire for the absolutely other is absolute, Levinas argues, since we are mortal and the Desired invisible; this desire implies our relationship with what is not given, and of which there is no idea. Vision “adequates” an idea with a thing, comprehending what it encompasses.

Beyond the knowledge which measures being, beyond brightness and depth, there is an inordinate desire for the most high: “Desire is desire for the absolutely other.” Unlike a hunger or thirst, metaphysics desires the other beyond satisfaction, and so understands the exteriority or remoteness of the other; metaphysics opens up the very dimension of height itself. The alterity glimpsed in this desire is thus not adequate to an idea, but nonetheless has a meaning — the alterity of the Other, and of the Most-High.

Not the height of heaven but the Invisible; there is no doubting human misery but to be a man is to know the dominion which things and the wicked exercise over us — our animality. “Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in peril.” To know, to be conscious, is also to have time, space to breathe, to avoid, to forestall the “instant of inhumanity”; for Levinas, it is this very postponing of the hour of treason which implies the disinterestedness of goodness, the desire for the absolutely other, the dimension of metaphysics, or “nobility.”

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, of transitivity–is language, and is produced only in the speaker who, consequently, himself faces. Language is not added to the impersonal thought dominating the same and the other; impersonal thought is produced in the movement that proceeds from the same to the other, and consequently in the interpersonal and not only impersonal language. An order common to the interlocutors is established by the positive act of the one giving the world, his possession, to the other, or by the positive act of the one justifying himself in his freedom before the other, that is, by apology.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity 251, “Beyond the Face”

Levinas argues forcefully that the truth of our being is compromised when we submit to tyranny. It is neither suicide nor resignation to declare this truth, but rather love itself, revolted by the violence of reason. There is a plane of reality that must be indicated, whose very existence at once presupposes and transcends the revelation of the other, wherein the I bears itself beyond death.

Yet in this movement, where subjectivity itself is posited as a function, the I also recovers from its return to itself. This plane is certainly love: the other who faces us arouses an infinite desire, and reveals a mode of subjectivity which is the meaning of language, or justice, and which is the very actuality of love, living for others. The mere existence of this plane implies both separation and transcendence — a revolt against the violence of a “reason” that would reduce interpersonal discourse to silence.

Subjectivity cannot accept silence — but it can cease its apology. This is not suicide but love. Resignation to a universal reason compromises our very being. Even if it is “rational,” it remains a form of submission to tyranny. Levinas writes that existence in history consists in placing my consciousness outside of myself, in “destroying my responsibility.” (T&I 252) Nonetheless, my individuality is very different from an animal partiality — even when supplemented by a “reason” issuing from organic-inorganic assemblages of contradictory “animal” impulses. When the self has its consciousness outside of itself, a kind of inhumanity resides in the consciousness of violence within oneself. A singularity is already at the level of reason — one is a personal discourse, an apology, issuing from itself to the others:

“I am in truth by being produced in history under the judgment it bears upon me, but under the judgment that it bears upon me in my presence–that is, while letting me speak… The difference between ‘to appear in history’ (without a right to speak) and to appear to the Other while attending one’s own apparition distinguishes again my political being from my religious being.” (Levinas, Totality & Infinity 253)

Impersonal reason does not leave us magically outside the state or spare us from violence. Our freedom reads shame in the eyes which look at me; our freedom is an apology, meaning only that it refers already from itself to another’s judgment it solicits. As a result of this apology, my being does not equal its appearance in our awareness, and is not called to appear to itself in reality. Yet it also does not equal what it has been for others, in the terms of an impersonal “universal” reason: “If I am reduced to my role in history I am unrecognized as I was deceptive when I appeared in my own consciousness.” (252) My historical existence is the movement whereby my consciousness is placed outside of “myself,” and this difference is not only theoretical: our awareness of the tyranny of the State makes it actual, even if this consciousness is “rationally grounded.” The violence death introduces into my being does not make truth imposible. The violence of death appears to reduce to silence a subjectivity without which truth could not be produced; unless the subject renounces itself without violence. This is not suicide, not resignation, but the meaning of revolt against the tyranny of impersonal reason. Love presupposes and transcends the epiphany of the other. Not apology, but submission to tyranny compromises the truth of my being.

Notes on Ethics and Alterity

1. From Music

Could we imagine that the ethical is a musical progression, and has the same sort of double articulation as a musical passage?

Modulated by a more primary force than itself, a difference at the heart of identity — already “conceptual” or contrapuntal, as well as non-conceptual and “atonal”? An expression of specific difference in terms of standard variations, modulations of “key,” shifts in tonality or “meter”; and also expressive immediately of pure difference in terms of grouped pulses, percussive and tonal intensities, that is to say, rhythmic and melodic qualities, whose innate expressivity precedes and makes possible the hierarchical modal arrangement of tones, the production of tonal and rhythmic ‘centers’ or ‘attractors.’

Pure musical transformation precedes and makes possible the linearized inscription of musical notes onto paper. Ethics sounds in silence, speaks through ruptures and cracks in walls; in transformation it is the voice of caution.

Hold back, do not exhaust yourself.

But also: Have faith, keep playing, light is all around you.

The “rules” of music are technical — abstract and mathematical — but also epistemological, cultural, perceptual — which is a science no less rigorous, yet anexact — a robust science of emotions and dynamisms.

A science of pure music.

I ask: In what sense is ethics any different?

2. Desire and Erasure

The ethical appears within language as a possibility, an anticipation of a form of “pure” expression; properly speaking it names the “light” and “enlightening” gesture of radical apology, which turns thought towards a constitutive difference or asymmetry within sociality itself. Shared reality is always-already oriented, but ambiguously so that it may be read in either direction simultaneously. The practice of ethics opens asymmetries, interpenetrates social multiplicities into one other, produces transcendence within immanence. In other words the ethical is a specific difference, turned inside-out (having crossed the void which was always “folded” within itself.) Ethics occurs beyond and before ontology, it is a soundless word, the “non-figure” of the relation to alterity which precedes delimitation, even as it opens the possibility of isolation, “lack”, all manner of thoroughly negative “unities.” And already ethics is the trace of a pragmatics of de(con)struction, cautiously unbinding these kinds of negative limits within society, even within our own relation to others. The ethical does not limit enjoyment but violence.

Ethics, not “morality,” is the figure of the “originary” unbinding of slavery to any One, the annihilation of the sense of ‘self’ as subject, and the slow, difficult, painful construction of a free, yet interconnected ‘self’ (in some sense “positively” interdependent.) Alterity is infinity: ethics owes its proper method to this formula, which is Emmanuel Levinas’ groundbreaking, difficult and uncanny insight. Following upon this “overturning” or “re-orientation” of metaphysics, we shall to attempt to discover how, as a political “translation” of this idea of infinity, ethics tends to degenerate into two “dominant” styles of expression or decisional modalities which, despite their inter-relation, produce a dis-unity at the heart or essence of ethics and that to which it is turned — towards sociality, towards immanent alterity. In a sense these are already “moralities” and not truly ethical movements.

The primary orientation produces (“liberating”) forms of sociality; the second distinguishes as primary the production of conditions under which there can be (“free”) expression. They are not actual procedures of revealing the essence of ethics, but they are natural orientations one can take “from” the ethical. The hermeneutical problem which arises is that this orientation away from the alterity which both presuppose is itself a paradox; because both movements are revolutionary they both escape from the radical non-unity of ethics proper — they turn away from alterity, and hence turn in upon themselves, their lived social and political conditions — and immediately apply their “natural” ethical orientation in order to transform social relations.

However, ethics is not a decision but precisely the pre-decisional orienting movement itself. Ethics turns towards alterity, towards the infinitely other. Hence, the two “unconscious” movements away from ethics are in some sense symmetrical paradoxes, and though possessing radically distinct orientations, both directions are conjoined in terms of their production of a politics of “absolute” origins, a politics which turns away from the other in the name of ethics. We shall attempt to undermine each of these readings’ absolute claim upon ethics. Their behavior in terms of a re-unification of ethics is to some degree “rational,” since we after all grant that it is quite dangerous that ethics is such a poorly-united essence — however, the effort to “unite” ethics is misguided, it is not an essence or a One. We have reason to fear over-clarity as much as obscurity.

What seems incontestable, however, is that in either “reading,” ethics takes either the form of the two (in the primary sense mentioned before) or of the multiple (in the secondary sense,) and so ethics in the form of unity is already a particular morality, not “ethical” per se but already entrenched within the relativity and exegesis of absolute Law. Furthermore, on either orientation, we see the ineradicable trace of an entire ontology. However, in order to clarify ontology, we have need an ethics not of the two, not even of infinite multiplicity, but of infinite alterity itself.

For ethics precedes ontology. Ethics is precisely freedom from the absolute unity of law, already the difficult approach towards what is otherwise-than-One, otherwise than presence, even otherwise than multiplicity. Ethics aims for the Good, which is the essence of alterity. In this sense, the “ethical” problem is properly speaking an ethics of ethics, and it is not about “rights” or “virtue” or “pleasure” — but rather precisely the relation to the Other, the twin problems of freedom and expression.

Though ethics is not unified, not hierarchichal, we can describe it in general as a science of enjoyment, an art of joy. This captures the primary sense, but not the force of what intend to say, which is this: ethics is joy itself.

3. Joy and Difference

What? Have we really mistaken pleasure for enjoyment — and even made ethics itself confused? How quickly we forget — how quickly we repress? — the radical anarchy of joy, the infinite chaos of enjoyment. For so long “reason” and even “love” stood in opposition to this primary orientation to the other; instead of finding in the social relation the primary relation itself, instead of turning to respond to the other, dogmatic thought slavishly and repetitively calls for the “real” first question, which must be question of the place of principles and our theoretical “orientation” to the form of Law, in short, how to create and use rules in society… This is a very old question, indeed the first purely “ontological” question: are we on our way to or from first principles?

We perceive that the question of orientation already here appears in a derived form: an entire metaphysics precedes this ontological consideration, the very structure of this question describes not one but two equivocal (ethical) modalities or “regimes.” Hence, the mystical authoritarianism of ethics, its “final” injunction, its self-proclaimed “completion,” will here be in question.
For the divergent impulses which unfold in the essence of the ethical itself are, in an important sense, a unity through pure difference — that is, both smooth and discontinuous, always conjoined and always conflicting — because there are at least two “readings” or “directions” of an ethical statement.

Ethics is complete and incomplete: along these lines it is possible to formulate the structure the primary question of the ethical as the decision upon alterity. It is not the ontological question of what is excluded, what remains “outside,” but rather a metaphysical question about alterity.

This decision may or may not be explicitly stated; or it may be stated only to be erased or forgotten; it may be stated as a premise or consequence or as a procedure for moving from one to the other. The structural location of the decision-upon-alterity within the conceptual model determines the broad orientation of the ethical system with regard to alterity; however two systems may appear to be nearly identical, except for this decision there is no similarity between them.

For there is a distance or difference in the heart of ethics itself, an isolation or radical atheism at the “non-center” of ethics. Because of the openness, the fragility, the vulnerability of this “non-position,” for any ethical statement, there exist two “obvious” yet inverse directions (that is to say, at least two senses) in which it may be “read” — produced or enacted — and hence two operative and divergent impulses, attempting to create joy.

Ethics is thus doubly-written, falsified as a “unity” or “essence,” in fact an absent relation to a relation — in other words, a one-way passage, a space of transformation — in some sense, the social relation as such. The ethical is a relation without relation, a relation with infinity. Now, here is one way to state as a “orientative” question this divergence at the heart or essence of the ethical. Does the ethical simply conjoin images to movements as a decisional procedure — in a bifurcation of series, or unlimited multiplication of essences?

Or, on the contrary, is the ethical creative and passive at once, a creation through holding back, a passivity which is genesis, perhaps even force itself — a differential element of willing which pulses with the entire cosmos — the “flowers” of evil? The malice which invents (even impossible) problems is a supremely ethical agency — producing unforeseen revolutions in thought and action — ascending to and overturning the law, or descending beneath and undermining it.

Ethics before being, an absence which holds itself back — in order to reach a point of pure difference where new possibilities unfold — in some way, time does not flow except from the other. Thought begins the journey of metaphysics when it turns toward the absolutely other, and it has reached the impossible “center” of ethics when it responds.

4. The Void and the Other

The void, the lack, the “problem” — this is the core of our mystery itself. Voids are never ‘lonely’ — they find a way to parasite everything, to suture to being, to fracture systems of solid objects and fill in the cracks. As a singular essence, they connote the impure paradox of relative contradiction (an absence issuing from presence,) that is, as already “being” themselves an expressive positivity-in-emptiness sounding in the noisy boundaries “between” solid forms.

A parasite: a noisy collective, issuing in waves and swarms, hijackers, diverging flows of energy — the atom of a relation, and as ‘multiplicity’ effectively a univocal difference-in-itself. “Lack” is parasitic, already disorientation: the vacuum idealized, producing a universal language of absolute heterogeneity, a cosmic “style” without unification, an idea without boundaries: emptiness as “such.” No doubt already religion. What we “have” is essentially a formless form: the approach to the other is made through an infinite nothingness, an absence at the heart of identity, the pure void of absolute transformation.

Hence traversing the gap between myself and the other, “reorientation” is a transcendence of presence, that is, already a response to the “full” presence of the Other. Approached in ecstasy, the pure enjoyment of youth, the world and the other open up in univocity. Yet an important danger exists here on this thin line — the art of disarticulation is caution — but through following transversal lines which break with imaginary forms, we find the noisy world: impossibly, here we discover life itself — enjoyment, hope, laughter, light, warmth. In the heart of emptiness we build a home, we welcome the Other in — the parasitic logic underlying expression itself.

Language is a parasite of being. But “parasite” should be understood neutrally as well — the form of enjoyment is irrelevant — it is our excess of noise, that is to say our indigence and lack of enjoyment, which mirrors the mysterious lack within the other, and is already the uncanny principle by which ethics subverts alterity into infinity. Desire is always alterity, a repetition which unbinds identity, a pure multiplicity without concept. As first philosophy, ethics restructures or rather reorients thought — away from the Same and towards Presence, towards the infinite, towards the Other.

A verb is that which, in addition to its proper meaning, carries with it the notion of time.

No part of it has any independent meaning, and it is a sign of something said of something else… Verbs in and by themselves are substantival and have significance, for he who uses such expressions arrests the hearer’s mind, and fixes his attention; but they do not, as they stand, express any judgment, either positive or negative.

For neither are ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ or the participle ‘being’ significant of any fact, unless something further is added; for in themselves they do not indicate anything, but imply a copulation, of which we cannot form a conception apart from the things coupled.

(Aristotle, On Interpretation)

The unspoken is not merely what is deprived of sound; rather, it is the unsaid, what is not yet shown, what has not yet appeared on the scene… [what is not spoken] will linger in what is concealed as something unshowable. It is mystery. The addressed speaks as a pronouncement, in the sense of something allotted; its speech need not make a sound.

(Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language”)

Being, Language, Difference

(anticipating the essence of language: of a break and a blueprint)

Let us follow, if we can, a line of thinking which must arrive at the essence of writing. In order to more linearly explicate (and also to more narrowly circumscribe and constrain the necessary exorbitance of such a procedure) we shall also follow a related line of thinking which discovers the characteristic nature of writing in a certain relation between the hands and the eyes, that is, of thought to time: this clearly, if in an obviously limited way, inscribes the way our investigation must proceed, onto a far horizon here only implicated.

What is a universal language, the essence of a universal script or pure language of forms? Anticipation of the beginning: is this not the essence we are bringing thought to unearth, uncannily to grasp, an extruded logic of being, or form of language itself: all in order to cause someone to catch a glimpse of the last writing, the “writing” of the end of writing? This mystical closure-by-anticipation is already non-language in its purified immediacy, its incapability of substitution (which characterizes linguistic signals.) Alterity is not the ultimate horizon of expressivity, but rather something not entirely of the order of language, though it is secret the essence of expressivity itself; that is to say: a pure difference in itself, a parasitic infestation, light and noise, radical exteriority.

The essence of language is immanent, and not clearly or rigorously grasped in anticipation, but rather in creativity, in improvisation and the positivity of pragmatic variation. Speech is more narrowly circumscribed than inscription or graphism in this regard, but also more temporal, immediately more dramatic, already a showing and a saying — a double- and triple-articulation — whereas writing or ‘virtual’ speaking holds these two (and more) senses of performative language at the (a) critical distance, and in this opening (which is also a closure) allows a new kind of drama to unfold — one which will close at its effacement or beginning, the erasure of the mark (by time, by noise, by disaster.) The conflict between the sound and the mark unleashes radical alterity itself, opening the curtains again the oldest drama, ungrounding the duplicitous serialism of comedy, releasing the infinite parallelism of tragedy.

We anticipate this beginning in all beginnings, this conflict between the law and the noise, the exception that founds the law, the noise from which channels and signals are created. The parasites invent language in order to exchange it for reality; the essence of language is that which is aware before it is aware, which is inherently capable of desire, of experimentation and hypothesis, of transgression and infestation and hallucination — activities prior to sense and to empirical conceptions of form, in short of graphical writing — this essence of anticipation is always what is implicated in language, whether consequently as in its passive and written sense of ‘marking,’ counting, scratching (re-production of signs)…

Yet these origins also bring us close to the real and primary essence of language (i.e., its infinite virtuality or unbounded expressivity) insofar as language is that presupposes, and is in anticipation of, the invention or distinction of spaces for thought to cross and traverse: language is constituted for these breaks, these rifts riven onto a smooth space which compose a kind of blueprint, a virtual model or design, and only symbolically or analogically implicated by a linearized stream of signals.

In German, der Riss means a crack, laceration, cleft, tear or rift; but it is also a plan, a design in drawing, a graphical or theoretical account, a blueprint. Heidegger plays on this double-sense of Riss and Aufriss when he tells us in The Way to Language that

…the unity in the essence of language that we are seeking is called the Rift-design [der Aufriss]. The name calls upon us to descry more clearly what is proper to the essence of language. Riss [rift] is the same word as ritzen [to notch or to carve]. We often come across the word Riss in the purely pejorative form, for example, a crack on the wall. Today when farmers speak in dialect about plowing a field, drawing furrows through it, they still say aufreissen or umreissen [lit. to tear up, to rend or rive, to turn over]. They open the field, that it may harbor seed and growth. The Rift-design is the totality of traits in the kind of drawing that permeates what is opened up and set free in language.

Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language” (from Basic Writings p. 407)

A blueprint is as close to a perfect symbol for virtuality as there can be, except for its apparent ‘rigidity’; the virtual includes all blueprints which are possible and which ever could become possible; this is why the virtual contains but is greater than the potential. From virtualization to actualization, the break indicates the work of pure alterity itself, the mediation or rupture in itself which is what interprets us, that which digs into the mind to open us up that we may be set “free” — is this rupture only the drawing of what is at work in language?

Or is it also a fractal blueprint of the essence of humanity? Heidegger is arguing that an inevitable fracture-design emerges between the speaker and his or her speech; language is thus a faculty of opening and being-lacerated-open by expressivity; and in order to be opened up by langauge onto a shared world, in order to express ourselves through language, a blueprint must be made, the space or rift between the spoken and the unspoken must be crossed, opened up, turned over and made fruitful. Hence we find Heidegger claiming again later that “[t]he Rift-design [der Aurfriss] is the drawing of the essence of language, the well-joined structure of a showing in which what is addressed enjoins the speakers and their speech, enjoins the spoken and its unspoken.” [Heidegger, the Way to Language 407-8] This enjoinment is a putting into motion of the categories of being, of presence and absence, in order to bring language to a self-disclosure.

Heidegger achieves a description of a pure category of self-composition, a truth beyond onto-theology; yet this thought of language is still fixated upon the actuality or “verbality” of being, and hinges upon a secondary dialectics of presence and absence, of the spoken and unspoken. He seeks to transcend metaphysics itself by this kind of primary and even scientific procedure; yet his work still remains proscribed within the horizons of a fractured or aporetic writing, even of a kind of fractal science of writing which upsets the classical orientation of scientific thought.

If writing is structured around rifts, around ruptures and equivocations, around arbitrary interconnections of significance and deep confluences of meaning, then metaphysics has to be revolutionized, not only in terms of new concepts and images of thought but to revival and invention of different kinds of expressivity. Heidegger overturns metaphysics without bringing philosophy with him, playing upon an equivocation to destabilize the formal boundaries of thought, the unconscious ontological structures of thought operating beneath classical metaphysics (identity, analogy, univocity.) For example, Aristotle:

…it is possible both to affirm and to deny the presence of something which is present or of something which is not, and since these same affirmations and denials are possible with reference to those times which lie outside the present, it would be possible to contradict any affirmation or denial. Thus it is plain that every affirmation has an opposite denial, and similarly every denial an opposite affirmation…

[However,] the identity of subject and of predicate must not be ‘equivocal’.

(Aristotle, On Intepretation)

Do we now see any more clearly the essence of the individuation of language, or hyper-alterity within writing we are seeking to expose? Aristotle is here experiencing the line of univocity we are chasing, whose beginning is indeed ‘formless’. A fractal history of abstraction: association, diagnosis, linearization; imagism, graphism and phonetic writing; and finally analysis, critique, social transformation.

Yet this origin of society and science at once in the essence of anticipation of particularity (i.e., hypothesis, experimentation) is figured in a much larger horizon than writing itself, that of social articulation, the psychobiological production of expressivity, the noisy essence of sonority, the profound essences actualized in our feelings and intuitions. Is this a vaguely-exposited idealism “guaranteed” by the inevitable process of temporality — or a study into the heart of the singularity of expression, the production of universality through language, which always and is almost even definable by the fact that it joyously anticipates its positive results?

There is an unease in the imagination which is healed by the production of codes, blueprints, systems: it is the unlimitedness of thought in imagination that paradoxically limits it, and of itself develops its own positive limits: these are thresholds of generativity, partial disclosure, a closure or marking off of certain spaces which opens up new modalities of expression, revolutionizes production and amplifies natural creative potentialities. Affirmation is a revolutionary closure because writing closes the infinity of time, paradoxical because affirmation opens horizons: that is, underneath the static form there is always an affirmation of difference.

A positive boundary: the essence of abstraction and conservatism at once. Association or repetition must again be asserted against encoding, as substance to form, and by analogy as matter itself to its human account. A pure difference and rupture precedes the unification of the imagination which occurs in the primary inscription or encoding, a break which is also a design which comes before the mark or the distinction. An absence which precedes the presence, through whose holding back presence itself is produced.
But this is still too abstract, let us find another way to express the same essence at the heart of producing expression: the hands that write are also instruments of hearing and reading, the ears that listen are also instruments of the production of sound. The eye that reads projects light and meaning, constructing linear spaces of thought. The mind which is opened up by thinking also produces dream images, revolutioanry spaces of thought; even the “primary” forms of self-affection, the essence of consciousness, is quite naturally capable of the construction of enormously detailed dream-realities.

Symbols are and are not the basis for this process: both the production and the overturning of the symbol, both the positive construction of a limit and its overturning by traversing the space. In short, there is a principle at work: every signal-transducer functions both ways, sentience has non-equivocal being and cannot be produced in terms of an object or subject, but always and only of multiplicities, networks, symbolic exchanges, parasitic infestations…
As always, it is the insects which discover writing first: in the construction of linearized spaces of production. Not to mention their faculties of chemical expression: they write on the landscape itself, demarcating territories for reproduction, for food, for work, for birth, for death, etc. A whole religion, local and global at once. A “spirit” moving them all, or just a communication network? Or yet something more primordial indeed, a function simply of complexity itself, of chaos and emergence from noise?

Where is the unity of expressivity we so humbly demanded from language — it has fractured completely, there is nothing left but multiplicity, always languages. There is no “essence” of language to be discovered, no singularity at the heart of expression, but always the mobile force of alterity, of expressive networks, of productive intensities and divergent, that is to say alternate and minoritarian spaces of thought. Radical exclusivity is the foundation of gesture, pointing, showing and saying are in effect the same political movement: this “is” the “way” “this” “thing” “is” — a five-fold injunction, five layers of assumption: individual, social, political, spiritual, material.

Language is a mobile cage of representation and identity, a way to synchronize thought which is naturally and of its own accord a-temporal, and about divergences in speed between flows of energy, about conjunctions and networks and signals and alternate modes of temporality. By thinking, we can pierce the horizons of being.

Thought naturally escapes representation and the institution of sense, unless it is trained to also to need and desire it. This is the ‘natural’ or ‘civic’ state of humanity, in a sense a pre-social humanity, a humanity without society — which now brings us to a suitable point of incompletion, and also a question for further discussion; and we shall have to postpone this thought until then.

To conclude, a late video of Heidegger on the future of philosophy (with English subtitles).

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

(Karl Marx, from the introduction to Grundrisse)

Between being and language there is an interval, a purified difference articulated through individuation, a difference in time or development: language is in such a way that it always is yet to be as a being. Language becomes through the production of alteration or mutation: we can and cannot formulate the sense or direction of writing — it is always in a process of developing into an exotic, immaterial, and “purified” being — or even into a different kind than “being.”

Through a coincidence of non-identicals, language plunges into becoming in order to reverse its temporal structure: pure language is tachyonic, a signal reversed in time, whose being unfolds in waves, inverting the radiation of light and noise, subverting distribution of space, producing an unusual, internal co-resonance which unfetters time (alterity) itself.

Language is radiation, interference; thus linguistics is a kind of harmonics: a science of language without phonetics, a science of noise and parasitic diagrams, which would already in some sense be reducible to a violently “purified” mathematics (the “post-modern” is but footnotes to Aristotle, a fervently anti-idealistic “clarification” of ontology.)

The analysis of linguistic structures unconsciously proceeds in (genea)logical fashion: yet should we not also seek language in its positive or generative aspect (which correlates with a larger sense of language as expressivity, productive recording,) that is also to produce new languages of pure forms, and also to invent mathematical and scientific languages; and between and underneath both to produce instructions for pure machines?

The difference between being and language is produced through the process of language itself — that is, it is expressed in expression, this difference is what is produced in production, it is the expressivity innate or inherent within all production.

All generation is linguistic, all genealogy is rhizomatic. There is “truth” in the signifier as such only to the degree writing itself is degraded, misunderstood, improperly measured or approximated. Linguistics is already dangerously fragmented; we do not even know any longer either the way to language or where writing is going (and this impossibility or incredulity of knowing is perhaps what rescues us, what “redeems” genesis from the brink of madness) — nor indeed, if writing is already gone.

Perhaps historians will someday place an arbitrary mark somewhere in the dense folds of the 21st century, saying: “Look, this is where writing becomes something else, where the signifier failed and something new therefore had to be produced.”

Or re-invented…– Writing experiences degeneration and salvation more intensely than human beings, it is a more intense activity to revive language than to “simply” attempt a direct revival of the being or essence of humanity (whether singularly or as a multiplicity or even as something else entirely) — yet in practice these different impulses, which are by nature so profoundly divergent, cannot be distinguished.

Writing precedes speech as both a degeneration and transcendence, as the possibility of science, perhaps more profoundly as memory itself: a science of language which is not a writing, a non-serial or “first” writing which comes (“chronologically”) last.

Language is analyzing and recreating itself, despite our conservatism.

The patterns of intensity only amplify through time; radically divergent investigations more and more often intertwine. Time is inter-linked, history is alive.

Memory and the future, science and the humanities: twins, embryonically interwoven, yet as divergent, as radically other to one another as extraterrestrials to ourselves. Degeneration and transcendence: a science of language without being a writing, a first science which imposes upon philosophy a new challenge.

In the relation of the human being to language, a process is reflected that extends to the relation of the human being to beings in general: The scientific knowledge has become the standard knowledge! The other: thinking, spirit of language, history, culture is still there, yet dragged along into a certain indeterminateness.

It is decisive that the consciousness was lost as to where this other belongs and of what kind must the reflection be in order to still experience it essentially.

Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Language

One is substituted for another. The Other is already a replacement: stood in front of, signified for, stereotyped, “represented.” Always already excluded. Alterity is secrecy, criminal, “terrorist.” The other is an unsurface, continuously fragmenting, always already a mute revelation of presence-within-absence, an irruption of pure expressivity conveying without mediation the disunity constitutive of production. A signal which effaces itself, fracturing identity and imploding the non-position at the heart or essence of expression.

The degradation of the other in (through) writing, even through speaking itself and in what is before speaking, in the materiality of the saying and in the voice, already in the other’s cry of pain or even the internal distance wherein I myself become alien, become other before my own suffering and “involuntary” reactions — all these complicate an analysis into alterity, into the other nature of space. The politics of alterity, of absence, the comprehension of the place of the other, takes place outside of our dialogical place-together, outside the infinity of our interconnection. Politics operates not in but as a finite emptiness, a literal or material void which is applied to society like the one-sided edge of a surgical knife.

Like a whirlwind, the power of absence (the politicization of place) tends to decode expressive machines and dissolve solid relations of production. This is both a metaphysical and historical process of dissolution; “conditions” are never what they seem to be, there is always already political economy, conditions are always themselves conditioned by a constituent division from the outside, that is to say, by a political encounter which ontologically precedes their essence, and which therefore obviates the practice (if not the theory) of political ontology proper.

Because politics relates to that which is non-ontological as such. It can perhaps even be defined in this way. Hence a science of politics would relate in an essential — but uncanny and inexact — way to the practice of moral philosophy. Aristotle has of course already claimed as much as this in the “preface” of the Nicomachean Ethics; he identifies politics itself as the highest art, because it knows how to make decisions regarding what social practices and sciences, poetry, etc., ought to be taught, and specify how much should be learned by which classes in society. Thus for Aristotle the problem is metaphysical; our relation to science and art and philosophy and even politics itself are all politically conditioned. It is in this sense that we can say our orientation towards the other is the essential decision of politics and ethics in common, their radical inter-continuity.

Manipulating this relationship to nature, to alterity itself, transforming the relation to “place” and the social comprehension of the ethical space of human decision, is the characteristic or essence of the highest and most authoritative art: the science of politics.

Yet, the question remains whether we are being fooled by morality. In at least one important senses ethics operates on a completely different basis than politics; alterity is apprehended as infinity, overflowing itself, properly transcendental, the source of knowledge (if not already light itself) — a relation wholly without totality, a connection which can never be circumscribed.

Ethics and politics quarrel as the essential movement of philosophy itself, open to multiplicity and difference by virtue of its “halfway” position, a space of non-identity or absence operating between poetry and science.

The logic of absence and presence is no longer adequate for the analysis of space; this is only to remark that we stand in need of supplementary concepts, novel modes of conceptual production — not at all to “ground” presence and absence in some transcendental matrix, but precisely to unground this conservative logic, to disturb generality from its slumber, in order to produce new maps of political and ethical space of decision, new conceptual and pragmatic models — to ground the ungrounding of being.

Theory is actual, already a counter-representation or subversion — extrusion of secret tragedies, hidden comedies — . Critique is a brush with death, the imposition of unspace into space, the wreck of formlessness at the heart of form, the gathering of non-existence which precedes expression and produces society, even as the substrate of substance itself…