We would like to take a moment celebrate a milestone: Fractal Ontology is now over four years old and boasts more than 300 posts.

We’ve upgraded our theme to celebrate. We are hoping that it might also serve to make navigating through our archives a bit more accessible and pleasant. We would like to invite you to explore!

We would also like to take this oppourtunity to express our heartfelt gratitude for those who have supported us here with kind words and encouragement — or have gone even further, and extended to us a chance to engage in discussion and debate. Thank you. (You’re awesome!)

I have added a strange note to the end of this post that…trails off at the end. When you see it, if you do, good reader, (ha, old conventions are funny), it will make sense that it does not make sense (to which, they replied, you mean the paper or the note?) What a wonderful audience. Anyway, this paper needs to be cleaned up immensely (as I specify later), so please be patient and suspend all belief/disbelief….In any case, I think that ascetically revised and focused, this work dovetails into questions that Laruelle has elaborated concerning the foundations of the human sciences or what he calls sciences of men. On the one hand, the bricolage translation I threw together on Speculative Heresy of Laruelle on Simondon and technics is a good starting point to connect non-philosophy with Simondon; on the other hand, it would be interesting to engage Simmel in the work of non-philosophy (perhaps as material? ha!). All sketchy thoughts, which can be followed if the route is trekked and mapped…

(Reading) Simmel sans Simondon: Part I

            In his chapter “How Is Society Possible,” Georg Simmel inquires into the unity of society on the basis of an analogy derived from Kant concerning the question of the conditions of possibility of nature. While for Kant nature is synthesized by the mind’s activity so as to structure it, Simmel argues that society is unified without the need for an observer, even if there can be an additional synthesis by an outside observer in terms of a spatial metaphor (6-7). In any case, there is arguably no need for an observer because the elements of a society are individuals investing their psychic energies in such a way as to already be absorbed in the relations that unify it (7). Nevertheless, the answer Simmel derives via the analogy with Kant’s question does not necessarily satisfy him from the start, for he declares that the entire contents of his monumental Soziologie will be devoted to it: “it inquires into the processes—those which, ultimately, takes place in the individuals themselves—that condition the existence of individuals as society…not as antecedent causes of this result, but as part of the synthesis to which we give the inclusive name of ‘society’” (8). In other words, Simmel’s question does not allow for a simplistic solution in terms of abstract conditions of possibility, since it continues to question in what sense the “concrete processes in the individual consciousness” correspond with “processes of sociation”, and how these processes inform how there can be a “production of a societal unit out of individuals” (8). On the basis of these reflections, Simmel will argue that sociation or association (Vergesellschaftung) should therefore be conceived as “functions or energies of psychological processes” insofar as it involves the interaction of concrete individuals; nevertheless, in abstract terms that may not necessarily be realizable, it can also be conceived as “ideational, logical presuppositions for the perfect society” (9). In this sense, individuals are the society they deserve, insofar as they are at the basis of their actual interactions and their idealizations of the perfect society which is from the start fueled by their psychic energies.

            But this would only be true in terms of any empty, farcical life, for it implies that individuals, societies, and the social and psychological energy involved in sociation are all indivisible wholes or a priori unities. When Simmel compares the uniqueness of the personality with the impossibility of reducing the individual to a general type, he writes,

All of us are fragments, not only of general man, but also of ourselves. We are outlines not only of the types “man,” “good,” “bad,” and the like but also of the individuality and uniqueness of ourselves…it is precisely the practice of life which is based on…the transformation of the given fragments into the generality of a type and into the completeness of the ideal personality (10-11).

It is because the individual is invested in but not wholly subsumed by social life that Simmel can note that “life is not entirely social” (14). There may be unities, but these unities belie the fact that they did not exist prior to the fragments that crystallize. This is why it can be said that because society is not perfect in the ideational sense we can have some reprieve, so to speak, from the social; the context of our fragmentation leads to the feeling designated by that ‘logically uncertain concept ‘freedom’” (15). The fact that life is not entirely social also implies the same for nature, and an immediate analogy can be drawn with the natural realm: “man comprises nature in spite of the fact that it is independent and very often hostile; that which is, according to man’s innermost life feeling, outside of him, must necessarily be his medium and element” (16). Society, too, is problematically felt to be a medium that overwhelms, incorporates and is incorporated by the individual, short-circuiting the difference between inside and outside or at least reducing it to a difference of degree than a difference in kind. This isomorphism between the natural and the social is the starting point for an investigation of the basis that undergirds them along with the psychological processes that make their unities possible, namely the domain of the biological.

            Since society can be conceived as a “general elaboration of a fundamental form of general life”, it is necessary to discover the vital basis for the possibilities of these forms. Although certainly for Simmel and in general, life as such or the category of the vital perhaps cannot be reduced to the biological as a specific domain of knowledge, it is important to note that biological structures form the continuity of interactions on the levels of the social and the psychological. Simmel sums this up by arguing that we should be understood as products and members of society, bypassing the one-sided view that individuals may simply be “vessel[s]” that would carry the mixture of historical and physiological accumulations of the species: “By our life and its meaning and purpose, we are as inextricably woven into society, as a synchronic, coexisting phenomenon, as we are, as products, into diachronic, successive society” (16). Society allows for that degree of freedom that provides the species with the means to not simply be reduced to vital reiteration and historical redundancy (this is the question of the sociological extremes of considering individuals or social phenomena on the basis of society or the human species). In terms of nature, we involve a “circulation of natural forces” that pervades our “completely self-less structures”, and so our existence logically follows the necessities of the laws of nature (16). In the same sense, Simmel draws the analogy between the natural or biological and the social, arguing that insofar as we are social and lifted beyond the individual realm, we do not “live around any autonomous core” but exist in a nexus of interactive or reciprocal relations with others (16). This analogy holds for Simmel due to the fact that categories like the “social” and the “individual”, however abstract, ultimately share the same contents[i] (16).  

Nevertheless, this analogy sometimes may seem to be taken to the point where it threatens to dissolve into a simple metaphor or resemblance translated among disparate domains. For example, in terms of the dual position that sociation involves with the individual, Simmel will write that “[the individual] is both a link in the organism of sociation and an autonomous organic whole; he exists both for society and for himself”[ii] (17). It is extremely important to note that Simmel does not divide the organic on the side of the individual exclusively or vice versa; he does not take the physico-biological as the pyramidal base for the hierarchization of a structure leading towards an apex that would culminate in the social through its psychological midsection. In other words, he does not produce a certain verticality that would be reminiscent of a Platonic idealization of life culminating in another world of Forms. Sociation is an organism[iii] with individuals as links just as these individuals themselves are organic wholes. In any case, the analogy with the organism is also meant to evoke the notion of unity, insofar as the individual’s existence involves “two logically contradictory characterizations”—both member and product, function of it and autonomous center (18). The organism (or perhaps for Simmel, life itself) exemplifies the maintenance of this tension and the principle of reciprocal interaction by embodying this dualism or its overcoming, by providing a solution to irresolvable incompatibilities.

In light of this, there is an important footnote in Simmel’s chapter on ‘Conflict’ treats the conceptions of life that consider it to always have two opposing parts, while the other conception “lets the whole really be the whole”, i.e. a “wholeness which covers both strictly-speaking unitary relations and dualistic relations” (72-73). In other words, “Life constantly moves between these two tendencies…It makes the unity, which after all comprises both contrasts, alive in each of these contrasts and in their juncture”. Thus life brings to light conceptual juxtaposition of the organism and society to have certain overlapping domains, precisely that of conflict and unity. Just as the individual may struggle with others in monetary exchange, or perhaps with societies themselves as concrete environments of exchange, for example in the metropolis with its violent stimuli, in the same way the organism struggles in its environment against other hostile organisms and situations. While this example may be flawed due to the fact that it seems to justify metaphor with metaphor, Simmel persists in his usage of analogy[iv] and insists on the structural analogy of organism and society through the notion of unity, and gives it an empirical justification: “For unity in the empirical sense of the word is nothing but interaction of elements. An organic body is a unity because its organs maintain a more intimate exchange of their energies with each other than with any other organism; a state is a unity because its citizens show similar mutual effects” (“The Problem of Sociology,” 23).[v] Thus societies are analogous to the organism through their unity, but more essentially through their capacities for reciprocal interaction which involves an exchange of energies; this is why groups are able to develop “functional” or “social organs” that tie group elements together on the basis of interactions that involved “disproportionate expenditures of energy” (“Group Expansion and Development of Individuality,” 292-93).

            There is another, perhaps deeper reason for the resonance of this mapping of the biological and the social, and that has to do with the fact that in “The Problem of Sociology” Simmel seems to want to base his idea for a science of society on the model of the science of life (25-27). Yet this mapping of the science of life does not require mimicry or even an extensive study of biology in order to be fruitful: “The science of life did not establish itself on a firm basis until it investigated specific processes within organisms—processes whose sum or web life is” (27). In this sense, the life sciences have moved beyond simple structures or organs to the underlying processes that allow for individuation to take place. This enables Simmel to make the point that it was not until science stopped thinking life ‘as such’ or in general that life was able to be studied for the processes and interactions that it involves. Unlike Freud, who struggled under the weight of a certain biologism or early intimation of thermodynamics that stemmed from a desire to model psychoanalysis after the sciences, Simmel is attempting to isolate a structural equivalent in the sciences of life that can prove fruitful for the schematization of a science of society. Here, there is no transfer of technical biological vocabulary or what could be called an attempt to model the concepts of sociology on the basis of the concepts of biology. Simmel is not interested in a methodological intervention, but the conditions of possibility of a knowledge of society in terms of the interactions involved with society. More importantly, however, it allows Simmel to base his sociology on an analysis and synthesis of the social forms of interaction, thus simplifying the domain of sociology in a way similar to the way morphology studies forms and not formations, for example.

This problem of isolating the form from the content—which Simmel again and again says is only an operation of abstraction and not the reality of the lived situation—will never fully satisfy Simmel’s ideals, and it will return in the question of the relation between life and form. Here, the question is different and it seeks to clarify the transcendental constitution of sociology as a science. For Simmel, sociology as the science of the “purely” social aspects of man “is related to the other special sciences of man as geometry is related to the physicochemical sciences…Both geometry and sociology leave to other sciences the investigation of the contents realized in the forms” (28). Sociology and geometry deal with pure types or idealizations, at least insofar as they remain towards the side of the ‘purely’ social or geometrical. In fact, Simmel notes there may be no sure way to perform an analysis of form and content, especially considering that “the isolation of truly pure sociation out of the complex total phenomenon cannot be forced by logical means” (31). Even when sociological concepts are applied successfully, there is always the possibility that certain elements do not always obey the form and content distinction, rendering it arbitrary (33). Thus, while sociological givens are psychological processes, these processes—taken as ‘contents’—are subsumed under psychologically categories in individual lived experience. While these categories may be necessary to understand the experiences themselves, they make it difficult or unwieldy to sociologically register the “objective reality of sociation” (35).

Perhaps we can say, looking ahead, that Simmel is aware of the traps that he may fall into by concentrating his sociology on the exclusive domain of forms—which, as he notes, cuts these forms from the contents without which they could not live. Simmel may have ‘given up’ on a sociology of life, or realized that a sociology of forms would need to be supplemented with a philosophy of life that could translate its cognitions back into life in order to think life on its own terms, life qua life; the fact that he did not ‘succeed’ in ‘founding’ such a sociology or philosophy does not at all result in the proposition that Simmel failed in these areas, for he both thought a sociology on the basis of its conditions of possibility and repeatedly question the legitimacy of such a ‘pure’ undertaking. In this sense, even towards his own thought he proved what he would argue for later, namely the fact that knowledge, by confronting its own boundaries, transcends those very boundaries at the same time, thus proving the “real infinity of vital movement on the level of the intellect” (“The Transcendent Character of Life,” 358). In short, the difficulties that Simmel runs up against suggests that he has an intimation that what is being left out by pure sociology is the transcendence of life in terms of its intimate ties with individuation, i.e. that which does not allow form and content to be grasped in isolation fully, as though through the pretenses of the hylemorphic model.

(Reading) Simmel avec Simondon

Following a wise suggestion, before in-forming our reading of Simmel in light of Simondon, I would like to offer the reader my own simple haiku (prospectively titled “(In)corporeographies” that will help to crystallize the resonances that I am attempting to harmonize:

Life’s forces in flux

Center split, will not hold this

Formless formation

            This haiku takes up and extends some introductory questions of Raymond Ruyer’s Genesis of Living Forms, namely: how is there an isomorphism between form and formation; what leads from an iso-amorphism to an isomorphism? How to think, not structures that exist after individuation, but the operations that allow for structures to be generated? And, through these difficulties, how to think the knowledge that results insofar as it rests on structural correspondences? (5-9). Gilbert Simondon will attempt to account for some of these difficulties in his investigation of the hylemorphic model. In his primary doctoral thesis The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis, Simondon begins with the assumption that the principle of individuation is prior to definitions of form and matter. The example he uses in the first chapter of this work is simple and quotidian. He considers the production of a brick through the interaction of a three-dimensional rectangular mold and a ball of clay. In a basic sense, the hylemorphic model reduces the event of the interactive forces (reciprocal relations) between the matter and form in order to concentrate on the two abstract givens. This model therefore skips over the entire process that allows for this clay and this mold to be understood as entering into direct communication of forces here and now under determinate conditions. In a sense, the hylemorphic model resembles a particular aspect of the Marxist model of alienation in terms of the sphere of commodities: (in the market as consumers, we see the banana, not the sweat involved with the process of labor, transportation and marketing, etc. In other words, the model reduces labor to a magic show and the reproduction of the commodity to natural immediacy).  Indeed, this symmetry with Marx should not be too surprising, and this will lead Simondon to argue that the hylemorphic model persists because it in fact is neither based on vital reality nor technology operation, but on a certain social mediation between the two. It is this social aspect which is tied to a certain division of labor that needs to be unpacked if we are to unearth the foundations of the hylemorphic model that attempts to lay claim at a certain form of universality.

As soon as Simondon begins to deconstruct the problematic aspects of the hylemorphic model, he already shows that it leaves many things out of the account. First, it is obviously impossible to think of a purely formless matter or a form without matter except apart from a concrete, lived situation; in the same sense, the matter of the clay, for example, has to be prepared in a certain number of ways (it must be dug out of the ground, sifted, purified of extraneous materials like pebbles and roots, it must be of a certain viscosity and wetness to take on a future form, etc.). The preparation of the clay involves a certain amount of labor that seems to go without saying for the hylemorphic model.  On the other hand, the form, too, must be prepared (in a foundry, for example) in such a way that clay does not stick to it after removal, that it can hold and not deform too significantly during the molding process, and that it does not leave any cracks, fissures or air bubbles in the clay during the process (among other things). And all of these preparations are necessary to the extent that the ideal of the finished product (here, the brick) is conceived as having a purely homogeneous reality—that it is uniform in structure throughout. The hylemorphic model only makes sense in terms of this homogeneous reality, for what is desired is an individual which, after individuation, will be conceived as having an internal stability which is antithetical to the real metastability of the interaction of the clay molecules and the walls of the mold the moment when a field of energy places them in communicative interaction (the situation that makes individuation possible). It is in this sense that Simondon will note that the matter is in a position to be in-formed by the mold because it can serve as a vehicle for the potential energy that will result from the reciprocal reaction of the clay and the pressure of the walls of the mold. It is in this moment that the form and the matter are dynamically interacting in such a way that one cannot say that the form is ‘acting’ on a ‘passive’ matter.  Indeed, Simondon will go on to say that it is preferable not to speak of form acting on matter, but to conceive of the shape of the mold ‘acting on’ (really, interacting with) the shape of the clay.

            One of the main pitfalls behind the simplicity of the hylemorphic model is both the reductionist way in which it conceptualizes individuation and the way in which its presuppositions guarantee it a sort of universality and applicability throughout various fields. Simondon argues that it seems to involve a reciprocity between the technological field and the vital domain such that a dualism of substances results: form is the order of the master, while the matters are not of the latter’s concern insofar as his slaves are the ones who acquire and prepare these matters. For Simondon, form is basically reduced to the master’s order-words, for it exists on the level of the expressible. This way of polarizing activity on the side of form and passivity on the side of matter only makes sense if it presupposes the existence of a certain type of social hierarchy. It is not necessarily Simondon’s main goal here to renovate a theory of alienation in terms of technological schemata (although he does in some sense engage in such a theory in principle by trying to refute the anthropological independence of man from the rest of the living contra Heidegger), but to show how a certain model which seems to extend to virtually all areas of life is at base expanded from a contingent stability of social structure. In this sense, the stability of the products of the model itself inheres in its social foundation which would find such a stability to be the mirror image of its own power and perseverance.

            Simondon will contrast this technical abstraction of the hylemorphic model with what he takes to be the principle of individuation: namely, that the principle of individuation is an operation and cannot be understood on the basis of structures alone. In other words, the crux of the matter is to think the individual on the basis of individuation, and not the other way around. This is why Simondon will conceive genesis and the principle of individuation as essentially the same thing. Genesis is not the before or after of individuation, but on the same level as the form and the matter within a system of energy potentials or field of forces. Thinking the brick apart from the field of forces that inspired its taking form in a mold—in other words, thinking it hylemorphically—is always possible and perhaps preferable, especially if one is only worried about bricks or things ‘in general’ apart from the creation. This makes more sense when we remember that the brick undergoes a molding, which in some way is considered to be a momentary individuation that will not become subject to future individuations (the brick is stable and not metastable, so even if it were broken down to dust and reassembled into another brick, it would be a new individual and would require another individuation, which would also be conceived in terms of its ultimate stability). This is a roundabout way of saying that the brick is not alive, but the important thing to remember is that the hylemorphic model literally cuts the brick, and everything else that comes into its fold, from life, and it does so by assuming that life somehow exists after or before the appearance of the individual, rather than contemporaneous with its ascent into existence. Again, it does harm (to thought and to life?) because it fails to appreciate the specific nature of the interactions and instead focuses on the products of the latter, which ultimately cannot be thought without these interactions in general.

            Before returning to Simmel and his explicit turn to questions concerning life, we should note the main differences between molding an inorganic brick, for example, and the continual and variable molding of a living being, something Simondon likes to call modulation in reference to electrical transductors. Unlike molding with its once-and-for-all principle of individuation, modulation implies that there is a molding which develops an ongoing and variable individuation that serves as irreversible stock for future individuations. In A Thousand Plateaus before going on to discuss what they call Nonorganic Life (an esprit de corps of matter) Deleuze and Guattari remark how this notion of modulation opens up the avenue for their own off-the-beaten-path concepts: “Simondon criticizes the hylemorphic model for its taking form and matter to be…like a simple relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that is no longer possible to grasp” (408). What molding according to this model hides is the fact that the living being does not ultimately become independent of the pre-individual milieu from which it sprang through the course of its initial individuation. Modulation, as the principle of vital individuation, expresses the fact that the individual carries with it this charge of the pre-individual milieu and continues to structure and restructure itself through its incorporation of potential energy (in Nietzsche this principle seems to run all throughout Twilight of the Idols insofar as it is a work of convalescence and regeneration, a work of cheerfulness in the course of traversing opposites, and not to mention a work that is still attempting to rethink the concept of becoming[vi]). Regeneration, for Nietzsche, is the primary example of this incorporation of potential energy, and thus it implies the will to power which overcomes itself through its gradual increase in strength.  

(Re-reading) Simmel sans/selon Simondon: Part II

            In his essay on “The Adventure,” Simmel contemplates the essence of a particular form of experiencing that places the elements of life in a new and unprecedented contrast with the normal modes of existing (197). This notion of the adventure as a form of experiencing, and not as a content, not as an accumulation of events or chance occurrences, is important insofar as it emphasizes that the adventure is not a question of what happened in general, but the realization of how a life and its events take on new significance and intensity: “adventure accentuates the disparate elements of life…that makes itself deeply felt” (193). On the one hand, the adventure is a dropping out of the continuity of life, something like a “foreign body in our existence” (188). On the other hand, Simmel also describes it as the fact that there is a feeling of a “subject other than the ego” taking hold (188). Although this could imply that the adventure possesses the subject in such a way as to render it foreign to itself, what is being emphasized is the fact that the adventure has an organic unity and motivation that precisely makes life foreign to its constituents: “This factor of decisive boundedness…is not mechanical but organic: just as the organism determines its spatial shape not simply by adjusting to obstacles…but by the propelling force of a life forming from inside out” (189). The adventure is organic because it does not result from a succession of incidences with a before and after, but short-circuits the difference between the two in its ongoing individuation. Thus this foreign body, this alter ego, comes to designate the principles of an individuation that grafts onto that of the physico-biological: it proceeds as a modulation of the individual. The adventure allows us to “forcibly pull the world into ourselves”, but this incorporation itself requires a certain form of expenditure that requires a certain flexibility or plasticity on the individuals undergoing the adventure (193).

            Indeed, while the adventure is a form of experiencing rather than a content, it also implies that the subject is rife with experiential tension (197). This is what allows for an event to be raised to the level of adventure (198). While this tension again evokes this notion of a foreign substance in our lives, it also points out that Simmel has an early conception of metastability, which is formulated almost thirty years later and which he is using in order to explain how the adventure is not a simple accumulation of events. This tension, qua metastability, implies that the adventure calls for an ongoing restructuration of the forms and media of the individual’s experience. Whereas an everyday love encounter does not constitute an adventure, the love that puts our lives and existence in a new perspective fraught with tension, perhaps not yet actualized, is akin to what Rilke’s torso of Apollo requires of us: that we must change our lives. Yet the adventure is not an ultimatum to our existence per se, but the challenge of life to continue to encounter and undergo unprecedented transformations that do not leave the stability of the ego (or the individuated being for that matter) intact. And since new and unprecedented forms of experience, those forms which alone are adequate to the adventure, are rare, one must reserve enough plasticity within one’s potential reserve to survive or even merit the metamorphosis.

            This is why “The Adventure” ends with the juxtaposition of the youth against the old. Youth privileges process over substance and takes delight in the feeling of its power, almost in the sense in which Simmel describes the will to power qua life as seeking the feeling of being more alive (198). On the other hand, old age relies more on substance, for it has already spent a large quantity of its energy reserves in the maintenance and perpetuation of its own structuration. Paradoxically, the more the individual progressively structures itself, the more stock it has for future individuations and the less able it is to cope with metastable situations in which it has to undergo a critical phase involving the resolution of incompatibilities. As Simmel says, the old rely more and more on the center of their substance while the “accidents” of life become more and more marginal, failing to garner the potential to be fully integrated in a way that lifts experience out of its quotidian framework of existence (198). Because of this reliance on substance, accidents in life lose the ability to form that experiential tension that forces a life to integrate these external and internal incidents as necessary[vii] (192). This is what Deleuze might have called the ethics of the event, insofar as it requires for beings to be resolute in the midst of the adventure so as not to be unworthy of what happens to us (Logic of Sense, 145).

It is towards this end that Simmel will argue that, for very special types, the adventure can be conceptualized on the basis of life itself, such that the whole of life can be seen as an adventure. The analogy is fitting because it indicates that Simmel understands that the fundamental elements of what make the adventure unique are also those that are valid for the logic of the individuation of life itself. They are both ongoing processes that do not begin or end with fixed boundaries but are responsible for the resonating of these boundaries and for the overcoming of the latter. The adventure is not “change” in the facile sense, but a series of becomings-resolute towards the contents of life itself, perhaps a new vessel with old wine, but which, nonetheless, intensifies and accentuates the latter in a way that leaves it such that it cannot be called the same or even similar. The adventure is not the state of psychedelic intoxication, but the very preparedness of our vital lives to succumb and ascent to that which within us has primed us for the forms of heightened intensity in our awareness and capacities of affecting and being affected. Ultimately, perhaps when Simmel is juxtaposing the youth against the old, he is remembering a sober realization that Nietzsche had reached only two decades earlier: the exhaustion of an individual or the degeneration of a race follows from the fact that cultural and social energies have been wasted in the pursuit of war and struggle, thus ruling out the heightened capacity for being affected and for undergoing new and positive transformations. Here it seems that the forms dominate life without the means for the resolution of conflicts and crises that face it.

The profound consequences of the form of the adventure will take on deeper significance in Simmel’s chapter on “The Transcendent Character of Life” and “The Conflict in Modern Culture”. Although dozens of books could devote themselves to these texts alone due to their sheer depth and richness, it should be noted that, like an adventure, they bring to the forefront many of the elements of Simmel’s thought in such a way as to accentuate and resonate with his other works. This can be seen easily by realizing that Simmel does not finally come to the question of life and form in these texts after everything, but instead that these questions themselves have been there all along. For example, it could be said that Simmel never fully approved of separating form and content in a hylemorphic model, even if for the expediency of scientific legitimacy, such that life—as a concept and more-than-concept—never stops coming to the forefront to remind Simmel that all these conceptualizations in fact betray its essence. Simmel will admit just as much when he notes that conceptual forms are not appropriate for dealing with the idea of life. Simmel writes: “intellectual life cannot but present itself in forms…But these forms enjoy in the very moment of their emergence an objective significance of their own…with which they confront the life which created them” (“The Transcendent Character of Life,” 370). Just as Simondon argues that concepts are only good for individuated reality (i.e. forms) and are not valid for understanding pre-individual reality[viii], Simmel argues that conceptual antinomies arise “whenever immediately lived reality is projected onto the plane of intellectuality” (367). Thus the intelligence is able to work easily on the level of individuated forms, but balks at the ontogenetic destruction and creation of these forms, especially since they constitute one and the same, “cosmic, generic, singular phenomenon” (366). This is why Simmel fully emphasizes the fact that the “essence of life is the transcendence of itself”, for by becoming aware of these antinomies through mental and creative life and positing them in and beyond their unity, we hit upon “an absolute concept of life which subsumes within itself that dichotomous characterization” (368).  It is by overcoming the dualism of vital force and form that life can be understood as transcending itself on mental and physiological levels (but also the biological and the social, which are coextensive with the former and the latter) (371).

It is striking that Simmel tries to think the self-transcendence of life as both mental or creative and life as physico-biological, for they share in the vital force that both animates and threatens them from without and within. The approximations of mental life in its attempts to grasp its own vital flux itself are continually shown to be lacking, thus requiring them to also be transcended: the fact that we have an intimation that “the world might not wholly enter the forms of our cognition…represents a movement of the mental life over itself” (357). It is not necessarily the old formula of Socrates that our knowledge is knowing that we know nothing. Opposed to such a generic way of characterizing mental life, Simmel argues that in our attempts to grasp this life = X, we precisely see that we cannot grasp this X, thus providing a transcendence of mental life but also the conditions of possible of creating form anew. This ability both to transcend and then to seek out the grounds for new forms fully characterizes what Simmel calls “the freedom of the human spirit”, i.e. “form-giving creativity” (“How Is History Possible,” 5). This creativity—which perhaps can be understood as the psycho-social grounds for new individuations of knowledge, cognition or even sensation analogical with the vital domains—proves that the mind itself is “something absolutely vital” (“The Transcendent Character of Life,” 358). There is truly a struggle between life and form here on the level of the mind or spirit, a question of penetrating the forms of life as such, but this penetration should be thought of as positive and not destructive, insofar as it provokes the grounds for the creative innovation of new forms, extending the psychological, social and the mental in their chasing of the life that is continuously reaching-out-beyond-itself.   

Conclusion: Towards a Lived Trans-Epistemo-Ontology

            I have coined the rather ugly phrase “trans-epistemo-ontology” (perhaps the title of my haiku?) in order to talk about what future studies concerning the Simondon-Simmel conjunction should scout out from the paths that we have trekked above. On the one hand, epistemo-ontology emphasizes, for example, that for Simmel there is a struggle between the forms of knowledge and the formative formlessness of life. On the other hand, as “lived” and “trans-“, it also suggests the way in which it is a “struggle of life for self-identity” through its self-transcendent character (“The Conflict in Modern Culture,” 382). This struggle for self-identity is itself lived insofar as the “object of all knowledge must be transformed into life” (387).   Stringing all of these together in order to justify this neologism, it is a question of knowing if the vital principle of individuation itself allows for Simmel to be on the verge of thinking the “differences of degree” among the human and natural sciences, for example, towards thinking all these forms of knowledge as involving not an analogical structure, but perhaps an analogical operation, for example. In a similar vein, Barthélémy writes concerning Simondon: “The sciences are precisely those of fully ob-jectivizable structures, which is precisely not individuation if the knowledge of individuation is itself individuation of knowledge[ix]” (13, author’s emphasis). While the sciences think structures that can be identified via their forms (e.g. morphology) they still require an allagmatic theory which would be concerned with operations (allagma meaning exchange or interchange, thus evoking Simmel’s Wechselwirkung).  Simmel finds the allagmatic operation at work on structures in terms of play (a key notion of interaction) in his essay “The Transcendent Character of Life”: “life cannot lose itself in form. The achievement of every structure is at once a signal to seek out another one, in which the play…is repeated” (370). Strikingly, Simondon echoes Simmel by writing that an operation is “the conversion of a structure into another structure[x]”. Thus the notion of a trans-epistemo-ontology would delve into questions concerning the unity of the psychic, the social, the vital and the technological on the basis of individuation. This basis leads beyond having to settle for the purely sociological or the purely psychological, pushing beyond towards the trans-individual domain which provides a further individuation of the individual beyond the simple inter-individual relation to other individuals. Simmel is himself already thinking about the questions of the individuation of the group, its sub- and super-ordination, beyond those of simple relations among individuals. By thinking through the individuation of the group to the trans-individual without reducing this level to the culmination of the species or the form that society takes, Simmel can continue the forego the opposition between the psychological and the sociological, which are extreme, limit or “pure” cases. Thus, just as there exist analogies between the biological and the social, the psychological and the artistic based on their vital unities of reciprocal interaction, so these analogies, guided by a theory of operations on all levels, can serve for the hypothetical reconstruction of a ‘unification’ of the human sciences. If the differences of degree between the human and natural sciences can be reduced or translated on the basis of a knowledge of individuation, then this would serve at least as a potential project for the self-transcendence of mental life over its own conditions, namely the formal conditions of being outstripped by the reality of life. The biological, technological, physico-chemical domains of knowledge could all be projectively understood in terms of their operations as limits cases of the same vital source. Again, it cannot be a question of reducing life to its forms or of reducing these forms to any sort of stable identity, but of raising the threshold of cognition to the point where life itself can be seen as translating and individuating the forms themselves and then life again translating these forms back into itself for the benefit of knowledge.

From http://www.johnmundtesquire.com/Minds_Eye_avatar.jpg

The following is an essay that I composed for a class last semester on the cultivation of the self. It is a work in progress, and I have added idiosyncratic notes to the work in brackets–don’t mind them if they don’t make sense…In any case, the main inspiration behind this work is my ongoing engagement with F. Laruelle and the term vision-in-One–which I believe in some way can be traced back to Plotinus in some fashion, but perhaps further back. My lack of expertise as a classicist will betray itself very quickly as soon as the reader sees the way in which I attempt to engage the Latin; please don’t be put off to much if I seem to fetishize the Latin vers/vert/volt/volu, etc. and notions of light, darkness, and seeing.  Now that I’ve discouraged every reader possible…..enjoy!

In the fifth of his Enneads, Plotinus elaborates a paradigm of seeing that will return consistently in the metaphorical language of conceptualizing understanding and the will in terms of a specific kind of vision, namely that of an inner, intellectual vision that provides access to a domain beyond that of corporeal phenomena.  Perhaps it would be better to call Plotinus’ model an incorporeal theory of vision:

But since the Intellectual-Principle is not to see this light as something external we return to our analogy; the eye is not wholly dependent upon an outside and alien light; there is an earlier light within itself, a more brilliant, which it sometimes sees in a momentary flash…This is sight without the act, but it is the truest seeing, for it sees light whereas its other objects were the lit not the light (Enneads V: 7).

The mind is here conceived as being photoreceptive without the need for a physical, ocular organ. The question of a “sight without the act” and an “earlier light” will come to dominate the language of St. Augustine and, for different yet strikingly similar reasons, also that of Renatus Descartes. In what follows we intend to show how the notion of an inner vision will come to dominate the thinking of Augustine and Descartes to such an extent that their projects would seem less tenable without its utilization. In other words, how does the notion of inner vision come to structure Augustine’s narrative of finding the path to conversion, and what sort of insights can this provide us concerning Descartes’ separation of the senses from the mind (i.e. does the res cogitans have eyes?).

Augustine in his Confessions first grabbed my attention as a reader due to the fact that, as a skilled teacher of rhetoric, he has admirable skill with his prose, forcing me to track down his original Latin text out of sheer curiosity; but the more striking quality of that language is the incessant logic of a road with many twists, turns, backtracks, beaten-paths, and perversions (read: losing one’s way). Augustine literally begins his narrated journey already lost on the path, with its wandering astray and its “amans fugitivem libertatem” (III: 3.5); he was in love with his runaway freedom[(note for later: here would be a good time to go on a tangent and extend this material to look at the different lines of flight running throughout the text....the conversion scene includes a line of flight, faciality, and an evental refrain.....it is, as such, a micropolitical cartography/rhizome/je ne sais que...].  Running away from God, if such a thing were possible, would lead him away from his homeland: “defluxi abs te ego et erravi, deus meus, nimis devius ab stabilitate tue in adulescentia et factus sum mihi regio egestatis” (I sank down from you and wandered away, my God, too much astray from your care in my youth and became to myself a wasteland (II: X.4-5). The deviousness of Augustine’s wandering dislodged himself from God’s stability, forcing him to lose the light that would serve to guide his path. By deviating, Augustine will wind his road as it becomes enveloped in darkness (“volui et involui illa caligine”) (III: XI.25). This is how Augustine’s training in the arts of inner vision will begin in the midst of a shadowy world that does not seem to offer any signposts along the way.

It is important to note that Augustine’s turning away from God [why didn't I bring in Deleuze and Guattari here with the plateau on faciality? was it too easy, and so forward in my thinking that I was simply oblivious---which is not true--but I specifically ignored citing it....possibly to keep from being overcoded by my own efforts to 'read into' things]. reiterates the way in which Being flows forth or sinks from the One in the model of Plotinus, which turns away and splits: “What we know as Being, the first sequent upon the One, advanced a little outward, so to speak, then chose to go no further, turned inward again and comes to rest” (Enneads V.5.5). It is this sinking that thrusts the material world in the face of the light that would lead one to the paths toward home, leading to a perpetual weeping and gnashing of teeth: “one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows” (I: 6.9). For Plotinus, the only solution to this quagmire of the soul is to turn back toward the Fatherland whence the source of the inner light sparks the wanderer’s candle and illuminates his darkness (“inluminabis tenebras meas” Confessions IV: XV.23-24). Before turning to the logic of an inner vision that will provide Augustine with the means to combat this dark night of the soul (for, at this stage in the Confessions, Augustine is still not granted access to God’s presence due to his use of certain corporeal fictions—the material world is still too strongly asserting itself on the level of the intellect[1]), it is important to follow Augustine’s own twisted paths (“vias tortuosas”) leading him out of Thagaste to Carthage into Rome so as to better understand the deeper logic of the ‘travel narrative’ that forms a part of the broader themes of the text.

While the journey of the soul cannot be narrated in sheer terms of spatial localization, this does not foreclose the possibility of reading it in figurative terms. For example, Augustine himself reads his migration to Rome, both in literal and allegorical terms: on the one hand, the trip to Rome is expedient because the students there are less rambunctious, more orderly, less intrusive, and more respectful of the privacy of others [Guattari, Machinic Unconscious, semiotics of the 'pre-school' child, the crushing of inchoate assemblages of enunciation...what is the micropolitical choice here that Augustine is making for his contrast between students?]. On the other hand, it is read allegorically in terms of an exodus out of the city of Babylon (i.e. the worldly realm of lust) into the city of God. Both of these readings are valid, and they provide a consistent framework for the narrative that Augustine is developing. Nevertheless, the figurative aspects of this trip have not been explicitly revealed to us, and it could be a theoretical question to what extent Augustine may have been implying it simply with his reference to Babylon. For the journey leading to Rome is prefigured in the mythic story concerning the foundation of Rome itself; thus Augustine’s journey towards the kingdom of God mirrors the journey of the Roman people to found their own kingdom and homeland.

Born in Thagaste, Augustine eventually at a young age travels to Carthage, often referred to as the ‘shining city’. Yet it is not here that Augustine will find his inner light; instead, it constitutes a step further away on this devious path. In the same way, at the beginning of the Aeneid, Aeneas and his men leave the besieged city of Troy and eventually make their way to Carthage. Yet this destination is only meant to be temporary, for Aeneas is charged by Jupiter with the task of founding the city of Rome, the fatherland of his future people. The tension of this departure becomes overwhelming due to the fact that Aeneas has fallen in love with Dido, the queen of Carthage (to whom he relays a large portion of his tale). Although Aeneas is driven to stay because of his love, he must leave on his journey from which he cannot turn away. Dido, stricken with grief, throws herself onto his sword, proving that we truly do kill the things we love. This narrative framework can help shed some light on Augustine’s own travels to Carthage and then to Rome, for it exemplifies not only that Augustine must confront the realm of lust and fornication—“Ita fornicatur anima, cum avertitur abs te,” for the soul fornicates when it turns away from thee (II:VI.19)—but also that he himself struggles against the very thing he must do, which is to kill and confront his lust for the material realm (hence Augustine’s famous line, that God should grant him chastity, just not yet, please). Carthage, like the vessel of the body, must be cast off for there to be a journey inwards, a journey homewards, both to the literal fatherland of Rome (which is arguably also the displaced birthplace of Christianity, through expedient imperial appropriation) and his figurative homeland in God. Plotinus, similarly, recaptures this figuration by turning to the epic of Odysseus with which he would have been familiar: “Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso—not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of the senses filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is the Father” (Enneads I:VI.8). Thus both Aeneas and Odysseus forego temporary pleasures (what Augustine will call ‘felicitatis temporalis’ or temporary happiness) for the deeper journey towards home, which for Augustine, following Plotinus, will lead inwards, guided by the light of the soul [difference between 'all the pleasure offered to his eyes' (external) and the pleasures of internal vision?...].

The ability to access this light, however, is not necessarily innate, at least not fully formed. It requires a certain type of training, a training in interiority that will be similar, but not reducible, to the way in which Foucault, commenting on Seneca, describes the notion of conversion ad se in his chapter on the cultivation of the self: “If to convert to oneself is to turn away[2] from the preoccupations of the external world…then one can turn back to one’s own past, recall it to mind, have it unfold as one pleases before one’s own eyes” (Care of the Self, 66). Here Foucault is talking about a certain kind of turning away, inward and back again, which resembles the training that Augustine is seeking to undertake, except for the fact that it remains within the realm of the search for tranquility and does not fully capture the dynamic of inner vision sought here, which is perhaps at once more religious and mystical. In the context Foucault lays out, inner vision might simply be reduced to the ability to recall relaxing imagery of the past in times of great stress, thus bringing it into the purview of the questions of imagination. But the imagination cannot be reduced to inner vision, at least not without threatening to scramble the terms of the projects that Augustine and Descartes are performing (in truth, the imagination is the threat to their projects insofar as it projects an analogy between inner and outer vision that will threaten to collapse the duality into a simple ‘seeing’ of bodies [can this be unpacked more and made more central?]). It fails to include the struggle between the oculis carnis, the eye of the flesh, which cannot “see” the inner man or ex intimo, and that of the acies mentis or the mind’s ‘envisioning’ or in-vision, to offer up a neologism [...obviously thinking of Laruelle--vision-in-One--but, just as obviously, in ways that try to stay close to the language of the authors....therefore, metaphorically or simply abstractly]. The crucial difference is the fact that Augustine does not oppose an oculis mentis to the body’s eye through a simple analogy, but instead that of an acies, which has to be understood literally both on the level of vision in terms of gazing or looking upon and in terms of the intellect as insight. Thus Augustine’s turning inward is not the search for a secure domain or a simple Stoic means of defining the limits of what is within our power; it is not a turning towards the imagination, but a means of becoming prepared to be in a position to reach the source of light itself springing from the divine mind that requires for us to become equal to the event à la Deleuze: like Rilke’s torso of Apollo, it requires that we must change our lives.

The tension of this perpetual turning, this spinning in a void of darkness, already comes to a sort of climax at the end of book IV of the Confessions: “vivit apud te semper bonum nostrum, et quia inde aversi sumus, perversi sumus. Revertamur iam. Domine, ut non evertamur[3]” (Our Good ever lives with thee, from which when we turn away, we turn aside [I like to read 'perversi sumus' as we stumble, our fall off/out of the path....this is to read the prefix of per- with that of the versi or turning....I admit that my translation here can seem over-literal, but in the Cassell's Latin dictionary, the adjective form perversus literally means crooked or askew....this again evokes the idea of torsion, twisting, etc........on a related note, why is this bringing to mind the story of Moses and his wandering...]. O Lord, let us now return that we may not be overturned). It is this “versa et reversa,” this turning to and fro, that will lead Augustine to confront the dizziness of his twisted ways and prepare himself for the training of his inner vision (VI:XVI.4). On the one hand, aversi sumus, perversi sumus, recapitulates Augustine’s definition of fornication given above, insofar as the latter only occurs with the turning away from God’s light, the aversi of the sumus [he suggests also in On Christian Teaching that to turn away (the aversi) is to fornicate (the perversi...which is wrongly or overly literally translated in my 40's edition of the Confessions as 'we become perverted'. It keeps the literal Latin and the root stem, but perhaps betrays a more literal meaning--the translation the class was using rendered it something like 'we break our troth'...I can't remember exactly]. On the other hand, the perversi sumus is not necessarily a becoming perverted (although this connotation immediately implies fornication), but a losing one’s way, a becoming-crooked or disjointed, a sort of perambulation of the soul which will not remain still or resolute. It is the rounding of the turn, the per signifying that one turns back to one’s starting point without, for all that, finding one’s way [Moses, anyone?]. Finally, perversi also implies a subverting, a becoming-subverted or becoming-under-turned, analogous to the evertamur or the overturning that would render one prostrate, i.e. incapable of turning in any direction. It is precisely the directionality of the turning that extends the broader logic of Augustine’s geographical journeys home in this devious sojourn to his spiritual homeland. If the involution of the soul is precisely revolutionary or is the Archimedean point that will allow for the complete overhaul and turning of all things with it, even including the turning of the turn, then we can understand it as the logic of the conversion that will leave no nook or cranny of the inner life unturned and will lead to the going under and overcoming of old habits and techniques of the self.

[Ok, this maybe can be spread out, becomes it seems to be laid on thick....but, hopefully without coming to seem ridiculous, what I am really trying to do is tease out the logic of Augustine's meditation--is that appropriate?--on this notion of the turning, the vert and the volve............................I don't think I would have come to be preoccupied with this issue if Laruelle's work--for example, his essay on Deleuze and his chapter in Speculative Turn on non-philosophy and materialism--hadn't really pointed it out to me....I am extending the riffing on the turning that Laruelle has illuminated (another pun?....it seems my basic 'puns' or word plays are the play of light and shadow and the play of vectors of directionality (Laruelle again, Phi et non-phi, the idea of 'rectionality' torn from its di-, its splitting into two...its Plotinian turning).]

Again and not surprisingly, the logic of this journey is presaged by Plotinus himself and serves as a blueprint for shedding light on Augustine’s excursions: “This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land…all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use” (Enneads I:VI:8)[4]. As Plotinus makes clear, this inner vision must be modulated and adapted in its earliest stages in order to develop the capacity to access the divine Light: “Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendor. Therefore the Soul must be trained” (Enneads I:VI.9). In fact, Plotinus will liken this training to that of an aesthetic paradigm: when looking into oneself, if one does not find beauty, then one should act like the sculptor upon one’s own inner life in order to chisel away the asperities and asymmetries: “cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked[5], bring light to all that is overcast…until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.” The he purification of the soul is projected analogously onto that of the sculptural work of art; alternatively, today perhaps Plotinus would use the architectural metaphor of a stained-glass window or the technological metaphor of a laser, insofar as the former implies allowing the universal Light to be infinitely and beautifully reflected in an unbounded spectrum of light, or, on the other hand, to denote how the laser is a hyper-concentration of light, its amplification and unity that resembles the maximum intensive density of God’s luminosity. In any case, he indicates that we shall reveal our true nature when we show ourselves to be this very Light which is not circumscribed by space: “when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become vision itself: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain, and see.” It is noteworthy that Plotinus proves himself to be conceptualizing a training that is foreign to that of Foucault and Seneca, insofar as it presupposes a metaphorical aestheticizing of the soul that prepares itself for the tension and activity of straining towards insight, rather than reaching insight in order to overcome the tension and strain of the outside world. In other words, the training of Seneca will lead us out of tension into tranquility, whereas for Plotinus the journey inward itself is the training that does not dispense with the tensions of life, but culminates in them and intensifies them, such that tranquility is not necessarily achieved but perhaps left behind for the prospect of transformation.

Augustine himself recapitulates the notion of this infirmity at first insight. He writes: “et reverberasti infirmitatem aspectus mei radians in me vehementer, et contremui amore et horrore” (and you beat back the weakness of my sight, streaming forth with your beams of light most vehemently, and I trembled with love and horror). First, it should be noted that Augustine is thinking vision according to an early, obsolete model in which the eye sends forth beams of light that are reflected back to it; similarly, here the infirmity of the rays of Augustine’s newly opened inner eyes are “beat back” or “forced to turn back” due to their awe-inspiring power. Nevertheless, it shows that Augustine has taken the first step towards opening these eyes of the soul and keeping them open, even if he must squint at first in order to bear it. In the same vein, Augustine has a mystical moment of epiphany in which the phenomenon of the flash of light or the flash of a single trembling glance (“in ictu trepidantis aspectus”)—alluded to by Plotinus above in the first quote of this essay—allows him to see that which is (often lovingly referred to simply as ‘deus meus’). Yet this mystical moment itself passes by, for he cannot sustain his gaze (“sed aciem figere non evalui”) (VII:XVII.9). This inability to sustain the gaze of God—an inability to sustain the face-to-face that in a Biblical context God only reserved for the prophet Moses on Mount Sinai, aging him terribly, perhaps proving that Moses himself may not have been strong enough for this inner vision—will require that Augustine again turn away and revert back to his old habits, if only to regain his strength enough for the imminent tolle lege conversion scene.[6]

The tension produced by Augustine’s turning to and from God culminates in one of the most striking passages in the Confessions that shows in what sense the shadows plaguing his internal vision are not due to an imperfection on God’s part, but because Augustine himself is standing in the way, blocking out the divine light: “dorsum enim habebam ad lumen, et ad ea, quae inluminantur, faciem: unde ipsa facies mea, qua inluminata cernebam, non inluminabatur” (for I had my back against the light, and my face towards things that were illuminated; so that my face, with which I perceived illuminated things, was not itself illuminated) (IV:XVI.1-5). Thus it is by turning away, turning our back to God, that we fall, stumble and go astray, fornicating in the shadows, perhaps waiting for a sort of divine high noon that will reduce these shadows to their shortest extension (although, paradoxically, this would be the most intense light and would require the strongest inner-visual constitution–dorsal sunburn). Augustine is straining to think conceptually the eclipse of God with the stubborn corporeal fictions that blind the mind’s eye to its proper origin and destination, its homeland.

This leads Augustine to adding a new link to the chain of the Platonic allegory of the cave. Whereas for Plato, the prisoners who are tantalized by the shadows on the wall do not see the real light because they have their faces away from it as it casts shadows of actual things onto the wall, for Augustine the walls, the cave, and the shadow are all a product and a component of the stubbornness of the mind that cannot keep itself turned towards the light. We all inhabit our own caves, and these caves are nothing but ourselves, which is nothing but the domain of the obscure and confused made flesh. Looking ahead to future examinations of this topic, it would be fascinating to inquire in what sense the paradigm that Plotinus sets up (and, perhaps, also adopts and adapts from elsewhere) is preserved by Thomas Aquinas; this inquiry would provide an essential missing link that would more convincingly connect Descartes and Augustine on this issue. If my assumption is true that Aquinas might hold a key position in the continuity of this tradition, then it would shed light on the pervasiveness of this way of thinking about the mind’s eye (which persists even in everyday culture and in specifically modern cultures influenced by Eastern traditions with its conception of a ‘third eye’). On the other hand, if there is no adequate theory of inner vision in Aquinas, then the question would be to see why this is the case and what sort of edifice comes to take its place. This inquiry would help investigation the constitution of another link in the evolution of an aesthetic, religious and epistemological paradigm that both attempts to rid the mind of its residual substantialism and also holds onto one last corporeal metaphor in order to make the entire framework resonate and make some sort of (common) sense. [The transition to the ending of this could be better--also....much more on Descartes to connect the idea of a confession...]

It is my great delight to help announce the publication of one of the first book-length English translations available of the writings of French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), published by Univocal. The volume is available under the title Two Lessons on Animal and Man and was translated by Drew Burk. The work is composed of a series of lectures intended for undergraduates interested in the humanities, especially philosophy, sociology and psychology.

As the translator puts it, “[f]or many, Gilbert Simondon is an unheard of landscape of philosophical inquiry. For other thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler his work on individuation is essential for the task of moving outside anthropocentric conceptions of identity formation and humanity’s relationship to the technical universe.” (Two Lessons on Animal and Man, Translator’s Note) I might merely add that in this text Simondon offers insights that are of vital urgency and interest, especially to those called by this aptly-designated “task.”

There is a very good introduction by Jean-Yves Chateau that is quite helpful in developing the themes, introducing the chief concerns and setting the stage for the questions ahead. In particular Chateau very clearly identifies and elaborates the critical problematic that the relationship between animals and human beings poses for any general psychology. Chateau also provides some helpful context in terms of Simondon’s larger project, considering a question that Simondon poses in his major philosophical work, L’Individu et sa genese physico-biologique 151: “how do the psychical and the vital distinguish themselves from one another?” while making it clear that the distinctions here are not identical to those between animals and men. Chateau closes the introduction by reminding us that “we cannot say in advance what the capability of a being is, as soon as we are dealing with a living being” (Two Lessons…, “Introduction” by Jean-Yves Chateau, p.27), a point that bears repeating in and of itself; though we should here remember the special importance of Simondon in Deleuze’s philosophy.

Much of the main body of the work is involved with carefully tracing the major history of conceptions of the relationship between animals and human beings. In doing so he uncovers and elaborates some perhaps surprising aspects of this problem. He begins the first lesson by taking us back to antiquity and the ancient idea (which he notes is in a sense “pre-philosophical”, present in myths before theories) of a metempsychotic community of souls continuously transmigrating between humans and animals. For many ancients thinkers, he shows, there was a common vital and spiritual component shared by animals and plants; the soul was no different in quality in non-human animals than in a human being. Between animal and man there is no gap or break in continuity.

Simondon says this idea of a basic spiritual continuity of all living things is what “really surprises” historians of thought when they look back at the philosophy of antiquity, and unpacks here what might be understood as a doctrine of the “pre-individuality” of the soul; through transmigration a soul “individualizes” itself, but has the opportunity for another existence after death through “de-individualizing” and migrating again. He makes the interesting claim that the idea of metamorphosis — fables in which crying women become trees or even rivers… — have their ultimate basis in these ancient beliefs in the transmigration of the soul.

To give a sense of the scope of Two Lessons on Animal and Man, permit me to sketch Simondon’s trajectory. The first lesson begins with ancient Greek philosophy with respect to the problem of the relationship between animals and men. Simondon discusses the philosophy of Pythagoras and Anaxagoras, and then devotes a good deal of time talking about Socrates and Plato. He finishes the first lesson by discussing the Stoics,  drawing a basic distinction between “naturalist” and “ethical” theories about the relationship between animals and men. The second lesson opens with a discussion of the Apologists and then Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. Simondon then turns to Giordano Bruno and Saint Francis of Assisi, followed by Montaigne and Descartes, to whom he devotes a good deal of care. The discussion begins winding down with brief readings of Malebranche’s and Bossuet’s positions on the question. Finally, we are treated to a beautiful discussion of the critiques of Cartesian metaphysics embedded in several of La Fontaine’s fables, including The Two Rats, The Fox and The Egg. While definitely something of a whirlwind tour, Two Lessons offers us an extraordinary number of sharp insights into the problem it sets out for itself.

I would highly recommend this text for anyone wishing to get more acquainted with Simondon’s insights and theoretical contributions to philosophy. The translation is a landmark in terms of Simondon coming to our shores, and hopefully indicates that more of his important work will be coming soon in English.

The 99% movement sweeping the globe is indeed something new under the sun. Little molecular revolutions, the occupations are rhizomes; in this clear revolt against neoliberal “realism” who does not see the spirit of sixty-eight, dormant for a long winter of four decades, awakening once more?

Thinkers have not only the opportunity but in many ways a profound obligation to help focus and organize the will of the people, to help inspire and to amplify revolutionary reflection and affect.

While the medium of thinking is primarily writing, nevertheless theory can help crystalize and push complex systems towards transformation — towards becoming-something-else. This transformation need not, as some might have it, be specified entirely in advance; indeed, such a specification is perhaps impossible.

The self-regulated emergence or becoming of the people’s voice through the consensual decision-making mechanism of general assembly, the thunderous roar of the people’s mic, are things that philosophy should not simply note, or even sit back and interpret, but actively encourage and assist.

It is perhaps incumbent upon theory as well to offer certain precautions, to warn of the various dangers attending the construction of smooth spaces and lines of flight. The warnings should be multiplied as much as the inspiration, at least enough to temper blind enthusiasm. It is certainly true that a smooth space is not enough to save us; we must also foster the continuous development of self-regulating systems, and help conceive and develop other kinds of spaces that can effectively resonate with these novel impulses.

To actively construct a new plane of consistency and create new concepts to populate it, the occupation of theory would be obligated to take up the refrain not only of the multiple and immanence but of the event and its complex genesis or emergence. At any rate, the occupation of theory cannot just amount to a theory of the occupation.

What is the politics of philosophy, rather than the philosophy of the political as such? Theory can illuminate the battlefield, reveal behind politics the spiritual and natural forces animating it: the system of judges whose dream is to crush and regulate desire; the virus of resentment and misery which has turned the world into a madhouse; the searing want that tortures working people all over the world. My hope is that more thinkers will directly engage the occupation; at least to address them, as Zizek did, and encourage them to continue to have the courage to want what they truly desire, as well as to share concerns and certain warnings.

I am inspired by Mirzoeff’s excellent consideration of the 99% movement; he concludes confidently that while it may be difficult to specify precisely what an ‘occupied’ theory might look like, we will figure it out: “As we occupy theory, we’ll find out what it is that we need to learn.”

“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.” (Montaigne)

Protocol. Perhaps one dimension of the aesthetic appeal of the mechanical is in the ‘purity’ of the interleaving of dynamisms — the quality of being a kind of ‘moving’ and even ‘living’ diagram that excites certain sensitivities. Each machine is already a manifold network of various configuration-spaces (involving significant mechanical, environmental, logical factors, etc.) — its singular and intricate behavior produced ‘simply’ by becoming activated and operated. I ask: how was it possible to lay out a common plane where signs and objects, code and data and things and people could all participate ‘democratically”?

Everything unfolds as though some master plan were pre-existent, as though the very organization of society, language and thought itself implicitly support a certain orientation, a certain set of virtual borderlines and existential territories establishing a kind of plane of consistency. The capitalist mode of production engenders the conditions for a radical destruction of the consistency of classical plans in place of a generalized decoding of flows; that is to say, flows of words, devices, actions, passions, people, all swept up into a decoded ‘polyvocity’, a collective elocution of a machinic assemblage complete with black holes and lines of flight, bursting with fractal islands of knowledge and complexity. The network illuminates.

At any rate we are not far from that pure diagrammatic force — that becoming war-machine which deterritorializes and sweeps up both signs and objects at once in an ever-broadening vortex. In particular a computer network, though composed of apparently ‘static’ devices, is radically mobile and creative in terms of this process of mobilizing a generalized decoding; capital decodes, but this decoding itself relies on the correspondence between the coded flows and the architecture of the network through which they are disseminated. The network is in a certain way the mode of production of capital itself. Everything occurs in such a way that we cannot really say which comes first, the thing or the sea of relations; the exchange or the objects and signs manipulated; the signal or the asignifying. There is no silence; there is always background noise threatening to overwhelm the whole process.

The sea is always there, a living and “electrical” sea whose deafening roar is always looming, even if we are able to forget it; always threatening to drown our voices into silence. There is no peace without certain noises that allow us to distinguish, not fall back into the background and the vortex of social and animal life. At any rate background noise should not be reduced to a pleasant hubbub or murmuring or the dusty old secrets of a forgotten sea god. A certain noise can transform the world in an instant. The sea is a network of relationships, an assemblage continuously in flux.

The roar of the sea hides certain curious and perhaps terrifying dimensions — beneath the noisy surfaces, in the (nearly) silent depths, the highest mountains are born and grown… But how to remember the noise of the sea at all and what it indicates when we are forever indoors with the murmuring of our machines?

"Fractal Nebula" from LDS Jedi on DeviantArt

Spectral. Spectrality may consist in the destruction of time — or perhaps just of our relationship to history, the world, life. Uprooted from the flow of events — this is perhaps what it means to ‘possess,’ to hide from the violent flow of time. Possession means to always be on guard against the future and one another, and even in a way against oneself.

What is history but the unfolding of new and obscure powers? –and perhaps there is one most curious of all: the power of becoming alien that has been growing in the profound depths of the human animal. What is this becoming-alien, to oneself and others and to the species and the world? A ghost does not even combat the world but simply abhors it — deigning only to ‘possess’ aspects of it as needed. The promise of modernity is perhaps this spectral vision of overcoming of the organs; that is to say, it is a glimpse of the actuality of ‘pure’ becoming, a ‘becoming’ independent of a substrate, a body of light — a half-remembered dream of a thought without an image.

Efforts to paper over the schisms of the overlapping and contradictory agendas of industrialization and colonization and globalization will continue to exacerbate the basic challenge facing us as a species (which is our immanent destiny, to have done with the organism/organs and the judgments of God.)

Becoming imperceptible perhaps relates to this glimpse of a body of pure light and our reaction to it — our turning-away from one another and from ourselves, our disappearance into ourselves and into the vortex of capital and technology. Our spectrality is perhaps a symptom of our terror at discovering what we are becoming. We are haunted by the future.

In the duplicity of beauty there is the strange trope of a presence which is the shadow of itself, of a being which, anachronously, lurks in its own trace. (Levinas, Otherwise than Being)

Loyalty to Earth! There is a primordial immanence of the body, a primacy of lived experience; natural-and-spiritual forces are firstly constellations of singular point-signs, assembling lines of flight or death, and merely falsified (explicated at best) through signifying abstractions incapable of unleashing — and in fact devoted to nullifying — their chaoid variability. The Earth, whose infernal and howling depths unground the transcendence of organic representation, purifies the living death of abstraction through oblivion.

Consider the transcendent death-carrying agency transmitted by the sign, its inherent duplicity and danger. Signals hide virulent spiritual and natural forces beneath their opaque transparency, imperceptible and uncanny agencies strategically and fiercely engaged in combat against the tyranny of heaven.

The speech of angels would be the unvoice of the Godhead, the planetary annunciation of a regime of point-signals (logospheres) ungrounding or self-awakening. Desertification indexes fiery pathways to aridity, holey spaces desiccated by an eternal fire. Consider Heraclitus’ paradox of the inescapable proximity of  warmth and dryness: “[h]ow, from a fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape?”

For the destiny of matter is to be swept up and conjoined to a differential field of explosions, overturnings — to be thrown into a combat zone.

Reality is not constituted by borderlines but functions; the identity of a thing is not a matter of limits but of capacities. In this way the turbulent development of matter and life and thought is in every case a matter of an annihilation of certain delimitations — even if this is in each case to replace, supplement or supersede these old delimitations with new borderlines, they indicate radical transitions in capacities for undergoing and inducing transformations, of extracting variations and variables from the fluidity of chaos.

Lines are becomings or memories, which is to say, quite real beings whose presence indicates a virtuality enfleshed, pure movements of a body ‘all by itself’ with no need of organs; a glowing divine thread crossing each borderline in turn. These movements are the ‘forces’ of the parasite, running madly along the flows; and they are the body of the abstract machine, the essence or interventionary diagram which occurs when an abstract machine directly (strategically) conjoins a collective assemblage of enunciation. The abstract machine conjoins lines of flight to concrete assemblages, specifying a mechanospherics or molecular topodynamics of forces, a spiritual-natural aerology of power.

If reality is drift, life is absolute flight — an exploratory winged creature plunging into a viscous and fluid hyperchaos (spreading like a patch of oil, fleeing in every direction at once.)

"Bird in Tree, Dreaming"

Genesis. Enormous psychosocial and political transformations were necessary in order to put into place the global transhistorical capitalist institutions we take for granted. Capitalism is different, genetically as it were, from all previous ways of organizing human society. It dissolves society in favor of the decoded flows of pre-individual traits and elements which will form abstract labor and commodities. This dissolution is what previous forms of society had attempted to prevent. They had precisely developed various auto-immunities against this total subversion of traditional sense and value engendered by the radical deterritorialization attending the development of capital.

Modernity is this insane and universal cosmopolitan social order which encircles everything within its technocratic grasp; degeneration, death, disaster and apocalypse are both its legacy and sense. What remains for subjectivity but the twin messiahs of nothingness — the state and the market? A timeless celestial burrowing-machine and a timely sociopolitical ungrounding-device — messenger and channel, rex and flamen.

"Cosmic Ovulation", Claude McCoy

Hermes and venus. History discloses a message to delicate ears — a riddle for the sphinx, as it were: existence and its whirling turbulence are continually winding down, breaking apart, falling and leaping back up — but in this metastability even death gives in, even disaster and apocalypse hold back, allow themselves to be defeated. Even time allows itself to be overcome, oversaturated, absolved and annihilated — in the name of a time which remains, a time to come.

This gift of time is a luminous substantiality, a virtual trace situated beyond the chaotic waves of immanence, beyond the noises and silences of eternity – where shadows and colors at last exhaust themselves in a final and furious burst of apocalypse — and fall silent… And when light holds back, when the voice of health is silent… of course, we already know: pestilence, noise, darkness – parasites proliferate. What happened? When health holds back it is enough to unground discourses and psyches and societies. This silence bludgeons holes in time and the landscape, it burrows beneath the sky.

History is the production and education of desire, the unique evolution and development undertaken by particular flows of desire, arranged in complex differential systems and entering into a variety of singular relations with assemblages of transhistorical agencies and collective discursivities. But the work of time is the movement of angels, that is to say, the development of minor voices — which are precisely not the ones who ‘give voice to’ an idealized minority, not transhistorical institutions or their representations.

How to hear these schismatic voices of the desiring-machines themselves – these always already revolutionary/literary/theoretical machines, voices of the schism or flux/gap in eternity and productive psychosocial diagrams at once, complentarily? Well – it is not enough, for instance, simply to listen…

Biography of the Eye by François Laruelle

Originally published as “Biographie de l’oeil,” La Decision philosophique 9 (1989): 93-104.

for Adolfo Fernandez Zoila

“Man is this night, this empty nothingness that contains everything in its undivided simplicity…he is this night that one sees if one looks a man in the eyes.”

Hegel

Supplement to Hegel’s judgment concerning man

A philosopher has never looked a man directly in the eyes. The philosopher is the man who turns his eyes away to look man in the eyes: he is a man with a distorted gaze. The philosopher misrecognizes the immediate for he himself is not immediate.

To look in the eyes: a maxim of philosophical curiosity, of its oblique indiscretion.
The philosopher is the man with an oblique gaze who lacks the straightforwardness of man.

To look in the eyes: this multiple sounds like a singular, like the penetration into the unique depths of the soul, if it isn’t simply a possibility of untruthfulness or contradiction between the eyes, quickly effaced.

The philosopher looks at man from outside: in the eyes, and he can only see the void and the night, a haze that thickens into nothingness or dissipates in the light of day.

The philosopher looks man in the eyes to dissolve the World into man and man into nothingness. The philosopher does not see man in man and sees the nothingness of the World.

Eyes can be felt, burnt, penetrated, caressed, but they are only eyes—eyes that see—if one can look into them. Like beasts attached to their cubs by filling them with their own breath, the philosopher believes to attach himself to man by throwing his own gaze onto the depths of man’s eyes. Thus he makes a new philosopher of him.

Rules of philosophical vision: 1. Man is a being who must be looked in the depths of the eyes; 2. Only another man can access the depths of man; 3. Being thus looked in the eyes makes him man, i.e. philosopher.

Looking in the eyes is the inversion of transcendence, its reversal and redoubling. Two gazes tie together into one and become reversible—abyssal desire where man spills over and is lost in the other, where both are brought together without ever attaining the ultimate reduction.

Penetrating the other through the eyes goes beyond indiscretion if it can touch his desire and unsettle his nothingness.

For the philosopher, the eye is convertible in the eye, reversible with another eye. The eye is a man for the eye, man is eye for man.

Man is an abyss for man, i.e. for the philosopher who looks at man.
The eye that is seen in the eye is infinite speculation. The eye is a speculative abyss for the eye, it is what the philosopher sees if he looks a man in the depths of his eyes.

The philosopher is this man to the eyes in a face-to-face, i.e. slowly turned away, this night and this nothingness that look at each other in the other; it is the philosopher that one sees in the eye who is mirrored in the other eye.

Lesson of the night

Man does not look in the eyes, but sees-in-One. A man is this night that looks into the night, with the exception of the All.

There is no eye that is not One (eye). The eye that contains the eye as an other is no more One (eye) than the Other-of-the-Other is One (Other).

The eyes do not contain everything. Or they contain everything with the exception of vision, hence the supplementary eyes of the philosopher. Or the eye contains itself in its undivided simplicity, with the exception of the All.

“To look in the eyes” is either the reflexive tautology of philosophical speculation, or the identity of the non-speculation that man brings with him.

If Being is the distorted eye and sees no more than the Other’s shadow in their vicinity, the One is the eye that sees the Other in person.

What man as seeing-in-man sees when he looks in man is this undivided simplicity, with the exception of the All.

Man is this undivided simplicity, this mystical night before nothingness, that looks in himself and contains nothing but himself and manifests himself as nothingness when he looks a man in the eyes.

Only man—neither God nor animals—can be looked in the depths of the eyes and more still from the depths of the eyes.

Man who looks in himself sees the night in-him, nothingness and the all outside-him.

The night in man is forever il-luminated and the nothingness forever a-nihilated.

To look in the eyes is either impossible because of obliqueness or means that the eye looks in the eye like the One in the One.

The gaze cast onto the depths of the eyes is the reflection of the seen-in-One.

Vision is foundational when it abandons perception and sees-in-the-night.

Man as what is seen in-him or in-One is the real content of every theory of vision.

For the philosopher, man is the reflection of the nothingness of the World or the All. For man, the World or the All is the reflection of the night of man.

Man’s undivided simplicity is the only one that does not contain everything and which sees that it does not contain everything because it sees the All in a nothingness outside itself.

The vision-in-One sees the eye-in-One. But the eye-in-One is either simply the One-in-One or is the vision of the eye in the nothingness beyond the One.

Philosophers have divided the undivided simplicity of nothingness and the all, but human eyes have never divided the unique night.

Man is this undivided simplicity that sees the night when he looks in the indivisible night; nothingness when he looks in the indivisible nothingness; the all when he looks in the indivisible all.

The vision-in-the-night is the identity of vision and night, of the eyes and the depths of the eyes, of the window and the crossing of the window.

Man is a lesson of the night.

Vengeance and the community of gazes

The philosopher advances under the protection of the horizon there where man is to be discovered in his undivided simplicity. The philosopher watches over the gaze of man and waits for it.

The philosopher looks man in the eyes to grasp the nakedness of his depths and finds nothing but his own desire.

In the cavern of the eye, as in its approach, fulgurates that which illuminates the night and enshrouds the day.

The philosophical eye wishes to see the nothing in the eye of man rather than see nothing. The philosopher wishes to look the nothingness of man in the eye rather than be a nothingness of vision.

The philosopher cannot orient himself in the black night of the eye because he does not even know that this night is prior to the eye.

The eye was “in” the eye, and the World did not see. Vision was “in” the eye, and the eye did not see.

Philosophy is this speculation or this theory-of-vision that does not see the vision-in-One.

To look in the eyes is at best an objectification sans object, a reflection sans mirror—the pure medium of speculative optics.

Speculation requires man as this void where it is mirrored and through which it gives consistency to its own nothingness.

Man is this mid-place of day and night, mid-place of nothingness and all that one sees if one looks Oedipus in his third eye.

Man is this night, this nothingness that the philosopher hallucinates when he looks man in the eyes. I call hallucinating—a common feminine noun—every thought or vision which believes to see the real when it only sees the all; which believes to see the One when it sees Being. It is a hallucinating of the type: I think, therefore I am…

One cannot look a man in the eyes as one looks through a window. Man is the only being to look at a window.

The speculative eye is the already divided One, Being whose essence is double vision, the vision-in-One reflected facing its instrument and turned into an optics.

Philosophy remains an optics. Transcendental no doubt, but specular: thus intuitivity is its unavoidable structure. The eye is first external empirical sense; then it is divided and doubled, the introduction of the other gaze constituting an optical or a priori specular field; then the gazes tie together, form a chiasmus, and constitute a transcendental speculative field. But the multiplication of the eye en abîme does not abolish it, for the eye is the intuition that now gives the other eye; the gaze that opens upon the other gaze—is the nucleus of every transcendental aesthetic. From external sense, it becomes external and internal sense, its reflexive and speculative power increases, but it is not really abolished by philosophy, which is instead its development. It definitively belongs to philosophy to be an intuition and an intuition of empirical intuition or transcendental vision—never a pure thought, never an internal transcendental experience prior to every optics and prior to the disjunction of the eye that founds optics.

The philosopher is a double blind: naïve consciousness is open to experience and blind to sense; philosophical consciousness is blind to experience and open to sense. Philosophy is this system of thought that tries to compose a single vision or provide vision with two blindnesses.

Man sees in-blind in the truth itself.

Man is this blind that contains undivided simplicity in himself with the exception of the All. He is this night that perceives this blind if he looks a man in the eyes.

Man is this medium between night and nothingness. Less than this medium: nothingness which is nothing but nothingness; night which is nothing but night. More than their medium: this identity (of) nothingness, (of) the night, which is neither night nor nothingness.

The philosopher: “we the seeing.” Man: “we the blind,” we see everything from the depths of things. We see prior to the eye.

The night is human down to the depths of the eyes. The philosopher is human down to the surfaces of the eyes.

“To look in the eyes” also means: “The Same is the eye and the eye”—the matrix of speculation.

Philosophy is the division of the eye—its doubling and redoubling. It is the division of the night that dwells in the One-depths of the eye in an internal night and an external night; a night through the absence of light, a night through the excess of light.

Philosophies—speculative dialectic or not—are particular distributions, economies regulated by the exchange of gazes between men and a general forgetting of the vision-in-One as the real cause that determines the exchange of gazes in the last instance.

Every philosophical speculation is communication, and communication is always speculative. Their maxims: 1. to see through myself by seeing in the place of the other; 2. eye-for-an-eye.

“Eye-for-an-eye”: formula of the metaphysics of vengeance and metaphysical vengeance, from which only the vision-in-One can save us. It can receive two senses: as eye for itself or the speculative subjective; as Eye-for-the-Other, as hostage-of-the-Other-eye. In both cases, vengeance is not warded off.

Eye-for-an-eye: exchange and reversibility of gazes that oscillate between vengeance and desire; vengeance and desire that oscillate between reversibility and exchange.

The division of the eye-for-an-eye regulates the inhuman economy of transcendence. To look in the eyes: the speculative community of gazes founds humanity on nothingness and vengeance—on speculation.

…man—this night that contains everything in himself and thus does not contain this night—man who contains everything in himself and thus does not contain man—this nothingness that contains everything in itself and thus does not contain this nothingness—man who contains everything in himself and thus does not contain man—this simplicity that contains everything in itself and thus does not contain this simplicity—man…

For us non-seeing non-philosophers

…man is indifferently this speculative eye this phenomenological eye their resolved contradiction for us philosophers identically what the speculative eye sees when it looks in the phenomenological eye identically the seeing the becoming of the seeing in the seeing that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking a non-seeing in the eyes indifferently this empty night this full night their resolved contradiction identically what the empty night sees when it looks in the full night identically the night the becoming of the night in the night that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking a contradiction in the eyes indifferently this white nothingness this black nothingness their resolved contradiction identically what the white nothingness sees when it looks in the black nothingness identically the nothingness the becoming of the nothingness in the nothingness that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking Being in the eyes indifferently this complex indivision this simple indivision their resolved contradiction identically what this simple indivision sees when it looks in this complex indivision identically the indivision the becoming of the indivision in the indivision that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking the One in the eyes man is this night that contains everything with the exception of the night this nothingness that contains everything with the exception of nothingness this simplicity that contains everything with the exception of simplicity this everything that contains everything with the exception of everything he is this indivision of everything the exception of every exception that one sees if we non-seeing non-philosophers look a man in the eyes…

The night is a human

The night is this humanity, the empty nothingness is this subjectivity, the undivided simplicity is this interiority, which are all contained in themselves with the exception of the All. It is facing this humanity that man sees the Other man in the eyes of humanity.

The night is this interiority, the empty nothingness is this humanity, the undivided simplicity is this subjectivity, which are all contained in themselves with the exception of the All. It is facing this subjectivity that man sees the Other man in the eyes of subjectivity.

The night is this human, this woman in the eyes of nothingness, this nothingness that one perceives if one looks a woman in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains everything in its undivided simplicity with the exception of the All. It is this night that one perceives if one looks the undivided night in itself.

The simplicity is this human that contains everything in its undivided nothingness with the exception of the All. It is this simplicity that one perceives if one looks the undivided nothingness in itself.

Woman is this human who contains everything in her undivided gaze with the exception of the All. It is this woman that one perceives if one looks a gaze in itself.

The night is this human that sees nothingness and the all facing its own depths in the occasion of the eye, that sees the eye facing its own depths in the occasion of nothingness and the all; that determines nothingness and the all in their undivided simplicity.

This night is this human that looks man in the eyes, the nothingness is this human that looks woman in the eyes. Man is this night sans horizon that only contains its undivided simplicity; this nothingness sans light that only contains its undivided interiority; this simple sans simplicity that contains nothing but its undivided humanity.

The night is this human that does not speculate about man. Who am I, who am? I am neither this reason nor this intelligibility; neither this question nor this speculation. I am this night, this transcendental woman who sees in man who I am, what I am with the exception of All.

The night is this human sans horizon. The horizon has never known the eye, it is a wall raised against the eye. The eye lets the night traverse the horizon. The night is this humanity which is nothing but night.

The night which is in the night and the Other night

The Other man is not another man; the Other woman is not another woman; the Other night is not another night. It is what one sees if one looks another man, another woman, another night—in the eyes.

The Eye-in-One is not the flesh, it sees the Other himself. The eye is the oracle of the Other.

To look a man in the eyes is to see him twice. Once as he is seen in-himself or in-One; once as one sees the Other: identically “in-man” and “in transparency.”

It is still the eye that one sees in the depths of the Other eye; still the night in the depths of the Other night. But the Other night is what the night sees when it looks in the Other man. THE night is this human that sees the Other night when it looks in itself.

The night which is in the night sees the undivided night which is in the Other man. The night which is in the state of the night sees in it the night which is in the state of the Other. The eyes which are in the eyes see the unique nothingness which is in the Other man.

The Other man is this whole night, this whole nothingness that contains itself in their undivided simplicity; and this whole Other night, this Other nothingness that contains itself completely with the exception of their undivided simplicity.

The Other man is this point-blank night, this gaze that has not seen any gaze, this simplicity which has not given any division that one perceives when one looks a man in the eyes. The Other man is what one sees without looking in the gaze of the Other man.

The Other man is this night identical (to) nothingness, this nothingness identical (to) this simplicity, this simplicity identical (to) the night, which identically contain themselves with the exception of the Other. This is what one sees if one looks another man in his identity.

The Other night is this human night forever non-posed in the night. The Other nothingness is this human nothingness forever non-opened upon nothingness. The Other simplicity is this human simplicity forever non-closed upon simplicity. It is what one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The Other woman is this simple night that is not enveloped in the night, this simple nothingness that is not doubled by nothingness, this simplicity that is not bound with simplicity. It is what one sees if one looks another woman in her simplicity.

The Other woman is this transcendental field of the night, devoid of dawn and dusk; this opening of nothingness, devoid of the horizon of being; this indivision of the simple, devoid of retreat. It is what one sees if one looks another man in the indivision of his void.

The Other woman is this night non-illuminating (of) itself, this nothingness non-annihilating (of) itself, this simplicity non-simplifying (of) itself that contains this All non-totalizing (of) itself. It is what one sees if one looks another woman in her eyes non-seeing (of) herself.

The night is this human that contains the Other-night through its undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-night that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains the Other-all through its undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-all that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains the Other-nothingness through is undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-nothingness that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

Man is this human night that contains the Other-night, this human nothingness that contains the Other-nothingness, this human-simplicity that contains the Other-simplicity—with the exception of themselves. It is this Other-night, this Other-nothingness, this Other-simplicity that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

Translated by Taylor Adkins 3/2009.

Irrealism. Modernity can be seen as a kind of victory for realism, but this victory was always already betrayed by capitalism, disseminated to death. Despite all appearances, the masks and pseudonymity of the postmodern era indicate not an abandonment of the war against cynicism and superstition, but rather a renewed undertaking of this same battle with a greater degree of caution, pragmatism and assiduity than the modern age could have imagined necessary.

Will to think. Philosophy at its very best is saddening, a cautious disenchantment: a deciphering of the hidden resentment with which we have crafted our values, the nihilism behind the idealities humanity has raised above itself. Yet how could philosophy ever have taken hold and prospered without a certain artistry in masking its true purpose from us; how could it not begin by seducing us to another reality — seducing us to reject this life and this reality? Consider that the will to think must partially close the “field” of thought, in this way allowing it to acquire definite shape and form: the force of thought severs thought from becoming, reducing the chaos of becoming into an organized noise. In this sense, the force of thought disjoins not only a given thought from what it can do but transforms the very categories of thought in order to render existence inert, harmless and ready for transmission. The innate becoming reactive of thinking is what philosophy opposes in all ages and throughout all its disguises.

Psyche. We are always furthest away from ourselves: there is a “necessary unconsciousness” of the underlying machinery of thought; it cannot be integrated into consciousness without violence and tragedy. The healthy constitution of the workshop of the unconscious is the entire problem of psychoanalysis; yet is not psychoanalysis then, at least insofar as it depends on extruding a repressed trauma to work its cure, founded upon the paradox (or illusion) of knowing what we cannot know — the unconscious meaning of the symptom — in short, knowing what we should not be able to know? It is indeed this strange ethical status of psychoanalysts which makes their “cure” possible — i.e., by pretending to an esoteric insight, a “necessarily unattainable” knowledge of the nature of the soul, the pathway to a cure for certain neurotics is possible. For everyone else, psychoanalysis as constituted cannot help but botch the cure at the start, driving it to return again and again to an overpowering and miraculous violence by which the unconscious may be interpreted, and so already transformed, “healed.” Our certain ignorance is ignored for the sake of the cure, since at any rate therapy will provide the hooks one requires to enact the transformation; in this way one ultimately abandons the truth of the symptom. Without shame one may now impose an identical interpretation upon every case, since we should not know the truth.

Torn. There is a tragic flaw in every first principle; behind each first principle there is a force which may be interpreted. Thinking is not mediation (or axiomatization for that matter) but always a becoming, and a becoming “active” only insofar as it is taken to its limit. Thinking is itself rendered legible in turn only by uncovering the force of thought, which is not the driving force within the thought; rather almost the opposite: the force of thinking is that which subjugates thought, that force which extracts thinking as though from the raw “material” of subjectivity.

Event Horizon, Geoffrey Chandler (http://iasos.com/artists/chandler/)

Events are decentered and non-relational, and always a kind of creation (the event is the very introduction of novelty into existence.) As the substance of history events amount to  chasms splitting the world in two, and sometimes sweeping it away, or even shattering it to pieces. The event insofar as it is always already the production of revolution, is the very becoming of becoming.

Now, an ontologist naturally grasps the event precisely through its diaphanous non-identity, in its differential externality, and especially as a kind of infinite multiplicity. The event is understood then as a kind of hyper-being, a without-being which enters into being through –what, precisely? The void — which is to say, it must create itself through a bizarre repetition, but whence? An infinite dissemination is demanded. And what of the turbulence of the Event, its volcanic or cyclonic roaring?

Emancipation can be understood as the liberation of forces necessary to produce the will to resistance. This event is indeed “eternally recurring”: strained ears may catch the distant footfalls of daybreak, and the dangerous voice of a love without a history and without hierarchies — which is, after all, not a signifier to be interpreted, not a “meaning,” but an asignifying rupture, already an act of creation.

Silence, that shadow of language in which everything is nevertheless said, is today almost always but a lapse, the momentary oversight of an animal which acts as though in speech it found its very reality, its absolute and primary function. The distinction between language and noise dwindles, and yet is taken all the more seriously. Too often our silence seems but a desire to escape noise; it is so rarely to evade our enslavement.

And so one but barely and insubstantially glimpses that Silence which is both resistance and elevation, even a kind of victory against a terrible foe, which is not without its spoils. To discover language is in fact to be without a language, a radical immediacy which at once shatters every moral or political claim, and every shred of symbolism; and at this point many things are possible, indeed, too many things: a violent regression to the prelinguistic, a wispy and premature transcendence to the postlinguistic, or finally the immanent resistance and spontaneity of the counterlinguistic.

The necessity of silence in the transformation of the soul cannot be overstated. That indeterminate silence in which sublime meditation, the uncanny intermediation of thinking, takes place — is a warlike silence. For language as such does not think but merely tyrannizes, blindly suturing truth to meaning, a neuroticized “schizophrenia” whose experiments lead inevitably into a cavernous abyss.

The health and growth of a language is precisely the death-instinct of language “for-itself,” which is to say that language, in this limited respect like philosophy, is profoundly dangerous for unhealthy cultures. A culture without the power to reinvigorate and transform its language is already a slave to it (the same thing is true, in fact, of production more generally.) The health of a language requires a continuous recreation and enrichment reaching precisely the point of a critique of language (for without this no creation is possible.) What is demanded with respect to categories and axiomatic ontologies is precisely a kind of “schizophrenization” or, more precisely, the unconscious aggregation of radically disparate forces which underlie a sublime silence (which turns towards thinking and tends towards novel creations.) The reproduction of language is a kind of explosion of machines, whose repression is quite intentional and even the basis of conscious awareness (consciousness is a being-strangled by the Sign.)

Silence may then be grasped in its positive sense as an inexpressible chaos, as a fearful and indeterminate abyss in which an infinity of heterogeneous forces are dangerously and inextricably intertwined. Yet it may also be grasped as some truly “heretical” Unexpressed, the enthusiastic proclamation of energy itself as pure potentiality — a blank canvas, upon which thought dares to create. Language is always both at once, in a constitutive and radical ambiguity. While currently constituted as a tyrannical conjunction of signs, nonetheless the possibility of transformation remains embedded within it. Discouraging as the current conditions may seem it is nevertheless not unreasonable to predict, with Derrida, the death of not only such a conception of language but also (albeit at the distance of some centuries) its practice.

World War I, Wasily Kandinsky

A man like Kant can explain the beautiful in terms of a pure disinterested pleasure — such a knotted definition is not in itself surprising, nor is the kind of cynicism about the potential and limitations of life which is quite effectively communicated thereby. What is curious is that he in fact means to enhance the importance of artistic creation by converting the unsettling power of the artist into a kind of channel to a familiar universality. Is the beautiful not, then, grasped – but grasped in precisely at its most narrow and isolated state, through a transcendental enframing, even as an annihilation of life itself: as a kind of dazzling infinition which nonetheless does not interact with our conscious interest but with our immaterial, intangible “soul”?

There is even almost a kind of foundational axiom of psychoanalysis embedded in Kant’s definition (of course a paradox): there is no pleasure except in losing the possibility for pleasure — the glare of infinite Being when one has finally completely lost one’s identity, and dissolved oneself into the universal (father-mother)… The deep pessimism expressed in this kind of escape, this resentment of life which is by no means peculiar to Kant, is nevertheless quite clearly the pulsing thread underlying his patchwork labor in his “critiques” of the mournful becoming of things. We find in psychoanalysis as well such a stoic willingness to defend the infinite ‘metaphysical’ essence which refuses to escapes its container: and always he leaves open the possibility that human beings are indeed the receptacles of divine messages, channels of pure truth. Frames…

The various critiques in effect each pass through God: the divine body in each case codified, colonized, and contained according to a schema or matrix. Ancient diagrammatics: but religious prophecy and classical philosophy — which is perhaps to say a body without organs and its degenerate, parasitic outgrowths — allow such a convergence only through the quelling of a kind of very earthly subterranean enmity between the drives amounting to a kind of repressed hatred. For now they are neither and only pretending, which lodges us squarely in the endless hypocritical abyss of the subject: and finally this desire (and repeated failure) to escape, to dissolve and to disappear turns inwards and becomes a kind of holy resentment, a “stoic” pessimism. The way out is completely blocked, or rather the only path of escape is precisely through this divine sieve we thereby create: and is there not always a bizarre consciousness of self-division which takes place, a realization we are merely ‘acting,’ which suddenly seems almost to divide the Cosmos itself in order to produce the way out such vanity desperately and incessantly seeks? In short, perhaps Kant meant to be — an artist…?

Will. The question of the will is not whether to emphasize cycles or fluxes (identities or events, structures or processes, concepts and percepts or acts and effects); still less how to conduct a grand unifying synthesis of the two — events and processes as differing stages or aspects of what is ultimately some overly ideal dialectical Unity; the question is rather, first and foremost, to determine how we can possibly proceed (vis a vis the unconscious) given the radical discontinuity between the two accounts of thought and existence. A theory of the will (a diagnostics of the sick will and a genealogy of the healthy, that is to say the real analysis of the unconscious) must affirm the divergence of a purely ‘immanent’ theory of flows and a purely ‘ideal’ theory of machines. Yet the very difficulty in convincingly theorizing the will is precisely the fact that these two modes of interpretation beg one another and are ultimately cut from the same cloth; a successful account of the will cannot disguise the deadlocks which have hitherto almost completely blocked the progress of understanding the unconscious. (It was owing to the sterile dogmatism wherein both accounts decayed for centuries, each thinking itself “complete,” that their kinship and even mutual implication had been able to go so long unnoticed.)

Resemblances. The event has an excess over existence, as a surplus; must this intimate some radical intervention of Truth or more simply, an intangible and virtual dimension of immanence — that the event happens to return, perhaps without limit, breaking with the continuity of resemblances, linking up with a pre-individual and differential flux?

Ground. Becoming can also be understood as a terrible guest: a noisy, ill-mannered, and parasitic inhabitant of beings. Both noise and parasites (and bad manners for that matter) indicate pathways to grasping becoming — these transversal or transevental vectors each affirm a dangerous divergence from the smooth severity of the host or background. Becoming fractures (a) being into a prism: it is precisely the assemblages of parasitic flows of matter and of life which collectively constitute “becoming,” the eruption and eviction of Being; and yet, in another sense, the singular, material and sufficient cause of existence.

Degeneration. Growth (whether cosmic or vital) is never simply a question of similarity, it is not a matter of the general but rather precisely of the repeated: not of convergent series but “degenerate” planes and lines which expand only through a rigorous fragmentation, a limitless mechanism of tortuous recurrence. What is ontologically primary are these infested and “aware” surfaces, the resurgence of certain parasitic elements within the event, the systematic degeneration on the part of the surface of being, the positive knowledge of our incapability to maintain the stability of the surface against the rising ground.

This creature Life, beyond all evaluations, remains an uninterpretable difference — a kind of difference which is primary with respect to a differential identity, a difference which directly induces individuation, and thereby also seduces us to imitation, to the law of identity, and the shackles of representation. Difference for itself becomes the enemy and not a single word is possible on the value of life; how can we interpret this chaosmogenetic reality, arrive at by subtraction this very truth which endlessly ruptures with the signifying systems we use to interpret the world to another? It seems to verge on a kind of heresy, a prediction of apocalypse with respect to philosophy as such: can a mathematization, an axiomatization of the real take place?

The enormous suffering which has gone into everything beautiful is a misery which not only fails to become sensible in the light of Being, but which forcibly undermines the notion that all descends from pure forms (existence from Idea; God as pure and liberating Force of truth) rather than through the violent admixture and interpenetration of wildly heterogeneous forces and bodies (existence from cruelty; God as the tortuously circular Process of differentiation.) A metaphysics from the absolute will to tragedy is an anti-moral, materialist, atheist metaphysic: the singular vision of the real in which our decisions could be dangerous (need I mention also the only one in which knowledge necessarily involves suffering and self-deception?)

Thinking is precisely this adventure which connects its desires not to an identical reality or a primary nullity, but precisely to the an-identical, the differentiality of existence. Not a kind of compromise between two poles of the idea but a war with the arbitrary division of the idea into isolated components, the body of Life into organs without bodies. “We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” Nietzsche (Daybreak, II.103)

Bomberg, The Mud Bath

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit.

Firestorm. Heidegger reminds us that despite our apparent control over the machines we create, that in fact we do not even control the desire within us which causes us to create, to use them, or to extend our control over the world through the conception and production of new machines. To this problem, indeed, there is no solution, and very likely there will never be any solutions. The mystery, the secret truth of desire, lies within the machine.

I mean to say that the world is full of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman.

Friedrich Nietzsche

War on Information. Idealism begins with the proposition that life is futurity, yet attempts to halt before the inevitable futility this produces, the cancerous desires which follow, not from “particular” notions, but precisely from the incorporation of Truth into life, that is, the incorporation of a point of ideality into the social diagrammatics of thought. A bad conscience, alienation, a nullity or ‘nihilism,’ is the necessary counterpart to this process of internalization of the infinite (or at least a “point at infinity”) into the collective machines through which the world is enunciated. Existence as the stability of identity is the absolutely firm foundation upon which all idealism has hitherto constructed its watchtowers and fortresses.

The struggle of nihilism is not simply that of the rejection of transcendence, but rather the real production of new “reality” through the incorporation of truth. To the degree that the truth bears such an incorporation, there is a degree of nihilism in all thought, a war on Information, a degree of rupture and continuous elusion of identity. Thinking is therefore inextricable from a micro-politics of subversion, from the actions and passions of war machines; the question is one of strategy and not of ideology. Without this struggle of desiring-machines, this war of learning and desiring, all beliefs, all thinking would lack interest.

Truth defaced. Both the origins of truth and untruth may always be followed back to a human face — an other whose thoughts and expressions were found useful, for a longer or shorter span of history. Yet the origins of mathematics and philosophy, the evolution of the scientific instinct and will to truth, could hardly be explained in the same way; rather the problem of the origin of the will to truth could be approached in a general way only through a genealogical analysis in which the origins of morality are primary; this kind of thinking is oldest, older than language (whose history must be considered in an ultimate sense sense quite secondary to the history of morality.) The origin of the drive for ‘reality’ must be sought through the actions and passions of human bodies, through that uncanny relationship between desire and its Outside.

In conversation three of Ethics and Infinity, Levinas recounts the philosophical and existential implications of the il y a, the ‘there is’ or what he calls the “phenomenon of impersonal being” (48). The “there is” is many things at the same time: it is a belief, a feeling, an experience and even an affect (the source of the Judaic affect proper to one of philosophy’s “turns” in the 20th century) on one side and an ontological claim, an objective state of affairs, and even the (proto-)origin of Being and Nothingness on the other.

If the “there is” is not a simple mixture of Being and Nothingness, it is at least the source of their mixing and unmixing. Beyond the fact that there are objective and subjective aspects to the full impact of this attempt to conceptualize the “there is,” what should be noted is the way in which the “there is” animates the theological and ethical orientation of Levinas’ discourse of the social relation with the Other. What follows endeavors to construct the beginnings of an ‘analytic’ of the “there is” in order to better understood how it plays a fundamental role for Levinas in his conception of ethics as first philosophy.

The conversation about the “there is” begins with a contrast between the conceptions of Appolinaire and Heideggerian ontology: it designates neither the abundance or joy of being nor the ‘es gibt’ of Being to Dasein. Going beyond the limitation of givenness to Dasein, a conception which could very easily found a humanist Heideggerianism, Levinas stresses that there is no “generosity” in the “there is” because the latter constitutes an impersonal dimension of being, a silence that is simultaneously a noise: “neither nothingness nor being” (48).

One of the most fascinating statements concerning the “there is” occurs very early in the conversation and posits its primacy in relation to the conditions of existence: “[The “there is”] is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that “there is” is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation—there is” (48). What can we unpack from this passage?

To begin with, what should first be identified in this concise passage is the presence of the “there is” as a feeling, an affect, but also a faith based on an ontological claim. The scene of being is open and not foreclosed means: existence necessarily is. This statement is undeniable in two senses: first as objective claim or matter of fact, then as the basis for a belief or matter of faith. Levinas is trying to describe an ontological state of affairs that is not reducible to any particular thing but is the pre-individual, impersonal, and universal permeation of existents by existence. Yet the belief in this ontological claim almost seems to turn Being into the always-already given, and thus to save it from any real disaster that would threaten the sustainability of this givenness. In other words, it seems to be a faith in the fact that things will always exist, and that even if the existence of particular things is contingent, existence itself is necessarily absolute.

It would be wrong to see this ontological belief as an argument based on a personal God. If there is a God in Levinas, it comes through the Other’s face or leads beyond Being. What I mean to say is that the thought of the “there is” is meant to be the horror that the persistence of impersonal existence wreaks upon the individual. This impersonal aspect bears affinities with Heidegger’s thrownness, in that existence only comes to the things that are thrown into the totality of the “there is,” as though gladiators into an arena to wage the war that existence demands of itself. This is the Heraclitean/Nietzschean image of Being as the cosmic struggle where things are always ontologically at war through their own becoming and struggle of forces. If ontology’s prerequisite is the war of existence/being, what leads beyond this struggle and allows an access to the requirement of ethics as first, indeed as first philosophy that henceforth subordinates ontology to it?

The impersonality of being, its rumbling, exists beyond the requirement of the World and its sustainability. This is a faith that requires a reinvestigation of the meaning of disaster. Following Blanchot, Levinas recognizes disaster as that which “signifies neither death nor an accident, but as a piece of being which would be detached from its fixity of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, as dis-aster” (50). This evocation of a persistence of the possibility of existence, supra-cosmological or existing beyond the conditions of the cosmos (and even life and its sustainability?) is the opening beyond the totality of being, the totality of the “there is” that contains our own being, and thus an elevation to the heights of the absolutely other, there where the infinity of the social relation, of a new understanding of holiness as the ethical beyond being and ontological war, an escape beyond the cumbersome of the totality of existents and existence (which is characterized in Levinas’ sayings like: “The social is beyond ontology” and “It is not a matter of escaping from solitude, but rather of escaping from being” (58-59).

How do we escape from being and or move beyond it? As Levinas suggests, the overcoming of ontology begins with a question or even problem of mastery, even, one might say, of a certain position in relation to the totality of things as a system to be mastered (man as the custodian of the things of the universe) and to the infinite as social relation exceeding being, and thus non-totalizable: this is the infinite ethical opening of the Other beyond being. Yet this opening does not leave the totality of Being untouched in relation to my existence as a subject or ego in the intersubjective relation: “For the ego that exists is encumbered by all these existents it dominates. For me the famous Heideggerian “Care” took the form of the cumbersomeness of existence” (52). As Levinas interprets it, Heideggerian care is too caught up with ontology and things, its position doesn’t justify that of man as Other: “to escape the ‘there is’ one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings” (52). This new idea about the subject’s relation to the Other emphasizes the Latin of the word sub-ject: the subject is literally thrown under the Other’s height or at the Other’s feet due to the asymmetry that Levinas believes to separate the subject from the Other. The Other calls upon me from the height of God through the face, and my ethical responsibility is to respond to that calling from on high, to throw myself under the yoke of the ethical relationship. This new emphasis on Heideggerian care now indicates the opposite of what Levinas found in Being and Time: instead of being the cumbersomeness of existence, it represents the moment of clarity where the Other lifts the weight of the sovereign self by calling into question the absolute self-enclosed separation of my ego, i.e. calling into question my ipseity.

The position of the subject in the ethical relation is that of an ability to respond, a responsibility in relation to the height of the Other, precisely the call or appeal of the Other that demands a response. The selfsameness or ipseity of the ego is called into question by the ethical relation insofar as the face of the Other requires a response that does not leave the speaker intact as subject, insofar as my “I” is called into question by the Other’s alterity. The height of the Other, as absolutely Other and thus as presence of God through the face, is the reinterpretation of the social as first based on a religious, i.e. ethical foundation rather than one that is ontological, i.e. political. But this is a religion that annuls itself as an ethics, an ethics that is responsibility to the Other, even to the point of being the hostage of the Other in the face-to-face, but that does not call for the worship of the Other, except insofar as it founds the social beyond the political in a bond that remains to be fulfilled, precisely the infinite bound of duty that can never be exhausted by the subject due to the fact that its content itself is infinite, i.e. the demand of the Other. This is why Levinas states that, more so than the Other allowing me to escape solitude, the Other allows me to escape from the totality of beings as ultimate determination of (my) existence itself.

As Levinas specifies in relation to the ethical significance of the face in his Totality and Infinity, signification is guaranteed only by the face of the Other, and it is only insofar as this face appears and directs me that the meaning of the ethical relationship, which is constitutive of my freedom as Other and for the Other, that my own selfsameness and ipseity is called into question (206). It is the signification of the Other’s face and speech that disrupts and disturbs the separateness of the ego in the social relation. As Levinas makes clear, the face of the other and the instantiation of the socio-ethical relation is a fundamental encounter and event that breaks down the confines and limits of my existence and subjectivity. This overcoming of the self and the sublation of the ego’s interests is the first step towards the Aufhebung of the politico-ontological vanity of the subject towards the true creation of peace and social harmony, which is for Levinas beyond Being and politics in the ethical and religious root of the socius: “Politics tends towards reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not struggle for recognition. It is the surplus possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition for equality itself” (64). Whereas politics strives for equality, religion is the ground upon which it strives. Although this could read as though Levinas were condoning a sort of fundamentalist return to the domination of society by an eminent religious state, it should be noted that Levinas’ concept of the holy does not entail the re-injection of religious sentiment into social life; on the contrary, the idea of the holy for Levinas is to be found in a de-secularization of the world, or, in other words, the holy is opposed to the sacred insofar as the latter emanates from a false, illusionary transcendence whereas real holiness constituted by a community of Others invokes the ethical responsibilities of the socius that Levinas nevertheless still prefers to call “religious.” We shall see why and why this conception entails a revision of the theories of justice in a community.

It is precisely because the face is the turning point for the entrance into social and ethical life that Levinas can begin Totality and Infinity from the standpoint of the self-subsistent ego that is separated both from a charitable God and a social milieu. Levinas begins this work by positing a completely self-reliant ego that knows neither the presence of God nor has any need of that presence. In truth, Levinas does not at all presuppose the religiously devoted ego as the subject of his study, for, in a sense, that would make the exercise of the text all too easy, presupposing what it would be necessary to demonstrate. In fact, Levinas has to start from the completely self-involved subject in order to make his arguments about the Other, language, and ethics make sense. He presupposes nothing or presupposes that which would be most resistant to his new theory of ethics and society: precisely the atheistic subject who does not come ready-equipped with what it means to believe in a transcendent God who would guarantee meaning for all existence or who does not necessarily find within social fellowship the religious inspirations of the communal bond. It is this new notion of religion, which takes on its real autonomy in the social sphere only as an intersubjective ethics, that requires my responsibility for and to the other to become a bond that rests upon a new conception of justice.

Earlier we described the way in which the Other calls into question my own selfsameness or ipseity. This deposing of the sovereign subject indicates that the I or the cogito is not the end-all be-all of existence. In other words, the cogito as a psychism which is an event in being does not suffice of itself to produce justice. This is one of the reasons why Levinas does not believe that ontology can be first philosophy. Instead, ethics (with a specific Levinasian religious foundation) poses itself as first philosophy because it provides the basis for justice in the social sphere, while ontology promotes the war of all against all insofar as they wish to be equal. As Levinas writes: “Ethics is the spiritual optics…The work of justice—the uprightness of the face to face—is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced—and “vision” here coincides with this work of justice. It is our relations with men…that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of” (78-79). Thus, justice is rooted in the ethical relation with the Other who is only holy because there is no transcendent, ontological God (God as Being or a being) to guarantee the value of that ethics. This indicates the fact that, in the ethical relation of the face-to-face, the Other precisely coincides with the idea of God insofar as the former also contains the infinity of the ideatum that overflows the idea: the only real religion comes on the scene when God has been removed from the sky, and the only real ethics takes on its truth-as-justice when the Other is seen as ordinary man in the face.

But this does not yet ground the idea of justice. Instead, it almost threatens to unground it due to the infinity of the Other in the ethical relation. What redeems this notion of justice? In a sense, the ipseity of the ego, the selfsameness of myself, is called into question by the ethical, intersubjective relation: to look in the face of the Other leaves no Self unchanged and unsettled. This transformation of the self, which is an ongoing event demanded by the efficacy of the socio-ethical relation, not only uproots a certain ipseity of the self but also establishes an illeity (literally based on the Latin for ‘he’) in the self, a sort of third-person position that is coterminous with the I. It is this illeity immanent to the ethical relation that guarantees the overcoming of a spontaneous ipseity: in other words, the movement from an I to a You in relation to a Thou (the holy Other) is guaranteed by the existence of a he or she, or maybe even it, if we consider Levinas’ penchant for the impersonal aspect of existence. It is this illeity in the self that allows for God to become invisible, disembodied, and immanent to the ethical relation, legitimating the statement that theological concepts are simply anthropological to a higher degree (Cartesian “perfection,” even if it is based on a negative valuation of man). It is the third-person in me that cries out against the tyranny of the ego in its self-satisfied separation. This is precisely how morality is defined in Totality and Infinity: the ability to reflect upon my actions as violent and arbitrary, and thus to come to the real critique of ipseity.

If Levinas, as he claimed, went against the major tendencies of the history of philosophy in its treatment of man, this may be because Levinas was one of the few philosophers to take Plato seriously and assert that the Good is beyond Being, that ethics is primary over ontology and first, and that knowledge is not the culmination of existence, but learning, teaching, and discourse with the Other are. Subordinating knowledge to teaching and learning is one of the ultimate ways in which Levinas redeemed the face to face relation as an encounter with the infinity of the Other through signification. Nevertheless, if learning and teaching were subordinated to knowledge, we would have the structure of ipseity, the master discourse for determining what is legitimate knowledge and what is excessive. This structure simply cannot stand withstand real democracy in thought and the face of the Other.

Joyful wisdom. Science is such that it can only truly be said to exist once many powerful and warring social and psychic desires have been tamed, coerced into accord, allowed to achieve their fragile pact. (A difficult enough thing; and, indeed, the conditions for a joyful science are still far from ripe!) The result being that a scientist, insofar as he or she is a scientist, is precisely the one who is unconcerned about whether another agrees to the “truth” of this or that proposition; in every instance it is rather the force or real function which counts, which is to say: the manner in which a given idea alters, amplifies, and re-assembles already existing systems of ideas. The production of a new semiotic system is always coupled to a wide variety of psychic and social machines, together forming a new regime of ideas along with an appropriate “pragmatics” of desire. This “image of thought,” for our purposes here, can be considered simply as a series of collective practices interwoven with a multiplicity of signifying systems, the coupling of productive processes with anti-productive processes, a conjoining of systems of pure affects with order-words. A pragmatic then is precisely a ‘process’ which can be said to function ‘structurally’ only in a heuristic and reductive sense. Indeed, the reality of thought is not a stasis or immanent emptiness but rather (or more fundamentally) a transfinite process of conception, first and fundamentally a flight into new pragmatic regimes. This a conceiving of new practices  may be realized or constituted in any particular case, but only insofar as it tends to produce novel and singular functions. It is not true that the repetition of a similar effect is the origin of thinking; rather it is precisely a difference, in the last instance a shift in perspective, sometimes infinitesimal, which is required.

Scars. A break is a source, a disjunction capable of unravelling the reality, the stitches of any flux. A break is a void, a schism — think only of the ‘irreducible’ split between grammatical subject and object — which serves a fundamentally connective role, constituting a heterogeneous stitching-together of a multiplicity of disparate elements. The void binds as much as it serves to disjoin and interpose its chilly emptiness and taste of the beyond. So much to say that this unravelling co-extensive with the Void (despite gloomy prophesies to the contrary!) connotes a kind of concerted deconstruction whose force is entirely positive, an affirmative disjunction.

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.

For catren’s online essays, check out “On Classical and Quantum Objectivity” and “Can Classical Descriptions of Reality Be Considered Complete?” and “Geometric Foundations of Classical Yangs-Mill Theory” and “Notes on Dilaton Quantum Cosmology” with Claudio Simeone, and “Time asymmetries in quantum cosmology and the searching for boundary conditions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation” with Mario Castagnino and Rafael Ferraro, and finally “Quantization of the Taub cosmological model with extrinsic time” with Rafael Ferraro.

I also want to thank Sid Littlefield and Anthony Paul Smith for their work on some of the definitions. It makes it all the more fitting that the translation would also be a collaborative effort. In that sense, I also want to thank Joe Weissman and Chris Eby for their intellectual support, as well as Ben Woodward and Nick Srnicek for their efforts in editing the work. Lastly, I want to thank Sid again for his constant efforts towards enriching my own intellectual development and those of many others who have the veritable luck to learn from him.

Also, last but first and foremost, let me extend my thanks to Laruelle and his collaborators (A.-F. Schmid, S. Valdinoci, T. Brachet, G. Kieffer, L. Leroy, and D. Nicolet) for their endeavors to make an economy of philosophical vocabularies, i.e. a non-philosophical dictionary, possible.

Here’s a link to the pdf. Enjoy!

Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs. 

Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign.

Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within a single ideal situation, but rather the process of problematization of an element or elements which somehow causes the contents of the problem to problematize the very situation itself. This marks  a radical becoming-social of problematics — or if you like, the becoming-event of the concept (becoming-problem.) Yet does it not seem as though this method is still profoundly Lacanian somehow, as though the real is being implicitly understood as a strange hyper-real gap between Difference and itself — mysteriously and paradoxically allowing a differentiation to differenciate itself infinitely, suspending both the emotional-organic ontology of desiring-repression as well as the mechanical logic that underlies materialism, allowing thought to move at infinite speed on a hyperplane of immanence — ripping a hole through the symbolic networks, allowing the transpiercing and reprogramming of the assemblage by the outside? The difficulty remains even if we understand the practice of militant problematization or counter-actualization to be a process of differentiating problematic or ‘insurgent’ elements of the situational social assemblage with respect to their capacity for transformation.

A certain noise is all it takes. Parasites can indeed be shaken off and immediately so; but they are chased out only by a greater noise, by the willing invitation of still more powerful parasites. –So at least there are specific cries which are anathema to a given variety of parasite: the roaring of their host-cum-predators. Of collective liberation.

Other. In order to grasp the organless body of capital, we must also grasp the decoding and distribution of scales (layers) necessitated by its cyclic, redundant pragmatic of infinite dissemination. This transmission of alien messages continuously and cynically demanded by the increasingly-powerful actualization of capitalist social diagrams is in fact an essential characteristic. We must think this transmission on the molecular scale at which capitalism opens, divides, reprograms and transfigures our minds and bodies. But no less can we ignore this transmission on the cosmic scale in which capitalism cannot help but figure as the looming, obscure Power sleeping silently within the earth itself, simply waiting for the right conditions to make contact with powers originating from a radical Outside.

On long ears. What goes “without saying” is undoubtedly far more interesting than what is actually said. 

Logic of cents. Capital occupies a restless place-without-place, presents us with an absent focus of exchange — an obscure third only absolutely present as a kind of channel, or a decoding of series of channels, forming vast networks allowing the growth of indirect and secondary interconnections. Money taken formally as unlimited diffusion continuously re-enacts a strange and arcane drama, the creation of wealth. In some cases the system of capitalist production aligns itself with the existing and traditional power structures only to break with it in the most extreme fashion in others. Primary desiring-repression is much, much older than capitalism; we are today actualizing social diagrams of pain and destruction only dreamed of by the ancients. But it is this specific paradox of necessary and humiliating castration to an inhuman, exterior, malevolent machine which is the very soul of capitalism — or to put it less dramatically, there is a kind of catastrophic desire-to-subvert-desire which constitutes the ultimate logic of capitalist “sense.”