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Senselogic

April 5, 2015

Postnihilistic Speculations on That Which Is Not: A Thought-World

According to an Ontology of Non-Being by Cengiz Erdem

When everything appears similar, nothing really is…

~ Alain Badiou

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away…

 ~ Philip K. Dick

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism…

~ Fredric Jameson

If you are trapped within the dream of the other you are fucked…

~ Gilles Deleuze

The Satyr, at his first sight of fire, wished to kiss and embrace it, but Prometheus said: You, goat, will
mourn your vanished beard, for fire burns him who touches it, yet it furnishes light and heat, and is an
instrument of every craft for those who have learned to use it…

~ Plutarch

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil…

~ Socrates as quoted by Plato in “Phaedo“

Hermetico-Promethean Postnihilism

To begin at the beginning we shall say that philosophy is the dialectical process of truth in time, it is
an infinite questioning of that which is known, a continuity in change of the unknown, a practice of
situating eternity in time. Without a relation to the requirements of one’s own time philosophy may
still mean many things, but these do not amount to anything worthy of rigorous consideration much.
This doesn’t mean that philosophy must have an absolute conception of goodness and constantly
strive towards it. Quite the contrary, if anything, philosophy would much rather resist against the evil
within this inconsistent multiplicity falsely named world. No, there is no one world against which
philosophy can situate itself, but rather many multiplicities out of which philosophy infers meanings
and values in accordance with a better future in mind. Not necessarily better than today, but less bad
than it will have been if nothing is done to slow down worsening. So having an idea of a better future
is not necessarily imposing a totality, an absolute conception of goodness upon the multiplicity of
existents. What’s at stake might as well be that the resistance against evil in time is itself a creative
act sustaining the less worse condition of future existence. It’s all bad and it can only get worse, the
question is this: How can we decelerate this worsening condition of we humans, we animals and we
the plants?

My interest in science in general and neuroscience in particular derives from this understanding of
philosophical activity as a dialectical process in nature. For me science is not an object of philosophy
but a condition of it. Presumably you can already hear Badiou’s voice here, and rightly so I must say.
Badiou had once said that “philosophy is the conceptual organisation of eternity in time.” What, then,
is dialectic? Dialectic is simply “the unity of opposites,” as Fredric Jameson defines it in his Valences of
the Dialectic. Everything has within itself nothing and inversely. The self and the other are always
already reconciled, but in order to actualise this unity philosophy splits the one in such a way as to
sustain the process of its reconciliation within itself. The one is not, it all begins with two and
continues ad infinitum. Of course a designation such as Hermetico-Promethean postnihilism is
paradoxical, but this being paradoxial is itself creative of the space out of which something not only
new but also good, or less worse than that which is or could be, can emerge. That said, a positively
altered future itself only ever emerges from a split introduced in-between the past and the present,
the good and the bad…

Now, I see nothing bad in interrupting the process of negativity, but needless to say one cannot
achieve this by affirming it. One still needs negativity to interrupt negativity. It is in this sense that
nihilism turned against itself becomes a condition of progressive philosophy. If science is making a
huge progress while the whole planet is rapidly dying, what’s the point of that progress in science? It
becomes a meaningless activity for its own sake. Without a future there can be no science either, but
it is only by way of putting science into good uses that we can have a future. And when I say we I mean
we humans, we animals and we the plants. Paradoxical though as it may sound, robots are of no
concern to me, but enhancement technologies such as neuroplasticity softwares are…

I take whatever rings true to me in accordance with my intention. Intending something is not
necessarily willing without consciousness. One may be driven to anything at all, including willing
nothingness as Nietzsche has taught us, adding that “man would much rather will nothingness than
not will.” Although Nietzsche’s proclamation may be valid for some, it is not necessarily valid for all.
To say again now what I’ve already said some other time, I’m still up for consciously desiring good life.
That said, I reckon it’s not even worth mentioning that will, drive and desire are not the same thing. As
for the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness, we must return to Hegel as
always. There are indeed many illusions in this life, some for life yet some others not, some necessary
while some irrelevant. Not that I am one, and yet it’s not for nothing that Hegel had once said, “the
great man of his time is he who expresses the will and the meaning of that time, and then brings it to
completion; he acts according to the inner spirit and essence of his time, which he realizes.” This, I
think, is still true and ever will be, if we are to have a future worthy of the name, that is…

Being, Non-Being and Becoming Non-Identical of the Subject as ∅

If the one is not, nothing is. 

~ Parmenides

When it comes to philosophy I usually avoid dialogue, in that sense I am strictly Deleuzean, a man of
“free indirect speech”, always sustaining a kind of internal dialogue with the philosopher’s image of
thought he created in his mind. Rather than engaging in polemics with the philosophers, Deleuze
used to think with them, although not always in accordance with them, sometimes for and sometimes
against them, always disjunctively synthesizing affirmation and negation as well as transcendence
and immanence. For Deleuze the important thing was to bring out that which matters in thought.

Now, for Kant the thing-in-itself, or the noumenon, could be thought but couldn’t be known. We could
only know the transcendental ground of our thought, and therefore the thing-in-itself is not
submitted to change. For change requires the transcendental constitution of the subject to take place
in time. The subject constitutes and is constituted by the transformation of the thing-in-
itself(noumenon) into the thing-for-us (phenomenon).

In his Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes between the determinative and the reflective modes
of judgement.

If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, the judgement that subsumes the
particular under it is determinative. If, however, only the particular for which the universal is to
be found is given, judgement is merely reflective. [1]

If we keep in mind that the reflective mode of judgement reflects on particulars in such a way as to
produce universals to which they can be subjected, and that the determinative mode of judgement
determines a particular by subjecting it to a universal, it becomes understandable why among these
two it is the reflective mode which splits as it unites the subject of enunciation and the enunciated
subject. But it must also be kept in mind that the subject of enunciation which refers to the universal is
itself a constitutive illusion, or a regulatory idea necessary for the emergence of the subject as the
enunciated content. It is only in and through a position of non-being within and without being at the
same time that the becoming non-identical of the subject can take place. For change requires the
localisation of being in a particular world submitted to time as Badiou puts it in  his Being and
Event.Therein Badiou asserts that there can be multiplicities not submitted to change and there can
also be ones submitted to change. Change is not on the side of multiplicity but on the side of the
relationship between multiplicities. There can only be a relation between multiplicities in a particular
world. Change is the property of being when being is localised in a world. Change is not the destiny of
being as in Heraclitus, but is submitted to the relation between multiples. Hence Badiou can say that
“the one does not exist.” It exists neither as a totality as in Parmenides, nor as a multiplicity as in
Heraclitus. While for Heraclitus being is in constant change, for Parmenides being is that which never
changes. Kant splits being into two halves, one half of being ever changes(phenomenon), while the
other half of being never changes(noumenon). For Heraclitus there is only multiplicity, while for
Parmenides there is only one. If we have mutltiplicity then there is also change, if we have the one
there is no change at all. Being an atomist, Democritus says that being is composed of atoms and the
universe is composed of an infinity of atoms. Democritus is the atomic explosion of Parmenides and
the sub-atomic implosion of Heraclitus at the same time.[2]

We find ourselves on the brink of the decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one
and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistical
consumption. This decision can take no other form than the following: the one is not.[3]

Is there an existing totality before thought? If there is one, is there a part of this existing totality which
is outside change? We exist in a world of change and when we think the world we think its change. For
change to be thought there has to be an identity first. The relationship between identity and
difference is probably the oldest and most complicated philosophical problem. The two orientations
of thought concerning the problem of change and the interaction between identity and difference
have their roots in Socrates and Zeno as analysed by Badiou in Being and Event.

If one allows that being is being-in-situation—which means unfolding its limit for the Greeks—it
is quite true that in suppressing the ‘there is’ of the one, one suppresses everything, since
‘everything’ is necessarily ‘many’. The sole result of this suppression is nothingness. But if one
is concerned with being-qua-being, the multiple-without-one, it is true that the non-being of
the one is that particular truth whose entire effect resides in establishing the dream of a
multiple disseminated without limits. It is this ‘dream’ which was given the fixity of thought in
Cantor’s creation. Plato’s aporetic conclusion can be interpreted as an impasse of being,
situated at the deciding point of the couple of the inconsistent multiple and the consistent
multiple. ‘If the one is not, (the) nothing is’ also means that it is only in completely thinking
through the non-being of the one that the name of the void emerges as the unique conceivable
presentation of what supports, as unpresentable and as pure multiplicity, any plural
presentation, that is, any one-effect. Plato’s text sets four concepts to work on the basis of the
apparent couple of the one and the others: the one-being, the there-is of the one, the pure
multiple and the structured multiple. If the knot of these concepts remains undone in the final
aporia, and if the void triumphs therein, it is solely because the gap between the supposition of
the one’s being and the operation of its ‘there is’ remains unthought. This gap, however, is
named by Plato many times in his work. It is precisely what provides the key to the Platonic
concept par excellence, participation, and it is not for nothing that at the very beginning of the
Parmenides, before the entrance of the old master, Socrates has recourse to this concept in
order to destroy Zeno’s arguments on the one and the multiple.[4]

Badiou proclaims “the multiple as heterogeneous dissemination,”[5]  while  Žižek rightly criticizes
Meillassoux in particular and Speculative Realism in general for not having an adequate theory of the
subject for the present, for the time of being in change.

I think that, in its very anti-transcendentalism, Meillassoux remains caught in the Kantian topic
of the accessibility of the thing-in-itself: is what we experience as reality fully determined by
our subjective-transcendental horizon, or can we get to know something about the way reality
is independently of our subjectivity. Meillassoux’s claim is to achieve the breakthrough into
independent ‘objective’ reality. For me as a Hegelian, there is a third option: the true problem
that arises after we perform the basic speculative gesture of Meillassoux (transposing the
contingency of our notion of reality into the thing itself) is not so much what more can we say
about reality-in-itself, but how does our subjective standpoint, and subjectivity itself, fit into
reality. The problem is not ‘can we penetrate through the veil of subjectively-constituted
phenomena to things-in themselves’, but ‘how do phenomena themselves arise within the flat
stupidity of reality which just is, how does reality redouble itself and start to appear to itself ’.
For this, we need a theory of subject which is neither that of transcendental subjectivity nor
that of reducing the subject to a part of objective reality. This theory is, as far as I can see, still
lacking in speculative realism.[6]

Today philosophy has a tendency to think outside the contemporary world, whereas the goal of
Ancient Greek philosophy had been to find an orientation of thought for the good life in time. The
quest was how to live in accordance with a conception of goodness in mind. This is not an abstract
goal, but rather aims at transforming subjectivity as it is here and now.

If one took the point of being which seemed to be the smallest, much like a dream within sleep,
it would immediately appear multiple instead of its semblance of one, and instead of its
extreme smallness, it would appear enormous, compared to the dissemination that it is
starting from itself.[7]

In his Logics of Worlds, Badiou makes a distinction between being and existence.

I have posed that existence is nothing other than the degree of self-identity of a multiple-being,
such as it is established by a transcendental indexing. With regard to the multiple-being as
thought in its being, it follows that its existence is contingent, since it depends—as a
measurable intensity—on the world where the being, which is said to exist, appears. This
contingency of existence is crucial for Kant, because it intervenes as a determination of the
transcendental operation itself. This operation is effectively defined as ‘the application of the
pure concepts of the understanding to possible experience’. In my vocabulary—and obviously
with no reference to any ‘application’—this can be put as follows: the logical constitution of
pure appearing, the indexing of a pure multiple on a worldly transcendental. But, just as with
the object, Kant will immediately distinguish within this operation its properly transcendental
or a priori facet from its receptive or empirical one.[8]

As the subject’s intensity of self-consciousness increases, so does its pain and anxiety in the face of
death. This causes hopelessness and despair which may or may not lead to a total devastation of the
project of inverting and putting into the spotlight the nothingness at the centre of the subject.
Heidegger repeatedly puts all this down in Being and Time when he says that “being-towards-death is
angst.” One cure for expelling anxiety has been to believe in god, any other metaphysical construct, or
in some cases it has even taken the form of a materialist system of thought; in all these cases,
however, an escape is seen as a solution when in fact it is the problem itself. For our concerns, an
escapist attitude, and especially one that tries to go beyond the present, does not work at all, for what
we are looking for is a way of learning to make use of the reality of the death drive as an interior
exteriority constitutive of the subject as a creative agent of change at present, in the time of the living
and the dead at once. And here is the Lacanian definition of the subject referred to by Badiou towards
the very end of Being and Event…

I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am, there where I do
not think I am thinking.[9]

Why has there never been a noumenology but ever a phenomenology within the philosophical

field, and what if this doesn’t mean that there never will be one?

As a speculative attempt to  situate the thought-worlds  of ontology/epistemology  and

noumenology/phenomenology within one another, this essay aims at explicating why the life drive
and the death drive are rooted in transcendence, whereas immanent theory  requires conscious
desiring to produce new modes of being and thinking as yet not conceivable from within the dominant
model of projection-introjection mechanism based on identification. It even goes further than that by
way of presenting the life drive and the death drive, each divided within itself, as constitutive of the
two sides of a single projection-introjection mechanism driven by capitalist axiomatics governed by a
virtual domain of being beyond and yet immanent to the human-condition at present, at once a cause
and an effect of human existence which wills its own servility to, and subsumption under,  the
virtual world of capital driven by big-data-mining finance centers…

My primary objective  is to develop a strategy of reading/writing, thinking/acting or simply

living/being in accordance with  a philo-fictional thought-world in and through which it  becomes
possible to immanently negate and transcendentally affirm the concepts of life drive and death drive
as modes of being and thinking. I claim that by way of  turning these concepts from forms of
knowledge to modes of being and thinking, the life/death drives emerge as the two components of a
dynamic and mobile speculative apparatus born of and giving birth to a fragile cont(r)act between
immanence and transcendence, as well as between affirmation and negation, hence sustaining the
conditions of possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for immanently intervening in the
thought processes of contemporary nihilism in such a way as to transcend the Anthropocentric
modes of being and thinking inherent to it. This is a presentation of what I have designated
as affirmative recreation of that which is not…

A speculative move in the way of mapping the cartography of an ontology of non-being, of that which
is yet to come, post-nihilism clears or excavates the old ground, thereby suspending the dominant
presumptions, therefore rendering the void, non being, or the Real itself as the new ground on
and  out of which  a new subject can emerge  and present  the  paradoxical and contingent natures
of ‪Truth and Necessity, as well as the ‎non-correlation of Being and Thought… We subversively call
this subject the non-mortal subject beyond the Life-Death-Drives and inversely…

It begins to appear as a being but not yet as as an existent… Noumenology brings forth the force of
thought necessary to intervene in the process of its (self)entrapment and breaks the vicious cycle of
its own dispersal within itself. The nihil annihilates itself, the void is filled with a void, and hence the
intensity of the degree of existence increases, thought contracts to cope with the expansion of its
dimension and undergoes a  qualitative change…

The Dualities of Prometheus/Hermes and Projective-Identification/Introjection, or, A Genealogy

of the Non-Relation Between the Dialectical Couples of Ontology/Epistemology and
Noumenology/Phenomenology

The above subtitle attempts to say almost all in one go and probably fails in doing so even in two
goes. But this failure should not discourage the reader from even beginning to engage in an
encounter with this essay. This essay is a performative articulation of a totalizing gaze, a vision-in-
one if we are to use a Laruellean term, upon the philosophical concept of Phenomenology as a field of
study in this time of absolute torpidity. To be more precise we can say that this essay is a genealogy of
phenomenological theories of the world as it manifests itself within the contemporary climate of
thought, that is, at a period of transition from the 20th century to the 21st century, from Nihilism to
Post-Nihilism, away from a Life-Driven-by-Death, and towards the Non-Mortal-Subject beyond the
Life-Death-Drives…

If you are governed by the death-drive you constantly fail in achieving the goal but keep doing it in
spite of that, keep saying it, keep failing, perchance to fail better as Beckett would have put it. Lacan’s
interest in the concept of death-drive arises from a Kantian insight. Kant says that education or
cultivation does not target the animal in human, but the unruliness in human. This unruliness is the
death-drive itself. It is the site of the production process of eternal truths. Death-drive already
disturbs nature, but it is not yet culture. The subject as death-drive insists on the truth of the unknown.

Descartes was the most insistent philosopher on the truth of the unknown. One can even go so far as
to say that he was the first philosopher to have systematically took it upon himself to prove that
eternal truths can be created. The Cartesian subject is extremely paradoxical in that its claim to truth
rests on an impossibility; that there can be a beginning of an eternal being. The question is how can
something eternal have a beginning? Given a second thought this paradoxical situation resolves
itself. For it is not that the eternal truth did not exist before we realized it. It has always already
existed, but it is only now that we are coming to a realization of it. When Descartes says “I think,
therefore I am,” that’s precisely what he means. It is only in so far as I think of a being that it exists,
even if that being is me. For Descartes there can be an indiscernibility between thought and being.
Perhaps that’s where the melancholic Cartesian subject is stuck. For as Nietzsche once put it, “man
would much rather will nothingness than not will.”

In his analysis of Nietzsche’s eternal return Deleuze develops for the first time the idea that
repetition is the repetition of difference. One insists or subsists in what one says or does only insofar
as it dissolves itself into its molecular components in and through language. The violent action upon
the void within the subject constitutes the symbolic identity of the subject as split. This split subject
constantly moves away from what it thinks itself to be as it attempts to express itself in and through
language. The reason for that is its mode of being; a becoming in-between the unconscious drives and
the conscious desires; the subject as death-drive is a void within and without the symbolic at once.

The Deleuzean “univocity of being” is the flow itself, it is the flow of being becoming in-itself, and it is
only death that brings about the completion of this process, it is only in death that being becomes in-
itself, that is, as nothingness, as a void, as an absence, as non-being. And there, where something is
split from nothing, novelty takes place, it takes the place of nothingness and death, hence giving birth
to new life, an impersonal life, the life that is not of something, but the life that is non-being itself, the
being of death within life which drives it as an undercurrent. And therein also resides the link
between Deleuze’s concept of the impersonal consciousness, Jung’s collective unconscious and what
Nick Land would later call cosmic schizophrenia.

Philosophical dualities can play games of mutual supplementation of their terms, move

in circles ad nauseam, invert their duality, overturn their duality, and so  on, but they
always perpetuate the duality nonetheless. Philosophy never goes beyond a widened
cogito: any putative immanence it might have is limited to a self-reflection  or self-
affection. To think ‘of’ the Real is to miss it for the representation itself. Deconstruction
tried to break the mirror of representation by substituting the Other for Being. But still
the dyadic relation – and the decision – is there. A genuine transformation of thought, by
contrast, will not consist in playing new  games with representation, but rather in
determining representation through, as  Laruelle himself puts it, ‘a radically un-
representable agency or instance – more precisely, through a without-representation
that allows itself to be thought by means of representations which have been reduced
to the status of philosophically inert material’.[10]

One of the issues on which both Zizek and Badiou agree is that Plato is the first philosopher of the
traumatic incident. And one of the major insights of Plato is that an Idea is that which interrupts the
order of being. With the emergence of a new Idea another dimension intervenes the ordinary reality
and creates a rupture within the process of becoming. If we keep in mind the Parmenidean and the
Cartesian axiom that “thought is being”, it becomes clear why Ray Brassier, in his  article on That
Which is Not: The Entwinement of Truth and Negativity, pits against this stance the idea that “thought
is non-being” rather than being. Put otherwise, the correlate of thought is non-being rather than
being. Brassier also says in his article that “being and non-being are entwined.” To my mind the
interwoven nature of being and non-being signifies nothing but the correlation of becoming and
finitude. It is at this point that the question arises as to whether a dynamic infinity is possible. Is it
possible for change to take place within infinity? Can an eternal being not only exist but also change?

As Badiou exactingly puts it in his lecture on Eternity in Time, “philosophy is the conceptual
organisation of the relationship between time and eternity.” Therein Badiou distinguishes four distinct
conceptualisations of the immanence of eternity to time.

The first one of these is the mystical experience where eternity is reduced to a point in time.

The second one claims that the time is the realisation of eternity, eternity is time itself from the point
of view of becoming, becoming is the immanent realisation of something which is eternal in nature.
This second one is split within itself and has two different versions: Hegelian and Nietzschean…
Hegelian version sees time as the realisation of the absolute. For Hegel historical time is not in
contradiction with eternity, the history itself moves in the direction of the complete realisation of the
absolute idea; totality of time creates the absolute idea. In the second version of this second approach
developed by Bergson and Deleuze, history is replaced by the potency of life and infinity is
understood as life itself. The tension between time and eternity is resolved in the constant creative
capacity of life itself. For Bergson as it is for Deleuze, life is in time but goes beyond time, life is the
name of the immanence of eternity.

The third one is the Platonic conception of time as an image of eternity.

And the fourth one is the Cartesian claim that eternity can be created within time, that truth is a form
of eternity in time.

Badiou situates himself within the Cartesian tradition and clearly states that his whole project has
been to prove that eternal truths can be created within time.

As far as I know Heidegger’s aim in his Being and Time is precisely what Badiou claims the
philosophical task to be, namely “the conceptual organisation of the relationship between time and
eternity.” For Heidegger, being in time is being towards death, but rather than simply implying that
we will all die and there’s nothing we can do about it, Heidegger’s claim is that human finitude is a
condition of possibility for change to take place, that change can only take place within time, and also
that we humans should approach death with resoluteness. The fact of our mortality shouldn’t
paralyse us, quite the contrary, it should move us in the way of acting so as to change our condition of
being in the world. For Heidegger the meaning of death is not simply that we are all doomed because
of the inescapability of our eventual demise, but that the thought of death is itself an opening within
finitude. Is it worth mentioning that Heidegger does indeed introduce negativity, thought of non-being
into the order of being? Yes, it is worth mentioning, but it is not sufficient. For there’s always quite a
few more steps to be taken further in these fields where thought and language become one. And
Brassier is one of those who have taken some of these steps.

In his Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier asserts that “thought has interests that
do not coincide with those of the living.” If I understand him correctly, Brassier’s philosophical project
is driven by a will to philosophize in the name of those who are either dead or about to die; those who
live on the edge of life and on the verge of death at the same time. For Brassier nihilism is not a
closure but an opportunity for a new beginning, precisely because “to be able to think that which is,
we have to think that which is not.” As is clear from the title of his book, his goal is to unbind that which
is not, to give a voice to non-being. Contra Parmenides and Descartes, Brassier claims that the
correlate of thought is non-being rather than being and the capacity of thought to interrupt the usual
flow of things is something to be defended.

A traumatic incident usually interrupts the usual passage of time for the traumatized subject. It is as
though time doesn’t pass any more, time is frozen and the subject who has lost a loved one or had any
other kind of disfiguration in his/her life is stuck in this frozen time. The traumatized subject usually
locks him/herself at a time before that traumatic incident and is trapped within an endless process of
mourning. As I’ve put it in a  previous post, according to the orthodox interpretation of Freud’s
Mourning and Melancholia, this subject is melancholic. But as you may remember therein I also say,
referring to Zizek’s lecture On Melancholy, that according to Agamben’s unorthodox reading of
Freud’s text in his Stanzas, melancholia occurs not when the process of mourning fails and becomes
endless, but when the desire itself is lost rather than the desired object. And when the desire for the
object is lost the death-drive intervenes and splits the subject into the two always already within
itself; into something and nothing, in-between which there is less than nothing. The subject is
henceforth split within itself into that which it was before the traumatic incident and what it will have
been after the traumatic incident, into the subject before the loss and the subject after the loss. This
also means that the subject is divided by an absolute presence, a non-existent absent object, a lack of
lack. In a situation driven by a lack of lack the subject lives in another time within and without the
ordinary time of clocks at once. A time in which nothing is present as an absence, the time of the lack
of lack is the condition of possibility for the change of the status of the impossible within the pre-
dominant order of meaning/being to take place. And needless to say only therein can a new truth
emerge, wherein time takes the form of the space itself.

Driven by a negation of Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world as being-towards-death, the

thoughts of Deleuze-Badiou and Henry-Laruelle constitute a lineage of thought-world driven by a will
to immanence and affirmation nevertheless.  It is this despise of transcendence and negation
disguised as immanence and affirmation that constitutes a unilateral (Laruelle) and perhaps even
univocal (Deleuze) lineage common to them all, manifesting itself as a stance against the treatment
of that which is not as though it is that which is, culminating in a stance against God, that is, a
secularization of the infinite, it is this transcendental materialism/realism, this affirmation of the
immanence of eternity, this presentation of the human in human more human than the human which
we call postnihilism.

The infinite, then, is within finitude and inversely, so in order to think the infinite we have to think the
finite and inversely, that is, the thought of death within life and life within death. Although the thought
of death has a high price which the subject pays by a loss of mental and physical health, it is
nevertheless useful in opening up the way to limit experiences. The death drive devastates the
predominant conceptualisations of the “good” of civilized progress and the “bad” of barbaric regress.
The subject as the death drive situates itself as the traitor on the opposite pole of belief and faith in
immortality. In the place of statues representing immortality, it erects nothing. That way it confronts
the promised land of total security and harmony with a world governed by the anxiety of the feeling
of being surrounded by nothingness. In this world there remains no ground beneath the symbolic
order. Death is in the midst of life; it is life that surrounds death. Death is immanent to life, and life is a
finite process of transcending death.

There is this transcendental field of immanence which renders a non-mortal mode of being in the

world possible, neither for nor against it, but engagingly indifferent to it in such a way as to turn its
own alienation from mortality into its driving force in its attempt to demolish the faculty of finite
judgment and create the conditions of possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for an infinite
judgment to take place beyond the subject/object of a Law that is mortal, all too mortal.

One traverses the nothing in order to think something and say what he may against all odds. Absolute
affirmation is total negation, Deleuze’s mode of being and thinking… Consciousness is the knowing of
what we say, self-consciosness is the truth of what we say, it is the knowledge of what we are doing
when we say something, so there is indeed the introduction of a distinction between the subject of
enunciation and the enunciated content. The subject is always a formal manifestation of that which is,
it is that which is not, non-being, thought. This modification of the Parmenidean axiom concerning the
correlation of being and thought, this inversal, reversal or subversal of the Parmenidean subject-
object relations, constitutes and delivers a post-dialectical, that is, a post-nihilistic mode of being and
thinking which is situated beyond, before and after the life death drives and the death life drives, it is
the mode of being of the non-mortal subject, or the non-being of the mortal subject, call it what you
may, it is the becoming of what one already is, has always been, and will always be, that is,  an object
whose death is driven by life or a subject whose life is driven by death. As Deleuze puts in his Post-
script on the societies of control, when and if the subject becomes thought, non-being, life becomes a
resistance against its present tense or sense of self at present and a striving for its future absence or
the sense of its absence of self, its non-self in the future of its own life driven by death and its own
death driven by life.

The non-mortal subject within and without the predominant symbolic order is not only the cause, but
also the effect of its own alienation from mortal life. This regulatory idea of immortality, which is also
a constitutive illusion, is inspired by the post-structuralist theme of becoming non-identical as we see
in Laruelle, Deleuze and Derrida. If one could become non-identical, why would one not also become
non-mortal? If one could become alienated from one’s identity, why would one not also become
alienated from one’s mortality?  Why not become immortal in the sense of being devoid of death so as
to become capable of sublating the exploitations of this mortal, all too mortal life? What motivated me
to take immortality as a virtual mode of being was Badiou’s theory of the subject as infinity which
aimed at secularizing the concepts of truth and infinity. Badiou’s way  of secularizing the truth is
inspired by the 19th  century mathematician Georg Cantor’s method of secularizing the infinite. As
Badiou claims, the secularization of infinity started with Cantor who stated that there was not one, but
many infinities varying in size and intensity. From then onwards it became possible to link Deleuze’s
concepts of impersonal consciousness and transcendental empiricism with Badiou’s theory of the
subject of truth and Kant’s assertion that for reflective judgement to take place and turn the object
into a subject a transcendental ground is necessary.  For me a transcendental ground is necessary
only to the extent that it enables the subject to shake the foundation of its own mode of being and
opens a field for immanent critique to take place. In other words, the untimely indifference of
immortality is required in order to actively engage in an exposition of the exploitation of mortality in
this time…

The Subject as the Non-Real, Performing the Effects of the Real with the Real

Our philo-fiction begins, to borrow a term from Laruelle, with the  suspension of a philosophical
decision: that the ontological structures do exist outside the phenomenological world, that there is an
epistemology of being beyond the phenomenal world. It is the study of this noumenal politics of
phenomenal being which we call noumenology. It would be easy to choose the road more travelled
and simply designate our orientation as yet another version of nihilism…

A thought thinking itself is thinking nothing other than nothing. It thinks itself as its own object, which
means that it thinks nothing as something. This circular thought we designate as the thought of
nihilism. It is this thought thinking itself as the thought of nihilism which we name post-nihilism.
Primarily driven by the thoughts of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, François Laruelle and Michel Henry
respectively, the post-nihilistic thought attempts to  theorize the unilateral duality of the dialectical
conceptions of immanence/transcendence and affirmation/negation.

The nihil and the infinite are conjunctively and disjunctively presented as one, an act of engaged
indifference disjoins and conjoins them in one simultaneous movement of thought-force manifesting
and manifested by a modulation  as yet not conceivable from within the dominant projection-
introjection mechanism driven by correlationist axiomatics in which the subject as non-being
realizes its own (self)entrapment in a process of becoming other than itself, the executor of the
actualization of its own annihilation without end…

A revoiding of nothing and devoiding the void of its non-existent essence, it is a performative act of
thought in the way of presenting that which is within and without it less and more than itself at the
same time, a future anterior being-in-itself, nothing and everything at once…  Consequently this
subject takes it upon itself  the creation of the conditions of possibility for the generation of a post-
nihilistic thought-world ever yet to come, always already history, eternally here and now…

We live in a time of nihilism’s dispersal. This time in which we find ourselves constantly failing to
actualize the transition to another mode of being and thinking, we designate as postmodern nihilism.
But instead of calling for a resurrection of the past, of the before of postmodernity, that is, of
modernity, we call for a post-nihilistic approach to the famous questions of “what is to be done? what
can be done? how can it be done?” asked and answered in different ways by Marx, Nietzsche  and
Freud among many others. Presumably as we all know, that which is common to these three non-
philosophers is their will to take it upon themselves to change the axiomatic structure of the thought-
world in which they found themselves. By way of creating new critical, speculative and clinical
apparatuses of undertsanding, sensing and conceptualising in the way of transforming the world,
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud became probably the most eminent figures of 20th century
Prometheanism. They became the symbols of Man’s taking his own destiny in his own hands, stealing
the fire from the higher Gods up in the sky and delivering it to the people here on earth to be be put to
new uses not against but for all of us, we humans, we animals and we the plants…

A new Prometheus need not take the form of the ‘Modern Prince’, the party, if the latter
is regarded as a commanding height and centre supervenient on any other council,
association or organisational form. Collective control must involve the control and
‘recall’, to use that important slogan of delegation in communes and soviets, of its
inevitable instances of centralisation. But whether the horizon be one of radical reform
or revolution, a systemic challenge cannot but take on, rather than blithely ignore, the
risks of Prometheanism, outside of any forgetful apologia for state power or survivalist,
primitivist mirage. Most significantly, the unreflected habit of associating power’s
corruption with certain seemingly intractable contents—the possibility of violence, the
proliferation of bureaucracies, the mediation of machines—needs to give way to an
engagement with the social forms and relations of control. Warning against the menace
of Prometheanism at a time when the everyday experience of the immense majority is
one of disorientation, powerlessness and opacity—that is, one where knowledge, scale
and purpose are rent asunder—is simply to acquiesce in the exercise of power in the
usual sites and by the usual agents, in that particular mix of anarchy and despotism that
marks the rule of and for capital.[11]

As the exposition of an old problem’s imposition as a new problem, the  inversion and/or the
subversion of a problem of decision disguised as a limitation to thought, Speculative Realism has
become an anchoring term for what we consider to be the emergence of a post-nihilistic thought-
world. Hermetically Promethean in orientation, driven by a will to sustain a  unilateral duality of
Prometheus and Hermes as modes of being and thinking, Speculative Realism as a form of post-
nihilism which thinks and lives according to nothing as something, is a venture into the Noumenal
world of transcendent a priori(s) within the Phenomenal realm itself, if we can make such a
distinction, that is… With roots reaching back to Kant and Schelling, unless to Zeno of Citium the
founder of Stoicism and Epictetus the pragmatic, eventually finding its utmost expression in the
the  transcendental materialism/realism of François Laruelle (non-philosophy and quantum
mechanics) and Michel Henry (meta-psychology and theology), Speculative Realism constitutes a
post-nihilistic thought-world wherein the distinctions between idealism/materialism,
immanence/transcendence and affirmation/negation have collapsed in on themselves. A
philosophical decision introducing a split between these dialectical couples is suspended, as such it
has once again become possible to create another mode of being and thinking, and perchance even
another world perhaps, beyond the vicious cycles of the axiomatics of capital, away from a life driven
by death and towards more non-mortal and less mortal subjects of the future to come. It is the future
itself that has become possible again, future is yet again possible in this new conceptualisation of
space as time and time as space, a future anterior…

Philosophy originates with one fundamental principle: that everything is

philosophisable.  This is philosophy’s narcissism, its philocentrism. Laruelle calls this
the ‘Principle of Sufficient Philosophy’. Parmenides is rightfully the (covert) patron saint
of all philosophy in seeing a perfect adequation between being and thought  (that we
saw Badiou, for one, endorse). Taking exception to this, Laruelle playfully asserts that
‘not everything is philosophisable, such is the good news I bring’. Philosophy must have
a limit, namely whatever is non-philosophy, which must itself exist at least in principle
(or as a last resort), on pain of otherwise assuming  that philosophy is indeed the
measure of everything. In place of this principle of self-sufficiency or auto-positionality,
non-philosophy sees no justification for philosophy’s supposed ability to apply itself to
everything – the philosophy of art, the philosophy of science, and so on – in a manner
that allows it a fundamental status in the discourse of those subjects. It has limits: its
autonomy is relative (to the Real) and not absolute (to itself). For Laruelle, the conditions
of possibility  of experience and the object of experience are the same. As a
consequence, there  is no first philosophy. Non-philosophy accordingly installs an
equality between  the ‘fundamental’ and the ‘regional’ – though without losing their
heterogeneity – in a drastically anti-hierarchical approach.[12]

This brings us to the issue of the split nature of reality itself. The melancholic Cartesian subject
cannot access the reality in-itself precisely because the reality is always already split in-itself.
Strange though as it may sound the in-itself is itself split. And stranger still, that split is not within
something, but rather between something and nothing. We can say that the gap between the real and
the symbolic is included within reality itself. Perhaps that’s why Zizek insists on the need to affirm the
mediation of illusion, the necessity of fantasy in accessing reality as it is in-itself. At this juncture one
cannot help but remember Meillassoux’s dictum, “the only thing necessary is contingency itself.” And
therein resides the call for the need to establish a non-relation to the world for us, in the way of
constituting a relation to the world as it is in-itself, as pure multiplicity. This requires the production of
a new mode of being in the world in such a way as to be in relation to the without within this world, to
an outside inside this world, a non-correlationist relation to nothing itself. Is it worth mentioning that
Deleuze’s “impersonal consciousness” is something akin to that mode of being? It is this
transcendental inconsistency itself that regulates, governs and drives the Deleuzean plane of
immanence, and precisely for this reason Deleuze calls it the transcendental field of immanence in
his last book, Pure  Immanence: A Life, wherein he attempts to clarify his “transcendental
empiricism.” Let it suffice for the time being to say that transcendental materialism is repetitively
different from transcendental empiricism, in that what’s at stake in transemp is the action of the
unconscious upon the subject, whereas in transmat the situation is retroactively reversed in a
progressive way; it is the subject’s indiscernibility from the unconscious that’s at stake in transmat.
Influenced by and influencing Zizek, Adrian Johnston’s transmat adds to Deleuze’s transemp the role
of the external matter itself as internally constituted in the self-constitutive process of the subject.
Profoundly Hegelian indeed to say the least…

We open up passages in the internal structure of the dominant projection-introjection mechanism

through which new meanings flow in new directions and initiate change in the way of opening up new
paths towards new modes of being and thinking… A creative revolution is always a live act, a process
of progressive change in and through which the fundamental principles of our way of life are
shattered and created anew in such a way as to act out a continuity in change contiguous with the
demands of the present…

Signifying a stance away from Freud and towards Lacan, the center of attention has shifted from
Eros/Thanatos (life drive and death drive) to Hermes/Prometheus (the drives to which they
correspond are yet to be found). But the formal structure of thought remains the same in that Melanie
Klein’s projective-identification and introjection mechanism is still constitutive of the governing
principle, the philosophical decision common to all is that the Real is external to the subject and can
be an object be it ontological/epistemological or noumenal/phenomenal.

In his Organs Without Bodies, Zizek undertakes a critique of Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the Body
Without Organs, claiming that what Deleuze and Guattari have in mind when they use the concept of
desire is precisely the Lacanian drive, or the Freudian death-drive. This confusion of concepts on
behalf of D&G is in stark contrast with Deleuze’s use of the concept in Difference and Repetition. For
therein Deleuze attributes a positive quality to the death-drive, just like Lacan does later in his career.

If we keep in mind that drive is the fixation on impossibility and desire is the relation of being to lack,
we can see the profoundly Lacanian dimension of Deleuze’s thought as he wrote Difference and
Repetition. Even in The Logic of Sense Deleuze still affirms desire as lack. It is only with his
collaboration with Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus)
that leads Deleuze to create a new concept of desire, desire as production. But the whole thing turns
against itself in time and the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of desire turns out to be the Lacano-
Freudian concept of death-drive.

In the act of life in-between birth and death there is a cycle of expansion and contraction at work;
without the one the other cannot be… Life as a creative act  is a resistance against reaction which is a
disease that feeds on life as a creative act…  One is eventually doomed unless one stops reacting to
the reactive forces and instead takes it upon oneself to create something new out of one’s engaged
indifference to the governing rules of the game imposed by the predominant order of meaning and
being…

Wherever there is an increase in the intensity of existence there emerges something new… It’s all a
matter of the degree of being alive; the more dead you are the less intense your existence is and
hence less creative you become in time… We call it being comfortably numb, or dumb as it is
generally put by the public; all these details in the way of becoming more exacting and precise as to
the nature of life as a creative act…

Just as the flower is the reproductive organ of a plant, so too the human brain can be considered a
reproductive organ rather than a destructive one, depending of course, on the thoughts it produces…
At the end of the day both the flower and the brain create and emit sensible signs; the human brain
produces thoughts and the flowers produce scents… Long story short, you are actually a mobile
plant…

Here is yet another repressed truth for you… If all these repressed truths were allowed to manifest
themselves in our lives with real effects, then most of the problems of humanity – which are used as
excuses to access inordinate measures of financial gain and uncontrollable power over the lives of
many – would cease to exist at once…

The Non-Mortal Subject Engagingly Indifferent to the Life-Death-Drives

Probably the most philosophical one among all the Saramago novels, Death at Intervals portrays a
world wherein death has ceased its operations and stopped taking lives. Of all the countries in the
world, only within the particular country the name of which is not given in the way of creating a sense
of universality, people do not die any more. Confronted with an unexpected absence of death and a
sudden presence of immortality here and now, the dominant system as a whole (both in its state form
and in the private domain) begins to collapse in on itself. If that is the case, then Saramago is implying
that the predominant order is run by the dominance of death. Death having a central role to play in
the predominant order of governance means that a subtraction of death from the system will bring
about a void, a kind of black hole within the system, a gap causing an inward spiraling, an interruption
of life as it is, with death at its center, now devoid of it, producing a contraction of the dominant mode
of being alive…

We live in such times and spaces wherein time and space have themselves become rare
commodities… If we keep in mind that scarcity is that which determines the value of a commodity, we
can understand why and how the interruption of the ordinary run of things, socially accepted forms of
using time and sapce, can open the gates to a new mode of being and thinking in a new space and
time…

In a world where time is used as the currency, wherein you can earn more time at work to sell it for
goods, foods and other services, you are caught in an ever regressive process of production and
consumption in and through which time becomes capital and capital becomes life… Once your time as
capital runs out, you die…

The situation depicted in the film In Time (2011) is very similar to contemporary capitalism in which
value of your life is measured by how much money you have in the bank, higher the number all the
more immune to death you feel you are… The rich survive death forever, while the poor run out of
time and die.

Capitalism is a mega death-drive, an ever regressive process of production and consumption in and
through which time becomes capital… The value of your life is measured by how much money you
have in the bank, higher the number all the more immune to death you feel you are… In capitalism the
future has succumbed to retrospection, but still there are signs all around for the possibility of a
reversal, one only needs to have the eyes to see them in this time, as Mark Fisher puts it in his
Capitalist Realism.

What Zeno of Elea actually wants to say is that we can only perceive the world as it is for us, not as it is
in-itself… In a similar fashion, we perceive time only as divided units represented by clocks rather
than as it is in-itself, that is as eternal… In other words, human brain introduces motion into
immobility and finitude into eternity in the process of perception because humans are naturally
mortal becomings, whereas being in-itself is infinite and immobile, an absolute and eternal void
continually consuming that which it produces… Driven by this kind of a self-creative/destructive void
within and without at the same time, a human can only perceive itself as it desires itself to be, rather
than as it really is in-itself, independently of human consciousness… To cut a long story short let us
recall Kant and simply say this: The things-in-themselves can always be thought, but can never be
known in any form other than they are for us, we humans, we animals and we the plants.

Now, we know that according to Plato time doesn’t really exist and that it is merely a representation
of the real, an image of eternity beyond life as we live it… Needless to say it is the human finitude, the
fact of mortality that produces human subjects as beings in time. The change of seasons, for instance,
signifies the passage of time for humans, but this is an illusion, because the change of seasons
doesn’t mean anything for the universe itself, it signifies the passage of time only for mortal human
consciousness… For nature and the universe as they are in-themselves it’s business as usual in a
never ending circular movement, a continuity in change within itself ad infinitum… Never mind the
clocks, time outside of capital is itself eternal, and once you break the vicious cycle of capitalist
axiomatics you shall yourself become immortal, for then you will have also broken out of the
dialectics of time and capital, therefore transcending this mortal, all too mortal life imposed upon you
by the predominant order of being.

How can we produce new thoughts and new texts given the exhaustion of the orthodox
form of thinking at the end of twentieth-century Continental philosophy? But the ‘non-’
in non-philosophy is  not, as we will see, either the destruktion, deconstruction,
withdrawal from, or end  of philosophy. It implies the generalisation, universalisation
and most consistent  implementation of theory; one that rethinks the history of
philosophy in a radically new style. His is a ‘post-deconstructive’ or ‘non-Heideggerian
deconstruction’searching for the means, tool, or organon by which we might renew
theory without contenting ourselves simply with deconstructing philosophy.[13]

How would our lives change if we were to become capable of imagining and conceptualising
ourselves as immortal beings? If we keep in mind that we are always already locked within the
vicious cycle of the life and death drives governed by the law of capital, it becomes easier to
understand why we need to break this vicious cycle of Capitalism and its governor, liberal-democracy,
based on unjust representations, in order to create, produce or present the realm of love beyond the
rotary motion of drives. But it must also be kept in mind that when we say beyond, we are talking
about a beyond which is always already within the predominant symbolic order and yet not within the
reach of mortal beings. It is a beyond only from the perspective of the present state. In our scenario,
immortality is not something to be attained, rather, it is a virtual potential or an actual capacity within
every mortal being, awaiting to be realised. The realisation of the immortality within us, or the
realisation of the infinite potential that life contains, depends on our proper use of our powers of
imagination as wll as of our conceptualisation. Let us imagine and conceptualise ourselves as
immortal beings then, which we already are, but cannot enact because of the finitude imposed upon
us by the already existing symbolic order. Would we need to get out of this order to become
immortal? Yes and no. Yes, because the within which we said infinity resides is a within which is
exterior only from the point of view of the already existing order. No, because only from within the
already existing order can we present an outside of this order,  “an outside”, in Deleuze’s words
apropos of Foucault and Blanchot, “which is closer than any interiority and further away than any
exteriority.”

In his Theoretical Writings Alain Badiou attempts to separate himself from the Romantic
understanding of infinity, and the pursuit of immortality. According to Badiou, contemporary
mathematics broke with the Romantic idea of infinity by dissolving the Romantic concept of finitude.
For Badiou, as it is for mathematics, the infinite is nothing but indifferent multiplicity, whereas for the
Romantics it was nothing more than a “historical envelopment of finitude.” Behind all this, of course, is
Badiou’s strong opposition to historicism and temporalisation of the concept. It is in this context that
Badiou can say, “Romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalisation of the concept as a
historical envelopment of finitude.”[14]

Mathematics now treats the finite as a special case whose concept is derived from that
of the infinite. The infinite is no longer that sacred exception co-ordinating an excess
over the finite, or a negation, a sublation of finitude. For contemporary mathematics, it is
the infinite that admits of a simple, positive definition, since it represents the ordinary
form of multiplicities, while it is the finite that is deduced from the infinite by means of
negation or limitation. If one places philosophy under the condition such a mathematics,
it becomes impossible to maintain the discourse of the pathos of finitude. ‘We’ are
infinite, like every multiple-situation, and the finite is a lacunal abstraction. Death itself
merely inscribes us within the natural form of infinite being-multiple, that of the limit
ordinal, which punctuates the recapitulation of our infinity in a pure, external ‘dying.’[15]

The political implications of the move from Romantic infinity to mathematical infinity can be
observed in Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. In this little book Badiou criticizes
the hypocrisy of human rights for reducing being-human to being a mortal animal. Of course Badiou
admits that what is called human is indeed a mortal animal, but what he objects to is the exploitation
of this state of being. Against this deprecative attitude, Badiou pits the immortal subject, or rather, the
subject who is capable of realising his/her immortality.[16]

For Laruelle, the establishment of a radically immanent philosophy, one which  escapes
transcendence, cannot be achieved in and through traditional philosophy at all: it can only
be instituted through a ‘non-philosophical’ thought whose subject matter is the history of
philosophy itself. This non-philosophy will thus appear  similar to philosophy, but only
because its raw-material is traditional philosophy in all of its inevitable intermixtures with
and consequent corrupting transcendentalisation of the ‘Real’ or ‘One’. Echoing the ideas of
Derrida, Laruelle claims that transcendence is the fundamental shape of all philosophy. But
Laruelle’s escape  is not into the formalities of writing – philosophy as literature – nor a
restituted  (negative) theology. Non-philosophy is not just a theory but a practice. It re-
writes  or re-describes particular philosophies, but in a non-transcendental form –
nonaesthetics, non-Spinozism, non-Deleuzianism, and so on. It takes philosophical concepts
and subtracts any transcendence from them in order to see them, not as representations,
but as parts of the Real or as alongside the Real. This practice  is called ‘cloning’,
‘determination-in-the-last-instance’, or ‘force (of) thought’. In this respect, Laruelle’s non-
philosophical discourse would be a movement between any polarised philosophies, given
the subtraction of the Real from their positions.[17]

There can be no future without the legacy of Marx, for he is beyond the artificial divisions imposed
upon humanity as a whole. Marx transcends the illusory differenciations such as race, ethnicity,
religious orientation, and introduces a split between the real, the actual, and the virtual. That split is a
new form of differentiation which brings justice and equality down on earth rather than leaving it up
in the sky, infinitely postponed to a non-existent life after death in the incapable hands of a non-
existent being commonly known among we the human mortals as God…

A truth comes into being through those subjects who maintain a resilient fidelity to the
consequences of an event that took place in a situation but not of it. Fidelity, the
commitment to truth, amounts to something like a disinterested enthusiasm, absorption
in a compelling task or cause, a sense of elation, of being caught up in something that
transcends all petty, private or material concerns.[18]

Some sentences always ring true, that’s why we designate them as one among many manifestations
of eternal and yet singular truths… A truth is that which once established remains eternally true in its
singularity… Truth is an infinite multiplicity which nevertheless belongs to a particular time and
space but also expresses a part of being which doesn’t change… To become capable of touching the
real and manifesting a truth of one’s time requires a sensitivity to that which persists in its existence
as an affirmative negativity… This negativity is affirmative because it only negates the world and life
as they exist for humans at present, not as they are in themselves… A truth always emerges out of
this affirmative negativity which sees world and life as they are in-themselves, independently of the
human consciousness… A truth, therefore, lays the foundations of a future to come which is based on
reality as it is in-itself rather than its particular representations for us… Every truth, once it is
realized in actuality, smashes the illusions propagated by the contemporary militarist-capitalism…
The subject of a truth must always be prepared to shake its own foundations in the way of a better
future, a future liberated from the shackles of lies and slavery imposed upon humanity for more
money and power at all costs…

Altering the Supposedly Predestined Future

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. ~ Karl
Marx

We live on the cusp of things, an age when the human Anthropocene is giving way to the
inhuman. Nature no longer exists. We’re all artificial now. The engine of inhumanism is eating
reality alive so that nothing human will as Land once said “get out alive”. We’re seeing the
human vanish before our eyes, the last remnants of the humanist traditions are imploding, the
worlds of metaphysical bric-a-brac are giving way to the triumph of sciences which are far
stranger than philosophy which is actually quite conservative and conserving. I know I talk of
Zizek, Badiou, Land, et. al… but in truth I’m a post-nihilist who has already crossed the post-
human divide, the zone of no return where whatever we’re doing is part of some hyperstitional
collective madness of constructing the future out of the ruins of a failed and failing world of
humans into the inhuman worlds which seem to be imploding toward us out of the future.~ S.C.
Hickman

Unfortunately the future has changed, it’s not the same good old brighter future anymore… Earth is
rapidly going down the drain and we cannot even slow down the process… One only needs to look at
science-fiction movies to see this: Most of them used to imagine a better future on Earth, but today
this is reversed; the utopian imagination has turned against itself and most of these movies have
become dystopias imagining a darker future and rather grim days to come… Of course many humans
are aware of this fact, but they cannot help being driven towards a hell on Earth nevertheless…
Acceptance of reality as it is doesn’t mean affirming it, one has to negate the current state of affairs in
order to alter reality and create at least a less bad future for all of us, we humans, we animals and we
the plants…

Hegel, probably the greatest philosopher of all time, had defined dialectic as “the unity of opposites”,
as Jameson puts it in his Valences of the Dialectic… We can interpret this as the being-one-in-
essence of the apparently opposite entities… Hence becoming is the coming out of that which is
within… The self and the other are always already juxtaposed, or intertwined, but their roles are
continually reversed over time… Just as life turns into death over time, an idea turns into its opposite
as well, eventually becoming one with that which it is not… Now, we find ourselves in a situation
wherein a victim is victimized twice in the name of “politically correct” values of civilised Western
societies… Democracy and freedom turn against themselves to actualise themselves… The paradox
of the human-condition at present is beyond measure, there is an inherent contradiction within the
status-quo itself… In our world today the aggressors are protected and the victims are condemned in
the name of justice… The problem is that this conception of justice itself signifies a massive
injustice… These are dangerous waters, but we shouldn’t be afraid of “tarrying with the negative”
against all odds… 

The countries keep falling into a crisis created by the very system in which they lose themselves…
The crisis doesn’t exist before the governments create it… That’s how capitalism works, a crisis is
created and then coped with… The failure of the states to cope with the problems piling up increases
by the minute as the future rapidly disappears in an orgy of indifferent multiplicities governed by
fools of all kinds… Unfortunately ignoring the problems doesn’t make them go away and that is
precisely what our governments are doing… Making the same mistakes and expecting different
results over and over again… Everything keeps getting worse all the while… The system is already
totally bankrupt…

The rise of fascism is ongoing with full force all over the planet… An eye for an eye still keeps turning
the whole world blind as usual…  The planet  is becoming one big gas chamber… The states and
governments keep organising themselves against their own people all around the Earth… That’s the
way Militarist Capitalism works, it’s not even neo-liberalism anymore (that would be too optimistic a
term)… They create crisis in order to violently cope with it so that the people are left with no
alternative and submit to the order of the day… They don’t allow people even to imagine a different
world, hence the nihilistic despair drowning us in the capitalist ideology itself, which feeds on nothing
but inequality and injustice as well as ethnic-religious conflict all around the planet…

To be able to change the course of events leading to a mostly man-made catastrophic future, or an
artificial apocalypse, to act in the way of preventing an early demise of the organic life forms on
Earth as we know it, and perhaps even become capable of altering these course of events in the right
direction, we have to understand how the system in which we find ourselves works first, as Brassier
has put it in an interview… And perhaps more importantly, we also have to understand how our minds
work  in this process of understanding how the world works, as Zizek has put it numerous times in his
books and lectures… Otherwise we mess things up and everything gets even worse than it already
is… Change for the better requires the force of thought… And that is precisely why  we preach
becoming more human than human as we have come to know it…

Humans don’t learn, they only remember the truth… What we call truth is actually the forgetting of
the ignorance of the past known as knowledge… A truth emerges only as the realisation of the falsity
of history, it is a process, not a state… It’s not for nothing that we keep saying it can only get worse for
all of us… The reason is that we humans have abolished rational thought itself together with the
fidelity to the unknown truths of our time, as Badiou reckons here as well as elsewhere…

The arrival of Anthropocene means nothing but the death of the human as we come to know it… It
signifies a stage of human-condition in which everyone suffers from the damage caused on the
planet… Our existence as humans has direct negative effects on other beings such as plants and
animals with which we share this habitat… The Anthropocene must become conscious of its
responsibility and take it upon itself to radically change its ways and means…

A massive amount of dying takes place in the womb for the transformation of the fetus into a
human… Many of our cells die before we are born, we die so that we can be born… Our birth as
humans requires our death as fetuses… Life is driven by death and inversely… The spaces between
your fingers are the presences of non-being in being… The interactive process between your being
and non-being is your becoming, your life is your death, a process, not a state… In this sense it is
analogous to Badiou’s conception of truth as the process of situating eternity in time in accordance
with a less bad future for all of us, we humans, we animals and the plants…

Indefinite Consequences: The Finite Effects of the Real as Infinitude

As I was reading this post of his I felt a deep underlying, almost religious tone in his voice; the
power of the absolute filtering its banal surprise (maybe a non-God, non-All, rather than the
mundane gods or God religion or the philosophers). Whatever the absolute may be, it seems to
ride the edges, or borderlands of  between thought and non-being rather than the
metaphysical realms of Being. Though secular through and through the incorporation of the
themes of eternity, time, mortality, immortality, etc. like those others who have influenced our
thinking: Nietzsche, Badiou, Zizek, Laruelle, Henry, Deleuze, etc. – and, lest we forget, Freud
(Lacan: lack?) with his mythology of drives, that endless war of eros and thanatos, life and
death, love and war – comes through Erdem’s essay. What struck me above all is the
underlying mythos and movement toward transcension, toward elsewhere, immortality,
transcendence. Of course as he says, this is nothing new, and it is everywhere in our present
transcendental field of speculation, as if between a totalistic closure upon metaphysics had
brought with it – not a rational kernel, but rather an irrational kernel of ancient thought. For do
we not hear that oldest of songsters, Orpheus, the Greek singer, theologian, poet, philosophical
forbear out of whose roots Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle and their ancient antagonists
Leucippas, Democritus, and Lucretius down to our day still wage a war over the body of a dead
thought (God?). ~ S.C. Hickman

Of course the dreadful has already happened, in several occasions throughout history we should say,
that’s not even worth mentioning in our nihilistic times; but then again, also needless to say is that the
worst is yet to come and it will only come when and if the number of people responding to this simple
and direct question of “whether we are really going to let a bunch of greedy selfish fools do in this
whole planet” by saying “get on with it” exceeds the number of those who simply and directly say no…
We reckon there is still hope for a global postnihilistic society…

Capitalism is not only failing real big time, it is crumbling and disintegrating into very little pieces by
the minute as well… Capitalism cannot sustain itself under its own conditions, because it is becoming
more and more vulnerable as the technology produced by it keeps turning against the capitalists
themselves… So we can say that capitalism is a system that continually develops, but this
development is also its process of falling apart, its progress is also its regress, such is its paradox…
And needless to say its process of turning against itself is also its turning against humanity and
against the world in general, with all those plants and animals residing therein… It is a self-
destructive organisation of social, political and global economic relations, a system driven by its own
annihilation… To cut a long story short and put it simply: “The shit is fucked up and stuff.”

And yet there is indeed a spectre haunting our world in this time as Marx has once put it… It’s the
spectre of a future to come, unless it is the ghostly presence of the future here and now… For the
future itself has become possible again after many movies which could very well imagine the end of
the world but could neither conceive of, nor at least consider the possibility of even a slight change
within capitalism itself, let alone imagine a future without capitalism at all, as the saying goes I should
say…

Engagingly indifferent to the ordinary reality of capitalism driven by and driving the exploitation of
mortality on a massive scale, this spectral subject takes it upon itself the difficult task of “traversing
the fantasy” and reaching beyond  “the night of the world”, thereby creating the conditions of
possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for the generation of a postnihilistic thought-world
ever yet to come and always already history, unless it is the eternal memory of the here and now, in-
the-last-instance of humanity, consequently, that is…

Reference Matter

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Wilder Publications,
2008), 13

[2] Alain Badiou, Being and Event, Meditation Two: Plato, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum,
2005), 31-7

[3] Badiou, BE, 23

[4] Badiou, BE, 36

[5] Badiou, BE, 33

[6] Slavoj Žižek, Interview with Ben Woodard, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and
Materialism, Graham Harman, Nick Srnicek, Levi Bryant (eds.), (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 415

[7] Badiou, BE, 34

[8] Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Section Two, Kant, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2009), 237

[9] Badiou, BE, 431

[1o] John Mullarkey, Post-Ccontinental Philosophy, (London & New York: Continuum, 2006), 141-2

[11] Alberto Toscano, The Prejudice Against Prometheus, STIR, 2011.

[12] Mullarkey, 139.

[13] Mullarkey, 135.

[14] Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, (London: Continuum,
2006), 38.

[15] Badiou, 38

[16] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001), 41

[17] Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy, 134.

[18] Peter Hallward, “Introduction” in Alain Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2002), x

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain.  Theory of the Subject, trans. and intro. B. Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009)

Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005)

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

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009)

Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000)

Badiou, Alain. Theoretical Writings, trans. eds., Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2006)

Brassier, Ray. ‘That Which is Not: Philosophy as Entwinement of Truth and Negativity’ in Stasis, No.1
2013

Brassier, Ray. ‘Lived Experience and the Myth of the Given’, Filozofski Vestnik, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, 2011

Brassier, Ray. ‘The View from Nowhere’ in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture, Vol. 8,
No.2, 2011.

Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)

Brassier, Ray. ‘Axiomatic heresy: the non-philosophy of François Laruelle’, Radical Philosophy, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994)

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)

Grant, Iain Hamilton. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2008)

Graham Harman, Nick Srnicek, Levi Bryant (eds.),The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and
Materialism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011)

Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etskorn, (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1973)

Henry, Michel. ‘Phenomenology of life’, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2003.

Henry, Michel. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Sanford University Press, 1998)

Henry, Michel. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. K. McLaughlin, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
UP, 1983)

Henry, Michel. Barbarism, trans. and intro. Scott Davidson, (London: Continuum, 2012),

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 2008)

Johnston, Adrian. “Alain Badiou, the Hebb-event, and Materialism Split from Within.” Angelaki 13 (1):
27–49, 2008.

Laruelle, François. ‘The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter‘, trans. Ray Brassier, in Pli, Vol.
12. What Is Materialism? 2001, 33-40.

Laruelle, François. Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. A. P. Smith, (New York: Continuum, 2010)

Laruelle, François, ‘The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication‘
in Parrhesia 9 (2010): 18-22.

Laruelle, François, ‘The End Times of Philosophy‘ in continent. 2.3 (2012): 160-166.

Laruelle, François, ‘A Summary of Non-Philosophy’ in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 8.
Philosophies of Nature, 1999.

Laruelle, François, ‘Identity and Event’ in  Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 9. Parallel
Processes, 2000.

Laruelle, François. Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. A. P. Smith, (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Mullarkey, John. Post-Continental Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2006)

Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006)

Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012)

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Cengiz Erdem
Received his master's and doctoral degrees from The University of East Anglia in England,
Norwich. He specializes in culture and communication, creative writing and critical theory,
cinema, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has written many articles and is the author of
five books...
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***
|~|
Kültür ve iletişim, eleştirel teori, edebiyat ve yaratıcı yazarlık
alanlarında uzmanlaşmış, yüksek lisans ve doktorasını İngiltere’de tamamlamıştır. Felsefe,
iletişim, sinema, psikanaliz ve edebiyat alanlarında yazdığı pek çok makalenin yanı sıra
yayımlanmış beş kitabı vardır... View all posts by Cengiz Erdem

 Alain Badiou, Apocalypse, Cengiz Erdem, Cultural and Critical Theory, Death Drive, François Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze,
Hegel, Immortality, Kant, Martin Heidegger, Marx, Melanie Klein, Neuroplasticity, Neuroscience, Nietzsche, Nihilism,
Non-Philosophy, Noumenology, Ontology, Philo-fiction, Philosophy, Politics, Post-Nihilism, Post-Nihilistic
Speculations, Psychoanalysis, Ray Brassier, Saramago, Science and Metaphysics, Slavoj Žižek, Speculative Realism,
The Life Death Drives, Transcendental Materialism, Transcendental Realism, Writings in English
 affirmative recreation, Alain Badiou, Capitalism, Cengiz Erdem, François Laruelle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze,
Hegel, Immortality, Jacques Lacan, Kant, Laruelle, Marx, Michel Henry, Nietzsche, nihilism, Non-philosophy, Ontology,
Philo-fiction, Philosophy, Politics, Postnihilism, Quantum Thought, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Slavoj Žižek,
Speculative Realism, The Life Death Drives, Transcendental Materialism, Zizek
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Ontology of Non-Being by Cengiz Erdem”

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