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The Logic of Sense

Abstract

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Preface: From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics

this theory is inseparable from paradoxes: sense is a nonexisting entity, and, in fact, maintains very special relations with nonsense. Page 12

Preface: From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics Page 12

The preface introduces the core idea of the book: a theory of sense that is paradoxical, a non-existent entity, and intimately connected with nonsense. It sets the stage by referencing sources like Lewis Carroll and the Stoics, suggesting the exploration will involve logic and language games as much as philosophical concepts.

#on/philosophy #on/sense

First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming

First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming Page 15

Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time. Page 15

Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy at once. Page 16

The paradox of this pure becoming, with its capacity to elude the present, is the paradox of infinite identity (the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time-of future and past, of the day h(ยทfonยท and th(โ€ข day after, of more and less, of two much and not enough, of actiw and passiw, and of cause and effect). It is language which fixes th(โ€ข limits (the moment, for exampl(', at which the excess Page 16

begins), but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming ("A red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and ... if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds"). Page 17

which way, which way?" asks Alice, sensing that it is always in both directions at the same time, so that for once she stays the same, through an optical illusion; the reversal of the day before and the day after, the present always being eluded-"jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam to-day''; the reversal of more and less: five nights are five times hotter than a single one, "but they must be five times as cold for the same reason"; the reversal of active and passive: "do cats eat bats?" is as good as "do bats eat cats?"; the reversal of cause and effect: to be punished before having committed a fault, to cry before having pricked oneself, to serve before having divided up the servings. Page 17

Thus the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. Page 17

Paradox is initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction, but it is also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities. Page 17

The first series explores the paradoxes inherent in "pure becoming," where things are simultaneously moving in opposite directions (e.g., becoming larger and smaller at the same moment). This unlimited, paradoxical becoming is linked to the simulacrum and challenges conventional notions of good sense (single direction) and common sense (fixed identities), suggesting that when language focuses on events and verbs of becoming, traditional identities dissolve.

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Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects

Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects Page 18

First, there are bodies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions, and the corresponding "states of affairs." These states of affairs, actions and passions, are determined by the mixtures of bodies. Page 18

But to the degree that there is a unity of bodies among themselves, to the degree that there is a unity of active and passive principles, a cosmic present embraces the entire universe: only bodies exist in space, and only the present exists in time. There are no causes and effects among bodies. Rather, all bodies are causes-causes in relation to each other and for each other. In the scope of the cosmic present, the unity is called Destiny. Page 18

Second, all boditยทs are causes in relation to each other, and causes for each other-but causes of what? They are causes of certain things of an entirely different nature. These ~/Teets anยท not boditยทs, but, properly speaking, "inrnrporl'al" mtitil's. Thl'y ar(' not physical qualities and Page 18

properties, but rather logical or dialectical attributes. They are not things or facts, but events. Page 19

Thus time must be grasped twice, in two complementary though mutually exclusive fashions. first, it must be grasped entirely as the living present in bodies which act and are acted upon. Second, it must be grasped entirely as an entity infinitely divisible into past and future, and into the incorporeal effects which result from bodies, their actions and their passions. Only the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future. But only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely. These are not three successive dimensions, but two simultaneous readings of time. Page 19

[The Stoics distinguished] radically two planes of being, something that no one had done before them: on the one hand, real and profound being, force; on the other, the plane of facts, which frolic on the surface of being, and constitute an endless multiplicity of incorporeal beings. Page 19

But what we mean by "to grow," "to diminish," "to become red," "to become green," "to cut," and "to be cut," etc., is something entirely different. These are no longer states of affairs-mixtures deep inside bodies-but incorporeal events at the surface which are the results of these mixtures. Page 20

Incorporeal effects are never themselves causes in relation to each other; rather, they are only "quasi-causes" following laws which perhaps express in each case the relative unity or mixture of bodies on which they depend for their real causes. Page 20

Thus freedom is preserved in two complementary manners: once in the interiority of destiny as a connection between causes, and once more in the exteriority of events as a bond of effects. For this reason the Stoics can oppose destiny and necessity. Page 20

this split always refers us back to language, either to the existence of a declension of causes or, as we shall see, to the existence of a conju9ation of effects. Page 20

This section elaborates on the Stoic distinction between physical bodies and their actions/passions (existing in a temporal present and acting as real causes) and incorporeal events or effects (existing at the surface and in the unlimited time of the Aion, acting as quasi-causes). This fundamental duality establishes a frontier between things and events, bodies and language, and introduces a split in causality.

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Third Series of the Proposition

Third Series of the Proposition Page 26

The first is called denotation or indication: it is the relation of the proposition to an external state of affairs (datum). The state of affairs is individuated; it includes particular bodies, mixtures of bodies, qualities, quantities, and relations. Denotation functions through the association of the words themselves with particular images which ouaht to "represent" the state of affairs. Page 26

The denotating intuition is then expressed by the form: "it is that," or "it is not that." Page 26

It would be wrong to treat them as universal concepts, for they are formal particulars (sinauliers) which function as pure "designators" or, as Benveniste says, indexicals (indicateurs). These formal indexicals are: this, that, it, here, there, yesterday, now, etc. Proper names are also indexicals or designators, but they have special impor-tance since they alone form properly material singularities. Page 27

A second relation of the proposition is often called "manifestation." It concerns the relation of the proposition to the person who speaks and expresses himself. Manifestation therefore is presented as a statement of desires and beliefs which correspond to the proposition. Desires and beliefs are causal inferences, not associations. Desire is the internal causality of an image with respect to the existence of the object or the corresponding state of affairs. Correlatively, belief is the anticipation of this object or state of affairs insofar as its existence must be produced by an external causality. Page 27

it makes denotation possible, and inferences form a systematic unity from which the associations derive. Page 27

The primacy of manifestation is confirmed by linguistic analysis, which reveals that there are in the proposition "manifesters" like the special particles I, you, tomorrow, always, elsewhere, everywhere, etc. In the same way that the proper name is a privileged indicator, "I" is the basic manifester. But it is not only the other manifesters which depend on the "!": all indicators are related to it as well. Page 27

denotation to manifestation, a displacement of logical values occun which is represented by the Cogito: no longer the true and the false, but veracity and illusion. In his celebrated analysis of the piece of wax, for example, Descartes is not at all looking for that which was dwelling in the wax-this problem is not even formulated in this text; rather, he shows how the I, manifest in the Cogito, grounds the judgment of denotation by which the wax is identified. Page 28

We ought to reserve the term "signification" for a third dimension of the proposition. Here it is a question of the relation of the word to universal or 9eneral concepts, and of syntactic connections to the impli-cations of the concept. Page 28

Signification is defined by this order of conceptual implication where the proposition under consideration intervenes only as an element of a "demonstration," in the most general sense of the word, that is, either as premise or as conclusion. Thus, "implies" and "therefore" are essentially linguistic signifiers. "Implication" is the sign which defines the relation between premises and conclusion; "therefore" is the sign of assertion, which defines the possibility of affirming the conclusion itself as the outcome of implications. Page 28

Demonstration must not be understood in a restricted, syllogistic or mathematical sense, but also in the physical sense of probabilities or in the moral sense of promises and commitments. In this last case, the assertion of the conclusion is represented by the moment the promise is effectively kept. 2 Page 28

the condition ef truth, the aggregate of conditions under which the proposition "would be" true. Page 28

For if manifestation itself is primary in relation to denotation, if it is the foundation, it is so only from a very specific point of view. To borrow a classic distinction, we say that it is from the standpoint of speech (parole), be it a speech that is silent. In the order of speech, it is the I which begins, and begins absolutely. In this order, therefore, the I is primary, not only in relation to all possible denotations which are founded upon it, but also in relation to the significations which it envelops. But precisely from this standpoint, conceptual significations are neither valid nor deployed for themselves: they are only implied (though not expressed) by the I, presenting itself as having signification which is immediately understood and identical to its own manifestation. Page 29

But if another domain exists in which significations are valid and developed for themselves, significations would be primary in it and would provide the basis of manifestation. This domain is precisely that of language (langue). In it, a proposition is able to appear only as a premise or a conclusion, signifying concepts before manifesting a subject, or even before denoting a state of affairs. It is from this point of view that signified concepts, such as God or the world, are always primary in relation to the self as manifested person and to things as designated objects. Page 29

the conclusion can be detached from the premises, but only on the condition that one always adds other premises from which alone the conclusion is not detachable. Page 30

circle of the proposition. Page 31

Whether we ought to be content with these three dimensions of the proposition, or whether we should add afourth-which would be sense-is an economic or strategic question. It is not that we must construct an a posteriori model corresponding to previous dimensions, but rather the model itself must have the aptitude to function a priori from within, were it forced to introduce a supplementary dimension which, because of its evanescence, could not have been recognized in experience from outside. Page 31

It is undeniable that all denotation presupposes sense, and that we position ourselves strai9ht away within sense whenever we denote. Page 31

If these significations collapse, or are not established in themselves, personal identity is lost, as Alice painfully experiences, in conditions where God, the world, and the self become the blurred characters of the dream of someone who is poorly determined. Page 32

signification can never exercise its role of last foundation, since it presupposes an irreducible denotation. Page 32

One is perpetually referred from the conditioned to the condition, and also from the condition to the conditioned. ror the condition of truth to avoid this defect, it ought to have an element of its own, distinct from the form of the conditioned. It ought to have somethin9 uncond1tioned capable of assuring a real genesis of denotation and of the other dimensions of the proposition. Thus the condition of truth would be defined no longer as the form of conceptual possibility, but rather as ideational material or "stratum," that is to say, no longer as signification, but rather as sense. Page 33

Sense is the fourth dimension of the proposition. The Stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed <!{ the proposition, is an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition. Page 33

This section introduces the traditional three dimensions of a proposition: denotation (relating words to things/states of affairs), manifestation (relating the proposition to the speaker's beliefs/desires), and signification (relating words to concepts and implications). It argues that these dimensions form a circle, requiring a fourth dimension, Sense, as an unconditioned element (an incorporeal event at the surface) to ground their genesis.

#on/philosophy #on/language #on/propositions #on/sense

Fourth Series of Dualities

Fourth Series of Dualities Page 37

ft is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal. Page 24

"the substance of things hoped for, and the existence of things not seen." Page 25

The continuity between reverse and right side replaces all the levels of depth; and the surface effects in one and the same Event, which would hold for all events, bring to language becom-ing and its paradoxes. Page 25

Sense is that which is expressed. Page 34

In truth, the attempt to make this fourth dimension evident is a little like Carroll's Snark hunt. Perhaps the dimension is the hunt itself, and sense is the Snark. It is difficult to respond to those who wish to be satisfied with words, things, images, and ideas. For we may not even say that sense exists either in things or in the mind; it has neither physical nor mental existence. Shall we at least say that it is useful, and that it is necessary to admit it for its utility? Not even this, since it is endowed with an inefficacious, impassive, and sterile splendor. This is why we said that in fact we can only infer it indirectly, on the basis of the circle where the ordinary dimensions of the proposition lead us. It is only by breaking open the circle, as in the case of the Mobius strip, by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its genetic power as it animates an a priori internal model of the proposition.'ยฐ The logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism. Only empiricism knows how to transcend the experiential dimensions of the visible without falling into Ideas, and how to track down, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom at the limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience. Page 34

There are many noemata or senses for the same denotatum: evening star and morning star are two noemata, that is, two ways in which the same denotatum may be presented in expressions. Page 34

The noema is not given in a perception (nor in a recollection or an image). It has an entirely different status which consists in not existing outside the proposition which expresses it-whether the proposition is perceptual, or whether it is imaginative, recollective, or representative. Page 35

Let us consider the complex status of sense or of that which is expressed. On one hand, it does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it; what is expressed does not exist outside its expression. This is why we cannot say that sense exists, but rather that it inheres or subsists. On the other hand, it does not merge at all with the proposi-tion, for it has an objective (objectite) which is quite distinct. What is expressed has no resemblance whatsoever to the expression. Page 35

Sense is both the expressible or the expressed ef the proposition, and the attribute ef the state of effairs. It turns one side toward things and one side toward propositions. But it does not merge with the proposition which expresses it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things. It is this aliquid at once extra-Being and inherence, that is, this minimum of being which befits inherences. 12 It is in this sense that it is an "event": on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state ef affairs. We will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself. The event belongs essentially to language; it has an essential relationship to language. But language is what is said of things. Page 36

The eve.nt subsists in language, but it happens to things. Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense. This frontier does not mingle or reunite them (for there is no more monism here than dualism); it is rather something along the line of an articulation of their difference: body/ language. Comparing the event to a mist rising over the prairie, we could say that this mist rises precisely at the frontier, at the juncture of things and propositions. As a result, the duality is reflected from both sides and in each of the two terms. On the side of the thing, there are physical qualities and real relations which constitute the state of affairs; there are also ideational logical attributes which indicate incor-poreal events. And on the side of the proposition, there are names and adjectives which denote the state of affairs; and also there are verbs which express events or logical attributes. On one hand, there are singular proper names, substantives, and general adjectives which indi-cate limits, pauses, rests, and presences; on the other, there are verbs carrying off with them becoming and its train of reversible events and infinitely dividing their present into past and future. Page 38

To pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression-without pausing at the intermediaries, namely, at manifestation and signification. It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes, but only to that which it expresses, that is, to sense. This is the final displacement of the duality: it has now moved inside the proposition. Page 39

in many of Carroll's poems, one wit-nesses the autonomous development of two simultaneous dimensions, one referring to denoted objects which are always consumable or recipients of consumption, the other referring to always expressible meanings or at least to objects which are the bearers of language and sense. These two dimensions converge only in an esoteric word, in a non-identifiable aliquid. Take, for example, the refrain of the Snark: "They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; I They pursued it with forks and hope"-where the "thimble" and "fork" refer to designated instruments, but "hope" and "care" to considerations of sense and events (sense, in Carroll's works, is often presented as that which one must "take care of," the object of a fundamental "care"). The strange word "Snark" is the frontier which is stretched as it is drawn by both series. Page 40

The fourth series delves deeper into the nature of Sense as an incorporeal entity that is the "expressed" of the proposition and the "attribute" of the state of affairs. It acts as a boundary or frontier between things and propositions, not merging them but articulating their difference at the surface. Sense is likened to a mist or a phantom, difficult to grasp directly but necessary for the genesis of propositional dimensions.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/duality #on/surface

Fifth Series of Sense

Fifth Series of Sense Page 42

Sense is never only one of the two terms of the duality which contrasts things and propositions, substantives and verbs, denotations and expressions; it is also the frontier, the cutting edge, or the articulation of the difference between the two terms, since it has at its disposal an impenetrability which is its own and within which it is reflected. Page 42

The paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation.

The paradox ef regress, or ef indefinite proliferation. Page 42

Sense is like the sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think their conditions. Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak; I would not be able to begin without this presupposition. In other words, I never state the sense of what I am saying. But on the other hand, I can always take the sense of what I say as the object of another proposition whose sense, in turn, I cannot state. I thus enter into the infinite regress of that which is presupposed. Page 42

Frege's paradox. Page 43

"The name of the song is called 'Haddock's Eyes' -"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. - "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name of the song is called. The name really is 'The A9ed A9ed Man. ' " -"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the son9 is called'?" Alice corrected herself. -"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"-"Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.-"! was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sittin9 on a Gate'! . .. " Page 43

But we can be satisfied with a regress of two alternating terms: the name which denotes something and the name which denotes the sense of this name. This two-term regress is the minimal condition of indefinite proliferation. Page 44

This section introduces the paradox of indefinite proliferation or regress: sense is always presupposed in speech, but cannot be stated directly; attempting to state the sense of a proposition leads to another proposition whose sense must also be presupposed, creating an infinite chain, exemplified by Carroll's "Haddock's Eyes" dialogue.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/paradox #on/regress

The paradox of sterile division, or of dry reiteration.

The paradox ef sterile division, or ef dry reiteration. Page 45

One of the most remarkable points of Stoic logic is the sterility of sense-event: only bodies act and suffer, not the incorporeal entities, which are the mere Page 45

rl'sults of ,Hยทtions and passions. This paradox may be called the Stoics' paradox. Page 46

"The stratum of expression-and this constitutes its pecu-liarity-apart from the fact that it lends expression to all other intentionalities, is not productive. Or if one prefers: its productivity, its noematic service, exhausts itself in expressin9." Page 46

The two paradoxes, that of infinite regress and that of sterile division, form the two terms of an alternative: one or the other. If the first forces us to combine the greatest power with the greatest impotence, the second imposes upon us a similar task, which we must later on fulfill: the task is to combine the sterility of sense in relation to the proposition from which it was extracted with its power of genesis in relation to the dimensions of the proposition. Page 46

This section presents the paradox of sterile division: despite being results of bodily actions and passions, incorporeal sense-events are themselves impassive and sterile, lacking causal power. The philosophical task is to reconcile this sterility with sense's power to generate or organize the dimensions of the proposition.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/paradox #on/stoicism

The paradox of neutrality. or of essence's third estate.

The paradox c!f neutrality. or <!{ essence's third estate. Page 46

Sense is strictly the same for propositions which are opposed from the point of view of quality, quantity, relation, or modality. Page 46

Sense is always a double sense and excludes the possibility that there may be a "good sense" in the relation. Events are never causes of one another, but rather enter the relations of quasi-causality, an unreal and ghostly causality, endlessly reappearing in the two senses. It is neither at the same time, nor in relation to the same thing, that I am younger and older, but it is at the same time and by the same relation that I become so Page 47

The event, for its part, must have one and the same modality, in both future and past, in line with which it divides its presence ad infinitum. If the event is possible in the future and real in the past, it is necessary that it be both at once, since it is divided in them at the same time. Page 47

The first state of essence is essence as signified by the proposition, in the order of the concept and of conceptual implications. The second state of essence is essence as designated by the proposition in the particular things in which it is involved. But the third state of essence is essence as sense, essence as expressed-always in this dryness (animal tantum) Page 48

and this splendid sterility or neutrality. It is indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the general and to the particular, to the personal and to the collective; it is also indifferent to affirmation and negation, etc. In short, it is indifferent to all opposites. This is so because all of these opposites are but modes of the proposition considered in its relations of denotation and signification, and not the traits of the sense which it expresses. Page 49

This section explores the paradox of neutrality: sense is indifferent to the logical and ontological oppositions (like affirmation/negation, universal/singular) that characterize propositions and things. It operates as a "double sense" or quasi-causality that goes in both directions at once, establishing Sense as a neutral "third estate" distinct from the essences grasped by signification and denotation.

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The paradox of the absurd, or of the impossible objectS.

The paradox ~f the absurd, or of the impossible objectS. Page 49

the propositions which designate contradictory objects themselves have a sense. Their denotation, however, cannot at all be fulfilled; nor do they have a signification, which would define the type of possibility for such a fulfillment. Page 49

Impossible objects-square circles, matter without extension, perpetuum mobile, mountain without valley, etc.-are objects "without a home," outside of being, but they have a precise and distinct position within this outside: they are of "extra being"-pure, ideational events, unable to be realized in a state of affairs. Page 49

If we distinguish two sorts of beings, the being of the real as the matter of denotations and the being of the possible as the form of significations, we must yet add this extra-being which defines a minimum common to the real, the possible and the impossible. For the principle of contradiction is applied to the possible and to the real, but not to the impossible: impossible entities are "extraexistents," reduced to this minimum, and insisting as such in the proposition. Page 49

This section addresses the paradox of the absurd: propositions describing contradictory or impossible objects (like square circles) still possess sense, even though they lack denotation (no real object exists) and signification (no logical possibility). These impossible objects exist as "extra-being" or pure ideational events, highlighting sense's detachment from the realms of the real and the possible.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/paradox #on/absurd

Sixth Series on Serialization

Sixth Series on Serialization Page 50

The paradox of indefinite regress is the one from which all the other paradoxes are derived. Now, regress has, necessarily, a serial form: each denoting name has a sense which must be denoted by another name: n 1 ~ n 2 ~ n 3 ~ n4 โ€ขโ€ขโ€ข Page 50

But if, instead of considering the simple succession of names, we consider that which alternates in this succession, we see that each name is taken first in the denotation which it brings about, and then in the sense which it expresses, because it is this sense which serves as the denotation of the other name. Page 50

the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity ef at least two series. Page 50

Alice is the story of an oral resress, but "regress" must be understood first in a logical sense, as the synthesis of names. The homogeneous form of this synthesis subsumes under it two heterogeneous series of orality: to eat/to speak, consumable things/expressible senses. The serial form itself therefore refers us to the already described paradoxes of duality and forces us to address them again from this new point of view. Page 51

The same duality, we have seen, occurs outside, between events and states of affairs; at the suiface, between propositions and denoted objects; and inside the proposition between expressions and denotations. Page 51

The law governing two simultaneous series is that they are never equal. One represents the signifier, the other the signified. Page 51

We call "signifier" any sign which presents in itself an aspect of sense; we call "signified," on the contrary, that which serves as the correlative to this aspect of sense, that is, that which is defined in a duality relative to this aspect. What is signified therefore is never sense itself. In a restrained sense, signified is the concept; in an extended sense, signified is any thing which may be defined on the basis of the distinction that a certain aspect of sense establishes with this thing. Page 51

it is always the case that one series has the role of the signifier, and the other the role of the signified, even if tht'se roles are interchanged as we change points of view. Page 52

Jacques Lacan has brought to light the existence of two series in one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. First series: the king who does not see the compromising letter received by his wife; the queen who is relieved to have hidden it so cleverly by leaving it out in the open; the minister who sees everything and takes possession of the letter. Second series: the police who find nothing at the minister's hotel; the minister who thought of leaving the letter in the open in order better to hide it; Dupin who sees everything and takes back possession of the letter. Page 52

the essential appears when small or great differences predominate over resemblances and become pri-mary; in other words, when two quite distinct stories are developed simultaneously, or when the characters have a vacillating and ill-determined identity. Page 52

first, the terms of each series are in perpetual relative displacement in relation to those of the other (thus, for example, the position occupied by the minister in Poe's two series). There is an essential lack of correspondence. Page 53

There is thus a double sliding of one series over or under the other, which constitutes both, in a perpetual disequilibrium vis-a-vis each other. Page 54

Second, this disequilibrium must itself be oriented: one of the two series -the one determined as signifying, to be precise, presents an excess over the other. For there is always a blurred excess of signifier. Page 54

Finally, we reach the most important point, a very special and paradoxical case, which ensures the relative displacement of the two series, the excess of the one over the other, without being reducible to any of the terms of the series or to any relation between these terms. The letter in Lacan's commentary on Edgar Allan Poe's story, for example, is one such case. Page 54

What are the characteristics of this paradoxical entity? It circulates without end in both series and, for this reason, assures their communication. It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series. It is the mirror. Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc. It guarantees, therefore, the convergence of the two series which it traverses, but precisely on the condition that it makes them endlessly diverge. Page 54

We must say that the paradoxical entity is never where we look for it, and conversely that we never find it where it is. As Lacan says, it fails to observe its place (elle manque a sa place). 6 It also fails to observe its own identity, resemblance, equilibrium, and origin. Page 55

But they are strictly simultaneous in relation to the entity by means of which they communicate. They are simultaneous without ever being equal, since the entity has two sides, one of which is always absent from the other. It behooves it, therefore, to be in excess in the one series which it constitutes as signifying, and lacking in the other which it constitutes as signified: split apart, incomplete by nature or in relation to itself. Its excess always refers to its own lack, and conversely, its lack always refers to its excess. Page 55

The sixth series explores the necessary consequence of the regress paradox: the emergence of serial form, specifically the coexistence of at least two heterogeneous series (signifier and signified). These series are in constant disequilibrium and displacement, linked by a paradoxical entity (like Lacan's letter) that circulates between them, being simultaneously present in both while failing to occupy a fixed place or identity.

#on/philosophy #on/serialization #on/signifier #on/signified

Seventh Series of Esoteric Words

Seventh Series of Esoteric Words Page 56

We find first two series ef events with sli9ht internal differences bein9 re9ulated by a strange object. Page 56

Undoubtedly, these two series are successive in relation to each other, yet simultaneous in relation to the strange object-in this case, an eight-handed watch with reversing pin which never follows time. On the contrary, time follows it. It makes events return in two ways, either in a becomingmad which reverses their sequential order, or with slight variations according to the Stoic fatum. The young cyclist, who falls over a box in the first series of events, now proceeds uninjured. But when the hands of the watch return to their original position, the cyclist lies once again wounded on the wagon which takes him to the hospital. It is as if the watch knew how to conjure up the accident, that is, the temporal occurrence of the event, but not the Event itself, the result, the wound as an dernal truth. Page 56

two series of events with areat internal and accelerated d![ferences being regulated by propositions, or at least by sounds and onomatopoeias. Page 57

The transitions from one series to another, and the communication between series, are generally secured through a proposition which begins in one series and ends in another, or through onomatopoeia, that is, a sound which partakes of both. Page 57

we find two series of propositions ( or rather, one series of proposi-tions and one series of "consumptions," or one series of pure expres-sions and one series of denotations). These series are characterized by great disparity, and are regulated by means of an esoteric word. Page 57

One type is formed by contracting the syllabic elements of one proposition, or of many propositions which follow one another. Page 57

For example, in Sylvie and Bruno (chapter 1), ''_y'reince" takes the place of "Your royal Highness." Page 57

esoteric words of this first type form a connection, a synthesis of succession which bears upon a single series. Page 57

Tl II' 1 ยทsotl'ric words which are characteristic of Carroll, however, lwlong to another type. They belong to a synthesis of coexistence intended to guarantee the conjunction of two series of heterogeneous propositions, or of dimensions of propositions. Page 58

the best example of this was the word "Snark": it circulates throughout the two series of alimentary and semiological orality, or throughout the two dimensions of the proposition-the denotative and the expressive. Page 58

This word therefore is "called" by names which indicate evanescences and displacements: the Snark is invisible, and the Phlizz is almost an onomatopoeia for something vanishing. Or again, the word is called by names which are quite indeterminate: aliquid, it, that, thing, gadget, or "whachamacallit." Page 58

the word has no name at all; it is rather named by the entire refrain of a song, which circulates throughout the stanzas and causes them to communicate. Or, as it is the case with the Gardener's song, the word is named by the conclusion of each stanza which brings about the communication between premises of two different genres. Page 58

we .find 9reatly ramified series being regulated by portmanteau words and constituted if necessary throu9h esoteric words C!f the previous kind. Page 58

They are defined by their function of contracting several words and of enveloping several senses ("frumious" = fuming+ furious). Page 58

Jabberwock is undoubtedly a fantastic animal; but it is also a portmanteau word, whose content, this time, coincides with its function. In fact, Carroll suggests that it is formed from "wocer" or "wocor," which means offspring or fruit, and "jabber," which expresses a voluble, animated, or chattering discussion. It is thus as a portmanteau word that "Jabber-wock" connotes two series analogous to those of "Snark." It connotes a series of the animal or vegetable provenance of edible and denotable objects and a series of verbal proliferation of expressible senses. It is of course the case that these two series may be connoted otherwise, and that the portmanteau word does not find in them the foundation of its necessity. Page 59

the portmanteau word is grounded upon a strict disjunctive synthesis. Page 60

the function of the portmanteau word always consists in Page 60

the ramification of the series into which it is inserted. This is the reason why it never exists alone. It beckons to other portmanteau words which precede or follow it, and which show that every series is already ramified in principle and still further ramifiable. Page 61

Michel Butor said it very well: "each of these words can act as a switch, and we can move from one to another by means of many passages; hence the idea of a book which does not simply narrate one story, but a whole ocean of stories." Page 61

When the esoteric word functions not only to connote or coordinate two heterogeneous series but to introduce disjunctions in the series, then the portmanteau word is necessary or necessarily founded. Page 61

The esoteric word in general refers at once to the empty square and to the occupant without place. Page 61

three sorts of esoteric words: contractin9 words, which perform a synthesis of succession over a single series and bear upon the syllabic elements of a proposition or a succession of propositions in order to extract from them their composite sense ("connection"); circulatin9 words, which perform a synthesis of coexistence and coordina-tion between two heterogeneous series and which directly and at once bear upon the respective senses of these series ("conjunction"); and disjunctive or portmanteau words, which perform an infinite ramification of coexisting series and bear at once upon words and senses, or syllabic and semiological elements ("disjunction"). The ramifying function or the disjunctive synthesis offers the real definition of the portmanteau word. Page 61

The seventh series categorizes esoteric words into three types (contracting, circulating, and portmanteau), based on their function in synthesizing or disjoining series. Portmanteau words are highlighted as particularly important for their role in contracting multiple senses and enacting a disjunctive synthesis that leads to the infinite ramification of series, embodying the paradoxical element traversing different levels of language and meaning.

#on/philosophy #on/language #on/esoteric-words #on/serialization

Eighth Series of Structure

Eighth Series of Structure Page 62

Levi-Strauss has indicated a paradox in the form of an antinomy, which is similar to Lacan's paradox: two series being given, one signifying and the other signified, the first presents an excess and the latter a lack. By means of this excess and this lack, the series refer to each other in eternal disequilibrium and in perpetual displacement. Page 62

The primordial signifier is of the order of language. Page 62

the signified in general is of the order of the known Page 62

"The Universe signified long before we began to know what it was signifying ... Man, since his origin, has had at his disposal a completeness of signifier which he is obstructed from allocating to a signifed, given as such without being any better known. Then- is always an inadequacy between the two." Page 62

Any society whatsoever has all of its rules at once-juridical, religious, political, economic; laws governing love and labor, kinship and marriage, servitude and freedom, life and death. But the conquest of nature, without which it would no longer be a society, is achieved progressively, from one source of energy to another, from one object to another. This is why law weighs with all its might, even before its object is known, and without ever its object becoming exactly known. It is this disequilibrium that makes revolutions possible. It is not at all the case that revolutions are determined by technical progress. Rather, they are made possible by this gap between the two series, which solicits realignments of the economic and political totality in relation to the parts of the technical progress Page 63

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator-computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about. Page 63

There is, necessarily, '_"floating signifier, which is the servitude of all finite thought, but also the promise of all art, all poetry, all mythic and aesthetic invention." We would like to add that it is the promise of all revolutions. And then there is on the other side a kind of floated signified, given by the signifier "without being thereby known," without being thereby assigned or realized Page 63

What is in excess in the signifying series is literally an empty square and an always displaced place without an occupant. What is lacking in the signified series is a supernumerary and non-situated given-an unknown, an occupant without a place, or something always displaced. These are two sides of the same thingtwo uneven sides-by means of which the series communicate without losing their difference. Page 64

1) There must be at least two heterogeneous series, one of which shall be determined as "signifying" and the other as "signified" ( a single series never suffices to form a structure). Page 64

2) Each of these series is constituted by terms which exist only through the relations they maintain with one another. To these relations, or rather to the values of these relations, there correspond very particular events, that is, singularities which are assignable within the structure. Page 64

a structure includes two distributions of singular points corresponding to the base series. And for this reason, it is imprecise to oppose structure and event: the structure includes a register of ideal events, that is, an entire history internal to it Page 64

for example, if the series include "characters," it is a history which connects all the singular points corresponding to the positions of the characters relative to one another in the two series Page 64

3) The two hcttยทrngeneous series converge toward a paradoxical clement, Page 64

which is their "differentiator." This is the principle of the emission of singularities. This element belongs to no series; or rather, it belongs to both series at once and never ceases to circulate throughout them. It has therefore the property of always being displaced in relation to itself, of "being absent from its own place," its own identity, its own resem-blance, and its own equilibrium. Page 65

In short, it has the function of bringing about the distribution of singular points; of determining as signifying the series in which it appears in excess, and, as signified, the series in which it appears correlatively as lacking and, above all, of assuring the bestowal of sense in both signifying and signified series. Page 65

We can conclude from this that there is no structure without series, without relations between the terms of each series, or without singular points corresponding to these relations. But above all, we can conclude that there is no structure without the empty square, which makes everything function. Page 65

This section defines 'structure' based on the relation between at least two heterogeneous series (signifying/signified) characterized by singularities (ideal events). The structure functions through a paradoxical element (like a "floating signifier" or "empty square") that traverses the series, embodying excess and lack, ensuring their disequilibrium, and ultimately distributing singularities and bestowing sense, demonstrating that structure and event are not opposed.

#on/philosophy #on/structure #on/series #on/singularities

Ninth Series of the Problematic

Ninth Series of the Problematic Page 66

What is an ideal event? It is a singularity-or rather a set of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, "sensitive" points. Page 66

The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is quite indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general-and to their oppositions. Singularity is neutral. On the other hand, it is not "ordinary": the singular point is opposed to the ord. I mary. Page 66

not only are there several divergent series in a structure, but each series is itself constituted by several convergent sub-series. Page 67

Peguy clearly saw that history and event were inseparable from those singular points: "Events have critical points just as temperature has critical points-points of fusion, congelation, boiling, condensation, coagulation, and crystallization. And even within the event there are states of surfeit which are precipitated, crystallized, and determined only by the introduction of a fragment of the future event." Page 67

Events are ideal. Page 67

Novalis sometimes says that there are two courses of events, one of them ideal, the other real and imperfect-for ex-ample, ideal Protestanism and real Lutheranism. 3 The distinction howt'ver is not between two sorts of events; rather, it is between the event, which is ideal by nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. The distinction is between event and accident. Page 67

Events are idea-tional singularities which communicate in one and the same Event. They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist. Rather, it is the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which they subsist and insist. Events are the only idcalitics. Page 67

To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities. Page 67

The mode of the event is the problematic. One must not say that there are problematic events, but that events bear exclusively upon problems and define their conditions. Page 68

The event by itself is problematic and problematizing. A problem is determined only by the singular points which express its conditions. We do not say that the problem is thereby resolved; on the contrary, it is determined as a problem. Page 68

We must then break with the long habit of thought which forces us to consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge or as an empirical moment which would indicate only the imperfection of our method and the unhappy necessity for us not to know ahead of time-a necessity which would disappear as we acquire knowledge. Even if the problem is concealed by its solution, it subsists nonetheless in the Idea which relates it to its conditions and organizes the genesis of the solutions. Without this Idea, the solutions would have no sense. The problematic is both an objective category of knowledge and a perfectly objective kind of being. "Problematic" qualifies precisely the ideal objectivities. Page 68

The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem. Page 69

Sylvie and Bruno. "Once a coincidence was taking a walk with a little accident, and they met an explanation . Page 69

psychological and moral characters are also made of pre-personal singularities, and that their feelings or their pathos are constituted in the vicinity of these singularities: sensitive crisis points, turning points, boiling points, knots, and foyers Page 69

We can speak of events only in the context of the problem whose conditions they determine. We can speak of events only as singularities deployed in a problematic field, in the vicinity of which the solutions are organized. Page 70

The problem is determined by singular points corresponding to the series, but the question is determined by an aleatory point corresponding to the empty square or mobile element. The metamorphoses or redistributions of singularities form a history; each combination and each distribution is an event. But the paradoxical instance is the Event in which all events communicate and are distributed. It is the Unique event, and all other events are its bits and pieces. Page 70

The ques-tion is developed in problems, and the problems are enveloped in a fundamental question. And just as solutions do not suppress problems, but on the contrary discover in them the subsisting conditions without which they would have no sense, answers do not at all suppress, nor do they saturate, the question, which persists in all of the answers. There is therefore an aspect in which problems remain without a solution, and the question without an answer. It is in this sense that problem and question designate ideational objectivities and have their own being, a minimum ?f bein9 (see the "answerless riddles" of Alice). Page 70

The ninth series defines events as ideal, pre-individual, non-personal singularities that constitute the problematic. Problems are objective realities, determined by these singularities, which subsist even when solutions are found. The problematic is itself an objective kind of being, and singularities are ideal objectivities deployed in a problematic field, culminating in a unique Event where all singularities communicate.

#on/philosophy #on/events #on/problematic #on/singularities

Tenth Series of the Ideal Game

Tenth Series of the Ideal Game Page 72

Whether it be Pascal's gambling man or Leibniz's chess-playing God, the game is explicitly taken as a model only because it has implicit models which are not games: the moral model of the Good or the Best, the economic model of causes and effects, or of means and ends. Page 73

1) There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule. Page 73

2) Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw. Page 73

3) The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a single cast which is ontologically one. Page 73

This is a nomadic and non-sedentary distribution, wherein each system of singularities communicates and resonates with the oth-ers, being at once implicated by the others and implicating them in the most important cast. It is the game of problems and of the question, no longer the game of the categorical and the hypothetical. Page 74

4-) Such a game-without rules, with neither winner nor loser, without responsibility, a game of innocence, a caucus-race, in which skill and chance are no longer distinguishable-seems to have no reality. Page 74

The ideal game of which we speak cannot be played by either man or God. It can only be thought as nonsense. But precisely for this reason, it is the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure thought. Each thought forms a series in a time which is smaller than the minimum of consciously thinkable continuous time. Each thought emits a distribution of singularities. All of these thoughts communicate in one long thought, causing all the forms or figures of the nomadic distribution to correspond to its own displacement, everywhere insin-uating chance and ramifying each thought, linking the "once and for all" to "each time" for the sake of "all time." For only thought finds it possible to <ifjirm all chance and to make chance into an object ef <ifjirmation. If one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens; and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced. This game is reserved then for thought and art. In it there is nothing but victories for those who know how to play, that is, how to affirm and ramify chance, instead of dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in order to win. This game, which can only exist in thought and which has no other result than the work of art, is also that by which thought and art are real and disturbing reality, morality, and the economy of the world. Page 74

This is how J. L. Borges describes the Babylonian lottery: if the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be desirable for chance to intervene at all stages of the lottery and not merely in the drawing? Is it not ridiculous for chance to dictate the death of someone while the circumstances of his death-its silent reserve or publicity, the time limit of one hour or one century-should remain immune to hazard? ... In reality, the number ef drawin9s is infinite. No decision is.final, all diver9e into others. The i9norant suppose that an if!finite number '!f drawin9s requires an infinite amount ef lime; in reality, it s1:Jfices that time be i'!finitely subdivisible, as is the case in the famous parable of the Tortoise and Hare. 2 Page 75

We have seen that past, present, and future were not at all three parts of a single temporality, but that they rather formed two readings of time, each one of which is complete and excludes the other: on one hand, the always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as causes and the state of their mixtures in depth (Chronos); on the other, the essentially unlimited past and future, which gather incorporeal events, at the surface, as effects (Aion). Page 75

Is there not in the Aion a labyrinth very different from that of Chronos-a labyrinth more terrible still, which commands another eternal return and another ethic (an ethic of Effects)? Let us think again of Borge's words: "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line .... The next time I kill you ... I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting." Page 76

Briefly, there are two times, one ef which is composed only ef interlockin9 presents; the other is constantly decomposed into elon9ated pasts and futures. Page 76

One of the esoteric words found in "Jabber-wocky" contaminates both times: "wabe." For, according to one sense, "wabe" must be understood as having been derived from "swab" or "soak." In this case, it would designate the rain-drenched lawn sur-rounding a sundial; it is the physical and cyclical Chronos of the variable living present. But in another sense, it is the lane extending far ahead and far behind, "way-be," "a long way before, a long way behind." It is the incorporeal Aion which has been unfolded. It has become autono-mous in the act of disinvesting itself from its matter and flees in both directions at once, toward the future and toward the past. In it, even rain falls horizontally following the hypothesis of Sylvie and Bruno. This Aion, ht'ing straight line and c-mpty form, is the time of events-effects. Page 76

The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening. The x, with respect to which one feels that it just happened, is the object of the "novella"; and the x which is always about to happen, is the object of the "tale" ("conte"). The pure event is both tale and novella, never an actuality. It is in this sense that events are si9ns. Page 77

The event is that no one ever dies, but has always just died or is always going to die, in the empty present of the Aion, that is, in eternity. Page 77

Each event is the smallest time, smaller than the minimum of continuous thinkable time, because it is divided into proximate past and imminent future. But it is also the longest time, longer than the maximum of continuous thinkable time, because it is endlessly subdivided by the Aion which renders it equal to its own unlimited line. Page 77

Each event is adequate to the entire Aion; each event communicates with all others, and they all form one and the same Event, an event of the Aion where they have an eternal truth. This is the secret of the event: it exists on the line of the Aion, and yet it does not fill it. Page 78

The Aion is the ideal player of the game; it is an infused and ramified chance. It is the unique cast from which all throws are qualitatively distinguished. Page 78

The tenth series introduces the concept of an "ideal game" distinct from traditional games, characterized by inventing rules, affirming chance, qualitative distinction of throws within a single cast, and nomadic distribution. This game can only be played in thought or result in a work of art. It is linked to the time of the Aion, contrasting it with Chronos; Aion is the infinite, straight line of the past-future where pure events subsist, always already passed and yet to come, forming a labyrinth of effects.

#on/philosophy #on/game #on/time #on/aion #on/chronos #on/chance

Eleventh Series of Nonsense

Eleventh Series of Nonsense Page 80

Let us summarize the characteristics of this paradoxical element or perpetuum mobile. Its function is to traverse the heterogeneous series, to coordinate them, to make them resonate and converge, but also to ramify them and to introduce into each one of them multiple disjunc-tions. It is both word = x and thing= x. Since it belongs simultaneously to both series, it has two sides. But the sides are never balanced, joined together, or paired off, because the paradoxical element is always in disequilibrium in relation to itself. To account for this correlation and this dissymmetry we made use of a number of dualities: it is at once excess and lack, empty square and supernumerary object, a place without an occupant and an occupant without a place, "floating signi-fier" and floated signified, esoteric word and exoteric thing, white word and black object. This is why it is constantly denoted in two ways: "for the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Page 80

"Snark" is an unheard-of name, but it is also an invisible monster. It refers to a formidable action, the hunt, at the end of which the hunter is dissipated and loses his identity. "Jabberwock" is an unheard-of name, a fantastic beast, but also the object of a formidable action or of a great murder. Page 81

First fi9ure: the para-doxical element is at once word and thing. In other words, both the blank word denoting it and the esoteric word denoting the blank word have the function to express the thing. It is a word that denotes exactly what it expresses and expresses what it denotes. It says something, but at the same time it says the sense of what it says: it says its own sense. It is therefore completely abnormal. Page 81

The name saying its own sense can only be nonsense (Nn). Nonsense is of a piece with the word "nonsense," and the word "nonsense" is of a piece with words which have no sense, that is, with the conventional words that we use to denote it. Page 81

Second fi9ure: the portmanteau word is itself the principle of an alternative the two terms of which it forms (frumious = fuming-andfurious or furious-and-fuming). Each virtual part of such a word denotes the sense of the other or expresses the other part which in turn denotes it. Under the same form, the entire word says its own sense and is, for this reason, nonsense. Page 81

Nonsense thus has two sides, one corresponding to the regressive synthesis, the other to the disjunctive synthesis. Page 81

When we assume that nonsense says its own sense, we wish to indicate, on the contrary, that sense and nonsense have a specific relation which can not copy that of the true and false, that is, which can not be conceived simply on the basis of a rdation of exclusion. Page 82

This is indeed the most general problem of the logic of sense: what would be the purpose of rising from the domain of truth to the domain of sense, if it were only to find between sense and nonsense a relation analogous to that of the true and the false? Page 82

The logic of sense is necessarily determined to posit between sense and nonsense an original type of intrinsic relation, a mode of co-presence. Page 82

Every property must belong to a type higher than the properties or individuals over which it presides, and every class must belong to a type higher than the objects which it contains. It follows that a class cannot be a member of itself, nor may it contain members of difkrent types. Page 82

two forms of the absurd correspond to the two figures of nonsense, and these forms are defined as "stripped of signification" and as constituting paradoxes: a set which is included in itself as a member; the member dividing the set which it presupposes -the set of all sets, and the "barber of the regiment." Page 83

a term devoid of signification has nonetheless a sense, and the sense or the event is independent of all the modalities affecting classes and properties, being neutral in relation to all of these characteristics. Page 84

Inside the series, each term has sense only by virtue of its position relative to every other term. But this relative position itself depends on the absolute position of each term relative to the instance = x. The latter is determined as nonsense and circulates endlessly throughout the series. Sense is actually produced by this circulation as sense which affects both the signifier and the signified. In short, sense is always an effect. It is not an effect merely in the causal sense; it is also an effect in the sense of an "optical effect" or a "sound effect," or, even better, a surface effect, a position effect, and a language effect. Page 84

nonsense does not have any particular sense, but is opposed to the absence of sense rather than to the sense that it produces in excess-without ever maintaining with its product the simple relation of exclusion to which some people would like to reduce them. 3 Nonsense is that which has no sense, and that which, as such and as it enacts the donation of sense, is opposed to the absence of sense. This is what we must understand by "nonsense." Page 85

It is thus pleasing that there resounds today the news that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery. It belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a surface effect, being inseparable from the surface which is its proper dimension. It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depth lack surface, that they lack sense, or have it only by virtue of an "effect" which presupposes sense. Page 86

And how could we not feel that our freedom and strength reside, not in the divine universal nor in the human personality, but in these singularities which are more us than we ourselves are, more divine than the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent revolution and partial action? What is bureaucratic in these fantastic machines which are peoples and poems? It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the' "grt'at politics" begin. An empty square for Page 86

neither man nor God; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, and events which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever dreamed of, or God ever conceived. Today's task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak-in short, to pro-duce sense. Page 87

The eleventh series defines nonsense not as the absence of sense but as the positive, paradoxical element (word=x, thing=x, empty square) that traverses and organizes series, embodying regressive and disjunctive syntheses. Sense is produced by the circulation of nonsense as a surface effect. Unlike truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense have an intrinsic relation of co-presence; nonsense is what has no sense but enables the donation of sense, operating at the surface, liberated from traditional notions of depth or height.

#on/philosophy #on/nonsense #on/sense #on/paradox #on/surface

Twelfth Series of the Paradox

Twelfth Series of the Paradox Page 88

The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow us to be prescnt at the genesis of the contradiction. Page 88

The paradoxes of signification are essentially that of the abnormal set (which is included as a member or which includes members of different types) and that of the rebel element (which forms part of a set whose existence it presupposes and belongs to two sub-sets which it determines). Page 89

The paradoxes of sense are essentially that of the subdivision ad infinitum (always past-future and never present), and that of the nomadic distribution ( distributing in an open space instead of distributing a closed space). They always have the characteristic of going in both directions at once, and of rendering identification impossible, as they emphasize sometimes the first, sometimes the second, of these effects. Page 89

Paradox is opposed to doxa, in both aspects of doxa, namely, good sense and common sense. Page 89

Good sense is essentially distributive; "on one hand and on the other hand" is its formula. Page 89

Good sense is altogether combustive and digestive. It is agricultural, inseparable from the agrarian problem, the establishment of enclosures, and the dealings of middle classes the parts of which are supposed to balance and to regulate one another. The steam engine and the livestock, but also properties and classes, are the living sources of good sense, not only as facts which spring up in a particular period, but as eternal archetypes. Page 90

The systematic characteristics of good sense are thus the following: it affirms a single direction; it determines this direction to go from the most to the least differentiated, from the singular to the regular, and from the remarkable to the ordinary; it orients the arrow of time from past to future, according to this determination; it assigns to the present a directing role in this orientation; it renders possible thereby the function of prevision; and it selects the sedentary type of distribution in which all of the preceding characteristics are brought together. Page 90

Good sense plays a capital role in the determination of signification, but plays no role in the donation of sense. Page 90

Good sense is not content with determining the particular direction of the unique sense. It first determines the principle of a unique sense or direction in g(ยทm-ral, ready to show that this principle, once given, forces us to Page 90

choose one direction over the other. The power of the paradox there-fore is not all in following the other direction, but rather in showing that sense always takes on both senses at once, or follows two directions at the same time. Page 91

"Which way, which way?" asks Alice. The question has no answer, since it is the characteristic of sense not to have any direction or "good sense." Rather, sense always goes to both directions at once, in the infinitely subdivided and elongated past-future. Page 91

"For the entire universe, the two directions of time are thus impossible to distinguish, and the same holds for space; there is neither above nor below" (that is, there is neither height nor depth). Page 91

Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future-but only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems. Page 91

Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present. For no present can be fixed in a Universe which is taken to be the system of all systems, or the abnormal set. To the oriented line of the present, which "regularizes" in an individual system each singular point which it takes in, the line of Aion is opposed. Page 91

In common sense, "sense" is no longer said of a direction, but of an organ. It is called "common," because it is an organ, a function, a Page 91

faculty of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same. Common sense identifies and recognizes, no less than good sense foresees. Page 92

Objectively, common sense subsumes under itself the given diversity and relates it to the unity of a particular form of object or an individualized form of a world. It is the same object which I see, smell, taste, or touch; it is the same object which I perceive, imagine, and remember ... ; and, it is the same world that I breathe, walk, am awake or asleep in, as I move from one object to another following the laws of a determined system. Page 92

ln this complementarity of good sense and common sense, the alliance between the self, the world, and God is sealed-God being the final outcome of directions and the supreme principle of identities. Page 92

The paradox therefore is the simultaneous reversal of good sense and com-mon sense: on one hand, it appears in the guise of the two simultaneous senses or directions of the becoming-mad and the unforeseeable; on the other hand, it appears as the nonsense of the lost identity and the unrecognizable. Page 92

Beyond good sense, Carroll's doubles represent the two senses or two directions of the becoming-mad. Let us look first at the doublet of the Hatter and the March Hare in Alice: each one of them lives in one direction, but the two directions are inseparable; each direction subdivides itself into the other, to the point that both are found in either. Two are necessary for being mad; one is always mad in tandem. The Hatter and the Hare went mad together the day they "murdered time," that is, the day they destroyed the measure, suppressed the pauses and the rests which relate quality to something fixed. The Hatter and the Hare killed the present which no longer survives between them except in the sleepy image of the Dormouse, their tortured companion. But also this present no longer subsists except in the abstract moment, at tea time, being indefinitely subdivisible into past and future. The result is that they now change places endlessly, they are always late and early, in both directions at once, but never on time. On the other side of the lookingglass, the Hare and the Hatter are taken up again in the two messengers, one going and the other coming, one searching and the other bringing back, on the basis of the two simultaneous directions of the Aion. Page 93

There is nothing astonishing in the fact that the paradox is the force of the unconscious: it occurs always in the space between (l'entre-deux) con-sciousnesses, contrary to good sense or, behind the back of consciousness, contrary to common sense. Page 94

For if it is a question of knowing "why at this moment rather than at another," "why water changes its state of quality at o O centigrade," the question is poorly stated insofar as o O is considered as an ordinary point on the thermom-eter. But if it is considered, on the contrary, as a singular point, it is inseparable from the event occurring at that point, always being zero in relation to its realization on the line of ordinary points, always forth-coming and already passed. Page 94

But, precisely because nonsense has an internal and original relation to sense, this paradoxical element bestows sense upon the terms of each series. The relative positions of these terms in relation to one another depend on their "absolute" position in relation to it. Sense is always an effect produced in the series by the instance which traverses them. This is why sense, such as it is gathered over the line of the Aion, has two sides which correspond to the dissymmetrical sides of the paradoxical element: one tending toward the series determined as signifying, the other tending toward the series determined as signified. Page 95

The twelfth series positions paradox as a force that undermines doxa (common sense and good sense). While good sense relies on a single direction and common sense on fixed identities, paradox affirms simultaneous directions (becoming-mad, unforeseeable) and dissolves fixed identities (nonsense of the unrecognizable), reflecting the fluid, double-sided nature of sense itself, which is produced by the paradoxical element traversing series.

#on/philosophy #on/paradox #on/doxa #on/sense

Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl

Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl Page 96

Nothing is more fragile than the surface. Is not this secondary organi-zation threatened by a monster even more awesome than the Jabber-wocky-by a formless, fathomless nonsense, very different from what we previously encountered in the two figures still inherent in sense? Page 96

the mistake made by logicians, when they speak of nonsense, is that they offer laboriously constructed, emaciated examples fitting the needs of their demonstration, as if they had never heard a little girl sing, a great poet recite, or a schizophrenic speak. Page 97

the problem is a clinical problem, that is, a problem of sliding from one organization to another, or a problem of the formation of a progressive and creative disorganization. It is also a problem of criticism, that is, of the determination of differential levels at which nonsense changes shape, the portmanteau word undergoes a change of nature, and the entire language changes dimension. Page 97

Artaud considers Lewis Carroll a pervert, a little pervert, who holds onto the establishment of a surface language, and who has not felt the real problem of a language in depth -namely, the schizophrenic problem of suffering, of death, and of life. To Artaud, Carroll's games seem puerile, his food too worldly, and even his fecality hypocritical and too well-bred. Page 98

At a deeper level, he ensures a resonance between the two series and a conversion from one to the other, as he translates English words into foreign words according to their phonetic elements (consonants being the most important). "Tree," for example, is converted as a result of the R which recurs in the French word "arbre," and again as a result of the T which recurs in the Hebrew term; and since the Russians say "derevo" for tree, one can equally well transform "tree" into "tere," with T becoming D. This already complex procedure is replaced by a more generalized one, as soon as the patient has the idea of evoking a number of associations: "early," whose consonants R and L pose particularly delicate problems, is transformed into various associated French locutions: "surR-Le-champ," "de bonne heuRe," "matinaLement," "a la pa Role, " "devoRer L 'espace," or even into an esoteric and fictional word of German consonance, "urlich." (One recalls that Raymond Roussel, in the techniques he invented in order to constitute and to convert series within the French language, distinguishes a pri-mary, restricted procedure and a secondary, generalized procedure based on associations.) It is often the case that some rebellious words resist all of these procedures, giving rise to insufferable paradoxes. Thus, "ladies," for example, which applies to only half of the human popula-tion, can be transcribed only by the German "leutte" or the Russian "loudi," which, on the contrary, designate the totality of humankind. Page 99

Artaud develops his own antinomic series-"to be and to obey, to live and to exist, to act and to think, matter and soul, body and mind"-he himself has the impression of an extraordinary resemblance with Carroll. Page 100

The two series are articulated at the surface. On this surface, a line is like the frontier between two series, propositions and things, or between dimensions of the same proposi-tion. Along this line, sense is elaborated, both as what is expressed by the proposition and as the attribute of things-the "expressible" of expressions and the "attributable" of denotations. The two series are therefore articulated by their difference, and sense traverses the entire surface, although it remains on its own line. Undoubtedly, this immaterial sense is the result of corporeal things, of their mixtures, and of their actions and passions. But the result has a very different nature than the corporeal cause. It is for this reason that sense, as an effect, being always at the surface, refers to a quasi-cause which is itself incorporeal. This is the always mobile nonsense, which is expressed in esoteric and in portmanteau words, and which distributes sense on both sides simultaneously. All of this forms the surface organization upon which Carroll's work plays a mirror-like effect. Page 100

Artaud's genius is known to any schizophrenic, who lives it as well in his or her own manner. For him, there is not, there is no lon9er, any suiface. Page 100

The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. Things and propositions have no longer any Page 100

frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. Page 101

the entire body is no longer anything but depth-it carries along and snaps up everything into this gaping depth which represents a fundamental involution. Everything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies, and inside the body, interlocking and penetration. Page 101

Artaud said that everything is physical: "We have in our back full vertebrae, transfixed by the nail of pain, which through walking, the effort of lifting weights, and the resistance to letting go, become cannisters by being nested in one another." Page 101

Everything is really a can-canned food and excrement. As there is no surface, the inside and the outside, the container and the contained, no longer have a precise limit; they plunge into a universal depth or turn in the circle of a present which gets to be more contracted as it is filled. Hence the schizophrenic manner of living the contradiction: either in the deep fissure which traverses the body, or in the fragmented parts which encase one another and spin about. Body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body-these are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body. Page 101

In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning. Page 101

the word loses its sense, that is, its power to draw together or to express an incorporeal effect distinct from the actions and passions of the body, and an ideational event distinct from its present realization. Every event is realized, be it in a hallucinatory form. Every word is physical, and immediately affects the body. Page 101

The word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of affairs; its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture and a new state of affairs, as if they themselves were a noisy, poisonous food and canned excrement. Page 102

For the schizophrenic, then, it is less a question of recovering meaning than of destroying the word, of conjuring up the affect, and of transforming the painful passion of the body into a triumphant action, obedience into command, always in this depth beneath the fissured surface. Page 102

Triumph may now be reached only through the creation of breath-words (motssoeffies) and howl-words (mots-eris), in which all literal, syllabic, and phonetic values have been replaced by values which are exclusively tonic and not written. To these values a glorious body corresponds, being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud). Page 102

the contradic-tion lived in schizophrenia finds its real point of application: passion and action are the inseparable poles of an ambivalence, because the two languages which they form belong inseparably to the body and to the depth of bodies. One is thus never sure that the ideal fluids of an organism without parts does not carry parasitic worms, fragments of organs, solid food, and excremental residue. Page 102

What defines this second language and this method of action, prac-tically, is its consonantal, guttural, and aspirated overloads, its apostrophes and internal accents, its breaths and its scansions, and its modulation which replaces all syllabic or even literal values. It is a question of transforming the word into an action by rendering it incapable of being decomposed and incapable of disintegrating: lan9ua9e without articulation. Page 103

These howls are welded together in breath, like the consonants in the sign which liquifies them, like fish in the ocean-mass, or like the bones in the blood of the body without organs. A sign of fire, a wave "which hesitates between gas and water," said Artaud. The howls are gurglings in breath. Page 103

The duality of the schizophrenic word has not been adequately noted: it comprises the passion-word, which explodes into wounding phonetic values, and the action-word, which welds inarticulate tonic values. These two words are developed in relation to the duality of the body, fragmented body and body without organs. They refer to two theaters, the theater of terror or passion and the theater of cruelty, which is by its essence active. They refer to two types of nonsense, passive and active: the nonsense of the word devoid of sense, which is decomposed into phonetic elements; and the nonsense of tonic elements, which form a word incapable of being decomposed and no less devoid of sense. Here everything happens, acts and is acted upon, beneath sense and far from the surface. Sub-sense, a-sense, Untersinn-this must be distinguished from the nonsense of the surface. According to Holderlin, language in its two aspects is "a sign empty of meaning." Although a sign, it is a sign which merges with an action or a passion of the body. Page 104

In fact, there are no longer any series at all; the two series have disappeared. Nonsense has ceased to give sense to the surface; it absorbs and engulfs all sense, both on the side of the signifier and on the side of the signified. Page 105

in this primary order of schizophrenia, the only duality left is that between the actions and the passions of the body. Language is both at once, being entirely reabsorbed into the gaping depth. There is no longer anything to prevent propositions from falling back onto bodies and from mingling their sonorous elements with the body's olfactory, gustatory, or digestive affects. Not only is there no longer any sense, but there is no longer any grammar or syntax either-nor, at the limit, are there any articulated syllabic, literal, or phonetic elements. Page 105

we can oppose Artaud and Carroll point for point-primary order and secondary organization. The suiface series of the "to eat/to speak" type have really nothing in common with the poles ef depth which are only apparently similar. The two figures ef nonsense at the surface, which distribute sense between the series, have nothing to do with the two dives into nonsense which drag along, engulf, and reabsorb sense (Untersmn). The two forms of stuttering, the clonic and the tonic, are only roughly analogous to the two schizophrenic languages. The break (coupure) of the surface has nothing in common with the deep Spa/tung. The contradiction which was grasp<"d in an infinite subdivision of the past-future over the in- Page 105

corporeal line of the Aion has nothing to do with the oppos1t1on of poles in the physical present of bodies. Even portmanteau words have functions which are completely heterogeneous. Page 106

Artaud thrusts the child into an extremely violent alternative, an alternative of corporeal action and passion, which conforms to the two languages in depth. Either the child is not born, that is, does not leave the foldings of his or her future spinal cord, over which her parents fornicate (a reverse suicide), or she creates a fluid, glorious, and flamboyant body without organs and without parents (like those Artaud called his "daughters" yet to be born). Carroll, on the contrary, awaits the child, in a manner conforming to his language of incorporeal sense: he waits at the point and at the moment in which the child has left the depths of the maternal body and has yet to discover the depth of her own body. This is the brief surface moment in which the little girl skirts the surface of the water, like Alice in the pool of her own tears. These are different regions, different and unrelated dimensions. We may believe that the surface has its monsters, the Snark and the Jabberwock, its terrors and its cruelties, which, although not of the depths, have claws just the same and can snap one up laterally, or even make us fall back into the abyss which we believed we had dispelled. Page 107

This section contrasts Carroll's focus on the surface organization of sense with Artaud's exploration of the depths of the body and language in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is presented as a state where the surface collapses, language is reabsorbed into bodily actions and passions (noise, sub-sense), and duality exists only between actions and passions of the body, distinct from the surface duality articulated by sense.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/schizophrenia #on/artaud #on/carroll

Fourteenth Series of Double Causality

Fourteenth Series of Double Causality Page 108

This is to say that incorporeal sense, as the result of the actions and the passions of the body, may preserve its difference from the corporeal cause only to the degree that it is linked, at the surface, to a quasi-cause which is itself incorporeal. The Stoics saw clearly that the event is subject to a double causality, referring on one hand to mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on the other, to other events which are its quasi-cause Page 108

The events of a liquid Page 108

surface refer to the inter-molecular modifications on which they depend as their real cause, but also to the variations of a surface tension on which they depend as their (ideational or "fictive") quasi-cause. Page 109

It seemed to us that the event, that is, sense, referred to a paradoxical element, intervenin9 as nonsense or as an aleatory point, and operatin9 as a quasi-cause assurin9 the full autonomy ef the ~[feet. Page 109

The autonomy of the effect is thus defined initially by its difference in nature from the cause; in the second place, it is defined by its relation to the quasi-cause. Page 109

For, insofar as it affirms its difference in nature from corporeal causes, states of affairs, qualities, and physical mixtures, sense as an effect or event is character-ized by a striking impassibility (impenetrability, sterility, or inefficacy, which is neither active nor passive). Page 109

Viewed from this angle, it appears as a neutrality (a mere double extracted from the proposition, or a suspension of the modalities of the proposition). On the contrary, as soon as sense is grasped, in its relation to the quasicause which produces and distributes it at the surface, it inherits, participates in, and even envelops and possesses the force of this ideational cause. Page 109

sense is essentially produced. It is never originary but is always caused and derived. However, this derivation is two-fold, and, in relation to the immanence of the quasi-cause, it creates the paths which it traces and causes to bifurcate. Page 109

In other words, we must understand it in relation to the denoted states of affairs, to the manifested states of the subject, and to the signified concepts, properties, and classes. Page 110

On one hand, we have impassibility in relation to states of affairs and neutrality in relation to propositions; on the other hand, we have the power of genesis in relation to propositions and in relation to states of affairs themselves. Page 110

The fourteenth series elaborates the Stoic concept of double causality: incorporeal events (sense) are effects caused by deep bodily mixtures but also relate to incorporeal quasi-causes (like other events or nonsense) at the surface. This dual relation ensures the autonomy and generative power of sense, making it impassive and neutral in itself while enabling the genesis of propositions and even states of affairs.

#on/philosophy #on/stoicism #on/causality #on/sense #on/events

Fifteenth Series of Singularities

Fifteenth Series of Singularities Page 114

Neutrality, the impassibility of the event, its indifference to the determinations of the inside and the outside, to the individual and the collective, the particular and the general-all these form a constant without which the event would not have eternal truth and could not be distinguished from its temporal actualizations. Page 114

But it is above all because the battle hovers over its own field, being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, neutral and impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and brave; because of this, it is all the more terrible. Never present but always yet to come and already passed, the battle is graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires. This will, which we must call will "of indifference," is present Page 114

in the mortally wounded soldier who is no longer brave or cowardly, no longer victor or vanquished, but rather so much beyond, at the place where the Event is present, participating therefore in its terrible impassibility. "Where" is the battle? This is why the soldier flees when he flees and surges when he surges, determined to consider each temporal actualization from the height of the eternal truth of the event which incarnates itself in it and, alas, incarnates itself in his own flesh. Still, the soldier needs a long struggle in order to arrive at this beyond of courage and cowardice, to this pure grasping of the event by means of a "volitional intuition," that is, by means of the will that the event creates in him. This intuition is distinct from all the empirical intuitions which still correspond to types of actualization. Page 115

In relation to propositional modes in general, the neutrality of sense appears from several different perspectives. From the point of view of quantity, sense is neither particular nor general, neither universal nor personal. From the point of view of quality, it is entirely independent of both affirmaiton and negation. From the point of view of modality, it is neither assertoric nor apodeictic, nor even interrogative (the mode of subjective uncertainty or objective possibility). From the point of view of relation, it is not confused within the proposition which expresses it, either with denotation, or with manifestation, or with signification. Hnally, from the point of view of the type, it is not confused with any of the intuitions, or any of the "positions" of consciousness that we could empirically determine thanks to the play of the preceding propositional traits: intuitions or positions of empirical perception, imagination, memory, understanding, volition, etc. Page 115

A consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification, but there is no synthesis of unification of consciousness without the form of the I, or the point of view of the Self. What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as rnnditions of the syntheses of consciousness. Singularities are the true Page 116

transcendental events, and Ferlinghetti calls them "the fourth person singular." Far from being individual or personal, singularities preside over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a "potential" which admits neither Self nor I, but which produces them by actualizing or realizing itself, although the figures of this actualization do not at all resemble the realized potential. Only a theory of singular points is capable of transcending the synthesis of the person and the analysis of the individual as these are ( or are made) in consciousness. Page 117

Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental. Page 117

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather "metastable," endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event.) Page 117

In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. Page 117

In the third place, singularities or potentials haunt the surface. Everything happens at the surface in a crystal which develops only on the edges Page 117

Thus, even biologically, it is necessary to understand that "the deepest is the skin." The skin has at its disposal a vital and properly superficial potential energy. And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequen Page 117

it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation and reformation. Page 118

Gilbert Simondon has expressed this very well: The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit .... The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists .... The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of li'ing matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living .... To belong to interiority does not mean only to "be inside," but to be on the "in-side" ?f the limit. ... At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another ... Page 118

As a fourth determination, we will say therefore that the surface is the locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as long as they do not enter into the surface organization which assures the resonance of two series (two images-signs, two photographs, two tracks, etc.). Page 118

And this is why (determination number five) this world of sense has a problematic status: singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field and crop up in this field as topological events to which no direction is attached. As with chemical elements, with respect to which we know where they are before we know what they are, likewise here we know of the existence and distribution of singular points before we know their nature (bottlenecks, knots, foyers, centers ... ). Page 118

It is true that sense is the characteristic discovery of transcendental philosophy, and that it replaces the old metaphysical Essenses. Page 119

The error of all efforts to determine the transcendental as consciousness is that they think of the transcendental in the image of, and in the resemblance to, that which it is supposed to ground. Page 119

metaphysics and transcendental philosophy reach an agreement to think about those determinable sin9ularities on!J' which are already imprisoned inside a supreme Self or a superior I. Page 120

Nietzsche's discovery lies elsewhere when, having liberated himself from Schopenhauer and Wagner, he explored a world of impersonal and pre-individual singularities, a world he then called Dionysian or of the will to power, a free and unbound energy. These are nomadic singularities which are no longer imprisoned within the fixed individu-ality of the infinite Being (the notorious immutability of God), nor inside the sedentary boundaries of the finite subject (the notorious limits of knowledge). This is something neither individual nor personal, but rather singular. Being not an undifferentiated abyss, it leaps from one singularity to another, casting always the dice belonging to the same cast, always fragmented and formed again in each throw. It is a Dionysian sense-producing machine, in which nonsense and sense are no longer found in simple opposition, but are rather co-present to one another within a new discourse. The new discourse is no longer that of the form, but neither is it that of the formless: it is rather that of the pure unformed. To the charge "You shall be a monster, a shapeless mass," Nietzsche responds: "We have realized this prophecy." Page 121

As for the subject of this new discourse ( except that there is no longer any subject), it is not man or God, and even less man in the place of God. The subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality. "Overman" means nothing other than this-the superior type of everything that is. Page 121

He could not stand to stay on the fragile surface, which he had nevertheless plotted through men and gods. Returning to a bottomless abyss that he renewed and dug out afresh, that is where Nietzsche perished in his own manner. It would be preferable to say that he "quasi-perished"; for sickness and death are the event itself, subject as such to a double causality: that of bodies, states of affairs, and mixtures, but also that of the quasi-cause which represents the state of organization or disorganization of the incorporeal surface. Nietzsche, it seems, became insane and died of general paralysis, a corporeal syphilitic mixture. But the pathway which this event followed, this time in relation to the quasi-cause inspiring his entire work and co-inspiring his life, has nothing to do with his general paralysis, the ocular migraines and the vomiting from which he suffered, with the exception of giving them a new causality, that is, an eternal truth independent of their corporeal realization-thus a style in an reuvre instead of a mixture in the body. We see no other way of raising the question of the relations between an reuvre and illness except by means of this double causality. Page 122

The fifteenth series defines singularities as pre-individual, impersonal, and neutral events that constitute the transcendental field, distinct from individuals, persons, or universal concepts. These singularities organize metastable systems on the surface, auto-unify via a mobile paradoxical element, and are the locus of sense. This perspective, exemplified by Nietzsche's "will to power," involves a new discourse and ontology based on the affirmation of singular difference, moving beyond traditional philosophies centered on the self, world, or God.

#on/philosophy #on/singularities #on/transcendental #on/surface #on/nietzsche

Sixteenth Series of the Static Ontological Genesis

Sixteenth Series of the Static Ontological Genesis Page 123

a singularity may be grasped in two ways: in its existence and distribution, but also in its nature, in conformity with which it extends and spreads itself out in a determined direction over a line of ordinary points. Page 123

Leibniz then was right to say that the individual monad expresses a world according to the relation of other bodies with its own, as much as it expresses this relation according to the relation of the parts of its own body. An individual is therefore always in a world as a circle of convergence, and a world may be formed and thought only in the vicinity of the individuals which occupy or fill it. Page 124

The power of renewal is conceded only to individuals in the world, and only for a time-the time of their living present, relative to which the past and future of the surrounding world acquire, to the contrary, a permanent and irreversible direction. Page 124

the structure individualworld-interindividuality defines the first level of actualization. At this first level, singularities are a~tuaJized both in a world and in the individuals which are parts of the world. To be actualized or to actualize oneself means to extend over a series of ordinary paints; to be selected according to a rule of convergence; to be incarnated in a body; to become the state of a body; and to be renewed locally for the sake of limited new actualizations and extensions. Page 124

actualization is always both collective and individual, internal and external, etc. Page 124

To be actualized is also to be expressed. Page 124

The expressed world is made Page 124

of differential relations and of contiguous singularities. It is formed as a world precisely to the extent that the series which depend on each singularity converge with the series which depend on others. This conver-gence defines "compossibility'' as the rule ef a world synthesis. Where the series diverge, another world begins, incompossible with the first. The ex-traordinary notion of compossibility is thus defined as a continuum of singularities, whereby continuity has the convergence of series as its ideational criterion. It follows that the notion of incompossibility is not reducible to the notion of contradiction. Rather, in a certain way, contradiction is derived from incompossibility. Page 125

If it is true that the expressed world exists only in individuals, and that it exists there only as a predicate, it subsists in an entirely different manner, as an event or a verb, in the singularities which preside over the constitution of individ-uals. It is no longer Adam-the-sinner but rather the world in which Adam has sinned .... Page 125

The first level of actualization produces correlatively individuated worlds and individual selves which populate each of these worlds. Individuals are constituted in the vicinity of singularities which they envelop; they express worlds as circles of converging series which depend upon these singularities. To the extent that what is expressed Page 125

does not exist outside of its expressions, that is, outside of the individuals which express it, the world is really the "appurtenance" of the subject and the event has really become the analytic predicate of a subject. Page 126

Analytic predicates do not yet imply logical considerations of genus and species or of propertit's and classes; they imply only the actual physical structure and diversity which make Page 126

them possible inside the mixture of the body. This is why we identify, in the last analysis, the domain of intuitions as immediate representa-tions, the analytic predicates of existence, and the descriptions of mixtures or aggregates. Page 127

Only when something is identified between divergent series or between incompossible worlds, an ob1ect = x appears transcending individuated worlds, and the Ego which thinks it transcends worldly individuals, giving thereby to the world a new value in view of the new value of the subject which is being established. Page 127

We must therefore understand that incompossible worlds, despite their incompossibility, have something in common-something objectively in common-which represents the ambiguous sign of the genetic element in relation to which several worlds appear as instances of solution for one and the same problem (every throw, the result of a single cast). Page 128

The incompossible worlds become the variants of the same story: Sextus, for example, hears the oracle ... ; or, indeed, as Borges says, "Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill him. Naturally there are various possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations." Page 128

the entire deduction is as follows: 1) persons; 2) classes with one single member that they constitute and properties with one constant which belong to them; 3) extensive classes and variable propertiesthat is, the general concepts which derive from them. Page 129

The universal Ego is, precisely, the person corresponding to something = x common to all worlds, just as the other egos are the persons corresponding to a particular thing = x common to several worlds. Page 129

Hrst, beginning with the singularities-events which constitute it, sense engenders a first field (complexe) wherein it is actualized: the Umwelc which organizes the singularities in circles of convergence; individuals which express these worlds; states of bodies; mixtures or aggregates of these individuals; analytic predicates which describe these states. Page 130

Then, a second, very different field (complexe) appears, built upon the first: the Welc common to several or to all worlds; the persons who define this "something in common"; synthetic predicates which define these persons; and the classes and properties which derive from them. Just as the first stage of the genesis is the work of sense, the second is the work of nonsense, which is always co-present to sense (aleatory point or ambiguous sign): it is for this reason that the two stages, and their distinction, are necessarily founded. Page 130

In truth, the person is Ulysses, no ont" (elle n'est personne) properly speaking, but a produced form, derived from this impersonal transcendental field. And the indi-vidual is always an individual in general, born, like Eve, from Adam's side, from a singularity which extends itself over a line of ordinary points and starts from the pre-individual transcendental field. The Page 130

individual and the person, good sense and common sense, are produced by the passive genesis, on the basis of sense and nonsense which do not resemble them, and whose pre-individual and impersonal transcendental play we have seen. Good sense and common sense are therefore undermined by the prinicple of their production, and are overthrown from within by paradox. Page 131

In Lewis Carroll's work, Alice would be rather like the individual, or the monad which discovers sense and has already a foreboding of nonsense, while climbing back up to the surface from a world into which she fell, but which is also enveloped in her and imposes on her the difficult law of mixtures. Page 131

The sixteenth series describes the "static ontological genesis," a process where singularities (sense and nonsense) engender the domains of being. The first stage produces individuated worlds and individuals (Umwelt), associated with good sense. The second stage, built upon the first by nonsense, produces common worlds, persons, and concepts (Welt), associated with common sense. This genesis reveals individuals and persons not as primary but as products derived from the pre-individual and impersonal transcendental field, showing how good sense and common sense are implicitly undermined by the paradox of their origin.

#on/philosophy #on/genesis #on/ontology #on/singularities

Seventeenth Series of the Static Logical Genesis

Seventeenth Series of the Static Logical Genesis Page 132

Individuals are infinite analytic propositions. But while they are infinite with respect to what they express, they are finite with respect to their clear expression, with respect to their corporeal zone of expression. Persons are finite synthetic propositions: finite with respect to their definition, indefinite with respect to their application. Individuals and persons are, in themselves, ontological propositions-persons being grounded on individuals (and conversely, individuals being grounded by the person). The third element of the ontological genesis, however, namely the multiple classes and variable properties which in turn depend on persons, is not embodied in a third proposition which would again be ontological. Rather, this element sends us over to another order of the proposition, and constitutes the condition or the form of possibility of the logical proposition in general. In relation to this condition and simultaneously with it, individuals and persons no longer play the role of ontological propositions. They act now as material instances which realize the possibility and determine within the logical proposition the relations necessary to the existence of the conditioned (conditionne): the relation of denotation as the relation to the individual (the world, the state of affairs, the aggregate, individuated bodies); the relation of manifestation as the relation to the personal; and the relation Page 132

of signification defined by the form of possibility. Page 133

beyond the tertiary order of the proposition and even the secondary organization of sense, we anticipate a terrible primary order wherein the entire language becomes enfolded. Page 134

Solutions are engen-dered at precisely the same time that the problem determines itself This is why people quite often believe that the solution does not allow the problem to subsist, and that it assigns to it retrospectively the status of a subjective moment which is necessarily transcended as soon as a solution is found. The opposite though is the case. By means of an appropriate process, the problem is determined in space and time and, as it is determined, it determines the solutions in which it persists. The synthesis of the problem with its conditions engenders propositions, their dimensions, and their correlates. Page 135

Sense is thus expressed as the problem to which propositions corre-spond insofar as they indicate particular responses, signify instances of a general solution, and manifest subjective acts of resolution. Page 135

Interrogation is the shadow only of the problem projected, or rather reconstructed on the basis of empirical propositions. But the problem in itself is the reality of the genetic element, the complex theme which does not allow itself to be reduced to any propositional thesis. 1 It is one and the same illusion which, from an empirical point of view, formulates the problem from the propositions which function as its "answers," and which, from a philosophical or scientific point of view, defines the problem through the form of the possibility of the "corresponding" propositions. This form of possibility may be logical, or it may be geometrical, algebraic, physical, transcendental, moral, etc. It does not matter. As long as we define the problem by its "resolvability," we confuse sense with signification, and we conceive of the condition only in the image of the conditioned. Page 136

That the problem does not exist outside of the propositions which, in their senses, express it means, properly speaking, that the problem is not: it inheres, subsists, or persists in propositions and blends with this extra-being that we had previously encountered. Page 137

Sense is neutral, but it is never the double of the propositions which express it, nor of the states of affairs in which it occurs and which are denoted by the propositions. This is why, as long as we remain within the circuit of the proposition, sense can be only indirectly inferred. Page 137

We cannot think of the condition in the image of the conditioned. The task of a philosophy which does not wish to fall into the traps of consciousness and the cogito is to purge the transcendental field of all resemblance. Page 137

The idea itself of a static genesis dissipates the contradiction. When we say that bodies and their mixtures produce sense, it is not by virtue of an individuation which would presuppose it. Individuation in bodies, the measure in their mixtures, the play of persons and concepts in their variations-this entire order presupposes sense and the pre-individual and impersonal neutral field within which it unfolds. It is therefore in a different way that sense is produced by bodies. The question is now about bodies taken in their undifferentiated depth and in their measure-less pulsation. This depth acts in an original way, by means ef its power to or9anize swfaces and to envelop itself within suifaces. Page 138

The surface is neither active nor passive, it is the product of the actions and passions of mixed bodies. It is characteristic of the surface that it skims over its own field, impassible and indivisible Page 138

There is therefore an entire' physics of surfaces as the effect of deep mixtures-a physics which endlessly assembles the variations and the pulsations of the entire' universe, enveloping them inside these mobile limits. And, to the physics of surfaces a metaphysical surfact> necessarily corresponds. Metaphysical surface (transcendental field) is the name that will be given to the frontier established, on one hand, between bodies taken together as a whole and inside the limits which envelop them, and on the otht>r, propositions in general. This frontier implies, as we shall see, certain properties of sound in relation to the surfact>, making possible thereby a distinct distribution of language and bodies, or of the corporeal depth and the sonorous continuum. In all these respects, the surface is the transcendental field itself, and the locus of sense and expression. Sense is that which is formed and deployed at the surface. Even the frontier is not a separation, but rather the element of an articulation, so that sense is presented both as that which happens to bodies and that which insists in propositions. We must therefore maintain that sense is a doubling up, and that the neutrality ef sense is inseparable from its status as a double. The fact is that the doubling up does not at all signify an evanescent and disembodied resemblance, an image without flesh-like a smile without a cat. It is rather defined by the production of surfaces, their multiplication and consolidation. This doubling up is the continu-ity of reverse and right sides, the art of establishing this continuity in a way which permits sense, at the surface, to be distributed to both sides at once, as the expressed which subsists in propositions and as the event which occurs in states of bodies. When this production collapses, or when the surface is rent by explosions and by snags, bodies fall back again into their depth; everything falls back again into the anonymous pulsation wherein words are no longer anything but affections of the body-everything falls back into the primary order which grumbles bent"'ath the secondary organization of sense. On the other hand, so long as the surface holds, not only will sense be unfolded upon it as an effect, but it will also partake of the quasi-cause attached to it. It, in Page 139

turn, brings about individuation and all that ensues in a process of determination of bodies and their measured mixtures; it also produces signification and all that ensues in a process of determination of propo-sitions and their assigned relations. It produces, in other words, the entire tertiary arrangement or the object of the static genesis. Page 140

The seventeenth series describes the "static logical genesis," explaining how the problematic nature of sense engenders the dimensions of the proposition (denotation, manifestation, signification). Problems are presented as objective realities that persist even through solutions, revealing their underlying conditions. This process occurs at the surface, which is established as the transcendental field and the locus of sense, produced by deep bodily mixtures but distinct from them, enabling the determination of individuals, persons, and concepts (the tertiary arrangement).

#on/philosophy #on/genesis #on/logic #on/problematic #on/surface

Eighteenth Series of the Three Images of Philosopher

Eighteenth Series of the Three Images of Philosopher Page 141

Idealism is the illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy and, with its litany of ascents and downfalls, it is even philosophy's manic-depressive form. Mania inspires and guides Plato. Dialectics is the flight of ideas, the Idee'!fiucht. As Plato says of the Idea, "it flees or it perishes .... " And even in the death of Socrates there is a trace of a depressive suicide. Page 142

"What does your ascending path matter to us, your thread leading outside, leading to happiness and virtue ... ? Do you wish to save us with this thread? As for us, we ask you in earnest to hang yourselves with this thread!" Page 142

"Behind every cave there is another, even deeper; and beyond that another still. There is a vaster, stranger, richer world beneath the surface, an abyss under-lying every foundation." Page 143

In the beginning was schizophrenia; pre-Socratic philosophy is the philosophical schizophrenia par excellence Page 143

In the famous Empedoclean alternation, in the complementarity of hate and love, we encounter, on the one hand, the body of hatred, the parcelled-out body sieve: "heads without a neck, arms without shoulders, eyes without a face"; but on the other hand, we encounter the glorious body without organs: "formed in one piece," without limbs, with neither voice nor sex. Likewise, Dionysus holds out to us his two faces, his open and lacerated body, and his impassible organless head: Dionysus dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable. Page 143

They no longer expect salvation from the depths of the earth or from autochthony, any more than they expect it from heaven or from the Idea. Rather, they expect it laterally, from the event, from the East-where, as Carroll says, "all that is good ... , ris(es) with the dawn of Day!" Page 143

Rereading Diogenes Laertius' most beautiful chapters, those on Diogenes the Cynic and on Chrysippus the Stoic, we witness the development of a curious system Page 143

of provocations. On one hand, the philosopher eats with great gluttony, he stuffs himself; he masturbates in public, regretting that hunger cannot be so easily relieved; he does not condemn incest with the mother, the sister, or the daughter; he tolerates cannibalism and anthropophagy-but, in fact, he is also supremely sober and chaste. On the other hand, he keeps quiet when people ask him questions or gives them a blow with his staff. If you pose abstract and difficult questions, he will respond by designating some bit of food, or will give you a whole box of food which he will then break over you-always with a blow of his staff. Yet he also holds a new discourse, a new logos animated with paradox and philosophical values and significations which are new. Indeed, we feel that these anecdotes are no longer Platonic or pre-Socratic. Page 144

there is no lon9er depth or hei9ht. Page 144

it is not Essence but event. Page 144

Contrary to what Plato believed, there is no measure high above for Page 144

these mixtures and combinations of Ideas which would allow us to define good and bad mixtures. Page 145

every mixture is as good as the bodies which pervade one another and the parts which coexist. Page 145

Chrysippus used to distinguish two kinds of mixtures: imperfect mixtures which alter bodies; and perfect mixtures which leave bodies intact and make them coexist in all their parts. Page 145

What is really Stoic here is the discovery of passions-bodies and of the infernal mixtures which they organize or submit to: burning poisons and paedophagous banquets. Page 145

Hercules is always situated relative to the three realms of the infernal abyss, the celestial height and the surface of the earth. Page 145

It is no longer a question of Dionysus down below, or of Apollo up above, but of Hercules of the surface, in his dual battle against both depth and height: reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography. Page 146

But there is of course another story, namely, the story of that which, from the Heraclitean world, is able to climb to the surface and receive an entirely new status. This is the event in its difference in nature from causes-bodies, the Aion in its difference in nature from the devouring Chronos. Page 146

The autonomy of the surface, independent of, and against depth and height; the discovery of incorporeal events, meanings, or effects, which are irreducible to "deep" bodies and to "lofty" Ideas -these are the important Stoic discoveries against the pre-Socratics and Plato. Everything that happens and everything that is said happens or is said at the surface. The surface is no less explorable and unknown than depth and height which are nonsense. For the principal frontier is displaced. It no longer passes, in terms of height, between the universal and the particular; ncir, in terms of depth, does it pass between substance and accident. Page 146

It is perhaps to Antisthenes that credit must be given for the new demarcation: between things and propositions them-selves. It is a frontier drawn between the thing such as it is, denoted by the proposition, and the expressed, which does not exist outside of the Page 146

proposition. (Substance is no more than a secondary determination of the thing, and the universal no more than a secondary determination of the expressed.) Page 147

There is nothing behind the curtain except unnameable mixtures, nothing above the carpet except the empty sky. Sense appears and is played out at the surface (at least if one knows how to mix it properly) in such a way that it forms letters of dust. It is like a fogged-up windowpane on which one can write with one's finger. Page 147

The philosopher is no longer the being of the caves, nor Plato's soul or bird, but rather the animal which is on a level with the surface-a tick or louse. The philosophical symbol is no longer the Platonic wing, or Empedodes' lead sandal, but the reversible cloak of Antisthenes and Diogenes: the staff and the mantle, as in the case of Hercules with his club and lion skin. What are we to call this new philosophical operation, insofar as it opposes at once Platonic conversion and pre-Socratic subversion? Per-haps we can call it "perversion," which at least befits the system of provocations of this new type of philosopher-if it is true that perversion implies an extraordinary art of surfaces. Page 147

The eighteenth series presents three philosophical "images" or orientations: the Platonic ascent from depth to height (idealism, dialectics), the pre-Socratic exploration of depth (philosophical schizophrenia), and the Stoic focus on the surface. Stoicism is characterized as a philosophy of the surface that rejects both traditional depth and height, discovering the autonomy of incorporeal events (sense, Aion) and shifting the philosophical frontier to between things and propositions, an operation that can be called "perversion" for its art of surfaces.

#on/philosophy #on/plato #on/stoicism #on/perversion #on/surface

Nineteenth Series of Humor

Nineteenth Series of Humor Page 148

The event is the identity of form and void. It is not the object as denoted, but the object as expressed or expressible, never present, but always already in the past and yet to come. As in Mallarme's works, it has the value of its own absence or abolition, since this abolition (abdicatio) is precisely its positwn in the void as the pure Event (dedicatio). "If you have a cane," says the Zen master, "I am giving you one; if you do not have one, I am taking it away." (Or, as Chrysippus said, "If you newr lost something, you have it still; but you never lost horns, er9o you haw horns.") Page 150

Across the abolished significa-tions and the lost denotations, the void is the site of sense or of the event which harmonizes with its own nonsense, in the palce where the place only takes place (la ou n 'a plus lieu que le lieu). The void is itself the paradoxical element, the surface nonsense, or the always displaced aleatory point whence the event bursts forth as sense. Page 151

The question is less that of attaining the immediate than of determining the site where the immediate is "immediately" as not-to-be-attained (comme non-a-atteindre): the surface where the void and every event along with it are made; the frontier as the cutting edge of a sword or the stretched string of the bow. To paint without painting, non-thought, shooting which becomes non-shooting, to speak without speaking: this is not at all the ineffable up above or down below, but rather the frontier and the surface where language becomes possible and, by becoming possible, inspires only a silent and immediate communication, since it could only be spoken in the resus-citation of all the mediate and abolished significations or denotations. Page 151

It is therefore a matter of disentangling, from a combined threefold operation, a universal form of the individual (real-ity), and, at the same time, of extracting a pure Idea of what we speak about (necessity), and of confronting language with an ideal model assumed to be primitive, natural, or purely rational (possibility). Page 151

What all the figures of irony have in common is that they confine the signularity within the limits of the individual or the person. Thus, irony only in appearance assumes the role of a vagabond. Page 153

Classical discourse was held by the individual, Romantic discourse by the person. But beneath these two discourses, overturning them in various ways, the faceless Ground speaks now while rumbling. Page 154

In each case and for each type of discourse, three languages must be distin-guished. First, a real language corresponding to the quite ordinary assignation of the speaker ( the individual, or rather the person ... ). Second, an ideal language representing the model of discourse relative to the form of the one who holds it (the divine model of Cra~vlus in relation to the Socratic subjectivity, for example; or the rational Leibnizian model in relation to classical individuality; or the evolutionist model in relation to the Romantic person). And finally, esoteric lan-guage, which in each case represents the subversion, from the ground up, of the ideal language and the dissolution of the one who holds the real language. Page 154

Nonsense and sense have done away with their relation of dynamic opposition in order to enter into the co-presence of a static genesis-as the nonsense of the surface and the sense which hovers over it. The tragic and the ironic give way to a new value, that of humor. For if irony is the cocxtmsiveness of being with the individual, or of the I with representation, humor is the co-extensiveness of sense with nonsense. Humor is the art of the surfaces and of the doubles, of nomad singularities and of the always displaced aleatory point; it is the art of the static genesis, the savoir-faire of the pure event, and the "fourth person singular"-with every signification, denotation, and manifestation suspended, all height and depth abolished. Page 155

The nineteenth series introduces humor as a philosophical attitude or value distinct from tragedy and irony. Humor is the art of the surface, where sense and nonsense are co-present (static genesis), and where the paradoxical element (void, surface nonsense) enables the pure event to burst forth. Unlike irony, which confines singularity to the individual, humor operates with nomadic singularities and the "fourth person singular," suspending signification, denotation, and manifestation by abolishing height and depth.

#on/philosophy #on/humor #on/sense #on/nonsense #on/surface

Twentieth Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy

Twentieth Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy Page 156

Diogenes Laertius relates that the Stoics compared philosophy to an egg: "The shell is Logic, next comes the white, Ethics, and the yoke in the center is Physics." Page 156

the place of ethics is clearly displayed between the two poles of the superficial, logical shell and the deep physical yoke. Page 156

Divination is, in the most general sense, the art of surfaces, lines, and singular points appearing on the surface. Page 157

Representation attains this topical ideal only by means of the hidden expression which it encompasses, that is, by means of the event it envelops. There is thus a "use" of representation, without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless. Page 160

Representation envelops the event in another nature, it envelops it at its borders, it stretches until this point, and it brings about this lining or hem. This is the operation which defines living usage, to the extent that representation, when it does not reach this point, remains only a dead letter confronting that which it represents, and stupid in its representiveness. Page 160

The relation to the archer is closer to Zen: the bowman must reach the point where the aim is also not the aim, that is to say, the bowman himself; where the arrow flies over its straight line while creating its own target; where the surface of the target is also the line and the point, the bowman, the shooting of the arrow, and what is shot at. This is the oriental Stoic will as proairesis. The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temporal actualization, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed according to the line of the Aion. But, at the same time, the sage also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh. Identifying wi Page 160

the quasi-cause, the sage wishes to "give a body" to the incorporeal effect, since the effect inherits the cause (Goldschmidt puts it very well, with respect to an event such as going for a walk: "The walk, incorporeal insofar as it is a way of being, acquires a body (prend corps) under the effect of the hegemonic principle which is manifested in it. " 4 And this applies to the wound and to archery just as much as it applies to the stroll). Page 161

The quasi-cause does not create, it "operates," and wills only what comes to pass. Representation and its usage therefore intervene at this point. Corporeal causes act and suffer through a cosmic mixture and a universal present which produces the incorporeal event. But the quasi-cause operates by doubling this physical causality-it embodies the event in the most limited possible present which is the most precise and the most instantaneous, the pure instant grasped at the point at which it divides itself into future and past, and no longer the present of the world which would gather into itself the past and the future. The actor occupies the instant, while the character portrayed hopes or fears in the future and remembers or repents in the past: it is in this sense that the actor "represents." To bring about the correspondence of the minimum time which can occur in the instant with the maximum time which can be thought in accordance with the Aion. To limit the actualization of the event in a present without mixture, to make the instant all the more intense, taut, and instantaneous since it expresses an unlimited future and an unlimited past. This is the use of represen-tation: the mime, and no longer the fortune-teller. One stops going from the greatest present toward a future and past which are said only of a smaller present; on the contrary, one goes from the future and past as unlimited, all the way to the smallest present of a pure instant which is endlessly subdivided. This is how the Stoic sage not only comprehends and wills the event, but also represents it and, by this, selects it, and that an ethics of the mime necessarily prolongs the logic of sense. Page 161

The twentieth series examines Stoic ethics, located between logic (surface) and physics (depth). It highlights divination as an art of surfaces and introduces the Stoic will (proairesis) and the "use of representation." This involves the sage grasping the pure event in its eternal truth (in the Aion) and then willing its actualization in a precise, instantaneous present (like an actor or mime), effectively doubling physical causality with an incorporeal quasi-causality, defining an ethics of counter-actualization.

#on/philosophy #on/stoicism #on/ethics #on/events #on/counter-actualization

Twenty-First Series of the Event

Twenty-First Series of the Event Page 162

To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: "My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it." 1 It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator; of producing surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected, finds itself again as incorporeal and manifests in us the neutral splendor which it possesses in itself in its impersonal and preindividual nature, beyond the general and the particular, the collective and the private. It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world. Page 162

"Everything was in order with the events of my life before I made them mine; to live them is to find myself tempted to become their equal, as if they had to get from me only that which they have that is best and most perfect." Page 162

the Amor Jati is one with the struggle of free men. Page 163

My misfortune is present in all events, but also a splendor and brightness which dry up misfortune and which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation. All this is the effect of the static genesis and of the immaculate conception. The splendor and the magnificence of the event is sense. The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us. In accord-ance with the three preceding determinations, it is what must be understood, willed, and represented in that which occurs. Page 163

Bousquet goes on to say: "Become the man of your misfortunes; learn to embody their perfection and brilliance." Page 163

Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one's own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break Page 163

with one's carnal birth-to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event Page 164

The actor is always acting out other roles when acting one role. The role has the same relation to the actor as the future and past have to the instantaneous present which corresponds to them on the line of the Aion. The actor thus actualizes the event, but in a way which is entirely different from the actualization of the event in the depth of things. Or rather, the actor redoubles this cosmic, or physical actualization, in his own way, which is singularly superficial-but because of it more distinct, trenchant and pure. Thus, the actor delimits the original, disengages from it an abstract line, and keeps from the cwnt only its contour and its splendor, becoming thereby the actor of one's own events-a counter-actualization. Page 164

With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the moment in which the event is embod-ied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying "here, the moment has come." The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum. . . . It has no other present than that of the mobile instant which represents it, always divided into past-future, and forming what must be called the counter-actualization. Page 165

In one case, it is my life, which seems too weak for me and slips away at a point which, in a determined relation to me, has become present. In the other case, it is I who am too weak for life, it is life which overwhelms me, scattering its singularities all about, in no relation to me, nor to a moment determinable as the present, except an impersonal instant which is divided into still-future and already-past. Page 165

Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to me at all-it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded only in itself. On one side, there is the part of the event which is realized and accomplished; on the other, there is that "part of the event which cannot realize its accomplishment." There are thus two accomplishments, which are like actualization and counter-actualization. It is in this way that death and its wound are not simply events among other events. Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double. "It is the abyss of the present, the time without present with which I have no relation, toward which I am unable to project myself. For in it I do not die. I forfeit the power of dying. In this abyss they (on) die-they never cease to die, and they never succeed in dying. Page 166

It is the "they" of impersonal and pre-individual singularities, the "they" of the pure event wherein it dies in the same way that it rains. The splendor of the "they" is the splendor of the event itself or of the fourth person. This is why there are no private or collective events, no more than there are individuals and universals, particularities and generalities. Everything is singular, and thus both collective and private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal. Page 166

Only the free man, therefore, can comprehend all violence in a single act of violence, and every mortal event in a sin9le Event which no longer makes room for the accident, and which denounces and removes the power of ressentiment within the individual as well as the power of oppression within society. Only by spreading ressentiment the tyrant forms allies, namely slaves and servants. The revolutionary alone is free from the ressentiment, by means of which one always participates in, and profits by, an oppressive order. Page 166

It is at this mobile and precise point, where all events gather together in one that transmutation happens: this is the point at which death turns against death; where dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most singular !if e takes on in order to substitute itself for me. Page 167

The twenty-first series explores the nature of the event as something that invites us to become its "Operator" or quasi-cause through counter-actualization. This involves willing the event in its impersonal, eternal truth (in the Aion) rather than merely undergoing its personal, temporal actualization (in Chronos). This counter-actualization is likened to the actor's performance and represents a liberation from the limitations of the individual self, especially in relation to death, allowing for a transmutation where singular life affirms itself over the merely personal.

#on/philosophy #on/events #on/counter-actualization #on/amor-fati

Twenty-Second Series Porcelain and Volcano

Twenty-Second SeriesPorcelain and Volcano Page 168

"By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked-it's the Grand Canyon." Page 169

If the order of the surface is itself cracked, how could it not itself break up, how is it to be prevented from precipitating destruction, even if this meant losing all accompanying benefits-the organization of language and even life itself? How could we not reach the point at which we can only spell letter by letter and cry out in a sort of schizophrenic depth, but no longer speak at all? If there is a crack at the surface, how can we prevent deep life from becoming a demolition job and prevent it from becoming it as a matter "of course"? Is it possible to maintain the inherence of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it into existence, and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body? Page 171

Well then, are we to speak always about Bousquet's wound, about Fitzgerald's and Lawry's alcoholism, Nietzsche's and Artaud's madness while remaining on the shore? Are we to become the professionals who give talks on these topics? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla-just enough to extend the crack, Page 171

but not enough to deepen it irremedially? Wherever we turn, every-thing seems dismal. Indeed, how are we to stay at the surface without staying on the shore? How do we save ourselves by saving the surface and every surface organization, including language and life? How is this politics, this full guerilla waifare to be attained? (How much we have yet to learn from Stoicism .... ) Page 172

Alcoholism does not seem to be a search for pleasure, but a search for an effect which consists mainly in an extraordinary hardening of the present. Page 172

In its hardness, the present has lost its hold and faded. It no longer encloses anything; it rather distances every aspect of the other moment. Page 173

The hardening of the present (I have) is now related to an effect of the flight of the past ( drunk). Everything culminates in a "has been." This effect of the flight of the past, this loss of the object in every sense and direction, constitutes the depressive aspect of alcoholism. Page 173

Everything has become equally remote and determine Page 173

the necessity of drinking anew, or rather of having drunk anew, in order to triumph over this hardened and faded present which alone subsists and signifies death. Page 174

What gives alcoholism an exemplary value, however, among all these events of the same type, is that alcohol is at once love and the loss of love, money and the loss of money, the native land and its loss. It is at once object, loss ef object, and the law governing this loss within an orchestrated process of demolition ("of course"). Page 174

If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves-better death thanยท the health which we are given. Page 174

The eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the flesh. But each time we must double this painful actualization by a counter-actualization which limits, moves, and transfigures it. We must accompany ourselvesfirst, in order to survive, but then even when we die. Counter-actualization is nothing, it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have the value of what could have happened. But, to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. It is to give to the crack the chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the bursting within each body; it is, finally, to give us the chance to go farther than we would have believed possible. To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualization, counteractualization liberates it, always for other times. Page 175

Burroughs wrote some strange pages on this point which attest to this quest for the great Health-our own manner of being pious: "Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths .... " A strafing of the surface in order to transmute the stabbing of bodies, oh psy-chedelia. Page 175

The twenty-second series addresses the fragility of the surface and the threat of breakdown (likened to cracking porcelain) and explores how to maintain the surface organization of sense in the face of inherent fault lines ("the crack"). Using alcoholism as an example, it shows how events inscribed in the flesh can lead to destructive actualization. Counter-actualization is proposed as the means to double this process, allowing the incorporeal crack to operate at the surface and liberate the event from its painful realization, enabling thought and a form of "great Health" beyond conventional notions.

#on/philosophy #on/surface #on/crack #on/counter-actualization #on/alcoholism

Twenty-Third Series of the Aion

Twenty-Third Series of the Aion Page 176

1) in accordance with Chronos, only the present exists in time. Past, present, and future are not three dimensions of time; only the present fills time, whereas past and future are two dimensions relative to the present in time. Page 176

Chronos is an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents, with God as the extreme circle or the external envelope. Inspired by the Stoics, Boethius said that the divine present complicates or comprehends the future and the past. Page 176

2) Inside Chronos, the present is in some manner corporeal. It is the time of mixtures or blendings, the very process of blending: to temper or to tcmporalize is to mix. Page 176

3) Chronos is the regulated movement of vast and profound presents. Page 177

Is there not already in the Stoics this dual attitude of confidence and mistrust, with respect to the world, corresponding to the two types of mixtures-the white mixture which conserves as it spreads, and the black and confused mixture which alters? In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the alternative frequently resounds: is this the good or the bad mixture? This question finds an answer only when the two terms end up being indifferent, that is, when the status of virtue (or of health) has to be sought elsewhere, in another direction, in another element-Aion versus Chronos. Page 177

time has only the present with which to express the internal subversion of the present in time, precisely because it is internal and deep; Chronos must still express the revenge taken by future and past on the present in terms of the present, because these are the only terms it comprehends and the only terms that affect it. This is its own way of wanting to die. Page 178

Having been a corporeal mixture, Chronos has become a deep break. In this sense the adventures of the present manifest themselves in Chronos, in agreement with the two aspects of the chronic present-absolute and relative movement, global and partial present: in relation to itself, in depth, insofar as it bursts asunder and contracts (the movement of schizophrenia); and in relation to its more or less vast extension, in virtue of a delirious future and a delirious past ( the movement of manic depres-sion). Chronos wants to die, but has it not already given way to another reading of time? Page 178

1) In accordance with Aion, only the past and future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once. Page 178

Whereas Chronos expressed the action of bodies and the creation of corporeal qualities, Aion is the locus of incorporeal events, and of attributes which are distinct from qualities. Whereas Chronos was inseparable from the bodies which filled it out entirely as causes and matter, Aion is populated by effects which haunt it without ever filling it up. Whereas Chronos was limited and infinite, Aion is unlimited, the way that future and past are unlimited, and finite like the instant. Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents-such as blockages or precipitations, explosions, disconnections, and indurations-Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure emptyform ef time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. It is perhaps all the more dangerous, more labyrinthine, and more tortuous for this reason. Page 179

2) It is this new world of incorporeal effects or surface effects which makes language possible. Page 180

Pure events ground language be-cause they wait for it as much as they wait for us, and have a pure, singular, impersonal, and pre-individual existence only inside the language which expresses them. Page 180

The most general operation of sense is this: it brings that which expresses it into existence; and from that point on, as pure inhcrencc, it brings itself to exist within that which expresses it. It rests therefore with the Aion, as the milieu of surface effects or events, to trace a frontier between things and propositions; and the Aion traces it with its entire straight line. Without it, sounds would fall back on bodies, and propositions themselves would not be "possible." Language is rendered possible by the frontier which separates it from things and from bodies (including those which speak). Page 180

First, the entire line of the Aion is run through by the Instant which is endlessly displaced on this line and is always missing from its own place. Page 180

Second, the instant extracts singularities from the present, and from individuals and persons which occupy this present. Page 180

Third, the straight line which extends simultaneously in two directions traces the frontier between bodies and language, states of affairs and propositions. Page 181

Sense and event are the same thing-except that now sense is related to propositions. It is related to propositions as what is expressible or expressed by them, which is entirely different from what they signify, manifest, or denote. It is also entirely different from their sonorous qualities, even though the independence of sonorous qualities from things and bodies may be exclusively guaranteed by the entire organization of the sense-event. Page 181

The entire organization, in its three abstract moments, runs from the point to the straight line, and from the straight line to the surface: the point which traces the line; the line which forms the frontier; and the surface which is developed and unfolded from both sides. Page 181

3) Many movements, with a fragile and delicate mechanism, intersect: that by means of which bodies, states of affairs, and mixtures, consi-dered in their depth, succeed or fail in the production of ideal surfaces; and conversely, that by means of which the events of the surface are actualized in the present of bodies (in accordance with complex rules) by imprisoning first their singularities within the limits of worlds, individuals, and persons. Page 181

The notion of the present has therefore several meanings: the measureless or dislocated present as the time of depth and subversion; the variable and measured present as the time of actualization. Page 182

This present of the Aion representing the instant is not at all like the vast and deep present of Chronos: it is the present without thickness, the present of the actor, dancer, or mime-the pure perverse "moment." It is the present of the pure operation, not of the incorporation. It is not the present of subversion or actualization, but that of the counter-actualization, which keeps the former from overturning the latter, and the latter from being confused with the former, and which comes to duplicate the lining (redoubler la doublure). Page 182

The twenty-third series contrasts the two readings of time: Chronos (the circular, corporeal time of the present, mixtures, and regulated movement) and Aion (the straight, incorporeal time of the past-future, events/effects, and infinite division). Aion is the milieu that makes language possible by providing the frontier between things and propositions. The organization of sense/event in Aion involves a point, line, and surface, culminating in the pure, instantaneous present of counter-actualization, which differs from the presents of depth or actualization.

#on/philosophy #on/time #on/aion #on/chronos #on/sense #on/language

Twenty-Fourth Series of the Communication of Events

Twenty-Fourth Series of the Communication of Events Page 183

The Stoic paradox is to affirm destiny and to deny necessity. Page 183

What brings destiny about at the level of events, what brings an event to repeat another in spite of all its difference, what makes it possible that a life is composed of one and the same Event, despite the variety of what might happen, that it be traversed by a single and same fissure, that it play one and the same air over all possible tunes and all possible words-all these are not due to relations between cause and effect; it is rather an aggregate of noncausal correspondences which form a system of echoes, of resumptions and resonances, a system of signs-in short, an expressive quasi-causality, and not at all a necessitating causality. Page 184

In short, the relations of events among themselves, from the point of view of an ideational or noematic quasi-causality, first expresses noncausal correspondencealogical compatibilities or incompatibilities. Page 185

Compossibility must be defined in an original manner, at a pre-individual level, by the convergence of series which singularities of events form as they stretch themselves out over lines of ordinary points. Page 185

lncompossibility must be defined by the divergence of such series: if another Sextus than the one we know is incompossible with our world, Page 185

it is because he would correspond to a singularity the series of which would diverge from the series of our world, clustered about the Adam, the Judas, the Christ, and the Leibniz that we know. Page 186

Two events are compossible when the series which are organized around their singular-ities extend in all directions; they are incompossible when the series diverge in the vicinity of constitutive singularities. Page 186

We are rather faced with a positive distance of different elements: no longer to identify two contraries with the same, but to affirm their distance as that which Page 186

relates one to the other insofar as they are "different." Page 187

Nietzsche exhorts us to live health and sickness in such a manner that health be a living perspective on sickness and sickness a living perspective on health; to make of sickness an exploration of health, of health an investigation of sickness: "Looking from the perspective of the sick toward healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again from the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life down into the secret work of the instinct of decadence-in this I have had the longest training, my truest experiences; if in anything, I became master in this. Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives . ... " Page 187

With Nietzsche, on the contrary, the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms: another town corresponds to each point of view, each point of view is another town, the towns are linked only by their distance and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their houses and their streets. There is always another town within the town. Each term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of another, by following the entire distance. Nietzsche's perspective-his perspectivism-is a much more profound art than Leib-niz's point of view; for divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of separation. lncompossibility is now a means of communication. Page 188

Instead of a certain number of predicates being excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of its concept, each "thing" opens itself up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self. 6 The communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates. Page 188

Everything happens through the resonance of disparates, point of view on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation of difference, and not through the identity of contraries. Page 189

If the self is the principle of manifestation, in relation to the proposition, the world is the principle of denotation, and God the principle of signification. But sense expressed as an event is of an entirely different nature: it emanates from nonsense as from the always displaced paradoxical instance and from the eternally decentered ex-centric center. It is a pure sign whose coherence excludes merely, and yet supremely, the coherence of the self, world, and God. 7 This quasi-cause, this surface nonsense which traverses the divergent as such, this aleatory point which circulates throughout singularities, and emits them as pre-individual and impersonal, does not allow God to subsist. It does not tolerate the subsistence of God as an original individuality, nor the self as a Person, nor the world as an element of the self and as God's product. The divergence of the affirmed series forms a "chaosmos" and no longer a world; the aleatory point which traverses them forms a counter-self, and no longer a self; the disjunction posed as a synthesis exchanges its theological principle for a diabolic principle. It is the decentered center which traces between the series, and for all disjunctions, the merciless straight line of the Aion, that is, the distance whereupon the castoffs of the self, the world, and God are lined up: the Grand Canyon of the world, the "crack" of the self, and the dismembering of God. Upon this straight line of the Aion, there is also an eternal return, as the most terrible labyrinth of which Borges spoke-one very different from the circular or monocentered return of Chronos: an eternal return which is no longer that of individuals, persons, and worlds, but only of pure events which the instant, displaced over the line, goes on dividing into already past and yet to come. Nothing other than the Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries, which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across all of its disjuncts. Page 190

The twenty-fourth series explores the communication of events through expressive quasi-causality, contrasting it with necessitating causality. It redefines compossibility and incompossibility based on the convergence or divergence of singularity series at a pre-individual level. Unlike philosophies based on identity and exclusion, this perspective, aligned with Nietzschean perspectivism, affirms divergence and positive distance, where incompossible events communicate through resonance. Sense/event is seen as a pure sign emanating from nonsense (the paradoxical element), establishing a "chaosmos" and a "counter-self" that excludes the traditional coherence of self, world, and God, culminating in an eternal return of pure events on the line of the Aion.

#on/philosophy #on/events #on/causality #on/compossibility #on/incompossibility #on/nietzsche #on/eternal-return #on/sense

Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity

Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity Page 191

Incompatibility is born only with individuals, persons, and worlds in which events are actualized, but not between events themselves or between their a-cosmic, impersonal, and preindividual singularities. Incompatibility does not exist between two events, but between an event and the world or the individual which actualizes another event as divergent. Page 191

It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as event; and that she grasp the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events. Each individual would be like a mirror for the condensation of singularities and each world a distance in the mirror. This is the ultimate sense of counter-actualization. This, moreover, is the Nietzschean discovery of the indi-vidual as the fortuitous case, Page 192

Klossowski takes it up and restores it, in an essential relation to the eternal return. Witness the vehement oscillations which upset the individual as long as he seeks only his own center and does not see the circle of which he himself is a part; for if these oscillations upset him, it is because each corresponds to an individuality other than that which he takes as his own from the point of view of the undiscoverable center. Hence, an identity is essentially fortuitous and a series of individualities must be traversed by each, in order that the fortuity make them completely necessary." Page 192

As the individual affirms the distance, she follows and joins it, passing through all the other individuals implied by the other events, and extracts from it a unique Event which is once again herself, or rather the universal freedom. The eternal return is not a theory of qualities and their circular transformations, but rather the theory of pure events and their linear and superficial condensation. Page 192

The gray butterfly understands so well the event "to be hidden" that, by remaining in the same place, plastered to the trunk of a tree, it covers the whole distance separating it from the "to invigorate" of the black butterfly; it also causes the other event to resonate as individual, within its own individuality as an event, and as a fortuitous case. Page 193

You come to this house; but in other possible pasts you are my enemy; in others my friend. . . . Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy .... The future exists now ... but I am your friend. . . . For a moment his back was again turned to me. I had the revolver ready. I fired with the utmost care. Page 193

The univocity of Being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a disjunctive synthesis, and they themselves are disjointed and divergent, membra disjuncta. The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same "sense" of everything about which it is said. That of which it is said is not at all the same, but Being is the same for everything about which it is said. It occurs, therefore, as a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things, Eventum tantum for all events, the ultimate form for all of the forms which remain disjointed in it, but which bring about the resonance and the ramification of their disjunc-tion. The univocity of Being merges with the positive use of th Page 193

disjunctive synthesis which is the highest affirmation. It is the eternal return itself, or-as we have seen in the case of the ideal game-the affirmation of all chance in a single moment, the unique cast for all throws, one Being and only for all forms and all times, a single instance for all that exists, a single phantom for all the living, a single voice for every hum of voices and every drop of water in the sea. Page 194

Univocity means the identity of the noematic attribute and that which is expressed linguistically-event and sense. Page 194

Being pure saying and pure event, univocity brings in contact the inner surface of language (insistence) with the outer surface of Being (extra-Being). Univocal Being inheres in language and happens to things; it measures the internal relation of language with the external relation of Being. Neither active nor passive, univocal Being is neutral. It is extra-Being, that is, the minimum of Being common to the real, the possible, and the impossible. A position in the void of all events in one, an expression in the nonsense of all senses in one, univocal Being is the pure form of the Aion, the form of exteriority which relates things and propositions. Page 194

In short, the univocity of Being has three determinations: one single event for all events; one and the same aliquid for that which happens and that which is said; and one and the same Being for the impossible, the possible, and the real. Page 194

The twenty-fifth series introduces the concept of the Univocity of Being, which means Being is said in a single sense of multiple, different beings and events, rather than there being a single, identical Being. This univocity is the positive use of disjunction, the affirmation of all difference, and merges with the eternal return as a unique Event for all events. Counter-actualization allows the individual to participate in this univocity, grasping herself as event and traversing a series of individualities. Univocal Being is a pure saying/event, extra-Being, neutral, and the form of the Aion, relating things and propositions.

#on/philosophy #on/univocity #on/being #on/eternal-return #on/sense

Twenty-Sixth Series of Language

Twenty-Sixth Series of Language Page 195

Events make language possible. But making possible does not mean causing to begin. We always begin in the order of speech, but not in the order of language, in which everything must be given simultaneously and in a single blow. There is always someone who begins to speak. The one who begins to speak is the one who manifests; what one talks about is the denotatum; what one says are the significations. The event is not any of these things: it speaks no more than it is spoken of or said. Nevertheless, the event does belong to language, and haunts it so much that it does not exist outside of the propositions which express it. But the event is not the same as the proposition; what is expressed is not the same as the expression. It does not preexist it, but pre-inheres in it, thus giving it a foundation and a condition. Page 195

without the event all of this would be only noise-and an indistinct noise. Page 196

Thus the entire organization of language presents three figures: the metaphysical or transcendental swface, the incorporeal abstract line, and the decentered point. These figures correspond to surface effects or events; at the surface, the line of sense immanent to the event; and on the line, the point of nonsense, surface nonsense, being co-present with sense. Page 197

The verb has two poles: the present, which indicates its relation to a denotable state of affairs in view of a physical time characterized by succession; and the infinitive, which indicates its relation to sense or the event in view of the internal time which it envelops. Page 198

The pure infinitive Page 198

is the Aion, the straight line, the empty form, and the distance; it permits no distinction of moments, but goes on being divided formally in the double and simultaneous direction of the past and the future. The infinitive does not implicate a time internal to language without expressing the sense or the event, that is to say, the set of problems raised by language. It connects the interiority of language to the exteriority of being. It inherits therefore the communication of events among themselves. As for univocity, it is transmitted from Being to language, from the exteriority of Being to the interiority of language. Equivocity is always the equivocity of nouns. The Verb is the univocity of language, in the form of an undetermined infinitive, without person, without present, without any diversity of voice. It is poetry itself. As it expresses in language all events in one, the infinitive verb expresses the event of language-language being a unique event which merges now with that which renders it possible. Page 199

The twenty-sixth series explores the relationship between events and language. Events make language possible by pre-inhering in propositions as their condition, preventing language from being mere noise. The organization of language is structured around surface effects/events (metaphysical surface), the line of sense (incorporeal line), and the point of nonsense (decentered point). The verb, particularly in its pure infinitive form, is the univocity of language, expressing sense/event and transmitting univocity from Being to language, representing language itself as a unique event.

#on/philosophy #on/language #on/events #on/sense #on/univocity #on/verb

Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality

Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality Page 200

we find ourselves confronted with a final task: to retrace the history which liberates sounds and makes them independent of bodies. Page 200

sound takes on a conventional value inside denotation, a customary value in manifestation, and an artificial value in signification, only because it establishes its independence at the surface from the higher authority of expressivity. Page 201

Now, the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theater of terror whose unforgetable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage, actor, and drama at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and a bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimen-tary morsels. The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these internal objects, and by a re-projection of these objects into the mater-nal body. Thus, introjected morsels are like poisonous, persecuting, explosive, and toxic substances threatening the child's body from within and being endlessly reconstituted inside the mother's body. The necessity of a perpetual re-introjection is the result of this. The entire system of introjection and projection is a communication of bodies in, and through, depth. Orality is naturally prolonged in cannibalism and anality in the case of which partial objects are excreta, capable of exploding the mother's body, as well as the body of the infant. The bits of one are always the persecutors of the other, and, in this abominable mixture which constitutes the Passion of the nursing infant, persecutor and persecuted are always the same. In this system of mouth-anus or aliment-exrement, bodies burst and cause other bodies to burst in a universal cesspool. Page 201

We call this world of introjected and projected, alimentary and excremental partial internal objects the world of simulacra. Melanie Klein describes it as the paranoid-schizoid position of the child. It is succeeded by a depressive position which characterizes a dual progress, since the child strives to reconstitute a complete aood Page 201

object and to identify himself with this object. The child strives thus to achieve a corresponding identity, even if in this new drama he has to share the threats, sufferings, and all the passions undergone by the good object. Depressive "identification," with its confirmation of the superego and formation of the ego, replaces paranoid and schizoid "introjection-projection." Everything is prepared at last for the access to a sexual position marked by Oedipus, through new dangers. In it, the libidinal impulses tend to be disengaged from destructive impulses and to invest through "symbolization" always better organized objects, interests, and activities. Page 202

What the schizoid position opposes to bad partial objects-introjected and projected, toxic and excremental, oral and anal-is not a good object, even it if were partial. What is opposed is rather an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price. At this point, the tension between id and ego is formed. Page 202

If we assume that the schizophrenic, with all the language he has acquired, regresses to this schizoid position, we should not be surprised to find again in schizophrenic language the duality and complementarity of words-passions, splintered excremental bits, and of words-actions, blocks fused together by a principle of water or fire. Henceforth, everything takes place in depth, beneath the realm of sense, between two nonsenses of pure noise-the nonsense of the body and of the splintered word, and the nonsense of the block of bodies or of inarticulate words (the "that doesn't make sense," fa n 'a pas de sens, acting as the positive process of both sides). The same duality of complementary poles is found again in schizophrenia between reiter-ations and perseverations, between jaw-grinding and catatonia, for example. The first bears witness to internal objects and to the bodies they break to pieces-the same bodies which break them to pieces; the second manifests the body without organs. Page 203

The good object has another "position." It belongs to the heights, it holds itself above, and does not allow itself to fall without also changing its nature. Page 203

The superego does not begin with the first introjected objects, as Melanie Klein says, but rather with this good object which holds itself aloft. Page 203

the good object of the heights maintains-a struggle with the partial objects in which force is at stake in the violent confrontation of two dimensions. The body of the infant is like a den full of introjected savage beasts which endeavour to snap up the good object; the good object, in turn, behaves in their presence like a pitiless bird of prey. Page 204

Such is the vortex id-ego-superego, in which every one receives as many blows as he metes out and which character-izes the manic-depressive position. Page 204

The good object is by nature a lost object. It only shows itself and appears from the start as already lost, as havin9 been lost. Its eminent unity lies here. Only as lost, the good object confers its love on the one who is able to find it for the first time as "found again" ("retrouve") (the ego which identifies with it); and it confers its hate on the one who approaches it aggressively as something "discovered" or "exposed," and yet already there (the ego taking the side of internal objects). Page 205

The good object is cruel (the cruelty of the superego) to the extent that it ties together all these moments of love and hate conferred from on high with an instance which turns its face away and offers its gifts (dons) only as gifts offered once before (redonnes). Page 205

The manic-depressive position, being determined by the good object, presents therefore all sorts of new characteristics at the same time that it inserts itself in the paranoid-schizoid position. This is no longer the deep world of the simulacra, but rather that of the idol on high. It is no longer a matter of mechanisms of introjection and projection, but of identification. And it is no longer the same Spaltun9 or division of the ego. Page 206

what guarantees the first rough sketch of this sculpture, and the first stage in the formation of a language, is the good object of the depressive position up above. For it is this object that, from among all the sounds of the depth, extracts a Voice. If we take into consideration the characteristics of the good object (of being found only as lost, of appearing for the first time as already there, etc.) it seems that they are necessarily gathered into a voice which speaks and comes from on high. Page 207

For the child, the first approach to language consists in grasping it as the model of that which preexists, as referring to the entire domain of what is already there, and as the familial voice which conveys tradition, it affects the child as a bearer of a name and demands his insertion even before the child begins to understand. Page 207

And so we are left outside sense, far from it, this time in a pre-sense (pre-sens) of heights: the voice does not yet have at its disposal the univocity which would make it a language, and, having unity only in virtue of its eminence, rests entangled in the equivocity of its denotations, the analogy of its significations, and the ambivalence of its manifestations. Page 208

F5QSYV8K Page 208

Truth to tell, to the extent that it denotes the lost object, one does not know what the voice denotes; one does not know what it signifies since it signifies the order of preexisting entities; one does not know what it manifests since it manifests withdrawal into its principle, or silence. It is at once the object, the law of the loss, and the loss itself. Page 208

This is the paradox of the voice which at the same time marks the insufficiency of all theories of analogy and equivocity: it has the dimensions of a language without having its condition; it awaits the event that will make it a language. It is no longer a noise, but is not yet language. Page 208

We constantly relive in our dreams the passage from noise to voice; observers have correctly noted how sounds reaching the sleeper were organized in the voice ready to awaken him. 6 We are schizophrenic while sleeping, but manic-depressive when nearing the point of awak-ening. Page 208

It is not necessary to wonder whether echoes, constraints, and thefts are primary or only secondary in relation to automatic phenomena. This is a false problem since what is stolen from the schizophrenic is not the voice; what is stolen by the voice from on high is, rather, the entire sonorous, prerncal system that he was able to make into his "spiritual automaton." Page 209

The twenty-seventh series traces a dynamic genesis of language starting from the "primary order" of depth, referencing Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic stages. It describes the transition from the paranoid-schizoid position (world of simulacra, introjection-projection, depth) to the depressive position (good object, identification, height). This latter stage extracts a "Voice" from the noises of depth, representing a "pre-sense" located at the heights, which has the dimensions of language but lacks its full condition (univocity), awaiting the event that will make it language proper.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/language #on/genesis #on/klein

Twenty-Eighth Series of Sexuality

Twenty-Eighth Series of Sexuality Page 210

The word "partial" has two senses. First, it designates the state of introjected objects and the corresponding state of the drives attached to these objects. It also designates elective bodily zones and the state of the drives which find in them a "source." These are objects which may themselves be partial: the breast or finger for the oral zone, excrements for the anal zone. Page 210

A stage is characterized by a type of activity which assimilates other activities and realizes in a certain mode a mixture of drives-absorption, for example, in the first oral stage, which also assimilates the anus, or excretion during the anal stage, which prolongs it, and which also takes over the mouth. Zones, on the contrary, represent the isolation of a territory, activities which "invest" this territory, and drives which now find in it a distinct source. Page 210

But the essential difference is that zones are facts c!_[ the surface, and that their organization implies the constitution, the discovery, and the investment of a third dimension which is no longer either depth or height. Page 211

sexual perversion is distinct from the depressive ascent or conversion and from the schizophrenic subversion. Page 211

Precisely because the entire surface does not preexist, sexuality in its first (pregenital) aspect must be defined as a veritable production of partial surfaces. The auto-eroticism which corresponds to it must be characterized by the object of satisfaction projected onto the surface and by the little narcissistic ego which contemplates it and indulges in it. Page 211

Each erogenous zone is inseparable from one or several singular points, from a serial development articulated around the singularity and from a drive investing this territory. It is inseparable from a partial object "projected" onto the territory as an object of satisfaction (ima9e), from an observer or an ego bound to the territory and experiencing satisfaction, and from a mode of joining up with other zones. The entire surface is the product of this connection, and, as we will see, this poses specific problems. Precisely because the entire surface does not preexist, sexuality in its first (pregenital) aspect must be defined as a veritable production of partial surfaces. The auto-eroticism which corresponds to it must be characterized by the object of satisfaction projected onto the surface and by the little narcissistic ego which contemplates it and indulges in it. Page 211

The fact is though that height renders possible a constitution of partial surfaces, like many-colored fields unfolding beneath the wings of an airplane. As for the superego, despite all its cruelty, it is not without kindness with respect to the sexual organization of superficial zones, to the extent that it can assume that the libidinal drives are there separated from the destructive drives ef the depths. Page 212

Of course, the sexual or libidinal drives were already at work in the depths. But it is important to understand the state of their mixturewith the drives of preservation, on one hand, and drives of death, on the other. Page 212

In this sense, all three drives merge together in depth, under such conditions that preservation provides the drive, sexuality provides the substitutive object, and destruction provides the whole reversible relation. But precisely because preservation is, at its foundation, threatened by this system fo which it has become involved (wherein to eat becomes to be eaten), we see the whole system being displaced; death is recovered as a drive inside the body without organs at the same time that this dead body is eternally conserved and nourished while it is sexually born of itself. The world of oral-anal-urethral depth is the world of a revolving mixture which can truly be called bottomless, as it bears witness to a perpetual subversion. Page 213

When we link sexuality to the constitution of surfaces or zones, what we mean to say is that the libidinal drives find the occasion for an at least apparent double liberation, which is expressed precisely in autoeroticism. On one hand, they free themselves from the alimentary model of the drives of preservation, since they find new sources in the erogenous zones and new objects in the images projected onto these zones: thus, for example, sucking (le suqotement) which is distinguished from suction (la succion). On the other hand, they free themselves from the constraint of the destructive drives to the extent that they get involved in the productive labor of surfaces and in new relations with these new pellicular objects. Page 213

We must then consider the twice liberated libido as a veritable supeificial energy. We should not believe, however, that the other drives have disappeared, that they do not continue their work in depth, or especially that they do not find an original position in the new system. Page 213

The twenty-eighth series positions sexuality as operating on a surface dimension, distinct from the depth (introjection/projection, oral-anal mixture, subversion) and height (good object, identification, ascent) described previously. Pregenital sexuality, particularly auto-eroticism, involves the production of partial surfaces and the apparent liberation of libidinal drives as superficial energy, marking a shift to a new organization beyond the mere mixing of drives in depth.

#on/philosophy #on/sexuality #on/psychoanalysis #on/surface

Twenty-Ninth Series Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished

Twenty-Ninth Series-Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished Page 216

It is necessary therefore to imagine Oedipus not only as innocent, but as full of zeal and good intentions-a second Hercules who will experience a similarly painful experience. Page 216

One is never certain that the destructive drives, which continue to act under the sexual drives, are not directing the work of the latter. The phallus as an image at the surface risks constantly being recuperated by the penis of the depths or the penis of the heights. Thus, it risks being castrated as phallus, since the penis of the depths devours and castrates, and the penis of the heights frustrates. There is therefore a double menace of castration through preoedipal regression (castration-devouring, castration-deprivation). The line traced by the phallus risks being swallowed up inside the deep Spaltun9. Page 216

DIPWZM6Y Page 216

Incest risks also returning to the state of eventration of the mother and of the child, or to a cannibalistic mixture where the one who eats is also eaten. In short, the schizoid and even the depressive position-the anxiety of one and the culpability of the other-threaten endlessly the Oedipal complex. As Melanie Klein says, anxiety and culpability are not born of the incestuous affair. They would, rather, prevent its formation and compromise it constantly. Page 216

The constitution of surfaces has also as a principle and intention the separation of sexual drives from destructive drives from the depths, and, in this respect, it encounters a certain complacency on the part of the superego or of the good object of the heights. Thus, the dangers of the oedipal affair must also derive from an internal evolution. Moreover, the risks of confusion or of corporeal mixture, invoked by the first response, take on their full meaning only in relation to these new dangers generated by the oedipal enterprise itself. In short, this affair necessarily creates a new anxiety which is proper to it, a new culpability or a new castration which is not reduced to either of the preceding cases-and to which alone the name "castration complex" corresponds in relation to Oedipus. The constitution of surfaces is the most innocent, hut "innocent" does not signify "without perversity." Page 217

The child receives the phallus as an image that the good ideal penis projects over the genital zone of his body. He receives this gift (narcissistic overinvestment of an organ) as the condition by which he would be able t~ bring about the integration of all his other zones. But the fact is that he cannot accomplish the production of the surface without introducing elsewhere some very important changes. In the first place, he splits the gift-making idol or good object of the heights. Both parents were combined earlier, in accordance with for Page 217

mulas dearly analyzed by Melanie Klein: the maternal body of the depths comprised a multiplicity of penises as partial internal objects; and especially, the good object of the heights was, as a complete organ, both penis and breast-mother provided with a penis, father provided with a breast. Page 218

On one hand, the child identifies the mother with the wounded body, being the primary dimension of the complete, good object (the wounded body must not be confused with the shattered or fragmented body of the depths); and on the other hand, the child identifies the father with the last dimension, that is, with the good object retired into its height. As for the wounded body of the mother, the child wishes to repair it, with his restorative phallus and make it unharmed. He wishes to recreate a surface to this body at the same time that he creates a surface for his own body. As for the withdrawn object, he wishes to bring about its return, to render it present with his evocative phallus. Page 218

In the unconscious, everyone is the offspring of divorced parents, dreaming of restoring the mother and bringing about the return of the father, pulling him back from his retreat: it seems to us that this is the basis of what Freud called the "familial romance" and its linkage with the Oedipus complex. Never has the child, in his narcissistic confidence, had better intentions, never again will he feel as good. Far from casting himself into an agonizing and guilt-ridden venture, never, in this position, had he believed himself so close to dispelling the anxiety and culpability of the previous positions. It is true that he assumes the father's place and takes the mother as the object of his incestuous desire. But the incest relationship, almost by proxy, does not imply here violence: neither eventration nor usurpation, but rather a surface relation, a process of restoration and evocation in which the phallus brings about a lining at the surface. Page 218

Oedipus is a tragedy, but we must be able to imagine the tragic hero as gay and innocent, and as starting off on the right foot. Incest with the mother through restoration and the replacement of the father through evocation are not only good intentions (for it is with the Oedipus complex that the intention-the moral notion par excellence -is born). As intentions, they are inseparable extensions of what is apparently the most innocent activity, which, from the point of view of the child, consists of creating a total surface from all his partial surfaces, making use of the phallus projected by the good penis from above, and causing the parental images to benefit from this projection. Oedipus is Herculean because, as peace-maker, he too wishes to form a kingdom of surfaces and of the earth to fit his size. He believed that he had warded off the monsters of the depth and allied himself with the powers from on high. And in his endeavour, the restoration of the mother and the summoning of the father are the targets: this is the true Oedipus complex. Page 219

The superego as the good object begins to condemn the libidinal drives themselves. In fact, in his desire for incest-restoration, Oedipus saw. What he saw (once the cleavage has been made), but should not have seen, is that the wounded body of the mother is not only wounded by the internal penises it contains; insofar as its surface is lacking a penis, it is wounded like a castrated body. The phallus as a projected image, which bestowed a new force on the child's penis, designates, on the contrary, a lack in the mother. This discovery threatens the child in an essential manner, for it signifies (on the other side of the cleavage) that the penis is the property of the father. Wishing to summon the father back and to make him present, the child betrays the paternal essence of withdrawal. This essence could not be found but only as if recovered-recovered in absence and in forgetfulness-but never given Page 219

in a simple presence of the "thing" which would eliminate forgetting. 2 It becomes therefore true, at this moment, that by wishing to restore the mother, the child has in fact castrated and eventrated her; and that by wishing to bring back the father, the child has betrayed and killed him, transformed him into a cadaver. Castration, death by castration, becomes the child's destiny, reflected by the mother in this anguish he now experiences, and inflicted by the father in this culpability he now submits to as a sign of vengeance. Page 220

"Perversity" is the traversal of surfaces, and here, in this traversal, something new and changed is revealed. Page 220

This castration, which alone merits the name "complex," is distinguished in principle from the two other castrations: that of depth, through devouring-absorption; and that of height, through privation-frustration. It is a castration through "adsorption," a surface phenomenon: like, for example, the surface poisons, those of the tunic and the skin which bum Hercules Page 220

As a surface phenomenon, it marks the failure or illness, the premature mold, the way in which the surface prematurely rots, and the surface line rejoins the deep Spa/tung or incest rejoins the cannibalistic mixture of the depths-all of this, in conformity with the first reason which we invoked earlier. Page 220

Far from being an agency of the depths, intention is the phenomenon of the entire surface, or the phenomenon which adequately corresponds to the coordination of the physical surfaces. The very notion of Image, after having designated the superficial object of a partial zone, and then the phallus projected on the genital zone, and the pellicular parental images born of a cleavage, comes finally to designate action in general. Page 221

In short, intention as an Oedipal category does not at all oppose a determined action to another, as, for example, a particular willed action to a particular accomplished action. On the contrary, it takes the totality of every possible action and divides it in two, projects it on two screens, as it determines each side according to the necessary exigencies of each screen. On one hand, the entire image of action is projected on a physical surface, where the action itself appears as willed and is found determined in the forms of restoration and evocation; on the other, the entire result of the action is projected on a metaphysical surface, where Page 221

tlw .1dio11 itself appears as produced and not willed, determined by the forms of murder and castration. The famous mechanism of "denegation" (that's not what I wanted ... ), with all its importance with respect to the formation of thou9ht, must be interpreted as expressing the passage from one surface to another. Page 222

In fact, along with the "narcissistic wound," that is, when the phallic line is transformed into the trace of castration, the libido, which invested the ego of secondary narcissism at the surface, undergoes a particularly important transmutation-that which heud called "desexualization." Desexualized energy appeared to Freud as nourishing the death instinct and as conditioning the mechanism of thought. We must therefore grant a dual value to the themes of death and castration. We must grant the value they have with respect to the preservation or liquidation of the Oedipus complex and in the organization of the definitive genital sexuality, upon its own surface and in its relations to the previous dimensions (the schizoid and depressive positions). But we must also grant the value which they take on as the origin of desexualized energy and the original manner by which this energy reinvests them on its new metaphysical surface, or surface of pure thought. This second process -which, to a certain extent, is independent of the others, since it is not directly proportional to the success or failure of the liquidation of Oedipus-corresponds in its first aspect to what is called "sublimation," and in its second aspect to what is called "symbolization." Page 222

In this crack of thought, at the incorporeal surface, we Page 222

recognize the pure line of the Aion and the death instinct in its speculative form. Page 223

the crack, in a singular fashion, risks breaking up the surface from which it is nevertheless inseparable. It runs the risk of encountering again on the other surface the simple trace of castration. Or even worse, it runs the risk of being swallowed up in the Spaltun9 of depths and heights-carrying with it all the debris of the surface in this generalized debacle where the end finds again the point of departure and the death instinct, the bottomless destructive drives. Page 223

"for, of course all life is a process of demolition ... ," including speculative life. Page 223

The twenty-ninth series examines the Oedipus complex not as a story of transgression but of "good intentions" aiming to constitute a total surface and integrate erogenous zones via the phallus. This process, however, is undermined by the persistence of depth drives and leads to a new form of castration (by "adsorption," a surface phenomenon) and the transformation of the phallic line into a trace of castration. This "narcissistic wound" results in desexualization, the investment of the death instinct, and the emergence of a metaphysical surface for thought (sublimation, symbolization), though this "crack of thought" risks collapsing back into the depths.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/oedipus #on/castration #on/surface #on/desexualization #on/intention

Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm

Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm Page 224

, ) It represents neither an action nor a passion, but a result of action and passion, that is, a pure event. Page 224

Events are effects (thus, for example, the castration "effect," and the parricide "effect"...). But insofar as they are effects, they must be tied not only with endogenous causes, but with exogenous causes as well, effective states of affairs, actions really undertaken, and passions or contemplations effectively actualized. Page 224

Neither active nor passive, neither internal nor external, neither imaginary nor real-phantasms have indeed the impassibility and ideality of the event. In light of this impassibility, they inspire in us an unbearable waiting-the waiting of that which is going to come about as a result, and also of that which is already in the process of coming about and never stops coming about. Page 225

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psychoanalysis in general is the science of events, on the condition that the event should not be treated as something whose sense is to be sought and disentangled. The event is sense itself, insofar as it is disengaged or distinguished from the states of affairs which produce it and in which it is actualized. Page 225

For it is with Oedipus that the event is disengaged from its causes in depth, spreads itself at the surface and connects itself with its quasi-cause from the point of view of a dynamic genesis. It is the perfect crime, the eternal truth, the royal splendor of the event-each one of which communicates with all the others in the variants of one and the same phantasm. Page 226

And if it is indeed at the point where the actualization cannot accomplish or the cause produce that the entire event resides, it is at the same point also that it offers itself to counteractualization; it is here that our greatest freedom lies-the freedom by which we develop and lead the event to its completion and transmutation, and finally become masters of actualizations and causes. As the science of pure events, psychoanalysis is also an art of counter-actualizations, sublimations, and symbolizations. Page 226

2) The second characteristic of the phantasm is its position in relation to the ego, or rather the situation of the ego in the phantasm itself. Page 226

Although the ego may appear occasionally in the phantasm as acting, as undergoing an action, or as a third observing party, it is neither active nor passive and does not allow itself at any moment to be fixed in a place, even if this place were reversible. Page 226

That which is beyond the active and the passive is not the pronominal, but the result-the result of actions and passions, the surface effect or the event. What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned. It literally releases them like spores and bursts as it gets unburdened. Page 227

This neutrality, that is to say, this movement by which singularities are emitted, or rather restored by an ego which is dissolved or adsorbed at the surface, belongs essentially to the phantasm. Page 227

Thus, the individuality of the ego merges with the event of the phantasm itself, even if that which the event represents in the phantasm is understood Page 227

as another individual, or rather as a series of other individuals through which the dissolved ego passes. The phantasm is inseparable therefore from the toss of the dice or from the fortuitous instances which it enacts. Page 228

And the famous grammatical traniformations (such as those of President Schreber or those of sadism or voyeurism) register each time the rising up of singularities distributed in disjunctions, all of them, in each case, communicating in the event and all events communicating in one event, as for example in the case of the throws of the dice in the same cast. We find once again here an illustration of the principle of positive distance, with the singularities which stake it out, and of an affirmative usage of the disjunctive synthesis (and not a synthesis of contradiction). Page 228

3) It is not an accident that the development inherent in the phantasm is expressed in a play of grammatical transformations. Page 228

It is not the case that the phantasm is said or signified; the event 'presents as many differences from the propositions which express it as from the state of affairs in which it occurs. The fact is, though, that it does not exist outside of a proposition which is at least possible, even if this proposition has all of the characteristics of a paradox or nonsense; it also inheres in a particular element of the proposition. This element is the verb-the infinitive form of the verb. The phantasm is inseparable from the infinitive mode of the verb and bears witness thereby to the pure event. Page 228

From this pure and undetermined infinitive, voices, moods, tenses, and persons will be engendered. Each one of them will be engendered within disjunctions representing in the phantasm a variable combination of singular points, and constructing around these singularities an instance of solution to the specific problem-the problem of birth, of the difference of the sexes, or the problem of death. Page 229

Once an infinitive has been determined in a phantasm (for example, "to live," "to absorb," or "to give"), she investigates several types of connection: the subject-object connection, the active-passive conjunction, the affirmation-negation disjunction, or the type of temporalization of which each one of these verbs is capable ("to live," for example, has a subject, but one that is not an agent and that has no differentiated object). She is therefore able to classify these verbs in an order which runs from the least to the most determined, as if a general infinitive which is taken to be pure were progressively specified according to the differentiation of formal grammatical relations.4 This is how Aion is peopled by events at the level of singularities which are distributed over its infinitive line. Page 229

It seems to us, precisely, that the phantasm, properly speaking, finds its origin only in the ego of the secondary narcissism, along with the narcissistic wound, the neutralization, the symbolization, and the sublimation which ensue. In this sense, it is inseparable not only from grammatical transformations, but also from the neutral infinitive as the ideational material of these transformations. The phantasm is a surface phenomenon and, moreover, a phenomenon which is formed at a certain moment in the development of surfaces. For this reason, we have opted for the word "simulacrum" in order to designate the objects of depth (which are already no longer "natural objects"), as well as the becoming which corresponds to them and the reversals by which they are characterized. We choose "idol" in order to designate the object of the heights and its adventures. We choose "image" in order to designate that which pertains to partial, corporeal surfaces, including the initial problem of their phallic coordination (good intention). Page 230

The thirtieth series defines the phantasm as a pure event, a result of action/passion, characterized by ideality and impassibility. Psychoanalysis is the science and art of these events and their counter-actualization. The phantasm operates at the surface, where the ego dissolves and liberates pre-individual singularities, expressing itself through grammatical transformations linked to the infinitive verb. Originating with secondary narcissism, the phantasm is a surface phenomenon distinct from simulacra (depth) and idols (height), reflecting the processes of desexualization, sublimation, and symbolization.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/phantasm #on/events #on/surface #on/infinitive #on/singularities

Thirty-First Series of Thought

Thirty-First Series of Thought Page 231

First, the phantasm covers the distance between psychic systems with ease, going from consciousness to the unconscious and vice versa, from the nocturnal to the diurnal dream, from the inner to the outer and conversely, as if it itself belonged to a surface dominating and articulating both the unconscious and the conscious, or to a line connecting and arranging the inner and the outer over two sides. Page 231

Second, the phantasm returns easily to its own origin and, as an "originary phantasm," it integrates effortlessly the origin of the phantasm (that is, a question, the origin of birth, of sexuality, of the difference of the sexes, or of death ... ). 1 This is because it is inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin. Page 231

Nothing is finalized like the phantasm; nothing finalizes itse!f to such an extent. Page 231

V5TRJNDU Page 232

The (oedipal) intention was to restore, to bring about, and to coordinate its own physical surfaces; but all of this was still located within the domain of lmageswith the narcissistic libido and the phallus as a surface projection. The result is to castrate the mother and to be castrated, to kill the father and to be killed, along with the transformation of the phallic line in the trace of castration and the corresponding dissipation of all the images (mother-world, father-god, ego-phallus). Page 232

Thus, the beginning is truly in the void; it is suspended in the void. It is with-out. The paradoxical situation of the beginning, here, is that it is itself a result, and that it remains external to that which it causes to begin. This situation would afford no "way out," had not castration transformed the narcissistic libido into desexualized energy. This neutral or desexualized energy constitutes the second screen, the cerebral or metaphysical surface on which the phantasm is going to develop, begin anew with a beginning which now accompanies it at each step, run to its own finality, represent pure events which are like one and the same Result of the second degree. Page 232

The phantasm's formula is this: from the sexual pair to thought via castration. If it is true that the thinker of Page 232

depths is a bachelor, and that the depressive thinker dreams of lost betrothals, the thinker of surfaces is married or thinks about the "problem" of the couple. Page 233

The phantasm returns to its beginning which remained external to it (castration); but to the extent that beginning itself was a result, the phantasm also returns to that from which the beginning had resulted (the sexuality of corporeal surfaces); and finally, little by little, it returns to the absolute origin from which everything proceeds (the depths). One could now say that everything-sexuality, orality, anality-receives a new form on the new surface, which recovers and integrates not only images but even idols and simulacra. Page 233

To be precise, the phantasm goes from the figurative to the abstract; it begins with the figurative, but must be continued in the abstract. The phantasm is the process of the constitution of the incorporeal. It is a machine for the extraction of a little thought, for the distribution of a difference of potential at the edges of the crack, and for the polarization of the cerebral field. As it returns to its external beginning (deadly castration), it is always beginning again its internal beginning (the movement of desexualization). In this way, the phantasm has the property of bringing in contact with each other the inner and the outer and uniting them on a single side. This is why it is the site of the eternal return. It mimics endlessly the birth of a thought, it begins a new desexualization, sublimation, and symbolization, caught in the act of bringing about this birth. Without this intrinsic repetition of beginnings, the phantasm could not integrate its other, extrinsic beginning. Page 234

Why glory? What kind of metamorphosis is it, when thought invests (or reinvests) that which is projected over its surface with its own desexualized energy? The answer is that thought does it in the guise of the Event. It does it with the part of the event that we should call nonactualizable, precisely because it belongs to thought and can be accomplished only by thought and in thought. There arise then aggressions and voracities which transcend what was happening in the depths of hodies; desires, loves, pairings, copulations, and intentions which tran Page 234

scend everything happening at the surface of bodies; and finally, powerlessnesses and deaths which transcend all that could have happened. This is the incorporeal splendor of the event as that entity which addresses itself to thought, and which alone may invest it-extraBeing. Page 235

In short, metamorphosis is the liberation of the nonexistent entity for each state of affairs, and of the infinitive for each body and quality, each subject and predicate, each action and passion. Metamorphosis (sublimation and symbolization) consists, for each thing, in the liberation of an aliquid which is the noematic attribute and that which can noetically be expressed, eternal truth, and sense which hovers over bodies. Only here to die and to kill, to castrate and to be castrated, to restore and to bring about, to wound and to withdraw, to devour and to be devoured, to introject and to project, become pure events on the metaphysical surface which transforms them, and where their infinitive is drowned out. For the sake of one single language which expresses them, and under a single "Being" in which they are thought, all the events, verbs, and expressible-attributes communicate as one inside this extraction. The phantasm recovers everything on this new plane of the pure event, and in this symbolic and sublimated part of that which cannot be actualized; similarly, it draws from this part the strength to orient its actualization, to duplicate it, and to conduct its concrete counter-actualization. For the event is properly inscribed in the flesh and Page 235

in the body, with the will and the freedom which befit the patient thinker, only in virtue of the incorporeal part containing their secret, that is, the principle, truth, finality, and quasi-cause. Page 236

It is, in fact, the entire sexual surface which is intermediary between physical depth and metaphysical surface. Page 236

The first orientation must be determined as the orientation of psychosis, the second as that of the successful sublimation; between the two, one finds all the neuroses, in the ambiguous character of Oedipus and of castration. And it is the same thing with death: the narcissistic self regards it from two sides, according to the two figures described by Blanchot-the personal and present death, which shatters and "contradicts" the ego, as it abandons it to the destructive drives of the depths and to blows of the outside; but also the impersonal and infinitive death, which "distances" the ego, causing it to release the singularities which it contains and raising it to the death instinct on the other surface, where "one" dies, where one never succeeds in, or finishes, dying. Page 236

The mouth is not only a superficial oral zone but also the organ of depths, the mouth-anus, the cesspool introjecting and projecting every morsel. The brain is not only a corporeal organ but also the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized. 3 Between this mouth and this brain everything occurs, hesitates, and gets its orientation. Only the victory of the brain, if it takes place, frees the mouth to speak, frees it from excremental food and withdrawn voices, and nourishes it with every possible word. Page 237

The thirty-first series explores the phantasm as a process of thought that moves from the sexual surface to a metaphysical surface, driven by desexualized energy resulting from castration. The phantasm integrates its origins, traverses psychic systems, and constitutes the incorporeal by liberating pure events (sense/aliquid/infinitive) on this new surface (sublimation/symbolization). This process, where thought invests the non-actualizable part of the event, allows the phantasm to recover and reorient elements from previous dimensions (depth, height, sexual surface), culminating in a "metamorphosis" where events are grasped in their incorporeal splendor, bridging the physical and metaphysical.

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Thirty-Second Series on the Different Kinds of Series

Thirty-Second Series on the Different Kinds of Series Page 238

These two aspects-sequence and block-represent the forms taken on respectively by displacement and condensation in depth, within the schizoid position. It is with sexuality, that is to say, with the release of the sexual drives, that the series begins-because the serial form is a surface organization. Page 238

There are, first, the erogenous zones of pregenital sexuality: each one of them is organized in a series which converges around a singularity represented most often by an orifice surrounded by a mucous membrane. Page 239

In each of these senses, a series linked to an erogenous zone appears to have a simple form, to be homo9eneous, to give rise to a synthesis of succession which may be contracted as such, and which in any case constitutes a simple connection. Page 239

But second, it is clear that the problem of the phallic coordination of the erogenous zones comes to complicate the serial form: without doubt, the series prolong one another and converge around the phallus as the image imposed on the genital zone. The genital zone has its own series. It is inseparable, however, from a complex form which subsumes under it hetero9eneous series, now that a condition of continuity or conver9ence has replaced homogeneity; it gives rise to a synthesis of coexistence and coordination and constitutes a conjunction of the subsumed series. Page 239

Third, we know that the phallic coordination of surfaces is necessarily accompanied by oedipal affairs which in turn emphasize parental images. Page 240

The importance of this new moment or relation could not be too greatly stressed, since it animates the Freudian theory of the event, or rather of the two series of events. This theory consists first in showing that a traumatism presupposes the existence of at least two independent events, separated in time, one of them infantile and the other post-pubescent, between which a sort of resonance is produced. Under a different aspect the two events are presented as two series, one pregenital and the other oedipal, with their resonance being the process of the phantasm. 2 In our terminology, it is therefore not a question of events properly speaking, but rather of two series of independent images, whereby the Event is disengaged only through resonance of the series in the phantasm. Page 240

It is in relation to itself that the phallus is both a defect and an excess, when the phallic line meraes with the trace of castration, and the excessive image no longer designates anything other than its own lack, as it takes away the child's penis. We are not going to repeat the characteristics of the phallus that Lacan has analyzed in several well-known texts. It is the paradoxical element or object = x, missing always its own equilibrium, at once excess and deficiency, never equal, missing its own resemblance, its own identity, its own origin, its own place, and always displaced in relation to itself. It is floating signifier and floated signified, place without occupant and occupant without place, the empty square (which can also create an excess through this void) and a supernumerary object (which can also create a lack by being this excess number). It is the phallus which brings about the resonance of the two series that we earlier called pregenital and oedipal, and which can also receive different qualifications, provided that, through all possible qualifications, the one is determined as signified and the other as signifying. 3 It is the phallus which is surface nonsense, twice nonsense, as we have seen, and which distributes sense to the two series, as something happeninB to the one and as something insistinB in the other (it is thus inevitable that the first series does not yet imply a comprehension of what is in question). Page 242

If we consider all three serial kinds - the connective synthesis on a single series, the conjunctive synthesis of convergence, and the disjunctive synthesis of resonance, we see that the third proves to be the truth and the destination of the others, to the degree that the disjunction attains its positive and affirmative use. Page 243

in the series of sexuality, something begins by being grasped as a premonition before being understood. This pre-understanding relates to what is already there. Page 243

This is, indeed, what the child extricates from the voice upon leaving the depressive position: an apprenticeship of formative elements before any understanding of formed linguistic units. In the continuous flow of the voice which comes from above, the child cuts out elements of different orders, free to give them a function which is still prelinguistic in relation to the whole and to the different aspects of the sexual position. Page 244

Serge Leclaire's recent book, Psychanalyser, proposes an extremely interesting thesis: an erogenous zone (that is, a libidinal movement of the body insofar as it happens at the surface, distinguishing itself from drives of conservation and destruction) would be marked essentially by a "letter" which, at the same time, would trace its limit and subsume under it images or objects of satisfaction. "Letter" at this point assumes no mastery of language and still less a possession of writing. It is rather a question of a phonemic difference in relation to the difference of intensity which characterizes the erogenous zone. The precise example invoked by Leclaire, however, that of the letter V in the case of the Wolf Man, does not seem to go in this direction: in fact, the letter V in this example marks rather a very general movement of openness, common to several zones (to open Page 244

one's eyes, one's ears, one's mouth), and connotes several dramatic scenes rather than objects of satisfaction.6 Should we rather think, to the extent that the phoneme itself is a cluster C!f distinctive traits or differential relations, that each zone would rather be analogous to one of these traits and determined by them in relation to another zone? In this case, there would be reason for a new heralding of the body founded on phonology; the oral zone would necessarily enjoy an essential privilege, insofar as the child would make an active apprenticeship of phonemes at the same time that she would extract them from the voice. Page 245

The fact is now that the oral zone would pursue its liberation and its progress in the acquisition of language only to the extent that a global integration of zones could be produced, or even an alignment of clusters and an entry of phonemes into more complex elements-what linguistics sometimes call a "concatenation of successive entities." Here we encounter the second point, and with it the problem of the phallic coordination as the second aspect of the sexual position. It is in this sense that Leclaire defines the surface of the entire body as an aggregate or sequence of letters, while the image of the phallus assures their convergence and continuity. We thus find ourselves inside a new domain. It is no longer at all a question of a simple addition of the preceding phonemes, but rather of the construction of the first esoteric words, which integrate phonemes into a conjunctive synthesis of heterogeneous, convergent, and continuous series-thus, in an example analyzed by Leclaire, the secret name "Poord'jeli," that a child creates. It seems to us at this level that the esoteric word in its entirety plays not the role of a phoneme or of an element of articulation but that of a morpheme or of an element of grammatical construction represented by the conjunctive character. It refers to the phallus as an agent of coordination. Only afterward, such an esoteric word takes on another value, or another function: as the conjunction forms an entire series, this series enters into a relation of resonance with another divergent and independent series- ')oli corps de Lili" (Lili's beautiful body). The new series corresponds to the third aspect of the sexual position, that is, to the development of Oedipus, the castration complex and the concomitant transformation of the phallus which has now become object = x. Then, and only then, the esoteric word becomes a portmanteau word insofar as it enacts a disjunctive synthesis of the two series Page 245

(the pregenital and the oedipal, that of the proper name of the subject and that of Lili), causes the two divergent series to resonate as such and ramifies them. 7 The entire esoteric word, in line with Lacan's thesis, plays now the role of a semanteme. According to this thesis, the phallus of Oedipus and of castration is a signifier which does not animate the correponding series without cropping up suddenly in the preceding series, in which it also circulates, since it "conditions the effects of the signified by its presence as signifier." We thus go from the phonemic letter to the esoteric word as morpheme, and then from this to the portmanteau word as semanteme. Page 246

In the transition from schizoid position of depth to the depressive position of the heights, we went from noises to the voice. But in the surface sexual position, we go from voice to speech. Page 246

The organization of the physical sexual surface has three moments which produce three types of syntheses or series: the erogenous zones and connective syntheses bearing on a homogeneous series; the phallic coordination of zones and the conjunctive synthesis bearing on heterogeneous, yet convergent and continuous series; and the evolution of Oedipus, the transformation of the phallic line into the trace of castration, and the disjunctive synthesis, bearing on divergent and resonating series. Now, these series or moments condition the three formative elements of language-phonemes, morphemes, and semantemes-as much as they are conditioned by them in a circular reaction. Nevertheless, there is still no language; we are still in a prelinguistic domain. These elements are not organized into formed linguistic units which would be able to denote things, manifest persons, and signify concepts. Page 246

At this level, speech begins: it begins when the.formative elements c,,flan.'lua9e are extracted at the suiface,jrom the current ef voice which comesfrom abol'c. This is the paradox of speech. On one hand, it refers to language ,is lo sonwthing withdrawn which preexists in the voice from above; on Page 246

the other hand, it refers to language as to something which must result, but which shall come to pass only with formed units. Speech is never equal to language. It still awaits the result, that is, the event which will make the formation effective. It masters the formative elements but without purpose, and the history which it relates, the sexual history, is nothing other than itself, or its own double. We are not yet therefore in the realm of sense. The noise of the depths was an infra-sense, an under-sense, Untersinn; the voice from the heights was a pre-sense. One could now come to believe, with the organization of the surface, that nonsense has reached that point at which it becomes sense, or takes on sense: is not precisely the phallus as object = x, this surface nonsense which distributes sense to the series which it traverses, ramifies, and makes them resonate, determining one as signifying and the other as signified? Page 247

The organization of the physical surface is not yet sense; it is, or rather will be, a co-sense. That is to say, when sense is produced over another surface, there will also be this sense. Sexuality, according to the Freudian dualism, is that which also is-everywhere and always. There is nothing the sense of which is not also sexual, in accordance with the law of the double surface. But it is still necessary to await this result which never ends, this other surface, for sexuality to be made the concomitant, and the co-sense of sense, so that one might say "everywhere," "for all times," and "eternal truth." Page 247

The thirty-second series explores the different kinds of series that emerge with the organization of the sexual surface, distinguishing them from the sequence/block forms of depth. These include connective series (erogenous zones), conjunctive series (phallic coordination), and disjunctive series (Oedipus/castration resonance). These series, along with the phallus as the paradoxical element/surface nonsense, condition prelinguistic formative elements (phonemes, morphemes, semantemes), marking the transition from Voice to Speech. This physical surface organization is not sense itself, but a "co-sense" that anticipates and accompanies sense on a separate, metaphysical surface.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/sexuality #on/series #on/language #on/phantasm #on/phallus

Thirty-Third Series of Alice's Adventures

Thirty-Third Series of Alice's Adventures Page 248

It is rather the Cheshire Cat who plays this role: he is the good object, the good penis, the idol or voice of the heights. He incarnates the disjunctions of this new position: unharmed or wounded, since he sometimes presents his entire body, sometimes only his cut off head; present or absent, since he disappears, leaving only his smile, or forms itself from the smile of the good object (provisional complacency with respect to the liberation of sexual drives). In his essence, the cat is he who withdraws and diverts himself. Page 249

There is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general; rather, they are clinicians of civilization. Page 251

The neurotic can only actualize the terms and the story of his novel: the symptoms are this actualization, and the novel has no other meaning. On the contrary, to extract the non-actualizable part of the pure event from symptoms (or, as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible), to raise everyday actions and passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking, or dying) to their noematic attribute and their corr<'sponding pure Event, to go from the physical surface on which symptoms are played out and actualizations decided to the metaphysical surface on which the pure event stands and is played out, to go from the cause of the symptoms to the quasi-cause of the reuvre -this is the object of the novel as a work of art, and what distinguishes it from the familial novel. 2 In other words, the positive, highly affirmative charact<'r of desexualization consists in the replacement <?f psychic re9ression by speculative investment. Page 252

The artist is not only the patient and doctor of civilization, but is also its pervert. Page 252

The thirty-third series uses Alice's Adventures (specifically the Cheshire Cat as the good object/voice of the heights) to illustrate how art and literature function. Like a clinician organizing symptoms, the artist/novelist extracts the non-actualizable pure event from lived experience/symptoms and transforms it into a work of art on a metaphysical surface, a process seen as a form of speculative investment that replaces psychic regression and distinguishes the work of art from mere life.

#on/philosophy #on/literature #on/art #on/psychoanalysis #on/carroll #on/symptoms #on/events #on/surface

Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organization

Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organization Page 253

r it is true that the phantasm is constructed upon at least two diverging sexual series and that it merges with their resonance, it is nevertheless the case that the two basic series (along with the object = x which traverses them and causes them to resonate) constitute only the extrinsic beginning of the phantasm. Let us call the resonance "intrinsic beginning." The phantasm develops to the extent that the resonance induces a forced movement that goes beyond and sweeps away the basic series. It has a pendular structure: the basic series traversed by the movement of the object = x, the resonance, and the forced movement of an amplitude greater than the initial movement. This initial movement is, as we have seen, the movement of Eros, which operates on the intermediary physical surface, the sexual surface, or the liberated area of sexual drives. But the forced movement which represents desexualization is Thanatos and "compulsion"; it operates between the two extremes of the original depth and the metaphysical surface, the destructive cannibalistic drives of depth and the speculative death instinct. Page 253

We can therefore name the entire forced movement "death instinct," and name its full amplitude "metaphysical surface." At any rate, the forced movement is not established between the basic sexual series, but rather between the two new and infinitely larger series-eating, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, where the second always risks disappearing into the first, and the first, on the contrary, risks being projected onto the second. Page 254

Speaking, in the complete sense of the word, presupposes the verb and passes through the verb, which projects the mouth onto the metaphysical surface, filling it with the ideal events of this surface. The verb is the "verbal representation" in its entirety, as well as the highest affirmative power of the disjunction (univocity, with respect to that which diverges). The verb, however, is silent; and we must take literally the idea that Eros is sonorous and that the death instinct is silence. In the verb, the secondary organization is brought about, and from this organization the entire ordering of language proceeds. Page 255

It is this whole system, point-line-surface, that represents the organization of sense and nonsense. Sense occurs to states of affairs and insists in propositions, varying its pure univocal infinitive according to the series of the states of affairs which it sublimates and from which it results, and the series of propositions which it symbolizes and makes possible. Page 255

For the voice gave us only denotations, empty manifestations and denotations, or pure intentions suspended in tonality. The first words gave us only formative elements, without reaching formed units. In order that there be language, together with the full use of speech conforming to the three dimensions of language, it was necessary to pass through the verb and its silence, and through the entire organization of sense and nonsense on the metaphysical surface-the last stage of the dynamic genesis. Page 255

Sexual organization already presents us with an entire point-line-surface system; and the phallus, as object = x and word = x, has the role of nonsense, distributing sense to the two basic sexual series, the pregenital and the Oedipal. This entire intermediary domain, however, seems to be neutralized by the movement of desexualization, just as the basic series of the phantasm have been by the series of amplitude. The reason is that phonemes, morphemes, and semantemes, in their original relation to sexuality, do not yet form units of denotation, manifestation, or signification. Sexuality is neither denoted, nor manifested, nor signified by them; rather, sexuality is the surface that they double, and they themselves are the doubling up which builds the surface. It is a question of a dual surface effect, of reverse and right sides, which precedes all relations between states of affairs and propositions. This is why when another surface is developed with different effects which at last found denotations, manifestations, and significations as ordered linguistic units, elements like phonemes, morphemes, and semantemes seem to tum up on this new plane, but seem to lose their sexual resonance. Page 256

a desexualized Page 256

energy invests or reinvests an object of sexual interest as such and is thereby re-sexualized in a new way. Such is the most general mechanism of perversion, on the condition that perversion be distinguished as an art of the surface from subversion as a technique of depth. Page 257

Perversion is a surface structure which expresses itself as such, without being necessarily actualized in criminal behaviors of a subversive nature. Crimes may undoubtedly follow, but only through a regression from perversion to subversion. The real problem of perversion is shown correctly in the essential mechanism which corresponds to it, that of Verleu9nun9. For if Verleu9nun9 is a question of maintaining the image of the phallus in spite of the absense of a penis, in the case of women, this operation presupposes a desexualization as the consequence of castration, but also a reinvestment of the sexual object insofar as it is sexual by means of desexualized energy: Verleu9nun9 is not an hallucination, but rather an esoteric knowledge. 2 Thus Carroll, perverse but without crime, perverse but nonsubversive, stuttering and left-handed, uses the desexualized energy of the photographic apparatus as a frightfully speculative eye, in order to invest the sexual object par excellence, namely, the little girl-phallus. Page 257

Repression is always the repression of one dimension by another. Page 257

The return of the repressed occurs in accordance with the general mechanism of n-gression: there is regression as soon as one dimension falls back on another. Page 258

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what is essential is the threat that depth brings to bear on all other diml'nsions; thus, it is the locus of primitive repression and of "fixa Page 258

tions"-the ultimate terms of regressions. Page 259

Alongside repression and the return of the repressed, we must save a place for these complex processes through which an element characteristic of a certain dimension is invested as such with the very different energy corresponding to another dimension: for example, subversive criminal conduct is inseparable from the function of the voice from above, which reinvests the destructive process of depth as if it were an obligation that is forever fixed, and orders it in the guise of the superego or of the good object (see the story of Lord Arthur Savile). 3 Perverse conduct is also inseparable from a movement of the metaphysical surface which, instead of repressing sexuality, uses desexualized energy in order to invest a sexual element as such and to .fix it with unbearable attention (the second sense of fixation). Page 259

The aggregate of surfaces constitutes the organization which is called secondary, and which is defined by "verbal representation." Verbal representation must be carefully distinguished from "object representation," because it concerns an incorporeal event and not a body, an action, a passion, or a quality of bodies. Verbal representation is, as we have seen, the representation which enveloped an expression. It is made of what is expressed and what is expressing, and conforms itself to the twisting of the one into the other. It represents the event as expressed, brings it to exist in the elements of language, and, conversely, confers on these elements an expressive value and a function as "representatives" which they did not have by themselves. The whole order of language is the result of it, with its code of tertiary determinations founded in turn on "objectal" representations (denotation, manifestation, signification; individual, person, concept; world, self, and God). Page 259

From the tertiary order, we must move again up to the secondary organization, and then to the primary order, in accordance with the dynamic requirement. Take, for example, the table of categories of the dynamic genesis in relation to the moments of language: passion-action (noise); possession-privation (voice); intentionresult (speech). Secondary organization (the verb or verbal representation) is itself the result of this long itinerary; it emerges when the event knows how to raise the result to a second power, and when the verb knows how to grant elementary words the expressive value of which they were still deprived. But the entire itinerary is indicated by the primary order, where words are directly actions and passions of the body, or even withdrawn voices. They are demonic possessions or divine privations. Obscenities and insults afford an idea, by way of regression, of this chaos in which bottomless depth and unlimited. height are respectively combined. For, however intimate their liaison may be, the obscene word illustrates the direct action of one body on another which is acted upon, whereas the insult pursues all at once the one who withdraws, dispossesses this one of all voice, and is itself a voice which withdraws. Page 260

Satire is a prodigious art of regressions. Page 260

Height, however, prepares new values for language and affirms in it its independence and its radical difference from depth. Irony appears each time language deploys itself in accordance with relations of eminence, equivocity, or analogy. These three great concepts of the tradition are the source from which all the figures of rhetoric proceed. Page 260

Once height makes the constitution of surfaces possible, along with the corresponding release of sexual drives, we believe that something happens, something capable of vanquishing irony on its own terrain-that is, on the terrain of equivocity, eminence, and analogy. It is as if there were an eminence in excess, an exaggerated equivocation, and a supernumerary analogy which, rather than being added to the others, would on the contrary ensure their closure. An equivocation such that "afterward" there can be no other equivocation-this is the sense of the expression "there is also sexuality." It is as with Dostoevsky's characters who keep on saying: please consider, dear sir, there is still this matter, and again that matter. . . . But with sexuality, one arrives at an "again" which ends every "again," one reaches an equivocation which renders the pursuit of equivocities or the continuation of ulterior analogies impossible. This is why, at the same time that sexuality is deployed over the physical surface, it makes us go from voice to speech and gathers together every word into an esoteric whole and in a sexual history which will not be designated, manifested, or signified by these words, but which rather will be strictly coextensive and co-substantial with them. This is what words represent; all the formative elements of language which exist only in relation (or in reaction) to one another-phonemes, mor Page 261

phemes, and semantemes-form their totality from the point of view of this immanent history with which they are identical. There is therefore an excessive equivocation from the point of view of the voic<" and in relation to voice: an equivocation which ends equivocity and makes language ripe for something else. This something else is that which comes from the other, desexualized and metaphysical surface, when we finally go from speech to the verb, or when we compose a unique verb in the pure infinitive-along with the assembled words. This something else is the revelation of the univocal, the advent of Univocity-that is, the Event which communicates the univocity of being to language. Page 262

The univocity of sense grasps language in its complete system, as the total expresser of a unique expressed-the event. The values of humor are distinguished from those of irony: humor is the art of surfaces and of the complex relation between the two surfaces. Beginning with one excessive equivocation, humor constructs all univocity; beginning with the properly sexual equivocation which ends all equivocity, humor releases a desexualized Univocity-a speculative univocity of Being and language- the entire secondary organization in one word. 5 It is necessary to imagine someone, one-third Stoic, one-third Zen, and one-third Carroll: with one hand, he masturbates in an excessive gesture, with th<" other, he writes in the sand the magic words of the pure event open to the univocal: "Mind-I believe-is Essence-Ent-Abstract -that is-an Accident-which we-that is to say-I meant-." Thus, he makes the energy of sexuality pass into the pure asexual, without, however, ceasing to ask "What is a little girl?"-even if this question must be replaced with the problem of a work of art yet to come, which alone would give an answer. Page 262

Equivocity, analogy, and eminence will no doubt recover their rights with the tertiary order, in the denotations, significations, and manifestations of everyday language submitted to the rules of good sense and common sense. As we then consider the perpetual entwining which constitutes the logic of sense, it seems that this final ordering recovers the voice of the heights of the primary process, but also that the secondary organization at the surface recov<"rs som<"thing of the most profound noises, blocks, and elements for the Univocity of sense - a brief instant for a poem without figures. What can the work of art do hut follow again the path which goes from noise to th(ยท voice, from Page 262

voice to speech, and from speech to the verb, constructing this Musik fiir ein Haus, in order always to recover the independence of sounds and to fix the thunderbolt of the univocal. This event is, of course, quickly covered over by everyday banality or, on the contrary, by the sufferings of madness. Page 263

The thirty-fourth series summarizes the dynamic genesis of language from the primary order (depth/height, noise/voice) through the intermediary sexual surface (speech, formative elements) to the secondary organization on the metaphysical surface (verb, verbal representation, formed units). The phantasm, driven by the death instinct/desexualization, is key to this process. This movement culminates in the univocity of language, the art of the verb, and the values of humor, which operate on the complex relationship between the physical and metaphysical surfaces, ultimately recovering elements from all dimensions to express the univocal event.

#on/philosophy #on/psychoanalysis #on/language #on/genesis #on/surface #on/verb #on/univocity #on/phantasm #on/desexualization #on/perversion #on/humor

I. The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy

I. The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy Page 265

I. PLATO AND THE SIMULACRUM

I. PLATO AND THE SIMULACRUM Page 265

In very general terms, the motive of the theory of Ideas must be sought in a will to select and to choose. It is a question of "making a difference," of distinguishing the "thing" itself from its images, the original from the copy, the model from the simulacrum. Page 265

The purpose of division then is not at all to divide a genus into species, but, more profoundly, to select lineages: to distinguish pretenders; to distinguish the pure from the impure, the authentic from the inauthentic. Page 266

It is to screen the claims (preten-sions) and to distinguish the true pretender from the false one. Page 266

The characteristic of division is to sur-mount the duality of myth and dialectic, and to reunite in itself dialectical and mythic power. Page 267

In short, an elective participation is the response to the problem of a method of selection. Page 267

To participate is, at best, to rank second. The celebrated Neoplatonic triad of the "Unparticipated," the participated, and the participant follows from this. One could express it in the following manner as well: the foundation, the object aspired to, and the pretender; the father, the daughter, and the fiance. The foundation is that which possesses something in a primary way; it relinquishes it to be participated in, giving it to the suitor, who possesses only secondarily and insofar as he has been able to pass the test of the foundation. The participated is what the unparticipated possesses primarily. The unparticipated gives it out for participation, it offers the participated to the participants: Justice, the quality of being just, and the just men. Undoubtedly, one must distinguish all sorts of degrees, an entire hierarchy, in this elective participation. Is there not a possessor of the third or the fourth rank, and on to an infinity of degradation culminating in the one who possesses no more than a simulacrum, a mirage-the one who is himself a mirage and simulacrum? Page 267

the totality of the Platonic motivation: it has to do with selecting among the pretenders, distinguishing good and bad copies or, rather, copies (always well-founded) and simulacra (always engulfed in dissimilarity). It is a question of assuring the triumph of the copies over simulacra, of repressing simulacra, keeping them completely submerged, preventing them from climbing to the surface, and "insinuating themselves" everywhere. Page 269

In short, it is the superior identity of the Idea which founds the good pretension of the copies, as it bases it on an internal or derived resemblance. Page 269

In short, there is in the simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming unlimited, as in the Philebus where "more and less are always going a point further," a becoming always other, a becoming subversive of the depths, able to evade the equal, the limit, the Same, or the Similar: always more and less at once, but never equal. To impose a limit on this becoming, to order it according to the same, to render it similar-and, for that part which remains rebellious, Page 270

to repress it as deeply as possible, to shut it up in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean-such is the aim of Platonism in its will to bring about the triumph of icons over simulacra. Page 271

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The Platonic model is the Same, in the sense that Plato says that Justice is nothing more than just, Courage nothing other than courageous, etc.-the abstract determination of the foundation as that which possesses in a primary way (en premier). The Platonic copy is the Similar: the pretender who possesses in a secondary way. To the pure identity of the model or original there corresponds an exemplary similitude; to the pure resemblance of the copy there corresponds the similitude called imitative. Page 271

Whether in monocentric circles or in converging series, philosophy does not free itself from the clement of representation when it embarks upon the conquest of the infinite. Its intoxication is a false appearance. It always pursues the same task, lconology, and adapts it to the speculative needs of Christianity (the infinitely small and the infinitely large). Always the selection among pretenders, the exclusion of the eccentric and the divergent, in the name of a superior finality, an essential reality, or even a meaning of history. Page 272

Between these basic series, a sort of imernal resonance is produced; and this resonance induces a forced movement, which goes beyond the series themselves. These are the characteristics of the simulacrum, when it breaks its chains and rises to the surface: it then affirms its phantasmatic power, that is, its repressed power. Freud has already shown how the phantasm results from at least two series, one infantile and the other post-pubescent. The affective charge associated with the phantasm is explained by the internal resonance whose bearers are the simulacra. The impression of death, of the rupture or dismembering of life, is explained by the amplitude of the forced movement which carries them along. Thus the conditions of real experience and the structures of the work of art are reunited: divergence of series, decentering of circles, constitution of the chaos which envelops them, internal resonance and movement of amplitude, aggression of the simulacra. Page 273

The signal is a structure in which differences of potential are distributed, assuring the communication of disparate components: the sign is what flashes across the boundary of two levels, between two communicating series. Page 273

In order to speak of simulacra, it is necessary for the heterogeneous series to be really internalized in the system, comprised or complicated in the chaos. Their differences must be inclusive. Page 273

Let us consider the two formulas: "only that which resembles differs" and "only differences can resemble each other." These are two distinct readings of the world: one invites us to think difference from the standpoint of a previous similitude or identity; whereas the other invites us to think similitude and even identity as the product of a deep disparity. The first reading precisely defines the world of copies or representations; it posits the world as icon. The second, contrary to the first, defines the world Page 273

of simulacra; it posits the world itself as phantasm. Page 274

It matters little whether the system has great external and slight internal difference, or whether the opposite is the case, provided that resemblance be produced on a curve, and that difference, whether great or small, always occupy the center of the thus decentered system. Page 274

In the reversal of Platonism, resem-blance is said of internalized difference, and identity of the Different as primary power. The same and the similar no longer have an essence except as simulated, that is as expressing the functioning of the simulacrum. There is no longer any possible selection. The non-hierarchized work is a condensation of coexistences and a simultaneity of events. It is the triumph of the false pretender. It simulates at once the father, tlw pretender, and the fiance in a superimposition of masks. But the false pretender cannot be called false in relation to a presupposed model Page 274

of truth, no more than simulation can be called an appearance or an illusion. Simulation is the phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the functioning of the simulacrum as machinery-a Dionysian machine. It involves the false as power, Pseudos, in the sense in which Nietzsche speaks of the highest power of the false. By rising to the surface, the simulacrum makes the Same and the Similar, the model and the copy, fall under the power of the false (phantasm). It renders the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, the determination of the hier-archy impossible. It establishes the world of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchies. Far from being a new foundation, it engulfs all foundations, it assures a universal breakdown (effondrement), but as a joyful and positive event, as an un-founding (effondement}: "behind each cave another that opens still more deeply, and beyond each surface a subterranean world yet more vast, more strange. Richer still ... and under all foundations, under every ground, a subsoil still more pro-found." Page 275

That the Same and the Similar may be simulated does not mean that they are appearances or illusions. Simulation designates the power of producing an effect. But this is not intended only in a causal sense, since causality would remain completely hypothetical and indeterminate without the intervention of other meanings. It is intended rather in the sense of a "sign" issued from a process of signalization; it is in the sense of a "costume," or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another.... Simulation understood in this way is inseparable from the eternal return, for it is in the eternal return that the reversal of the icons or the subversion of the world of representation is decided. Page 275

In the eternal return, one must pass through the manifest content, but only in order to reach the latent content situated a thousand feet below (the cave behind every cave ... ). Thus, what appeared to Plato to be only a sterile effect reveals in itself the intractability of masks and the impassibility of signs. Page 276

The secret of the eternal return is that it does not express an order opposed to the chaos engulfing it. On the contrary, it is nothing other than chaos itself, or the power of affirming chaos. Page 276

To the coherence of representation, the eternal return substitutes something else entirelyits own chaodyssey (chao-errance). Between the eternal return and the simulacrum, there is such a profound link that the one cannot be understood except through the other. Only the divergent series, insofar as they are divergent, return: that is, each series insofar as it displaces its difference along with all the others, and all series insofar as they rnmplicate their difference within the chaos which is without beginning or end. The circle of the eternal return is a circle which is always exnยทntric in relation to an always decentered center. Klossowski is right to say of the eternal return that it is a "simulacrum of a doctrine": it is indeed Being (f.tre), but only when "being" (etant) is the simulacrum. Page 276

Thus, the eternal return is, in fact, the Same and the Similar, but only insofar as they are simulated, produced by the simulation, through the functioning of the simulacrum (will to power). It is in this sense that it reverses representation and destroys the icons. It does not presuppose the Same and the Similar; on the contrary, it constitutes the only Same-the Same of that which differs, and the only resemblance-the resemblance of the unmatched. It is the unique phantasm of all simulacra (the Being of all beings). It is the power to affirm divergence and decentering and makes this power the object of a superior affirmation. It is under the power of the false pretender causing that which is to happen again and again. And it does not make everythin9 come back. It is still selective, it "makes a difference," but not at all in the manner of Plato. What is selected are all the procedures opposed to selection; what is excluded, what is made not to return, is that which presupposes the Same and the Similar, that which pretends to correct divergence, to recenter the circles or order the chaos, and to provide a model or make a copy. For all its long history, Platonism happened only once, and Socrates fell under the blade. For the Same and the Similar become simple illusions when they cease to be simulated. Page 277

he untimely is attained in relation to the most distant past, by the reversal of Platonism; in relation to the present, by the simulacrum conceived as the edge of critical modernity; in relation to the future, it is attained by the phantasm of the eternal return as belief in the future. Page 277

The artificial and the simulacrum are not the same thing. They are even opposed to each other. The artificial is always a copy of a copy, which should be pushed to the point where it changes its nature and is reversed into the simulacrum (the moment of Pop Art). Page 277

For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm-the most innocent of all destructions, the destruction of Platonism. Page 278

This section contrasts Plato's philosophy, motivated by a will to select and repress the simulacrum in favor of copies based on identity and resemblance (Iconology), with a philosophy that affirms the simulacrum. The simulacrum, when it rises to the surface, overturns representation, establishes nomadic distributions, and operates based on difference as primary power and simulation as the effect. This process is inseparable from the eternal return, which affirms chaos and divergence, bringing back only that which differs, in a "reversal of Platonism" that constitutes a joyful "un-founding."

#on/philosophy #on/plato #on/simulacra #on/copy #on/phantasm #on/eternal-return #on/nietzsche

2. LUCRETIUS AND THE SIMULACRUM

2. LUCRETIUS AND THE SIMULACRUM Page 278

In our world, natural diversity appears in three intertwined aspects: the diversity of species; the diversity of individuals which are members of the same species; and the diversity of the parts which together compose an individual. Specificity, individuality, and heterogeneity. Page 278

From these three points of view, Wt' can deduce the diversity of worlds themselves: worlds are innumerable, often of different species, sometimes similar, and always composed of hl'terogeneous elements. Page 278

Nature, to be precise, is power. In the name of this power things exist one by one, without any possibility of their being gathered together all at once. Nor is there any possibility of their being united in a combination adequate to Nature, which would express all of it at one time. Lucretius reproached Epicurus' predecessors for having believed in Being, the One and the Whole. These concepts are the obsessions of the mind, speculative forms of belief in thefatum, and the theological forms of a false philosophy. Page 279

But what is the one if not a particular perishable and corruptible object which we consider arbitrarily in isolation from every other object? And what forms a whole if not a particular finite combination, filled with holes, which we arbitrarily believe to join all the elements of the sum? Page 279

the Nature of things is coordination and disjunction. Neither identity nor contradiction, it is a matter of resemblances and differences, compositions and decompositions, "everything is formed out of connections, densities, shocks, encounters, concurrences, and motions. " Page 280

1) The atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought. The atom is to thought what the sensible object is to the senses: it is the object which is essentially addressed to thought, the object which gives food to thought, just as the sensible object is that which is given to the senses. The atom is the absolute reality of what is perceived. Page 280

2) The sum of atoms is infinite, precisely because atoms are elements which do not form a totality. But this sum would not be infinite if the void were not also infinite. Page 281

3) In their fall the atoms collide, not because of their differing weights, but because of the clinamen. The clinamen is the reason for the collision, it relates one atom to another. Page 281

In the void, the velocity of the atom is equal to its movement in a unique direction in a minimum of continuous time. Page 281

There is therefore a minimum of time, no less than a minimum of matter or a minimum of the atom. In agreement with the nature of the atom, this minimum of continuous time refers to the apprehension of thought. It expresses the most rapid or briefest thought: the atom moves "as swiftly as thought." 5 But, as a result, we must conceive of an originary direction for each atom, as a synthesis which would give to the movement of the atom its initial direction, without which there would be no collision. This synthesis is necessarily accomplished in a time smaller than the minimum of continuous time. This is the clinamen. Page 281

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"incertus" does not mean indeterminate, but rather unassignable; "paulum," "incerto tempore," "intervallo minima" mean "in a time smaller than the minimum of continuous, thinkable time." Page 282

4) This is why the clinamen manifests neither contingency nor indetermination. It manifests something entirely different, the lex atomi, that is, the irreducible plurality of causes or of causal series, and the impossibility of bringing causes together into a whole. In fact, the clinamen is the determination of the meaning of causal series, where each causal series is constituted by the movement of an atom and conserves in the encounter its full independence. Page 282

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5') Atoms have various sizes and shapes. Page 282

The sizes and shapes of atoms are not infinite in number, there is however an infinity of atoms of the same size and shape. Page 282

6) Not every atom combines with another as they meet; otherwise atoms would form an infinite combination. Page 283

7) Every combination being finite, there is an infinity of combinations, but no combination is formed of a single species of atoms. Thus, atoms are specific seeds in a second sense-they constitute the heterogeneity of the diverse in a single body. Page 283

The philosophy of Nature presents to us the heterogeneity of the diverse with itself, and also the resemblance of the diverse with itself. Page 283

8) There is the power of the diverse and its production, but there is also the power of the reproduction of the diverse: it is important to see how this second power is derived from the first. Resemblance proceeds from the diverse as such and from its diversity. There is no world or body that loses elements at every moment and then finds new of the same shape. There are no worlds or bodies which do not have their similar in space and time. Page 283

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Lucretius acknowledges a final aspect of the principle of causality: a body is born not only of determined elements, which are like the seeds producing it; it is born also into a determined setting, which is like a mother suited for its reproduction. The heterogeneity of the diverse forms a sort of vitalism of seeds, but the resemblance of the diverse forms a sort of pantheism of mothers. Page 284

Physics is Naturalism from the speculative point of view. What is essential to physics is to be found in the theory of the infinite, and of the spatial and temporal minima. Page 284

What is truly infinite is the sum of atoms, the void, the sum of atoms and the void, the number of atoms of the same shape and size, and the number of combinations or worlds which are similar to (or different from) ours. What is not infinite are the parts of the body and of the atom, the sizes and shapes of the atom, and above all, every worldly or intra-worldly combination. Page 284

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for Lucretius as for Spinoza later on, the religious man displays two aspects: avidity and anguish, covetousness and culpability-a strange complex that generates crimes. The spirit's disquietude is therefore brought about by the fear of dying when we are not yet dead, and also by the fear of not yet being dead once we already are. The entire problem is that of the source of this disturbance or of these two illusions. Page 285

Bodies or atomic compounds never cease to emit particularly subtle, fluid, and tenuous elements. These seconddegree compounds are of two sorts: either they emanate from the depth of bodies, or they detach themselves from the surface of things (skins, tunics, or wrappings, envelopes or barks-what Lucretius calls simulacra and Epicurus calls idols). Insofar as they affect the animus and the anima, they account for sensible qualities. Sounds, smells, tastes, and temperatures refer especially to the emissions from the depths, whereas visual determinations, forms, and colors refer to the simulacra of the surface. Page 285

Noises from the depth, for example, become voices when they find in certain perforated surfaces (the mouth) the conditions of their articulation. Conversely, the simulacra of the surface are able to provide colors and forms only if there is light, which is emitted from the depths. Page 286

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This is why the object is perceived as it must be perceived, relative to the state of simulacra and emissions, the distance they have to cross over, the obstacles they encounter, the distortions to which they submit, or the explosions of which they are the center. At the end of a long journey, the visual envelopes do not strike us with the same vigor; shouts lose their distinction. But always, the property of being related to an object subsists. Page 286

On the basis of the analogy, there is a minimum ef sensible time no less than there is a minimum of thinkable time. Just as the swerve of the atom occurs in a time smaller than the minimum thinkable time, so that it has already happened within the smallest time that can be thought, likewise the emission of simulacra occurs in a time smaller than the minimum sensible time, so that they are already there in the smallest time that can be sensed and seem to he still within the object after they have reached us. " ... In one moment of time perceived hy us, that is, while one word is being uttered, many timf's are lurking which reason understands to be there, that is why in any given moment all these various images are present, ready in every place...." 22 The simulacrum is thus imperceptible. The Page 286

image alone is sensible, which conveys quality, and which is made up of this very rapid succession, and the summation of many identical simulacra. Page 287

simulacra are swifter than emanations, as if there were, in the case of sensible time, differentials of diverse orders. Page 287

The theory of time and its "exhaustive" character assure the unity of the two aspects of the method. For there is a minimum of sensible time as well as a minimum of thinkable time, and in both cases a time smaller than the minimum. But, finally, the analogous times, or their analogous determinations, are organized in a gradation, a gradation, which causes us to pass from the thinkable to the sensible, and vice versa: 1) a time smaller than the minimum of thinkable time (an incerwm tempus brought ahout by the clinamen); 2) a minimum of continuous thinkable time (the speed of the atom traveling in a single direction); 3) a time smaller than the minimum of sensible time (puncwm temporis, occupied by the simulacrum); and 4) a minimum of continuous sensible time (to which the image corresponds, which assures the perception of the object). Page 287

There is yet a third species, distinct from the emanations issued from the depth and from the simulations detached from the surface of things. These are phantasms, which enjoy a high degree of independence with respect to objects and an extreme mobility, or an extreme inconstancy in the images which they form (since they are not renewed by the constant supplies emitted by the object). It seems that here the image stands for the object itself. Page 287

There are three main varieties of this new species of simulacra: theological, oneiric, and erotic. Page 287

Theological phantasms are made up of simulacra which intersect spontaneously in the sky, forming immense images out of the clouds-high mountains and figures of giants.1 ~ In any case, simulacra are everywhere. We do not cease to be immersed in them, and to be battered by them as if by waves. Being very far from the objects from which they emanate, and having lost with them any direct connection, they form these grand autonomous figures. Their independence makes them all the more subject to change; one might say that they dance, that they speak, that they modify ad infinitum their tones and gestures. Page 287

The second genre of phantasms is constituted by simulacra which are particularly subtle and agile, coming from different objects. They are apt to merge together, to condense and dissipate, and are too swift and too tenuous to offer themselves to sight. But they are capable of supplying the animus with visions which pertain to it in its own right: centaurs, Cerberus-like creatures, and ghosts; all of the images which correspond to desire or, again and especially, dream images. Not that desire is creative here; rather, it renders the mind attentive and makes it choose the most suitable phantasm from among all of the subtle phantasms in which we are immersed. The mind, moreover, isolated from the external world and collected or repress<:>d when the body lies dormant, is open to these phantasms. Page 288

for the third genre, the erotic phantasms, they too are constituted of simulacra issuing from very diverse objects and are apt to be condensed ("what was before a woman seems to be changed into a man in our grasp"). The image constituted by these simulacra is doubtless connected with the actual love object; but, unlike what happens in the case of the other needs, the love object cannot be either absorbed or possessed. The image alone inspires and resuscitates desire, a mirage which no longer signals a consistent reality: "But from man's aspect and beautiful bloom nothing comes into the body to be enjoyed except thin images; and this poor hope is often snatched away by the wind." Page 288

Time itself is affirmed in relation to movement. This is why we speak of a time of thought in relation to the movement of the atom in the void, and of a sensible time in relation to the mobile image which we perceive, and which causes us to perceive the qualities of atomic compounds. And we speak of a time smaller than the minimum of thinkable time, in relation to the clinamen as the determination of the movement of the atom; and of a time smaller than the minimum of sensible time, in relation to simulacra as components of the image (for these components, there are even differential orders of swiftnessprofound emanations being less swift than surface simulacra, and surface simulacra being less rapid than the third species). Page 288

Perhaps movement, in all of these senses, is constitutive of "events" (eventa, what Epicurus calls symptoms), in contrast with attributes or properties (conjuncta), so that time must be called the event of events, and the "symptom of symptoms," which is entailed by movement. Page 288

In virtue of their speed, which causes them to be and to act below the sensible minimum, simulacra produce the miraae ef a false infinite in the imaaes which they form. They give birth to the double illusion of an infinite capacity for pleasure and an infinite possibility of torment-this mixture of avidity and anguish, of cupidity and culpability, which is so characteristic of the man of religion. It is particularly with the third and swiftest species, the phantasms, that one witnesses the development of the illusion and the myths which accompany it. In a mixture of theology, eroticism, and oneirism, amorous desire possesses only those simulacra which lead it to know bitterness and torment, even into the pleasure which it wishes were infinite. Our belief in gods rests upon simulacra which seem to dance, to change their gestures, and to shout at us promising eternal punishment-in short, to represent the infinite. Page 289

The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism, science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all of the theologico-eroticoneiric myths in which it is expressed. Page 290

To the question "what is the use of philosophy?" the answer must be: what other object would have an interest in holding forth the image of a free man, and in denouncing all of the forces which need myth and troubled spirit in order to establish their power? Page 290

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The events which bring about the unhappiness of humanity are inseparable from the myths which render them possible. Page 290

The first philosopher is a naturalist: he speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the gods. His condition is that his discourse shall not introdunยท into philosophy new myths that would deprive Nature of all its positivity. Active gods are the myth of religion, as destiny is the Page 290

myth of a false physics, and Being, the One and the Whole are the myth of a false philosophy totally impregnated by theology. Page 291

horn Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of thought and sensibility an affirmation. It directs its attack against the prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy. The spirit of the negative made an appearance out of the sensible; and linked the intelligible to the One or the Whole. But this Whole, this One, was but a nothingness of thought, just as the appearance was a nothingness of sensation. Naturalism, according to Lucretius, is the thought of an infinite sum, all of the elements of which are not composed at once; but, conven,ely as well, it is the sensation of finite compounds which are not added up as such with one another. In these two ways, the multiple is affirmed. The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as diverse is the object of joy. The infinite is the absolute intelligible determination (perfection) of a sum which does not form its elements into a whole. But the finite itself is the absolute sensible determination (perfection) of everything which is composed. The pure positivity of the finite is the object of the senses, and the positivity of the veritable infinite is the object of thought. There is no opposition between these two points of view, but rather a correlation. Lucretius established for a long time to come the implications of naturalism: the positivity of Nature; Naturalism as the philosophy of affirmation; pluralism linked with multiple affirmation; sensualism connected with the joy of the diverse; and the practical critique of all mystifications. Page 291

This section explores Lucretius' Naturalism as a philosophy opposing Plato's iconology. Nature is presented not as unity or totality but as power, coordination, and disjunction of diverse atoms and worlds. Key concepts include the atom, the clinamen (a swerve ensuring irreducible causal plurality), and different levels of temporal minima. Simulacra, emitted from the surface, and emanations from depth, account for sensible qualities. Phantasms are autonomous simulacra creating illusions of the false infinite (religious myths, avidity/anguish). Lucretian Naturalism is fundamentally affirmative, embracing multiplicity and difference, critiquing all forms of mystification based on false notions of unity or infinite duration, laying a foundation for a philosophy of pure affirmation.

#on/philosophy #on/lucretius #on/naturalism #on/atoms #on/clinamen #on/simulacra #on/phantasm

II. Phantasm and Modern Literature

II. Phantasm and Modern Literature Page 292

3. KLOSSOWSKI OR BODIES-LANGUAGE

3. KLOSSOWSKI OR BODIES-LANGUAGE Page 292

It is possible to say that the animal body "hesitates," and that it proceeds by way of dilemmas. Similarly, reasoning proceeds by fits and starts, hesitates and bifurcates at each level. The body is a disjunctive syllogism; language is an egg on the road to differentiation. The body seals and conceals a hidden language, and language forms a glorious body. The most abstract argumentation is a mimicry, but the body's pantomime is a sequence of syllogisms. One no longer knows wheth('r it is the pantomime which reasons, or reasoning which mimics Page 292

What is perverse is precisely this objective power of hesitation in the body: this paw which is neither left nor right; this determination by fits and starts; this differentiation never suppressing the undifferentiated which is divided in it; this suspense which marks each moment of difference; and this immobilization which marks each moment of the fall. Page 293

It is no obscene in itself, says Klossowski; that is, the obscene is not the intrusion of bodies into language, but rather their mutual reflection and the act of language which fabricates a body for the mind. This is the act by which language transcends itself as it reflects a body. "There is nothing more verbal than the excesses of the flesh. . . . The reiterated description of the carnal act not only reviews the transgression, it is itself a transgression of language by language." Page 293

Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities -divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist-animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions. Page 293

If perver- Page 293

sion is the power hditting the body, equivocity is the power of theology; they are reflected in one another. If one is the pantomime par excellence, the other is reasoning par excellence. Page 294

Klossowski's work derives from this: the unity of theology and pornography in this very particular sense. We must call it a superior pornology. It is his own way of transcending metaphysics: mimetic argumentation and syllogistic pantomime, the dilemma in the body and the disjunction in the syllogism. Page 294

The difficult and decisive conditions are those in which the description concerns the perversion of bodies in pathology (the disjunctive organic cascade), and reasoning concerns the equivocity of language in theology (the disjunctive spiritual syllogism). Page 294

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To possess is thus to give over to possession and to see the given multiplied in the gift. Page 295

The function of sight consists in doubling, dividing, and multiplying, whereas the function of the ear consists in resonating, in bringing about resonance. Page 295

Klossowski's entire work moves toward a single goal: to assure the loss of personal identity and to dissolve the self. This is the shining trophy that Klossowski's characters bring back from a voyage to the edge of madness. But as it happens, the dissolution of the self ceases to be a pathological determination in order to become the mightiest power, rich in positive and salutary promises. The self is "corrupted" only because, in the first instance, it is dissolved. This happens, not only to the self which is observed and loses its identity under the gaze, but to the observer also, who is set outside of herself and is multiplied in her own gaze. Page 295

But he also knows well that, as a result of his observation, he loses his own identity, sets himself outside of himsdf, and is multiplied in the gaze as much as the other is multiplied under the gaze-and that this is the most profound content Page 295

of the idea of Evil. The essential relation, that is, the complicity of sight with speech appears. For what can one do, vis-a-vis doubles, simulacra, or reflections, other than speak? With respect to that which can only be seen and heard, which is never confirmed by another organ and is the object of forgetting in memory, of an Unimaginable in imagination, and of an Unthinkable in thought-what else can one do, other than speak of it? Language is itself the ultimate double which expresses all doubles-the highest of simulacra. Page 296

Sometimes sight induces speech, and sometimes speech leads sight. But there is always the multiplication and the reflection of what is seen and spoken-as well as of the person who sees and speaks: the speaker participates in the grand dissolution of selves, and even commands or provokes it. Page 296

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Sight splits what it sees into two and multiplies the voyeur; likewise, language denounces what it says and multiplies the speaker Page 297

The body is language because it is essentially "flexion." In reflection, the corporeal flexion seems to be divided, split in two, opposed to itself and reflected in itself; it appears finally for itself, liberated from everything that ordinarily conceals it. Page 298

In an excellent scene of La Revocation, Robcrte, thrusting her hands into the tabernacle, feels them grasped by two long hands, similar to her own .... In Le Souffieur, the two Robertes fight, clasp hands, and lock fingers while an invited guest "prompts": make her separate! And Robert ce soir ends with Roberte's gesture-her holding out "a pair of keys to Victor, which he touches though never takes." This is a suspended scene, a genuinely frozen cascade, which reflects all the dilemmas and syllogisms with which "the spirits" had assailed Roberte during her rape. Page 298

But if the body is flexion, so too is language. An entire reflection of words, or a reflection in words, is necessary for the flexional character of language to appear, finally liberated of everything that covers it up and conceals it. Page 298

If language imitates bodies, it is not through onomatopoeia, but through flexion. And if bodies imitate language, it is not through organs, but through flexion. There is an entire pantomime, internal to language, as a discourse or a story within the body. If gestures speak, it is first of all because words mimic gestures: "Virgil's epic poem is, in fact, a theater where words mimic the gestures and the mental states of the characters . . . . Words, not bodies, strike a pose; words, not garments, are woven; words, not armors, sparkle .... " Page 298

In Hexion, according to Klossowski, there is a doubllยท "transgression"-of language by the flesh and of the flesh by Page 299

language. 11 He was able to derive from this a style and a mimicry-a particular language and a particular body at once. Page 299

One theme runs through the entire work of Klossowski: the opposition between exchange and true repetition. For exchange implies only resemblance, even if the resemblance is extreme. Exactness is its criterion, along with the equivalence of exchanged products. This is the false repetition which causes our illness. True repetition, on the other hand, appears as a singular behavior that we display in relation to that which cannot be exchanged, replaced, or substituted-like a poem that is repeated on the condition that no word may be changed. It is no longer a matter of an equivalence between similar things, it is not even a matter of an identity of the Same. True repetition addresses something singular, unchangeable, and different, without "identity." Instead of exchanging the similar and identifying the Same, it authenticates the Page 299

different. Page 300

In short, the double, the reflection, or the simulacrum opens up at last to surrender its secret: repetition does not presuppose the Same or the Similar-these are not its prerequisites. It is repetition, on the contrary, which produces the only "same" of that which differs, and the only resemblance of the different. Page 301

This is the relation between frozen scenes and repetition. A "fall," a "difference," a "suspension" are reflected in the resumption, or in repetition. In this sense, the body is reflected in language: the characterisitic of language is to take back into itself the frozen scene, to make a "spiritual" event out of it, or rather an advent of "spirits." In language -at the heart of language-the mind grasps the body, and the gestures of the body, as the object of a fundamental repetition. Differ-ence gives things to be seen and multiplies bodies; but it is repetition which offers things to be spoken, authenticates the multiple, and makes of it a spiritual event. Page 301

What is the dilemma? How is the disjunctive syllogism, which expresses the dilemma, made up? The body is language; but it may conceal the speech that it is-it can hide it. The body may, and ordinarily does, wish for silence with respect to its works. In this case, repressed by the body but also projected, delegated, and alienated, speech becomes the discourse of a beautiful soul that speaks of laws and virtues while keeping silent over the body. It is clear, in this case, that speech itself is pure, so to speak, but that the silence on which it rests is impure. By holding its silence, at once covering up and delegating its speech, the body delivers us over to silent imaginings. Page 302

Such is the first term of the dilemma: either Roberte keeps quiet but provokes the aggression of spirits, her silence being all the more impure as her speech is ever more so .... Or there must be an impure, obscene, and impious language in order for silence to be pure, for language to be a pure language which resides in this silence. "Speak and we disappear," say the spirits to Roberte. Page 303

Does Klossowski simply mean that speaking prevents us from think-ing about nasty things? No; the pure language which produces an impure silence is a provocation of the mind by the body; similarly, the impure language which produces a pure silence is a revocation of the body by the mind. As Sade's heroes say, it is not the bodies which are present that excite the libertine, but rather the great idea of what is not there. In Sade, "pornography is a form of the battle of the mind against the flesh." More precisely, what is revoked in the body? Klossowski's answer is that it is the integrity of the body, and that because of this the identity of the person is somewhat suspended and volatilized. Page 303

the body-language dilemma is established between two relations of the body and language. The couple "pure language/impure silence" designates a certain relation, in which language brings the identity of a person and the integrity of a body together in a responsible self, but maintains a silence about all the forces which cause the dissolution of this self. Or language itself becomes one of these forces and takes charge of all these forces, giving thereby to the disintegrated body and the dissolved self access to a silence which is that of innocence. In this case, we have the other term of the dilemma: "impure language/pure silence." In other words, the alternative is between two purities, the false and the true, the purity of responsibility and the purity of innocence, the purity of Memory and the purity of Forgetful-ness. Posing the problem from a linguistic point of view, Le Baphomet says: either the words are recalled but their sense remains obscure; or the sense appears when the memory of the words disappears. Page 303

Death and duplicity, death and multiplicity are therefore the true spiritual determinations, or the true spiritual events. We must under-stand that God is the enemy of spirits, that the order of God runs counter to the order of spirits; in order to establish immortality and personality, in order to impose it forcefully on spirits, God must depend upon the body. He submits the spirits to the privative function of the person and to the privative function of resurrection. The outcome of God's way is "the life of the flesh." 24 God is essentially the Traitor: he commits treason against spirits, treason against breath itself, and, in order to thwart their riposte, doubles the treason by incarnating him-self. 25 "In the beginning was treason." Page 304

This is the other term of the dilemma, the system of breaths/spirits, the order of the Antichrist, which is opposed point for point to the divine order. It is characterized by the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of language which now expresses only intens-ities. Page 306

Thus, the dilemma finds perhaps its most acute expression: the identity of the self always refers to the identity of something outside of us; therefore, "if it is God, our identity is pure grace; if it is the ambient world where everything begins and ends by denotation, our identity is but a pure grammatical joke." Page 306

In short, the sum total of the possible is an originary material from which the exclusive and complete determination of the concept of each thing is derived through disjunction. God has no other sense than that of founding this treatment of the disjunctive syllogism, since distributive unity does not allow us to conclude that his Idea represents a collective or singular unity of a being in itself which would be represented by the Idea. Page 308

But it is precisely inside God's order, and only there, that Page 308

disjunctions have the negative value of exclusion. And it is on the other side, inside the order of the Antichrist, that the disjunction ( difference, divergence, decentering) becomes as such an affirmative and affirmed power. Page 309

It seems that breaths, in themselves and in ourselves, must be conceived of as pure intensities. In this form of intensive quantities or degrees, dead spirits have "subsistence," despite the fact that they have lost the "existence" or extension of the body. In this form they are singular, though they have lost the identity of the self. Intensities comprehend in themselves the unequal or the different-each one is already difference in itself-so that all of them are comprehended in the manifestation of every one. This is a world of pure intentions, as Baphomet explains: "no self-esteem prevails"; "every intention may yet be permeated by other- intentions"; "only the most senseless intention of the past hoping for the future could triumph over another intention"; "were another breath to come to encounter it, they would then presuppose each other, but each one according to a variable intensity ef intention." Page 309

The system of the Antichrist is the system of simulacra opposed to the world of identities. But, as the simulacrum dismisses identity, speaks and is spoken, it takes hold at the same time of both seeing and speaking and inspires both light and sound. It opens up to its difference and to all other differences. All simulacra rise to the surface, forming this mobile figure at the crest of the waves of intensity -an intense phantasm. Page 310

In a fine analysis of Nietzsche, Klossowski interprets the "sign" as the trace of a fluctuation, of an intensity, and "sense" as the movement by which intensity aims at itself in aiming at the other, modifies itself in modifying the other, and returns finally onto its own trace. Page 310

There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complicatons: every true thought is an aggression. It is not a question of our undergoing influences, but of being "insufHations" and fluctuations, or merging with them. That everything is so "complicated," that I may be an other, that something else thinks in us in an aggression which is the aggression of thought, in a multiplication which is the multiplication of the body, or in a violence which is the violence of language-this is the joyful message. For we are so sure of living again (without resurrection) only because so many beings and things think in us: because "we still do not know exactly if it is not others who continue to think within us (but who are these others who form the outside in relation to this inside which we believe ourselves to be?)everything is brought back to a single discourse, to fluctuations of intensity, for instance, which correspond to the thought of everyone and no one." Page 311

The values of expressive or expressionist language are provocation, revocation, and evocation. Evoked (expressed) are the singular and complicated spirits, which do not possess a body without multiplying it inside the system of reflections, and which do not inspire language without projecting it into the intensive system of resonances. Revoked ( denounced) are corporeal unicity, personal identity, and the false simplicity of language insofar as it is supposed to denote bodies and to manifest a self. As the spirits say to Roberte, "we can be evoked; but your body can also be revoked." Page 311

From intensity to intentionality: every intensity wills itself, intends itself, returns on its own trace, repeats and imitates itself through all the others. This is a movement of sense which must be determined as the eternal return. Page 311

"Thus, all I have to do is to will myself again, no longer as the outcome of previous possibilities, not as one accomplishment out of a thousand, but as a fortuitous moment, the very fortuity of which implies the necessity of the integral return of the whole series." Page 312

The Nietzschean repetition has nothing to do with the Kierkegaardian repetition; or, more generally, repetition in the eternal return has nothing to do with the Christian repetition. For what the Christian repetition brings back, it brings hack once, and only once: the Page 312

wealth of Job and the child of Abraham, the resurrected body and the recovered self. Tht>re is a difference in nature between what returns "once and for all" and what returns for each and every time, or for an infinite number of times. The eternal return is indeed the Whole, but it is the Whole which is said of disjoint members or divergent series: it does not bring everything back, it does not bring about the return of that which returns but once, namely, that which aspires to recenter the circle, to render the series convergent, and to restore the self, the world, and God. In the circle of Dionysus, Christ will not return; the order of the Antichrist chases the other order away. All of that which is founded on God and makes a negative or exclusive use c!f the disjunction is denied and excluded by the eternal return. All of that which comes once and for all is referred back to the order of God. The phantasm of Being (eternal return) brings about the return only of simulacra (will to power as simulation). Being a coherence which does not allow mine to subsist, the eternal return is the nonsense which distributes sense into divergent series over the entire circumference of the decentered circle-for "madness is the loss of the world and of oneself in view of a knowledge with neither beginning nor end." Page 313

This section examines Klossowski's work as an exploration of "bodies-language," a realm where body and language mutually reflect and transgress each other through "flexion," dissolving personal identity and the self. This leads to a "pornology" that unites theology (equivocity) and perversion (power hitting the body). Klossowski contrasts false repetition (exchange, resemblance) with true repetition, which authenticates difference and produces the Same of difference. His work presents a dilemma between a "pure language/impure silence" (responsible self) and an "impure language/pure silence" (dissolved self, innocence), aligning with an "order of the Antichrist" based on simulacra, multiplicity, and the affirmative use of disjunction, contrasting with God's order of identity and negative exclusion. This system of intensities and complications culminates in an understanding of the eternal return as a Dionysian affirmation of divergent simulacra, where nonsense distributes sense.

#on/philosophy #on/literature #on/klossowski #on/simulacra #on/language #on/body #on/repetition #on/dilemma #on/theology #on/perversion #on/eternal-return

4. MICHEL TOURNIER AND THE WORLD WITHOUT OTHERS

4. MICHEL TOURNIER AND THE WORLD WITHOUT OTHERS Page 313

Related to origins, Robinson must necessarily reproduce our world, but related to ends, he must deviate. This is an odd deviation, although it is not one of those of which Freud spoke, since it is solar and takes elements as its objects: such is the sense of Uranus. "If this [solar coition] is to be translated into human language, I must consider myself feminine and the bride of the sky. But that kind of anthropomorphism is meaningless. The truth is that at the height to which hiday and I have soared, difference of sex is left behind. Friday may be identified with Venus, just as I may be said, in human terms, to open my body to the embrace of the sun." 5 If it is true that neurosis is the negative of perversion, would not perversion, for its part, be the elemental aspect of neurosis? Page 316

perversion is not defined by the force of a certain desire in the system of drives; the pervert is not someone who desires, but someone who introduces desire into an entirely differ-ent system and makes it play, within this system, the role of an internal limit, a virtual center or zero point (the well-known Sadean apathy). The pervert is no more a desiring self than the Other is, for him, a desired object endowed with real existence. Page 316

Rather than being a thesis on perversion, it is a novel which develops the very thesis of Robinson: the man without Others on his island. Page 316

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The effects of the absence of Others are the real adventures of the spirit: this is an experimental, inductive novel. Under the circumstances, philosophical reflection can garner what the novel reveals with so much force and life. Page 317

The first effect of Others is that around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantle or background, where other objects and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition which regulate the passage from one to another. Page 317

In all these respects, my desire passes through Others, and through Others it receives an object. I desire nothing that cannot be seen, thought, or possessed by a possible Other. That is the basis of my desire. It is always Others who relate my desire to an object. Page 318

the Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does. That this structure may be actualized by real characters, by variable subjectsme for you and you for me-does not prevent its preexistence, as the condition of organization in general, to the terms which actualize it in each organized perceptual field-yours and mine. Thus the a priori Other, as the absolute structure, establishes the relativity of others as terms actualizing the structure within each field. But what is this structure? It is the structure of the possible. Page 319

The other is the existence of the encompassed possible. Language is the reality of the possible as such. The self is the development and the explication of what is possible, the process of its realization in the actual. Page 319

In short, the Other, as structure, is the expression <fa possible world; it is the expressed, grasped as not yet existing outside of that which expresses it. Page 320

Each of these men was a possible world, having its own coherence, its values, its sources of attraction and repulsion, its center of gravity. And with all the differences between them, each of these possible worlds at that moment shared a vision, casual and superficial, of the island of Speranza, which caused them to act in common, and which incidentally contained a shipwrecked man called Robinson and his half-caste servant. For the present this picture occupied their minds, but for each of them it was purely temporary, destined very soon to be returned to the limbo from which it had been briefly plucked by the accident of the Whitebird's getting off course. And each of these possible worlds naively proclaimed itself the reality. That was what other people were: the possible obstinately passing for the real. Page 320

we doubt that dualism is correctly defined as long as it is established between the matter of the perceptual field and the pre-reflective syntheses of the ego. The true dualism lies elsewhere; it lies between the effects of the "structure Other" of the perceptual field and the effects of its absence (what pl'retโ€ขception would he were there no Others). Page 320

It is the structure which conditions the entire field and its functioning, by rendering possible the constitution and application of the preceding categories. It is not the ego but the Other as structure which renders perception possible. Thus, the authors who interpret dualism poorly are also the authors who cannot extricate themselves from the alternative according to which the Other would be either a particular object in the field or another subject of the field. Page 321

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Real dualism then appears with the absence of the Other. Page 321

Is not this progressive though irreversible dissolution of the structure what the pervert, on his interior "isle," attains by other mtยทans? To put it in Lacanian terms, the "forclusion" of Others brings Page 321

it about that others (Jes autres) are no longer apprehended as Others (des autruis), since the structure which would give them this place and this function is missing. But is it not then the whole ยทof our perceived world that collapses in the interest of something else ... ? Page 322

The fundamental effect is the distinction of my consciousness and its object. This distinction is in fact the result of the structure-Other. rilling the world with possibilities, backgrounds, fringes, and transitions; inscribing the possibility of a frightening world when I am not yet afraid, or, on the contrary, the possibility of a reassuring world when I am really frightened by the world; encompassing in different respects the world which presents itself before me developed otherwise; constituting inside the world so many blisters which contain so many possible worlds-this is the Other. 12 Henceforth, the Other causes my consciousness to tip necessarily into an "I was," into a past which no longer coincides with the object. Before the appearance of the Other, there was, for example, a reassuring world from which my consciousness could not be distinguished. The Other then makes its appearance, expressing the possibility of a frightening world which cannot be developed without the one preceding it passing away. For my part, I am nothing other than my past objects, and my self is made up of a past world, the passing away of which was brought about precisely by the Other. If the Other is a possible world, I am a past world. The mistake of theories of knowledge is that they postulate the contemporaneity of subject and object, whereas one is constituted only through the annihilation of the other. Page 322

Then suddmly there is a click. The subject breaks away from the object, divesting it of a part of its color and substance. There is a rift in the scheme of things, and a whole range of objects crumbles in becoming me, each object transferring its quality to an appropriate subject. The light becomes the eye and as such no longer exists: it is simply the stimulation of the retina. The smell becomes the nostril-and the world declares itself odorless. The song of the wind in the trees is disavowed: it was nothing but a quivering of the timpani .... The subject is the disqualified object. My eye is the corpse of light and color. My nose is all that remains of odors when their unreality has lwm dtยทmonstrated. My hand refutes the thing it holds. Thus the problem of awanยทmยทss is born of anachronism. It impl<'s th<' simultaneous existence of th Page 322

subject with the object, whose mysterious relationship to himself he set'ks to define. But subject and object cannot exist apart from one another since they are one and the same thing, at first integrated into the real world and then b ll cast out y 1t. Page 323

The Other thus assures the distinction of consciousness and its object as a temporal distinction. Page 323

Robinson is but the consciousness of the island, but the consciousness of the island is the consciousness the island has of itself-it is the island in itself. We understand thus the paradox of the desert isle: the one who is shipwrecked, if he is alone, if he has lost the structure-Other, disturbs nothing of the desert isle; rather he consecrates it. Page 323

Robinson progressively nears a revelation: initially he experienced the loss of Others as a fundamental disorder of the world; nothing subsisted but the opposition of light and night. Everything became harmful, and the world had lost its transitions and virtuality. But he discovers (slowly) that it is the Other who disturbs the world. The Other was the trouble. Having disappeared, it is no longer only the days which are redressed. Things are also, no longer being pulled down hy Others one on top of the other. So too is desire, no longer being Page 323

drawn down on top of a possible object or a possible world expressed by Others. The desert isle initiates a straightening out and a generalized erection. Page 324

it is the Other who has imprisoned the elements within the limits of bodies and, further still, within the limits of the earth. For the earth itself is but a great body which retains the elements; it is earth only to the extent that it is peopled by Others. The Other fabricates bodies out of the elements and objects out of bodies, just as it fabricates its own countenance out of the worlds it expresses. Thus, the liberated double, when the Other collapses, is not a replica of things. It is, on the contrary, the new upright image in which the elements are released and renewed, having become celestial and forming a thousand capricious elemental figures. Page 324

the Other, as it encompasses the possible worlds, prevents the doubles from standing erect. The Other is the grand leveler, and consequently the Page 324

<le-structuration of the Other is not a disorganization of the world, but an upright organization as opposed to the recumbent organization; it is the new uprightness, and the detachment of an image which is vertical at last and without thickness; it is the detachment of a pure element which at last is liberated. Page 325

Isn't it the case that nature and the earth had already told us that the object of desire is neither the body nor the thing, but only the Image? When we desire Others, are not our desires brought to bear upon this expressed small possible world which the Other wrongly envelops, instead of allowing it to float and fly above the world, developed onto a glorious double? And when we observe a butterfly pillaging a flower that exactly resembles the abdomen of the female of the species and then leaving the flower carrying on its head two horns of pollen, we are tempted to conclude that bodies are but detours to the attainment of Images, and that sexuality reaches its goal much better and much more promptly to the extent that it economizes this detour and addresses itself directly to Images and to the Elements freed from bodies. 18 Robinson's deviation is the conjunction of the libido and the elements; but the full story of this deviation, so far as ends are concerned, encompasses the straightening up of things, the earth, and desire. Page 325

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the elements, the sign of a death instinct-an instinct which has become solar. Page 330

The expressiveness which defines the structure-Other is constituted by the category of the possible. The a priori Other is the existence of the possible in general, insofar as the possible exists only as expressed-that is, in something express-ing it which does not resemble what is expressed (a torsion of the expressed in that which expresses it). Page 330

BAILTSUY Page 330

the Other conditions the entire perceptual field, the application to this field of the categories of the perceived object and the dimensions of the perceiving subject, and finally, the distribution of concrete Others in each field. In fact, perceptual laws affecting the constitution of objects (form-background, etc.), the temporal determination of the subject, and the successive development of worlds, seemed to us to depend on the possible as the structure-Other. Even desire, whether it be desire for the object or desire for Others, depends on this structure. I desire an object only as expressed by the Other in the mode of the possible; I desire in the Other only the possible worlds the Other expresses. The Other appears as that which organizes Elements into Earth, and earth into bodies, bodies into objects, and which regulates and measures object, perception, and desire all at once. Page 330

This is Robinson's discovery: the discovery of the surface, of the elemental beyond, of the "otherwise-Other" (de l'Autre qu'autru1). Why then do we have the impression that this great Health is perverse, and that this "rectification" of the world and of desire is also a deviation and a perversion? Robinson exhibits no perverse behavior. But every study or every novel of perversion strives to manifest the existence of a "perverse structure" as the principle from which perverse behavior eventually proceeds. In this sense, the perverse structure may be specified as that which is opposed to the structureOther and takes its place. And just as concrete Others are actual and variable terms actualizing this structure-Other, the pervert's behaviors, always presupposing a fundamental absence of the Others, are but variable terms actualizing the perverse structure. Page 331

Lacan and his school insist profoundly on the necessity of understanding perverse behavior on the basis of a structure, and of defining this structure which conditions behavior. They also insist on the manner in which desire undergoes a sort of displacement in this structure, and the manner by which the Cause of desire is thus detached from the object: on the way in which the dj!Jerence ef sexes is disavowed by the pervert, in the interest of an androgynous world of doubles; on the annulment of the Other inside perversion, on the position of a "beyond the Other" (un au-de/a de l'Autre) or of an "otherwise Other" Page 331

(un Autre qu'autrui), as if the Other disengaged in the eyes of the pervert his own metaphor; finally, they insist on perverse "desubjectivation"for it is certain that neither the victim nor the accomplice function as Others. Page 332

The world of the pervert is a world without Others, and thus a world without the possible. The Other is that which renders possible. The perverse world is a world in which the category of the necessary has completely replaced that of the possible. This is a strange Spinozism from which "oxygen" is lacking, to the benefit of a more elementary energy and a more rarefied air (Sky-Necessity). All perver-sion is an "Other-cide," and an "altrucide," and therefore a murder of the possible. But altrucide is not committed through perverse behavior, Page 332

it is presupposed in the perverse structure. This does not keep the pervert from being a pervert, not constitutionally, but at the end of an adventure which surely has passed through neurosis and brushed up against psychosis. This is what Tournier suggests in this extraordinary novel: we must imagine Robinson as perverse; the only Robinsonade possible is perversion itself. Page 333

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Neurosis and psychosis-this is the adventure of depth. The structure-Other organizes and pacifies depth. It renders it livable. Page 327

M5Y8GW3H Page 327

Everything has lost its sense, everything becomes simulacrum and vesti9e-even the object of work, the loved one, the world in itself or the self in the world ... ; that is, unless there be some sort of salvation for Robinson; unless he invents a new dimension or a third sense for the expression "loss of Others"; unless the absence of the Other and the dissolution of its structure do not simply disorganize the world but, on the contrary, open up a possibility of salvation. Robinson must return to the surface and discover surfaces. The pure surface is perhaps what Others were hiding from us. It is perhaps at the surface, like a mist, that an unknown image of things is detached and, from the earth, a new surface energy without possible others. Page 327

It is at the surface that doubles and ethereal Images first rise up; then the pure and free Elements arise in the celestial surveying of the field. The generalized erection is the erection of surfaces, their rectification-the disappearance of the Others. At the surface of the isle and the overarching sky, simulacra ascend and become phantasms. Doubles without resemblance and elements without constraint-these are the two aspects of the phantasm. Page 327

"Robinson turned the question over in his mind. For the first time he was clearly envisaging the possibility that within the crude and brutish half-caste who so exasperated him another Friday might be concealed-just as he had once suspected, before exploring the cave or discovering the coomb, that another Speranza might be hidden beneath his cultivated island." Page 328

But hiday functions in an entirely different way-he indicates another, supposedly true world, an irreducible double which alone is genuine, and in this other world, a double of the Other who no longer is and cannot be. Not an Other, but something wholly other (un tout-autre) than the Other; not a replica, but a Double: one who reveals pure elements and dissolves objects, bodies, and the earth. "It seemed, indeed, that (Friday) belonged to an entirely different realm, wholly opposed to his master's order of earth and husbandry, on which he could have only a disruptive effect if anyone tried to imprison him within it." 24 It is for this reason that he is not even an object of desire for Robinson. Page 329

This section analyzes Tournier's Friday as a novel exploring the "world without Others." The Other is revealed as an a priori structure of the perceptual field that makes perception and desire possible by organizing elements into bodies, objects, and worlds. The absence or dissolution of this structure, depicted by Robinson's solitude, leads to a chaotic world but ultimately reveals a deeper truth: the Other was the source of disturbance and limitation. This absence enables the discovery of the surface, a new dimension where elements are liberated into pure images/phantasms (doubles without resemblance, elements without constraint), leading to a "rectification" of the world and desire that Deleuze interprets as the "perverse structure," a fundamental organization beyond conventional behavior, an "Other-cide" that replaces the possible with necessity.

#on/philosophy #on/literature #on/tournier #on/other #on/perversion #on/surface #on/possible #on/necessity

Thirty-Fifth Series of the Crack

Thirty-Fifth Series of the Crack Page 334

For example, if one says "I am ill," one is speaking, from the point of view of the neurotic, of a certain object in a certain situation, but one is also speaking of a process that is occurring in the interiority of the organism and in its physical depth-a rupture, a fissure, a wound which is not simply physical, but is also libidinal and destrudo-a crack. Page 334

The entire drama of illness unfolds between "I am ill" and "one dies." It unfolds between the neurotic statement of the patient who has his object, his world, and his identity as a person, and the impersonal event of death which occurs on the threshold of the unconscious, at the limit of the subject, on the line of the Aion, in the pure form of the infinite past-future. The paradox of the event, as we have seen, is that it is an action or passion in the infinitve; it has a "voice" which is neither active nor passive, but which, on the contrary, is the source of both the active and the passive as the result of a transformation. The crack is a passion and an action. Page 334

The formula "one dies" is the form of the event, the form of the infinitive, which expresses an eternal truth and which possesses an infinite value (being related to the time of the Aion, the indefinite past and future), while the formula "I am ill" is only the actualization of the event, its incorporation into a state of affairs, a spatio-temporal event, which has only a finite value (being related to the time of Chronos, the always limited present). And it is this difference which is essential. It is this difference which causes the event to be that which exceeds its actualization. Page 335

The crack is not only a point in the body's depth, it is also a line or a surface on the limit of the body, where the infinite past-future is at last determined, where the ideal accident (event) is finally inscribed, and where the body, ceasing to be anything but a body in depth, becomes a body without organs. Page 335

The two are indissociable; it is impossible to determine whether the crack is first of all corporeal (depth) and secondarily ideational (surface), or vice versa. It is, in any case, simultaneously depth and surface, and it does not allow itself to be reduced to one of the two dimensions. Page 335

What is essential is not only that the crack should be physical as well as psychic, but that it should be understood precisely as the limit, the surface, the "between" where the physical communicates with the psychical, and also where language communicates with things. Page 335

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For what is essential in the illness is the crack or fault, this incorporeal event on the surface that constitutes the very limit of life and death, where the body itself opens onto the pure past and the pure future. Page 336

It is this crack, then, which causes the body to cease being a single unity, to open up in depth and at the surface, to cease being anything but depth, and to become, in an act of counter-actualization, the unlimited past-future in the indefinite form of a verb. It is the instantaneous and pure time of the crack that causes the body to cease being limited and defined by its present, its acts and passions, and its qualities and properties. It is the ideal time of the crack that allows us to grasp the pure event in its eternal truth. It is here that the transmutation occurs. This transmutation does not at all reside in a miraculous metamorphosis, nor in a sudden mystical illumination. It is no more than this: a conversion of the action into passion and the passion into action, insofar as the crack, like the verb, is both action and passion. It is the conversion of death into life and life into death, as the crack makes the body itself a body which does not cease to die, but also a body which does not finish living. Page 336

Lacan is correct to show that the crack of the body is inseparable from the crack of language; the two cracks enter into resonance. The crack of language is the passage of language into the pure verb, the passage from speech to the infinitive, which gathers into one the entire divergence of series. It is the loss of the world and of the self, the loss of every object which would be denoted, every subject which would be manifested, and every concept which would be signified. The world and the self are lost in the unique event which concerns them all. Page 337

It is the formula "one dies" or "one is ill," which in its impersonal or fourth person singular form says all the divergence of series and the communication of all events in a single one, at the surface. Page 337

When the crack of the body communicates with the crack of language, all of the disparate series, whether corporeal, psychic, or linguistic, resonate in the unique Event which hovers over them, without being actualized in any one of them in particular. Page 337

For the logic of sense is the logic of the eternal return of the event. In it, there is no longer anything but a pure distance between the infinite past-future of the event and the always limited present of its actualization. The logic of sense is the logic of this distance, which can never be bridged. Page 337

To think is to reach this limit, to inscribe it in the body, and to extract from the crack, through transmutation, the eternal truth of the event. Page 338

In short, this entire book has the object of showing how the logic of sense makes the advent of an entirely new philosophy possible, a philosophy of the pure event as grasped in the pure time of the Aion and extracted from the spatio-temporal actualizations by the transmutation of the crack. In this philosophy, sense is grasped neither in things nor in the mind, but at the surface, as the incorporeal event or the ideal quasi-cause which is produced by the depth of bodies and actualized in them, but also as that which distributes itself over the metaphysical surface and actualizes bodies. Page 338

This section explores the "crack" as a fundamental concept linking physical depth and linguistic/metaphysical surface. The crack is simultaneously a wound in the body's depth, an incorporeal event on the surface, and the limit where physical, psychic, language, and things communicate. It enables the transmutation of action/passion and life/death and is inseparable from the crack of language (transition to the pure verb/infinitive). The logic of sense is the logic of this crack and the distance between the eternal event (Aion) and its limited actualization (Chronos), facilitating a new philosophy of the pure event grasped at the surface.

#on/philosophy #on/crack #on/event #on/surface #on/time #on/transmutation #on/body #on/language

Thirty-Sixth Series of Stones

Thirty-Sixth Series of Stones Page 339

Stones are neither body nor idea, but they are the elements of sense, pure logical attributes, or nonexisting entities. Stones cannot be thrown except on the condition that they already be there, in the unlimited future or the indefinite past. There is always a stone there where there has always been one. It is at the surface that the stone is thrown and makes sense. It is at the surface that the stone acquires its logic and its event. The logic of stones is neither physical nor psychical. It is incorporeal and impersonal; it is neither individual nor universal. But it is precisely because the stone has no existence other than that of subsistence, that it has no reality other than that of insistence, that it affects both the deepest bodies and the loftiest Ideas. It affects bodies as the weight which precipitates them or retains them, and Ideas as the obstacle which prevents them from being realized. It is the eternal truth of the stone which allows it to affect bodies and ideas in different ways in the eternal return of the same stone. "What is important," said Artaud, "is that stones fall as ideas, that ideas fall as stones." Page 339

In the logic of the stone, one can grasp the power of nonsense to distribute sense. Page 340

It is indeed in the logical and paradoxical eternity of the Aion that stones come back, with their eternal youth or their eternal age, and with their eternal truth. It is in the pure form of the unlimited past-future that the stone comes back again. There are here neither models nor copies, neither first time nor second time, neither original nor reproduction. There is only the eternal return of the simulacrum which includes simulacrum and simulated at once, as in the case of the stone thrown which includes the stone which is there before it is thrown and the stone which is there after it has been thrown. Page 340

It is when one is at the surface, exposed to the pure event of the stone, that one is able at last to go into the depths and to rise up to the ideas, but without confusing stones with depths, nor logic with the heights. Page 340

To grasp the stone as sense is to raise the simulacrum to the height of the idea, and to discover the pure event as the transcendental ideality of stone, as opposed to the Idea understood as essence. It is to go from the formless to the pure unformed. What can physics do but make the stone fall in the air? And what can psychics do but cause it to penetrate a body or rebound on it? But the logic of the stone is to make the stone fall as an idea, and to give to ideas the materiality of stones. It is here that transmutation occurs. Page 341

The thirty-sixth series uses the "stone" as an example of an element of sense, a pure logical attribute existing at the surface with subsistence and insistence, not material existence or conceptual reality. Stones are thrown/make sense at the surface, affecting bodies (as weight) and ideas (as obstacle) due to their eternal truth, returning in the Aion as simulacra. The logic of the stone is the power of nonsense to distribute sense and represents a transmutation that raises the simulacrum to the level of ideal event, allowing access to depths and ideas without reducing one to the other.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/simulacra #on/logic #on/transmutation #on/event #on/surface #on/stone

Thirty-Seventh Series of Simple Bodies

Thirty-Seventh Series of Simple Bodies Page 342

A simple body, fire, air, earth, or water, exists in a certain way, and acts and suffers in a certain way, but it is only capable of receiving sense from its relation to an unlimited past-future which is not identical with its own present. The simple body is opposed to the mixed body as much as the mixed body is opposed to the simple body. Simple bodies are always there, in all their aspects: they are "always already" there, but also "yet to come," without ever being in the present. Page 342

It is the world of simple bodies which gives rise to paradoxes; it is the world of mixed bodies which gives rise to problems, and the world of composites that give rise to solutions. Page 342

The "simple body" is not a body-it is an action or a passion, a quality or an attribute considered in the infinitive, detached from bodies, and taken in its eternal truth. Page 342

We have seen that the event is the attribute in the infinitive. It is action and passion, detached from bodies. It is the distinction of the "expressed" from the proposition and the "attribute" from the state of affairs. It is subsistent and insistent, but not existent or real. It is extra-Being, the minimum of Being common to the real, the possible, and the impossible. It is neutral, impassive, and sterile. It is a double, a simulacrum, or an idol. It is the site of the eternal return. It is the accident separated from its actualization, the pure event which is always already passed and yet to come. It is the limit, the frontier, the surface, the crack, the between. Page 343

Every problem is the problem of a mixed body and a composite, but it is enveloped by a paradox which concerns simple bodies. Page 344

The world of simple bodies has no relation to the Other, and therefore no relation to the possible. Page 344

Simple bodies constitute a paradoxical world, without mixture, without Other, without future or past which are attached to a present. Page 345

The world of simple bodies is a world without Others, a world without the possible, a world without Chronos-a world of pure events, of the eternal return, of nomadic distributions, of crowned anarchies, of the indefinite past-future, of the pure infinitive, of the simulacrum, of the crack, and of the pure surface. This is the world that is affirmed in this book. Page 345

The thirty-seventh series defines "simple bodies" not as physical bodies but as actions, passions, qualities, or attributes in the infinitive form, detached from bodies and grasped in their eternal truth (pure events). These are paradoxes, existing in the Aion (always/yet to come), without relation to the Other or the possible. The world of simple bodies is the world of pure events, the eternal return, simulacra, the crack, and the pure surface โ€“ the world affirmed throughout the book, distinct from the world of mixed/composite bodies that generate problems.

#on/philosophy #on/simple-bodies #on/event #on/aion #on/simulacra #on/surface #on/paradox

Thirty-Eighth Series of Sense and Event

Thirty-Eighth Series of Sense and Event Page 346

Sense and event are the same thing, but their identity is that of the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs. The identity of the expressed and the attribute defines the ideality or the incorporeal status of sense and event. This identity is maintained and renewed at the surface, as the surface twists that which expresses it into that which is expressed. The surface makes the entire proposition reflect the state of affairs in such a way that the expressed of the proposition merges with the attribute of the state of affairs, and that language becomes possible in this operation. Sense is therefore precisely at the frontier which allows language to be related to things. This is the operation by means of which the sense of that which is said is said of that concerning which it is said. Page 346

This operation is always expressed by the pure infinitive. Page 346

sense is produced at the surface by the deepest states of affairs, by the action and passion of bodies in their depths. It is this production that makes language possible. Page 346

It would be possible to say that sense has no sense, but is opposed to the absence of sense. It gives sense, but only in disjoining it from itself. In fact, sense is a double of itself. It is at once what is said of things and what exists in the proposition; it is both at once, but neither one without the other, always on the two sides of the frontier that it constitutes. This double is neither model nor copy, neither original nor reproduction; it is a simulacrum. This double does not resemble that which is expressed any more than it resembles the expression; it is only coextensive with both. Page 347

The problem is therefore to grasp language as that which relates itself to pure events, as that which is itself the unique event, and as that which is the pure univocal Verb of Being, the very Univocity of Being. Page 347

The most difficult task is to understand the nature of this simulacrum-double-event-sense which is on the surface, without falling into the depths or flying off to the heights. It seems to us that this is the essential task of the philosophy of sense. Page 347

To grasp sense and event in their ideality is to grasp them in their eternal truth, distinct from their actualizations. It is to grasp them as something yet to come and always already passed. It is to extract them from the limited time of Chronos and to locate them in the unlimited time of the Aion. It is to grasp them in their ideality, which is not at all abstract but is rather a concrete, problematic, and transcendental ideality of singularities. Page 347

Thus, the entire philosophy of sense may be summarized as a Stoicism gone mad. Stoicism gave us the first principles of the logic of sense: the distinction between bodies and incorporeal events, the distinction between causes and quasi-causes, the distinction between the present and the eternal truth, the autonomy of the surface, the nature of the event as expressed of the proposition and as attribute of the state of affairs, the theory of the Aion and of instantaneous time. But Stoicism had also its restrictions: the absence of the concept of nonsense, the exclusive nature of the eternal truth of the event, the confusion of the quasi-cause with the infinite series of events themselves, the lack of the concept of the static genesis, and the absence of an ontology of the pure event understood as the Being of the incompossible. When these restrictions have been lifted by the contributions of Nietzsche (the eternal return, the will to power, the play of force, the affirmation of nonsense, the univocity of Being, the positive use of the disjunction), of Carroll (the structure of nonsense, the organization of surfaces, the simulacrum, the static genesis), and of psychoanalysis (the dynamic genesis, the phantasm, the crack, the transmutation)-this is when the logic of sense is truly unleashed. Page 348

In short, the expressed is the sense of that which is said. This is the ultimate unity of language and the Being which is said of language. Page 349

The thirty-eighth series concludes the book by reiterating the core identity of sense and event as the incorporeal expressed/attribute located at the surface, enabling language's relation to things. Sense, distinct from absence, is a productive double, a simulacrum. The philosophy of sense aims to grasp this surface entity in its eternal, problematic, transcendental ideality (in Aion). The logic of sense, the logic of the pure event, is a "Stoicism gone mad," integrating contributions from Nietzsche, Carroll, and psychoanalysis to affirm the univocity of Being and language on the surface.

#on/philosophy #on/sense #on/event #on/simulacra #on/surface #on/univocity #on/stoicism #on/nietzsche #on/carroll #on/psychoanalysis