Temporal Dying and Dying in Time; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 8

An example of the spiritualization of death in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal, perfectly slighted by the maternal figure. 5:12-6:20.

Before moving further in the concept of "the real," Brassier needs to repudiate the spiritualization of death that has become conspicuous in 20th century thought. This is in order to give credence to a real that is purely being-nothing, which means at an absolute independence from subjectivity. Brassier will want to show how Laruelle's "unilaterlization" that "lies at the heart of the diachronicity...which indexes the asymmetry of thought and being" constitutes a real time that is not temporal. We will distinguish between objective time and subjective temporality in this post. If we are to understand "the real" that happens completely on its own without reference to anything, then this will first need to be understood at the expense of temporal dying which finds its spiritualization through Heidegger. If the idea of Diachronicity is a "time" that happens completely independent of human subjectivity, then the idea of "time" itself will be something different than the explanation of "time" given by Heidegger where "time" is the "who" of subjectivity, and ultimately the "who" of Dasein, meaning "time" is absolutely the structure of Dasein, and nothing else. This circumscription of time by Heidegger that has certainly held a strong sway over philosophy in the 20th century into the 21st century has kept philosophy from looking past its veiled mystical proclivities. If this last statement holds any ground, it should point to the curious nature of certain philosophers who ignore science in its discoveries, and who rely on an idea of transcendental "pure reason" that's ostensibly able to make discoveries that ground the work of science. But how much of this ostensible "pure reason" is actual discovery and how much of it is a pretense for privileging a neo-platonic conception of the universe where there is always something beyond us, making one self-satisfied in the belief of a transcendental-invisible realm that can never be accounted for, except by pure subjectivity? This is a question for an honesty that may not be possible for Dasein. If this explanation of temporal privilege holds ground, then it will serve as an introduction to this post that will distinguish the difference between dying in time and temporal time, or between absolute death, and spiritual death. We will come to learn the basics of Heidegger's temporal dying as Dasein's utmost possibility in difference to absolute bio-physical death that happens without subjective privilege of its own possibility. For all intents and purposes, Brassier takes a sledgehammer to the temporal-subjective interpretation of death in the next passage.

"It is the occlusion of temporality's bio-physical instantiation which inflates phenomenological death into an impossible possibility - but an impossibility which is recoded as the condition for the possibility of everything else. Yet to say that that impossibility is the ultimate condition of possibility is still to say that it never happens. Just as the transcendental conditions of representation cannot be represented, so death as quasi-transcendental condition for all happening cannot itself happen. This sophism points not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality. I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." Death for Heidegger is "impossible possibility" in so far as death is 1. unable to be experienced and 2. the ground for the experience of "presence." What this means is that Dasein (human being) can never know its own death. It's not an epistemological matter. One can't possibly "know" ones death in its absolute "presence." At the same time, the foreboding of the eventual death that everyone experiences in others (not in themselves) is what makes "presence" (consciousness) possible. So while death for Heidegger cannot be understood in itself (ontically), it functions as the ground to human existence since it's something "to come." In this sense, the question of death becomes the question of dying for Heidegger. Instead of asking about death, Dasein's should ask about "dying" because this is what death actually is according to Heidegger. It's the non-present possibility that grounds existence. It's the process of always being-towards-death, and not the absolute bio-physical reality of the death instance. Being-towards-death is the absolute function of subjectivity. As a generalization of part I of Being and Time, all categories ascribed by Heidegger to Dasein are all looking-ahead which for Heidegger shows Dasein's constant (albeit unconscious) attention towards its own death as its eventual possibility. The verbiage though of the "impossible possible" still points to the fact that death is impossible. In other words, for Heidegger, it's always possible to be dying but never to die. One can always be in the Heraclitian process but one can never simply die. While death can ground Dasein, it can never actually "happen" because it's impossible. This raises the question for what exactly the word "happening" is and a cursory realization of how cloudy this concept has become through the idea of phenomenology. Like this impossibility of possibility in regards to death, the transcendental conditions of representations cannot be represented, which is to say that the transcendental conditions of death cannot "happen." Death for Heidegger then is merely a transcendental condition that forms the Dasein (human experience) and constitutes its existentiality. It's something that actually never happens. Regardless of how many people and things we know die, this actually isn't what's happening for Heidegger, but this is already assuming too much for Heidegger because he isn't interested in understanding anything beyond human possibility. But as Brassier sharply lets us know, this idea of death points "not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality." Because phenomenology (working within the confines of human consciousness) can’t realize the space outside of human consciousness, doesn't mean that death isn't something that actually happens. To put it more simply, just because we are self-conscious beings who can't think outside of ourselves, doesn't mean that there isn't something outside of ourselves that isn't "experienceable." Working within consciousness, we only have the "who" of Dasein (transcendentally understood as the "we") and so all reality is grounded on what we do (ontology). The premise for this phenomenological impulse is not dishonest nor necessarily presumptuous though. It simply thinks it can't know anything other than itself. But there comes a point where the phenomenological method of absolute naiveté has to be understood as somewhat disingenuous, or rather, one can simply escape out of the phenomenological attitude as quickly as they came in. One can understand that another has died and isn't coming back as quickly as one can enter into a mindset that the process of dying functions as the axiom to human existence. Brassier surmises this perfectly in final passage of the quote above. We will quote it again for extra recognition: “I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." In other words, my knowledge of my eventual death is at an absolute difference with the fact that I will die. I can know that I'm going to die. I can "anticipate" that something will happen to me called "death," but because I can't ever know this "death," doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Because I'm limited to only being able to anticipate my absolute finitude doesn't mean that something called "death" doesn't absolutely happen to myself as a biological organism independent of my temporal-memorial consciousness. Just because I'm limited to only knowing what dying is, 1. doesn't mean that death can't happen to me from without, and 2. doesn't mean that dying and death are the same things. In fact they are very different things. If I can only think of what dying is and not of what death is, then they must be very different things. This is very easily solved when we understand that we can't have a 1st person understanding of what we call "death" but can absolutely witness a 3rd person observation of "death," while phenomenologically speaking, we can have an "ecstatic" experience of dying, but this wouldn't be a "knowing." This knowing of an "ecstatic" experience of dying would be a transcendental figuration for Dasein which for Heidegger is the ontological ground for Dasein. The transition in Heidegger's thinking into this "ecstatic" being is where modern philosophers don't realize that this shouldn't be considered a "transition of thinking." More specifically, thinking doesn't happen in ekstasis (The closest Heidegger will come is in privileging poetry as being able "to speak for experience"). Regardless of this phenomenological digression, death is a happening that is not a matter of knowing for us, but just because it's not a possibility for our experience and knowing, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. In this sense we can understand "happening" in a much broader sense than "knowing" and "experience." At the very least, we can say that something happens absolutely independent of my knowing it to happen, even if it happens to me (from some ostensible 3rd person outside perspective). Temporality does not equal time. My anticipatory human nature that thinks in terms of a past, present, and future is at an absolute distance from the diachronicity that separates the nervous system from everything else that could ever possibly happen.

Brassier finds it necessary to destabilize this anthropomorphic idea of time from diachronic time. Philosophy rarely has a sense or appreciation of scientific time and often has the compulsion to understand it in terms of the human being. Again, this points to the compulsive correlationism assumed by philosophy; that everything outside of the human being has to be in reference to the human being, and more grotesquely in the new 21st century, that everything that we are as human beings, has to be in reference to a "larger world outside of us" (rarely does this "care" to situate the human being in the context of a larger-vaster world recognize the possibility of the larger-vaster world being able to cause volcanic explosions at will or causing meteors to smash structures to bits). This ideality of philosophy is what will lead Heidegger to point-blank call the scientific use of time "vulgar." Why is it vulgar? It's vulgar because it doesn't have any interest in human beings which for Heidegger had to be a problem for his project of fundamental ontology. Limiting the task of fundamental ontology to an existential analytic is Heidegger's work though. Ontology isn't limited to an existential analytic. We learned before in Enlightenment and Extinction of Badiou's ontology composed in the expansive problems of set-theory regardless of his eventual movement into the evental circumstance for human beings at the end of Being and Event. What is ontology not in reference to us? What is being not in reference to us? How can we think the non-dialectical logic of "unilateral duality" understood by Laruelle where anything that comes after something called "the real" has nothing to do with something we understand afterwards as something called "the real?" How can we understand duality without dialectical logic? How can we understand unilateralization without identity? Brassier asks more precise preliminary questions: "How does thought think a world without thought? Or more urgently: How does thought think the death of thinking?"

Name Calling; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 5

Guy: "I think this flower is called..."
Girl: "Who gives a shit?"

In the last post, we asked a final question regarding the possibility of thinking being without recourse to a linguistic guarantor. We came to this thought as a consequence of seeing a "strong conrrelationist" thought in Meillassoux which wanted to say that mind-independent reality is contingent regardless of this statement being made. This affirmation of being to the non-conceptual space of reality forms a correlation that Brassier shows can't be made regardless of the "good" intentions Meillassoux may have had in destabilizing correlationism's inherent dualism (understanding being in terms of thought). Brassier's next step is to "unbind the void" through the thought of Alain Badiou, specifically his most popular work, Being and Event. It's with Badiou's move away from a linguistic guarantor for the disjunction between being and thinking that Brassier finds important. This is done by treating ontology not as an existential signifier but as discourse. The consequences of de-existentializing being is seeing presentation's internal structure as that of an "anti-phenomenon" which is presence's necessarily empty and insubstantial contrary. In other words, what we conceive of as "presentation" is exactly opposite of being (or presence). When we give ourselves the idea of presentation which we can find conspicuously in the "unfolding" of a musical presentation (work) (given as an example in Husserl's Internal Time Consciousness essays) we can literally describe what we think is the experience of the presence through the presentation of the musical work (presentation). But presentation is not being. What we think of as presentation happening in what we think of as "real time" is our way of thinking being by borrowing a catalog of concepts already in our conceptual lexicon and equating this idea of presentation with an idea of being. In other words, this phenomenological description relies on a historical lexicon of conceptions, or thinking in general and an equality between "presence" and what we figuratively do when we think and say something is being presented. With this being said, it's blatantly inaccurate and unfaithful to something called "being" to ascribe what we think it is to "what it is." Toward the end of the last post, I asked "Why then rely on a concept of ontology (being) in general?" This was assuming we qualified the concept of being as an existential characteristic. With Badiou, ontology becomes a claim about discourse, not about the world. As Brassier states, "Anything that is must be counted-as-one, but unity is not an intrinsic characteristic of being; it is merely the result of an operation which produces consistent multiplicity, from inconsistent multiplicity." Brassier here is explaining Badiou's use of set theory to settle the discourse of ontology a contrario a world of ontology. For example, when we see everything that compiles a tree, we see it as "tree." We see it as one thing called "a tree." This "a" functions to give unity to complexity. But because we call a multiplicity into a unity, this fact doesn't allow a leap into qualifying being. Just because we were presented something in some way doesn't mean that this says anything about being. Our presumptions about presentations don't serve as a harbinger to being. To put it more simply, "all access to being is via presentation, and presentation is always the presentations of something, never being itself" because concepts are always consistent which is incompatible with the claim that being is inconsistent multiplicity (and consequently it never being knowable and thinkable). With all this being said, the question still stands why the concept of being is still something that philosophers ponder over and something that a speculative realism should ponder over regardless of Badiou's demarcation of it into discourse, for discourse is still an attempt at explanation, or is it (we shall understand this further in the post)? While this operates at a sure distance from an existential analytic of ontology (set-theory mathematics rather than Heideggerian mythologization of finitude) it still asks of something called "being." This distance we will explain in this post through the concept of the empty set ({}). At the end though, we will find that Badiou's finding of an "event" from ontological discourse doesn't serve his own method of subtractive ontology(through empty-set theory), and that ultimately and again, the concept of being is one that is more than precarious for philsophical usage and something that can or even ought to be understood.

"Set-theory begins by declaring that non-belonging exists, a non-belonging which authorizes all subsequent belonging, but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." This is somewhat of a tricky statement to find our way around. First lets understand the concept of the empty set ({}). An empty set is a set that contains no elements but nonetheless we can see the mathematical syntax (symbolization). For Badiou, it's important to understand that the empty set represents a discourse of syntax, not of existence. According to Brassier, "It does not predicate existence of any concept, whether it be that of 'non-belonging' or 'inexistence.'...Its import is that, even in order to deny belonging, it is at least necessary to affirm the existence of a mark of belonging." So for Badiou, while using set-theory for a discourse of ontology that's at a distance from existential ontology, we are still required to use a mark to mark out this non-belonging. In other words, we affirm "the existence of a mark of non-belonging." The syntax then is in existence since it was marked. The empty set while operating mathematically instead of poetically and figuratively through Heideggerian post-religious secularized mysticism affirms its existence through non-belonging. Through non-belonging, (negation of belonging) which is presupposed by a set in general, (a set that is a multiplicity that we "count-as-one"), belonging is authorized to exist, "but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a mark showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires a mark to show pure non-belonging. The key here is in not saying "Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a mark showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires the existence of a mark to show pure non-belonging." Again, existence need not be relative to the operation of set theory. To be more specific, the logic of empty-set theory is an operation, not a predication about existence. With this being said, we understand how theory here "neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging" or being. Empty-set theory shows us nothing about existence, it shows us how marks are made from something that contains nothing. "The axiom of the empty-set asserts that the name of unpresentable is presented; or that there exists a name of inexistence. This nuance is crucial: asserting the existence of a name in discourse is quite different from asserting the existence of an extra-discursive concept. For it is through this nomination that presentation is able to suture itself to the unpresentable without presenting it. Thus Badious writes, 'the inaugural advent' of the unpresentable consists in 'a pure act of nomination' which 'since it is a-specific [...] consumes itself, thereby indicating nothing but the unpresentable as such.' This nomination neither marks the return of the One, since it does not make anything consist, nor does it index a multiplicity, since what it presents is strictly nothing." The key here is that empty-set theory has shown how the mark is sutured (tied) to the unpresentable without presenting it. In other words, we see a mark that happens when triggering what's unpresentable, but this mark that comes to represent what's unpresentable shows nothing about something called "presence" or "being." Instead, an operation happens where the empty-set is marked. The mark of the empty-set presents nothing nor does it make anything "exist." It indicates the unpresentable as nothing, and nothing else. This unpresentable doesn't gain a "wholly unknown other" from it's nomination. It's completely unknown and that's it. The mark indicates nothing and that's it. (It's worth noting that we (along with Badiou and Brassier) use the verb "indicate" rather than "symbolize" in this operational process.) A name is asserted, not an "extra-discursive concept." This is important to understanding subtractive ontology. Alternatively, we can say that a "mark is made, not an extra-discursive concept." From the mark of the empty-set, we then have no reason to attribute any of what happened to us (being). In this example of the empty-set, that a mark was first made and counted-as-one to first establish the empty-set that is never counted (but nevertheless presupposes a count-of-multiplicity as one) doesn't show anything about something called "existence." Nor does it show anything about "presence." It shows a process that Badiou calls "subtractive ontology," and that's it. It's the jump into an existential ontology that Brassier wants to eliminate; this desire to existentialize the mathematics of set theory. It's this existentializing of scientific concepts that creates the mysticism that creates nebulous notions of scientific disciplines. While we understand the concept of Folk Psychology, we can also understand a concept of Folk Science. The differences in what is called "ontology" is not just one example either. The callous way in which the science of Quantum Physics is used to explain things as embarrassing as "changing the way you live" is another conspicuous example.

What empty-set theory shows here for Brassier is that there is no "experience of being." While something is consistently presented (the mark which indicates the set with no elements), this doesn't account for the inconsistency of its own reality or being (the being of the empty-set). There's no understanding of what is the "presencing" within the logical operation of the nomination manifested from nothing. Instead we have an idea of this nothing that is exactly that, nothing and nothing else, and we have a mark that comes to indicate this nothing and nothing else. In other words, there's an operation that we happen to understand. What this operation was, is something that we understood. The understanding is always after an operation, and an operation is always on going on its own terms independent of thought. In this sense we can clarify the nebulous concept of being simply as "something that is just not for understanding." Whether this proves to be the case as we continue on in Enlightenment and Extinction remains to be seen. While Brassier appreciates the subtractive ontology that we just went into with empty-set theory above, he finds the "evental" conclusions drawn by Badiou to be problematic where Badiou inflates thinking to be the event and only event of being, meaning for example that "the Big Bang, the Cambrian explosion, and the death of the sun remain mere hiccups in the way of the world" because they operate at a large distance from the thinking being that Badiou privileges following the "change-the-world" syndrome experienced by many "thinkers" and naive idealists in general. "Thinking is sufficient to change the world: such is the ultimate import of Badiou's idealism." It's interesting to see how an ultimate import of "thought changing the world" can create useful objective thoughts on philosophical questions while having a possible initial import that's this embarrassing. But these aren't questions for philosophy, let alone anyone really. "Either Badiou denies that ontology is a situation, in which case he is obliged to choose between mysticism, Phenomenology, or metaphysics, or he accepts that the subtractive nature of presentation is such as to undermine all the non-ontological consequences he wishes to draw from it, specifically his theory of event." From this, we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between being and consequence, and ultimately between being and thought. Still, how can the concept of being still be used?