Cosmological Death-Drive; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 11

Ride the death drive. An organic experience of entropy.

In opposition to Deleuze and Heidegger's ontologies, Brassier casts Nietzsche's will to power reappropriated as the will to nothing which we discussed in the last post. The will to nothing becomes extended and more specific through Freud's concept of the death-drive found in his groundbreaking work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Brassier will want to extend the concept of Freud's death-drive into a cosmological framework, meaning an explanation of how organic life always tends towards it's entropic and non-organic nothingness. It's an extension of Freud's original concept in the sense that Brassier will find exact scientific phenomena to represent the death-drive beyond being, most specifically in the suns incineration roughly 4.5 billion years from now. First though, I think it's important to understand Freud's concept of the death-drive and Brassier does this wonderfully. We won't be understanding Freud on our own terms as if we had more authority to speak on the subject than Brassier (even if we did). Instead, we will let Brassier speak for himself regarding the concept of the death-drive. This will help us understand the initial concept of the death-drive and will also help is in understanding this concept within a cosmological context. The concept of the death-drive is one of the most important philosophical insights of the 20th century. It's something that confounded Freud before and during the Beyond the Pleasure Principle text. Freud though was never someone to stop a reduction when in the process of understanding anything (which makes him more of a philosopher than a psychoanalyst.) The understanding of the death-drive within the context of ontology will serve as the grounds for understanding it through the context of cosmology. Only when we can wipe away our teleological presupposition of vitalism can we come to grips of the sense of the death-drive concept. Brassier will help us with Freud, and then we can fully understand the farther reaching extension of arguably Freud's most important work.

"The phenomenon that motivates Freud's investigation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that of traumatic neurosis. The latter gives rise to a 'compulsion to repeat,' wherein the sufferer compulsively relives the traumatic incident in his or her dreams. Yet if the function of dreams is primarily that of wish-fulfillment, in conformity with the pleasure principle, which strives to maximize pleasure- where pleasure is defined as a diminution of excitation - and to minimize displeasure - where displeasure is defined as an increase in excitation- then traumatic neurosis poses a problem for psychoanalysis because it resists explanation in terms of the pleasure principle: why is the patient compelled to relive a shatteringly unpleasurable experience?" When Freud confronts traumatic neurosis in his patients, he's confounded by the fact that the patients repeat the traumatic event(s) that happened to them. This is at odds with what Freud preliminarily called the "pleasure principle," which simply put means that beings are driven to pleasure. What beings are driven towards in this classical concept of the pleasure principle is fulfillment of wishes. Beings wish and hope things for themselves and the pleasure principle defines beings in terms of the drive to attain the things they ideally wish and hope for. They are driven by their dreams. It's important to understand more specifically how Freud understood pleasure. Pleasure was firstly the drive to attain ones wishes. But more specifically, it was the "diminution of excitation" and an "increase in excitation." So contrary to the idea that pleasure would mean that one would be overly excited, pleasure is the diminution of excitation. In other words, the more placid one would be would signify a more maximal state of pleasure. This is important to highlight because it can be seen that someone who's overexcited is ostensibly experiencing "pleasure," whereas for Freud, this anxiety was neurotic and not pleasurable. That being said, how come patients were reliving their traumatic experiences not only in their dreams, but in their non-dream states where images would float into someones mind of the traumatic experience. Why was there a temptation and curiosity to relive something that was painful? In general, how is this perversity possible (How is a fetish possible?)? If Freud's patients, and anyone in general relives traumatic events either in dream states or non-dream states, then how much of the pleasure principle is really a principle? This is what leads Freud to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle and give an answer to the repetitive acts of trauma in his patients. Brassier writes, "Freud's answer is that through this repetition, the psyche is striving to muster the anxiety required in order to achieve a successful binding of the excess of excitation released by the traumatic breaching of its defenses." The psyche of the patient then is driven to continually allow anxiety to enter into their psyche in order to successfully bind to the original excitation of the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to equal the anxiety that was originally caused by the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to match the anxiety of a traumatic event. Why does it do this? "The compulsion to repeat consists in an attempt on the part of the unconscious to relive the traumatic incident in a condition of anxious anticipation that will allow it to buffer the shock, thereby compensating for the impotent terror that disabled the organism and staunching the excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound." The patient then repeats the traumatic event in their mind to "buffer the shock" of another hypothetical traumatic experience of the same kind. By repeating a traumatic event in ones mind, any new traumatic event won't be new to it. The patient will already have something in their own mind that they have experienced over and over again by the neurotic repetition of anxiety that drives to equal the hypothetical future traumatic experience. Any future experience of trauma will be staunched because the patient has relived the anxiety of trauma so much that the actual experience of trauma will be nothing new. The patient then is always in a state of anxiety anticipating a traumatic event. The patient can't know if the traumatic event will happen again or not. All that matters to the subconscious mind of the patient is that something traumatic has happened and could happen again, and the patient believes the traumatic event will happen again. If they didn't, they wouldn't hold in anticipation for something they know wasn't going to happen (just because it happened before). "The excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound" will be matched by the subconscious repetition of anxiety it knows will happen to itself, even though it may very well never happen again in reality. They key for the subconscious is to buffer shock specifically. Shock is the traumatic experience. Anxiety is a diminutive form of shock. It's a livable form of shock. One will never be shocked if they're always in a state of anxiety. If the subconscious keeps repeating the anxiety of a traumatic event (a trace of the traumatic event), no shock can happen to it because it constantly keeps shocking itself in smaller, more livable degrees than the initial shock that happened to itself. But for however much shock is buffered by the subconscious repetition of anxiety, this repetition of anxiety is anything but the pleasure principle. If the pleasure principle is defined as the diminution of excitation, then the drive to relive a trace of a traumatic experience is not a pleasurable drive. It's not a pleasurable drive to keep exciting oneself into small states of anxiety. If the preliminary concept of the pleasure principle given by Freud was to be an axiom for the operation of the subconscious, then the subconscious would simply forget about a traumatic event, and wouldn't feel the need to relive it in small states of anxiety in order to staunch massive excitation caused in a shock. The subconscious would say to itself: "because it happened once, doesn't mean it will happen again." If the subconscious said this to itself, it would do the opposite of repeating a traumatic event. It would end the traumatic event in the assertion that one event doesn't mean that the same exact event will happen again, or even more simply, that one event doesn't cause another event. In Freud's thought in Beyond the Pleasure Principle though, the subconscious is overwhelmed by the wound of the traumatic experience to rationally be able to reason with itself. It's here where the rationality of conscious life can take hold of the subconscious' death-drive proclivities by consciously reasserting to oneself that "I will always be shocked by something." This negates the subconscious drive to relive a traumatic experience in order to buffer a hypothetical future one because one is always constantly aware that something "shocking" can happen. Instead of constant bubbling anxiety, there's an acceptance of the constant possibility of traumatic events. Shocks will come and die away. In this sense, conscious life is retraining the ostensible function of the subconscious defined in Freud's death-drive to accept shock as something that will always happen, instead of letting one shock fester to shield from a hypothetical future shock. This is a digression from the post, but something I will want to explore later.

Brassier states "If the death-drive qua compulsion to repeat is the originary, primordial motive force driving organic life, this is because the motor of repetition - the repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation. This death-drive understood as repetition of the inorganic is the repetition of the death which gave birth to the organism - a death that cannot be satisfactorily repeated, not only because the organism which bears its trace did not yet experience it, but also because that trace is the marker of an exorbitant death, one that even in dying, the organism cannot successfully repeat." Here we find the move from the death-drive understood in Freud's sense to the death-drive understood through the framework of Deleuze's concept of repetition that grounds everything. In the psychoanalytical patient, we saw the drive to constantly repeat trauma that put them in a constant state of anxiety, working against their own ostensible "pleasure principle." With Brassier (with the help of Deleuze's meticulously detailed account of repetition in Difference and Repetition), we find the cosmological context for the death drive as the repetition of death. The psychoanalytical patient had a subconscious that repeated the anxiety of trauma that would lead towards its death, not towards its pleasure. The organic in general is driven by a repetition of death just the same way. In this sense, the subconscious classically understood is analogous to the cosmological repetition of the inorganic. The inorganic constantly repeats itself, thereby creating nothing. But this repetition of death "gave birth to the organism." The inorganic constantly repeats itself, and in doing so, creates constant nothings, one of them being what we call the "organism." Being is a "form" of death. It's one that has been repeated, and one which we see with the same functions in our own species. But this death can't be repeated. The death that happened where we are the trace of that death is not something that we can say was the cause of us. Nor can we go back and live any death in general, because being (as idea) has no access to the death-event. This "exorbitant death" is beyond the bounds of reason and image. It's non-symbolic and non-causal. Again, we have to let Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" simmer to fully appreciate the non-correlative aspect of identity without difference, and "process" without causality. Even our experience of dying which once thought itself able to ground death can't discover the repetition of death. As we stated in a prior post, the anticipation of dying is at an absolute distance from pure death. We are the trace of a death, not the death itself. If nothing happens, and something is a "form" of nothing, then this "form" is not nothing, nor can this "form" repeat nothing. The organism cannot repeat the death-possibility that breaks nothing. At the very most, we can say with Brassier that this "repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation." The trauma of individuation; this concept of the repetition of death is but a trace of inorganic repetition. To speculate just a little further in somewhat of a sporting interest, we can say: "Something had to live to be able to die."

The Will to Nothing; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 10

Someone literally willing nothing.

With Brassier's repudiation of Heidegger and Deleuze's conceptions of time as being anthropomorphic and specifically temporal, Brassier moves onto the pure movement of time as nothing, crystallized in Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. Brassier reappraises this notion though as a will to nothing. Nietzsche's writing has been extraordinary for thinking nothingness regardless of his seeing of the will's direct object in power. The fact that his writing is still fresh today within the domain of "thinking the death of thought," is a testament to his unconscious quest for utmost honesty; honesty not as a virtue in itself, but as a compulsion of a certain organism to simply will something absolutely independent of itself. Brassier acknowledges this power found in Nietzsche's writing but tweaks it towards its absolute logical extension; that the will that wills itself can't be understood as willing power, but as willing something that is so absolutely void of substance that at most we can say that the "will wills nothing." We can fully understand this through the tenor of Nietzsche's aphorisms which makes his insistence on power as the ground of existence curious. It's not worth trying to personally analyze the reasons behind this. For one, they would be boring, and two, it takes away justice to be done to the actual sway of Nietzche's writing which is most striking about great writers rather than solidified concepts that often serve as cursory introductions to the very writing of an author that transcends those solidified concepts. This post then will be a reappraisal of the concept of the will to power rather than a reappraisal of Nietzche's writing. We will understand the absolute logical conclusion that can be drawn from the will to power into the will to nothing with the help of Brassier. Being will no longer be understood ontologically, either in it's finitude or micro-biological aspects of difference. Instead it will be understood as a pure difference that couldn't possibly signify an ontology classically understood. The questions of being then becomes a non-question because there's nothing to question. Rather, the question of being becomes the question of nothing. The substance that ontology would like to premise its thought is non-substantial. Ontology then becomes something that can preliminarily be called "non-ontology," but even this idea couldn't be understood in a dialectical distinction to ontology. It would have to be understood purely as nothing regardless of the ostensible duality that the "non" signifies within the context of "ontology" (It's here where Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" explained earlier by Brassier is important to understand).

"For Nietzsche, 'will to power' is a synonym for the world interpreted as a chaotic multiplicity of conflicting forces - 'This world is will to power- and nothing besides!' which is to say, a synonym for 'becoming,' then to think the will in its being is to think the being of becoming in its essentially dissimulatory, inherently self-differentiating 'essence' as a flux of perpetual transformation. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence marks the moment when the will comes to know that it cannot know itself in itself because its knowable aspect necessarily corresponds to nothing - since there is nothing, no aspect of the will 'in-itself', for it to correspond to or adequately represent." Lets first distinguish between an immediate understanding of the will to power and the one we want to establish as the will to nothing. An immediate understanding of the will to power would echo a Hobbesian sentiment that conveys a political characteristic. You could conjure up ideas of absolute imperialism in this concept and you wouldn't be wrong considering the recorded time of actual peace in our archived history of the world (which ranges somewhere between 0 and 32 seconds). On the other hand, one can understand the concept of the will to power on a much more personal level. One can see it very simply when one is playing a game against anyone. One is always trying to win, or quitting because they don't want to compete thinking they can't compete, which can often lead to the quitter uttering a masked humiliatory sentiment such as "I don't believe in competition." With Nietzsche, we gain a concept of the will that's devoid of all morality, or at the very least reduced to the fact that if there is a morality in the process of phenomenal power, it's an interpretation of the phenomena and not the phenomena itself. This connotation is what Brassier will want to reappropriate. Because the phenomenal world is interpreted as chaotic forces that are always in conflict with each other doesn't lead to a logical jump of saying that power guides these conflicting forces. It can certainly be interpreted that way, but it can just as easily not be interpreted that way and stay reduced to it's dissimulatory nature. The idea of conflicting forces doesn't have to be understood anthropomorphically as personal conflicts understood in the immediate conception of the will to power. Instead, conflicting forces can be understood simply as entropy; meaning different things are always happening. That this difference can be interpreted as chaotic and conflicting is for the interpretation of an interpreter, not for anything preemptively understood as "the real." If we accept that the will to power for Brassier is a synonym for 'becoming,' then the concept of the will to power transitions into the will to nothing because no substance underlies the concept. What's "self-differentiating" and always in a "flux of perpetual transformation" is something different from the connotations one thinks of when thinking of power. One is taken back to the laconic phrases of Heraclitus. But the idea of "flux" need not symbolize an end point for the power of conceptual thinking, and this is what leads Brassier in a Q and A to say that he's an idealist because he thinks highly of the power of thinking to be able to out-think itself into what it's not. So the speculative opportunity of this nihilism doesn't end in an eternal look-of-awe into something normatively understood as "the void," but into an active movement that's wholly nothing. Thinking about this wholly nothing gains speculative help from the idea of eternal recurrence elaborated by Nietzsche. Briefly, the idea of eternal recurrence is the idea that what happens will always happen again making the idea of free will a non-factor in any sort of action-being; for what will happen now will have always happened and what has always happened will eventually happen again. In this sense, any choice that one thinks they are making at their own discretion has already been made an eternity of times. The ostensible "will" of this eternal recurrence though can't be known. We can describe it but we know that we can't because the "phenomena" is not knowable, or rather, is not a matter of knowledge. We can say that something will happen again that has already happened, but this isn't recurrence in itself because there is no static identity to recurrence. As we stated above, if we accept the will to power as the will to nothing - which is synonymous with "becoming"- and this becoming we understand as inherently self-differentiating, then the will to nothing would be an eternal self-differentiation of recurrence. So then, what is it to grasp the eternal self-differentiation of recurrence? We can first grasp it very simply as difference and repetition, self-differentiation and recurrence. We can understand it as the eternal phenomena of continual differences always reoccurring. The self-differentiating nature in recurrence points to nothing that can be known because no identity can be understood with something that is inherently always in a state of difference (Derrida). If nothing can be known, and the will wills nothing, then the will can't know anything. In other words, what the will "is," is not a matter of knowledge. At the very most, we can vaguely conceptualize the will as a pure process and nothing else. Even this concept of "process" needs to be annotated with a non-dialectical character though, putting the concept of process into the original reduction of the wills direct object to nothing. No aspect of the will can "correspond to or adequately represent" anything. It's important to make clear that the matter at hand seems to be an epistemological issue. While we can say that the will is "nothing," we can also say that it's "something that happens." But this later qualification doesn't pertain to the knowledge one may think it would like to convey. When someone says that at the very most "something happens" in reference to the will, this statement is non-declarative. It's not made in order to archive a truth or establish a philosophy. It's something that's said without any substance, but nonetheless something that is said. It's important to not make this statement into a conviction or declaration. There's nothing in this statement that points to anything personal. If we allow ourselves this, the will then is non-representational, and so one would go too far in establishing the will's "movement" as one synonymous with power. We can certainly understand the idea of the will to power within our context of being (Dasein) but this doesn't always have to be the case. Whatever the will is as becoming is not symbolic, and so is henceforth nothing, epistemologically speaking. The trick is in thinking the will not as it pertains to knowledge for us, but as non-knowledge, or non-ontology, or simply as nothing. The trick again is in thinking non-thought if something called "the real" can be appropriated. This transition from the will to power to the will to nothing is in this sense exactly not an epistemological event, or rather an attempt at making it a non-epistemological event. No new knowledge is gained when the will is understood as willing nothing. If anything, knowledge is lost. With the will to power we could give an innumerable amount of examples of powers sway over the word, but the will to nothing has no examples since it's nature is always self-differentiating, and this self-differentiation doesn't signify a Heraclitean aphorism (it can, but it doesn't have to), it simply signifies nothing. At the very least, it's important to understand that self-differentiating and conflicting phenomena doesn't necessarily point to some sort of conscious or unconscious power being waged in behalf of micro-biological organisms or nothingness itself. It simply points to something that is not a matter of knowledge, and hence close to something called "the real."

The transition from the will to power to the will to nothingness is not a subtle one, but for thinking it appears subtle. The move isn't the easiest in the world because thinking something without an intentional-direct object is contrary to a metaphysics of thinking. It's something that one lets simmer after an initial understanding. Much like Laruelle's concept of unilateral duality, the more the idea simmers, the more it becomes "appropriate." Of course, a brief but close reading of Nietzsche will acquire a deeper perspective of the will as becoming, and hence as the will that wills nothing, and that eternally reoccurs. For better or worse, it's in Nietzsche's style that we can best attain this perspective and not necessarily in a scientific understanding of the will. If there were a scientific understanding of the will, it would learn from science but would appear philosophical in style. It's not as if scientists concern themselves with the will to nothingness, not yet at least (it's not a matter of discovery). But being in the work of science is something like the will willing nothing. In regards to the speculative-philosophical perspective though, it takes a certain style to conjure this perspective and there's never been anyone before or after Nietzsche to do this. To understand this, the best thing to do is let Nietzsche speak for himself: "Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which comes to the same thing); the present must not be justified in reference to the future, not the past by reference to the present. Becoming is of equivalent value at every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word 'value' would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated..." - The Will to Power. The world is a different nothing. The world is nothing different.

Time is the Difference; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 9

What a difference time makes.

When trying to destabilize the ontological notion of time through it's temporal existentiality, Brassier doesn't find this ontological gesture simply through the work of Heidegger, but also finds it's extension in Deleuze. Brassier confronts Deleuze specifically in his Difference and Repetition text which stands as Deleuze's most theoretical work. To compare this work to Deleuze's work with Guattarai is like comparing applies to oranges. At the very least, one is extremely difficult to understand (Difference and Repetition) while the other is much easier (e.g. Anti-Oedipus). It's the difference between reading a pure philosophical text and reading a text which is more sociological with a philosophical style. Regardless of Difference and Repetition's difficulty, it will be important to understand the basic premise of this latters text in order to fully understand the pure and empty nothingness that Brassier continually tries to convey in Enlightenment and Extinction. While Heidegger finds time as the constituting form of Dasein (or the human being), specifically in its temporal nature, Deleuze digs deeper to find time as a differentiable operation that is made up of a logical emptiness devoid of sequence, meaning time as temporality is pure difference, and not an observed and objective sequence of time. It's with this explanation that we have a preliminary understanding of the slippery difference between time and temporality. While the earlier would like to serve as the pure objective sequence of phenomenal nature, the latter would like to serve as an abstract difference that works as a sort of difference maker between anything at all. While the observation of time entails nothing else other than the fact that things are happening at different times, the observation of temporality entails a difference that constitutes not just the being of Dasein, but anything in general. Temporality as time functions specifically as the sense of difference. The emphasis on time is the unconscious observation of phasing, while the conscious emphasis of time as temporality is the recognition of time as difference. One can understand then how time as temporality serves a correlative sense since it emphasizes a difference between things, most conspicuously to us, while the pure observation of phasing seeks nothing other than what's already happening in a observation. To understand this basic premise of Difference and Repetition (that Brassier explains in order to throw the shackels off the privilege of time "de-vulgarized"), lets take a look at what Deleuze specifically states regarding time and difference.

"It is the empty form of time that introduces and constitutes Difference in thought; the difference on the basis of which thought thinks, as the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is the empty form of time that distributes along both its sides an I that is fractures by the abstract line [of time], and a passive self that has emerged from the groundlessness which it contemplates. It is the empty form of time that engenders thinking in thought, for thinking only thinks with difference, orbiting around the point of ungrounding." First, we have an explanation of time as an empty form. For us to understand this, we have to think of something with no form, and in this case, we apply to our previous conception of time. Whatever one's conception of time was needs to be emptied to have no form. Time is nothing then. It's not the sequence one may have first thought it was or was initially taught. Rather, it constitutes difference in thought. What we understand here from Deleuze is time as the possibility of there being thought independent of thinking. The logic of this statement is grounded on the premise that this is thought and the formlessness of time makes a difference for thought. Thought is no longer what it is because of time. Time makes thought different. While thought was ostensibly happening without having to think anything, time engenders a difference for thought whereby it no longer simply happens without having to think. Instead, the difference of time engenders thinking into thought. Thought then no longer is in pure space, but temporalizes itself by a difference. This difference is time. Thought can no longer be thought but ends up thinking something. While thought didn't have a direct object for whatever it was, it now as a direct object in its process of now becoming thinking. It's difficult to think of what thought is without thinking. At the very most, it's being-nothing which means we can't think thought. We can't understand it as an activity of thinking because we are thinking beings as the difference from being-nothing. Attributing a character to being-nothing is on Deleuze though, and calling it something like "thought" is on us to try to understand through Difference and Repetition. Nonetheless, we are given a difference from thought by way of time. Time separates the being-nothing of thought into thinking. Deleuze further describes this distinction as the difference between the indeterminate and determination and this makes sense within the explanation of thought and thinking given above. Thought is indeterminate or simply being-nothing. Thinking on the other hand is determination in the sense that it has a direct object. We won't go so far to say that it functions in intentionality, but was can say that was it does, is give a direct object. The difference here is between saying what something does, and calling what something does, intentionality. We certainly can understand Husserl's gesture of making this leap because the arrow of what something does can be synonymized with intentionality, but this arrow is always for us, as much as thinking is for us. But if we are working past us, then we can understand the break at wanting to formalize the doing of an operation as an intentionality. So far then, we have thought as something completely indeterminate and thinking as determination. When we move forward in Deleuze with this passage, we find two characters that time distributes. One is the fractured I. What is the fractured I? What is an I that is fractured? What Deleuze means to say with the concept of the "fractured I" is the fact that the I is never unchangeable. The I will always change because of the abstract line of time. Now, we can't forget that this line of time is abstract which means we can't think of it in terms of a symbolized sequence. Instead we understand it as a difference that always happens. It's easier to understand time here simply as difference. The difference of time fractures the possibility of an I, meaning an identity. Nothing can ever be identified because abstract time as difference will not allow identity of something understood as an I. The identity of something is then never possible. Time breaks the possibility of being an identity. On the other hand, a passive self "happens" that has "emerged form the groundlessness which it contemplates." So time as difference does two things here. Firstly, it makes the possibility of the I as identity impossible since something can never be identified as the same thing. Secondly though, something called a "passive self" happens that emerges from the groundlessness of abstract time. To be more clear, for Deleuze, time engenders a fractured I, and also engenders a passive self. From this, we can understand there's a difference between an "I" and a "passive self." The passive self is an organism that is the receptor of passive phenomena which it may or may not allow to receive passive syntheses, meaning it has no choice in how "reality" happens to its own faculties. On the other hand, this phenomena that happens to to the "passive self" never is understood as an "I" because the very idea of the "passive self" is enveloped by continual phenomena because of its passivity. In other words, passivity doesn't allow for identity. Something that continually receives something passively can't stand ground and neurotically stop the passive phenomena. In the human being, it can try to, which we learned leads to the neurosis of Dasein (understood in our previous explanation of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus). But even this attempt at a stop to the phenomena of reality which eventually gives way to any number of modern-day labels of "sicknesses" where one has "lost their mind," (meaning the "I") has been fractured by the absolute nature of abstract time. From nowhere then, time contemplates this nowhere, and from this, a "passive self" is derived, meaning something which receives nothing. The contemplation of nothing engenders passivity. We can say that an organism receives something from pure nothingness. This is the difference that time makes. The break in nothingness is the difference of time and this break constitutes something that receives nothing, but this difference mimics this nothingness and changes it into something that's other than nothing; a different nothing if you will (because time breaks thought, thinking takes places which can only think about what ever is available, that being the nothingness of thought). We can understand that how "thinking only thinks with difference, orbiting around the point of ungrounding." The key here is how thinking orbits around the point of ungrounding. Ungrounding is a "taking-apart." It's an "explanation." It's an "enlightenment." Psychoanalytically, we can call it a "want to figure out." Thinking excavates nothing that was thought. Thinking hovers around the idea of discovering something from nothing. How much can be discovered though if there's nothing to be discovered? What we understand from this preliminary question is that thinking doesn't operate off some pragmatic virtue to "truly understanding what's outside of us" for example, instead, it's "content" to simply to unground nothing for the sake of ungrounding anything at all, even if there's nothing to unground. When time creates the difference of thought in thinking, this thinking that ostensibly ungrounds nothing doesn't think in order to discover something from nothing, but wills itself for no reason. Thinking is "content" with pretending it's doing something when it's really uncovering nothing. But the action of pretending it's doing something is the operation of thinking. In this sense, its discovery of nothing is the difference from nothing. This difference that breaks thought is the essence of time. It's the difference from being-nothing; essentially to think there's something to unground in being-nothing when there's nothing to unground. It's the eternal failure of thinking in time that makes the difference. And boy, what a difference it makes. Within this context that Deleuze sets up for the reader, we can fully appreciate the existential analytic of Heidegger, specifically the being that is looking around for something to do.

For however much Deleuze's account of time as temporality digs deeper than Heidegger in understanding ontology beyond existential being, this time understood as temporality still relies on a view of time that Deleuze wishes to convey under the auspices of an ostensible first-person perspective. What's privileged for Deleuze is the fact that something called a "first person point of view" is something worth understanding, and the fact that the "person" is something worth understanding . These presumptions lead to the correlationism that Brassier is trying to move away from in order to establish the absolute de-personalized science of non-correlationism where reality happens on its own. Difference need not be simply temporal, but may be something that happens in pure objective time. To understand this though, time can't be conceived of as something happening to us. It has to be "seen" happening completely independent of being's existentiality. It's here where time becomes de-privileged for Brassier. Instead, space as something that "is" independent of time (as we observe) is something that we can preliminary call "reality." How much can this space be understood in the third person perspective though? Maybe though, all that there "is" is the third person perspective, meaning everything that is understood (thinking) comes from a place that is always and already an observation, and that the ostensible access to being via absolute "knowledge of oneself" independent of the knowledge that one is a knowledge-being (discoverer of nothing) is a hopeless wish somehow brought about by the will that wills itself for no reason. How can this happen? How can being not realize it's own operation of actively seeking to know nothing? How can it not know itself as a knowing-being that simply wills to know nothing? How can it think that it's something other than the pure operation to know nothing and not ever find anything in the process because nothing is ever possible to be found? In other words, how can an impossible end come about? It's not as if the end of knowing-being is to know that it's simply a knowing-being with no other end. It's certainly has other ends in mind whether that be "being a good person," or "trying my hardest," etc. And it's not as if one can simply reduce this phenomena down to a christian-judeo historical context because the reduction can keep going endlessly. How one finds out about these "how's" is the trick that non-correlationsm and speculative realism is trying to convey. Ultimately, I think, it's trying to defer the authority of these questions to a pure third person scientific perspective at the destruction of any other perspective. The answer is really established though. Time breaks thought into thinking which makes an "I" impossible but at the same time creates passive organisms. Take this last statement, bracket out the "I" and "organisms," and substitute them with " pure and empty form of nothing" and then ask the "how." In the next post we will explore this pure movement further with Nietzsche's concept of the will, but Brassier will re-appropriate it to a place that's truly a will that wills itself, meaning a will that wills nothing other than its own operation; it's own end without ever knowing anything understood as an "end."

Introduction to the Real; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 7

As real as it gets...really.

In the last post we learned from Brassier and Laruelle of the decision made by philosophers who make a division between something called "the real" and "the ideal" whereby empirical reality ("the real") gets moved into ideality by transcendental functions of the mind. This decision can most easily be traced to Kant's Critiques. We then bracketed this decision from the attempt to understand the real after the explanation of this decision. What then is "the real" independent of this correlation between empirical and transcendental conditions? Laruelle defines it as the "real of the last instance." We gave it a preliminary definition; "It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking." In other words, it's whatever "is" independent of the fact that we are ideal beings. This post will be an attempt at an introduction to "the real" defined through Brassier and Laruelle. It will be an expansion of the "real of the last instance" which we elaborated on in the last post. Brassier starts this off in a distinction between objectivity and objectification. "'Objectivity' can be redefined to index the reality which subsists independently of conditions of objectification tethered to transcendental subjectivity, whether the latter be called 'Dasein' or 'Life.' What is original in Laruelle's work is in defining conditions under which thinking does not intend, reflect, or represent its object but rather mimes its unobjectifable opacity insofar as the latter is identical-in-the-last-instance with a real which is 'foreclosed' to objectification." This passage is enormously helpful in further understanding Laruelle's "real in the last instance" concept. At first Brassier distinguishes "objectivity" independent of "objectification" meaning that the real is independent of the mind taking something from something called "the real" and doing something with it. The word "objectivity" indexes reality independent of being's objectification of the former. It belongs to itself independent of all the abstractions nominated for the human being whether that be the Heideggerian concept of the being that is there, or the basic concept of an all encompassing spiritual-teleological life form enveloping the world. "The real" has nothing to do with these concepts. There must be more to "the real" though besides these gestures of de-objectification. We find this in the concept of the "real of the last instance." This real of the last instance is a place where thinking intends nothing nor does it reflect on anything. It does nothing, but it's there. It doesn't see an object for itself (like we would like to ascribe generally to the mind) and then take this object and represent it in mirror-form for us. The real in the last instance doesn't do what we think it does. Thinking as the real in the last instance "mimes its unobjectifiable opacity." Lets pause for a second to understand this. Reality is unobjectifiable and opaque. This "last instance" is not a matter of knowing anything about this last instance and hence is unobjectifiable because it's not matter of knowledge (epistemology). Thinking mimes this non-matter. It imitates what doesn't matter. It imitates what was never a problem for matter. The real in the last instance as "unobjectifiable opacity" is "foreclosed" to objectification. So whatever thinking is doing in this real in the last instance, it's not objectifying. Rather, Brassier gives us the verb of "mime" to describe the behavior of thought in this foreclosed reality. Brassier leads us to a concept of the mind that is imitating what is completely inimitable. Thus for Laruelle, "It is though we were to insist that the 'matter' of materialism should cognize itself and be capable of its own theorisation without having to pass through dialectical identity or some other philosophical apparatus designed to ensure the reversibility between the known object and the knowledge of the object." Matter happens to thought. Thought mimes the material which means absolutely nothing to us. The philosopher comes up with the idea that the mind "grabs" the material and puts it into ordered categories. This is the presumptive decision of the philosopher discussed in the last post. Thought "in the last instance" is merely something that mimes something that's unobjectifiable which is at an absolute distance from a "philosophical apparatus" that would create a dialectic between the real and ideal. Rather, there is no dialectic at all between the real and ideality. This is what is referred to as "identity without unity." "Identity without unity and duality without distinction are the hallmarks of determination-in-the-last-instance insofar as its structure is that of what Laruelle calls a 'unilateral duality.' By effectuating a unilateral duality between thought and thing, determination-in-the-last-instance manifests a non-correlational adequation between the real and ideal without re-incorporating the former within the latter, whether through the machinery of symbolic inscription or the faculty of intellectual intuition." Identity (ideality) happens to being not because of some unity to something that happened before it. Ideality was an occasional circumstance that happened that has no unity expect to itself which expresses "things." Nonetheless, we see "thing" and our "thinking" of the material thing that has no matter whatsoever. Seeing these two things though doesn't mean that there is a connection between the two. Because "thinking" sees something called "thing" that ostensibly happened to it, doesn't mean that this "thing" actually exists, nor does it mean that "thought" had anything to do with making this material into its own form. While there is certainly a duality for us in terms of making the assumption that there was a causality for our objectifying nature, this has nothing to do with the unilateral operation that happened on its own. The real is not ideal. No matter how much thinking at the very most mimes the nothing of the real, this miming has nothing to say about the real because the real by its very nature doesn't say anything. At the very most, thought comes to represent the real through symbols and even thinks itself the function that the real has to go through (absolute idealism). Thought thinks itself privy to something it can never know about. While this is a feature of thinking, this doesn't mean anything for the real. Because thought thinks it can distinguish between reality and ideality, doesn't mean that whatever is called "reality" is anything. "The real" is always at an absolute distance. The distance is so absolute that we understand Lacan's insistence in synonymizing it with "the impossible."

We have a couple different concepts happening here. We have "determination-in-the-last-instance" along with "unilateral duality." To be more specific, "determination-in-the-last-instance" is "unilateral duality." We have to be careful in describing this because of how easy it is to present a correlative sense to the process that is trying to be described. Fortunately, Brassier is very careful in his logic and words when describing this process. "Unilateralization is foreclosed to reflection: it can only be effectuated non-thetically, that is to say, non-auto-positionally. Being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being; it is not transcendent...it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying transcendence. Thus determination-in-the-last-instance requires objectifying transcendence even as it modifies it." The unilateral process that happens to the occasioned subject is not open to reflection. Thought can't reflect on the unilateral process because it was never remembering anything in the process. It didn't exist as a "mind" (we will see the phenomenological function of memory in the next chapter with Brasser's account of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.). Unilateralization doesn't happen from a "position." We are in a "position" as beings but reality is never in a position precisely because it's not beings. If we allow Heidegger to call being the being that is there, then we understand ourselves as positional beings. We are always somewhere looking around for something to do. This is our absolute limits. Reality though is not in a position where it's somewhere looking around for something to do. It's form isn't the form of the occasional Dasein. This is what Brassier means when he says "being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being." Reality knows nothing of us and we know nothing of it precisely because knowledge is not a matter for reality and is a matter for us. The salient point to be understood is that if we want to encounter whatever is ostensibly called "the real," it can't come from the classical sense of "who we are," meaning the positional-being well-elaborated by Heidegger in Book 1 of Being and Time. Reality doesn't matter. At the very least, when encountering "the real," it doesn't come from a position and obviously doesn't take a position. As was stated above, it's unilateral and we can further understand this by understanding that it's absolutely affirmative. It doesn't listen to anyone nor does it respond to anyone consciously. It happens on its own without the habit of memory getting in the way (the minds differentiation from reality comes fundamentally from memory and memory alone which we will go into in a future post). "The real" is not pacifistic, nor literally and figuratively understanding. It's totalitarian. We can infer micro-biological reactions in the process of unilateralization but these reactions wouldn't be dialectical and would only be our observations of the real of the unilateral. A question abounds. What is the real (as unilateral) under the guise of observation? More specifically what is the real to consciousness which is no longer dialectical? How much can "the real" still be understood even when the logic of "unilateral duality" usurps dialectical logic? At the very least, we understand that it's transcendence that causes thought, not what we call "material reality." Thought happens to itself. "Reality" doesn't cause thinking. Curiously though, "for thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real cause, it must be occasioned by its ideal cause." In other words, the only way we can know that we can't know about "reality" is by the transcendence of thought "letting us know" that we can't know anything called "the real" that we nonetheless ask about. Ideality provides the foundation for our asking of questions that are not a matter of the question-answer dialectic. At the same time though, sense is in thought. We have the sense to understand that while ideality has opened up the possibility of the foreclosure of "the real," we have enough sense to not keep asking questions about something called "the real," but instead to follow "the real" in its unilateral process without asking questions. In this sense, thought opens us to "the real" to be exactly what it's not; a miming dialectical representation of what we call "the real." This doesn't mean that we are in some sort of Hegelian circularity between the real and the ideal where thought would realize itself as what it's not. Instead no distinction is being made in what we call "the real" which happens to be "the real." "The real" doesn't stop for an answer nor listen to what "everyone has to say." It moves on without distinction from what the memory distinguishes as the past. Memory will serve as the difference to "the real." It will serve as the sole difference to "the real" which complicates thinking's being able to think unilateralization because it always remembers something from the past which makes it stop and reflect. The problem and explanation of memory will come in one of the next two posts.

Introduction to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

These captions under pictures are getting really boring.

At the end of D&G's Anti-Oedipus, we learn about the idea of "rupturing causality." We see causality manifesting itself from an interested party (an interested personality). "So this then that" is the semantical operation of being. Something happens, therefore it means this. In the last post I discussed wanting to move into the anti-correlationist theory of speculative realism to get a deeper understanding of this possibility of obviating causality. The first text to take on regarding this possibility is Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. While this is the first text we will take on, Ray Brassier doesn't start this anti-correlationist thought. If it finds its "historical place," it's in a discussion between Francios Laruelle and Derrida in 1988 (This discussion can be read here: http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/laruelle-derrida.pdf). This discussion I will want to do a close read on in at least 2 parts after the analysis of Enlightenment and Extinction. The reason for choosing Enlightenment and Extinction first is from an instinct of it being a good general overview of the basics of speculative realism. As it was published in 2007, it's relatively recent. It will be the first text I do a close analysis of from an author who isn't dead yet. This is also exciting. How many times does one read an author and think to themselves, "man, I wish they were still alive to see what they think today?" In this sense, the reading of the history of philosophy is a constant catching up to writers who aren't dead yet. You will be able to address them while they're alive and you have the basic grounds of western conceptual thought under your belt to understand the concepts and verbiage from their text (if one has done somewhat of a detailed reading of western philosophy). For better or worse, without historical perspective, neither I, nor Brassier can refer to the proper name of "Hegel" without a reading of "Hegel." I say "for better or worse" because the impulse to obviate the historical perspective from experience in speculative realism is so obvious that a mere skimming over the basic texts scream this at you. This impulse of course is not new and doesn't become vogue with the "officiality" of speculative realism. The critique of the historical perspective defining experience comes in its "formal form" as early as Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as far as the 20th century is concerned. This will be a topic to be addressed throughout our acquaintance with speculative realism; the usage of the historical perspective when trying to become a non-historical perspective. It's this idea that the Derrida-Laruelle discussion illuminates very well. With Ray Brassier though, we hope to gain a general overview of speculative realism in order to go deeper into its other authors and other works by Brassier himself. This post then will be a very basic introduction to what Enlightenment and Extinction is trying to explain. When we get further and deeper into the text we will uncover the substance behind the preface and the introduction (as always with a book of this conceptual magnitude). We will see from the beginning that Brassier is not simply speaking on behalf of anti-correlationsism, but nihilism. The connection between the two will become obvious through the reading of this text. To start off though, lets try to understand the basics of the title of the text and let Brassier speak for himself.

Firstly, lets take a close look at the title of this book. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Nihil is latin for "nothing." "Unbound" is not being bound. From this we can understand Nihil Unbound conceptually as a nothingness that is not bound. We gain the sense that the nothingness being conveyed by Brassier is not going to have a meaning. It's not going to be bound by meaning. Its nothingness is boundless. Enlightenment and Extinction. Enlightenment is reason's understanding of an experience that happened previous to "itself." One becomes enlightened when a thought comes to one's head. Classically understood, enlightenment happens from a realization from a past experience. This realization gives meaning to "something that happened." The meaning is an extra of something that always happens. Enlightenment in this title is connected to Extinction. Extinction of course is death and an end. We can infer from this part of the title that there is something combining realization and death. When we realize something, we die. The amount of ways of reading this is too vast to try to elaborate on now. This will speak for itself throughout the text. For now though, we have a nothingness that is not bound that is tied to a realization that brings about death. At the very least, we can infer that when one realizes themselves, they are supposed to die into a nothingness that has no meaning a contrario to the Hegelian supposition of the nothing that is still something. At the very least we can infer that man (being) sees himself in a relationship to something outside of himself and defines himself as such, rather than understanding the fact that what is outside of itself is not a matter of understanding. Whether these characterizations of inference will be brought out through this text remains to be seen. A general guess at the title is a good start to throwing oneself into the text though. Now that we have taken our guesses at the text, lets let Brassier speak for himself from the very beginning. "This term 'nihilism' has a hackneyed quality. Too much has been written on the topic , and any sense of urgency that the word might once has communicated has been dulled by overexposure. The result is a vocable tainted by dreary over-familiarity and nebulous indeterminacy. Nevertheless, few other topics of philosophical debate exert such an immediate grip on people with little or no interest in the problems of philosophy as the claim of nihilism in its most 'naive' acceptation: existence is worthless." From this we understand that Brassier takes nihilism seriously. Anybody who is passionate about anything in experience will be frustrated by the over-popularization of what's considered an important concept by that thinker. Brassier sees no sense of urgency in the term. He sees no one having a grasp of nihilism beyond its hackneyed connotation of "existence is worthless." Brassier asks us not to jump out of our seats at this hackneyed meaning. Brassier's compulsion is to take nihilism seriously as an opportunity, not as a system of personal identification which would be its absolute worst function and form. He admits this to himself at the beginning of of Enlightenment and Extinction. "This book was spurred by the conviction that this apparently banal assertion harbors hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philosophers..." For Brassier, there are hidden depths beyond nihilism's popularized connotations of "existence is meaningless." These depths we will explore through this text. To start off, it would be good to say what nihilism is not. This negative impulse will serve us in understanding its affirmative and opportunistic function. "First and foremost, it does not treat nihilism as a disease, requiring diagnosis and the recommendation of an antidote. But neither does it extol the pathos of finitude as a bulwark against metaphysical hubris..." At the very least, the concept of nihilism is not to be understood as a problem. This nihilistic concept is an explanation and an opportunity, not a psychological disease that needs to be "cured." On the other hand, this concept is not to be understood as a social call to experiential relativism regardless of how much the latter may be observed in the concept when it's fleshed out. There's a sense that Brassier is aiming at general Heideggerianism when he sees nihilism not as something to be understood in terms of privileging finitude against classical metaphysics. We can sense that finitude becomes a transcendental concept for Brassier and hence lacks the substance of nihilism's "quality" by this transcendence, regardless of how secular the concept of "finitude" may be. A transcendental concept need not be simply religious to give the thinker a sense of well-being. Giving myself the luxury of generalization, I would say that right now (culturally speaking) is a heightened time of situating secularized idols, whether this be passive pantheism (E.G. tarot cards) or hyper-aware environmentalism. As we learn from Nietzsche, the Christian God can be dead while God(s) still remain (literally, Nietzsche's impulse to call his text Twilight of the Idols). Brassier wants to warn the reader from nostalagizing finitude in hopes of curtailing the self-satisfied nature that being in general takes. It's this self-satisfied quality to being that will make being not understand the depths of nihilism, and instead where shirts with skulls on the front as a grand finale to ones identity finding. As was stated above, this would be the opposite of nihilism's impulse, and really any thinking that could be called philosophical. In general, the protection of a concept from a stabilized identity is a conspicuous philosophical gesture. This loyalty is large with Brassier's desire of understanding nihilism. Nihilism is neither a problem nor a solution. Death as God is not a solution when there's no problem to begin with. Instead of seeing nihilism as a problem or a transcendental solution, Brassier sees nihilism as "an achievement of intellectual maturity." As we watch the Twilight of the Idols, we are growing up. Also, what nihilism is not, is "a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary is the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone's 'home,' nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem." I let Brassier speak here beyond the point I wanted to intend to give the reader a more direct gateway to Brassier's impulse. Certainly, seeing the possibility of Philosophy as a "pathetic twinge of human self-esteem" speaks loudly. Much like Husserl, Brassier sees Philosophy as a mature opportunity for being, not a subjective identification of topical "meaningfulness." If the mind tells us anything for the realist, it's that this mind-reality happens regardless of our presupposition of "human freedom." The mind happens regardless of what we think of as "valuable" and "meaningful" which for Brassier are expressions to make what we call "nature" more hospitable. It will be interesting to understand how Brassier explains this phenomena of the "belief in human freedom." It will be interesting to see how Brassier explains "belief" in general. But to our point, the mind independent reality for the realist is a mind that happens without the figurative explanations of language. With this in mind, we can understand Brassier as relying on cognitive science and "hard science." If the "hard science" of the mind should rely on metaphors itself, it will be closer to the realist conception that offers no end to its investigations. Scientific metaphor will be more faithful to philosophical inquiry than freedom speak, so to speak. With a closer look at the scientific nature of "Nature," we will see that "Nature" is not our home nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. "Nature" is not here to help us out. "Nature" can certainly harm us and this can be seen not only in natural disasters but more specific and interesting examples like the self-cannibalism of leaf-insects which Brassier goes into later in the text. It's with this in mind that Philosophy should not provide itself an end and meaning ahead of time in its investigations if its to be a rigorous science that acts "despite the presumptions of human narcissism." Again, it will be interesting to understand the nihilistic-realist understanding of the "presumptions of human narcissism" that Brassier realizes exists.

For Brassier, "nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity." "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." It's with this in mind that as readers we need to be thinkers first and foremost rather than "living beings" with this text if we are to read it faithfully. We can't see nihilism as a "problem" that needs to be solved, and even a "problem that can't be solved" as we eternally sulk in despair at the obvious connotation belonging to nihilism. We are to take the concept of nihilism as something much deeper than "happy being sad." It is neither an existential problem nor a psychological problem which basically mean the same things. We have an intellectual opportunity to see things exactly how they are without seeing them "as is," and "for us." This thinking will not know whether it coincides with the benefit of man. It will not know whether it coincides with anything. This thinking starts very much in the same place as the phenomenological epoch but flows into different places than phenomenology, mainly I think because Brassier's nihilism has the luxury of technology on his side (cognitive and ethological technology and discovery). To Brassier's credit though, he has no problem not having a problem with technology. He takes Adorno and Horkheimer to task for nostalogizing a pre-industrial world much like he took Heideggerian finitude to task for nostalogizing a secularized idol of death which we spoke on above. It will be important to understand Brassier's criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer coming up in this text to fully grasp the realist attitude in not mythologizing anything. As readers of D&G's Anti-Oedipus we already have a strong start to de-mythologizing existence. We hope that Brassier will take us further. His criticism of Adorno and Horheimer's purist proclivities will show Brassier as someone faithful to realism. At this very preliminary stage, we can understand Brassier as someone not only faithful to realism and nihilism, but to the task of Philosophy itself.

Final Quotes from Anti-Oedipus

"You weren't born Oedipus, you caused it to grow in yourself; and you aim to get out of it through fantasy, through castration, but this in turn you have caused to grow in Oedipus - namely, in yourself: the horrible circle. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical incompetence - the right to enter the analyst's office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego."

"To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing it doesn't cost you a penny."

"To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: ...Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are stranding straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of the immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great immobile movement. Consider the example of one who having had the revelation of the mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false pretenses of residence."

"Let us consider for a moment the motivations that lead someone to be psychoanalyzed: it involves a situation of economic dependence that has become unbearable for desire, or full of conflicts for the investment of desire. The psychoanalyst, who says so many things about the necessity for money in the cure, remains supremely indifferent to the questions of who is footing the bill. For example, the analysis reveals the unconscious conflicts of a woman with her husband, but the husband is paying for his wife's analysis."

"For the unconscious of schizoanalysis is unaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of images, structures, and symbols. It is an orphan...It is not an orphan in the sense that the father's name would designate an absence, but in the sense that the unconscious reproduces itself wherever the names of history designate present intensities ('the sea of proper names'). The unconscious is not figurative, since its figural is abstract, the figure-schiz. It is not structural, nor is it symbolic, for its reality is that of the Real in its very production, in its very inorganization. It is not representative, but solely machinic, and productive."

"What makes the schizophrenic ill, since the cause of the illness is not schizophrenia as a process? What transforms the breakthrough into a breakdown? It is the constrained arrest of the process, or its continuation in the void, or the way in which it is forced to take itself as a goal."

"Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of live, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad song of emanates from it: eiapopeia."

"...the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them - even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis."

"There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation. As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sign of relief: one knew what this meant, and that everything was going to unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better."

"No 'gay liberation movement' is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes both to a common Oedipal and castrating stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two non-communicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of desire."

Rupturing Causality; Anti-Oedipus, Conclusion

"When a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world." Why do some people get off on this shit?

There has been one consistent theme throughout Anti-Oedipus, and that's been the extrication of the personality which can synonymously be understood as ideology. The incessant criticisms of psychoanalysis have been instinctively grounded in the idea that there are people who want you to be you, without tracing the phenomena of the personality to places like Platonic substantiality, and places much prior to that in the filiative structures of primitive civilization which D&G elaborate on in chapter three of Anti-Oedipus. Schizoanalysis as an attack on psychoanalysis can be summed up as criticizing the goal of analysis: to find your place within the social structure (Oedipus). Time and time again, D&G will state that psychoanalysis will make itself into its own truth without recognizing its own development and own metaphysics (even to the point of not recognizing who "Freud" really was, or wrote). To make it even more plain, analysis is really ignorant. Schizoanalysis will form itself by knocking out psychoanalysis as a truth unto itself. D&G's insistence on the disjunctive molecular aspects to vital life are directly opposed to the molar aggregate that sums things up, that sums up the body as a you. In psychoanalysis this "molar-gesture" is the process of "finding yourself." When taken to a phenomenological level, which D&G do without recognizing it (it's somewhat obvious that D&G have never really read the primary texts of phenomenology, and that their language would gain a clarity with this type of reading), they find causality as the sort of metaphysical operation that causes the personality as goal. This is an important step because it doesn't simply trace the aims of psychoanalysis to Plato, aggrandized mythology, or even surplus-value, but to a much more fundamental level of being in causality. With that being said, I think it's time to move onto anti-correlationist theory in my own reading with Speculative Realism. After this text, I will be taking on Brassier's Nihil Unbound to become acquainted with this thought. D&G get to this at the end of Anti-Oedipus but only after their focal interest is put in place (Schizoanalysis instead of psychoanalysis). This isn't because of a "lack" on their part (Deleuze wrote Difference and Repetition before his works with Guattari), but because of a "sociological move" in their thought and writing, the sociological move that Husserl implicitly warned against for philosophy in his Crises. In the end, Anti-Oedipus is one book that was influenced by sociology (Guatarri) as much as philosophy (Deleuze). It's an important book because sometimes theory without any examples in the socius is very difficult to understand. But make no mistake, Anti-Oedipus is proclaiming a way of being that is better off for being, in other words, it's being sociological. We can have fun with this book in its criticism of modern modes of being, but it's always important to realize that things will always phenomenally happen on their own regardless of a persons critique of anything. It's here where I stand faithful to phenomenology regardless of how powerful a book Anti-Oedipus was. The pure observation of the phenomenologist still stands as the most faithful to experience as is, even if it's obviously figurative in it's mode of expressing experience as is. Nonetheless, we can certainly learn much for ourselves as living beings living now with Anti-Oedipus. This book can help us avoid some pretty nasty traps while we have to live. For this, I respect this text and would easily recommend it. Lets move onto D&G finding their way into causality as the metaphysical grounds for personal interests and the personality in general.

"On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." Something to understand right off the bat is the synonymous nature between "preconscious investment" and personal interest. The preconscious is a Freudian term signifying an archive of things that we can remember. It may be something that is in the back of our minds that we aren't consciously thinking of right now. One can take a personal interest into something, forget about it, but it still remains in their mind somewhere. This place where it remains and where it can be recalled is refereed to as the preconscious level. For D&G, when one invests themselves with a personal interest, they are concealing their natural desire. When one gives oneself a goal, something to specifically be interested in (in differentiation from others), this is opposed to the unconscious desire that has no interest, but simply has intensities. This irrationality becomes repressed under personality interests; things that you would like to see yourself doing. You have reason to believe that this is the proper course of action to take. You have means for achieving your goals. There are certain events that have caused you to have aims. For example, I had a dream (an "epiphany") of someone playing guitar. I think to myself that this must mean something. This epiphany causes me to aim towards being this epiphany. This sign showed the way. This sign signified my existence. This interest that I invested in myself by the cause of a random "meaning sequence" (please recognize the irony) can rationalize the unconscious intensity that happens to my body and this is easy to understand. Instead of seeing my body as going through a process of neuro-physiological intensity in the moment where things happened because of spontaneous breaks within a flow, I break with the break and stop the flow. I invest interest in that break where I stop to see what's going on. I don't break and continue on flowing. I like the break. I settle in the break. I am the break. I invest in the break and aggrandize the break. The break becomes an interest. I see it as something. At this point, the unconscious desire (desiring-machines) moves into preconscious desire. I remember the break because it satisfied me. It had value. I will add more value to it (surplus-value) by making a memory of the break. Again, I am the break. I will be the ideology of this break. The preconscious is a memory attached to the personality during a process of unconscious desire. Actually the personality happens because of this attachment. How the process of this attachment happens is a question put towards phenomenology. This new ideology, this new socius will continue to "subordinate the entire production of desire." Desire will be subordinated to ideology and revolutionary interests. Now, "revolutionary interests" does not simply have to have Marxian connotations. To be sure it can, but "revolutionary interests" can simply be taken as any preconscious interest at all, in other words, ideology. Anything that I take to be me and I solidify as me is a "revolutionary interest" in the sense that the unconscious break had enough power to create a personality. This is revolutionary on a purely physiological level; essentially the creation of the personality. On the other hand, we can take "revolutionary interests" literally and have it mean a personal ideology that wants to create a sociological revolution where the person thinks it would be "liberating the masses" for X,Y,Z, etc reasons (you fill in the blank of all the boring reasons that there could possibly be). Either way and in each case, we have something called "interested parties." Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time would strikingly understand this under the category of "looking around for something to do." We dive deeper into the foundations of the subordination of desire though when we understand the "revolution" in the first instance where what happens unconsciously becomes ideology in the most general sense. This will need to be addressed later on in other texts (again, phenomenology does this figuratively). This preconscious investment that manifests "interested parties," "subordinates the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." The higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality. What does this mean? Again, the interest of the revolution is just that, an interest, not a desire. It's something that somebody thinks that they have to do, not what they love to do (eros). The break happened, the flow stopped, and revolution became idealized. Now what are the "inevitable sequences of causality?" These inevitable sequences of causality are everything that happens after desire becomes idealized into an interest. Desire becomes this. Because I think this way, I have to do this. Because I had this epiphany about this, I have to do these things. Because I see people earning a lesser wage than they're entitled to whom I never met, I have to protest on behalf of their struggle that I never experienced for myself. My life is devoted to a cause because its my sole interest in life. I am coded. I believe in this, so therefore I do this (I believe therefore I am: Ideology). After I do this, I do something else to further the cause. When I become ideology, pure causality follows in things that have to happen because of my personality. I'm coded to do things because I clinged onto a break in pure desire. D&G ask us, the preconsciously invested, to do something different. They ask us to "discover the necessity for a different sort of investment." They ask us to "perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in question of aims and interests." When we are preconsciously invested, we have shown that we are "interested parties." We are ideologies. We are personalities. But when we recognize this, we can discover a new way of investment. This investment is rupturing causality. What does this mean? This precisely means to break the break that has caused us to break and go back into the flow. Instead of finding "what to do next" after we are in a break that we somehow become satisfied in (value), we don't find what this ideology causes in is. Instead, we break with the ideology and let no cause happen to us in the name of the ideology that has broken us. We defer back to unconscious desire. What we do here is preconsciously invest into unconscious desire itself so we enter back into unconscious desire, in other words; enter back into the flow instead of breaking at the break. D&G aren't saying that one can't take a break. D&G aren't saying that the unconscious doesn't break in the flow. It's quite the opposite for D&G. There are breaks in the break-flow of unconscious desire. All of Anti-Oedipus has been grounded in the theory of the schizophrenic break-flow, but it must be noted that they have been using the flow against the breaks for obvious reasons. The breaks become satisfied (ideology is like taking a vacation from the unconscious). The flows keep moving while the breaks stop moving. When the breaks become anthropomorphized, it's here where being needs to invest back into itself, back into its unconscious desire. "This cannot be achieved except at the cost of, and by means of a rupture with, causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other." D&G refer back to the subject-group in distinction to the subjugated-group (which we discussed in the last post) where the subjugated-group is defined by "an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determined the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty." This is in distinction to the subject-group who "have as their sole cause a rupture with causality." Certainly, this subject-group will have its own "objective factors" that can be traced in a causal series where we can find out how the rupture of causality was possible in the first place, but this account is for the "reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place." In other words, the "memory-traces" being done by the schizophrenic subject-group will be the task of finding out where and how intensities happen to the body. It won't investigate how a personality is formed. It will recognize where the body trembled. It won't idealize this trembling, but will simply mark it out as something that happened and move on. The subject group will find where desire has happened to itself. It will see where it happened and when it happened. It will constantly discover the intensity of unconscious desires and move onto other places. This "constant discovering" will be the breaks in the subject group. Discovering is breaking. When not discovering, it will be flowing. Being will be the unconscious desire of the schizophrenic break-flow in the subject-group. This is what Schizoanalysis would "look like." It will find things that are happening to "itself" and forget about them as quickly as them came. It won't ask "what do we do next with this?" There is nothing next to do. Something happened, and that's it. It would be an amnesiatic "work." For the unconscious doesn't have a memory. It simply reacts to an environment outside of itself...all together as a body without organs.

This is obviously a massive leap that D&G want us to take in Anti-Oedipus. They don't ask us to accomplish the Schizoanalytical task all in one time. It's obvious that they wouldn't ask this of the reader becomes it's not a task to be accomplished but a preconscious investment that will happen all the time. If it could be classified as a "task," it would be eternal much like phenomenology. As phenomenology never ends as a descriptive science of phenomena, schizoanalysis would never end as an understanding of momentary breaks within a flow. The key movement in schizoanalysis that is somewhat of a "radical" gesture is this modification of "preconscious investment." Instead of remembering something and storing phenomena for recall, the preconscious would invest into not remembering anything at all, except forgetting something that it may remember. It would literally invest into forgetting. Implied in forgetfulness is a motive to forget, meaning something was remembered. Something in phenomena happened to a body at a certain intense degree that had enough of an impact to be invested into a preconscious. In schizoanalysis though, the subject realizes this impact, opens itself up to it in its entirety, and then forgets it flowing back into phenomena. Schizoanalysis then could be understood as a different attempt at negating repression. While psychoanalysis tends to harbor on a "repressed feeling" by continually following the chain of this "repressed feeling" to a father-mother complex or an archaic mythology, schizoanalysis wouldn't harbor the "repression" or even call it a "repression." Instead it would say that an intensity happened to the body and would open itself up to that intensity. That intensity somehow was invested into the preconscious, but in schizoanalysis, the preconscious is programmed to forget the intensity to move on in the flow, instead of breaking in the break, which would define you as you. There is no "a-ha" moment in schizoanalysis. There is no "so this is what that meant!" in schizoanalysis. There is something that happened to a body which the body realizes and soon forgets once it's enlightened by this realization. It breaks, then flows, then breaks again, and flows again...on and on. As a final note, the last passage of Anti-Oedipus will fully clarify the "task" for D&G and schizoanalysis.
"The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these - in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repressing of desire. Completing this process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed."