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.

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?"

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.

The Decision; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 6

Lacan's constipation in trying to understand the real; 6:10 - 7:15

In the last post we ended off by saying "..we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between between being and thought." We will understand this non-correlative thought more concretely through his elaboration of Francois Laruelle. We need to understand Brassier's theoretical acquaintance with Laruelle to fully understand the salient point of Laruelle's "non-philosophy," which will guide us to non-correlationism. There is much to gain from Laurelle's "non-philosophy" that comes across as a giant step for philosophy once fully understood. Laruelle identifies an essence of philosophy that leads him to analyze how philosophers think. Instead of coming up with a philosophical system in distinction and reference to previous philosophers, he instead analyzes how philosophers think. This analysis is a great step forward because of its originality and power. Laruelle does not rely on psychological concepts to define the philosophical thinker that tend to be turgid in description and lacking in precise rigor nor concepts of logic that would presume all the possibilities for philosophical thought. Instead, he finds one basic premise that every philosophers starts off at. What he finds is something he calls "the decision." As philosophers trying to understand something called "the real," this decision implicitly made by philosophers needs to be understood and open to bright lighting. Brassier explains Laruelle's position as such: "Every decision divides immanence between an empirical datum which it supposes as given through the a priori factum, and a transcendental immanence which it has to invoke as already given in order to guarantee the unity of a presupposed factum and a posited datum." First, lets understand the concept of "immanence." We understand immanence as a state of being within. The "real" of what is happening within is trying to be understood by philosophers. Now, a decision is made to how this immanence is to be understood. The implicit decision is a division between an outside and an inside. "The real" happens by a dialectical logic for the philosopher. This stems most notably from German idealism but find it's way into the neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology in the early 20th century. We first have an empirical datum which we only first come to know through a priori categories elaborated systematically in Kant's first Critique. We come to know this empirical datum through transcendental categories of the mind that synthesize this "hyletic data" into human conception. The unity of what is presupposed as already having to happen and what is posited by the human being naturally is a theoretical structure decided on by the philosopher. What is happening is an attempt by a philosopher at an explanation of pure causation between outside and inside. This correlation says very simply that "I can think and talk about something because something outside of myself happened to me that gave me the impulse to talk about this very thing that I'm positing, but I only know this thing to be outside of myself as I'm talking about it because I'm first able to think about it." What's privileged in this pseudo-steam of conscious statement is a synthetic causation between outside and inside; that I'm able to think only because something happened to me from outside of myself. Laruelle identifies three "distinct structural moments" which constitute this decision. First, there's an inventory of a priori's established by philosophers. These a priori conditions of experience are understood in Kant's first Critique as "transcendental categories." The most obvious one is the transcendental aesthetic that places space and time as the experiential grounds for the causal movement into concept (The Idea). Secondly, there is the "gathering-together" (synthesis) of a prioris by a single transcendental category. This synthesis is "said to be 'transcendental' then because it is supposed to exceed experience absolutely..." This transcendental synthesis then exists beyond the conditions of experience. This we can call the "correlative mechanism" that moves the conditions of experience happening to something other than itself into conceptualization (the Idea). Laruelle refers to this as the pure phenomenological Ego in Husserl's Phenomenology; "pure," meaning we have no choice that our mind synthesizes everything that is ostensibly happening outside of it. Thirdly, we have a unification of the single transcendental synthesis with the a priori categories of synthesis, meaning we see how the conditions of experience were understood through an extra-empirical mechanism of a single "gathering-together" mechanism. We make the connection (correlation) between the idea that there were things outside of ourselves that first needed to be the case and things inside of ourselves that had to be the case to make sense of what was outside of us. We remember this synthesis of rationalism and empiricism specifically in Kant's Critique when he states, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience...But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." In other words, just because knowledge had a place where it first began for us, doesn't mean that this first place constitutes all of what makes knowledge necessary. For Kant, it arises out of the transcendental faculty unifying the conditions of experience. But lets keep something in mind in this analysis of Kant. Kant was specifically focused on epistemology, i.e. knowledge. So his analysis was always in reference to knowledge for us. Now, just because something happened to us where we happen to gain something called "knowledge," doesn't mean that this exteriority to ourselves is a matter of knowledge in itself. Certainly all experience can't be accounted for as a reference for us. We certainly only see experience for us, but we should also see that seeing experience for us is a relative "function" of something we happen to call "experience." The philosophers "real" is understood not through an empirical or contingent sense but through the sense that makes Ideas possible in the first place (knowledge). For the philosopher, the decision is made that reality conditions ideality without interest into how "the real constitutes itself." "The decisional complex of transcendence, immanence, and the transcendental is ultimately determined by unobjectifiable immanence which Laruelle identifies with 'the real.'"

Now that we have analyzed the decision the philosopher makes when trying to understand "the real," we can bracket out this philosophical decision when trying to understand something called "the real." "By suspending the premise that decision co-constitutes the real, thought comes to realize that it can have a relation to a real instance which is neither empirically presupposed nor transcendentally posited as determining, but defined by thought as already-determined and determining for it - a 'real of the last instance' in accordance with which thought can approach the circle of transcendental synthesis from a place which is 'always-already' outside of it." We can understand what we call "the real" then not in terms of a correlation between an empirical and transcendental decision made by philosophers that always must be in reference to our possibility, but the fact that thought is already determined independent of a theoretical system that would like to account for it. It's the case that we are already thinking. Kant's system isn't needed to understand "the real." In a certain sense this a return to the Cartesian method with a specific injuction not to move into the Kantian decision. We know in the "real of the last instance" that we are thinking beings and what happened "before" this is "always-already" outside of thought's purview. We know at the very least that we are always and already thinking. But what is this "real of the last instance?" It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking. More precisely, it's the moment we are thinking at that exact moment we are thinking (without necessarily knowing we are thinking. Again, this "real" is at a distance from epistemology). The last instance of "the real" is already a thought, but it's at a shorter distance than the system built by Kant and Hegel to establish how thought came to be. It's this division from System that allows to find something called a "real in the last instance." Still, what is happening in this "real in the last instance, if anything at all?" At the very least, we know that "the use of the modifiers 'already' and 'without' in describing the 'real of the last-instance' is effectively shorthand for 'non-decisional.'" In other words, when we understand the "the real" in terms of having no choice in what happens, we understand that we make no decision in what happens to us, nor does "the real" assume some mystical/spiritual position that already makes decisions specifically for us. Neither what we call "the real," nor what we understand as Kantian synthesizing acts of the mind make decisions. "The real" happens independent of a decision. It happens in it's own way independent of what we would philosophically understand to be a "teleological presupposition." Lets let Laruelle speak for himself here. "To the extent that philosophy exploits 'transcendence' or 'being' in a privileged and dominant manner [...] the essence of transcendence or being according to their philosophical usage is the 'auto,' that is to say, the idea of philosophy's absolute autonomy in the form of a circle, of a self-reference such as becomes apparent in the dimensions of auto-donation and auto-position." From this, we understand that Laruelle sees the decision of the philosopher as privileging concepts of "being" and "transcendence" which is the essence of philosophy. What these concepts entail is a use of the concept "auto," meaning that the concept of being for example means that something automatically happens without decision. But this is what we understood above as Laruelle's non-philosophy. We understood it as non-decisional. We must distinguish between "auto-position" and "non-auto-decision." When Laruelle understands the decision made by Kantian and post Kantian philosophy, it's in the circularity between what's given (donated) and the position taken from the donation. Heidegger for example puts us in the position of the being of Being who thinks its own finitude by the modality of temporality. We are automatically in a position in other words with Heidegger's privileged-subjectivity . The idea conveyed by Laruelle in the form of a non-decisional non-philosophy is different from being put into an automatic position of being. The idea of non-decisionality obviates the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity as a duality (dialectical logic) in the first place. While Phenomenology would lay out what automatically happens to us without us having any knowledge of it, this non-decisional non-philosophy has no idea of "something happening to us automatically." This makes sense in the context of a "real in the last instance" because we are not yet at something we can identify as "being us." As was stated above, we are at a smaller distance with the "real in the last instance" than the system being constructed for the possibility of thought by Kant and Hegel. While "auto-positional" puts us in an automatic position we cant escape ("being"), "non-decisional" doesn't make available the philosophical decision to put us in an automatic place at all.

This analysis of the philosopher's decision relative to understanding "the real" will help us with understanding what Laruelle will specifically refer to as "the real" in the next post. Bracketing out the philosopher's decision of having to see "the real" in terms of a synthesis between ostensible empirical and transcendental conditions is a giant step for thought being able to think something called "the real" without the history of philosophy weighing so heavily on it.

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.