In his lecture On Melancholy, Zizek claims that melancholia occurs not when we lose the object, but rather when the object is still here but we no longer desire it. According to Zizek melancholia as Freud defines it in Mourning and Melancholia shouldn’t be interpreted as if it is a product of the failure of mourning, but rather as the premature mourning of an object before it is lost. According to the orthodox interpretation of Freud’s essay, the work of mourning is to symbolize the loss and transcend it, so that one can go on with one’s life as usual. Melancholia takes over the subject if the work of mourning fails in rendering the subject capable of accepting the loss. A melancholic is s/he who cannot come to terms with the loss and turns the lost object into an unattainable object of fascination, and melancholia is the obsession with that which is not, or no more is. Against this interpretation Zizek pits Agamben’s reading of Mourning and Melancholia where he claims that melancholia is a premature mourning, that in melancholia it is not the object but the object cause of desire and consequently the desire itself that is lost. For Zizek this is precisely the Cartesian subject’s mode of being. The Cartesian subject lives under the shadow of a loss and that loss is the desire for God. God is not dead yet, but we no longer desire it. It’s not for nothing that Lacan once said “desire is a relation of being to lack.” But we are no longer in 1953 and as Zizek points out time and again there is a shift in Lacan’s attention from desire to drive, from symptom to sinthome, and from mourning to melancholia towards the end of his seminars.

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

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

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

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

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

This finally brings us to the issue of the split nature of reality itself. The melancholic Cartesian subject cannot access the reality in-itself precisely because the reality is always already split in-itself. Strange though as it may sound the in-itself is itself split. And stranger still, that split is not within something, but rather between something and nothing. We can say that the gap between the real and the symbolic is included within reality itself. Perhaps that’s why Zizek insists on the need to affirm the mediation of illusion, the necessity of fantasy in accessing reality as it is in-itself. At this juncture one cannot help but remember Meillassoux’s dictum, “the only thing necessary is contingency itself.” And therein resides the call for the need to establish a non-relation to the world for us, in the way of constituting a relation to the world as it is in-itself, as pure multiplicity. This requires the production of a new mode of being in the world in such a way as to be in relation to the without within this world, to an outside inside this world, a non-correlationist relation to nothing itself. Is it worth mentioning that Deleuze’s “impersonal consciousness” is something akin to that mode of being? It is this transcendental inconsistency itself that regulates, governs and drives the Deleuzean plane of immanence, and precisely for this reason Deleuze calls it the transcendental field of immanence in his last book, Immanence: A Life, where he attempts to clarify his “transcendental empiricism.”

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

Let it suffice for the time being to say that transcendental materialism is repetitively different from transcendental empiricism, in that what’s at stake in transemp is the action of the unconscious upon the subject, whereas in transmat the situation is retroactively reversed in a progressive way; it is the subject’s indiscernibility from the unconscious that’s at stake in transmat. Influenced by and influencing Zizek, Adrian Johnston’s transmat adds to Deleuze’s transemp the role of the external matter itself as internally constituted in the self-constitutive process of the subject. Profoundly Hegelian indeed to say the least…

More on that later, though…

Read

‘Beni Bu Dışarıdan Çıkarın’ ve ‘Zeno: Filozofun Bir Ölümlü Olarak Portresi’, Cengiz Erdem’in daha önce yayımlanmış kitapları. Yazar, ‘Fantezi Makinesinde Hakikat Sızıntısı’ isimli elimizdeki son kitabında ise, dünyadaki tüm televizyon ekran…larının yanı sıra, daha başka ekranların da bilinmeyen sebeplerden dolayı bir anda beyaza bürünmesini ve ardından yaşananları anlatıyor. Bu durum, kaygı verici olayları da beraberinde getirecek ve televizyonun olmadığı bir dünya, çökme tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya gelecektir. İşin en ilginç yanı ise, romanın baş kahramanı Tekvin’in, yazmış olduğu fakat henüz yayımlamadığı kitabında bu olayı ayrıntılarıyla öngörmüş olmasıdır. Kitabında yazmış olduğu olayın gerçekleşmesi karşısında Tekvin, bunun kaynağını araştırmak üzere Amsterdam’a doğru yola koyulacak; hangi doğaüstü güçlerin buna sebep olduğunu anlamaya çalışacaktır. – Radikal Kitap Eki

Kitaptan

“Anlatı sanatının inceliklerini gayet iyi bilen okuyucularımız herhalde bu noktadan sonra artık tüm bu olanlar karşısında fotoğraf sanatının akıbetinin ne olduğu konusuna değinmenin de bir zaruret haline geldiğini takdir etmişlerdir diye düşünüyoruz.”

[…]

“Tüm bu olanların gayet normal olduğunu düşündüğü, şimdiye kadar olan her şeyi inanılır bulduğu halde fotoğraflar ve bilgisayar ekranları konusundaki açıklamalarımızı yetersiz bulan okuyucularımıza ise ne diyeceğimizi inanın biz de bilemiyoruz.”

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• Televizyonun olmadığı bir dünyada (Sabah Kitap Eki)

If you were to ask me at gunpoint, like Hollywood producers who are too stupid to read books and say, “give me the punchline,” and were to demand, “Three sentences. What are you really trying to do?” I would say, Screw ideology. Screw movie analyses. What really interests me is the following insight: if you look at the very core of psychoanalytic theory, of which even Freud was not aware, it’s properly read death drive-this idea of beyond the pleasure principle, self-sabotaging, etc.-the only way to read this properly is to read it against the background of the notion of subjectivity as self-relating negativity in German Idealism. That is to say, I take literally Lacan’s indication that the subject of psychoanalysis is the Cartesian cogito-of course, I would add, as reread by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. I am here very old fashioned. I still think that basically this – the problematic of radical evil and so on – is philosophy, and all the rest is a footnote. (Zizek, 2003a)[1]

It couldn’t have been that bad, but it was, for there truly was nothing to be done. It was that bad, almost worst, the situation we mean, for the sun would truly and gradually extinguish within the next 4.5 years. Amazed at the fact, Dr. Lawgiverz looked at his watch, which was an extraordinary tool to have considering the times in which we live; those times being the times of mobile phones which also have clocks. The time of clocks is not real, thought Dr. Lawgiverz, only the time which transcends the finite and human time of clocks is real. But this thought, of course, did not belong to him. It was a thought without him as its subject. Being a non-being, the subject has to think he is not himself to be able to say “I think, therefore I am.” This attempt at uniting thought and being, or filling the gap between thought and being with the subject who says I, was and remains an amazing trap set by Descartes against himself. For by equating thought and being, he also equated non-being and non-thought; that is, death and language…

Now, the issue of becoming becomes crucial here. We shall therefore attempt at clarifying the difference between being and becoming in relation to death, in the light of Lacan’s and Deleuze’s encounters with the matter at hand.

In a fine passage written by Deleuze on Lacan, entitled How do we recognize Structuralism? and published in his collection of essays Desert Islands, Deleuze makes an important point concerning Lacan’s contribution to the correlation between thought and being. He explicitly says that Lacan introduced a third dimension for thought with his concept of the Symbolic. Being as a (w)hole within the symbolic, leads to the conclusion that the subject can only be a being, for as soon as the passage to the symbolic takes place, the subject becomes a non-being; that is, a becoming undead…

It is at this point that Deleuze takes on the issue, where Lacan had left without carrying it all the way through its logical consequences. For Deleuze, the subject is not a lack in becoming but that becoming itself. That is, it is that which continually becomes different from what it always already is that we call a subject, not the other way around. The subject is that which produces and is produced by the real and the symbolic via imagination. It is the way in which the subject as being relates the real to the symbolic via the imaginary that matters. If one changes “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,”[2] so does the symbolic change. Althusser appears to be the imaginary link between Lacan and Deleuze in relation to the role of ideology in the constitution of the subject, then.

It is rather curious that Slavoj Zizek missed this point in his Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. For as is well known by those who have actually read the book, Zizek attempts to show Deleuze as an Anti-Lacanian at all costs. That said, I think Deleuze’s Lacanianism is a much more profound one than that which Zizek interprets.

Admitting that his reading of Deleuze relies heavily on Alain Badiou’s little book on Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, Zizek accuses Deleuze for being a philosopher of the One disguised as the philosopher of Multiplicity, reflecting these times.

I’m trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do-to bugger Hegel, with Lacan . . . so that you get monstrous Hegel . . . It’s a very technical, modest project, but I believe in it. All other things are negotiable. I don’t care about them. You can take movies from me, you can take everything. You cannot take this from me . . . What really interests me is philosophy, and for me, psychoanalysis is ultimately a tool to reactualize; to render actual for today’s time, the legacy of German Idealism. (Zizek, 2003a)[3]

As we can see Dr. Lawgiverz was and reamins a keen thinker of peculiarities to say the least. Perhaps it is for this reason that he had recently become the target of authorities. He knew that he had to find the man behind these conspiracies. What he didn’t know was from where to begin. To begin at the beginning would be the best thing, thought Dr. Lawgiverz, but where could that beginning be? Perhaps there was no beginning, perhaps he was loccked within an infinite process of becoming, just like Hegel’s spirit in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

According to Adrian Johnston’s reading of Zizek in his Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, however, the Hegelian subject can get out of the deadlock of dialectical materialism, an eternal  process in and through which the opposites reverse the roles and take on one another’s identities without end. For Johnston, Zizek’s ontology presents us with a very peculiar case of materialism other than dialectical materialism, in and through which the vicious circle of the movement between the noumenal(the thing in-itself) and the phenomenal(the thing for-us) can be broken and turned into a spiral. In Johnston’s account, the subject needs not go back to that which it has already come from, which is not so probable anyway, for that which it has come from changes with the new perception and action upon it. It turns not into its opposite, but rather into something altogether new. As opposed to dialectical materialism, rather than being a strategy serving the unification of the subject and the object, transcendental materialism is an attempt at changing the world by understanding it in a new way and acting upon it via this new understanding in such a way as to expose the transcendental’s immanence to the world so as to transform it in the way of creating a new world out of very little, almost nothing, which is matter, and matters in so far as it is capable of thinking the worlds as they are in-themselves, indifferently to humant thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, and emotions, but nevertheless in touch with these human faculties, and engaging in socioplitical action upon the world as it is for-us.

This is my problem, thought Dr. Lawgiverz, I cannot make a distinction between the world as it is for-me and the world as it is in-itself. If only I could solve this mind-body problem once and for all, I would be the happiest of homosapiens…

What Dr. Lawgiverz was not aware of was that he understood the world not only for-us, but also in-itself too well, and that was precisely the reason why the they were after him. Now, that’s where things get a bit complicated. For who are “we” and who are “they”? Needless to say, we are those who are in the process of moving from dialectical materialism towards transcendental materialism, and they are the ones who are struggling with us with the aim of imposing their ideas and ideals upon that which matters only insofar as it remains in-itself and not for-us. So we have to forget about ourselves and become capable of thought without passive remembering, that is, become capable of thinking outside the time of clocks. We have to create a condition of existence, or a mode of being which situates us within a non-space outside human time. Perhaps we are that non-space itself, rather than being entitities situated within a space. Perhaps we are the constituents of a space becoming other than itself in a way that is engagingly indiffernt to the time of clocks. A space becoming of time and a time becoming of space takes place at once in this eternal instant.

There is a pre-linguistic domain which is not nothingness, but something in between nothingness and everything that there is. That space between is a non-space, the realm of partial objects which serve the purpose of relating to the world even before the language is acquired. And with this we come back to what Zeno was saying. At the beginning there is no-motion, but that state of the being of things is not perceivable, for the mind unites partial-objects to form a sequence of events, before which there is nothing perceivable. Zeno says that movement in-itself is impossible because there can be no movement prior to the synthesis of the individual states of being at rest. But as Deleuze puts it in his Cinema books, with cinema we see that motionless pictures are put one after the other in a particular sequence and when the film revolves a continuity of images, a flow of pictures is created. There is the illusion of one continuous motion of events when in fact each event is a motionless picture in itself. But if it cannot be perceived how can we say that at the beginning there is nothing and immobility? Well, that’s not what we’re saying. There is nothing at the beginning precisely because nothing can be perceived before the beginning. You see, there is the absence of something, there is nothing as the object of perception. You have to assume that beginning itself has no beginning so that you can begin living, acting, and doing things. Otherwise how can you live with the thought of being surrounded by nothingness and death at all times? Death is where you cannot be. It is absolutely other to you, its presence signifies your absence and inversely. Perhaps we should have said there is nothing before the beginning and after the end. That fits in better with everything. It is not a matter of beginning or ending; everything is in the middle, and nothing is before the beginning and after the end. The eternal return has neither a beginning nor an end. Even when you die your body is still in the process of dissolving; you dissolve into other things and become something else. It is not resurrection we are talking about here. Nor is resurrection what Nietzsche attempted to theorize with the thought of eternal return, but a very materialist understanding of nature and its relation to man. Nietzsche never says what exactly the eternal return means but from what he says we come to a grasp of what it might mean. Let us do not hesitate to quote Nietzsche at length. In one of the best descriptions of what the eternal return might mean we see Zarathustra talking with a dwarf about time, the moment as a gateway to possibilities, and the passage of time.

 ‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’

‘Spirit of Gravity!’ I said angrily, ‘do not treat this too lightly! Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lamefoot—and I have carried you high!

‘Behold this moment!’ I went on. ‘From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us.

‘Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?

‘And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been here—before?

‘And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore—draws itself too?

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have been here before?

‘—and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?’[4]

What renders the eternal return possible is saying yes to difference in repetition. The eternal return is Nietzsche’s grand conception which excludes all binary opposition and defies the binary logic of being and non-being. You can see that it is far away from what Diogenes Laertius was saying concerning the relationship between absence and presence. For Laertius where there is absence there can be no presence and inversely. But Nietzsche thinks that being and non-being, presence and absence are intermingled, are the two constitutive parts of becoming. One side of becoming accomplishes its movement while the other fails to accomplish its movement. So the persistence of being can only take the form of becoming. It is the becoming of being that counts as the immaculate conception of the eternal return. The eternal return is not a metaphysical concept, rather it renders possible attachment to the material world, the world as it is before turning into a fable in and through a linear narrative of history. The eternal return is a tool for interpreting the world in its infinity and finitude at the same time, and its legacy lies in its rejection of both a purely transcendental and a purely immanent interpretation of the world. When Nietzsche makes the dwarf say “everything straight lies[…] all truth is crooked, time itself is a circle,” he is pointing towards an ethical imperative, namely, that one must give free rein to the unconscious drives so that in time, as these drives are let to manifest themselves in and through language, it becomes apparent that it is ridiculous to repress them for it is repression itself that produces them; so the more one represses them the more one contributes to their strengthening. As you can see what’s at stake here is a way of governing the self in relation to others. Eternal return is will to power and will to nothingness at the same time, it is the name of the process of becoming through which the subject becomes other than itself. This becoming other than itself of the subject is in the form of an emergence of the new out of the old, that is, realization of an already existing possibility and will towards its actualisation through this realization. So the subject assumes what it was in the past and upon this assumption builds its present as already past and yet to come. It is in this context that Foucault says genealogy is “a history of the present.”

These are the avenues Deleuze opened in the way of explicating the meaning of eternal return and its use. Look at what he says in a passage, perhaps the most lucid articulation of Deleuze’s conception of time and its passage in Nietzsche and Philosophy:

What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes. “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to world of being—high point of the meditation.” [Will to Power, 617] This problem for the meditation must be formulated in yet another way; how can the past be constituted in time? How can the present pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come—at the same time as being present. If the present did not pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait, the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past and future grounds its relation to other moments. The eternal return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is “one” or the “same.” We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand is as “return of the same.”[5]

With the big-bang a substance of infinite intensity begins its still ongoing process of expansion-contraction. And this process must always already be complete for it to even begin taking its course of becoming; everything happens at present and for that reason there is neither a beginning nor an end of time. The force combinations are infinitely repeated but because of its previous repetition the quality of the forces themselves change and give birth to its becoming different from itself through repetition of what it assumes itself to be in relation to time. So the subject always already is what it strives to become and yet the only way to actualise this becoming what one is is this: one has to realize that what one is striving to become is already what one is. All the configurations have to repeat themselves eternally for the return of the same to take place. But when this same returns one sees that it has never been the same but always already different from itself. When the future comes it becomes present, the subject is always at present and can never know what it would be like to exist in another present. There is nothing and the present.

Eternal return is the first conceptualisation of the death drive. It is not death drive but it operates the way death-drive operates, and since none of these have any existence outside their operations they are the two different forms the same content takes. The subject of the eternal return wills nothingness and this willing nothingness always returns as a will to power. You can see that Nietzsche uses this grand conception of the relationship between creation and destruction to invert destructive and reactive Nihilism into the spotlight; he turns Nihilism against itself through the thought of eternal return as the thought of becoming other than what one thinks one is. What was repressed and locked into the unconscious once turns into its opposite and becomes the order of the day in a new light and in another time. In this light time is itself the fourth dimension of space. That is how Nietzsche can see the rise of Nihilism in its material, historical conditions. We all come and keep coming from inorganic substance and will end up there. Nietzsche’s confrontation with truth was the confrontation of brain with chaos. And out of this confrontation emerges the truth of the death drive, the will to nothingness disguised as the will to truth, the internally constituted external governor of a Nihilistic Europe.

We are governed by nothingness and death which have neither a beginning nor an end. Well, at least not for us, who are those governed by them. For when we die we are nowhere to see our dead bodies or experience death as our own. Death occurs where there is the absence of my self’s sense-experience, all the rest is a process of being towards death, dying, becoming-dead. When death finally arrives even my name ceases to be mine, or rather, it is realized that even my name has never been mine. There remains no one to carry out my life in my name once death is here.

Death and nothingness are interior and exterior to us at the same time. Most of us, however, keep the thought of death at bay at all times; those of us are the ones who live their lives without thinking about death, for they think, in a Spinozan fashion, that “he who is free thinks of nothing less than of death and his meditation is a wisdom not of death but of life.” This is the time of good-sense where everything is identical and everything can be substituted by something else.

The will to power and the will to nothingness reverse the roles. We break down as we go along the way towards the completion of passing across the field of partial objects. And what is thought worth if it is not in the service of the present? Sacrificing the present by scarfacing yourself for the sake of a better future face is itself the worst thing that can be done to your face at all times. In vain is he/she who strives for immortality.

Let us move on to the subjects of finitude and infinity, then. Here is a question for you: Are we finite becomings or infinite beings? We might as well be neither or both of these. It’s a matter of taste depending on whether you see being alive as a process of dying or a process of living. We who are alive, or at least think we are, are infinite beings by nature, but turn into finite becomings in and through our cultures. I say we are infinite beings because infinity has no beginning or end, so it’s impossible for an infinite entity to be a becoming, only a being can be infinite, whereas a finite entity has a beginning from which its becoming starts taking its course and comes to a halt at the end. Since the concept of time is a cultural construct imposed on nature by human beings, because we see other people die, we have come to imagine that we are limited by finitude and surrounded by infinity, when in fact it is the other way around; that is, we are infinite beings and death constitutes an internal limit to our being in the world, giving birth to our idea of ourselves as finite becomings. We don’t have to strive for immortality, for we are always already immortals who are incapable of realising and actualising their immortalities.

Upon the realisation that infinity is transcendentally immanent to finitude and finitude is immanently transcendental to infinity Dr. Lawgiverz decides to reconsider Alain Badiou’s shifting conceptualisation of immortality.

In his Theoretical Writings Badiou attempts to separate himself from the Romantic understanding of infinity, and the pursuit of immortality. According to Badiou, contemporary mathematics broke with the Romantic idea of infinity by dissolving the Romantic concept of finitude. For Badiou, as it is for mathematics, the infinite is nothing but indifferent multiplicity, whereas for the Romantics it was nothing more than a “historical envelopment of finitude.” Behind all this, of course, is Badiou’s strong opposition to historicism and temporalization of the concept. It is in this context that Badiou can say, “Romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalization of the concept as a historical envelopment of finitude.”[6]

Mathematics now treats the finite as a special case whose concept is derived from that of the infinite. The infinite is no longer that sacred exception co-ordinating an excess over the finite, or a negation, a sublation of finitude. For contemporary mathematics, it is the infinite that admits of a simple, positive definition, since it represents the ordinary form of multiplicities, while it is the finite that is deduced from the infinite by means of negation or limitation. If one places philosophy under the condition such a mathematics, it becomes impossible to maintain the discourse of the pathos of finitude. ‘We’ are infinite, like every multiple-situation, and the finite is a lacunal abstraction. Death itself merely inscribes us within the natural form of infinite being-multiple, that of the limit ordinal, which punctuates the recapitulation of our infinity in a pure, external ‘dying.’[7]

 The political implications of the move from Romantic infinity to mathematical infinity can be observed in Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. In this little book Badiou criticizes the hypocrisy of human rights for reducing being-human to being a mortal animal. Of course Badiou admits that what is called human is indeed a mortal animal, but what he objects to is the exploitation of this state of being. Against this deprecative attitude, Badiou pits the immortal subject, or rather, the subject who is capable of realising his/her immortality.[8]

Badiou says that “being is inconsistent multiplicity.” As an advocate of immanence he doesn’t think that there is an ontological difference between Being and beings. As a matter of fact, he altogether refuses that there is such a thing as Being transcending the multiple beings, or beings as inconsistent multiplicities. To understand where Badiou is coming from we only need to look at his critique of Heidegger’s equation of being in the world and being towards death. For Badiou there is no such thing as being in the world, because for him there is not one world but multiple worlds and consequently being in the world as being towards death is a rather impoverished idea doomed to result in the mistaken assumption that consciousness of human finitude is self-consciousness. And I agree with Badiou that consciousness of human finitude merely serves to justify a life driven by death.

 I shall therefore propose a consciousness of infinitude rather than of finitude for a sustenance of the conditions of possibility for an ethical life and for an ethical death. For when you think about it, if we were immortal, that is, if our lives were eternal, we wouldn’t be so destructive of the environment, not so harsh on nature and one another, because no one would want to live in such a hell eternally. Since it is obvious that as humans we have been turning the world into a hell in the name of progress for a while now, and since death has been the end from which we have come to think we have been striving to escape in this progressive process, it is obvious that a forgetting of death, or rather, a remembering to forget our mortality would make us fear an eternal life in hell, rather than a finite life in an illusory heaven.

If we keep in mind that the global capitalist system, as we have tried to explicate, takes its governing force from its exploitation of life and death drives, that it is based on our fear of death and consciousness of finitude, it becomes clearer why a subtraction of death from life not only shakes, but also annihilates the foundations of capitalism.

There is this immanently transcendental and transcendentally immanent field that sustains a non-mortal mode of being in the world, neither for nor against it, but indifferent to it in such a way as to turn its own alienation from mortality into its driving force in its attempt to demolish the faculty of finite judgment and create the conditions of possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for an infinite judgment to take place beyond the subject/object of a Law that is mortal, all too mortal.

A truth comes into being through those subjects who maintain a resilient fidelity to the consequences of an event that took place in a situation but not of it. Fidelity, the commitment to truth, amounts to something like a disinterested enthusiasm, absorption in a compelling task or cause, a sense of elation, of being caught up in something that transcends all petty, private or material concerns.[9]

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

I don’t know if it is worth mentioning that in this time we are all slaves and yet some slaves dominate the others. Where time goes no one knows. There are necessary illusions in this life, some for life, some not. Both the extreme belief in civilized progress and barbaric regress are good for nothing. These two are now in the process of being left behind. A third possibility of developmental process is emerging in the form of a becoming-reconciled which is based on the recognition of the otherness of the other as it is, that is, prior to the additions and the subtractions imposed upon the self and the other, nature and culture, life and death. For a non-normative and progressive work it is necessary for the participants to become capable of making distinctions between their natures and cultures, their cliniques and critiques. It is a matter of realizing that theory and practice are always already reconciled and yet the only way to actualise this reconciliation passes through carrying it out and across by introducing a split between the subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation.

It is indeed true that sometimes it takes a long journey to get there, where one eventually got to, and realise that one is other than one thinks itself to be. Apparently the numbers indeed start with zero and continue with two, but it takes time to realise this actuality and become capable of actualising this reality. Perhaps we should indeed know that absolute reconciliation is impossible and yet still strive to reconcile ourselves as much as we can to all the living and the dead.

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

 If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, the judgement that subsumes the particular under it… is determinative. If, however, only the particular for which the universal is to be found is given, judgement is merely reflective.[10]

 If we keep in mind that the reflective mode of judgement reflects on particulars in such a way as to produce universals to which they can be subjected, and that the determinative mode of judgement determines a particular by subjecting it to a universal, it becomes understandable why among these two I shall be using the reflective mode which splits as it unites the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject. But it must be kept in mind that the subject of enunciation which refers to the universal is itself a constitutive illusion, or a regulatory ideal necessary for the emergence of the immortal subject as the enunciated content. It is only in and through a position of non-mortality within and without mortal life at the same time that the exploitation of mortality can be brought into the spotlight. A critique of the exploitation of mortality inherent in particularly exemplary cultural products will be achieved through putting them in a perspective that analyzes the life death drives in such a way as to expose the exploitation of the fear of death as the driving force inherent in them. The point is that it is indeed necessary to fantasize being what one is not, in our case being non-mortal, to be able to become self-conscious of one’s self-reflexivity in the way of creating an order of signification not caught up in the rotary motion of drives locked in Klein’s projection-introjection mechanism,  but rather one which breaks this vicious cycle and at least attempts to subtract death from life in a counter-act to the post-structuralist idea of life as a process of dying and death as an absent presence in the midst of life. It is only through such a subtraction of the absent presence of death within life that the productive interaction between Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Zizek’s transcendental materialism, Foucault’s bio-politics, Badiou’s theory of infinity, Kant’s reflective mode of judgement, and Hegel’s speculative philosophy give birth to the immortal subject as the womb of a new thought, a new life, and a new mode of being, free of the exploitation of mortality and engagingly indifferent to this mortal, all too mortal life.

Such were the thoughts of Dr. Lawgiverz on the day he decided to commit himself to actualising his immortality. And to this decision we can only respond with Nietzsche’s famous words:

 One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will!… And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not will… [11]

Related articles

Mortal, All Too Mortal: Nihilistic Speculations from Dr. Lawgiverz (1)

Mortal, All Too Mortal: Nihilistic Speculations from Dr. Lawgiverz (2)

• Badiou on Žižek (readysteadybook.com)
• Deleuze’s Bergson and the Einstein debate (magnusopium.wordpress.com)
• Slavoj Žižek masterclasses, and Jacques Lacan lecture (via P e r ∙ C r u c e m ∙ a d ∙ L u c e m) (cengizerdem.wordpress.com)
• Lacan and the pre-mortal life (bycommonconsent.com)
• Žižek’s new Hegel book (readysteadybook.com)
• Speculations II: Table of Contents Ready (via Hyper tiling) (cengizerdem.wordpress.com)
• Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control (politics.ie)
• Sforzian, Deleuzian. Deleuzian, Sforzian. (greg.org)
• Lacking Lacan (bohemienpoet.wordpress.com)
• Amira: Lewis Carroll and psychoanalysis: Why nothing adds up in Wonderland (aminotes.tumblr.com)
• Unity Versus Multiplicity in Object-Oriented Ontologies (becomingintegral.wordpress.com)
• Lacan and other philosophical short-circuits in David Lynch Films. (avepythagoras.wordpress.com)
• [Conceptually 'Plushed']: An erratic but joyful idea… (schizosophy.com)
• On Civilised Progress and Barbaric Regress (cengizerdem.wordpress.com)

In our daily lives we create little worlds of our own and invest them with various meanings. These worlds have their own logics, orders repetitively staged every day; this gives us a sense of continuity in time and hence a sense of security. Objects and subjects surrounding us, everything fits in its proper place in this microcosmic self-consciousness of ours.

The thought of being a tiny spot in the middle of nowhere, however, or somewhere in the vast universe is too unbearable to be thought through for many people because it reminds us of death. If one thinks this thought for too long all meaning collapses and life falls apart, the established symbolic order of object relations become disorganized. This is when the journey of the subject towards nothingness begins. If the subject manages to maintain integrity throughout the passage from self-consciousness to an impersonal consciousness reconciliation of self with life and the world takes place. With the advance of this macrocosmic impersonal consciousness in time everything symbolic loses meaning and credibility only to lead to an opening up of a space for the emergence of a new meaning. The new is not independent from the old. But is that which had hitherto been unseen, unrealised, unthought as a new possibility of a progressive movement.

Authentic fidelity is the fidelity to the void itself—to the very act of loss, of abandoning or erasing the object. Why should the dead be the object of attachment in the first place? The name for this fidelity is death drive. In the terms of dealing with the dead, one should, perhaps, against the work of mourning as well as against the melancholic attachment to the dead who return as ghosts, assert the Christian motto “let the dead bury their dead.” The obvious reproach to this motto is, What are we to do when, precisely, the dead do not accept to stay dead, but continue to live in us, haunting us by their spectral presence? One is tempted here to claim that the most radical dimension of the Freudian death drive provides the key to how we are to read the Christian “let the dead bury their dead”: what death drive tries to obliterate is not the biological life but the very afterlife—it endeavours to kill the lost object the second time, not in the sense of mourning (accepting the loss through symbolization) but in a more radical sense of obliterating the very symbolic texture, the letter in which the spirit of the dead survives.[1]

So, neither the work of mourning nor melancholia are progressive. It is the work of death drive to kill death, to cause a loss of loss, to destroy the symbolic texture causing death to take place; death drive is the only weapon against death in life. Rather than symbolizing and then accepting death, the subject as death drive contemplates death as nothingness and fills the space of death within the symbolic with nothing. Zizek points out that there is a great difference between willing nothing and willing nothingness.

What we are implicitly referring to here is, of course, Nietzsche’s classic opposition between ‘wanting nothing’ (in the sense of ‘I don’t want anything’) and the nihilistic stance of actively wanting Nothingness itself; following Nietzsche’s path, Lacan emphasized how in anorexia, the subject does not simply ‘eat nothing’ – rather, she or he actively wants to eat the Nothingness (the Void) that is itself the ultimate object-cause of desire. (The same goes for Ernst Kris’s famous patient who felt guilty of theft, although he did not actually steal anything: what he did steal, again, was the Nothingness itself.) So – along the same lines, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a void.[2]

The object that takes the place of the Real is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The objet petit a is that which the master-signifier causes to be signified. There is nothing to signify the objet petit a, it is that signifier itself. The master-signifier signifies the objet petit a as its own signifier. Without the objet petit a the nothingness behind the master-signifier would become manifest. Master signifier generates signs that signify their own autonomous existence. That is, they hide the latent content of the master-signifier which is nothingness.  By manufacturing the illusion of its own non-being the master-signifier signifies itself as the transcendental signified. It does this through signifying the objet petit a as the transcendental sign, (signifier and signified at once). The sublime object which stands in for nothingness behind it is the object of desire of masses who fantasize that they are drinking something good, when in reality they are drinking the void and their own life/death.

One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will!… And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not will… [3]

In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek gives the example of Diet-Coke as a symptom of will to nothingness inherent in contemporary society.

So, when, some years ago, the advertising slogan for Coke was ‘Coke is it!’, we should note its thorough ambiguity: ‘that’s it’ precisely in so far as that’s never actually it, precisely in so far as every satisfaction opens up a gap of ‘I want more!’. The paradox, therefore, is that Coke is not an ordinary commodity whereby its-use value is transubstantiated into an expression of (or supplemented with) the auratic dimension of pure (exchange) Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar use-value is itself already a direct embodiment of the suprasensible aura of the ineffable spiritual surplus, a commodity whose very material properties are already those of a commodity. This process is brought to its conclusion in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke – why? We drink Coke – or any drink – for two reasons: for its thirst-quenching or nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is also taken away – all that remains is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a substance which never materialized. Is it not true that in this sense, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally ‘drink nothing in the guise of something’?[4]

By drinking Diet-Coke, the subject, rather than being really healthy, is being merely less ill, since Diet or not, Coke is itself unhealthy.  Coke as we know it is miles away from its medicinal uses for which it was invented in the first place. The measure of health is not Coke without caffeine and sugar. So the Diet-Coke cannot be a sign of healthy living. Worse than being unhealthy, it is death disguised as an object of desire, that object of desire being healthy living. So we can see the process through which the Real of the subject’s desire, which is the death-drive, is turned into desire for healthy living. As the subject thinks he/she is moving towards greater health, he/she is in reality moving towards death. We have to be clear about where exactly the life-drive and the death-drive become separated from themselves and hence their roles are reversed, turning them into their opposites. It is precisely at this point of separation- unification of the life-drive and the death-drive that the conflict-event takes the place of the place itself.

This place is a playground on which this conflict-event between the life-drive and the death-drive is played out as a confrontation between the therapeutic society and critical theory. If the aim of psychotherapy is to adapt the subject to the environment, then it is by definition a normalizing practice. But asks critical theory, what is the definition of health? On which grounds are we talking about health? What are the values that make health? All these questions may lead down to the big question of ontology: “What is the meaning of life?” There is no meaning of life. It is my actions and words that invest my life with a particular meaning. What determines the meaning of objects surrounding me is the use I put them into. In this context, progress in therapeutic procedure is signified by an increase in the subject’s ability to use the objects surrounding him/her.

But critical theory says: you are confusing use-value and exchange-value. You are forgetting the need to remember that in your world the exchange-value preceeds the use-value. You are always already born into the world of objects with their values attached to them, how can you say that you are healing these people by telling lies to them concerning the cause of their desire and the Real of the objects they choose to put to use. Isn’t their choice already determined by the pre-dominant symbolic order?[5]

Critical theory agrees with psychotherapy that it is the use value of the object that is important. But what critical theory wants to say is that what psychotherapy presents the subject with, as the use-value, is already the exchange-value, so psychotherapy is presenting the subject with death disguised as life. It is there that there has been a shift in the gears, where Nietzsche conceived of himself as the stage of confrontation between Christ and Dionysus, as the conflict-event that shifted the gears at a certain moment in history. At this precise moment in time negation and affirmation change roles for the very reason that negating the symbolic order becomes the same as affirming the Real. One creates a fantasy which negates the symbolic and affirms the Real as it is, that is, with all its inconsistencies, internal conflicts, imperfections, and incompleteness. Something in the symbolic order is caused to fail by these interventions of the affirmative subject. Here a question awaits us: Does that mean that for creation to take place destruction is necessary? The answer to this question is a yes and a no at the same time. Because destruction causes a split in the order and yet this split’s consequence depends on the future of the response to it. Destruction is not essential to creation but is an inescapable result of it. [6]  So there may or may not be cases where there is something in the process of being created without anything being destroyed. For when one thinks about it, creation is not a subtraction from nature, but quite the contrary, an addition to it. For subtraction to become creative it should be a subtraction from culture, that is, from knowledge, or from the already existing symbolic order. Badiou’s subtraction opens a void within the already existing symbolic order and through this void a new truth flows. It is only in so far as the mortal human animal chooses fidelity to this truth-event that it becomes a subject, that is, an immortal indifferent to death.

The Immortal Subject Beyond The Death Drive

The creature called human can cease being a passive non-being and become an active being only insofar as it produces love against the negative power of the already existing capitalist law. As we all know, the laws’ negative impositions give birth to the vicious cycle of the life and death drives, which is in turn exploited in the way of more money.

With the domination of nihilist global capitalism all over the world social life has become a masquerade. The silence diminishes and noise pollutes the lives of all. This noise is what Nietzsche calls “the noise of the marketplace.” The subject neither questions its being in itself nor its being for itself. The system provides the subject with innumerable facilities to keep boredom at bay so as to sustain the conditions for the possibility of the non-being of thought to take place. The subject simply does not feel the need to think and in time the subject loses the ability not only to think but also to act consciously. It all becomes an empty and meaningless spectacle to live. Every subject takes on a role, or an identity in accordance with the demands of the show business and hides behind this role turning into a solipsistic monad acting itself out in the way of satisfying the big Other. Just like Judge Schreber who had to endure inordinate measures of suffering to satisfy the demands of those cruel gods he populated himself with… And Schreber, satisfied as he was with the mere pleasure of sharing the high profile mission of satisfying cruel and invisible gods, becomes a madman when in fact he was a woman enduring privation.[7]

In the banality of ordinary social reality the subject forgets to think of its death as its own. Absence of the thought of death brings with it the presence of the thought of being, which means that the subject has lost his/her sense of self/other distinction, and is governed by his/her unconscious drives. This leads to the subject’s ignorance of an external world, or perhaps an unintentional neglect of an external reality other than the one it imagines, for it has itself become exterior to itself.

When death is thought about, this thought never takes place in terms of the death of the self. It is always through the death of the other that the subject thinks of death. It is always a “they” who die. Death is conceived as a symbolic incident. The reason of that reductive attitude towards death is the will to preserve the banality of ordinary reality and sustain the conditions for the possibility of an illusory sense of oneness with the world. All this, of course, is done to keep the Real of the external world at bay.

Global capitalism produces subjects who cannot stand the thought of the outside; they cannot conceive the absence of an external world within them. The fear of death is so strong that with the force of its negativity it totally negates death in life, erases the slash in life/death, and vainly erects statues to attain immortality.

It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. “It’s me, and so it’s mine…” Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment.[8]

Today the purpose of life has become keeping the subject busy for the sake of the business of not thinking death. The subject is bombarded by objects of introjection to such extent that it has no time for feeling anxious about its own death. The objects form a transparent sheet between the subject and its death. As inorganic substances the objects fill the space of death within life. What we witness in this time is life turned into a project aiming at erasing the silence necessary for thought; and not only erasing but also replacing it with an unceasing noise causing nausea.

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

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

 In his Theoretical Writings Alain Badiou attempts to separate himself from the Romantic understanding of infinity, and the pursuit of immortality. According to Badiou, contemporary mathematics broke with the Romantic idea of infinity by dissolving the Romantic concept of finitude. For Badiou, as it is for mathematics, the infinite is nothing but indifferent multiplicity, whereas for the Romantics it was nothing more than a “historical envelopment of finitude.” Behind all this, of course, is Badiou’s strong opposition to historicism and temporalization of the concept. It is in this context that Badiou can say, “Romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalization of the concept as a historical envelopment of finitude.”[9]

Mathematics now treats the finite as a special case whose concept is derived from that of the infinite. The infinite is no longer that sacred exception co-ordinating an excess over the finite, or a negation, a sublation of finitude. For contemporary mathematics, it is the infinite that admits of a simple, positive definition, since it represents the ordinary form of multiplicities, while it is the finite that is deduced from the infinite by means of negation or limitation. If one places philosophy under the condition such a mathematics, it becomes impossible to maintain the discourse of the pathos of finitude. ‘We’ are infinite, like every multiple-situation, and the finite is a lacunal abstraction. Death itself merely inscribes us within the natural form of infinite being-multiple, that of the limit ordinal, which punctuates the recapitulation of our infinity in a pure, external ‘dying.’[10]

The political implications of the move from Romantic infinity to mathematical infinity can be observed in Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. In this little book Badiou criticizes the hypocrisy of human rights for reducing being-human to being a mortal animal. Of course Badiou admits that what is called human is indeed a mortal animal, but what he objects to is the exploitation of this state of being. Against this deprecative attitude, Badiou pits the immortal subject, or rather, the subject who is capable of realising his/her immortality.[11]

Badiou says that “being is inconsistent multiplicity.” As an advocate of immanence, unlike Heidegger, he doesn’t think that there is an ontological difference between Being and beings. As a matter of fact, he altogether refuses that there is such a thing as Being transcending the multiple beings, or beings as inconsistent multiplicities. To understand where Badiou is coming from we only need to look at his critique of Heidegger’s equation of being in the world and being towards death. For Badiou there is no such thing as being in the world, because for him there is not one world but multiple worlds and consequently being in the world as being towards death is a rather impoverished idea doomed to result in the mistaken assumption that consciousness of human finitude is self-consciousness. And I agree with Badiou that consciousness of human finitude merely serves to justify a life driven by death.

 I therefore propose a consciousness of infinitude rather than of finitude for a sustenance of the conditions of possibility for an ethical life and for an ethical death. For when you think about it, if we were immortal, that is, if our lives were eternal, we wouldn’t be so destructive of the environment, not so harsh on nature and one another, because no one would want to live in such a hell eternally. Since it is obvious that as humans we have been turning the world into a hell in the name of progress for a while now, and since death has been the end from which we have come to think we have been striving to escape in this progressive process, it is obvious that a forgetting of death, or rather, a remembering to forget our mortality would make us fear an eternal life in hell, rather than a finite life in an illusory heaven.

If we keep in mind that the global capitalist system, as we have tried to explicate, takes its governing force from its exploitation of life and death drives, that it is based on our fear of death and consciousness of finitude, it becomes clearer why a subtraction of death from life not only shakes, but also annihilates the foundations of capitalism.

To What End Last Words? To What End Suffering…

Throughout this article I have tried to develop a mode of critique in and through which nothing is excluded and/or determined. This reflective mode of critique itself enabled me to situate myself in the middle of the reflective and the determinative modes of judgment. The critical mode employed in this article is still context-bound to a certain extent, and yet it tries to restrictively dissociate itself from the predetermined context, rather than freely associate within it. A new field is opened, the conditions are created for the possibility of a decision beyond the Law of Militarist Capitalism and the Welfare State driven by and driving the exploitation of mortality on a massive scale.

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

A truth comes into being through those subjects who maintain a resilient fidelity to the consequences of an event that took place in a situation but not of it. Fidelity, the commitment to truth, amounts to something like a disinterested enthusiasm, absorption in a compelling task or cause, a sense of elation, of being caught up in something that transcends all petty, private or material concerns.[12]

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

I don’t know if it is worth mentioning that in this time we are all slaves and yet some slaves dominate the others. Where time goes no one knows. There are necessary illusions in this life, some for life, some not. Both the extreme belief in civilized progress and barbaric regress are good for nothing. These two are now in the process of being left behind. A third possibility of developmental process is emerging in the form of a becoming-reconciled which is based on the recognition of the otherness of the other as it is, that is, prior to the additions and the subtractions imposed upon the self and the other, nature and culture, life and death. For a non-normative and progressive work it is necessary for the participants to become capable of making distinctions between their natures and cultures, their cliniques and critiques. It is a matter of realizing that theory and practice are always already reconciled and yet the only way to actualise this reconciliation passes through carrying it out and across by introducing a split between the subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation.

It is indeed true that sometimes it takes a long journey to get there, where one eventually got to, and realise that one is other than one thinks itself to be. Apparently the numbers indeed start with zero and continue with two, but it takes time to realise this actuality and become capable of actualising this reality. Perhaps we should indeed know that absolute reconciliation is impossible and yet still strive to reconcile ourselves as much as we can to all the living and the dead.

• 

  Deuss Ex Machina # 335 – Goodbye 20+First Century_Awake From Tales

lawgiverz posted this

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 Eumerdification

Over at Pagan Metaphysics, Paul has posted a couple of great quotes from Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Hopefully he won’t mind if I reproduce his post here. Paul writes:

I was reading through Dennett’s Breaking the Spell again yesterday and came across an endnote that raised a laugh. Dennett is reflecting on the value and uses of incomprehensibility, mystification and paradox in religion, specifically as mechanisms for bedazzling the mind (effective marketing strategies or tools of transmission), when he notes in a side comment his first secular experience of this phenomenon.

My introduction to this somewhat depressing idea came in 1982, when I was told by the acquisitions editor of a major paperback publishing company that her company wasn’t going to bid for the paperback rights for The Mind’s I, the anthology of philosophy and science fiction that Douglas Hofstadter and I had edited, because it was “too clear to become a cult book.” I could see what she meant: we actually explained things as carefully as we could.

OK, not funny so far (although perhaps evoking a knowing smile). Dennett then proceeds to explain a related story.

John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: “Michel, you’re so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?” To which Foucault replied, “That’s because in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.” I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault’s candor: eumerdification. Read More

via Larval Subjects .

İdeoloji maddi bir varoluşa sahiptir.[2]

                                                                                                                                                            Althusser              

Beyin bir ekrandır.[3]

Deleuze

Rüya, Fantezi, ve Film

Eğer film ve gündüz düşü, film ve rüyaya kıyasla, daha doğrudan bir rekabet halindeyseler, ve eğer birbirlerine karışıyorlarsa, bu, ikisinin de gerçekliğe uyum sağlama noktasında -ya da, diğer yönden bakacak olursak, bir regresyon noktasında- yani, aynı anda ortaya çıkmalarından kaynaklanır: rüya çocukluğa ve geceye aittir; film ve gündüz düşü daha yetişkindirler ve güne aittirler, ama gün ortasına değil – daha çok, akşama.[4]

Hayalî Gösteren’de Christian Metz sinema ve bilinçdışı arasındaki ilişkinin oldukça önemli bir yönüne dikkat çeker. Rüya çocukluğa, geceye, bilinçdışına, Gerçeğe dairdir; bunun yanı sıra, film ve fantezi yetişkinliğe, simgesele, ve bilince aittir; yine de, bu bilincin kendisi akşama aittir. Aslında Metz’in söylemek istediği, sinemanın bize birçok şey göstermiş olmasına rağmen bizden aynı zamanda birçok şey saklamış olduğudur; çünkü her film Gerçeğin üzerindeki bir örtüdür, projektörden tek bir ışık demeti çıkar ve sinematik aygıtın loşluğunda kişi adeta hipnotize edilmiş gibidir, gösterilene yarı-bilinçli bir şekilde bakakalır.

Kendinizi bir sinema salonunda oldukça rahat bir koltukta otururken hayal edin. Bu an, öteki insanlardan oluşan bir kalabalığın arasında, karanlıkta, sessizce oturmayı kabul edeceğiniz o oldukça nadir anlardan biridir. Tek ışık kaynağı, imgeleri beyaz perdeye yansıtan projektördür. Beyaz perde yansıtılan ışığı hareketli resimlere dönüştürür ve siz de büyük bir hayretle bu resimleri izlersiniz. Rahat koltuğunuzda, dingin ve edilgensiniz, ve hareket etme kabiliyetiniz bir dış güç tarafından kısıtlanmıştır. Bu haliniz, gerçeklik ve rüyalar âlemi arasındaki yarı-uyanık kişinin haline oldukça benzemektedir. Bir film seyretmek, uyanık olmaktan uyku haline geçmeye benzer. Bir seyirci olarak izlediğinizin gerçek olmadığının farkındasınızdır, ama yine de bunun tamamıyla kurgusal olmadığına kendinizi ikna edersiniz. Bir film izlerken, tıpkı tam da uyanmak yahut tam da uyumak üzere olan birine benzersiniz.

Rüya malzemeleri, tıpkı sinemanın malzemeleri gibi, görsel ve işitsel imgelerdir. Ne var ki, rüyalar ve filmler arasında üç temel ve göstergebilimsel fark vardır. Hayalî Gösteren’de Christian Metz, bu farkları şöyle sıralar:

[...] öncelikle, öznenin yapmakta olduğu şeye dair eşitsiz bilgisi; ikinci olarak, gerçek algısal materyalin mevcudiyeti ya da eksikliği; ve üçüncü olarak, hakkında şimdi konuşacağımız metinsel içeriğin kendine ait (film veya rüya metnine ait) bir nitelik.[5] 

            Bütün bu farklar, öznenin uyanıklık derecesine bağlıdır. Uykuda bütünsel yanılsama söz konusudur; özne rüyanın metninde bir rol üstlenebilir. Fakat sinemada, özne kendini perdede göremez, elbette filmde oynayan aktör veya aktrislerden biri değilse. Sinemada sizinle gördüğünüz arasında bir mesafe koyan bir gerçeklik hissi vardır. Uyanık olduğunuzda, izlediğinizin kurgusal olduğunun bir noktaya kadar farkına varırsınız.

            Metz’in dikkat çektiği ikinci fark, algının maddesinin varoluşuyla ilgilidir. Sinematografik imge, gerçek bir imgedir; görsel ya da işitsel bir maddeden yapılmış bir imgedir. Rüyada, rüyanın maddesi yoktur, rüyanın materyali tamamıyla yanılsamadan ibarettir, dışsal bir nesne olarak varlığı yoktur.

            Üçüncü fark, filmin metinsel içeriğine dairdir. Bir rüyayla karşılaştırıldığında, kurgusal film çok daha mantıklıdır. Eğer David Lynch gibileri bir kenara ayırırsak, filmin planı genellikle seyircinin beklentilerine uyum gösteren bir sırada gelişir. Gelgelelim, rüyada, herhangi bir plan yoktur, çünkü kimse başka bir kimseye herhangi bir şey söylemiyordur. Rüya hiçbir yere ait değildir.

Sinema ve rüya arasındaki bu farkları ortaya koyduktan sonra, Metz bir başka terim ortaya atar. Bu Freud’un ‘Tagtarum’ dediği bir nevi bilinçli fantezi olan gündüz düşüdür.[6] Gündüz düşü filme daha yakındır, çünkü gündüz düşü gören, fantezi kuran öznenin bilinci bir noktaya kadar işlemektedir. Dahası, gündüz düşleri de uyanıkken tecrübe edilmektedir. Filmin mantıklı bir  yapısının olmasının nedeni, aktörlerin, yönetmenlerin, ve seyircilerin tümünün uyanık olmasıdır. Bir filmi yapmak ve izlemek, bilinçli, bilinç-öncesi, bilinç-altı psişik süreçleri içerir. Fantezi kurmak da bu üç psişik süreci içerir, fakat bir film, bilinçli seçimler sonucu üretildiğinden, belli bir amaca sahiptir ve belli bir anlamı iletmek ister; ne olacağı önceden planlanmıştır, ve her bir detayı yazılmıştır. Öte yandan, fantezi kurmak içerisinde boşluklar ve bağlantısızlıklar bulunduran tamamıyla psişik bir süreçtir. Fantezi kurduğumuzda, niyetimiz bir başka kişiye belli bir anlamı iletmek değildir. Her iki süreçte de Metz bir tür iradi simülasyonun işlediğini düşünür. Gündüz düşünü gören de, film izleyicisi de gördüklerinin yahut tahayyül ettiklerinin gerçek olmadığının bilincindedirler; fakat yine de tam tersi bir durumun söz konusu olduğuna kendilerini inandırırlar.

Hem film izleyicisi, hem de gündüz düşçüsü, gerçeklik ilkesinin yerine haz ilkesini koyarlar. Her iki durumda da kişinin görmekte veya hayal etmekte olduğunun gerçekten gerçekleşmekte olduğu yönündeki bir yanılsamaya dair gönüllü bir inanç vardır. Bu inanç olmadan, fantezi kuran ya da film izleyen öznenin herhangi bir haz duyması mümkün değildir. Bu etkinliklerin tek amacı, tatmin edici olmayan gerçekliği telafi etmektir. Fanteziler ve filmler toplumsal gerçekliğin destekleyicileridir; onlar sayesinde Gerçek uzakta tutulur, ve özne ile hiçlik arasındaki boşluk korunur. Hiçlik simgesel düzene içkindir. Rüya gören öznenin bilinçdışınca yönetilmesi gibi, sinema seyircisi ve fantezi kuran özne de Gerçeği bir haz kaynağına dönüştürüp simgesel düzene tercüme ederler. Film yapımcıları doğrudan seyircinin bilinçdışıyla iletişim kurmayı denerler. Hedefleri bilinçdışıdır ve bilinçdışı itkilere denk düşen imgeler bulurlar. Bilinçdışını oluşturan da tam bu denkleştirme sürecidir, çünkü bilinçdışı itkilerin adlandırılmasını önceleyen hiçbir şey yoktur. Sinema itkilerin nesnelerini metafor ve metonomi kullanarak toplumsal olarak kabul edilebilir ve simgesel olarak anlaşılır biçimlere sokar.

Lacan’a göre, metafor yoğunlaşmanın, metonomi ise yer değiştirmenin ürünüdür. Bu iki ifade biçiminin çok etkili olmasının sebebi, bilinçdışının işleyişine literal olandan daha yakın olmalarından kaynaklanır. Dolayısıyla, Lacan, “bilinçdışı dil gibi yapılandırılmıştır,” diyebilmektedir.

Gördüğünüz gibi, hâlâ bu “gibi”yi (like/comme) koruyarak, bilinçdışı dil gibi yapılandırılmıştır derken ortaya koyduğumun sınırları içerisinde yer alırım. Bilinçdışı bir dil tarafından yapılandırılmıştır dememek için, “gibi” derim -ki her zaman bu noktaya dönerim.[7] 

Böylece, metafor kavramı bastırmanın bir ürünü olarak belirir ve bir imgenin daha etkili olacak bir başka imgeyle yer değiştirmesini içerir. Metonomi bir nesnenin bütününü temsil etmesi için o nesnenin bir kısmını kullanmanın ürünüdür. Metafor ve metonomi bilinçdışı ve toplumsal gerçeklik arasındaki boşluğu doldurur. Onlar, bu iki dünya arasındaki aracılardır.

“Bildiğimiz haliyle sıradan gerçeklik, derisi soyulmuş etin ve değiştirilebilir maskenin proto-ontolojik Gerçeğine karışır.”[8] Zizek, John Travolta ve Nicholas Cage’in başrolleri paylaştığı Face/Off filmine gönderme yapar. Bu filmde, Travolta ve Cage kendilerini, ne yaparlarsa yapsınlar kendi kendilerine karşı koydukları bir durum içerisinde bulurlar. Birbirlerinin yüzlerine sahiptirler. Mesaj, yüzlerinin ardında Gerçeğin, derisi soyulmuş etin, bizi kendimizle özdeşleştirecek koca bir hiçin bulunduğudur. Toplumsal gerçeklik ve Gerçek arasındaki boşluk açılmıştır ve her iki adam da kendilerini düşmanlarının rolüne bürünmüş halde bulurlar. Yüzün kendisi Gerçeği saklayan maskeye dönüşür. Burada, maskenin Gerçeği temsil eden bir metafor olması değil, yüzün Gerçeği temsil eden bir metonomi olması söz konusudur.

Bu eksikliğin ortaya çıkışından önce (sinema gösterenine hâlihazırda çok yakınız), çocuk, büyük bir endişeden kaçınabilmek adına, inancını iki kat artırır (bir başka sinematik özellik) ve bu noktadan itibaren sonsuza dek iki çelişik fikre sahiptir (gerçek algının her şeye rağmen etkisiz olmadığının kanıtı).[9]

Bazı filmlerin bu iki çelişik konumu birbirinden ayırmadaki başarısızlığı, bu filmlerin iyi etkilerinin nedeni olur. David Lynch filmlerinde sıradan gerçekliğin Gerçeğe karışması sürecini gözlemleyebiliriz. Mulholland Drive’da, Hollywood kariyerinin başlangıcında genç bir aktrisi görürüz. Film onun dağılma sürecini anlatır. Hayalî, simgesel, ve gerçek kademe kademe birbirine karışır ve aktris de kurgusal olan, zihninde olan, ve toplumsal olan arasında ayrım yapabilme yetisini yitirir. Ancak filmin sonuna geldiğimizde, onun gerçek durumunun farkına varırız. Hayatının planını Hollywood’un kurgusal dünyasında kaybetmiştir. Bu kaybın açtığı alanı doldurmak için, uyuşturucu ve alkol bağımlısı olur, ve daha fazla uyuşturucu kullandıkça, iç alan daha da büyür, ve iç alan daha da büyüdükçe, bilinçli seçimler yapması imkânsızlaşır.

Yansıtmalı Özdeşim ve İçe Yansıtma

Klein içe yansıtılmış nesneler ile içsel nesneler arasında bir ayrım yapar. İçsel nesneler, hem içe yansıtılmış nesneleri, hem özdeşim nesnelerini, hem de a priori fantezi imgelerini içerir. Klein’a göre, içe yansıtma, çocuğun korkutucu iç dünyasından kaynaklanan endişe ve korkuya karşı bir savunma mekanizmasıdır. Çocuk kendini kötü, saldırgan, ve eziyet edici nesnelerle doluymuş gibi varsayar ve dışarıdan iyi nesneleri içe yansıtmayı dener. Bir başka deyişle, çocuk içsel kötü nesnenin yerine dışsal iyi nesneyi koymaya çalışır. Dolayısıyla, içe yansıtma yalnızca benliğimi değil, aynı zamanda içsel iyi nesneleri korumaya yarayan bir savunma mekanizmasıdır.[10]

Klein bilinçdışı fantezinin bütün psişik süreçlerin temelini oluşturduğunu iddia eder. Fakat Freud’a göre fantezi kurmak sinir bozucu ve tatmin etmeyen gerçekliği telafi eden bir savunma mekanizmasıdır. Klein bilinçdışı fantazmatik üretimin içgüdüsel süreçlerin tezahürü olduğunu düşünür. Klein’ın perspektifinden, bilinçdışı toplumsal gerçeklikte olup bitenle irtibatı olan daha etkin ve üretken bir dinamizme dönüşür. Klein’ın keşfinin önemi, çocuğun henüz hayatının başlangıcından itibaren toplumsal gerçeklikle nasıl da yakından ilişkili olduğunu göstermesidir. Çocuk annesine döner ve bilinçdışı onu çevreleyen nesnelerle ilişki kurma yoluyla bilince yönelir. Klein’a göre, çocuğun ilişki kurduğu ilk dışsal nesnelerden biri anne memesidir. Çocuk açlıktan ötürü, ve başka bir iletişim aracı olmadığından, ağlamaya başlar. Anne, çocuğun süt istediğini anlar. Annenin göğsünden gelen sütle karşılaşan çocuk, açlık sorununa çözüm teşkil eden dışsal bir iyi nesnenin varlığından haberdar olur. Fakat sütün akışının kesintiye uğramasıyla birlikte, açlığın da etkisiyle, çocuğun aklı karışır. Çocuk memeyi kötü bir nesne olarak görür ve daha saldırganlaşır. Süt geri geldiğinde ise, çocuk hem kötülüğün kaynağına, hem de iyiliğin kaynağına saldırdığını fark eder. Böylece çocuk her nesnenin hem iyi, hem kötü olduğunu kavrar; nesnenin nasıl kullanıldığı onun tikel iyiliğini ya da kötülüğünü belirler. Önemli olan, toplumsal gerçeklikle nasıl bir ilişki içerisinde olunduğudur.

Hayatın ilk yılında, içe yansıtma ve bölünme baskındır; çocuk ölüm itkisince yönetilir; bu itki, rahmin sağladığı ve organizmanın her türlü ihtiyacının organizmanın hiçbir çaba sarf etmesine gerek kalmadan sunulduğu kapalı mekân ve zamana dönüşün imkânsızlığı karşısında yaşanan düş kırıklığına cevaben ortaya çıkar.

Ölüm itkisiyle başa çıkabilmek için, özne saldırganlığının bir kısmını anne tarafından temsil edilen dış dünyaya yansıtır. Sonuç olarak, çocuk dış dünyayı kendi içinde bölünmüş bir dünya; kendi içlerinde iyi veya kötü olmayan, başka nesnelerle ilişkilerinde iyi-leşen veya kötü-leşen iyi ve kötü nesneleriyle dolu bir dünya olarak tanır. Yansıtmalı özdeşim çocuğun hayatın zorluklarıyla başa çıkabilmek için kullandığı bir başka savunma mekanizmasıdır. Yansıtmalı özdeşimle birlikte, benliğimi ve içsel iyi nesneleri dışsal kötü bir nesneden gelebilecek olası bir saldırıya karşı korumak için, çocuk içsel kötü nesnelerini dışsal iyi nesneye yansıtır. Çocuk dışsal iyi nesneleri, dışsal kötü nesneleri, içsel iyi nesneleri, ve içsel kötü nesneleri hep birbirine karıştırır. Her şey iç içe geçtikçe, çocuk kendine ve dış dünyaya karşı saldırganlaşır. Bu zor durumla başa çıkabilmek için, çocuk dış dünyaya bütünlükler yansıtır ve iyi ile kötü arasında bir ayrım yapmaz. Bu da çocuğun ölüm itkisince yönetilen halden, yaşam itkisiyle yönetilen hale geçtiği anlamına gelir.

Gelişimin üçüncü aşamasında, depresif konum vardır. Depresif konumla birlikte, çocuk, içinde bulunduğu içe yansıtma ve yansıtmalı özdeşimin paranoid-şizoid konumda, yalnızca iyi nesneye değil, aynı zamanda kötü nesneye saldırmasından ötürü kendini suçlu hisseder. Çocuk bu süre zarfında sevgi dolu ve şefkatli annenin paranoid saldırılara maruz kaldığının farkına varır. Sebep olduğu zararı telafi etmek için, çocuk toplumsal gerçekliği temsil eden anneyle olan ilişkisini onarmaya çalışır. Klein açısından depresif endişe bir ilerleme göstergesidir.

Bu psişik süreçler hayatın sonuna dek sürer. Çocuk aynadaki imgesini kendisi olarak tanımlar. Lacan, Klein’ın depresif konumuna “ayna aşaması” adını verir.

Hayalînin simgesele karşıt olduğu fakat aynı zamanda onunla üst üste bindiği Lacancı anlamda da, hayalî, benliğin temel cezbedilişini, Oedipus kompleksinden önceki (ve ondan sonra da devam eden) bir aşamanın tanımlayıcı damgasını, insanı kendi yansımasından yabancılaştıran ve onu kendi kopyasının kopyası yapan aynanın kalıcı izini, anneyle olan özel ilişkinin derinden süregidişini, eksikliğin ve sonsuz kovalamacanın saf etkisi olarak arzuyu, bilinçdışının ilksel nüvesini (ilksel bastırma) betimler. Tüm bunlar, şüphesiz, bir bakıma ilksel olarak yerinden olmuş uzuvlarımız için sahici bir fiziksel yedek, bir protez işlevi gören o öteki aynanın, sinema perdesinin, işlemesiyle yeniden etkinlik kazanır.[11] 

Bir hayalî ve narsistik özdeşimler dönemi olan ayna aşamasında, çocuk aynada gördüğü yanılsamaya inanır. Kendini bir bütünlük olarak görür ve hakikaten bir bütünlük olduğuna inanır. Bu, ötekinin arzu nesnesi olan benlik ile öznenin gördüğü haliyle benlik arasında geçen bir çatışma dönemidir. Aynadaki yansıma, ölüme dek sürecek olan içe yansıtma ve yansıtmalı özdeşim sürecini başlatır.

[...] Lacan tarafından tarif edildiği şekliyle ayna deneyimi, özsel olarak hayalî olanın (= bir hayaletle, imgeyle özdeşim yoluyla benliğin oluşumu) tarafında konumlanmıştır. Ayna, buradaki, büyük Öteki olarak işlev gören yansıması ayna alanında zorunlu olarak çocuğunkinin yanında görünen ve çocuğu cama doğru tutan annenin dolayımıyla simgesel olana da bir ilk erişim olanağı sağlar gibi görünse de, bu böyledir.[12]

            Perde, yansıtmalı özdeşimin alanıdır. Kendimi karakterin yerine koyarım ve filmi onun perspektifinden görmeye çalışırım. Bir bakıma, kendimi narsistik bir biçimde bütün bir kişi olarak filmin bağlamında konumlandırmaya çalışırım. Fakat perde, bu ayna benzeri niteliğini, ona eriştiği anda kaybeder. Perdeyle birlikte, daha gelişmiş bir süreç işlemeye başlar ve bu sürece, basitçe özdeşim değil, yansıtmalı-özdeşim adı verilir. Özne filmdeki karakter olmadığının ayırdındadır, fakat buna rağmen, sanki bütün bu maceraları yaşayan oymuş gibi, bu kimliği üstlenir.

            Ben, bir filmi izlediğimde, kameranın gözü olurum. Her şey benim etrafımda olup biter ve ben bütün bu olup bitenin gözlemcisi olurum. Bir film izlerken, bir bakıma, yarı-tanrılaşmış bir yaratığa dönüşürüm; her-şey-olmayanı herkesin-üstünde-olmayan bir konumdan gören, duyan bir yaratık; ve aşkın ile içkin arasındaki ikili ayrımı anlamsız kılan bir konum. Olayların hem içinde, hem dışındayım, ve bedenimle ve geriye kalan her şeyle aynı anda hem buradayım, hem başka bir yerde. Benliğin gözünü mümkün kılan ötekinin gözüdür.

Sinema ve Fetişizm

Bokun bile bir ticari değeri vardır. Bu, elbette, bokun kimin boku olduğuna bağlıdır. Söz konusu olan insan boku olduğunda, ondan kurtulmak için para ödemeniz gerekir. Fakat hayvan boku, birileri onu yenilemeyeceği için değersiz olarak görmek yerine kullanmayı öğrendiğinde, oldukça verimli ve etkili bir gübre olabilmiştir. “Bilakis, annenin bedeninin temaşasına yansıtılan bu terörün ta kendisidir, ve bu, anatominin farklı bir konformasyon gördüğü yerde bir eksikliğin okumasını yapmaya davet eder.”[13]

İçgüdüler bile öznenin kendini içinde bulduğu süperpanoptik yansıtma-içe yansıtma mekanizması tarafından üretildiğinden, bilinçdışına kendini ifade etmesi için bir serbestlik kazandırmak, içerideki kötünün dışa yansıtılmasını üretir. Freud’a göre, ölüm itkisi sonsuzluk, hiçlik, ve ölüm için verilen bir mücadelenin etkisidir. Ben, sebebi olduğunu da ekleyeceğim.

Meta fetişizmi, hiçliğin, öznenin arzusunun Gerçeğinin inorganik nesnelerce temsil edilmesi arzusu olduğu ölçüde, hiçlik istencine eşittir. Kapitalizm nesnelerin kullanım değerinin yerine iki-boyutlu ticari değeri koyar; böylece, özne arzulanmak için arzular, ve bunu da ancak meta fetişizminin iki boyutlu alanını benimseyerek, kendisi bir fetiş nesnesine dönüşerek yapabilir. Marcuse’nin tek-boyutlunun iki-boyutluyu massettiği yönündeki şikâyetini hatırlar ve aynı zamanda Marcuse’nin iki-boyutlu kültürünün bugünün baskın kültürüne dönüştüğünü hatırda tutarsak, çözümün, büyük Ötekine, hayatlarımızda hangi biçimle karşımıza çıkıyor olursa olsun, “Kendimi senin beni gördüğün gibi görmüyorum,” demek olduğu daha anlaşılır olacaktır.

Bizim fikrimizce, fetişizm yalnızca sadizmde, o da ikincil ve çarpıtılmış bir halde, ortaya çıkar. Fetişizm inkâr ve gerilimle olan özsel ilişkisinden yoksun bırakılmıştır ve, sadistik yoğunlaşma sürecinde bir fail olmak üzere, tamamıyla farklı olan olumsuzluk ve olumsuzlama bağlamına geçer.[14]

Böylece ölüm itkisi hâlihazırda var olan nesneleri bölerek yeni arzu nesneleri üretir. Ölüm itkisi olarak özne, simgesel olanı bölerek, hiçliği ve ölümü temsil etmek üzere yeni arzu nesnelerinin ortaya çıkmasına imkân tanıyan mekânlar açar.

İyi nesne bilginin tarafına geçmiştir ve sinema kötü bir nesneye dönüşür (‘bilim’in geride durmasını kolaylaştıran ikili bir yer değiştirme). Sinema ‘infaz edilir’, fakat bu infaz aynı zamanda bir onarımdır (bilme durumu hem saldırgan, hem de depresiftir), fakat göstergebilimciye özgü, özel bir onarım: Kurumdan, ‘incelenmekte olan’ koddan alınanın kuramsal bedende yeniden kurulması.[15]

Sinema hakkında yazmak, temelde, simgesel düzenin bir eleştirisidir, çünkü hem yazma, hem de sinematik üretim simgesel toplumsal etkinliklerdir. Sinema hiçliği örten bir şeyin arzusunu doyuma ulaştırarak yaşam itkisini sömürdüğünden, sinema hakkında yazmak esas olarak simgesel olanın ardındaki hiçliği ifşa etmeye çabalayan ölüm itkisince yönetilir. Bir filmin örttüğü, hiçlikten başka hiçbir şey olamaz; ve filmin ardındaki bu hiçliği ifşa etmek özne ile gösteren arasında bir bölme koyar. Bu açıdan bakıldığında, psikoterapi var olan toplumsal düzeni eleştirir olur, çünkü eleştirmen filmi eleştirmekle film endüstrisini tedavi eder, ki bunun da seyirci üzerinde tedavi edici bir etkisi olur

Sinemada olduğu kadar başka alanlarda da, fetişizmin iyi nesneyle yakından ilişkili olduğu aşikârdır. Fetişin işlevi, (Melanie Klein’ın söylediği anlamda) kendi ‘iyiliği’ içerisinde, eksikliğin dehşete düşüren keşfi tarafından tehdit edilen iyi nesneyi yeniden kurmaktır. Yarayı kapayan ve kendi erotojenik olan fetiş sayesinde, nesnenin bütünü aşırı bir korku olmaksızın yeniden arzulanabilir olur.[16]

            Metz’e göre, sinema bir fetiş nesnesidir. Filmler eksik olan bir nesneyi temsil ederler. İmgelerin perdedeki yansıması, perdenin ardındaki, imgelerin görünmesini mümkün kılan hiçliği saklar. “Fetiş, fiziksel haliyle sinemadır. Fetiş her zaman maddîdir: bir kimse, yalnızca simgeselin gücüyle onu telafi edebilmeye başlamışsa, artık fetişist değildir, demektir.”[17]

            Sinema, ulaşılmaz arzu nesneleri üretir. Bu nesneler, bir boşluğu doldurarak, hiçliği daha da ulaşılmaz bir hale getirir. Sakladıkları bir şey olduğu hissini uyandırarak, hiçlik arzusunu üretirler. Gelgelelim, sinemanın hiçlik istencini sömürme gücü, bir ideoloji biçimi olarak sinematik aygıtı eleştirebilmemiz için elimizde olan tek araçtır.

            Arzu nesnelerinin yüceleşmesi, sinema ve televizyon aracılığıyla olur. Daha da ulaşılmaz olmalarıyla birlikte, daha da yüceleşirler. Sinemanın yaptığı, bir bulunuş yanılsaması yaratmaktır. Sinema hiçliğin yerine geçen bir nesne sunarak eksik bir nesneyi gösterir. Perdede gördüğümüz de bir eksikliğin bulunuşudur. Sinemanın keyfine varabilmesi için, öznenin yapması gereken şey, izlediği şeyin yalnızca bir eksikliği kapatan bir bulunuş, öznenin arzusunun Gerçeğinin temsil edilişi olduğunu bilmektir. Böylece Metz, “fetişin fiziksel haliyle sinema olduğunu” söyleyebilecektir.[18] Bu haliyle, fetiş, hiçlikten başka bir şey olmayan Gerçek arzu nesnesini temsil etmek üzere üretilendir; bu anlamda, fetiş, hiçlik istencini tatmin etmek için üretilir.

            Sinematik anlatı olayları gerçek sırasıyla göstermez. Kesintiler, boşluklar, sahneler arası alanlar vardır. Bütün bunlar -kesintiler, boşluklar, sahneler arası alanlar- bir dış gerçekliğe doğru açılmalardır; gösterilenin dışında bir şey olduğu hissini uyandırırlar. Seyirci, filmde olup bitene dair bilmediği bir şey olduğuna inandırılır. Her insana içkin olan bu bilinmeyene dair merak, sinema tarafından sömürülür. Seyircinini perdede gördüğüne aynı anda hem inanmasını hem inanmamasını sağlayarak, sinema kendisi ile seyrici arasında müphem bir ilişki yaratır.

            Sinema, anlatıda boşluklar bırakarak, yansıtmalı özdeşime olanak tanır. Seyirci filmin metnindeki eksikliğin üzerine içindekileri yansıtır. Bu boşlukları kendi içsel kısmi nesneleriyle doldurur ve filmin bölünmüş anlatısına bir bütünlük ve süreklilik empoze eder.

            Ölüm itkisi bölünme ve içe yansıtma içerir. Ölüm itkisi olarak özne verili bütünlük ve süreklilikleri böler. Ölüm itkisiyle yönetilen bir seyirci için filmdeki karakterlerle özdeşleşmek imkânsızdır. Bilakis, bu seyirci hiçbir şeyi arzular ve onsuz hiçbir anlam olmayacağını bildiği hiçlikle özdeşleşir. Ölüm itkisi, anlatıdaki boşlukları doldurmak yerine, onlara ışık tutar, bu boşlukların anlatıya içkin olduğunu ifşa eder. Anlatının yarım kalmışlığı, anlamının olanaklılığının koşuludur.

            Bu iki seyirci türünü birbirinden ayırt edebiliriz: yaşam itkisince yönetilen seyirci ile ölüm itkisince yönetilen seyirci; çağrışımcılık ve çözülmecilik.

            Çağrışımcılıkta, özne kendini hayalînin ortamına yerleştirir ve filmdeki karakterlerle özdeşleşir. Çözülmecilikte, özne iç ve dış nesneler arasında yeni bölünmelere yol açar ve özdeşimi kendi için imkânsız kılar.

            Yaşam itkisi dünyayla bir olma istencidir; taklitçilik ve çağrışımcılık ardındaki güçtür. Ölüm itkisini taklitçilik ve çağrışımcılıkla irtibatlandırmak yanlıştır. Ölüm itkisi olarak özne bütünlüklerin ve sürekliliklerin çözülmesine ve bölünmesine yol açar. Korku filmlerinde, seyirci açısından hakikat bilgisinin yokluğu, yani seyirciye her şeyi bilen gözün rolü verilmemesi, seyirciyi meraklı kılar ve böylece filmde ne olup bittiğini anlamak için karakterlerle özdeşim kurmaya zorlar. Filmi seyrederken doldurulacak boşlukların bolluğu karşısında, yaşam itkisi izleme süreci boyunca yaptığı işlerden dolayı gücünü yitirirken, ölüm itkisi bastırıldığı için daha fazla güç kazanır. Nihayetinde, yaşam itkisi çöker ve ölüm itkisi salonu kaplar.

            Korku filmi, ölüm itkisi ürünü olsa da, yaşam itkisini, yani seyircinin bütünlük oluşturma, eyleme istencini, anlatıdaki boşluklardan ve tutarsızlıklardan kurtulma arzusunu sömürür. Ölüm itkisi olumsuzlamayı olumsuzlar ve ulaşılabilecek en üst olumlama düzeyine ulaşır. Thanatos hiçbir şey istemezken, Eros hiçliği ister. Thanatos’un Nietzsche’nin şu sözünü tersine çevirdiğini rahatlıkla söyleyebiliriz: “insan hiçbir şey istememektense, hiçliği ister.” Eros hiçliği istemeyi ister ve her şeyin yerli yerine oturması için bütünlükler oluşturma işine girişir; sistemin hiçbir eksiği, dolayısıyla Eros’un da hiçbir isteği olmayacaktır. Thanatos bölünmelere yol açar, ve simgesel olanın ardındaki hiçliğe ulaşmaya çalışır. Thanatos hiçliği istemez; hiçbir şey istemez. Hiçbir şey istemez ki, her şeyin ortasındaki hiçliği, var olan her şeyin ardında hiçbir şey olmadığını gösterebilsin.

            Eros hiçbir şeyin eksik kalmamasını, eksikliğin eksik kalmasını isterken, Thanatos yaşamı olduğu gibi olumlar ve eksikliği ister, bir şeylerin eksik kalmasını, her şey söylendikten ve yapıldıktan sonra o eksikliğin varlığını sürdürmesini ister, ki böylece o eksikliğin sunduğu hiçliği arzulayabilsin. Thanatos hiçbir şeyin yerine bir şey koymayı istemez; bilakis, o, her şeydeki eksikliği ister. Olumsuzlamayı olumsuzlayarak, ölüm itkisi yaşamı olduğu gibi, yani bitmemişliğiyle, ve tam ortasındaki hiçlik ve ölümle birlikte olumlar.

Netİceler

Bu denemede, sinematik aygıtı psikanalizle olan ilişkisi içerisinde çözümlemeye çalıştım. Adını anmamış olsam da, denemenin bütününde Gilles Deleuze’ün etkisi vardı. Henüz Fark ve Yineleme’de Deleuze beyni bir perde/ekran olarak anlar. Bana kalırsa, Deleuze’un bir perde/ekran olarak beyin anlayışının kökleri, onun Fark ve Yineleme’de yeniden yarattığı ölüm itkisi kavramındadır. Onun temsilî varlık tarzına karşı çıkışı, aslında Freud’un itki kuramındaki aşkınlığa yönelmiş kavramsallaştırmalara karşı bir saldırıdır. Deleuze külliyatı bilinçdışı itkiler ile bilinçli arzular arasındaki ilişki üzerine bir araştırma olarak okunabilir. Bu bağlamda, Deleuze’cü felsefeye sadık kalmak adına, beyni yalnızca bir perde/ekran olarak değil, aynı zamanda bir projektör olarak yeniden kavramsallaştırmak gerekir.

Sinematik aygıtın yalnızca bilinçli anlığı değil, aynı zamanda bilinçdışı itkileri de tetiklediğini, böylece yalnızca bilinç değil, bilinçdışını da ürettiğini düşünüyorum. Bilinçdışının arzuları ürettiği konusunda Deleuze’le hemfikirim, ancak Deleuze’de eksik olduğunu düşündüğüm şey, bilinçdışının da her zaman hâlihazırda sinema, medya, ve televizyon gibi dış güçler tarafından üretildiği fikridir. Dolayısıyla, bilinçdışının ürettiği arzu her zaman hâlihazırda hâkim şeyler düzenine hizmet eden hâkim bir arzulama tarzına uyum sağlamaya meyillidir.

İngilizce’den Çeviren: Mehmet Ratip

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The influencial French journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse has been made available online thanks to the AHRC and Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University.

As a joint project of the philosophy graduates at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the journal ran for ten issues between 1966 and 1969. You only have to look at the dates to know that these were some of the most influencial years in the history of French and modern European Philosophy. And this is certainly something equally reflected in the list of contributors from short time that the journal was operative. Jacques Derrida, Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault all contributed texts in various forms.

The site is gradually adding to the original texts with summaries, synopses and at a later stage, hopefully, translations.