April 01, 2005

Eternal Return of the Void

"In short, divergence and disjunction as such become the object of affirmation. The true subject of the eternal return is the intensity and singularity; the relation between the eternal return as actualized intentionality and the will to power as open intensity derives from this fact. As soon as the singularity is apprehended as pre-individual, outside of the identity of a self, that is, as fortuitous, it communicates with all the other singularities, without ceasing to form disjunctions with them. It does so, however, by passing through all of the disjoint terms that it simultaneously affirms, rather than by distributing them in exclusions. 'Thus, all I have to do is to will myself again, no longer as the outcome of previous possibilities, not as one accomplishment out of a thousand, but as a fortuitous moment, the very fortuity of which implies the necessity of the integral return of the whole series.'" (Deleuze)

This refers to Nietzsche's project of eternal return as affirmation - and creative destruction as affirmation - rather than negation as critical disjunction and separation. "And-and-and" rather than "either-or." This is a mathematical concept of the continuum as distribution of intensities and affirms the failure of Cantor's continuum hypothesis to be tamed by discrete countable constructible sets. We are left with the infinite multiple and its various sets which appear as worlds - seemingly discrete components but actually rearrangements of relations of elements. But these elements themselves are only further relations so all that actually appears are relations of relations of...the infinite multiple or void - the empty set. The will to power as open intensity is real or infinite while the intentional singularity or sovereignty is an expression or appearance of this infinite but it is "no thing" - it continues to participate in the infinite intensity even as it appears to have singular existence.

Our ontological error - which becomes moral, scientific, aesthetic, political, clinical error - is to signify - to become slaves to things as meaningful - including self, world, and god - rather than participating in process - expressionism in philosophy: simulacra as creative manifestation of intensity in an eternal return, refrain, or miming of the intensity itself.

The end of dualism shows us that the void is the infinite and only stops at the one, the two, the three, and the many along the way - that being is becoming and that matter is form. The dialogue between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze recapitulates a dialogue initiated by Plato and Aristotle which can now be resolved with reference to the mathematical-poetic biophysics of Wilhelm Reich's Orgonomy and Rene Thom's Semiophysics (not to mention the Surrealism of Bataille, Artaud, Breton, and Duchamp).

Along with analytic philosophy, scientific and poetic analysis, we leave behind the theological content of psycho-analysis and follow only the topological diagrammatic formation of schizo-analysis until we are left with analysis itself which subsumes philosophy, psychology, medicine, theology, ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, poetics - and in the place where poetics and analysis meet, the sovereign subject or event invents analysis anew each time, for all analysis is lay analysis and is signed by the proper name: Freudian Analysis, Lacanian Analysis, Joyceian Analysis, Duchampian Analysis, Nietzschean Analysis, Deleuzeian Analysis...

1. From the very beginning no-thing is.

2. There is void - empty set - potential, also known as substance - matter - continuum - the infinite infinite or infinite multiple.

3. Within the continuum of matter, a difference of relations of relations of this matter is what is called form, and form containing matter is an act(ualization) containing potential or an event which creates a set defined only immanently - generically - as what it is.

4. This event installs a set of relations of relations of matter (or empty potential - void) to itself by virtue of form.

5. This act of form-ation or per-form-ance installs a topological analytic object a, central object, or transcendental regime (a=c=t) axiomatically and locally.

6. Thus there is no One but only ones and the void is thus no lack or absence (from some-thing) but a pure affirmation of being becoming.

7. All events - or sets - remain topologically linked to the "ontological" infinite substance-matter-void while appearing as "phenomenological" things.

8. Thus the continuum of Number (or numericity) appears as discrete numbers, the Real appears as Imaginary-Symbolic structure, the ontological appears as the phenomenological.

9. Philosophy has nothing left to do other than analyze the axiomatic appearance and disappearance of sets, forms, worlds, or events - actualizations of the potential - finite numbering of the infinite - topological diagramming.

10. Analysis is.

Posted by scott at April 1, 2005 07:59 PM