PHILOSOPHY OF MOVEMENT

Kinesthesion

I

Prelude

We have argued, have we not?, that the one lacuna in philosophy today is its own lack of self-awareness. The problem of self-reflection—or rather, its persistent impracticability and even ontological-existential impossibility—is the critique of representation. Only a philosophy of movement can replace this hole (the black-hole of philosophy's self-awareness).

The heading under which this problematic of self-reflection has been raised is “Scholasticism”. This movement pushes in the direction of institutionalization, of control and stability. The philosophy of movement accomplishes a nomadic trajectory of alternation, like a crab's movements across the seashore (or seafloor). It seeks always a sideways motion, one that creeps along towards the edge, threatening to spill over, to surpass itself, to shed (or molt) its skin in favor of surpassing critique. In becoming self-aware it loses itself in the process, and walks away from itself. It steps into the Cave and finds a splendor there which cannot be encompassed by the representations of the Scholastics. It finds wonder. (And this perhaps is the direction of Michel Serres.)

We now found the philosophy of movement, and it cannot be encompassed by the Scholastic. It remains the purview of the “amateur” (in Said’s sense). It is rough, it is “barbarous” because it does not speak in the controlled language of the Journal, the Monograph—the monotonous tones of the bureaucrats of the University. It speaks from Love. The philosophy of movement is a philosophy of Love. But it is the underside, to extra-boarder-ism that is found contained within the Scholastic horizon.

The Scholastic gives itself to the philosophy of representation. In this philosophy, we find pure representatives of the loving drive which moves and encompasses. Jaspers gave the name to this Beast – “Existenz”. The philosopher of movement seeks the standpoint of Existenz as the mountaineer seeks the peaks just so long as, and in order to find what lies beyond the valley, the moment in-between the mountains. The ancient Fathers and Mothers of the Desert sought the infinity of the flat desert plains as their “mountains” which nothing could encompass. Existenz here took the form of the “eternal progress” whose paradoxical form Gregory of Nyssa envisioned: the peak of the mountain is a luminous Darkness, in which the journey become infinitely rapid—an infinite movement of Love, where the hierarchy ends along with the “progress” for the progress is the infinitely repetitious plane of self-surpassing Love. Eckhart speaks here of the “boiling” and “boiling-over” (bullito and ebullito) of die goteit, the God “beyond God”.

The philosophy of movement is not interested in what is representative. Rather, it is interested in that which itself animates the representations—the infinite movement of differentiation which refuses the stability of Systems and of Scholastics. The philosophy of movement is the philosophy which is inimical to control and power not originated by itself. Self-control, Self-power—these are the living symbols of the persistence of movement (of time, memory, change) and its autopoetic challenge, the challenge of “overcoming” through becoming. The philosophy of movement does not recognize “Being” because nothing is unless it becomes— and becoming is a moment in which, through contact and agglomeration, a “being” arises as a moment of becoming. Yet, it is in motion, even in its being it diverges and is divergent. The being in this sense “boils over”—escapes the confines of control and the system of bureaucratic management. The philosophy of movement is not “recognized”. Indeed, it seeks not recognition, but cognition. It seeks no representation, but it seeks presentation. It is not awareness it seeks, but the infinite movement that is its becoming-other, the entry into the possible. Through this movement a virtuality is self-generated, and it is into this self-generated virtuality it moves. Rather, its being is the becoming of this virtuality.

It is not about possibilia and actualia, or of the Aristotelian distinction between the dynamis of matter and the energeia of form; both dynamis and energeia are themselves generated and produced in the virtual/actual movement which is indicated by the Nietzschean formula the “being of becoming”. No-thing-ness stands “before” the virtual production of the actual; hence, the philosophy of movement is, in essence, a proto-ontological philosophy. It is the real basis of Eckhart's “mystical” theological philosophy (indeed, what is “mystical” is just what is “virtual”; there is mysticism in it only because of the philosophy of representation; striking down this philosophy shows that there is nothing mystical at all here). It involves the production of the representatives, and at the level of production is where we find power, energy, the dynamic—where we find Aristotle's stilted Platonism.

The philosophy of movement is the philosophy of chaos, or in Guattari's terms, a “Chaosmosis”. Guattari's philosophy of Chaosmosis is the philosophy of movement, which is a philosophy of creation; in his willfully disorienting expression it is a “Creationism”. Thus, the philosophy of movement uses scriptural configurations as ciphers of movement; scripture is a house of trajectories of dissimulation which encode an inexpressible philosophy of movement—not as “authorial intention” but as creative hermeneutic. That which resists the authorial intention is the plane of infinite movement which is regenerated in each hermeneutical gesture. Reading is a gesture of protest in the philosophy of movement—“hermeneutics” is the philosophy of the movement of ideas through the seemingly immobile and inflexible stasis of the written word. It is a practice of liberation. It is the ungovernable search for an infinite plane of movement—it is a search of “Love” (or Spinoza's affectus).

The philosophy of movement is founded on the axiom of retention (anal, ideational, etc.). In retention the organism or the socius seeks in fact to move and to displace and finally to expel. It moves towards dissipation and collection, and retention again for purposes of expulsion. The expulsive moment is the crucial moment for the philosophy of movement, because in the expulsion (from paradise) the dissipative movement is then recombined and the retentive moment is re-affirmed in order to repeat the out-flowing or boiling-over of the power of movement itself, the nomadic trajectory (the “wandering god”, the “wandering joy” as one scholar correctly describes Eckhart's philosophy) is thereby redoubled (even if one does not literally—most esp. not!—go anywhere; as Laozi put it, one needn’t go “10,000 li” in order to go very far—and thus we posit that the philosophy of movement is the abyssal “ground” of contemplation, the procedure of “meditation”, “prayer” and so on ... the bursting through of the representatives of infinite movement).

The philosophy of movement turns into the force of Totalitarianism the moment retention and expulsion are represented with the fictions of Totalities (race, gender, sexual “orientation”, the Nation, the “We”). In fact the philosophy of Representation, accomplished for example most systematically by Hegel, finds the expression for Representation: the in-itself, for-itself and the “for-others” dialectic is the sham which surrounds a subterranean and ungraspable infinite movement. The infinity of this underground movement is trapped in the trifold logics of dialectic, which enforces a procedure of sublation. To infinitize the boarders of this dialectic—to render the difference between the in-itself, the for-itself and the for-others infinite (or, infinitely surpassed (and surpassable) by an unending number of divisions, so that there is a continuum beneath the trifold logics of the Hegelian dialectic, an order of Infinity that surpasses the finite infinity of this Dialectic)—is to render it a useless fiction. This perhaps has been the direction of recent Hegelian studies. But in the absence of the threefold logic we have not a ‘logic’ so much as the movement of a multitude, the multitude of the being of becoming—a fundamentally “machinic” proto-ontology. Ontology—the end result of Dialectics—is just the solid phase of a multidimensional phasing, a morphology whose cartography of passage is given in the phase-diagrams of virtual/actual transitions. We have a logic not of solid forms but of transitions, of becomings, where a virtual/actual dyad is a logic of creation/destruction of stable systems. Ontology becomes itself methodology of escape and transition. Autopoesis (perhaps even beyond poetry).

What political form is produced? In itself we have a democracy because the movement disclosed by the philosophy of movement is both infinite (infinitely rapid, or rather, infinite because any two points in phase diagram are infinite near and thus already “traversed”; a concept is therefore a simple transversal movement, the “in itself” already “for others”) and planar, that is: there is no transcendence. There is infinite movement of immanence. Even the transcendental plane is a planar distortion (something akin to Lacan’s “point-de-capiton” but a pleat introduced not at the level of the representative—the symbolic/imaginary— but at the level of the proto-ontological, which even surpasses the “Real”, which for Lacan always stood in some dialectical relation to this plane of representation and the representative).

Here we traverse the plane of the “polis” as such (with its police force) and enter into the self-generated infinite planar motion of the “nomos”, the wandering brutes of the ‘aesthesic’ (to brutalize the Greek for our own barbaric purposes).

The philosophy of movement ends in the anti-“political” configuration of democracy, the plane upon which, as equals, the people as persons are enabled with the structures of disputation of power-centrality, the tools of de-centering and a free movement—the freedom to struggle. Democracy therefore is the unending and infinite agonism of opposition, the perpetual threat to power, the gaining of freedom from power to become a power of infinite movement in absence of power-centers (divergence-power). This is the permanency of dissent.

Houses of dissent are the way-stations of the nomadological socius.

II

(Generative) an-arche of (the standpoint of) kinesis, as stepping into phusis as panta rhei (“pantarheics”, “pantarheism”?).

We may define this standpoint against the standpoint of Aristotle. This is the first, negative, determination of the standpoint of kinesis.

“In Metaphysics A.1, Aristotle says that ‘all men suppose what is called wisdom (sophia) to deal with the first causes (aitia) and the principles (archai) of things’ (981b28), and it is these causes and principles that he proposes to study in this work”—

Thus says an encyclopedia entry on Aristotle's famous Metaphysics. We repudiate the knowledge of “first causes”—there are no “first causes”. Indeed, if the “first cause” is in actuality that which produces an effect from out of itself, then, by repudiating an “itself” (or opening up the in-itself to an other-for-itself, and so on—but not in the Hegelian manner), we show only an interest in production, that is, in force or power alone. That is, we show interest in creation, opening-forth, and it is this which gives only movement; thus, the standpoint of kinesis is (and must be) an an-archic standpoint, that without principle. The without-principle is the essence of the standpoint, in the sense not of being but of the being of becoming. Another word for it would be change; or, πάντα ῥεῖ—panta rhei.

The fourfold vice-grip of ancient philosophy, which has dominated Western thinking ever since the war over change within the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, is here also (therefore) repudiated. It is sophia (wisdom as seeking-after, or study); (discovery/disclosure and therefore) knowledge of aitia (causes); the determining archai (principles); things or objects as produced effects from aitia represented by the archai of logos (yielding in turn that sophia sought after by the philosopher as mere curious wonderer).

The negative determination we give to the standpoint of kinesis entails an involution of this fourfold vice; that is, all four concepts are curled up tightly and indivisibly by panta rhei. They constitute that “before” of the founding gesture of philosophy as such (“love of wisdom”); that is, what already has gone before the question of philosophy—‘what is X?’—shines forth as kinesis, the panta rhei, since in order to pose the question—‘what is X?’­ —an essential movement backwards to what has already slipped passed the view of the questioner himself must already have taken place, in order for the question to be possible in the first place. If, therefore, as Hegel rightly realized, philosophy always “comes too late” (so that the Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, at the conclusion of the day—when the curtains of the theatre have already come down), kinesis always comes too soon (or not soon enough), so that the path forward is always opening forth, a chaos (as yawning of becoming).

This is not a seeking after ‘truth’, or knowledge of ‘first causes’; rather, it is the play or agony of movement in and of itself, or rather, the play without recourse to self or thing. It is production of forces, powers—those that overtake and create. The ‘stepping into’ contained within panta rhei precisely is the only ‘thing’ here. Making, creating so as to pass on (death).

The irreversible trajectory: life to death. Not upward movement; movement along a line, a vector traversing a (horizontal) plane bounded only from behind because of its own self-irreversible movement. This is a paradoxical geometry: only a horizon behind, 180 degrees opposite to the direction of motion. Turning around is turning towards death (that is, the moment of becoming from behind is a moment of death); moving forward is life. There is no turning ahead of this direction; one can only turn around (toward death). Ahead is an infinite space, but one that does not even define a horizon. There is only a horizon when one conceives of the space into which one moves as already existing. But if the space into which one moves is also itself creating/created in the motion or movement that is the going-forward (the being of becoming), then there cannot exist a ‘horizon’. This geometry or space is therefore paradoxical in the sense that it is open towards a horizon only from behind, as an infinitely pointed cone opens up behind itself, leaving an ever-widening trail opposite to the direction into which the cone is becoming. In ‘front’ of itself it is becoming or flowing—into Nothingness.

This (absolute) Nothingness determines nothing, exactly no horizon or boundary at all. In this direction is the creation of boundaries, the production of spaces within which horizons are determined. However, only by turning back does a horizon as such appear; in the direction of motion in this paradoxical space (perhaps best understood and theorized subtly by the great Japanese thinker Nishida Kitarō) —which is to say, in the direction of production—there is only a pure Nothingness as being of becoming. Life in this space is, if you will, a continual dying. Death, therefore, is its own self-static point—which is only a death-for-another. There is no death-for-self just because a self, as such, is always pointed in the direction of motion, towards being of becoming, and never dies. What is called death (i.e., for oneself) is never called death from any point within the self as being of becoming (it is never a true self-description; it is exactly equivalent to “I am lying” and so forth), but only from another self as being of becoming. That is, ‘death’ is always and only a death-for-another and so is always referred from a point within the life-as-continual-dying of another self as being of becoming.

In the direction of motion of this panta rhei, we see that there is no eternal recurrence. Here we must also repudiate that last vestige of Platonism even remaining within that Herculean (but more Promethean) endeavor of Nietzsche’s. There may be cycles or patterns; and thus we may speak conditionally about an “ethics” (of Nature, as “physics”; or of Society, as “political-economy”; and so on—all Sciences are mere studies of habits, and are therefore branches of Ethics properly speaking). But everything, as panta rhei, just because it moves without ceasing, is opening out towards the chaos-yawn which is being of becoming and so therefore never returns—either to itself or to another. Let us say that precisely because boundaries and horizons are created in this unceasing kinesis—that even creation is created, and creativity is itself under the sway of panta rhei—nothing returns, nothing repeats. Everything is open towards this pure Nothingness as creation of creation, production of production. Even possibility is itself created in the direction of motion of being of becoming.

As tilted kinetically towards Nothingness, being of becoming does not yield a ‘thing’, system, or self to repeat or be repeated. Repetition must itself be created, and in its creation hides that being of becoming. Or more precisely: it is the very creation (or becoming) of repetition itself (as cycles, patterns, habits—in general, folds within being of becoming) that is its first act of hiding. The game of thought is, therefore, the agony of 'hide (physis)-and-go-seek (logos)'. This is Nature, as Heraclitus was first to record gnomically as “Nature loves to hide”. Nature loves hiding; or nature is ‘one’ (united) with hiding.

The umbilical link between repetition and being of becoming (which may be conceptualized as with Deleuze in terms of “difference-in-itself”) is lost to representational thinking, esp. when it drifts into pure and unbounded Dialectics—Hegel's being the most egregious example of the loss of this umbilical linkage between repetition and being of becoming. All the illusions of Representation flow from here: philosophies of Identity, the sham games of idealism/realism, and so on. But the “illusions” are “real” illusions in the sense that they themselves rest upon being of becoming and are implications of it. We first assert the “reality” of Representation only to refute it as such, i.e., as re-presentation.

The standpoint of kinesis (or the “philosophy of movement”) adumbrated here is not representational; rather, is presentation(al), period. It is a gesture of offering. It draws toward, as presentation of being of becoming, or movement. It is ‘religious’, neither ‘philosophic’ (because it has repudiated and overturned it) nor ‘scientific’ (it rather founds a new standpoint from which a ‘science’ in a new sense can be formulated and pursued), nor even exactly ‘aesthetic’ (although it marks out a territory, as paradoxical geometry of mono-horizonal opening, that is, of freedom and openness—but in a Dionysian mode, and therefore does it give free reign of play for the human being as a creative, productive whole body-becoming). It is exploration of being of becoming, panta rhei.

Turning around, away from the direction of motion which we might define by the precise absence of a horizon as such (boundary) —in the direction of kinesis there is no horizon, no boundary (exactly because boundaries and horizons and the spaces within which they exist are being created, produced) —what do we find? We find ‘things’, selves, systems, that is, remnants of being of becoming. That is, we find history or the past. Looking out across this terrain of remnants of scattered remains of being of becoming we look into the face of death (death is before, life is ahead, so that our true birth lies in the direction of the being of becoming, the horizonless contradictory geometrical plane of openness). We look, that is, into the essence of Ethics, or habit. ‘Study’ (or in particular, the logos) always faces this death head-on and must make something of it. That is, logos or study must re-animate the remains it finds, turning it into a kind of zombie, which is (more favorably described) a reproduction of what could have been poised to face its future, that is: it is a play in which characters and things (and so on) are recreated and reanimated with the spirit of the being of becoming. They are recreated so as to have to face (again) the challenge of being of becoming; they are re-immersed in the panta rhei and must act again. It is a play of repetition par excellence. But its meaning or truth is a truth-for-us, that is, a truth for those who live, and never for those who are dead -- never a truth for death, only life and the living (those poised now towards being of becoming). Study is a continual reanimation of the past through the life of the being of becoming. As such it is, in truth, a play of life and living, but sours as soon as it is produced and then re-produced. Scholasticism is the rotting fruit of the true works of scholarship, which is play of becoming with the things that have become and which have, therefore, become already another. That is, the true living fruit of scholarship as a whole is experimentations of becoming.

Study is an implication of being of becoming itself, just because the act of becoming leaves behind it remnants or remains, which may be precisely described as the remains of ‘being’. To curate these remains is to study them. From this, through the act of the logos, an organization is (actively) determined—but with a crucial difference, that is, with the ‘difference’ or order being imposed by an act of thought. But what is ‘thought’?

Thought is a fold in the being of becoming, it is the fold. This is why Spinoza refused to institute either a duality between “mind” and “matter” or a hierarchy of God (as “highest mind”) and Nature (as organized by God, and therefore as highest form of “matter”). God or Nature, or both... Thought is always turned behind itself as ‘intentional’. It is an eternal slipping between control and un-control, a paradox of in-itself and for-itself (as another). But it is itself habit, formation of habit—but at the same time (paradoxically, again) the breakage or slippage of habit, or rather, an infinitely vanishing, liminal boundary between what has become (as past and dead) and what is becoming (as future and living). Between the here of thought and the there of non-thought there is an absolute boundary, in irreconcilable breakage because of an infinite slipping. It is an infinitesimally opening conical vector of absolute this-ness; it is experience of uniqueness. Thought is fold of uniqueness. It is always subject and always object—it is paradoxically both together. The paradox is that it itself can never encompass itself as subject only; nor can it encompass itself entirely as object either. Thought is the infinite movement between the two (partial) standpoints, because it is this partiality which it can never encompass completely by one or the other standpoints. And it can never be “accounted” as such—as “thought” or as either subject, object, neither or both. There is no “account” (theory) of thought just because it is the being of becoming of all theory. Theory must have this singularity point, a point at which the equation between itself (theorizer and moment of theoretical becoming) and its object (theorized) and its other breaks down because the ratio between them is undefined (or rather, undefinable).

The untheorizability of thought (and the variations on the theory of thought: subjectivity, selfhood, and so on) is at the heart of Spinoza's philosophy—a greatly neglected philosopher even today. Mind and Matter are spilled equally out upon an infinite ontological plane, the one defined in terms of the other and vice versa; a ‘horizonal’ and absolutely symmetric equation is therefore produced. The relation between the two is given in terms of affectus, a planar field of essential inter-determination.

Thus we may quite easily dismiss ‘theories of subjectivity’ (or accounts of thought) as yet more (albeit real) illusions produced as a consequence of the being of becoming: the fold. Yet, let us place emphasis on the “reality” of this illusion: our question is what “truth” they do hold just because they are consequence of being of becoming ... this determines their Nietzschean value (if there be any to be found). What “hides” or is hidden in these ‘theories’? That is the form our question must take, if it now dwells within the standpoint of kinesis. It is like the question as to what forces overtake the Platonic soul, the Cartesian soul, the Hegelian ... it is the banished and banned sophistical question that is put to the man himself who theorizes and poses theories. We look to the being of becoming of the theory as itself product. We look to the one who proffers it. If it has value, then its value lies in experimentations of selfhood or subjectivity, clearings for the being of becoming of self... But our ultimate measure of the value of the theory will be the measure of its opening forth beyond itself, its reckoning with those forces of destruction and creation which carry us along beyond thing, system, self. Do we find mere curatorial conservation? Or unflinching embrace of what cannot be “known” in advance? This is no mere “critique” or “criticism”; rather, this gaze into the works of theory are creative gazes, seeking to produce what it is that could be, or taking down what is to refashion it for the possible, i.e., the future. But these must be works of love.

There must be a gap or breakage in any theory of thought (or of matter) —which is thought itself (or the matter itself). The very “thing itself” is the cypher for this impossible fusion or reconciliation of the study and theory to the object itself. Rather, the act of theorizing accomplished by the theorizer will always circulate, coming round and round and in this circulation create the object itself. Its posits and positions are just so many (faltering) attempts to determine what will not be finally determined at all, just because theory is itself caught in the loving embrace of panta rhei. In this way has Western thought so excelled in the negative determinations of critique—from Socrates onward. Working with remnants, Western critique gives the semblance of decisiveness, since it excludes from its own self-determination the forces of creation at work through the theoretical act itself, producing the theory from depths (necessarily) “unknown”. This does not render (from the standpoint of kinesis) all theory (including even ‘scientific’ theories) false; rather, more realistically, it renders them necessarily contingent and limited—and alive.

Just because they work in the direction 180 degrees opposed to panta rhei (being of becoming), they work from within an already established plane, in which, therefore, there is always perceptible (and so conceivable) a clear horizon or boundary. At infinity this horizon itself, however, is indeterminate and therefore leaves the theory unknowingly incomplete—always. In truth this backwards planar field discloses a horizon that drops away indeterminately at infinity and is itself always slipping away. But there is a horizon nonetheless, as slippery and as indeterminate as it is. This slipping away at infinity is the immediate point of disclosure when, turned around to meet the being of becoming head-on, we are faced with the infinite creation of spaces and horizons right ahead. The horizons behind the direction of motion are slipping just because, in the direction of motion itself, there is a movement ... but into Nothingness.

Seeing this limitation we are able to derive specific results from the specific content of any theory making this futile attempt to turn round and theorize the subject, the self, or the objects of the 'material world' and so on—in the old philosophical-cum-metaphysical mode of theoretical reflection. Each discloses a characteristic power or force animating it; and this takes us to the specifically 'historical' dimensions of its thinking (even if it seems to be a-historical in character).

This traversal into Nothingness as being of becoming is the ‘necessity of contingency’ some now speak about, but as already explained, in this direction of being of becoming the supposed problem of “correlationism” is abolished (it is simply not a ‘problem’ any longer, or rather, the premises from which it begins are rendered inert). Part of the abolishment of this problem comes from a surprising direction. Given a soft underpinning of pragmatism, with the theoretical edge of Deleuze, let us explore the concept of ‘function’. Deleuze says that it is this sort of concept that is fundamental to science. Scientific concepts are functional, that is, rooted in functions. So, what is a function-concept?

III

The Kinesthetic Dialectics of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy

A function in mathematics, to switch to a close neighbor of science, is a procedure for the production of numerical values or quantities, which can themselves be depicted or represented in some geometrical fashion: by the movement of one collection of mathematical elements towards or away from another. In this sense Descartes is the master-thinker of function-concepts, having determined clearly an “analytic” geometry, linking geometrical with functional-arithmetical forms. Functions here are recipes for the production—or we may say generation—of forms. Science as we know it historically (as a matter of the past and what has passed before us) is inconceivable and impossible without function-concepts. They are a means of grasping kinesis, that essence which science has always struggled to represent and to know in detail (forms and processes of movement).

The simple mathematical equation f(x) = x of course determines a line; but more importantly, it draws together two collections of elements which are mathematically identical yet which, in the relation established by the function expressed here, creates a new form from the two identities. Indeed, the most general expression of what this function accomplishes is given by a description of the (general) ‘product’ of a certain space of numbers (say, the reals) with itself. And more specifically, though no less generally, mathematicians describe a function in terms of the concepts of a ‘mapping’, with the property that every element of the domain of elements denoted ‘f(x)’ corresponds to one and only one element in the domain produced by the functional relation, denoted ‘x’.

Indeed, focusing just on the productive aspect of the function-concept, we see that it is, in a sense, asymmetric with respect to the productive action itself: the ‘x’ in f(x) = x is the product of the simple linear relation between the set of numbers used as inputs and the produced outputs—in this case, it is one-for-one: if f(x) takes ‘1’, we simply get ‘1’ as output. But the two, even though mathematically identical, determine, by virtue of this functional relation, a new form, an element against itself. Taking this through to the set of all positive integers produces a line, and in a regular Cartesian coordinate system this produces a line at a 45 degree angle with respect to the two coordinate axes. That is, the f(x) here may be used to produce a graph of a line, with the vertical axis representing the values or elements denoted ‘f(x)’—i.e. the collection of input values—and the horizontal axis representing the collection of output values. The function itself is only represented by the line; the vertical and horizontal axes merely representing the two sets of elements that will be joined in the relation ‘f(x) = x’. This third element itself corresponds to neither f(x) nor to x on their own; nor does it exactly correspond to both. The line is a certain determinate and specific product of the two: a linear product represented by f(x) = x, the stress now having to be placed on the equality. It is this equality or equation that produces the line, and gives us a characteristic functional relation. Neither set of elements, that is neither f(x)—which is simply the open set {0, 1, 2, 3, …}—nor x itself—which is again the same open set {0, 1, 2, 3, …}—corresponds to a geometrical object. Rather the two equated in the functional relation establish the geometrical form. Reversing the logic, we might say that a line may be decomposed into elements and these elements might be brought into exact correspondence with the set of integers. But in both cases, the form—whether geometrical when moving from the integers to the line, or arithmetical when moving from the line to the integers—is a product of some procedure or action.

The function is inherently productive, and hence, “motive”. It is in itself kinetic, and stands for—stands in the place of, that is to say: re-presents—a kind of motion or movement. Its elementary forms are therefore the generators of the motion of thought. Yet, the thought that thinks these mathematical forms is able to proceed without having to produce the necessary and implied forms. One needn’t generate actually a line (or whatever actual geometrical form is implied by the relevant function) in order to consider the function itself; moreover, it is possible, by considering functions as a whole abstractly (i.e., independently of either any particular determinate geometrical representation, or the specific content of any particular equation), to determine certain mathematical truths about all functions without ever producing a single one of them (that is, without ever having to work thought the particular implied movements or generative forms of each and every function); rather, mathematical thought proceeds with them abstractly, that is, at the level of pure representational form: from the concrete and geometrically implicit ‘f(x) = x’, to the more abstract (and geometrically indeterminate) ‘f: Y →X’, and so on. Herein lies the profound power of mathematics, but also its hidden and esoteric qualities—its initial obscurity. Its root in the movement of thought, which is itself being of becoming, is hidden by the second-hand abstract forms of algebra, that is, by the symbolic-formal linguistic representations given to mathematical function-concepts (a highly rule-governed system of expressions and symbolic forms, manipulable to an extent without creative insight, which rote manipulability ends the moment deeper proofs are required for more remote regimes of abstraction).

If we now interpose also two more fields of productivity and movement—that of observation (or phenomenological description procedures) and experimentation (in which a technological component is added, usually deeply wed to the phenomenological description-procedure)—then we arrive at the essential standpoint of Western science. That is, we arrive at the science of the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’, the science determined by Kepler, Galileo, Newton and many others during the 16^th and 17^th centuries (and beyond).

The great power and force of this new mathematical science was (and is) its subjection of representational ideas of nature, formed now phenomenologically from out of an idealization of a certain isolated situation into which a part of nature is put, to various tests or experiments. But before this Galileanism could begin to take hold, first observation had to be released to the actuality of mathematical forms without imposing a constraint of geometric regularity or inner rational organization not itself a function of what could be (in this specific case, visually) discerned and tabulated typographically. Kepler’s wrestling with those infamous “eight minutes of arc” in order to determine that the shape that describes the orbit of Mars is not circular (as it was demanded to be from Plato to Aristotle) but elliptical shows him forging a linkage between philosophical concepts and observational data, for which his “laws” were thought to be a kind of reconciliation—a stage in the ultimate discovery of some “harmony” in the sky. Yet, this was ultimately determined from (and hence a direct product of) the observational data, constituted in actuality by various points in an implicitly functional relationship: i.e., we have an ‘x’ or observed position in the sky of a certain (wandering) visible point, and we have a ‘y’ or the times of observation (which is itself measured relative to the daily solar cycle); and this was (descriptively) summarized in terms of the Equal Areas in Equal Times “law” eventually (through painstaking effort of imagination) posited by Kepler. In this case, the geometrical form was laid bare in a series of functionally related points, and the law-equation was its “solution” or general (and abstract) form.

Yet, this achieved (for later science—for later thinkers like Newton) only so much as an exacting description of what itself required “explanation”. The obvious question was (even to Kepler himself): if the motion of this planet describes an ellipse (rather than a circle), then what cause brings it about—how is it that it is this geometrical form produced, rather than some other? Thus the search for the “underlying” cause begins. The search begins anew for productive forces. Yet, without Galileanism, Newton’s search would not have left the realm of the purely phenomenological, and purely descriptive. The link to the conditions of actual experimentation with isolatable parts of nature opens this purely descriptive and phenomenological procedure to the spontaneity and nothingness of nature in itself, the point at which the representable and the conceivable and therefore knowable is opened out onto the sub-representative, un-conceptualized and therefore (radically) unknown. Here is where the “truth” of science is born for the first time.

A common distinction in professional philosophy is made between two “theories” of truth. There is the “coherence theory” of truth, in which truth is determined exclusively by the internal relations between statements; and there is the “correspondence” theory of truth in which, on the contrary, truth is supposed to be determined by the relation between a statement and a “fact” external to it. The problem into which much professional philosophy gets itself entangled is the compunction to have to (also) explicate what a ‘fact’ is—just in order to maintain absolute consistency with the theory of truth itself. There threatens an absolute paradox of self-referentiality.

However, what this supposed “theory” hides is the deeper reality that “truth” is just the openness of statements, propositions, claims, and so on to the indeterminateness of what has not been propositionally represented, or what stands just before, after, underneath or above the propositionally representable. The deeper reality is that propositions always fail to exactly represent what they intend to represent, except when they represent other propositions. Thus, the power of mathematics comes precisely because it is essentially tautologous in the sense that it refers only to itself (albeit at increasingly more abstract levels). And yet, because of this self-referential character, to the extent that a proposition intends to speak truthfully about itself, it eventuates in an aporia that cannot be closed propositionally. That is, even when propositions refer to themselves, there is a necessary hole: the self-referential proposition becomes sub-propositional because, in referring to itself, it immediately obtains the capacity to negate itself (“This statement is not true”). This simply means that the true must be externally determined—it must come from outside of itself. There must always be a system or ‘fact’ (or whatever) outside the (base) system in order for a ‘truth’ to obtain. Truth is only through this otherness.

Now of course—and we can take mathematics as a prime example—this “otherness” can always be another system of propositions of some degree of (representational) power and abstraction. So it looks as though “coherence” theories are the ones to be invoked for mathematics. Yet, we see that a kind of mixture must always be employed, just because of the “incompleteness” and necessary alterity of propositional systems (of sufficient complexity and representational power: as this complexity and power increases, the completeness diminishes rapidly). There is always an “external fact” required to achieve ‘truth’. Even the trick of arithmetical claims, used by Kant to show that some are true in virtue of the “internal relations” of the (singular) propositions themselves, fails upon scrutiny. “A triangle is a three-sided object whose interior angles sum to 180 degrees” requires, of course, explication, every part of which requires a stage of abstraction and therefore the actual production of a concept. (We think of extreme empiricism here—Hume perhaps.) What is unseen is the “normative” or regulative function of the latter portion of the statement: is becomes an ‘ought’ and then a ‘must’, so that in fact we have: “a triangle must be such-and-such”. The free act of imaginative creation of the Greek (or Euclidean) tradition becomes stabilized as a norm of geometric thought. In other words, we produce an a priori and “analytic” truth by the elimination of the dimension of production and movement within (in this case) the (geometric) thought itself. Hence, non-Euclidean ideas vanish from the possible by a hidden normative move, and the apparatus of “reason” created to retro-actively “justify” these truths, making reason appear desiccated and drained of internal motion (remember it was the intuition of time that gives Kant the most difficulty, and it was Kant, as Deleuze demonstrated, that determines time not to be a measure change, but change itself to be a measure of ‘time’).

The history of Mathematics itself, however, demonstrates the widening scope of forms so elevated to the status of “analytical” (i.e., dead and motionless or static) “truths”. Only by suppressing this productive and sub-representational or sub-propositional level (the level at which the concepts are created or generated and inwardly animated) can the trick of the a priori and analytically true be pulled off. And this gives to mathematics its airy power, as it then looks to generate proofs for its (axiomatizable) propositions. The motion returns to mathematical thought only because of its production of “demonstrations”, in which the “things” or concepts created in this field return to thinking and search for a certain form of expression (premise to conclusion, a creative reversal). Spinoza (as read by Deleuze) grasped this most profoundly. To “explain [explicare],” writes Deleuze of Spinoza’s conception of it,

is not … an operation of the intellect external to the thing, but an operation of the thing internal to the intellect. Even demonstrations are said to be ‘eyes’ of the mind, meaning that they perceive a movement that is in the thing. Explication is always self-explication, a development, an unfolding, a dynamism; the thing explains itself. (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 68.)

A mathematical proof supplies the soil, air, water and light, so to speak, within which a set of mathematical ideas can find a motion or movement proper to it (proper—though not always singular, for there are often numerous non-identical systems of propositions within which a given set of mathematical ideas can be proven). But with mathematics, it is the mathematical ideas themselves that are re-rooted in the intellect, where they in turn move in a certain determinate way. A proof is the image of this (internal) motion. Thus, the semiology of mathematical proof involves productive (and producing) signs, signs that are actualized, activated and which produce affects, that is: symbols which are actually performed and therefore released as motive elements in the intellect of the mathematician. They are external objects (typographical elements, in some material medium) that are in turn literally “subjected”, actively, to the movement of thought by their active performance. In this sense mathematical texts are musical scores—not metaphorically, but literally and exactly. But we have in fact a dialectic, just in the way that Adorno tried to comprehend musical composition: a dialectic between external (and static) form (something itself produced and therefore possessing a history of its own—a history of notation and interpretation and so on), and the dynamical internal motion—the “content” that is the mathematical thinking itself. We have an “in itself” and a “for itself”.

But the breakthrough to absolute otherness occurs only in the Scientific Revolution, and so to continue we must resume our consideration of the movement from Kepler to Galileo and Newton. Here the “correspondence” conception of truth becomes increasingly more relevant (to the point where today, it is the reigning theory—albeit in a radically ideological and therefore falsified form). The procedure of Galileo’s was to tinker with the natural world (to have some encounter with it, under certain specially designed and purposeful conditions), produce a phenomenological reduction of some aspect of the natural world, and then (finally) to conduct an “experiment” first in thought, and then (perhaps) outside of thought (that is, to return to those specially designed conditions of nature itself). Within these bounds a concept or expression is produced, just as Kepler achieved by wrestling with those “eight minutes of arc” but with a crucial difference: Galileo could imagine and actually undertake a manipulation of the experimental configuration—nature could be tinkered with in a way in which Kepler’s observations were strictly beyond human intervention or manipulation: they just were. Indeed, many if not all of Galileo’s thought-experiments entail precisely imagining counter-factual situations closely grounded in what he could (or could not) actually himself do within the experimental situation he could (actually) establish. However—and this is yet another crucial and perhaps surprising difference from Kepler—whereas Kepler aimed at exacting description and summarization via mathematical formulae, Galileo aimed to make a propositional inference from these thought-experiments, an inference which leads to his major concepts. The concepts produced here aim towards a kind of liberation from thought and achieve a new kind of correspondence with mathematical concepts, that is, with functions.

If we examine, for example, Galileo’s though-experiment of the rolling ball used to infer that such an object would continue moving forever (assuming no frictional resisting force), being compelled only by its initial downward motion (toward the Earth), we find that the actual situation observable is used to produce the conditions for an “infinite” result which could, in turn, be called a “law” or a description of the action or motion of the object itself. In order to arrive at the relevant inference, however, it is necessary to continually increase the angle at which the object approaches to second inclined plane, until the second plane is exactly identical with the imagined planar surface towards which it falls from a given height. We arrive at the following conclusion: as the angle with respect to this planar surface tends to zero, the time it takes this object to return back to its initial height tends to infinity; thus, the object moving now downward towards the Earth will never reaching the height ever again: it now moves along the second (now exactly horizontal) plane forever, which is to say, crucially, so far as can be thought. Yet this is not the final conclusion, for in fact we would seem to have reached a conclusion about the thought thinking the situation, and not about the object and its motion in itself. Rather, this conclusion is transformed from a ‘truth’ (in the medieval sense of adequation) into a boundary or limiting condition of the actual (observable and material) situation: the actual is a special case of the infinite (or “ideal”), the finite a special condition of the infinite.

We see, then, that what Galileo is establishing is a functional dependency of the affective phenomenology of the reductive/observational act and the material world from which it (now) derives the relevant elements with which the thought can produce a certain characteristic movement (in the inference-to-conclusion). Given that thought is already being subjected, even in its phenomenological procedure, to mathematical/geometrical forms, the result of its activity—the characteristic movement disclosed in the inferential act—can be summarized in terms of a purely mathematical expression. And, crucially, it takes the form of a certain characteristic ratio, which in turn will describe a functional relationship between two mathematical quantities or ‘magnitudes’ (to employ more modern terminology). Hence, Galileo must also introduce a very modern distinction, that between “primary” and “secondary” qualities, the former of which being those which can stand in this functional relationship and be subjected to the metric of a real-number line (and in turn related to a certain larger spatiotemporal coordinating framework), the latter of which remain fully unique and immune to the establishment of such a strictly mathematical-functional relationship because fully “in itself” (and never for another—the “secondary qualities” are the absolutely singular which refuse externalization under the conditions of the experimental design).

We find with Galileo that conditions are produced in which thought can be brought into uniform correspondence with movements external to itself, and then these external movements are activated by a process of thinking external to the situation itself, at which point the movement of the mathematically produced ideas corresponding to the relevant elements of the external situation move in a certain way, producing a result or “inference”—the latter being a productive consequence of the former. In this brilliant (if not confused) Platonic inversion, the very notion and reality of “experimentation” is created. Manipulability, control—the elementary conditions for a “test” of a theory—become primary epistemic moments of the paradigm of Science. Kepler’s descriptive observational exactitude achieves a closer relation to the otherness of the natural world; indeed, this new science is brought closer to its own conditions of (determinate) verification, confirmation and refutation. Science becomes the attempt to discern its own immanent limits—those implicit in the very conditions within which the manipulation and control of the natural world has been achieved. It is now always the labor of those “eight minutes of arc”, where its negation is found within the noise and error-bars of its own experimental determinations.

The “correspondence theory of truth”, then, really designates the coordinates of that otherness to which science must subject itself in order for its ‘truth’ to be determined. A ‘fact’ is a production that emerges from this Galilean machine. It indicates at once what can be actualized and achieved and under what conditions it can be so done. A ‘fact’ is a recipe. In itself it is sub-representational and therefore unknown as such (as represented): it necessarily eludes the net of concepts used to appropriate or indicate and capture it as such. As represented, it merely launches the knower or grasper of it into a landscape of theoretical determinations, each of which require “explication” and therefore production—always in principle possible. ‘Fact’ only stands for the location (and locality) of the battle between finite and infinite, the indication of a juncture of performance, the coming together of thought and nature upon a plane of struggle which is life in and of itself (a life, as Deleuze says, is immanence, a pure plane of immanence; a ‘fact’, then, is a zone of immanence). As zone of immanence, it is a disclosure of a great possibility of agonism, the play of nature under the tenuous provenance of human manipulation and control. It is a contraction of the actual into a zone of the virtual, a place where the void is filled with a virtual space of pure but determinate movement. But as its interior is located, and as its depths are probed, it threatens to dissolve into a pure opening which is the first moment of the science of nature itself, repeated infinitely in the interior of the ‘fact’. Every fact is therefore also at the same time a cypher for the agony of nature, that is, semiology of performance. What is atomic weight—if not the disclosure of the requirement to probe the interior of the atom itself, to look sideways at the greater dream of the infinite contained in the larger space of transformations, at higher and higher energies? Surpassing the apparent solidity of the atom, looking at its so-called constituents, releasing the flows of energy, the “desire” of the material is liberated, and the desire of the thought of nature itself enkindled, so that the two are drawn together and the lack of one is the fulfillment of the other. The production of the representations of the infinite interior of this ‘fact’ yields the infinite movement of thought necessary to traverse this interior, so that the ‘in itself’ becomes a ‘for another’. A ‘fact’ then is nothing but an invitation, the semiology of travel, and the vectoral articulation of the possibility of thought moving at an infinite speed. For every articulation of the “in itself” or the being, there is a flow, a becoming, which thought is invited to move into. Science, then, is the unending movement of the being of becoming itself—it “is” what it seeks to represent, so that only by performing nature (and nature performing mind) is the “real” disclosed as such, underneath, behind, above and below (simultaneously) the science as such.

The only adequate philosophical system here for the arrangement of this “real”, the being of becoming or the philosophy of movement (kinesis), is one in which movement (as “encompassing”), thought and matter are allowed free reign upon the same (ontological) plane, which we may define as a “plane of immanence”. Using existing philosophical paradigms, we might pull together, in a perhaps unappealingly syncretic mode, the philosophies of Spinoza, Lucretius, Bergson, Hume and Nietzsche (and James)—as against Descartes (and Newton himself), Kant and the “Platonic” Plato—in a manner indicated in the philosophical explications of these thinkers accomplished by a philosopher such as Deleuze (or Michel Serres).

IV

Movement In and Of Itself

The very first order of work for the philosopher of movement is to draw from the philosophy of movement those principles that will constitute the groundwork for a future activity—which may “only” be the activity of thinking itself, gathered upon that infinite, democratic “plane of immanence” referred to above. When it comes time to write out the “principles of a philosophy”, then the first order of work is to determine an articulation of the “to on” which will itself be constitutive of the being of the philosopher who makes its articulation thematic. That is, the act of writing principles is constitutive of the thinker thinking them into written form, and is an element of the being of the thinker. In this way the writing is constituted objectively in the subjective activity of the thinking, and the thinking is constituted objectively by the subjectivization of the principles themselves as the activity of the thinker. An unbroken relation is determined, punctuated in time like the stamps given to a materially produced object. Movement is being transformed, reestablished, redirected, shunted and so on—but movement there always is. But no movement is ever final or “determinative”—there is no “end” as decisive terminus. Thus, we in effect have the being of (unending and infinitely differentiable) becoming. A “statement of principles” just clarifies the line of flight—an initial flight-path. It works out a zone of immanence, and indicates the potentiality for growth and rhizomatic flow. It is always false just so long as it remains ink upon the page; it flows into thinking and into action (always falsifying itself and overcoming itself) to the extent to which it is subjected to the tribunal of thought. It is the material with which thinking is undertaken, and contributes or imparts something of itself to that activity, as the activity of the thinker thinking itself imparts something of itself to the words thought. In this regard, we have here a solitary and wholly individualistic endeavor. But this cannot remain the case, for the lines of flight draw the thinker into the tremors and abysses of history, and to the world beyond the page—and this is the place where the page and the thinker encounter otherness and difference-in-itself, but only as a secondary affair, for the very first and most elementary moment of otherness and difference is the thinker in itself—and the thinker must decide, what is life that there is thinking? What is this otherness that is always the residuum of thinking, this “essence” which always remains unthought right within thought itself? This is “life”—the differentiating outward “egg” of becoming out of which thought emerges in order just to repeat itself, and see itself, following haplessly the dialectics of recognition—something which haunts it for as long as the thinking thinks thought (Hegel is the Owl who takes flight at dusk—seeing in the blackness and under the cover of Night prey, food, nourishment from the already-living; this is thinking itself, always taking from presuppositions, “the given” and digesting it beyond recognition).

The principles, that is, should encapsulate an infinite motion or motility that only through thinking the principles in and of themselves, thought is drawn outward and becomes the “egg” of becoming that is its only life. Therefore, we claim that ‘life’ is a contradictory monad, a curl of life/death. While alive, life is a nuptial affair with death; upon death, the nuptial is nullified so that what remains is the ‘or’ of an eternal either/or over which the life was endlessly fought. During life, there is the both/and of the absolutely contradictory matrix life-death; at death (and this is its conceptual definition in the philosophy of movement) we have the consummation of the either/or—the remaining ‘or’—that is the first proposal at life (which constitutes its conceptual definition in the philosophy of movement). Life begins by annihilating the contradictory matrix, and ends by denying this denial. What occurs at both ends is the denial of “either/or”; in between (which constitutes the life as such) is the agony (or agonism) that ensues between the “either” and the “or”—which is the both/and. Prior to the emergence of (a) life, only the “either” exists as a suspension of possibilities, and they collapse into the both/and at birth, which in turn (teleologically) is oriented towards the conclusion of the initial either/or … we find the last act to be the “or”, which determines the life to be a something or other, determinately. The in-between stages are nothing but the movement from the virtual to the actual, and at death, only the actuality of the “or” remains … the final “choice” that affirms the totality of a concrete life in and of itself, as against the abstract possibilities contained in the moment prior to being born (relative to the person who becomes and lives this becoming-unto-death). At this final choice in death, the life itself becomes a determinate life, not factually but by the virtual reconfiguration that ensues when this final choice occurs. In other words, it “returns” to the status of virtuality—but in this case, the “or” stands in asymmetric relation to the “either”: in the first case, there is an infinity, in the latter, there is the concrete finitude of the determinate “or”, which establishes a determinate line of flight in the virtual, and can never be perturbed. In the former, the being of the becoming is an indeterminate infinitude (and hence a terrible freedom, a “false” freedom); in the latter, the being of the becoming constitutes now a determinate infinitude (and hence a true and real freedom).

[The thought remains here incomplete]

Movement “in and of itself” must always entail the destruction of a prior determination of movement, ending both its abstract form in thought, and its correlative determinate in matter. This is what the absolute democratic plane of immanence gives us: an agonizing battlefield, a war over the “thoughtful” determination in matter of the idea, and the material encompassing of thought that renders the thinking indeterminate (not quite an annihilation, but more like a scrambling or dispersion). The problem of the “origins” of life, or the “emergence” of thought from matter, or the absurd inversion of (false) idealism—the spiritualization of matter from thought considered as absolute and transcendent, etc.—is rendered not merely moot in a purely (bad) speculative sense, but philosophically inconclusive. No material “account” of the origin or emergence of thought from matter is possible just because the accounting itself necessarily surpasses the attempt to (retrospectively) determine the “truth” (as in correspondence). Gödel’s theorem is an existentialism, not a Platonism. Only “thought” will discover and “know” thought—and here the ancient dictum should be recovered for use (most especially anti-Platonically): “only like can know like”. Thought can only stand in correlation with thought, matter with matter. The Cartesian duality is, as the neo-Hegelians say, a psychoanalytical (and we could say, a logico-existential) and therefore necessary aporia. Thought is an infinite folding between (two or more) material systems, each with material properties; it is otherness both to itself and for others. The coils of the brain itself and the incessant and obsessive theories of complexity that try to ground thought materially should be read phrenologically, not just metaphorically. Both the attempt to reduce thought to matter, and the attempt to reduce matter (somehow) to thought are false and pretend philosophical positions; the presuppose a conclusiveness that cannot be achieved because it works against itself by positing a transcendence either in the direction of matter, or in the direction of thought. Descartes was right, just as Husserl understood almost a century ago, but what he discovered was the existential-psychoanalytical terrain that is the abyss one is lead to by pursuing the specter of truth as adequation—Descartes brings Aquinas to the brink of this internal abyss, and forces Aquinas to watch as that abyss gradually stares him back in the face. In fact, that abyss is a conflagration, an infinite burning—a desire, unquenchable but because of that, irresistible and obsessive.

Without the kinesthesis liberated by the philosophy of movement, we have two choices: Hegel or Spinoza. Beneath them stands the cataclysmic shaking of Kierkegaard on the one hand (faith) and the earth-quaking brought about by the Titan Nietzsche (instinct). Spinoza allows thought and matter to stand together, but lacks the agony of faith between them—thus the specter of Kierkegaard looms beyond Deus sive Natura, and haunts the “sive”, sifting the debris and scattering the remains of the splitting chaos that faith awakens as the singular is affirmed over the (new) absolute and universal “sive” that gathers Deus (on one side—the absolute Thought) and Natura on the other (the absolute Thing). This comfortable alliance, this indissoluble correlation between thought and thing seems to allow for an absolute relation, and, just because of its indivisibility and strict correlationism, allows for no terror and pain that is not itself an illusion because not producible by the mechanics of the absolute Sive. Kierkegaard perturbs this perfect theodicy, and finds the Beast and Darkness right within the Or. He transforms the former (Deus) into absolute singular freedom, the latter (Natura) into the vacuum of freedom dispersed. Neither Deus nor Natura, but the god of the gaps, the roving terrible fright of freedom in the midst of the Or itself. Kierkegaard’s great faith negates both in favor of neither—but the Or in and of itself. There must be a fundamental struggle, an uncertainty to awaken plain essence into existence—and this in the end is eliminated by Spinoza from the being of the immanence of God or Nature. Unknowingness, loss, pain, rupture—agony in a primal sense—gives existence where only essence was to be found. Empedocles has found a home in Abraham’s tabernacle. And Science is the mythology of awakening to this terror—the abyss of matter, and when the materialist looks for thought, thinking it can be “accounted”, finds yet another abyss. Some call this the “Two Voids”. Indeed. The either/or of Kierkegaard grasps these voids only by a leaping into them, that is, a kinesthetic puncture of the abyss presented by Deus or Natura—a movement into the heart of the abyss as such. What are the materialist reductionists looking for when they turn science upon their on activity as accountants of natural processes? They are looking for themselves, but positing a transcendent essence—a “matter”—which necessarily escapes even the most elementary physical sciences. Having not even a firm grasp of its own internal materialist foundation, it, in turn, looks for what is already unknown within a realm that, from its own side, is yet another void, a trip into a swirl of questions—desire, searching. The essence of matter is unknown because that which they seek is already subject, that is, already in motion beyond itself as “essence”. The materialist of the day (and we exclude the archaeological excavations of Michel Serres, who attempts to reanimate atomism for present and future purposes) first falsifies matter in an attempt to “account for” (i.e., explain) thought. In fact, this is absurd just working from Spinoza’s conception: the fundamental elements of our “material” conception are already the affective expression in thought what we seek in matter. Even before the materialist sets out to explain the “origins”, the thing itself (in and of itself) already explains itself. Thought is self-explicative and this is the first paradox which science, just because its first premise is itself already internally inconsistent and paradoxical, cannot grasp for itself (i.e., for its own epistemological easement). Yet, from still another Spinozan point of view, we can see that the attempt to determine a conceptual picture of thought from concepts that are supposedly material (or “natural”—what is still worse), really is the ongoing development of a strict correlation between the material things and thought. And this is all that it can hope for, in classic scientific fashion: a grand correlational mapping, which only yields mere information about the manipulation, intervention and (finally) control of the brain as instrumentality of discipline and organization. This can only end with the nuclear explosion exacted upon the “mind” as the final realm of privacy: the establishment of a system of rigid control through the direct incorporation of materials technologically and scientifically fashioned for the purposes of enabling “external” control, manipulation and intervention into the cranial material. This materialism only ends in unfreedom through a dual falsification of both materialism and idealism, a negation of both “matter” and “mind”, for the techno-scientific control by direct internal joining (of “man and machine”) always discloses not the either/or of one’s own existence, but the forcible and vulgar either/or imposed first by the specificity of the machinic element itself—something never itself able to be controlled or otherwise (existentially) determined. Only a ghetto of techno-scientific “freedom” is enabled, even at the expense of the void and abyss of the material reality in and of itself, for the open horizon of scientific exploration, and the possibility of it determinately overcoming itself in favor of the new: all this is decisively lost each time the inertia of technics accomplishes a juncture to/with the human in itself (and becomes an in “itself” for the human as such—like when human memory is inversely determined in relation to a memory-bank: the Internet, etc.; who owns the bank and mints the currency?). And this is why Spinoza is not enough; one must pierce Spinoza’s “or” by the Kierkegaardian abyssal leaping. So the embrace by the sober analysts of the mind of “neutral monism” must be combatted with the ontology (let alone the ethics) of ambiguity and absolute alterity.

While the sober, centrist and reconciliatory—those who construe philosophy as nothing but an ongoing debate[1], hemmed in by the strictures (illusory) supplied by an arch-arbiter, Reason— while the sober-minded analysts and accountants look to Spinoza to clear the air of materialist reductionism in science (so that they can move on with their own pet-philosophies of one sort or another), the radicalists and champions of revolution of various sorts, look, teary-eyed, to the great Father, Hegel, for solace, for clarity (!) and for progress (but ultimately, have they allowed the ideology of progress to drop from Hegel’s Owl of Dialectics, like scales which obscure and cloud—leading philosophy to contort the dynamism of its own compulsions into the Procrustean bed of the absolutely contemporary?). Nietzsche is the earth quaking beneath the dialectics. The dialectical unfolding of Hegel’s Spirit itself wears only the mask of fear over this trembling and splitting and fissuring of the earth, the titanic call of “instinct”. First this must be falsified—forced—to become Desire and, even deeper, the Drives. Instinct must be simultaneously depersonalized and personalized for the Spirit (it has its own personal, absolute alterity—lost in the Desires of the Other, the impulsions of Drive), so that it can claim it for its own. But before this, Hegel must be himself falsified—or else his name used to hide a torturously “new” philosophy whose true result is the reassertion and reanimation of the dying spirit of a people—Europe—who try to think universally but only end up thinking their universe (to ruin). The Hegelian System is not allowed to fly to bits; rather, the bits are assembled into a supposedly new materialism, struggling now to determine a “materialist theory of subjectivity”—thus reproducing the struggle to “account for”. It is the same procedure here as we found above with the materialist reductionists (who are much more philosophically naïve and perhaps in this regard more honest). With the heaviness of “theory”, the neo-Hegelian mounts the Owl, plucks its feathers, and lets it fly naked—now installed with an artificial Eye, giving us the panoptical view we have always desired. While the materialist reductionist at least starts with (what they posit as) “matter”, only to enter into a futile struggle to stay with matter and nothing but, the neo-Hegelian is saddled with the burden of first taking thought and removing a false (and mystifying) materialism, supplying a new materialism with the Eye of the System inserted into it (to give it a real and demystified mechanism of motion), so that we can turn the Void you are left with in (for them) the false materialism into the infinitely transparent (for the System) Voids of thought and thing. They accomplish what they say cannot be accomplished; they grasp what is ungraspable on their own account. As with the materialist reductionism of (some of) our contemporary natural philosophers, the paradox of encompassure is reproduced at a second-order level of theoretical activity. And it is here that the subterranean shifts and seismic displacements are missed—falsified. The impasse of “theory” vs. “praxis” is, perhaps, here most pronounced, since the “transcendental horizon” (which for the neo-Hegelians is perhaps their arch-problematic)—a reality produced as an epiphenomenal and supposedly necessary second-order effect—now is both its condition sine qua non and its theoretical problem. Gödel’s existential theorem returns with a vengeance—the return of the repressed. The conditions of possibility for theory, to use a formula they love now to employ and deploy ad infinitum, are also precisely its conditions of impossibility. What enables, existentially, the standpoint of theory itself—its necessary gestures of negation and of withdrawal and of personal/subjective excision (the tremors of universalism that quake at its central-most existential locus)—also disables it to the extent to which theory searches for a view or determinate place from which there exists no horizon beyond which it cannot (definitely and determinately) go, that is, it seeks to infinitely and eternally surpass all horizons as such—as delimitations of its own (existential)activity; and, its enabling condition disables it precisely because, furthermore, that horizon from which the theoretical must be posited as an “over against” can never be reached in order that it can be overcome, since to theorize is to step outside and look from a distance. Yet, it struggles futilely to internalize this distance as an ‘always-already’, without recognizing the obvious—which is that Nietzsche’s pathos of distance is distance and nothing but distance. It doesn’t seek to draw near, nor to internalize the alterity, but to redouble it by standing apart. In this sense, Nietzsche’s will-to-power is exactly opposite to the force of physical gravity: power is directly proportional to distance, and independent of “truth” and “falsity” (or falsification). Hegelian and neo-Hegelian alterity is retrospective and retroactive; Nietzschean pathos is eternally forward-facing, pointed into the direction of the absolute emptiness of the future, the place of the creation (the chaos or “yawn” as Heidegger reminds) of horizons—creation of selves, substances, consciousnesses, “minds” (or “things themselves”) … the “transcendental” or the “immanent”. In the direction of this absolute emptiness or nothingness is the fire that does not “burn” itself (to borrow from Nishitani), that is: where self-predication eludes the bounds of sense, precisely because, as a putative substance self-predicates, it is already in motion beyond its “self”—thus the logic is of the being of becoming, the flux or panta rhei— and this is the fire of creation in and of itself (river and fire are the two elementary symbols of Heraclitus). We may say properly that here, if this draws for us a growing plane of immanence, nothing is immanent to anything else. We must therefore speak about “absolute immanence”.

Why, then, would we wish to escape the “horizon” of the transcendent, if, in the being of becoming, horizons are themselves created? “Horizon” must be distinguished from the particular form it took (and the association it gained) once Plato introduced the problematic of the “chorismos”, the distinction that introduces a break between two worlds, one blesséd the other wretched. Accomplishing their “annihilation” and reconciliation within a dialectic does not eliminate either side—it grows them both into a frightfully growing One. Rather, anti-Platonically speaking, a horizon much more accurately is in fact the bend downward (fully “within” a world or plane of indeterminate encompassure), something “created” just insofar as one moves in any direction towards a fixed point. The “horizon” determines a moving “beyond”, always downward and always greater behind than before. The absolute limit before which one stands is nothing other than the absolute “horizon” of the very being of becoming—creation, “beyond” where there is absolute nothingness only because the “beyond” or nothingness is actively creating. In this direction, the horizon is infinitely near; in the opposite direction (in the direction of the past—memory), it is infinitely but determinately far, unreachable, just ahead, a place which, as you move, increases its distance. The reverse is the case as one turns round and stares at the abyss, the yawn of (absolute) creation: moving is the creation of the horizon itself, thus movement in this direction is always movement “inside” and exactly “at” a horizon, an act that yields the contradictory motion (of horizons receding just when one makes an effort to approach them decisively) whenever a turn is taken 180 degrees around. Staring one in the face is the either/or wherefrom springs horizons (the “abyss” into which Nietzsche stared was the abyss of either/or); staring back at you within the growing cone of history and memory is the both/and of contradictoriness, against which one must act when one sees only with eyes dredged up from the ocean of the past. The Hegelian and neo-Hegelian struggle is the struggle to reconcile this agony between the either/or in the direction of the future, and the sludge and inertial pull of the both/and that beckons one (to return to) the past. It tries dialectically to bring the either/or and the both/and into a kind of (newfangled) “rational”, total movement, granting the determinate reality of the illusion and of terror of the either/or (freedom, choice) and of the both/and (the negation of choice—its infinite cousin and long-lost blood relative). Nietzsche’s titanic hammer to the idols, the “gods”, was a death-blow to this dialectical “and” in-between the either/or and the both/and, cleaving the one from the other—with the extra punch that “the real world” is already lost to surfaces as deep and as profound as the airy noumena could never have been. Nietzsche found, with Kierkegaard, a joyful terror right with the middle of the either/or, which provided an enclosure for the agony of both/and. What Hegel drew heavily and mightily across the frictional and inertial plane of time, Nietzsche accomplished at once in a thundering flash right in-between the “either” and the “or”. The “either” was fateful, the “or” terrifying, and with the “either”, or with the “or”, one was saddled with both good and evil. But inside the either/or was only a yes!, never a no! (or a Bartleby’s “I prefer not to”). Inside the either/or every action is transfigured into a yes!, a fateful choice smashed within the Empedoclean vice-grip of love and strife. And right within here there is nothing to “interpret”—every action stands within itself as its own interpretation, as its own (living) symbol, the coincidence of all sign and signified. This is what makes the inside of the either/or—the field of the eternal both/and—so horrifying and so joyful: it is the place of the creation and the destruction of symbols which are your own inhabitances, something you haunt and something haunted by you. Nietzsche thus inaugurates a new distinction without a “chorismos”: life and death are eternally behind, rebirth (the “spirit”, Dionysius) is eternally ahead. Indeed, the “chorismos” or any separation and boundary lies, in truth, absolutely behind this rush into the yawn of creation. The former (life/death) pose for one a horizon that sinks to the earth, down below the land or the sea, beyond which one cannot see, while the latter eternally becomes horizons. What is blesséd is the future, the fiery breath of creation out of which horizons are formed; what is wretched is what we eternally seek forgiveness for, the past. And if we seek forgiveness for and repent of the past, this in itself is an affirmation of the future—since there is nothing from which one seeks this forgiveness or repentance except the future of oneself, the absolute juncture between the lost and the eternally gained—the futural-in-itself. Forgiveness, repentance … both are here converted into a source of power and strength just because the forgiver and the one who repents only does so as a futural act, and therefore, though turned in thought backward, in fact stands resolutely oriented forward (into the sun), into the yawn of creation, and thus celebrates with these gestures the time of the being of becoming. Both are acts creating the self which could receive forgiveness and repentance—the horizons which seem to at first only delimit and restrain.

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[1] One that, however, always stands actually inconclusive, and displays a pragmatic need for eternal doubt—which is its conversion of the opening act of modernity in Descartes, to which they constantly refer, from speculation into operating procedure. This conversion—an ontological conditio sine qua non for analyticity—just discloses the contradiction internal to its own epistemology, rooted in “clarity”, or the perpetual search for it by means of propositional logic and the elementary forms of propositional reasoning supposedly instituted by Aristotle, and refined by the disciples of the ensuing calculus of propositional logic, i.e., Frege, Russell, et al.