With a cursory statement having been made, I will go into far greater detail. To contextualize all of this, one should begin with a central thesis involved in a great deal of my overall work: my concept of mimetic hyperinflation, which draws equally from Freudo-Lacanian theory, from the psychoanalytic domain; Marxist critique in the economic domain, and generative-anthropology in the domain of human cognition and evolution, with the idea of the map serving to address its associated problematics. I’m going to use my own texts where I can because this stuff is very involved and I don’t feel like explaining something impromptu and off the cuff that I already explained with great care and committed to writing.
It is useful to here sketch the powerful connections between a few different economic and
psychoanalytic models by first examining the connection between symbolic-exchange in
the Freudo-Lacanian analysis, the value-exchange of Marxist doctrine, and the idea of
mimetic hyper-inflation. * Integrating several concepts drawn from Baudrillard, Bataille,
and the Schellingian philosophy of freedom, it should be understood that the entropy of
capitalism is accumulated within the accelerating and metastatic logic of its own System,-
not due to the eclipse of a Marxist inspired free-agency by the ecological determinism of
imperialist expansionism, as is argued in Biel’s application of systems-theory,- but
through the denial of Rank’s death-instinct,- (Even in that great Dionysian rapture of Pan,-
dancing forever as he does around the incertain margin of civilization and, at the fragile
boundary of consciousness, mockingly calling to us from behind the Satyr-mask of
Nature,- carrying with him whispers of Death; an eternal challenge to the triumph of the
Apollonian instinct toward the indemnification of immortal forms,- the pathos of the
artist-tyrant, upon which the soul of old Hellas was staked long ago.) that is, the doomed
attempt to accomplish the abolition of Death itself and fulfill the great Dream of
Oedipus,- the narcissistic-fantasy grounding the very logic of desire and the Freudian
Unconscious,- an attempt that, stripped bear of the dream-imagery of the metonym in
which it obfuscates its object from the fragmentating cognition of the abjected-self in the
primary stages of erogenetic differentiation, (in Lacanian terms) properly psycho-logized,
and finally brought forth from the mythic depths into consciousness,- and in this way
rendered amenable to rational analysis, indicates a forestalling of the destructive libido of
Bataille’s excessus (The essential thesis of Bataille’s economics is that every system, be it
political, economic, biological or cosmological in nature, accumulates an excess of force
as ‘unemployed-negativity’ that must either be sacrificed in an act of apparent madness
and utter waste, as is exampled by the gladiatorial spectacle of the Roman coliseums and
their theater of violence, or permitted to continue growing until it simply leads to the
collapse of the system and the release of this negativity into a more highly energized
form, just as the atom gives way to the molecule and the molecule to the cell, etc. or, in
the case of the political and economic structure of humanity, due to an exponential
fragmentation of the social strata, ie. the state of the world leading to the first world war,
via a concentration of wealth that outpaces the distributive channels through which
capital can be exchanged effectively and generate profit, as we see in the movement from
localized free-trade, as demonstrated by Braudel, to a stage of state-sponsored
monopolization of capital in order to ensure the long-term stability of transnational
commodity import and export. In our own time, imperialism has been replaced with
Globalism and an international banking system has emerged in the wake of the second
world war to strengthen, through entanglements of debt, these distributive channels and
form an as yet uncompleted pan-hemispherical world-market, justified to the world on the
dissimulative grounds of multicultural tolerance.) by converting the symbolic-exchange
(the result of the negotiation of what generative-anthropology defines as mimetic
inflation, eg. a group of proto-hominids start arguing over who gets the last piece of meat
and, through linguistic mimesis or repetition, this causes that meat to seem to have more
value than it really does, until it encourages fighting and is entirely invested with the
‘theological aura’ of unrestrained semiogenetic supply.) into value-exchange, (Marxist
analysis of capital.) echoing at the collective level of politics and economics the Freudian
logic of sublimation producing, at the level of the abstract individual, the libidinal excess
(As Rank elaborates on Freud: psychic repression can become so deeply impressed upon
the unconscious that it actually becomes a force itself,- an active psychogenic energy
which instigates the formation of a separate impulse, Thanatos, with which Eros then
rises in contest,- introducing the psychodynamic dualism necessary for accounting for the
emergence of instincts from the undifferentiated “oceanic” passion of organo-affective
unity, ie. the infantile-omnipotence protected from the injunction of the reality-principle
within the fantastical constructions of primary-narcissism.) at the basis of civilization
itself, insofar as it is responsible for engendering the Apollonian instinct and
controverting the order of Nature. It is quite necessary to focus in, as much as possible, on
precisely this instigative moment as the generative semiosis of the Event and the
hyperinflation of the theoacousmate or linguistic-aura. Through the Event, which should
be conceived of as a symmetrical inscription-ascription responsible for grounding the
mimetic function itself, it is possible to map the serial logic and economic-determinism of
the death-drive hidden within the dislocated paraphilias out of which the spatio-temporal
continuum of the value-exchange, conducted upon the pan-hemispheric market in the
image of Steigler’s techne, finally opens up to the free-play of the accelerating,
exponentially technologically reinforced inventory,- the endless stream of devices,
phones, internet, etc. used to construct within the virtual media of the symbolic-exchange
the oblated godform and idealization-body of commodified beauty, digital stimulation,
organosynthetic hypertrophy and ever smoother, ever sleeker and more hairless plasticity
of form,- of the continuous parade of bodily perfections and the gladiatorial arena of
sexual competition,- of sexuality rather transformed into a competition- of the libidinal
re-circulation around the missing-center of the primary-narcissistic fantasy whose
regressive sinthome and entropic accumulation of Negativity,- of scissure, rupture and
above all, thanatos,- within the hollowed-out Utopian center of Capital and the abortive
strictures of its own sublated logic, threatens the very System whose excesses have thus
far proved System to be the guarantor of the fantasy’s existence, now approaching its
imminent collapse from within and the final deterioration of the suspension of its
operational mimesis to the point of an actual reversal of its function, which would induce
a paralysis and gradual extinction of meaning instead of merely a replication of the
nullified core of the cathetcted investment in the image of Capital. Language evolved to
negotiate the hyperinflation of the aura surrounding the Event: my favored example
would be the constant tribal struggle over food investing it with greater and greater
cathected-libido or apparent value by the population as the original value of the object as
mere food was exaggerated over time and eventually transformed into a social
commodity,- fetishized as Marx would say,- and more than that, a marker of status, that
is,- a mere function of symbolic-exchange, until language simply emerged to aid in
negotiating a value that had transcended its material basis and threatened to absorb the
total organization of society into a mere function. This reversal would prevent language
from serving this function and cause symbolic-exchange and value-exchange to become
inverted. This would not only prevent the negotiation of the mimetic hyper-inflation
through which cathected investment is sublated by the self-sustaining logic of Capital [A
logic which interjects itself upon the sinthome in order to obvert recognition of the Other
and fuel itself by creating a feedback loop in which libidinal-excess is recirculated
through fetishization, exaltation, and deflation of the fantasy. This pattern is a
masturbatory one, in which shame and de-investment lead only to more powerful desire
and more avaricious re-investment, thus re-enforcing the pattern. Through object-
fetishization of the Other, one obverts recognition of the symbolic gap within one’s own
barred-subjectivity; one then enjoys the Other as a sexual commodity, though, to part
ways with the Lacanian mode, they have unconsciously interpolated the Mother upon it as a
regression to infantile oblative-projection and the psychic omnipotence of the primary-
ego; the phallic-law then demands shame, self-disempowerment and castration after the
libidinal discharge is completed; one then generates from this shame a new fetish, by
imagining ones’s own self in place of or as wielding the phallic law; then the process
repeats even more powerfully.] but would lead to the severance of symbolic-exchange
entirely and consequently to the very free-proliferation of mimesis which threatened the
survivability of our protohominid ancestors,- a situation we can see now in the fact that
our words, our personal information, etc. have become the most valuable product now,
via the internet. [We should read the cultural phenomenon of “memes”, as absurd as it
may seem, as an organic attempt by the populace to create a gestural metagame,
conducted within the very digital medium in which this problem has manifested itself
with a degree of urgency, in which “tribes” can negotiate the free-mimesis without any
new economic framework having arisen to address the growing problem, (A meme’s
humor is partially reliant upon a flag-system whereby an in-group determines the ‘status’
of an assumed outsider, with the humor provoked when someone fails the test posed by
the metagame and either rejects the meme or, in another circumstance, uses outdated
memes, or memes from an antagonistic tribe.) which many of these tribes believe will
come in the form of a crypto-currency.]
- Mimesis, first utilized as a concept by the Greeks to describe their preeminent aesthetic modality as an imitation of natural beauty,
when applied to psychoanalysis by Lacan in his first texts on the mirror-stage, which he offered as an extension of the Freudian
theory, establishes the train of thought which will come to dominate him and those of his school: the idea that the subject must split
itself from the outside, specifically by denouncing the authenticity of the Other, so that it can reformulate its own mental universe in
such a way as to avoid destabilizing the Freudian defensive structure without which civilization cannot exist, namely as a
hermetically sealed and independent logos within which to perfectly reconstruct objects in the outside world within itself, (the
admission of the Other would threaten the independence of the Ego) leading to the inevitable valuation of these inner-fantasies as in
fact superior to their intended objects outside the self, (sexualization would be a common form of such a perversion of the Other)
which accounts for the basic Freudo-Lacanian model of narcissism. Mimetic-hyperinflation, psychoanalytically, leads to the abjected
ego tasked with recovering the anabasis, while politco-economically, we see that it is primarily through the media of language and the
function of the symbolic-exchange, in which social appraisal is conducted, that the processes of mimesis are brought under control.
For Norman Browne, at least when considering his self-reversal in Love’s Body from the standard Freudian perspective, when man
satisfies a need, he must use a tool to do so, since nature left him with so very few of his own. But by creating the tool,- techne a ;a.
Steigler’s Prometheus, he reawakens a new desire in the Faustian image of his own perfectibility and potential, given the
dissumulative perfectibility of the tool itself, or of instrumental reason more generally, to recall Gadamerian terminology. And then
the process repeats. Again, this is another example of mimetic hyperinflation. But Browne believes that by fulfilling Life against
Death, the true goal of psychology in the transformation of the conscious mind by the unconscious, man would learn to identify that
his dream of technical perfectibility is only the result of neurosis, a neurosis the origin of which he, following Nietzsche, blamed on
the philosophers and Christianity; ["The bifurcation of the ontic and ontological, and the need to subsume one to the other … "-
Monon and Mone. Christian Thomist metaphysics subsumes the ontic, that is, our lived Being, to the skeletonized abstractions of the
ontological, yet subsuming either one to the other, as the ontological to the ontic in the case of Nietzsche and Heidegger, insinuates
the trap of univocity and ultimately a reductive metaphysics.] so that a return would be made to a myth after reason, greater than the
one before. Browne’s techne, Lacan’s mimesis, generative anthropology, etc.; it is of course, my own own perspective, the refusal of
the Negative, in which the account of hyperinflation is to be discovered. All systems, even in biology, accrue through the entropy
inherent to their very form, rifts that open up excesses (hyperinflation) and which lead to the collapse of a system from within, if that
element of the Negative, the true site of the Christianized ekstatic Beyond, is not reified; if it is not reckoned with. All disciplines and
forms of knowledge- even philosophy, must reify its own negativity,- its own Negation,- its asyntheme or transcendental auton.
Producing a map of the ineffable naturally leads to: thinking with the ineffable, that is, the “reification of the Negative” through the chiasmus, which produces a mediating limen in which the new emerges from the Negative, and allows the spatial gulfs revealed by the map to be crossed through the reversal which
generates Thought from Thought’s own entropic Negativity and deterministic
asymptote, [in Schelling’s phrase: from the primordial-will buried in the Unconscious or
“Night of the World”.] that is, from the Universe itself, and this accomplished by
laminating the plastic contours of the Real; un-gluing the apparational ontology that holds
the Symbolic fixtures or topos of the universe in place, and finally, allowing the
undulating subsurface of the Imaginal to erupt into pseudo-consciousness by way of the
ephemeral kairos [DESTINY] in which Thought blends with Nonthought and the
stochastic [CHANCE] element of its Ground of emergence in chronos, (the Remainder
of Schelling) producing the reversal of the chiasmus through which the Lacanian critique
is exhausted conceptually [[“The possibility of philosophy vs. the philosophy of the
possible”: this is the ultimate chiasmus, (At the most essential level, the chiasmus refers
to the Universal-Predicate reversal of terms, ie. that scansive element by which the
reticular kinetics of the symbolic-exchange is supplanted by a luminous kairos equivalent
to the mythic function of the Greek pharmakon or medicine-poison, whose ameliorative
effects or toxicity are a matter of circumstance and dosage. It is the functioning of this
pharmakon within the symbolic-exchange which is threatened by Post-Lacanian mimetic-
hyperinflation, leading to the eventuality we are now faced with in the Internet-age, that
is, the extension of the reticular global network to the point of its predictively insinuating
itself between the semasiosyntactic planes in the field of discourse, as nomos, [The
nomos of language or ‘semasiosyntactic media’ refers to the inner and outer network-
planes in which the nomogenetic and tychogenetic elements of language compete and co-
determine the recombinant logic and ‘kinetic nucleus’ of meaning at the level of the
endonomon. See Niels Danielsen, in: An Essay on Nomos and Human Language, as well
as the Anti-Chomskian thesis explored in: Papers in Theoretical Linguistics; The Kinetic
Analysis of Sentences.] 1 in order to guide the evolution of language toward the object of
advertisers, and, in this way, to effectively offload much of the global cortical load in
order to “think for us” as an emergent intelligence, and the possibility of a network
interruption or kairos which is in turn put in danger.) in which the self-deconstructing
Ground of self-constructing Thought confronts its own duplexity and simultaneity at the
threshold of the aleph-null, invoking and calling into question the very bifurcation of
truth out of whose khaos or symbolic-gap philosophy was engendered as both a
phenomenological closure (what Heidegger calls Dasein) and Imaginal scissure or
opening, (as Ontos, an image of Being) in the structure of Becoming.]] and Time acquires
an additional dimension of verticality given the horizontal succession across the
temporal-linear continuum, such that the Past and Future meet in the open witness of
Transcendence, and that in which alone the possibility of their reconfiguration exists,
which is to say, the possibility of free human agency- (The possibility of Reification
through the philosophical Negative: the subject as conceived beyond the psychoanalytic
framework, the natural sciences, etc. and rediscovered in that transcendental mode by
which pure-philosophy, denounced as delusional by the Lacanians, had once conceived
it.) with the Future reaching back toward the Beginning, beyond the black-hole of the
first-Will or primordial impulse, and the Beginning reaching beyond the event-horizon of
Futurity into its own possibility, that is, the opening up of Dasein’s phenomenological-
closure and in turn, the re-conversion of the existential Angst faced in confronting the
impossible horizon of Being into the Freedom of the Will exalted in the face of God.
- Any human sentence is the image of its own nomos or of its lack of allegiance to the law. The linguistic nomos is common to all
languages and the highest and uppermost universal in human speech. The nomos of human language is the lawfulness according to
which semantic entities are carried into effect in syntactic structures. The nomos of a given language is the semasiosyntactic
lawfulness in accordance with which its sentences are structured. Any specific nomos is a particular instance of the universal nomos.
That covers hyperinflation and the role of the Map. Of even greater importance to my own philosophy is the concept of the Negative, as well as “Reification”, which refers to philosophy at the limen, or that opening revealed by the map in which philosophy, through the chiasmus or “reversal of predicates”, returns itself to that Viconian imaginative-universal in which it is furthermore able to “trade places” with its own object, or that which is being philosophized, producing an ectype which goes on to organize an entirely new modality and philosophy of its own: (“The possibility of philosophy vs. the philosophy of the possible”: this is the ultimate chiasmus); [Though I would add that the Christus or God-Man is, theologically, a superior case of reversal]
True difference is difference from itself as well. The great error is in our trying to reduce
the terms of another to our own, as reduction is not agreement. To reduce our terms;
yours to mine or mine to yours, is what actually produces unhealthy conflict between
philosophers by the obscuring of the true difference, through which all reality of a
spiritual fraternity of intellects exists. Just the same as a life cannot be reduced to another
life, one must always respect the ideal of another philosopher as the product of his entire
life-process; incomprehensible for that reason to another philosopher in its fundament,- to
be approached only by degrees of understanding, and these won through the agon and by
healthy conflict. The limitations of language often force philosophers to adopt a word
from a more common lexicon with which to provide a point of entry for the unfamiliar to
a more refined lexicon applicable to their work alone, and consequently more specialized
for the task; for me, this word is: the Negative. Negative is the word I use to describe
inexistent things upon which existent things depend for their existence.
Thus, when I speak of transcendental recursion, or the transcendental auton, using things
like the metaphor of an infinitely repeating series, it is the super-ontological yet para-
ontic status of such an arrangement which I aim very loosely imply by the word
Negative,- as opposed to the sense of merely nothingness or negation, by which one
might be led when considering only the semantic associations of these later terms. The
Negative (as the inexistent through which the existent gains existence; as the Bataillean
Non-Knowledge whose repulsive counteractivity or ‘dark energy’ allows knowledge to
become articulate) is the entropy that tears system from within and pulls it apart with its
own excesses,- systems of philosophy, languages, biological organisms, etc. To escape
that fate, the Negative must be grasped through the veil of the Multiple and allowed to
release itself therefrom as Unity,- not the Unity before life, which would be merely a
regressive call back to the inorganic, to the death drive and to Nirvana, but the Unity after
Life, multiplicity, and phenomena, through which the chiasmus engraves the nuclear
reorganization of elementary predicative elements at the limen. What is that second,
liminal Unity, through which System transcends itself, instead of being annihilated, that
is, ‘negated’? Such a monon or Unity functions like the bodies of two lovers flashing up in
a moment of higher-ecstasy as a new, third being; this third being is precisely the
Negative, in my sense of this word, as it simultaneously does not exist and allows what
does exist to transcend itself and to come into existence, inasmuch as existence is just that
liminal state of transition and apotheosis. The Negative is in this way a guarantor of
existence, not by combining the lovers into a binary fusion or univocal synthesis, but
through the in-existent third being; for it is always third,- for it must remain inaccessible
to System like the Schellingian Un-Intuitable and unabsorbed by System, as the
asyntheme. Because it must remain in this sense unfulfilled, that is, unabsorbed, it is a
threat to the System whose existence it enables, that is,- to all things (like the Bataillean
share) that cannot or refuse to glimpse the Negative and allow it to release itself from
them,- from the System it would otherwise tear apart from within by its own excesses.
Thus when I implore philosophy to reify its own Negativity, I mean, to reify this
mysterious third or asyntheme, while by the term reify, I indicate the chiastic
rearrangement of the monon-mone, that is, this pattern of Unity–Multiplicity–Unity, as
had been engraved in the mystic sigil of the god Apollo in the Delphic Tetractys.
The Negative is Gnostic fire: Gnosis or true philosophic-understanding neither as the
subsumption of the ontic or ontological; neither as the enlightenment or the madness
inspired by the riddle of the Tree of Knowledge at the Garden of Life around which the
old rabbis gathered in hope of wisdom, having already denied themselves by taking
wisdom as something that could be hoped for, that is, predicated by something else,
something that would need to be “wiser than wisdom”; neither as Paradise or the wage of
death, as imposed by the angel Raziel at the foothold of the Garden,- but gnosis as the
Fall into Sin itself, and understanding as that incomprehensible datum by which the two
might be differentiated within the episteme (ie. one as a predicate to the other, instead of
reducing both to a univocity) by the still more mysterious element, namely the agapeic
transformation of redemption and the excessus of human nature, ie. the Christus;
understanding neither as belonging unto the perfect God or the Demiurge,- YHWH or
Lucifer; neither as one term within the binary structure of the predicates (predicate-
universal) or another, but rather, what Vico called the imaginative-universal in which all
Predicates take shape as an eddy in the historical circulus of the Universal, and through
which the Universal is in turn drawn into the vortices of the particular; both the prophetic
Dasein of Gerard Granel’s indeterminate nomination or the metonomasia,- the power of
the Name to cleave open a future space, as with God’s call unto man from out of the
whirlwind, that he name himself; that he take account for the emergence of identity, and
in this very act of reflective consciousness is granted the loci of possibility,- and, on the
other hand, the hypostasis of the Fragment over the image of Cosmos or the ‘whole’ in
Levinas’ formulation of transcendental subjectivity, ie. that burden of responsibility,- of
man, as Individual, to God,- which renders any account of Being within the stricture of
Dasein ‘at a Loss’, and any account of the Part within the Whole untenably staked on
what was, from his perspective, an analytically impermeable Negativity, [Here we see
that, where Heidegger subsumes the ontological by the ontic, in keeping with his general
critique of the Thomist-Augustinian tradition in which the ontological had subsumed the
account of Being, that is, the ontic, and thereby generated a morality of skeletonized
abstractions, Levinas recognizes the peril of Heidegger’s bifurcation of truth into the
ontic-ontological, as well as that implicated by the ascription of the Negative, and so
resists any subsumptive modality, though his solution, ie. hypostasizing the
transcendental subject by way of his reconceptualization of Responsibility, will of course
not be held to in our present volume.) requiring an ethics grounded exclusively on
metaphysics (the transcendental subject) instead of any ontology; the mystical otium of
the princeps philosophorum [Cristoforo Landino, in: the dialogue of Philotimus and
Aretophilus; from, De Vera Nobilitate.] and the civic duty or negotium informed by virtu,
(or, in a reversal, the mystical otium of virtue recling in its own perfection and
Platonizing image and the negotium of contemplation, by which the admixture of the
former terms produces yet a third, drawing on the Ficinian commentaries on Philebus, in
which Venus, Juno and Minerva serve as emblems for the vitae triplici genere.) or the
simultaneous ubi nihil valeo [power without object] and ibi nihil vole [object without
will] of the kenotic gnosis of self or ‘nudus sum Mundi contemplator’,- [Arnoldi
Geulinex, in: Gnothi Seuaton sive Ethica per Philaretum et Passionibus Animae per
Flenderum: Ubi nihil valeo, ibi nihil vole. … nihil valeo denotat inspectionem sui, nihil
volo denotat despectionem sui.] that is, the askesis or void of life’s plenitude and
excessus, through which the map of desire reconstructs the abortive universe of thwarted
libido, pulling the retreating Eros back from the gulf opened in abjection [the limit on
desire imposed by the paternal type through Freudian Werwerfung] and, through a
negative or reconcussive pressure exerted by the shadow of the phallic-law,- functioning
in that regard like the Zapffian psychic-anchor, sequestering an object now protected from
any recognition of the injunction of the Real upon the fantasy in the figure of the true
Other,-- [In Cioran’s phrase, askesis is the void of the plenitude of excess vitality, by
which the cultivation of the heavenly sensuality of the inner mystic is quite distinguished
from the merely political activity of the saint in conducting himself horizontally, as it
were, against the vertical dimension of the super-mundane.] above all of this- understanding
as the understanding that understanding itself is neither a Predication consequent to a
binary judgement nor the univocity of a monological reduction of a predicate to a Universal,
but rather, the mythopoietic chiasmus on whose scintillating surface all dramatic emergences
are reversibly organized,- simultaneously automaton-ized by the circulosis universalis and
concatenated by the replicating dyad of serial logic, and in whose limen the nucleus of
discourse is perpetually generated, deconstructed, and reconstructed by itself,- asyntheme
renewed beyond the imaginative syntheme and the intuition of the Ontos by the
ineradicable silence of Negativity, and that Loss hemmed around all Being,- the
inarticulation and ALEPH at the mysterious border or NULL of all speech, through which
alone speech might reckon with its own finitude and thereby produce actual meaning.