Sc Hickamn Life Agains the Void

"The creature chosen human tin can cease being a passive not-being and become an active being only insofar equally information technology produces dearest confronting the negative ability of the already existing backer police force. Every bit we all know, the laws' negative impositions requite birth to the savage cycle of the life and expiry drives, which is in turn exploited in the way of more coin."
– Cengiz Erdem

Living outside ourselves nosotros are guided not by the Real only by the inner compulsions of a drive toward the last flowering of the negative force we call Death; but, death, is not itself creative, it is only the truth-event of life as it changes identify with the symbolic social club of Life in its dark manner of entropy: a god of no thing and nothingness. Cengiz Erdem in his new essay tells usa that with "the domination of nihilist global capitalism all over the world social life has get a masquerade." I'thou reminded of Bruno Schulz for whom the "substance of … reality is in a country of incessant fermentation, of germination, of potential life. There are no expressionless, solid or restricted objects. Everything is diffused beyond its own boundaries, enduring in a particular form only for a moment, to quit it at the showtime opportunity."[ane] He saw this world, its community and manners equally being guided by a certain kind of principle, what he termed "panmasqueradium". Schulz says this of information technology:

"Reality adopts certain forms for appearance'south sake solitary, just as a joke, for a game. 1 person is a person, and some other a cockroach, but such forms do non reach the essence; they are merely roles, assumed only for a moment, similar an outer skin that, a moment later, is bandage off. A certain radical monism of substance is evinced here, in which individial objects are only masks. The life of this substance depends on its using upwardly a vast number of masks. This meandering of forms is its life essence. In that location emanates from that substance, therefore, the aureola of a kind of pan-irony. A backstage, behind-the-scenes atmosphere is ever present, in which the actors, having taken off their costumes, now pucker up with laughter at the pathos of their roles. The very fact of private existence implies irony, leg-pulling, and a clownish poking-out of the tongue."

Erdem on the other hand would non situate his philosophy within a "radical monism" as Schulz does, instead he is closer to those latter twenty-four hour period prophets of the nihil, Nietzsche and Zizek, both Transcendental Materialists in which people potable Diet-Coke equally a means toward drinking "nothing in the guise of something"; or, as Nietzsche stated information technology: "let us grasp this—a will to nothingness, an disfavor to life, a rebellion against the most primal presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a volition!… And, to say once again at the end what I said at the commencement: man would much rather will pettiness than not will…".

Erdem speaking of the banality of consciousness tells us that when nosotros think of death "this idea never takes place in terms of the expiry of the self. Information technology is always through the death of the other that the subject thinks of death. Information technology is e'er a "they" who die. Decease is conceived equally a symbolic incident. The reason of that reductive attitude towards death is the will to preserve the banality of ordinary reality and sustain the conditions for the possibility of an illusory sense of oneness with the world. All this, of course, is washed to go on the Existent of the external world at bay." He says we are at present closed off in a transglobal symbolic order in which none of the states can "stand the thought of the outside", none of us can "conceive the absence of an external world inside" ourselves. "The fear of death is and so stiff that with the forcefulness of its negativity it totally negates decease in life, erases the slash in life/death, and vainly erects statues to accomplish immortality."

The work of work is to go along united states distracted, to go on us entertained in a void, to go along us "decorated for the sake of the business of not thinking expiry." Objects are situated betwixt united states of america and that final termination point which is our death. As Erdem tells us what "we witness in this fourth dimension is life turned into a project aiming at erasing the silence necessary for idea; and not but erasing but also replacing it with an unceasing racket causing nausea." In an eloquent if disquieting passage Erdem continues, proverb:

"The infinite, then, is within finitude, so in lodge to call up the infinite we have to call back the finite, that is, the idea of death. Although the idea of decease has a high price which the field of study pays by a loss of mental and concrete health, information technology is yet useful in opening upwards the way to limit experiences. The death drive devastates the predominant conceptualisations of the "good" of civilized progress and the "bad" of barbaric regress. The subject of the death drive situates itself every bit the traitor on the contrary pole of belief and faith in immortality. In the place of statues representing immortality, information technology erects nothing. That way it confronts the promised land of total security and harmony with a earth governed past the feet of the feeling of being surrounded past pettiness. In this world at that place remains no ground beneath the symbolic order. Death is in the midst of life; it is life that surrounds expiry."

In the midst of this new globe a new type of beingness arises, one that senses its newness, that spits in the confront of the onetime symbolic order, that wanders freely amidst the rubble and detritus of our nowadays civilization like a god new built-in: this is the posthuman other in our midst, a stranger in a strange land, that has found in this nighttime presage of a new genesis a new lodge across all symbolic imaginaries; yet, still in touch with the oldest elements of its own dark heritage, this new type of being is reconciled simply to the living and dead that have given it birth, willing it from the 'will of the depths' within its own encrusted self – an identity that is a non-identity, an object manifesting itself equally pure non-relation, that relates as it is and wills. No longer driven by those impersonal forces of Life Death Drives, and neither their master nor their slave, it has turned the corner of beingness and rocked the foundations of both the polarization of Being and Void by being that creature that lives out the truth-event of Life and Death as the unique marker of an immortality within the abyss.

Erdem tells us information technology is high time for usa to breakfree of this prison of the global symbolic order, to escape our finitude, to enter into a new imaginative struggle against "this savage bike of Commercialism and its governor, liberal-democracy, based on unjust representations, in society to create, produce or nowadays the realm of dear across the rotary motion of drives." He imagines our voyage beyond, simply not an immaterial beyond of angelic presences nor of false heavens within which we can all magically live ever-happily after in a paradise of unreasoning poetic distance; no, instead, he envisions a scenarion in which "immortality is non something to exist attained, rather, it is a virtual potential or an actual capacity within every mortal beingness, pending to be realised. The realisation of the immortality within us, or the realisation of the space potential that life contains, depends on our proper use of our powers of imagination. Let us imagine ourselves as immortal beings so, which nosotros already are, only cannot enact considering of the finitude imposed upon us by the already existing symbolic order."

Then he asks: Would we need to go out of this society to become immortal? And, he answers with a Yes and No, saying: "Yep, because the inside which we said infinity resides is a within which is exterior just from the signal of view of the already existing gild. No, because only from within the already existing lodge tin we present an exterior of this order, "an outside" in Deleuze's words concerning of Foucault and Blanchot, "which is closer than any interiority and further abroad than any exteriority."

Erdem turns to Badiou who in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil where he iterated his disquisitional stance toward human rights advocates who would reduce existence human to "being a mortal animal"; and, although, he agreed that, yes, we are mortal animals he also affirmed against the deprecatory tone of homo rights advocates "the immortal subject field, or rather, the subject who is capable of realising his/her immortality." Erdem meditating on Badiou's stardom against Heidegger's equation of being in the world and being toward decease affirms that "consciousness of human finitude just serves to justify a life driven by expiry." He goes on to propose:

"I therefore propose a consciousness of infinitude rather than of finitude for a sustenance of the conditions of possibility for an ethical life and for an ethical death. For when you call up nigh information technology, if nosotros were immortal, that is, if our lives were eternal, we wouldn't be so subversive of the environment, not so harsh on nature and one some other, because no one would want to alive in such a hell eternally. Since it is obvious that every bit humans we have been turning the earth into a hell in the proper noun of progress for a while now, and since expiry has been the end from which we accept come to think we have been striving to escape in this progressive process, it is obvious that a forgetting of death, or rather, a remembering to forget our bloodshed would make united states fearfulness an eternal life in hell, rather than a finite life in an illusory heaven."

In a more than pointed attack on the premises of global capitalism and its use of the governing force of "exploitation of life and expiry drives, that it is based on our fear of death and consciousness of finitude, information technology becomes clearer why a subtraction of death from life not only shakes, just likewise annihilates the foundations of capitalism." He goes on to tells us that his critical mode of judgment as employed throughout the article has been a movement toward a new field in which "the weather are created for the possibility of a conclusion beyond the Law of Militarist Capitalism and the Welfare State driven by and driving the exploitation of mortality on a massive scale."

He has been exploring an imaginary: the thought of an immortal subject, of 1 who is afterward Deleuze and Derrida, non-identical. Erdem at present tells usa that for him " a transcendental ground is necessary only to the extent that it enables the subject to shake the foundation of its own way of being and opens a field for immanent critique to take identify. In other words, the untimely indifference of immortality is required in order to actively engage in an exposition of the exploitation of mortality in this time." After Nietzsche he affirms that sure illusions are needed, and still the beliefs in civilized progress and barbaric regress are to be dropped in any new critique, instead what is needed is the recognition that "a third possibility of developmental process is emerging in the form of a becoming-reconciled which is based on the recognition of the otherness of the other equally information technology is, that is, prior to the additions and the subtractions imposed upon the self and the other, nature and culture, life and expiry. For a non-normative and progressive work it is necessary for the participants to become capable of making distinctions between their natures and cultures, their cliniques and critiques. It is a matter of realizing that theory and practice are always already reconciled and withal the only fashion to actualise this reconciliation passes through carrying it out and beyond by introducing a split between the subject of statement (the enunciated) and the field of study of enunciation."

Between those ii enunciations we are situated like wavering angels in an immortal battle between the Life Death Drives that enforce their ain laws like guardians of an unforgettable memory of a new genesis beyond the human. Like all journeys this one is unfinished and the most we tin hope for in the long run is perhaps that "we should indeed know that accented reconciliation is impossible and yet still strive to reconcile ourselves as much equally we can to all the living and the dead."

Read the complete essay at: The Immortal Subject across the Life Expiry Drives

ane. Letter to S.I. Witkiewicz

via Nighttime Chemistry

• Outline and Notes on the Phaedo (ph10online.wordpress.com)
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• Blessed Mortality? Maybe… (thedenialfile.wordpress.com)
• Life Afterwards Death (lilpinkhouse.wordpress.com)

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Source: https://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/s-c-hickman-on-the-immortal-subject-beyond-the-life-death-drives/

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