BEYOND KLOSSOWSKI

I’ve been looking at Klossowski’s philosophical writing for the first time (Sade, My Neighbor and Living Currency). I’ve been hearing for a long time that he is the missing link between Nietzsche and Deleuze, but now I’m seeing just how true this is.

I bring this up as an occasion to return to the important distinction I am attempting to make between Ololonic and Transcendental will. As interesting and inspiring as I take the metaphysics of creation articulated in different ways by the above-mentioned philosophers (basically a fourfold picture of becoming - at the highest level is the material configuration of impulses that creates a subject, one level lower is the phantasm, which is the ever-inexpressible infinite creative vision generated by the impulses, one level lower is the simulacrum, which is a series of concrete, finite creations generated as a result of the effort to express the phantasm, and finally at the lowest level there are the stereotypes, socially acceptable imitations of the simulacra whose true source has been forgotten, and which as such constitute a form of evil, or at least a deficient level of intensity, which is the very world of appearance that most of us take to be ‘reality’ most of the time. This fourfold is usefully compared to the “olamot” in the tradition of jewish Kabbalah, which are named Atziluth, Beriyah, Yetzirah and Assiah, as well as to William Blake’s fourfold - Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro.) - I will now get on to the main clause of this sentence, lol: I don’t believe an ethics of creative becoming is adequate in the 21st century, because we now know that simply getting in touch with your phantasm and resonating with peoples who have similar interests is not going to stop humanity from destroying itself. On the contrary, it will help, because anything project that becomes successful becomes capitalism. Or perhaps its better to put it this way: any metaphysics of creative becoming that presents itself as an alternative to reason, representation or rationalism has a strangely conservative quality, despite presenting itself as radical. This is because it can’t help being an account of ‘the way things go in general’, presupposing that this is how it’s always been and will always be.

If OIOIONIC desire connects to a ‘religious’ horizon that is higher, more useful to civilization and more important than Transcendental desire, this should be understood in two simultaneous senses. On the one hand I have in mind the detachment and ascendence beyond the tragic concerns of the ordinary world - like family, commerce, recognition, sex - which we all associate with sages, yogis and mystics. But I also, at the same time - and in some ways more importantly - have in mind the densely cerebral effort to give a detailed and fully elaborated account of the nature of reality, which could be assessed, critiqued, revised by any being capable of discursive reason - in other words a falsifiable theory - using the language of rational theology.

This would be a rational theology that, unlike various theologies tied to different religious in the world, transcends and includes the secular humanist era with its life-as-art, psychoanalysis, marxism, capitalism and consumer culture. It must exist as revision of the qabalistic fourfold, beginning with an account of OIOION, which is the aspect of God that can be spoken of (as opposed to HAQQ, which is the aspect of God that surpasses all description (for now).

UNILATERAL DETERMINATION

HAQQ is something more radical and powerful than Laruelle’s One (ie the agent, so to speak, of unilateral determination) in two ways.   First of all, it has a character of majesty and authority that perhaps can not be thought but can most certainly be felt.   Secondly, it cannot be truly said to unilaterally determine; we can’t truly know whether it does this or not.  It may very well, but it might just as well do something far more ‘metaphysical’ and teleological.   Our nonknowledge of the nature of HAQQ disqualifies non-philosophy just as much as ordinary philosophical decision.  The key, I think, is personhood.   HAQQ has some kind of personhood, some “I” quality that can’t be said to be ‘anthropomorphic’, because surely the situation is the other way around (we are made in its image).  Or it ‘might’ have this personhood, or it has something beyond personhood, more personal than personhood.  The fallacy to avoid is a surreptitious substantialization or reification (despite enormous effort to avoid this) due to thinking of the One vaguely in the ‘3rd person’ as a side effect of the groundless injunction to rule out anthropomorphism.  

FATE

There are few greater minor frustrations than flight cancellations.   I’ll probably be stuck in Dallas for two days because of a storm warning in the northeast, and the worst part is that if I’d been a little sharper I could have beaten the storm - the flight immediately before mine was not cancelled; I could have switched to it earlier in the day and gotten home before the warning took effect.  

Spinozist amor fati is valuable at times like this.   If I grasp the (supposed) fact that everything is determined, I see and feel that there’s nothing I could have done to make that earlier flight.  Everything had to happen the way that it did, and my negative emotions about the event are tied to a false belief that things could have been otherwise.  I attain an intellectual joy by understanding that, in the chain of causation, there’s nothing I could have done.   

How far can this principle be scaled up?   At the highest level it implies that nothing we do is free, such that we ought to blame no one for any wrong doing and accept nature’s senseless raw power with no judgment.   But this seems to fail to take into account that at some level we obviously are  free, due to the possibility of deliberating and making decisions.   Nature’s determinism seems to have nothing to do with it.   This freedom seems to be of paramount importance.   But if it is, then there isn’t much consolation for having missed a flight due to failure to deliberate and decide properly. 

HAQQ AND OIOION

God is absolutely transcendent (as opposed to transcendental) because he is pure delirium.  Mind and body are two modes that seem to have a certain coordination, but there are an infinite number of other modes that we do not know.  This is God’s status as HAQQ.  For HAQQ there is no task, no need for redemption, no history - everything is given all at once, beyond human comprehension.  

OIOION is God’s temporal, caring, loving aspect.  She genuinely cares about the fact that something is wrong - she is troubled by it.  She has a task, and she is a task.  The difference between HAQQ and OIOION is the difference between willing nothing at all (characterizing HAQQ) and the will to nothingness, the desire for something - or rather everything - to come to an end (characterizing OIOION).  A slippage between two meanings of 'willing nothing'.

The OIOIONIC level of desire is higher than the transcendental level because it does not simply affirm becoming-in-itself.  It seeks to erode becoming, to master it, to bind it.  OIOIONIC desire has an antagonistic relationship to HAQQ, which is why in addition to being messianic it is also promethean.   

INTERREGNUM

Any vision offered during the moral interregnum of the Sixth Armistice that merely affirms the continuation of the moral interregnum is merely  Transcendental.  A vision is only properly Ololonic if it envisions putting the interregnum to an end.  That doesn't make it any less experimental and fallible, it just raises the stakes in a meaningful way.   Transcendental projects are good, but Ololonic ones are better  because they engage the master narrative of world history. 

THE HIGHEST

The OIOIONIC is the highest, but it only counts as such if everything below it is taken into account.  Otherwise it is worthless  

BLOOD

The OIOIONIC undoes everything.  The secret of desire is that there is nothing to desire.  But how can that have any meaning before it's too late?  The secret is that it's already too late.  There is too much in the way, so to begin is impossible, and there is no place to land, so no ending is possible.  But if we just step back for a moment - and I mean way back - further back than the perspective of eternity, which, after all, is only about half way back:  Human beings are yearning for some kind of system or structure at a certain point in their lives - and then after that point it is too late.  A window closes, and they are no longer able to absorb something new, a new core conviction.  The thing about the furthest-back perspective is that is is also the closest-up.  Intersubjectivity, history, ethics, politics constellate the field of reality, but they are foreclosed to anyone who is unwilling to sacrifice their knowledge of the true reality, which is private, surging pain, bleary red eyes, the magic of the blood.  To think the eschatological as a vast array of small packets bubbling with bits of energy, opening up just a little bit so that they can close a moment later.  It draws tears from the blood-heart even as its vision drifts up into the cotton...

BEYOND THE TRANSCENDENTAL

Now that Deleuze's philosophy has gained a certain hegemony, it is possible to see its limit.  Maybe the best way to put it is like this:  either Deleuze's ethics features a secret, unspoken eschatological horizon (which is the thesis of Joshua Ramey's book The Hermetic Deleuze) or else his ethics has transformed into the very engine of cyber-capitalist nihilism: create, produce, consume, yield novelty, take risks, be different, refuse to conform.   The conceptual opposition between subjected group (under the yoke of Oedipus) and subject group (the emerging identity) presented towards the end of Anti-Oedipus seems too facile in 2016.   Instagram celebrity, silicon valley startups and artisinal exposed brick shops in Williamsburg seem to fit the description of the latter more or less, and, though it isn't obvious that these three things are downright bad, their value is at the very least questionable.   It is worth noting that the now-dominant mental health tools, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychopharmacology, are just as anti-Oedipus as Anti-Oedipus.  But it is obvious that these things do not lead to any kind of liberating gnosis.  Pills and cognitive therapies as a rule bring people only to the point at which they are able to bear the stress of working in the current labor market.

In contrast to this (the, you might say, anti-Oedipal transcendental), we have to propose something higher.  The OLOLONIC then is a "religious" horizon for the transcendental.  

Without the payoff of either a transformative event or a gradual spiritualization, the creative novelty becomes simply more and more stressful and inane - just try to take seriously Nick Land's vision, and you can see what I mean.  We end up with a Nietzschean "last man" in the place we least expected to find him... having chosen the path of liberation of desire, we end up with a sort of catatonic clicking that is very much the last man's inane "blink".