Tarrying with the Negative

Gabriel Catren's project (as well as the work of Francois Laruelle) represents a continuation and radicalization of the Kantian/Copernican turn in philosophy that can be called meta-transcendental. “[If we read Laruelle not as a “non-philosopher” but as a meta-transcendental philosopher], [i]t then becomes possible to re-interpret the term ‘decision’ in Laruelle’s work as a synonym for transcendental synthesis [...] In this regard, Laruelle can be interpreted as a kind of renegade Kantian whose internal subversion of transcendental idealism not only rehabilitates the possibility of transcendental realism but also provides Kantianism’s posthumous rejoinder to Hegelian idealism in all its guises [...]” Ray Brassier - Nihil unbound pg 134.If Kantian transcendental philosophy is an account of the conditions by which experience and knowledge are possible, then meta-transcendental philosophy is an account of not just the genesis of the conditions by which experience is possible but the genesis of all possible conditions of experience. Insofar as the practicalist Aristotelian/Fichtean/Kantian orientation subordinates intelligibility to sensibility and roots experience in sensible intuition and apperception (rather than the Hegelian account of the self-determination of normativity, in which sensibility is subordinate to intelligibility), it then follows that possible experience is concomitant with possible sensible intuition, and given that the conditions of sensible intuition cannot be self-determinate, experience can be determined in the last instance by an external entity or unilateral immanence rather than a self-determinate universal totality and thus engender a multiplicity of possible forms of experience in which human experience is but one transcendental perspective among many.

Three theories of the unconscious: 1) Natural/vital/energetic unconscious: Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze/Guattari (theories of the will, Phusis, force, or Conatus); 2) Traumatic unconscious: Freud in BPP (oedipal or existential trauma whose repression is the unrepresentable core that consciousness is organized around) and Brassier in Nihil Unbound; 3) Symbolic unconscious: middle period Lacan and Zizek (the unconscious as gap or unsublatable remainder left behind by the development of consciousness that cannot be admitted into retroactive history or memory, ex: Schelling in The Ages of the World); “There are three modalities of the Real: the “real Real” (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object, from Irma’s throat to the Alien), the “symbolic Real” (the real as consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like the quantum physics formulas that can no longer be translated back into, or related to, the everyday experience of our life-world), and the “imaginary Real” (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable “something” on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary object).” (Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, pg. 92) Land is somewhere between 1 and 2, and Schelling is somewhere between 1 and 3. There are many parallels between Freud and Nietzsche, superego and the theory of guilt/debt in the Genealogy, but they diverge insofar as: 1) Freud is a masochist (health as minimal necessary neurosis) and Nietzsche is a sadist, and 2) the psychoanalytic theory of trauma is a kernel of negativity that has no place in Neitzsche's affirmative positivity (Deleuze expunges trauma from his reading of Freud ex: death in Difference and Repetition is a productive shock that forces us to think, and in Anti-Oedipus death is a vacuole of lack necessitated by anti-production).

What is important to me is to mark the main features of the worldview we are offered as the lodestar of the future art – the renunciation of realistic pictures, which Picasso sees as an empty illusion, that is, deception, and the affirmation of a wilful fiction, designed to spark enthusiasm, that is, the conscious deception of mythmaking. [...] Let’s just say that the main inner goal of such art lies in suppressing the consciousness of the conscious mind. A flight into superstition is the very minimum. Even better is a flight into an unimaginable world. Hence, the constant effort to shatter the mirror of life or at least to make it muddy and unseeing. Any image must now be given qualities of ‘unlikeness’. In the way, pictoriality recedes, eventually becoming something free of any association with real life. [...] Once it was enough to present a few geometrical figures on the canvas to avoid any associations. Now this is too little. The self-defences of consciousness are so refined that even abstract forms are reminiscent of something real. That requires an even greater degree of detachment. Hence, there appears anti-art, Pop Art, which largely consists of the demonstration of real things, enclosed in an invisible frame. In a sense, this is the end of a long evolution from real depictions to the reality of bare facts. It might seem we’ve already achieved that goal: the life of the spirit has ended, the worm of consciousness has been crushed. Still, that is an empty illusion. The ailing spirit’s attempts to jump out of its own skin are senseless and hopeless. When reflection revolves around itself endlessly, it only gives rise to ‘boring infinity’ and an insatiable thirst for the other. [...] Yes, ‘modern art’ is more philosophy than art. It is a philosophy expressing the dominance of power and facts on lucid thinking and poetic contemplation of the world. The brutal demolition of real forms stands for an outburst of blind embittered volition. It is the slave’s revenge, his make-believe liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple pressure valve. If it were only a pressure valve! There is a fatal connection between the slavish form of protest and oppression itself. According to all the newest aesthetic theories, art’s effect is hypnotic: it traumatises or on the contrary blunts or calms a consciousness that no longer has any life of its own. In short, it is the art of a suggestible crowd at the ready to run after the emperor’s chariot. Why am I Not a Modernist? - Mikhail Lifshitz

We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by. [...] They have not been transformed, or lent some higher meaning; they remain what they were before, transient and of no particular interest. Nor are they lifted into the timeless eternity of classical literature, posterity and the canon: you can dip into them wherever you like and they will not be any more quotable or Virgilian; they will, in fact, remain quite as nondescript as before. But Knausgaard has written them, and written about writing them, and this is the story, not of his own experiences, but of the writing of these non-reflexive sentences, about which we do not even feel his writer’s cramp or his aching shoulder, his blurred vision.