#levi bryant

Steven Shaviro: The Universe of Things. How are process ontology and Whitehead related to this?  Also by Shaviro: Doom Patrols, freely available theretical fiction about postmodernism and popular culture.

Levi Bryant: The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, freely available collection of essays by Stengers, Zizek, Harman, Negarestani and others. 

... Hegel is quick to add that this knowledge which seems richest, is actually poorest in truth.  “All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing” (ibid).  What we encounter here is a drama of language or the symbolic; a frustrating impotence that haunts all speech.  Hegel notes this in a couple of ways a moment later:

We write down this truth [that it is night]; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down [or can it? me], any more more than it can lose anything thorough our preserving it.  If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale. The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e., it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not.  The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not Night…  (60)

The world becomes or changes, yet the language remains fixed like a statue.  This is why, later, in his seminar, Lacan would associate language and death.  Life is that which becomes and changes, yet when it’s captured in language it is alienated by the trace of the signifier that preserves itself as that which is not.  This is a secret that every writer knows, for they find themselves trapped in the signifiers they have produced and from which they have since moved on.  Writing is a sort of death in that the reader mortifies the author in the works that she has written, demanding that she live in the crypt of those words rather than write on.

Here, then, we encounter the first alienation of language; the first source of tragic despair embodied in the impotence of the word.  The word is detached from its origin, from its moment of utterance, and travels throughout the world.  Detached from its origin, it grows stale and is liable to take on any meaning whatsoever.  John writes Revelation— perhaps – as a veiled political critique of Rome.  Today it is read as a prophecy about the end of the world.

Hegel continues,

[i]t is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is.  What we say is:  ‘This’, i.e., the universal This; or, ‘it is’, i.e. Being in general.  Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say.  But language, as we see, is the more truthful; in that, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.  (60)

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