Vital Decay
Reza has a wonderul discussion of decay in relation to space and triadic formulation of time. One sentence in particular stuck out to me: “vital time introduces nightmares of the cosmic time into the phenomena of life.” In a sense this defines the project of a dark phenomenology – of tempering the jubilant comportment as well as the ontological limits of sense as defined in most phenomenology. Furthermore, Reza’s concluding remark:
“We can say that in decay space is perforated by time: Although time hollows out space, it is space that gives time a twist that abnegates the privilege of time over space and expresses the irrepressible contingencies of the absolute time through material and formal means.”
This comment connects indirectly to the issue of the product/production tension in Iain Hamilton Grant’s articulation of nature philosophy. That is, the dyad of producer and produced disappears via the cosmic striations over time – and the retroactive recognition of mammalian perception digs objects out of the flatness of time – thereby orienting them to make sense of time. One must, against correlationist doxa, take the weight of the cosmic cascade into the pulsations of everday life, as saturating the seen and unseen.
Or, in other words, emergence cannot simply be taken as immanence if any coherent construction of being qua being is to be maintained. Schelling’s casting of nature as an ‘incomplete finitude’ is useful here – as the totalizing bounds of nature are incomplete through the function of time and space and we – like the hyer-organisms of Ligotti’s “The Red Tower” – simultaneously embody vitality and decay.
Filed under: Iain Hamilton Grant, Schelling, Speculative Realism | 2 Comments
Tags: decay, reza negarestani
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