It would be hard not to notice the numerous rapid descents in the Dark Knight which, while uncommon for filmic representations of superheroes, seem particularly frantic and well done. I would argue that this is indicative of the film’s content as well as its form: the Dark Knight is not so much the recognizable ‘descent into madness’ but more the repetitive chaos that threatens the apathetically sane post-capitalist world. [Spoilers Follow.]

The Dark Knight, regardless of intent, manages to present a politco-ethical knot and two approaches/causes/effects of that knot in all their ineffectual being. Batman and The Joker represent the attempt at truth and the attempt to display the juggernaut of meaninglessness or, at the risk of ridiculousness, the formalism and purity of Alain Badiou and the reckless refusal of Slavoj Žižek.

There is simultaneously a huge gap and a minimal difference between the manically Slovenian and the somber French cerebrate. This is mirrored particularly well in the origin of Batman versus the Joker - for Batman it is a question of superseding the material origins and becoming a symbol, something more than a man as it is depicted in the first film. The Joker, on the other hand, purposefully warps and shifts the story of his origin (this mimics the competing versions presented by various authors) because it doesn’t matter, in the end, what is important is that his origin served as an example that nothing matters.

The Joker is by no means a naive nihilist nor is the dark knight an inebriated idealist - both highly contextualize their differing forms of madness. From an ethical point of view it would seem that the Joker has the upper hand - Batman constantly teeters on the edge of the precipice of pure desire but always remaining within desire whereas the Joker is firmly established in the (dys)function of the drive. While both are grating to the official Law, Badiou/Batman is less likely to step into the realm of violence.

Following Lorenzo Chiesa’s reading of Lacanian ethics - Lacan’s ‘do not give up on your desire’ has frequently been glaciated and transformed into an injunction thereby corrupting the ethical and dragging it into the realm of the super ego. Chiesa’s point that the ethical must be a transgression of the transgression (the superegoic injunction) is pointing out that the underside of the law, the function of the pervert, must be rejected as well as the official Law. Batman enacts the underbelly of the Law - officially disavowed and hunted by the police yet necessary to their function as a superegoic fiat of ‘justice!’ The Joker then, represents the ethical act in that he, instead of trying to constantly replay the moment of pure desire, the moment of the act where the cause of one’s desire becomes just another object (the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents becomes one injustice among many which must be stopped) attempts to embody the drive, the constant motion of enacting (spreading chaos) which has no goal and is an end in and of itself.

To bring this back to Badiou and Žižek - the manhunt is on for Badiou as evidenced by a slurry of attacks by one of his stronger defenders - Adrian Johnston. Johnston’s recent text”‘Alain Badiou, The Hebb Event, and Materialism Split from Within” denouncing Badiou’s haphazard rejection of the biological sciences. Johnston’s central critique, which falls in line with Ian Hamilton Grant’s comment in “Being and Slime” is that Badiou assumes a materiality of mathematics where there is none.

At the end of the film Batman says that more than truth there is faith - thus he identifies with the formalism of the subject and that the various contexts of the trace of the event. This seems unsurprising in that Batman, unlike Badiou, has no tolerance for the ’strategic’ waiting of pre-Evental time. Thus, Batman becomes a Badiouian subject without a pursuing the truth of a particular trace and the Joker attempts to corrupt the rules of this pursuit, the tenements of faith via a constant reintroduction of the ex-nihilio of being itself.

The question becomes whether there is any alternative between this deadlock - between a contextualized yet overly-patient idealism and a chaotically effective field clearing but ultimately non-constructive erraticism. Ultimately, it becomes a contrast of being something (having direction but contextualized in such a way that creation is possible) and being nothing (repeating the a meaningless violence hoping that, out of the ruins, something new might emerge). In Badiou’s terms Batman represents his later turn towards subtraction whereas the Joker represents the political move (present in Theory of the Subject) towards destruction.

The difference is that the Joker cannot maintain himself - there cannot be a figure of chaos because, as is evidenced by Lee Edelman’s flawed but interesting text No Future, once one solidifies the drive in a figure (such as Žižek’s use of Bartleby) narcissism creeps in, the image-function of that being becomes imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) that is, one simply becomes obsessed with what is in them more than them self - their own capacity for chaos and this is Two Face. Two Face becomes the image of meaningless by introducing chance over chaos but, as Quentin Meillassoux has shown, chaos and randomness are not the same. Two Face exists in a world of chance yet when where the options are limited by his own narcissism, whereas the Joker (literally) has destroyed his face.

This is the true danger - it is not the hero becoming the villain (as Harvey Dent says) it is the subject being nothing which purports to be something, it is the apathy which allows one to say that I am something wonderful, great, but that is something that is forever hidden, that I am just misunderstood, ‘I have a pain or a treasure you cannot understand.’ Two Face exhibits this logic at its worse where the subject appears as obviously split, as a monster and as a human, but where, instead of deciding which one wins at what time, it is given up to chance yet a chance which is a draw from a deck stacked by our own narcissism.

The rift between narrative and non-narrative has been crystallized in the recent writers strike - as it becomes as visible as possible, what exactly it is the writers do for the television industry. Executives have predictably turned to reality television in its various forms to wait out the storm. Reality television is, in fact, almost as old as TV itself, if one counts candid camera and related shows as reality tv.

However, the game shows and hidden camera shows which are only considered reality television in the broad sense - in that it is a program which is generally unscripted. The first truly ‘real’ reality show would be An American Family, where a nuclear family going through a divorce was caught on film. An American Family was shot documentary style and falls in the same category of ‘real’ reality such as Cops and American High. And, interestingly enough, Cops came about because of a crippling writer’s strike in the 1980s.

The question becomes - are reality shows more about constructing an artifice which will generate a particular kind of reality (ie a set of contests and competitions is set up to show us the true competitive/angry/sleazy etc nature of people) or does it actually try to represent something natural or purportedly unconstructed, at least in a narrative sense?

Rob and Big was was funny as it was because it consciously played with the aforementioned tension. From the distance the show appeared rather unremarkable - it was about a semi-professional skate boarder and his body guard. While the two ostensibly make an odd couple - the appeal of the show was in fact not various entertaining moments of strife between them but the remarkable ease of their friendship (the show’s theme song is “Bestfriends”). What also makes the show interesting is that its scripted nature is semi-transparent. In each episode the duo sets about attempting some ridiculous task which they have both suddenly assigned the utmost importance. That is, Rob always acts as if he has just come up with a really silly idea out of nowhere (like putting sacred geometry on his skateboard or deciding to break as many Guinness Book of Word Records as Possible).

Unlike the vast majority of reality shows, there is no face to face confession in Rob and Big, the camera appears far less intrusive. Instead of embodying a real persona, Rob and Big play the roles of reality television personalities. The show purposefully constructs the object of reality television which is supposed to be spontaneous when it is in fact not. The duo’s interesting motto ‘Do work son,’ is partially the generic justification beyond their numerous shenanigans as well as an interesting call to do, to not just sit around doing nothing. Overall the show offered a kind of willing accidental entertainment is coupled with a generic heterogeneous encouragement. Together these themes question the knot, one which I have addressed before, of seriousness and intent. There is a well known quote that it is imperative to take what you do seriously and never take yourself seriously. Here Rob and Big’s take on the narrative plays ruthelssly with the boundaries of seriousness and intent.

Rob and Big, as a self aware reality show, or at least self aware in terms of form (not content), is part of a growing sense that the illusion is to be dropped when it comes to so called reality and, taking Lesie and the Lys as a model, critical ironic distance as well. Leslie Hall seems to be making fun of those who do ridiculous things self critically by doing what seems ridiculous seriously while aware that she’s doing is for an audience. In a sense then, Hall is reflecting on her performance (making sure that it is ironic) which makes it less seriously ridiculous - meaning that it comes off as more earnest (in its attempt to be ridiculous) and therefore seems less like an attempt at being ridiculous and more simply ridiculous thing.

To be clear: what we have here is a kind of non-relfexive Cartesian subjectivity (as Lacan articulates it) run amok that is “I think where I am not” and “I am therefore it thinks” is embodied as “When I think I should act as if I am not thinking and also my social being must have the halo of thought to show that I am aware of my being but not trying to form my being.” This is Zizek’s simultaneous postmodern decline and return of the big Other - the internalization of authority not in a traditionally disciplinary way but in a panoptic function.

Nick from The Accursed Share, Taylor from Fractal Ontology and myself have begun a collective blog which hopes to be a nexus for Speculative Realism, Non-Philosophy and Transcendental Materialism.

It is called Speculative Heresy.  Other authors have already signed on and translations and resources are also available.

Of the various terms that Francois Laruelle utilizes in his non-philosophy, none is odder than cloning.

Non-philosophical cloning is the performative method by which and from which, the stranger (or alien-subject) utilizes the transcendental material which comprises the world in order to foster new decisions and break current philosophical horizons. Where all philosophical thought according to Laruelle is founded upon a decision where a datum and factum (such as actual/virtual) are auto-posited as reciprocally constituting and given, non-philosophical cloning operates by distinguishing the Real term from the ideal term thereby turning the loop into a one way street. That is, the alien subject liberates immanence (the Real as absolute cause) from the transcendent (as occasional cause). Instead of transcendence functioning as a position of evaluation, transcendence becomes the result of loosing immanence as such from its correlationist trap thereby passing through the transcendental material (as a kind of accelerant) pointing a meteor towards the world from which the subject was cloned from.

However, it is fitting that the stranger/alien-subject is created via cloning since any sense of ontogenesis or non-ontological creation is eschewed by non-philosophy in total. While Brassier would no doubt argue that any sense of origin is already deciding on phenomenology as the subject’s horizon, we might suggest that a theory which disregards intentionality (as does Michel Henry and Deleuze’s system) and also takes the un-decisional or unconscious into account, might disrupt the stranger as being merely a lonely clone. John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Thought clearly indicates the formers vehement rejection of the unconscious.

To me it seems, by virtue of being born in a society, one is going to be pretty dinged up by the time the subject gets to the point of even possibly realizing their own solitude – that is, there seems to be an ambiguity between the coming to be of the alien-subject and always already being an alien subject in Brassier’s Alien Theory and Laruelle’s work on the whole.

Following Brassier, while every perceptual frame is auto-positioned with the real being grasped by a closed system of immanence and transcendence instead of being loosed as it is in non-philosophy – this does not negate the individual’s battered matter that occurs prior to knowing or even thinking it. Decision is a splitting which, via philosophy, is automatically sown back together but, despite Brassier’s critique of Churchland, there are decisions (that is to say unbindings followed by bindings) which happen by coincidence hence the neurological science saying ‘neurons that fire together wire together.’

Prior to the subject and the stranger that the individual would be of a different register where instead of inhabiting a world the world inhabits them – that is, where the passage from the subject to the stranger is the shift from ‘thinking of’ the Real to ‘thinking with’ the Real, the passage from the individual to the subject would be ‘from the Real’ to the Real. So individual-subject-alien would be parallel to ‘I am the Real (there is only immanence)’-‘the Real is not (there is only me via transcendence)’- ‘I am not the Real’ (I should think with it). That is we could look at Lacan’s progression of the Real in terms of Symbolic/Imaginary/Real in this sense.

Symbolic – Living in the chain of signifiers prior to self identification/limitation – gives one the idea that they are god (the infant sees all as part of their being) but they must still communicate sense they are born into the chain (eventually the mother can refuse their cries etc). This would be the un-decisional since there are signifiers and signified but no fixed set of meaning.

Imaginary – Once the self is articulated we see ourselves as more than ourselves the imago compensates for our broken (but never really existent) pre-Oedipal being. The introduction of the law (via the father or the transcendental material, the World) covers over the impossibility of godlike being with prohibition. Here we have the possibility of the transcendent view and hence the decisional.

Real – The very position of the subject (the economy of absence and presence is nullified) is obliterated in the wake of the real as a terrifying abyss/trauma (we could say actual immanence). We realize that our being from the beginning has always been this mute ‘isness’ and nothing more.

Of course these are deceptively neat cleavages - the imaginary relies on the symbolic by fixing and quilting signifier’s into pleasantly coherent fantasies. In other words, once we recognize our alienation from ourselves as well as the Other, the subject casts a complex phantasmatic net which restricts and allows their action in accordance with their contextual existence. The symbolic kills the very thing it tries to represent thereby digging a hole in reality instead of effectively grasping the always-already signified of the object qua object.

The Real is present at all stages as well and it would seem that it is treated with ignorance, then avoidance and eventually acceptance. I would argue however that such an acceptance, such as in the project of a Zizekian/Lacanian ethics, has stumbled primarily on the transition from the stage of the Imaginary to that of the Real. As exemplified in texts such as Lee Edelman’s No Future and Rey Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic, a politics of unbearable-being, of attempting to inhabit the drive, has appeared as the most common ethics of the Real. Alenka Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real is the is the obvious touchstone here though Lorenzo Chisea argues that she looses her way towards the end. Similair to Kolozova, Zupancic seems to fall onto the body, the remainder of castration, as the last guarantor of ethics - the stupid piece of meat.

The clone has an articulation, outside the non-philosophic sense, in Baudrillard’s scattered thought. In “Clone Story” Baudrillard argues that cloneing is the death of sexuality, it is the loosed death drive, that the clone does not encounter the mirror stage, for Baudrillard it is the death of individuation. Baudrillard’s collapse of the mirror stage supports Brassier and Laruelle’s jump from individual to alien subject. While most of Baudrillard’s account is a hysterical luddism, his conceptualization of cloning gains the most traction with non-philosophy in the non-genesis of the clone.

That is, Laruelle is clear that the stranger has no history, no sense of genesis, and it is here where psychoanalysis seems furthest from and closest to non-philosophy. Where some phenomenologists and deconstructionists have claimed that that psychoanalysis attempts to describe origins as such, it is always a hypothetical past, one of historical truth and not material truth. Thus, where psychoanalysis is almost obsessed with possible origins (in least in terms of effect) non-philosophy rejects them all together. Yet, at the same time, both non-philosophy and psychoanalysis are posited as meta-discourses (operationally) while denouncing meta-languages (as Mullarkey suggests in Post-Continental Philosophy). In both cases the question is to what extent do these parasitic discourses (or perhaps just symbiotic) as always already conditioning all philosophy, all thought and the Real itself?

Katerina Kolozova’s The Real and the “I” is a brilliant text which complicates Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy with post-structuralist feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and various continental philosophies. Like Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Kolozova’s project is a heretical reading of Laruelle’s philsopy which, while maintaining the basic tenets of his system (unilateral duality, vision in one, the Real, transcendence and immanence as distinct) pollutes the non-ness of his arguments. Unlike Brassier however, Kolozova is ultimately concerned with the experiential, with the aspects of non-philosophy which touch on existence as experienced by subjects (or strangers in Laruelle’s parlance). Jumping from Judith Butler, to Rosi Bradotti, to Drucilla Cornell, to Derrida, to Lacan (with thinkers such as Badiou, Derrida and Deleuze sprinkled throughout) Kolozova formulates a breathtakingly lucid and powerfully political, theoretical and social system or, at least, the possibilitly of such. My goal here is to introduce and problematize (albeit slightly) Kolozova’s text which deserves serious interpretation and continued engagement.

After critiquing the rampant textuality and playfulness of postructuralism as “hysterical denial” (p. 6) Kolozova goes on to point out how the much hated One (or Real) is cautiously encircled but ultimately denied across a broad spectrum of feminist texts. Kolozova claims that not only do theorists such as Butler and Bradotti unconsciously invoke the Real, but that they unknowingly perpetuate dualism by opposing deconstruction to traditional metaphysics (p. 7). Berrating Butler for her overly cautious rhetoric (which seems in line with Zizek’s humorous comments in Astra Taylor’s documentary film) Kolozova points out that Butler’s disavowal of Real returns in her placing the Real (of power and deconstruction on the whole) in the body itself (21-22). [I have, in the past, critiqued Butler along similar lines here]. In many ways, Kolozova appears as a Speculative Realist version of Joan Copjec.

Kolozova, via an engagement with Laruelle, goes on to show that Butler’s various oppositions are exploded via Laruelle’s vision-in-one which, is always already a unilateral two (42-48). Echoing Brassier’s critique of correlationism, Kolozova points out that all crisis, whether dyadic or not, is domesticated by deconstruction, purported as non-discursive and hence impossible (p. 52). Kolozova then goes on to articulate the dominating political problematic of our era that, in a deep echo of Zizek, is the name and existence of democracy (p. 65) and, in the most interesting passages, discusses how, the non-philosophical subject (as the stranger, the human in human) interracts with the Real via transcendental materialism (the being of language and experience).

While Speculative Realism has been more than slightly ambigious as to its relation to psychoanalysis and its derrivative transcendental materialism (save Brassier’s two swipes at Zizek in the footnotes of Nihil Unbound), Kolozova is clear in that the two doctrines are not opposed but that Laruelle’s system works with the Real whereas transcendental materialism (or what Laruelle denotes as non-analysis or non-psychoanalysis) thinks the human once it has been caught in the worldliness of the world. Whereas Brassier discusses the Real as only impossible, Kolozova acknowledges the varying modalities of the Real (a la Zizek and Zupancic) and how the Real is captured in our singular fragments of being.

One troubling ambiguity is exactly the role of the unconscious, a term that is limply deployed in Brassier’s texts and absent from the works of other Speculative Realists. While Kolozova discusses Butler’s dismissal of a romanticized unconscious as a wellspring of radical intervention (p. 23), she does not herself comment on its use or being. Reading between the lines of Kolozova’s Laruellian formulation, I would argue that the unconscious would be the moment where the human in human is first experienced as an exteriority (and therefore becomes being or transcendental in Laruelle’s formulation) and the Real speaks to this transcendental material (the symbolic) but in a language the subject doesn’t understand (p. 102). The unconscious may also speak to the lived-ness of the stranger, that life is a fiction which escapes language and both allows for and restricts our freewill (p. 44).

Kolozova argues that, despite Laruelle’s objections, some interface is needed in which transcendence operates on the Real - that the transcendental material of a specified subject (stranger) carries a particular formulation of the Real which, in the end, means that our various subjective anxieties are both Real and Transcendental (101-103). The political implications of this formulation seem to fall somewhere between Badiou (whose concept of evental sites Kolozova utilizes) and Zupancic/Zizek in trying to act according to or be an instance of the Real (p. 65). This formulation is what allows Kolozova to make claims about the aforementioned Real of democracy, which appear similar to Brassier’s comments about capital in his works prior to Nihil Unbound as well as Zizek’s discussion of capitalism in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.

If, as Kolozova suggests, the body is the nearest bearer of the Real of our being, how do we articulate a politics which is different from the tired attempts of identity politics? If we carry the real with us, and our experiences can touch upon the real, what is to separate a politics of the embodied Real versus an identity politics? The difference that Kolozova ends on is that since identity is always a failure to grasp the Real and sense the World, as experiential, is what forces and faxes the Real of such materialism, we can only remind ourselves that such a world is not-All, that the World can never grasp identity as such let alone any singular human in their automatic solitude. The strength here is that Kolozova seems bolder than Badiou in dismissing the pre-Evental non-subject and more optimistic than Transcendental Materialism in that not only can the subject think the gap that it is but that the gap does the thinking, that the Real itself desires to be transcendental to, in a sense, be political.

Kolozova gives as a subject that is both always already in tune with the possibility of the evental and the dishiscence of the drive.

Let us make a decision - cut one half of the vicious fluid from the other - for our purposes slime is an organic substance and is different from waste in that waste is what the organic sheds to shed whereas slime harbors a stronger claim to the core of the organism - it’s functions or its essence itself. The beginning of slime is the beginning of life itself - the clutter of pools, some millions of years ago, in which nucleic acids danced and chained together birthing life itself. Amniotic fluid, stolen by Victor Frankenstein by the bucket full (in the most true film adaptation), the glistening trails left by verminous life forms and so forth. There is the move from slime as the trace of life (either as primodrial or putrefaction) to the innocous artificial slime, that is, the stain of life instead of its trace. This domestication of slime, in its severe popularity, seems to coincide with the environmental upshot of the late 1980s and early 1980s - no doubt fueled by the Chernobyl incident, the Antarctic Ozone Hole, as well as the spill of the Exxon Valdez. The cultural explosion seems apparent in the likes of Captain Planet, TMNT, Toxic Avengers, The Stuff, and various Nickelodeon compounds such as Gak, Floam, Goooze, Skweez, and Sqand. Artificial slime would not meet our first definition but to call it sludge would suggest a disintegration of the organic or inorganic and not a purposefully created non-Newtonian fluid.

Might this creative sludge be akin to a zombie populism - a deterritorialized flesh a la Hardt and Negri. As Steven Shaviro wonderfully illustrates, capital has claimed, and will not let go of the monstrousness of things. This is why, in the best zombie narratives, exemplified by Romero’s work, humans are always more of a threat to one another then the zombies, simply because they cling to what capitalism has taught them. We could also later their use of the Golem in relation to characters such as Swamp Thing and The Heap and Man Thing.

We can relate this view of politics back to the explosion of the environmental concern of the late 80s and early 90s - particularly in relation to Captain Planet. Created by Ted Turner, the show was a strong supporter of globalization and NATO as the singular governing body (obviously with the United States as the unofficial center). While writers such as Mike Davis (Planet of Slums) has pointed out globalization’s output of ecological disaster, the moment of Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, signaled the beginning of the end for the USSR. Limp leadership and the failures of Afghanistan and the like, were evident of the eminent collapse and hence, it was a no-brainer that a logic of the global in the sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ and globalized markets, would be wed.

Thus we have the move from the slime that promises either life or death to the slime that gives us the always-already cohesive - that no matter how much one prods the material, it strengthens for the worse. In essence, globalization marks the deterritorialization of the monstrous social - where the more one struggles to escape the faster you sink. Instead of situationist recuperation, we have a meta-recuperation - where the excess of capitalist recuperation is posited as an escape from banality and this escape is codified in terms of new pleasures - Zizek’s supereogic demand of ‘Enjoy!’

Opposed to this false hope of futurity we have the equally misguided false nihilism, of Badiou’s image of the punk rocker who screams no future! Zizek’s Bartleby politics may error towards such useless negativity or may even equate if such a refusal is seen as anything other than a ‘clearing of the field.’ Lee Edelman’s No Future, is a perfect example of how a ‘politics of the Real’ can be misleading. Edelman seems to either conflate or confuse the Real Real and the Imaginary Real - the Real as disgusting void and the real of the narcisstic self, the in oneself more than oneself. How can a politics recognize a horrible sameness, a stupid materiality (such is the meaning of the word golem taking into its various interpretations in Hebrew) without resorting to defeat or romancing an unbearable life (fleshy zombic multitudes somehow outside capital) or blank futurity found in ‘the children are our future’ which is oppressively heternormative and, biological true.

To return to our divided slime that is the trace of life (the zombic) and the promise of life (the baby’s face) how might we bring this to the Real or bring the Real to them without creating a facism of the face (a la Edelman) or a hollow utopian creature (a la Negri and Hardt)? If Zizek represents a more nuanced version of the first then it would seem that Badiou would fall in line with the latter at least in terms of ostensible negativity and positivity. But, in terms of pragmatism, both of these thinkers are consistently critiqued for being too obtuse when it comes to politics coming into practice. While I believe there is some use in synthezing the two in a kind of looking awry at the event, the longevity of Zizek’s disruptive negativity seems to falter as does the murk of Badiou’s pre-Evental time.

Assuming that we are only ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ can there be a politics which is true to our finitude without falling into a hip nihilism which only engenders narcissism or, even worse, Randian objectivism? The closing pages of Nihil Unbound, leans towards what might be a politics, in that, jumping from Freud’s theory of the drive as repetition, there is an inherent will-to-know in humans that is, contrary to most of the universe, negentropic. As mentioned in the last piece, Brassier ignores half of the equation - the axis of alteration - the way in which the external world, whether this externality is something happening to the subject (from the physical outside) or an inexplicable unconcious thought causes a somatic state which is then connected to a consciously experienced externality. We could say that the synchronic axis of alteration is akin to Badiou’s evental politics whereas the axis of iteration is bound to Zizek’s politics of the act.

Bruno Bosteels puts it best when he says the political difference of psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics is “a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou).” However, as Zizek notes here, it is not simply that the break of the act for Lacan is the Truth opposed to Badiou’s fidelity to the event as truth, but that, for Lacan, truth lies after the fact in the response to the act. For Lacan (and ZIzek) truth is a form of already existant fiction whereas, for Baidou, the event is absorbed into a new structure. Zizek critiques Badiou for separating event from being and that keeping the multitude from the crystallizing one of the event, he maintains a naive oppositional stance - the building of a new structure intsead of an internal rupture.

To return us to slime, Badiou’s politics is the very move from the biological to the synthetic that is, politics is forgoing the trace of life, whether rotting or promising, whereas a psychoanalytic politics embraces the excess of the slime as life, as life being naturally unnatural - hence the negentropy of the drive along the axes of iteration and alteration. The quick political jump, which is the error, is to then proscribe a politics which happens by the very nature of the fleshy multitude, the slime of being. The question becomes: how does one account for the genesis of the multitude in a non-vitalist way, in a philosophically realist way, that does not occlude the possibility of politics? While speculative realism provides a step in the right direction, it that it illustrates the radicality of thought by ‘immanencizing’ the transcendental by binding it to the object, this remains a strong articulation of what Freud called material truth without giving any weight to historical truth - the truth of the unconscious, of affect, of implication.

Brassier, in his texts prior to Nihil Unbound, suggests that Laurelle’s non-philosophy, taken as philosophy, gives as a possibility of thinking capitalism as a decision - that the pre-capital can be thought. While the objects of a pre-capitalism (objects including subjects can be thought) one cannot simply remove the noetic trenches that capital has dug in our gray matter: our relation to capital centers on whether surplus value is Real, ontological or experiential. If capital invented surplus value, if it serves as its objet petit a (as Zizek argues) then how do we account for Harman’s discussion of object’s inherent allure? Or does this equate an excess that is hidden in the object versus an excess that is exuded by the object - that is, since Harman’s allure centers on the hidden depths of the object, can we separate capital’s surplus value as the possibility of the social, the social itself as object? Where Marx stated that the glow of the object relied on the suppression of its material history, the invested labor, doesn’t Harman’s objective allure have to do with the historical truth of objects, that is, there unknown relation and not there unknown being? That is, although Speculative Realism demystifies the object, it essentially mystifies the relation of objects via the occasionalism of Harman, the loss of cause and effects’ linkage via Meillassoux, the objectification of the subject via Brassier and the material excess of ontology a la Grant. This demystification highlights the gap between surplus value (the non-object, or in Laurelle the decision) and the fantasy of endless productivity.

Hence, the implicit politics in Speculative Realism is found in its return to slime as the trace of life, that the smudge of materiality cannot be idealized away, not even in the most basic form of relation itself, in the notion of currency and exchange. This zero point of being is, in a sense, a paradoxically deanthropomorphized bio-politics - that matter matters in that it can think itself as such without recourse to the reflective structures of ethics or democracy. Speculative Realism exposes that the zombic hunger of Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a form of thinking and not a form of being. The psychoanalytic contribution here is that capital, while inhabiting the drive’s mode of iteration, is still subject to alteration. In thinking capital as object we highlight the objects around it as possibly dissociable from it such as democracy and the social.

A fairly recent study to verify the existence of non-conscious effects in the brain entailed a subject being flashed with a fearful face so quickly (33 milliseconds) that it could not be consciously registered. Yet, as caught on a high res MRI, the face had an observable effect - causing anxiety in the test subject. Similar to Benjamin Libet’s studies and others which have verified his findings, it appears that the unconscious or subconscious or non-conscious, registers and causes effects prior to conscious thought.

In their text Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity and the Unconscious, Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti differentiate between the unconscious and the non-conscious. For Ansermet, the non-conscious is procedural whereas the unconscious is the fantasy trace of experience which, like the coincidence of simultaneously fired post-synapses, glaciates multiple signifiers in ways that are further and further from the signified.

Shifting to the latest volume of Collapse the question arises: are the un-seemingly un-formed oozes and horrors of the universe simply the formed horrors but at a faster pace? Is this the divide between Terror of horror versus the lurk of horror? Could the horrifying event, slowed down, been taken from the unconscious and put into the conscious - would this be the forbidden knowledge of Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos?

At the beginning of Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulu he writes:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Yet the reactions to ‘godless’ science seems to be more of a mixed bag of reactionary strategies: new age obscurantism, the theological term in philosophy, and, of course, the rampancy of the correlationist impulse. Houllebecq quotes Lovecraft on his cosmicism:

“The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions’. Only egotism exists.”

While Meillassoux does not engage Lovecraft directly in Collapse IV, it seems that After Finitude has much in common with the foremer’s cosmicism - that humans are simply insects that supplant their idealism on the cosmos. Lovecraft’s cosmicism, as different from nihilism, is, instead of a complete meaninglessness, a great leveling of meaning and the aforementioned egotism, no doubt, finds a comfortable home in correlationism. Horror then, is beyond our individual fragility and is about a trace in humanity’s fragility itself where terror is immediately effecting our egotism. It is obvious then that, for terror, it is more than often death whereas for horror it is insanity.

The tipping point here is that of the figure of the last girl or the sole survivor, which I’ve previously discussed. That is, once the terror is over, the last girl lives to carry on the trauma of what happened. While this seems out of the realm of the terrible it does not qualify for the realm of the horrible.

Put most directly: terror is not knowing, horror is knowing too much. However, there is a level of cross over. The horror, in the realm of terror, is the discovery of the body, it is the knowing too much which leads back to not knowing (in relation to the self) hence ‘am I next?’ The terror of horror, is the sight of the thing which cannot be definately described. As I discussed previously in terms of trauma, the figure of the serial killer moves from the full trauma (the human caused creation of the killer) to the result of the empty trauma, the lone survivor who was chosen, at least in the best slashers, arbitrarily.

In terms of trauma, horror moves in the opposite direction, the pointless existence of horrible things, not caused by humans, generate full traumas - causing complex networks of insanity in the victims - a mythos. In the case of terror - the person survives to tell the story for the benefit of others and themselves - in horror the story is hidden and buried, no one benefits from it.

The question then is what of films which display the genesis of what could become the horrible? That is monster movies in which the birth of the monster, or monsters, is obfuscated by the film’s end - that there may or may not be anyone left to tell the unbelievable tale. We are more used to monster tales being public whether massively (Cloverfield, Godzilla films, King Kong films, War of the Worlds and its imitators, Romero’s zombie films and the like) or more locally (vampires, werewolves, witches et cetera). Two of the examples that stick out here are Neil Marshall’s The Descent, which I discussed at length here and John Carpenter’s The Thing. These films reject the participation in legend and remain self contained horrors which are terrifying (Thacker in Collapse IV makes a similar point - p. 89).

Carpenter’s The Thing is particularly interesting because the thing itself is between formed and formless it is a creature which, if it has an orginary form, we never see it - throughout the film it, in various states of accuracy, copies the creatures around it. The thing is the embodiment of the organic excess of the organic, the drive’s axis of iteration. While this is the drive axis that is fitting to horror, and that which is key to speculative materialism as articulated by Brassier, terror’s axis of alteration, the transcription of trauma, is neglected. This is clear when, at the end of Nihil Unbound, Brassier equates Trieb with only repetition towards death.

Thus we end up somewhere between Benjamin Noy’s positing of the horror of time, the experience of time as a kind of horrendous all at once, and a potential buggering of Virlio’s notion of dromology. That is, where Brassier points to the correlationist separation of time and space, we might point out his removal of the experiential of effects of time - as a sharp terror and a creeping horror.

Speculative Realism is first and foremost a philosophy of depth:

For Brassier it is the hopeless depth of nihil, for Harman the demanding depth of objects, for Grant the seething depth of nature and for Meillassoux it is the depth of Hyper-chaos. In this sense the speculative realist has a downward momentum into the abyss of existence and, where the correlationist would rely on the inexistent short-ranged bioluminesce projected by their own consciousness, the former would toss flares of realism beneath them at regular intervals. This descent has no purpose, it is by definition, unreasonable. Its cause, if it can be said to have one in the proper sense, is none other than the result of ham fisted matter colliding into the object (that thinks and is, in the sense of being, nothing at all), into the darkness - pulled by the anchor of time.

While the correlationist would think nothing of the experience of the descent, the speculative realist learns as much as possible knowing that, in the end, there is only an un-poetic death. If Meillassoux is right in claiming that humanity’s great ability is that of being able to think a time (or place following Brassier and Harman) where there is no thought, what is the final result? If human existence is brutally riven from the machinery of the universe and our sense of telos writhes at our feet, then how does one approach the materiality of the immaterial?

Both Brassier and Meillassoux are currently engaged in topics which appear to concern the world ‘for us’ - taking on issues of epistemology, experience and representation - but there is little indication of the consistency of the for-us. While Speculative Realism is eager to celebrate our capacity to think the non-thought or non-thinkable, it is less clear how it would approach the solidification of relation. As with my last entry, my concern here is one of speed. One cannot help but notice how despite their radicality - Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier effectively glaciate their chaotic axioms - classifying them as eventual - leaving us to ask about the immediate experienciable. The most obvious avenue here, which would be to the philosophy of Badiou, is one that Brassier shuts down in Nihil Unbound. This is an odd move by Brassier and, while worth investigating, we will approach the issue diagonally via other ‘deep’ approaches.

While telos should stay dead - does this mean that time itself can and should be, be completely spatialized? Or put more in relation to the preliminary scenario - how might we investigate depth without obfuscating the temporal dimension? The work of DeLanda, Massumi and Zielinski may give us an interesting set of alternatives. Zielinkski’s approach in particular, while spatializing, still maintains a sense of time that is non-linear. Non-linearity is not the same as a completely spatialized time since non-linearity allows for breaks, irruptions and gaps to form. The narrative then, would only exist in retro as a kind of phenomenal or evental text or body. Zielinski’s technocultural archeology, which seeks out the new in the old, simultaneously celebrates and delmits the human subject via the character of the inventor. Massumi, who also thinks the inventor, argues that invention is that which proceeds its own utility - that retroactively creates necessity. How can these thinkers be placed alongside DeLanda who excises the subject from history? DeLanda participates in the objectification of the subject, throwing it into the cauldron as another materialist variable but what does it mean for this to be a thinking object?

The specter that is haunting the aforementioned discourses is that of Althusser and his process without subject and without object. An immediate problem arises however if, taking Badiou’s comments in Metapolitics to heart, there is even less of an object in Althusser’s work then there is a subject - the object is merely a mirror for the subject. Thinking Althusser’s “Contradiction and Overdetermination” may give us some idea of how Meillassoux and Brassier can let us begin a Speculative Realist buggering/deepening of Althusser:

Althusser begins his well known work by discussing the ‘mythical shell’ which Hegel’s specultive philosophy has made of the dialectic. While the dialectic is eschewed by Brassier and Meillassoux, we can take Althusser’s overdetermination of contradiction and run with it thereby exposing what is in Althusser more than Althusser himself. Might we push the multiplicity of contradiction to such an extent that it contradicts the very container which bears it - that of the totality of a society and perhaps totality itself? Taking overdetermined contradiction away from the dialectic makes it, as Althusser fears, at the mercy of philosophy. However, Althusser’s overdetermination must also be sawed from various superstructures -such as that of economics which always determines the contradiction (in language similar to Laruelle) in the last instance. The issue that rears its head here is that of the materiality of historical materialism or, perhaps more basically, the materiality of the social itself. Contradiction, loosed in such a fashion, might manifest in terms of a reversal of Meillassoux’s hyper chaos in that it would function as a contradictory it-self prior to the existence of humanity or the social. In other words, Althusser’s antihumanism is, while partially destroying the subject it is, more directly, destroying individualism and egoism in favor of the masses and hence his definition of the object as a reflection of relations.

Looking back at DeLanda, we should argue that structures are created after contradiction - contradiction does not operate within systems (since this would suggest the existence of contradiction in the form of an entity which, by logical definition, cannot follow) and sociality, as a form of structure, would be a kind of sedimentation of forces giving rise to contradictions. This formulation begs the question - what happens to chaos or the impossibility of contradiction in the realm of the social if the social does not subsist on entities but on relations? The issue here for Specualitve Realism then is to what extent can relations be said to exist? Ultimately our problem may boil down to that of phenomenology as articulated (though not as explicitly as in Meillassoux) by Graham Harman: that of understanding the relation of primary and secondary qualities. If our relations to things are incomplete, and such relations are a kind of inconsistent plenum flooding the spaces between objects, then how does thought strike?

The materiality of the social may lie in the specificities of Brassier’s mutation of Laruelle’s unilateral dualism, in the connection of thought to object. Without going into the almost endless details of Brassier’s articulation, we might venture that the non-dialectical yet twoness of Brassier’s formulation might explain to us how relations, emanating from material processes, attempt to materialize themselves in the form of the social. Our, to put it in terms of our mutiliated Althusser: thought attempts to seal the errancy of hyper chaos by closing contradiction in a system (whether economics or not) but, taking Meillassoux into account, the unthinkable is primary and hence no system can contain it since, that very system (a la Massumi and DeLanda) was birthed from that chaos and said chaos does not disappear after the fact.

The impossibility of contradiction then is the very possibility of potentiality and, against the coupling of potential and actual, I would replace the latter with loss. While adding objects to Althusser’s processes may lead one to assume actuality - this would forget that sedimentation and death are the ‘most actual’ things get. If, as Harman argues, objects are relations and relations are objects, then the social is the field immersed in relation moving towards the object. Science, or perhaps more specifically technology, might be the counterpart in that it sets out, from the invention of new objects, to redefine relations.

Following Nick of The Accursed Share’s brilliant remarks on Brassier’s reading of Deleuze, I wish to return to the following passage from Nihil Unbound:

“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).

The above quote has, for several weeks now, has plagued me and I do not believe simply because it is a serious challenge to transcendental Materialism – the philosophical doctrine to which I have been bound to for almost half a decade. The above is indicative of several issues in Speculative Realism that have been bothering me, particularly that of narrative and momentum.

In the above quote Brassier makes several assumptions:

1 – Brassier assumes that Zizek ontologizies the transcendental subject a la Kant and that a transcendental subject is necessary in order to retroactively assume/assert one’s freedom.

2 – Following the subject’s purported transcendentalism, that the subject chooses its objective status (and not its subjective status since, for Brassier, it must always already be transcendental) due to the fact that the absolutization of contingency nulls such a possibility. This is how Brassier concludes that all choice is arbitrary.

First let us engage the first point:

As is clear in his more recent works, Zizek’s use of the transcendental subject is an affirmative positioning and does not bear a necessarily ontological status. For instance, Zizek points out that the transcendental can be a useful political position such as when Mao, in response to the USA’s position of atomic weapons, quipped that it would make little difference to the universe if the entire Chinese race was wiped off the face of the planet. In a vein similar to Lacan’s use of the line from Jarry’s Ubu Roi that ‘Imagine there’s no Poland,’ the idea is that poles would exist even if Poland no longer did.
We might immediately assume that the above reeks of transcendental idealism, but does it necessarily? If the Real is that which guarantees the possibility of consistency, that is, it is that which forces all things to be self limiting to maintain their consistency, doesn’t this fall close to Meillassoux’s concept of factuality, the concept of unreason? The Real is, in essence, the consistency of the failure of things to corrupt one another completely – the guarantee that something, outside of difference, allows for difference as such.

Thus, just because the subject can place itself in a noetic position, does not mean that it is no longer an object. As Zizek argues apropos Daniel Dennet, the subject is caught in the very nexus of determinism. Now let us move on to the second point.

Brassier points out that Meillassoux’s principle of unreason negates the very concept of material determinism. But doesn’t this, as Nick points out, purport a rather odd conception of temporality? Doesn’t Brassier’s comment above collapse the thought that ‘things happened for a, or due to reason’ and ‘things happened the way they did because that is what happened?’ Both Brassier and Meillassoux seem to argue that, because anything can happen due to hyper chaos, then the way things did happen has no bearing on the present. Nick’s mention of Quantum Entanglement is very apt here as is Einstein’s response to it. Einstein referred to the theory as ‘spooky action at a distance’ which, to him, seemed to invalidate physics. Brassier and Meillassoux then are implicit proponents of the principle of locality, that only the present changes the present. But, as many experiments, though controversial, have shown, objects at a distance can and do affect one another. Taking a quantum reading of action at a distance into affect, one might be able to recapitulate Zizek’s forced choice.

Via experiments in quantum teleportation, it has been shown that entangled particles can have an immediate affect on one another but such an effect can only be registered after the experiment has taken place. The collision of these particles brings us to the famous Heisenberg principle and back to Meillassoux and Hume’s billiard balls. As Anton Zeilinger notes, information is smeared across the two particles making it unclear how the first was able to affect the second. Taking into account then that the transcendental position is just a position, if the force of the forced choice can be taken as material, not because of a complete determinism as Brassier suggests (although we may perceive it as such), but because of the speed of influence, because of the incompleteness of objects and that this incompleteness is spread from object to object. There is then, no ‘noumenal/subjective autonomy but only an unconsciousness registering of the collision, taking down on the ‘other scene’ of the brain. Zizek’s mistake then is in regards to the term reflection which, instead, should be articulated as a kind of registration.

The aforementioned Zeilinger has discussed ‘two freedoms’ due to the fact that the choice of instrument to locate the particle effects the result of the outcome but does not completely determine it (because of unpredictability – hyper chaos) hence the freedom of the researcher and that of nature. Zeilinger goes on, in terms similar to Meillassoux’s, to argue for things in and of themselves exist and we can only access them indirectly.  The instrumental arrestation of any particle is inaccurate because the measurement affects the outcome but this does not negate the impossibility of a perception-independent reality.

Have we then swung back to correlationism, that the existence of the in itself is, in fact, dependent on our observation? Clearly not – while our thoughts can reshape matter, it cannot disregard it, nor would the inexistence of our thoughts have any consequence on existence itself. For Meillassoux, our ability to think a time (and following Brassier a place) where there is no thought, is a uniquely human characteristic. But any sort of indirect thinking, that is having thought hypostasized in any way is automatically correlationist. Again, as Nick points out, Brassier’s reading of Deleuze slides between time being contracted by thought and time being reduced to a brute matter, a kind of Schellingesque unground – time as a pulsation of matter itself.

The unconscious disjunction between being and thinking disrupts our relation to time not in a way that we simply spatialize it, but in that we imperfectly experience it and register it in ways that are not chronological. Again, this does not mean that time is merely subjective but neither does it mean that we can have no relation to the past or to the future that is merely imaginary. Choice, then, cannot be reduced to mere compulsion as Brassier would have it – not because we can remove ourselves from the realm of objects affecting objects, but because there are non-local entities affecting our movement and our objective status. The unconscious is not purely noumenal in this sense but simply non-linear.

It would seem that a Speculative Realist theory of representation would have much to learn from psychoanalysis and that Manuel Delanda has much to say in regards to Meillassoux’s issues with the appearence of chaos.

Several points in the post are indebted to discussions here and here.

Derrida’s notion of language play and the purported death of the transcendental signifier seems to have anchored narratology, as it is understood in cultural studies and many veins of literary studies, in the swamp of post-structuralism. Furthermore, the phenomenological and post-Kantian articulation of experience as existence can, as Ray Brassier indirectly argues, can be construed as an ongoing attempt to narrativize being. In the beginning of Nihil Unbound, Brassier works through Paul Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism pointing out that while attempting to stream line human subjectivity (by erasing folk psychology - the understanding of human interiority through exterior observation) Churchland runs into a problem when he has to relate neurochemically caused consciousness to the outside world. The problem is that since all we are is a neurochemical network that represents the world - something outside that network must allow for that network (since the network, as any set, cannot contain itself).

Whereas thinkers such as Churchland envision a world where philosophy is gradually subsumed by developments in science, the problem of science’s limit, immediately raises the question of the place of reason, observation and transcendence in scientific naturalism. Brassier engages Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of the arche-fossil - the idea that there is a time prior to time - that events which occurred prior to the possibility of experience (by way of consciousness) such as the big bang, seriously challenge the phenomenological purchase on reality. While Brassier seems to support a theory of objects in themselves, that is that certain things pre-exist our experience, he is critical of Meillassoux’s fossil because it maintains the distinction between anthropocentric time and cosmological time thereby allowing phenomenolgists to disregard pre-experiential time as not existing properly until it was grasped by thought thereby placing Meillassoux’s ancestral realm as a reservoir ‘waiting’ to be intuited. The common thread here is that the mythical view of man, the view that any experience prior to the emergence of humanity only has value as it is researched or dug up through our experience, allows for a narrative which is contingent only to serve the centrality of human experience. It is for this reason that correlationist philosophy, philosophy that pays particular heed to Heidegger, is damaging to philosophy proper.

Brassier’s argument about the need for philosophy proper, in many ways, mirrors Copjec’s discussion of the Real as the self effacing quality that must exist in order to maintain consistency of any discursive construction. Copjec uses Deleuze’s discussion of Foucualt’s use of power - for power to be the force that it is in history Deleuze points out that it must trip over itself or else it risks becoming totalizing in such a way that it would be undifferentiated from existence itself. Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency falls in place here as well - the universe is necessary contingent and, this contingency refers to the law of contingency as well thereby showing not that all is flux but that flux itself is in flux. Here we can look back at Churchland’s problem of relating the network to the world and how it is supposedly solved by Speculative Realism:

Brassier argues that thought and being must be integrated without recourse to transcendentalism or phenomenology by way of Meillassoux and he accomplishes this by working through the thought of Francois Laurelle’s non-philosophy. Brassier adapts Laurelle’s definition of the Real as the zero point of being against defining it as the impossible (which he attributes to Lacan) and stating that it is what Badiou attempted to construct, via subtractive ontology as ‘being-nothing.’ While Brassier’s critique of Badiou seems rather apt, his quick dismissal of Lacan appears problematic. Copjec’s, as well as other Lacanians’, reading of the real is that it is what guarantees consistency via a self sabotaging which dismisses the myth of totality a la Godel and Russel. Here is where Transcendental Materialism and Speculative Realism come to a head - the the discussion of the narrative.

In a footnote Brassier writes:

“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).

Speculative realism. as it is articulated by Ray Brassier, suggests that because the determinism is voided by the hyper chaos of existence, because every situation is incomplete (a la Russel/Godel) there can be no definite chain of events that allows us to reflect on, to retroactively assert our freedom as Zizek argues. Brassier use of Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency in relation to the laws of nature to damage Zizek’s claims about retroactive freedom due to the fact that freedom is automatic and not reflexive due to the place of the object in Brassier’s thinking. Because, for Brassier, the object must be thought through, and thereby precedes thought, and because these objects make up a reality that is not all due to the fact that the laws of nature are themselves contingent (here Adrian Johnston’s reading of Zizek’s reading of Schelling appears useful).

While Brassier’s final reflections on the death drive in Nihil Unbound suggest a subjectivity that essentially ‘clears the field’ by way of its ‘being-nothing’ this sense of freedom seems indebted to the object (of the brain in this case?) as a kind of filter for our particular individuation - our own worthless repetitious response to the knowledge of extinction. Brassier’s discussion of freedom, as a kind of agency, appears to be missing from the text, and his strongest rejection of Zizek’s assertion would most likely lie in keeping being and thought separate without relying on transcendentalism. The question becomes: Is Brassier’s use of Laurelle’s Unilateral Dualism (a twoness in the void where one side runs amok, becomes an excess of the other) that different from Johnston’s articulation of Transcendental Materialism - where consciousness runs away from gray matter?

For Brassier, transcendence is only operative on the side of the object which is given (without relation, without givenness) by the real whereas Transcendental Material operates in an almost backwards fashion - transcendence is operative via giveness which the object gives from the real. Put in terms of consciousness: for Brassier the real gives us the brain which allows thinking but through a disjunction whereas for Johnston/Zizek, thought escapes the limits of the brain and goes to work on it.

Both Brassier and Zizek are attempting to write a narrative of humanity that is meaningless and yet useful, at least, until the stars go down and the heat death (or perhaps the big rip) of the universe begins. One has to wonder how irksome Brassier would find the extent which the human race would go to, pointlessly, exist beyond the death of the universe. The distinct possibility that, in the cold days of the degenerate era, trillions of years in the future, that humans, then huddled around a white dwarf, the universe’s last light, opened a quantum bubble and hopped into another universe.