THEORY
After After Finitude: An Afterword
By Justin Clemens
This afterword first appeared in Aesthetics After Finitude by Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland (re.press, 2016)
It is very common for people to think that they live in times of dissolution and
decay. In Christian Europe, for example, the book of Revelations was canonical:
‘The Apocalypse was widely commended as utterly indispensable.’1 Prophets of
one kind or another would accordingly emerge to declare that the end of the
world was nigh. It is still grimly amusing to see the phenomenon of firm dates for
the End being given, then broken—and then further dates given, to be broken in
turn. Year-after-year, the End has come and the End has passed, without the attitudes
and forms of thinking for which the End is clearly necessary failing to remain
popular. One might then propose with the poet Wallace Stevens that ‘the
mind is always at the end of an age’: that is, that a certain apocalypticism is perhaps
a condition for any possible or actual thinking as such.
Certainly, there have always been critics of the sense of an ending. Maurice
Blanchot has wittily declared that ‘the apocalypse will be disappointing,’ given
that we now know how miniscule our entire solar system is in the scheme of the
universe.2 What previous ages enthusiastically imaged as the total obliteration of
created things turns out to have been an almost-risible irrelevance. For his part,
Jacques Derrida has shown that the thought of the ‘end of man’ is itself inscribed
within philosophical anthropology itself, such that all putative calls for a transcending
of Man in fact repeat the fundamental operations of humanism.3 Compatible
contemporaneous critiques can be cited from across the post-World War
II humanities.
Only apparently paradoxically, this recognition of the insufficiency of the
concept of an end derives from analytics that draw their inspiration and methods
from finitude itself. The discovery of finitude is one of the most profound developments
in modern philosophy, and one of its greatest thinkers is Martin Heidegger. Why finitude? The ancient Greeks were finite thinkers of the finite: they
submitted all thought and being to the limiting order of the One, and found the
formlessness of the apeiron repulsive. But this isn’t finitude; quite the contrary, it
is merely the finite (of which more below). In contrast, Christian theology found
a way to render God infinite—in fact, found a way to give its deity a number
of staggering predicates or anti-predicates, such as immortal, immutable, infinite,
and so on. This is clearly not finitude, either. Yet this very ‘infinity’ was
inscribed in transcendence, that is, of an attitude to time that renders the time
of this world finite, integrally marked by the End. Although scientific thought, in
particular modern physics and mathematical set theory, renovated the thought
of an infinite universe and the status of infinity itself, it allegedly failed to comprehend
being-as-time.
Among other accomplishments, Heidegger returned simultaneously to the
necessity to rethink being, the traditions of thinking itself, and above all to the
problematics of disclosure, eclosion, and unveiling. As Christopher Fynsk puts
it: ‘By virtue of its inescapable temporal determination, thought can achieve
no final definition of its own situation and thus cannot transcend the history in
which it finds itself as it turns back upon that which gives it its impetus.’4 Such an
analysis of finitude is not a naïve one. The finitude of Being is not simply an empirical
finitude. Finitude is neither the finite, nor simply the negation of the infinite.
It is a critique of totality. It is a critique of science. It proposes that Being’s
finitude is inaccessible by most of the means by which thought seeks to grasp it,
and turns to the opening of questioning itself as a priority. Finitude is at once after-and-never-yet-after insofar as it seeks on principle to return any thought to the
time-of-its-own-happening.
Given this intellectual context, it seems that thought is confronted with at
least a double problem today. On the one hand, we are confronted with what
seems to be the patent evidence from an enormous range of events that we live,
at the beginning of the 21st century, in an unprecedentedly turbulent world. To
advert to the essays collected in this volume and to the editors’ expressed aims,
climate change, algorithmic capitalism, and technological innovation go beyond
any prior challenges that humanity has faced. On the other hand, the inherited
tools that we have to think such phenomena present as not only insufficient,
but possibly as part of the problem itself. Yet—and this has been essential
to Heidegger’s contribution—we cannot simply, by force of will or desire, think
that we can think our way out of this double-bind. If we do indeed need to actualize
a thinking that is after finitude, we must be aware that it was the thought of
finitude that has radicalized the problematic of the after as such.
So what then would it mean to be after finitude at all? What does the title
of the conference, this book, and perhaps this project even mean: Aesthetics
After Finitude? First of all, it is an allusion to Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude,
as well as to an entire milieu of radical thought, to Graham Harman and
Object Oriented Philosophy (OOP), François Laruelle and his non-philosophy, Ray Brassier and Nihil Unbound, Reza Negarestani and Cyclonopedia, to Nick
Land, whose Fanged Noumena exerts a powerful if occult force upon a wide range
of contemporary thinkers.5 Behind these, moreover, is an entire host of tutelary
figures, from C.S. Peirce and A.N. Whitehead through Wilfred Sellars and
beyond.
To the extent that Meillassoux’s book provides the keynote reference for the
present collection, Aesthetics After Finitude should also be understood as Aesthetics
After After Finitude, as the editors themselves note in their Introduction. But this
phantom ‘after’ is not written as such; it is patent but suppressed, as befits the
structure of allusion. Moreover, this should alert us to the meta-nominal aspect
of the title: the reflexive incorporation of another title within it, at once marked
and unmarked. Yet this also provokes a question: is this title a statement or a
question? Does it announce: here is aesthetics-after-finitude, this is what aesthetics
looks like after finitude or rather after after finitude; or rather is there aesthetics after
finitude? In the second case, there is a suppressed question mark, a punctuation
mark that is present-in-absence.
‘After’ implies, and this is part of the intention behind the nomination, a
temporal reference. ‘After finitude’ implies that finitude is finished. Finitude has
proven to be—perhaps unsurprisingly—finite. Finitude was finite in time; it had
its time (finite), and now it’s gone. Hence: what do we do now, in the time after
finitude? Presumably, we’re now in the in-finite or at least the non-finite, which
certainly poses some further questions. After all, finitude is not simply done
away with by the infinite. Finitude is by definition a subset of the infinite, included
in the infinite. Yet if we were just continuing to enjoy finitude-after-finitude,
one wouldn’t presumably need to have any discussions about it, we could
just keep doing what we’ve always done. So the title proposes a discussion of the
non-finite aftermath of finitude. Part of the problem would immediately seem
to be that ‘infinite’ has traditionally been equivalent to ‘everything’: what do we
do now, then, but everything? So perhaps we need to ask more about this equivalence.
Perhaps the infinite is not simply endless.6
The title may also imply that the time after finitude is infinite. But is that so?
What happens if, ‘after finitude,’ we’ve really hit the time of the infinite? That
doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that infinitude is infinite in time. In fact, the
‘after’ might seem to preclude an infinitude of time after the infinite; the time
of the infinite has already been limited by the time of the finite that it comes after.
The time of the infinite may not be infinite. In which case, there would be
a strong sense in which infinitude itself would still be finite. After finitude, then,
would be finitude, just more of it, more intense finitude. Which might imply that
finitude was or is or will itself be endless, that is, already infinite. Or, conversely,
that infinity and time necessarily part company; if there is to be infinity, then
it cannot be in time. It is not a priori clear that an infinite time is the equivalent
of eternity. Just because something lasts for ever doesn’t make it eternal: as
any good theologian might tell you, God is eternal but you yourself have only
the chance at everlasting life…the life after this life, which is not true life but its
antechamber.
Aesthetics has historically always been attentive to the problem of ‘after.’ In
being a discourse regarding the operations of formal invention in the regime of
the senses, aesthetics has always also had to deal with the problem of time-asform-giving. Here, again paradoxically, ‘after’ has meant in aesthetics not only
temporally belated, but formally belated as well. ‘After Poussin’ means, for example:
in the style of Poussin; or, alternatively, a new work created on the basis of a
work of Poussin’s. Thus ‘after finitude’ can mean: in the style of finitude. ‘Aesthetics
after finitude’ would then demand not infinity, but a continuation or extension
of aesthetics in the style of finitude.
We can then again reinterpret the project as asserting: ‘there are perhaps
many possible styles, such that finitude is one of them, and the one that we are
adopting here.’ Even more strongly, there’s a rather mournful edge to ‘after finitude’:
we’ve lost finitude, it’s gone, and now we’re chasing after it, hunting its
traces. Where has finitude gone? How do we get it back? ‘Aesthetics After Finitude’
might then mean: although we are seeking to come to terms with, even
affirm, the present, in which we are post-finitude, what we really want is to get
back to finitude so we can have our aesthetics again. Or again: our aesthetics
is modelled on finitude. So the temporality of the ‘after’ is also a question of a
principle of the creation and transmission of forms: what does ‘after’ mean for
form? Is form necessarily finite? Or must form and finitude divide after finitude?
After finitude therefore denominates and participates in an event of oxymoron,
contradiction, and paradox. It is also, as the contributors to this volume
all insist in their own ways, after what Meillassoux calls ‘correlation.’ That is:
finitude was the last recourse of a subjacent correlationism that ruled all modern
philosophy, at once illicitly limiting itself as it retained the privilege of an
anthropological bond. Such correlationism is a humanism, that is, a kind of
self-denying humiliation of thought and its objects in the name of a covert yet
grotesque inflation of humanity. Yet the greatest problem with finitude is that—
despite the sophisticated analyses it presented regarding time and being—it was
never really an after after all. While the philosophies of finitude proposed themselves
as a philosophical reaction to and affirmation of the Copernican Revolution
in natural science, they in fact accomplished quite the opposite, a Ptolemaic counter-revolution, to invoke Meillassoux. Finitude was the reinsistence of the
before posturing as the after. As such, it integrally installed the relation of the for
us as its non-negotiable condition and ideal. To be after finitude therefore also
means to generalize the not-for-us of thought. After finitude must be not-for-us because
we must now affirm our own cosmic deracination, our own irremediable
levelling in existence.
And this is why the absolute exigency of an inhuman speculation as absolute
and real is the governing motif of these investigations. Moreover, as the editors
admirably posit, part of the challenge is that the cosmic deracination attendant
on the after be given its properly aesthetic freighting. Yet this means that
aesthetics is no longer a science of feeling, sensibility, or sense, but ensnarled
in imperceptible batteries of polysonic decorporations. These essays, in other
words, and in line with their own professed inspirations and the challenges of
their often-anonymous materials, are offering a kind of philosophical therapy.
Philosophy has been from its foundations such a therapy: Socrates has been a
long time sick, as the phrase has it; Wittgenstein wanted to show the fly the way
out of the fly-bottle. Here, the treatment will and must be played out in the absence
of the for-us, in the often savage speculations regarding hyperstition, the
hyperfly, the hyperlaruellean, the hypermillennial, the hypergeological, the hypersynthetic,
the hypertransfinite, the hypercyclonic, the hyperalgorithmic, the
hypermallarmean, the hyperaccelerationist, the hypertiamatic, the hyperchimerical,
the hypergardic. Aesthetics After Finitude proffers a hypertherapeutics of
the afterthought among the madness of the molecules. Thinking big requires
feeling small.
So Aesthetics After Finitude seeks to cure us of ourselves by really unleashing
our own finitude, in all senses of that phrase. After the end of a thought of finitude
which itself had declared the end of the end, we find the thought of the after
as activating an absolute end. The end of correlationism is not only a destruction,
but a consummation of that which correlationism sought to think. One
consequence of the critique of correlationism must be the true assumption of our
own finitude. If one can see this elaborated with the utmost clarity throughout
the contributions to this volume, we could also invoke Brassier’s genial move as
exemplary: taking contemporary science seriously entails dealing with the absolute
necessity of universal extinction.
As Brassier puts it in the conclusion to his brilliant book:
In becoming equal to it [the trauma of extinction], philosophy achieves a
binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered
commensurate with the in-iteself. This binding coincides with the objectification
of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence
between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge
of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes
the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of
philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that
philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification,
but rather the organon of extinction.7
If I have any complaints about such a position, it is that this practice of philosophy
has sutured itself too directly and lovingly to contemporary physics. As
Brassier announces regarding the destiny of science: ‘the point is not just that
science enriches and amplifies our understanding of reality but that it uncovers the truth.’8 Confusing the refusal of ineffability with a particular image of
science, Brassier’s magnificent statements—such as ‘I am a nihilist because I
believe in truth’—remain superb interventions into contemporary thought, yet
only have pertinence on the basis of his prior collapsing of an old conception
of truth into a particular figure of knowledge. I don’t think anybody has to believe—
however authentically nihilistic such a belief may present itself as being—
that science uncovers truth. However, I do believe we have to agree that
science establishes what counts as knowledge. What’s the difference? Whether
there is one ring to rule them all. This is precisely where aesthetics can intervene
to snap apart such contingent competing collages of belief. What the current
collection does through its very attentiveness to aesthetics is supplement and
extend such work as Brassier’s by effectively de-suturing truth from knowledge
again. If there is indeed a general political point to aesthetics after finitude, it is
surely this: to ensure that the after is in the end the without-master.
But what I finally wish to emphasize in these heterogeneous writings is an
experience—or, more precisely, the contemporary non-experience of the loss of all possible
experience as an atemporal after—to which they all testify, but which none of
them directly discuss. This experience is in some sense a loss of the real—not
just of any real, but a loss of the real of time as loss. This is a cut between modernity,
for which time crystallizes in historical sites, and the contemporary, for
which the loss of the real of time is embodied in atemporal and inhuman articulations.
Of course, time still passes, vulgarly, experientially, non-linearly, kairotically,
differentially repetitively, intermittently, what have you. But the loss of
the real of time revivifies a kind of spontaneous speculative naivety regarding
the irreducibility of objects (OOO and OOP) and a concomitant if contradictory
tendency to revive one or another master of thought (e.g., physics for Brassier,
logic or mathematics for Meillassoux). Yet between this Scylla and Charybdis, a
new aesthetics of the aftermath. Speculation is to the present what melancholia
was for modernity—the attempt to present in thought the trace of an irreducible
in-temporal difference as the exhibition of action-in-inaction.
The classical melancholic was immobilized by the overwhelmingness of
what-was-gone—the void of the past deactivating the forces of the present beyond
any possible explanation—as a kind of zombie of being. Whether that persecutory
past had ever existed at all is unlikely; whatever the case, the key was
that it marked the present with its vitiating absence. Hence the pure time-mark
expressed by the melancholic: that there is time turns time against time within
time by intensifying the impotence of the living body. The melancholic enacts
and expresses the inability to act destined by the flaming brand of temporality.
Then, afterness was the real essence of being-time: that is, finitude. But now
we are after after. When that happens (or rather doesn’t happen), the only discourse
able to introduce a comparable immixture of consistency and paradox,
in-action and fabulation, is fantastic speculation on the basis of rigorous impersonal
knowledges.
Still: the future is obliteration and oblivion, extinction and extermination.
It swallows all speculation whole. Thinking at its geophysical and energetic limit,
where past-time’s exhaustion receives the final consummation from the future’s
inevitable apocalypse, the present presents as if it were already after. Today
we are living—and dying—in and as the Phantom of the After. This book
is a Necronomicon for its summoning.
1. C.A. Patrides, ‘“Something like Prophetick strain”: apocalyptic configurations in Milton’ in C.A.
Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds.), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: patterns, antecedents and repercussions, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 207.
2. See ‘The Apocalypse is Disappointing’ in M. Blanchot, Friendship, trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997.
3. See ‘The Ends of Man’ in J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982.
4. C. Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 16-17.
5. See, inter alia, Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London, Continuum, 2008; G. Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenolog y and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago, Open Court, 2005; F. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. N. Rubczak and A.P. Smith, London, Bloomsbury, 2013; R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, Houndmills, Palgrave, 2007; R. Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, Melbourne, re.press, 2008; N. Land, Fanged Noumena, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2011.
6. As one of the editors of the present volume commented here: ‘the prefix in is significant here too. In doubles in English as a verb formative but, equally, a substitute for the negative un, from Latin ante-. What is nice about the word infinity is that the paradox of the concept is allegorized in the lexeme, specifically in this Janus faced prefix.’
7. Brassier, p. 239.
8. R. Brassier and B. Ieven, ‘Transitzone/Against an Aesthetics of Noise,’ NY, 5 October 2009,
http://ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html, accessed 1 March 2016.
Justin Clemens is associate professor in the School of Culture and
Communication at The University of Melbourne. He is the author of many
books on European philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is also the author
of several poetry collections, including The Mundiad and Villain.
Aesthetics After Finitude by Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland (re.press, 2016)
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