On the Revolutionary Earth1
A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism
Reza Negarestani
(written for Dark Materialism, Kingston University of London)
To reactionaries...
(the everyday Copernican man)
The traumatic force catches up and, as it were, shakes the ego down from the high tree or the
tower. This is described as a frightening whirlwind, ending in the complete dissolution of
connexions and a terrible vertigo, until finally the ability, or even the attempt, to resist the force
is given up as hopeless, and the function of self-preservation declares itself bankrupt. This final
result may be described or represented as being partially dead. In one case such ‘being dead’
was represented in dreams and associations as maximal pulverization, leading to finally complete
de-materialization. The dematerialized dead component has the tendency to drag the not yet dead
parts to itself into non-existence, especially in dreams (particularly in nightmares).
(Sandor Ferenczi)2
What follows is a perilous venture to pursue what Freud refers to as ‘an extreme line of thought’ whose
only vocation is to ‘disturb the peace of this world in still another way’.3 We begin to construct, step by
step, a territopic model of materialism in which the geophilosophical synthesis between the history of the
human-citizen, the history of the state and the contingent natural history of the earth is no longer traceable
to the somatic integrity of the earth or what can be identified as an axiomatically veritable interiority.
Instead, we argue, that the geophilosophical synthesis (of the modern man qua citizen) is conditioned by a
geocosmic concatenation of traumas or cuts in the axiomatic fabric of interiorities. Since there is no single
or isolated psychic trauma (all traumas are nested), there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma
and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas. Here,
trauma should be understood not as what is experienced but as a form of cut made by the real or the
absolute in its own unified order; a cut that brings about the possibility of a localized horizon and a
1
This essay could never have been written were it not for the never-ending explosive supplies of Manabrata Guha,
Robin Mackay and Gabriel Catren.
2
Sandor Ferenczi, Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (Reprinted London: Karnac
Books, 1994), originally published in 1930, 222-223.
3
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961), 31n.2, and
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 353.
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singular but interconnected ‘point of view’. For this reason, the deepening of the localizing cut or trauma
substitutes the earthly ground of the geophilosophical synthesis with a groundless geocosmic continuum
built by a nested series of traumas that extend from the very conception of matter, to the formation of the
terrestrial field, to the psychic architecture. It will be elaborated that the deepening of the
geophilosophical synthesis from the grounded earth to the nested and exteriorizing geocosmic continuum
requires a geocosmic reinscription of psychoanalytical theories of trauma and drive (as explicated in the
works of Freud, Ferenczi, Rank, Spielrein and Reich). Moreover, it also demands a theory of an
exteriorizing Absolute that affords interiorized horizons and localizing points of view as its own forms of
cut or excision which can be deepened or topologically recalibrated.
Once the geophilosophical synthesis – as the drive of earthly thought – is divested of its grounded relation
to the earth and absolutized by the geocosmic continuum, it is militantly remobilized against any
philosophical or political model formed and driven by the axiomatic verity and somatic integration of its
interiorized horizon. The deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis under the aegis of an exteriorizing
absolute and underpinned by a geocosmic reinscription of the theory of trauma should be understood
precisely in terms of a radical weaponization of localized, territorialized or interiorized horizons. The
human-citizen, the state, the polis or the ecological thought of the deepened geophilosophical synthesis
are no longer somatically integral horizons functioning according to their repression-driven schemata.
They are non-isolated and interconnected traumas which are extendable to the radical exteriority or the
ungroundable absolute. It is precisely such extendibility – understood in terms of alternative modes of
deepening the localizing trauma into the exteriorizing absolute – that transforms these horizons into
immanent terroristic weapons. States, citizens and circumferential planes of thought become capable of
swapping their veritable identity or axiomatic interiority with an exteriorizing underside that is driven by
“the will of depths” (Schelling) and through the ever-twisting logics of trauma or contingent cuts. Whilst
every governing module or grounding system is receptive to such veritable identities or axiomatic
interiorities as necessary elements for supporting its ontological position, it is this ceaselessly selfrenegotiating verity (determinate-without-determination) of the exteriorizing absolute for which nothing
and no one is prepared. Yet since, in every horizon of interiority, the ostensibly veritable identity or
axiomatic interiority is inseparable from this ‘resident yet inassimilable’ index of exteriority, the binding
of the former as the grounding necessity for dwelling and governing is also the unbinding of the latter’s
territopic contingency. In other words, the binding of the territorial, localized or interiorized as a veritable
or axiomatic ground by governing or dwelling systems proves to be the unbinding of the contingent depth
that is mobilized within every interiorized horizon through the agency of nested traumas.
If we accept the non-controversial and rudimentary formula ‘Anti-axiomatic Surprise (i.e. the surprise
turn from axiomatic to non-axiomatic) = Terror’ then any form of remobilization of an interiorized
horizon or its resources in the name of its traumatic depth qua the exteriorizing absolute must be
considered as partaking in radical terrorism. Correspondingly, any form of thought set to irreparably
deepen the geophilosophical synthesis from the a priori terra verita rooted in the somatic integrity of the
earth, the state and the human-citizen to the ever-self-renegotiating verity of geocosmic continuum should
be identified as immanently territopic. The self-renegotiation of the universal absolute is determinate; it
transcends from itself and becomes immanent to itself. The determinate self-renegotiation of the universal
absolute does not slide into anything other than or outside of its absolute field so as to become
extraneously indeterminate. Yet in so far as it determinedly overcomes itself through ceaseless
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renegotiation of its verities, it becomes territopic (not inherently terrible) for any regional determination
imposed upon it. To this end, we shall briefly draw upon a model of territopic materialism in which the
dialectic and the evacuation of matter from its privileges intertwine so as to bring about the possibility of
a geocosmic synthesis whose revolutionary tensions are unbound by pushing for wider and deeper fields
of trauma within the terra verita of each earth, each state and every citizen. In other words, we shall find
an opportunity to see what it is like when the deepened geophilosophical synthesis sheds a cosmic light
on the maxim ‘the revolution starts from the inside’.
Trauma, or: It is not the psychoanalyst who knows the difference between amputation and
transplantation; it is the surgeon. And it is the revolutionary who can’t tell the difference between
one and many, not the psychoanalyst
Less than two years after the Great War, in his trenchantly written Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
presents an energetic model for the dynamism of the entire array of organic struggles on earth. According
to this model, the emergence of the organic from the so-called originary inorganic state can be seen as a
trauma which marks the temporary estrangement of the organic from the inorganic, the transient
establishment of a zone of interiority excised out of its inorganic precursor. The traumatic scission,
accordingly, brings about the possibility of life and concomitantly, a roundabout regression to the
inorganic source from which the organic has been distracted, temporarily and under external influences,
and to which it must return by any means and at all costs. Hence according to this model, the organism is
energetically driven – in the sense of being relentlessly pulled back – toward the inorganic whose reality
cannot be experienced and whose incommensurability with the temporal verity of the interiorized horizon
generates a form of tension and subsequently a form of synthesis. This tension is produced between the
reality of the inorganic that cannot be experienced (because it is diachronic to the organic subject) and the
interiorized horizon or the subject of experience. In short, this tension is the expression of the
incommensurability of the diachronic contingent reality that is now – thanks to the topological militancy
of trauma – dynamically posited inside the interiorized horizon. In the wake of trauma, in verifying – or
more precisely, axiomatizing – the verity of its interiority, the horizon must simultaneously stave off the
ingressing flood of the outside (überschwemmung) and even more significantly, must expose itself to the
inassimilable index of the precursor exteriority that is now resident within it.
The traumatic cut, accordingly, generates two modes of tension for which two corresponding syntheses
toward resolution are subsequently formed. We will carefully examine these two tensions and their
corresponding syntheses. This step is necessary to evaluate the implications of these regimes of synthesis
for the economy of the interiorized horizon and the binding of the universal absolute from which the
horizon has been excised. In other words, how do tensions and their respective syntheses occasioned by
the traumatic cut affect the axiomatization process whereby the horizon’s interiority is posited as a
veritable ground for both reflection and inflection upon the absolute?
The traumatic cut brings about the possibility of two tensions which, as we shall see, correspond to the
function or topology of the cut. These two tensions are exogenic and endogenic. As the exteriorizing
absolute (the unified and absolutized universal continuum) excises itself, the interiorized set or cut is
exposed to two registers of exteriority:
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I.
One register exerts the external reality of exteriority in the form of an energetic index that is
exorbitantly set against the outer threshold of the horizon, moulding it from the outside.
Correspondingly, a form of tension emerges as the horizon tries to preserve its somatic integrity
against the exorbitant index of exteriority that simply engulfs the interiorized horizon. This is the
exogenic tension often associated with sublime force or exorbitance. This exogenic tension is the
product of a traumatic cut that splits or creates incisions that unilateralize the exteriority as an
external excess or “an influx of excitation vastly in excess of the binding capacities” (Brassier, 236).
It therefore corresponds to an incisional form of trauma that simultaneously separates the interiorized
horizon from its exterior backdrop and sets it against the exteriority which is posited as external and
exorbitant. In short, exogenic tension is an economical tension insofar as the incisional cut
recapitulates the exteriority in terms of capacity, hence the energetico-reductivist realization of
exteriority as exorbitance. We can trace different forms of the exogenic tension in the Freudian
account of shell concussion, the protectionist strategy of the vesicle through the auto-mortification of
its outermost surface, and ultimately in the relation between the terrestrial biosphere (the history of
earthly thought included) and the sun. Once we have inspected the second register of exteriority, we
shall have occasion to examine these forms of traumatic cut more carefully. We will be able to see
how the traumatic synthesis or drive corresponding to exogenic tensions is indeed the motor of a
peculiar mode of binding exteriority. This curious mode of binding, it will be argued, is not only at
the base of all strategic modes of thought or systems of binding (from libidinal materialism to
capitalism) but also is the ultimate counter-revolutionary tool whereby the system, instead of staving
off or dismissing exteriority, economically binds it within the affordable duplicity of capacity and
excess.
II. The other register of exteriority does not exercise an exorbitant influence; quite the contrary, it is the
concomitantly neutral and incommensurable identity of the exteriority as such. The trauma is but the
self-excision of the universal absolute into its own localized and temporalized fields. The selfexcision (or self-reflection) of the absolute is rooted in universal contingency, that is to say, trauma is
the very expression of contingency in the gradational transition from the universal to the local or the
regional. Self-excision of the cosmic openness into its regional fields in such a way that the openness
retains its absoluteness both within the regional horizon and beyond it, is what we should identify
with an absolutized variant of Sandor Ferenczi’s ururtrauma or archi-trauma. The ururtrauma of the
absolute turns the secondary function of trauma as division (or secession) into the primary function of
the absolute’s self-experience or self-excision. No matter how originary and precursory a trauma is,
there is still another trauma to which it can be deepened, another trauma by which the infinite interconnected traumas can be widened – it is the one that makes sure the narcissistic wound keeps
bleeding. The diagonal immediacy of ururtrauma with the absolute and universal contingency bear a
number of consequences: The contingency of trauma not only means that it can happen anywhere and
at anytime, it also means that trauma transplants universal contingency into regional spatiotemporal
fields. The diagonal immediacy of ururtrauma with the absolute means that isolated or single traumas
do not exist – that is to say, trauma is intrinsically plural and traumas cannot but be linked and
interconnected. And lastly, in view of the previous conclusions, every horizon or regional field of the
universal absolute is formed by more than one traumatic cut, and for that reason, the traumatic
inflection upon the universal absolute does not follow a monistic regime of synthesis. To put it
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differently, there is always an alternative mode of traumatic synthesis by which an interiorized
horizon can be opened to exteriority, an alternative way by which the absolute inflects upon itself
from the same regional field. To this extent, the non-exorbitant – that is the neutral and absolute –
register of exteriority is nested along multiple interconnected points of entry within an interiorized
horizon. In short, ururtrauma unbinds trauma as an alternative cut and consequently, brings about the
possibility of an always-alternative system of traumatic synthesis or drive toward the universal
absolute. The ururtrauma or the self-excision of the absolute redefines both the reality and the
function of trauma from a pathologic / therapeutic system of anthropomorphic emancipation to a
mode of universal and contingent transplantation of the exteriority and remobilization of the absolute.
Trauma – in the sense of the absolute and not in the sense of the economical capacity of the
interiorized horizon – is perforation; its method of cutting is not incision and splitting but piercing
from multiple points of view, and nesting; it does not amputate, but transplants. Accordingly, the
tension that ‘trauma as perforation’ creates is endogenic. Such a tension originates from the
remobilization of the universal as the regional and the transplantation of exteriority within interiority.
Examples of endogenic tensions are to be found more in Ferenczi’s and even Reich’s later writings
than in the works of Freud, in particular in their accounts of child abuse (Ferenczi) and the myths of
UFO abduction (Reich). Freud’s insistence on seeing exteriority in terms of exorbitance and trauma
as splitting – the former rooted in an embryonic physics of thermodynamics, the latter in the now
questionable division between inorganic chemistry and biology – prevented him from foraying into
the realm of endogenic tensions associated with ururtrauma. The earth as conceived by ururtrauma is
not a scar formed upon the solar electromagnetic inundation; it is a contingently posited and
gradationally accreted field of complicities that has been excised by and out of the universal absolute
along manifold nested traumatic cuts. The regional (the earth), in this sense, is a cosmic constellation
of alternating and nested traumata of the universal absolute which twist the shape of the regional
along their contingently erupting points of intrusion and zones of transplantation. The terrestrial field
of complicity is encompassed as much by the trauma of the sun as it is by the trauma of stellar death
via the effective binding of iron (produced in the silicon burning process) – iron as both a
gravitational and chemical agent in forming the planet and stirring life from within and without.
Endogenic tensions express the inassimilable presence of the universal continuum within the regional
field, a resident yet alienating presence that has been bored and nested into the horizon from different
angles, contingently, gradationally, infinitesimally. We call this resident yet inassimilable index of
exteriority that can neither be expelled nor reintegrated within the interiorized horizon, the Insider. It
will be argued that endogenic tensions wrought by the Insider deform the interiority of the horizon
beyond recognition and necessitate forms of synthesis that progressively sabotage the verity of the
horizon’s interiority. Under the auspices of the Insider, enodogenic tensions call for a non-economical
inflection upon the absolute that breaks free from the insipid models of emancipation and
transgression: A revolution – that is to say an irreversible and radical change – made by the
ceaselessly self-renegotiating verity of cosmic exteriority and instigated through dialectic with/of the
absolute via territopic materialism.
Now we know that both endogenic and exogenic tensions inherent to trauma are dialectical tensions
between the universal absolute and its regional fields. However, the insurmountable traumatic tension
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here cannot be explained in terms of a full dialectical sublation. Why? Firstly, because the interiorized
horizon and the precursor exteriority are not precisely antithetical (one is merely the inflection or
focalization of the other). Secondly, because the reality underpinning trauma cannot be sublated through
assimilation or cancelation. The reality of the inorganic qua precursor exteriority is only interiorized
through the remobilizing and redeploying power of trauma, but due to its diachronicity and exteriority
cannot be fully assimilated in any way whatsoever. Therefore, the traumatic topology of tensions is
dialectical insofar as the absolute (whose index is, in this case, the inorganic – the precursor exteriority of
the organism) sets itself against its extensively realized horizon (which in Freud’s biological account is
the organism). Trauma is the self-dialectic of exteriority. Yet what is amiss in this dialectic is the
sublation. That is to say, all that is present in the exteriorizing dialectic of trauma is the insurmountable
tension immanent to the absence of any possibility for sublation. This necessary and irreversible lack
fuels a synthesis between the universal absolute and its regional field that, depending on the mode of
traumatic cut associated with it – that is to say, depending on the position of this lack with regard to the
interiorized horizon – determines the course and the unbinding power of the dialectic with/of the absolute.
With traumatic tensions being explained in terms of binding different registers of exteriority, we can now
proceed to examine modes of synthesis associated with these tensions and the exact role of traumatic cuts
in determining such syntheses.
The Dialectical Synthesis of the Traumatic Subject, or: How can we tell the difference between
counter-revolutionary traps and revolutionary weapons?
Regardless of its nature, the traumatic tension must be brought to a resolution in one way or another. But
what is this resolution? Freud relates this resolution to the restoration of an earlier stage before the
conception of the nervous system or the organic horizon. The tension drives the horizon toward a
resolution, which in Freud’s account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is the full restoration of the reality
of trauma qua the inorganic. The reality of inorganic exteriority is, however, diachronic in time and
exterior in space with regard to organic interiority. For this reason, the synthesis toward such reality
neither strictly conforms to principles of the interiorized horizon nor the unconditional neutrality (or
nullity) of the “anterior posteriority” (Brassier, 233) indexed by the inorganic. The binding of exteriority,
accordingly, conforms to the synthesis (as the motor of the drive) between the interiorized horizon and the
exteriority, or more accurately, between the universal gradient and its regional focalization. The mode of
inflection or openness toward exteriority depends on the behaviour of the traumatic synthesis which itself
is determined by the complicity between the universal and regional gradients. But the mode of complicity
between the universal absolute and its regional fields is also contingent upon the traumatic remobilization
of the absolute and deployment of the exteriority, that is to say, it rests upon the way by which trauma
posits the universal absolute in regard to its regional horizon. To summarize, the traumatic binding of the
absolute freedom qua contingency of cosmic depths is, at its base, neither the question of the subject’s
strategy in binding the universal absolute nor the ‘anterior posteriority’ of radical exteriority, but the
question of how trauma ushers in the ‘will of depths’.
In order to see how amputating and transplanting modes of trauma determine the type and mechanisms of
traumatic binding of the universal or the dialectical synthesis with the absolute, we shall examine the
syntheses of exogenic and endogenic traumatic tensions:
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I.
Traumatic synthesis where trauma incises exteriority from the interiorized horizon and thereby
generates exogenic tensions (examples: Freud’s account of the vesicle whose baked-through
[durchgebrannt] crust shields the organism against the flood of excitation and energy; Bataille’s
earthly life or grounded biosphere as the scar of the Sun upon the Earth): The traumatic cut is in this
case a form of splitting that sets the exteriority as an exorbitant register outside and against the
interiorized horizon. It is identical to what Brassier associates with François Laruelle’s unilateralizing
cut of non-dialectical negativity which possesses “a power of incision or dismemberment” (Brassier,
146). The unilateralizing traumatic cut amputates the universal from the regional; consequently, it
creates a grounded level of interiority in relation to the surface or the plane of amputation. Yet more
significantly, the amputating cut of the unilateralized difference between the interiorized horizon and
the exteriority economically reposits the universal absolute as that which is now outside the
affordances of the traumatized horizon of interiority. This external recalibration of the universal with
respect to the regional, positions the absolute as an unbindable exorbitance on the geocosmic
continuum. Yet binding exteriority as the universalized surplus of the regional – which the regional
horizon can never access except by means of dissolution – flattens the difference between the
universal absolute as exorbitant and manifested exorbitance as absolute. The one-sided or amputating
traumatic cut creates an amphiboly within the economic semantics of the interiorized horizon: The
contingent traumatic position of exteriority as an exorbitant index can no longer be distinguished
from an economic condition wherein the exorbitant manifestation of exteriority is but the necessary
essence of the absolute. Although the amputating trauma contingently realizes the universal absolute
as an exorbitant for the interiorized horizon, it also opens a new outside for the regional horizon
wherein exorbitance is necessarily correlated to the absolute. This flattening of difference, or to be
more exact, the confusion between the necessary and contingent positions of the absolute as
exorbitant resides not only at the heart of contemporary capitalism and its excesses but also in the
bone-marrow of the history of philosophy – especially when it comes to the relationship between
thought and the Earth or what can be called the geophilosophical synthesis. Capitalism and the state
maintain their universality and inevitability for Man by means of this traumatic confusion between
contingent and necessary manifestations of the universal absolute as exorbitant. Their machineries
continuously postulate their excesses not as products of unnecessary processes and violent methods of
conservation and protection but the unavoidable consequence of their regional binding of the
universal, of their becoming-universal. Accordingly, averting the path of the state or capitalism is no
longer a matter of treason or disobedience but the folly of the impossible – trying to walk away from
the universal. In the next section of this essay, we will argue that only by rigorously embracing this
folly can we develop a genuine non-restricted dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute.
For the geophilosophical synthesis where both the individual organism and the surface biosphere are
under various energetic influences of the sun, the confusion between contingent and necessary
positions of the universal absolute as inherently exorbitant leads to a chronic form of terrestrial
myopia: The universal absolute cannot be thought except as an exorbitant index of exteriority.
Likewise, in the same myopic vein, cosmic exteriority cannot be inflected upon except through a sun
or an energetic equivalent whose excess blinds the interiorized regional horizon. The sun becomes a
blind spot barring the scope of the abyss. Ironically, the unilateralizing cut only “sharpens onesidedness” (Brassier, 147) at the cost of establishing a regime of exorbitance which can only be bound
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through the synthesis of affordances inherent to the economical correlation between the interiorized
horizon and the exorbitant exteriority.
If the incisional mode of trauma contingently sets exteriority as an exorbitant index against the
interiorized horizon, this doesn’t mean that the exorbitant exteriority is non-dialectically posited. On
the contrary, since the interiorized horizon cannot successfully bind the exorbitant exteriority and
simultaneously, the pull-back toward the reality or the source of trauma is inevitable, then the horizon
has no choice other than affording the excess. The interiorized or regional horizon gradually and
indirectly – that is, in conformity with its own economic terms and conditions – binds the excess of
exteriority over interiority, the amputated universal over the dismembered regional. For this reason,
the unilateralized or non-dialectical conception of exteriority is translated into the energetic dialectic
of the interiorized horizon. The unbindable exorbitance of the unilateralized or amputated exteriority
determines the affordability of the interiorized horizon and demands an economical binding. In other
words, the incisional traumatic cut and exogenic tensions entail a type of synthesis which is but an
economical solution to bind the exorbitant index of exteriority.
Therefore, the synthesis inherent to exogenic tensions becomes that of constant translation of
exorbitance to affordances of the regional horizon. It accords with what Freud recognized as energetic
re-experiencing (simultaneous affirming and buffering) of the traumatic incident. The synthesis
between the unbindable exorbitance and the horizon of interiority forms a fully bilateral type of
economical correlation between the sources of tension. On the one hand, what we have is an
exteriority whose external excess to the interiorized horizon coercively necessitates the economical
binding (i.e. affordability) of the unbindable exorbitance as the expression of its inevitability. On the
other hand, the regional horizon economically assimilates the aforementioned excess as the basis of
its drive, establishing an affordable continuity between the negentropic excess (originary trauma) and
the entropic excess that will eventually dissolve it. Accordingly, the synthesis brought about by the
unilateralizing excess is realized as an accelerative curve of conservative-dissipative rates circuitously
constructed through regional affordances of the horizon. This synthetic curve simultaneously aims for
regional complexification and dissolution of the entire horizon. The acceleration, or precisely
speaking, the weaponization of such synthesis is therefore devoid of any revolutionary potency. The
embracing of the traumatic binding of the exorbitant exteriority via an accelerative synthesis of
exogenic tensions either switches affordances for those which afford more or unleashes the anarchy
of exorbitance within the system. But the anarchy of exorbitance is merely an extreme form of
conservatism since it dissolves the system according to its own economical ambit. The Outside it
opens up for the horizon is merely an exorbitant manifestation which was never absolute in the first
place. The psychological image of this accelerative strategy is the isolated mad individual reduced to
a vegetative state or the incendiary hypermanic transgressionist – two burnt-out and violent sides of
the same coin, the productive/anti-productive double-bind.
The dialectical synthesis built upon exogenic tensions with the unilateralized qua exorbitant
exteriority is not just impotent, it is a counter-revolutionary trap. The traumatic binding of an
exorbitant manifestation of the outside is limited to the economical correlation between the mandating
excess and the conservative sphere. In short, the synthesis is limited to the available affordance
between the interiorized horizon and the exorbitant exteriority. But what are the implications of this
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conformity to affordance or economical correlation? It means that the traumatic subject will be forced
to bind the universal absolute in one way and one way only. To put it differently, the interiorized
horizon follows a mode of binding or a type of synthesis that can be afforded. The organism wishes to
die in one way and one way only. The traumatized subject only wishes to bind the exorbitant source
of trauma by re-experiencing it over and over in dreams. Any other mode of binding that does not
correspond to the economical correlation between the conservative ambit of the interiorized horizon
and the exorbitant manifestation of exteriority is forestalled. Such alternative modes of synthesis
would generate real, fundamental disturbances in the axiomatic economic sphere of affordances.
Accordingly, the dialectical synthesis toward the universal absolute through exorbitant manifestations
of exteriority is characterized by its intrinsic closure toward alternatives (i.e. modally unbound
syntheses). The adherents of such a counter-revolutionary dialectical synthesis – whether disguised as
systems of thought, orders of change or ways of living – are distinguished by their reactionary and
restrictive attitude against alternatives, their dismissal of tactical improvisation and unwritten plans,
and their fear of asymmetrical fields of weaponization.
The revolutionary dialectical synthesis of the traumatic subject is marked by its ability to unbind
alternative modes of traumatic inflection upon the absolute and by its improvisation in the science of
asymmetrics. Or, in allusion to Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy and reappropriation of
his architectonics, the revolutionary synthesis is that of ternary logics. It extricates the unbound third
out of the first (the uno) and the second (the duo) by meshing relational and modal webs wherein the
mediating function of the third unifies all regional perspectives and localized hierarchies into a global
or universal function. To this end, we shall argue in the next segment, concerning the type of
synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions, that trauma as a transplanting cut precisely assumes the
role of this mediating and universalizing function between regional horizons. It beaks the symmetryin-asymmetry of the dyadic cut by arranging and negotiating the relationships between the universal
and the regional, exteriority and interiority, via transplantations and the plastic logic of gradients and
nestedness. Correspondingly, the dialectical synthesis brought about by ternary logic binds the
absolute through interconnected webs of traumata; it inflects upon cosmic exteriority through the
implicitly twisted logic of asymmetry-in-symmetry, liquefaction-in-cohesion, exteriority-ininteriority.
II. Traumatic synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions. Here trauma as the self-excision or selfreflection of the absolute, transplants exteriority within interiority and fabricates topologically nested
gradients of the universal (examples: Sandor Ferenczi’s account of autotomia and the alien will in
which the autoplastic [as opposed to alloplastic] nervous system of the child is moulded around the
inassimilable presence of the abusing adult; Maria Torok’s theory of deep burial of traumatic
humiliations in vast inter-vaulted ego-crypts which have their own cryptonymical patterns; and the
so-called ‘chthonic’ geochemical determination of life and its various aspects as the regional
expression of cosmochemical processes and events such as isotopic fractionations during the
formation of the solar system out of the molecular cloud): Trauma as the regionalizing self-reflection
of the absolute draws a third function from the unilateralizing function of radical exteriority and the
interiorizing function of the regional horizon. It synthesizes the extensive incision with the intensive
interiority of the regional horizon and brings forth the perforating cut whereby the universal can be,
contingently and from alternative points of entry, transplanted within its localized focal zone. The
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regional horizon, in this sense, is a focalized gradient or continuum occasioned by transplantations
and nested continuity of the universal which brings about the possibility of regional grades.
Accordingly, the transplanting mode of trauma does not unilateralize exteriority; it can be defined as
a nesting function that changes the local gradation (with regard to the universal), or more accurately,
the plasticity of the regional horizon. The synthesis associated with endogenic tensions, for this
reason, should be understood not in terms of regression or unsuccessful attempts in reestablishing the
precursor exteriority, but in terms of gradational changes in the plasticity of the regional horizon as it
asymptotically approaches the universal gradient from all directions. This is how the deepening of the
geophilosophical synthesis into the geocosmic continuum by way of transcending the dialectic of
endogenic tensions occurs: Regional horizons whose endogenic tensions are generated by traumatic
transplantations across the universal continuum can also gradationally reflect upon the universal
through the continuous and mediating function of traumas. But this emphatically means that the
universal absolute is reflected upon not as external or exorbitant, but as that which is infinitesimally
and gradationally within and outside the regional field.
The dialectical synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions is characterized, firstly, by its unbound
modality. If the ururtrauma of the absolute unbinds the trauma essentially as an always alternative
way for transplantation of the universal inside the regional and nesting of one regional horizon within
another, then the synthesis of endogenic tensions toward the absolute is identified by its asymmetric
approach toward the absolute across and through multiple non-isolated fields of traumata. Secondly,
the dialectical synthesis originating from endogenic tensions is not constituted on the primacy of the
inevitability of pull-back toward the absolute (the inevitability of extinction, the inexorable reckoning
day), it is built upon the complicities between the regional horizon and the universal, the interiorized
horizon and indices of exteriority already nested within it. Acceleration toward the inevitable, as it
was argued earlier, is not only an impotent avowal of the conservative-dissipative ambit of the
interiorized horizon, but also a counter-revolutionary trap by virtue of safeguarding the horizon
against alternative ways of inflecting upon exteriority and the absolute. Complicities between the
resident indices of exteriority and the interiorized horizon, on the other hand, absorb this so-called
inevitability merely as asymptotic expressions of the universal gradient or the geocosmic continuum:
Interiorities as nested asymptotes of exteriority, embodiment as the traumatic asymptote of
disembodiment (viz. the unfeasibility of embodiment in the pure extensity of expanding space) and so
on. Complicities or dialectical synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions deepen and widen the
regional interiorized horizon across the universal gradient and along these asymptotic lines. The
asymptotic approach of the traumatic binding / synthesis means that the complicities of regional
horizons with the universal absolute along zones of traumatic transplantations are no longer emptied
of significance or purpose. Everything matters, every complicity counts, every field of materialization
or materialist perspective has a global import, every regional function has a value to be mediated with
the universalizing function of trauma and interpolated by the asymptotic synthesis toward the
absolute. This is why the revolutionary subject celebrates the Copernican Revolution and its traumatic
legacy as a revolution by widening the regional across the universal gradient and asymptotically
approaching the absolute. If the Copernican Revolution is to be reductively distinguished by its
trademarks, one would be the absolute deinstitutionalization – and not the abolition – of the
Inquisition and its philosophy of cruelty; the other would be its call for search and mobilization of
10
alternative traumas capable of widening regional perspectives by and across the universal continuum.
It is the latter that indicates the replication of the Copernican inquisition inside everyday life.
In the wake of regional complicities with the universal and the reality of asymptotic synthesis,
strategies – whether on the level of praxis or as strategic thoughts, whether in the form of acceleration
toward exteriority (Nick Land) or philosophical binding of extinction (Ray Brassier), whether as
strategic values of “this world” (Peter Hallward) or strategic future force transformation (Donald
Rumsfeld) contribute in various degrees to the deep-seated counter-revolutionary tradition. Some by
dismissing regional tacticities and their corresponding asymmetric and asymptotic materialist
perspectives, some by putting their trust in opportunities unlocked by an exorbitant exteriority, and
some by their anti-Copernican phobias of outer worlds. The revolutionary dialectical synthesis widens
the regional horizon as an asymmetric tactical field. Each trauma that mediates the regional and the
universal, each zone of traumatic transplantation, is a field of tactics opened by complicities of the
regional and the universal, the local resistance of the former within the traction of the latter. The
alternative traumas of the regional horizon constitute its tactical dynamism within the universal
continuum. Since the propensity of tactics is to fade away from the sight of command and endanger
the integrity of the ground control, the tactical mobilization of trauma reinvents the regional horizon
outside of its grounded field as a platform for complicities between anonymous materials. The
revolutionary subject restlessly searches for alternative syntheses or modes of traumatic inflection
upon the universal absolute. It improvises out of its traumas, or to be more exact, out of traumas
which mediate between its regional horizon and the outside: Endogenic tensions generated by
contingent and alternative traumatic cuts nourish the drive for partaking in complicities with different
indices of exteriority across the geocosmic continuum.
The dialectical synthesis associated with exogenic tensions always takes the form of a compulsion to
repeat the originary trace of trauma qua incision. Since the originary trace of incision is traumatically
conceived as exorbitant, this compulsion to repeat is always performed energetically, namely, by
means of affording the unbindable exorbitant trace of trauma. The energetic reexperiencing of trauma
concomitantly buffers the excess and circuitously moves toward it. Correspondingly, the synthesis
firmly reestablishes the interiorized horizon as the ground or the central sphere from which – in a
Ptolemaic fashion – contact with the alien outside should be conducted. Once it is denuded of its
complexity-disguises planted along its economically detoured path, the course of exogenic synthesis
is revealed to be obsessively straightforward. The interiorized horizon is not allowed to relocate its
position outside of itself on the universal continuum; instead it must locate itself with regard to the
exorbitant gravity of trauma. Moreover, since the unilateralized exteriority enjoys an exorbitant
external ubiquity, its impact upon the horizon is mainly that of what Freud identifies in terms of
scarification, scorching and rigidification of the exposed regions. Whereas for transplanting traumas,
the effects of the inassimilable exteriority and universal hijacking of the regional horizon are
gradational and zonal changes in the plasticity of the horizon, or even sometimes contingent
anomalies in the internal topology of the traumatized sphere. Finally, since the dialectical synthesis
emerging out of exogenic tensions is determined by the externality of the source of trauma and the
economic internality of the regional horizon, its logic is foreign to the possibility of nested spaces (or
multi-connected traumas) and the possibility of universalization of regional categories (or trauma as a
mediating function between regional gradients of the geocosmic continuum). In short, the dialectical
11
synthesis inherent to the trauma of exorbitance is allergic to three branches of the mathesis of trauma:
topology, differentiable functions and categorical morphisms.
In the above differences and characteristics of the two traumatic syntheses – one modally unbound
and the other modally restricted – echoes of two geophilosophical systems can be heard:
Synthetic relations with the source of trauma as gravitational relocation vs. Location
according to an exorbitant gravity
Effects of different realizations of exteriority on a given sphere (earth): gradational vs. rigid
changes
The cosmology of trauma or the geophilosophical synthesis with topological, differential and
categorical configurations or without them
The realm of traumatic syntheses is that of a geocosmic expanse where the transition from the
nervous system to geophilosophy and geophilosophy to cosmology becomes increasingly blurred and
porous. It is interesting to point out that some of the psychoanalytical explications regarding the realm
of endogenic syntheses brought about traumatic transplantations are strikingly similar to deep earth
and extra-terrestrial stories. Sandor Ferenczi’s theory of alien transplant develops an alternative
account of traumatic synthesis for children who have been victims of sexual abuse. According to
Ferenczi, the psychic plasticity of the child is mainly susceptible to take forms (autoplastic
adaptations) rather than giving forms so as to make self-destruction and self-recreation unnecessary
(alloplastic adaptations). In confronting with a force whose communication is ambiguous (meaning
either it cannot be separated into its characteristic components or the child cannot determine the
nature and category of this communicating force), the plastic psychic horizon of the child takes the
shapes of the force. This communicationally ambiguous force that leaves its deep imprint on the
child’s plastic neuropsychic structure is the adult’s act of molestation which in families is usually
disguised under different semiotic patterns of parental love, playing and adult punishment all at once.
Since this adult presence cannot be reintegrated within the psychic structure of the child while it has
already been interiorized as a component of the self, it begins to change the cohesion of the psychic
horizon according to its inassimilable negativity. It commences its course of deterioration by entirely
changing the formation of the psychic sphere from inside-out. It sinks deep within the psychic
horizon and produces an inner gravitational core that differentiates the child’s psychic horizon to
different strata of an “individuum” (Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary, 10). Each stratum is formed out of
the complicity of the psychic fabric with the contingent will of this alien transplant. Even the
immediate external atmosphere of the growing child which is formed by alloplastic adaptations is also
determined by this sunken alien core. The alien transplant now determines the psychic life of the child
from inside and outside, in all directions, and through different spaces that it has improvised out of
the available ‘material resources’ of the psychic sphere. The only stratum that is left relatively
untouched so as to properly shield the alien will and supply the individuum with some sort of quasialien life is the outermost layer, the thin surface of personhood. The outermost layer of the
individuum is constituted of a surface biosphere where the person carries out its everyday life. It is a
seamless façade of superficiality where nothing is out of the ordinary, even though at times its transvacuous consistency is challenged by displacing volcanic eruptions of burnt-out remains of the
original person and purposeless energetic discharges. To be exact, on the surface the sky is calm. This
12
was never meant to be a children’s story but a moral lesson on the formation of the earth and its
biosphere.
The degradation of the terra verita of the psychic sphere from the inside through contingent
complicities of an alien transplant with horizon’s axiomatic components undergoes a full-blown
eversion in the later works of Wilhelm Reich.4 Seemingly distorted by hyperbolic turns and twists,
Reich’s entire oeuvre should be seen as an exquisite exfoliation of the same philosophical flower.
First, there are psychoanalytical, vital and anti-fascist works. Despite their controversial nature,
Reich’s writings prior to his move to the United States possess a robust coherency. These earlier
works can be seen as a continuous series of inquiries into the effects of energy disturbances, traumas
and repressions within different spheres of earthly life: sexual, physiological and socio-political
domains. However, as Reich sets foot on American soil, his project takes a drastic turn – unusual
even in terms of his European adventures in eclecticism. For one decade from 1947 to 1956 (up to the
completion of Oranur second report), Reich’s writings, research and personal life are secret facilities
where humanity consolidates its last lines of resistance against aliens. Everything that is developed
during this period verges on pseudo-science and cosmosophy: system-toxifying deadly orgone
radations (DOR), gravity and anti-gravity equations, models of alien visitation, pre-atomic chemistry,
studies on the inherent susceptibility of water as the vitalizing substance of the terrestrial life to extraterrestrial chemical forces, theories of desert formation and the clandestine role of UFOs in
desertification processes on a cosmic scale. We have heard about tales of alien abduction as
refabricated accounts of sexual child abuse developed by victims. In these scenarios, the worldly and
everyday reality of adult exploitation slowly twists into extra-terrestrial events of alien sighting,
contact, encounter, abduction and return. Rather than energetically re-experiencing the trace of
trauma in dreams, the sexually abused subject twists again and again the incident of ‘close encounter’
– the trauma of molestation – into an extra-terrestrial odyssey. The so-called grades of the encounter
(the first, the second, the third and so on) delineate the order of the traumatic synthesis whereby the
subject sights the alien on the earth, in its home, in its innermost horizon, next it is visited by the
alien, then it is abducted by trauma, taken out of this world, reconfigured and brought back to the
earth where now everything is twistedly alien, that is to say, human. Whereas Ferenczi’s account of
trauma is concerned with alienation of the internal sphere / erde, Reich – himself a molested victim of
capitalism and socio-political traumas – in his ufologic reports presents trauma as a close encounter
that relocates the subject from its totalized earth to a new alien field of gravity where the subject is
reconstituted outside of its own center once and for all. The subject’s previous grounded horizon
where the social sphere, the home and the psyche were totalized into one veritable earth, is now reexperienced and sighted from a synthetic terrestrial and extra-terresterial viewpoint.5 From here, the
earth is always a UFO, my home I can no longer remember or care for, myself is a continuously
4
Eversion is the process of turning inside-out. Here it denotes Reich’s concomitant turning of Ferenczi’s theory of
child abuse into an account of alien abduction and turning the deep-earth model immanent to Ferenczi’s traumatics
inside-out so as to transform it into a Copernican recalibration of the earth in space.
5
This synthetic perspective especially becomes evident in the claims of those who return from abduction. Their
physiology and somatic integrity have apparently been left intact save for inexplicable subtle changes experimented
on their reproductive organs during abduction. The abductee is a mongrel capable of reproducing synthetic
populations / perspectives which are neither strictly human nor purely alien proper.
13
relocating extra-terrestrial field of observation, the groundless base from which all planets are and
will be alienated.
These are no longer bewildering fictions of psychoanalysis but fully-fledged cosmological scenarios
unraveled by the mediating function of traumas and their universalizing syntheses.
***
Now we know that the question of dialectical synthesis or binding of the absolute, and hence the question
of revolution – viz. radical change by and through the universal absolute – is precisely the question of
inflective relationship of the subject qua regional with the absolute freedom qua contingency of cosmic
depths. It is the question of tactical mobilization of forces: How does the subject muster the ‘will of
depths’ through traumata? How does the constriction of the subjective horizon play upon the freedom of
depths, logistically, tactically and strategically? What is common to such questions concerning the
revolutionary relationship between the subject and the absolute through the mediating function of trauma
is the intimation of the Schellingian materialist thesis regarding the problem of evil – that is, the
imposition of the freedom of depths against the constricted horizon of the subject. This leads us to yet
another tunnel worthy of investigation: If it is trauma that topologically imposes the freedom qua
contingency of depths against the interiorized horizon, and if it is trauma that modally determines the
dialectical synthesis of the revolutionary subject, then what is the relationship between the reality of evil
and the revolutionary subject in its traumatic binding of cosmic depths?
The Weaponization of Modern Man, or: It is time to take the revolution out of the streets and into
space, or: Revolution was never meant to be strictly terrestrial
Only through dissecting the dialectical syntheses of the traumatic subject with the absolute, can we
identify the revolutionary subject i.e. the subject that brings a radical and irreversible change by and
through the absolute within its localized and temporalized horizon. Through its dialectical synthesis, the
revolutionary subject embarks upon the traumatic binding of the universal absolute so that the axiomatic
verity of its horizon is uprooted by the ceaseless self-renegotiating verity of cosmic exteriority. The
revolutionary subject breaks away from the isolationist regime of trauma and plunges into the ever
deepening and widening universal constellations of traumata. To put it differently, through the traumatic
binding of the universal absolute, the revolutionary subject deepens and widens the geophilosophical
synthesis of its horizon into and across the geocosmic continuum. In doing so, the revolutionary subject
finds an asymptote between its horizon of interiority, its regional horizon and the universal and
exteriorizing absolute. The unbound dialectic of the latter with itself becomes the regional dialectic and
the drive of the former.
Here we should pause and in order to avoid possible and further misunderstandings define the subject that
we have been exploiting so far in conjunction with the word revolution. The subject is only constructed
traumatically along the lines of the absolute’s self-excision so that the purported centrality of the subject
to the absolute becomes the absolute’s regional – that is, contingent and traumatically con-centrated –
focalization. In other words, the subject is but the traumatic focalization of the absolute. Its regional
horizon is no longer a somatically integrated earth, its interiority is no longer axiomatically veritable, for
it is now a gravitationally bound cluster of traumata suspended on the geocosmic continuum of the
14
universal absolute. If modern man is defined by traumas which take him in and out of focus, then in order
to reclaim him from the state, from the slithery of capitalism and finally from himself, his traumas must
be weaponized as revolutionary dialectical syntheses toward the universal absolute. The weaponization of
modern man prepares him in his long overdue run in the revolutionary course of the absolute where
reactionary enemies abound and he himself is at the center of fear and hostility.
The concomitant decentralization of the subject’s position in regard to the absolute and deaxiomatization
of its somatic integrity through traumas constitutes the very identity of the revolutionary subject. If the
subject can no longer be critically and universally investigated without traumas that contingently and
convolutedly determine its horizon, then the mobilization of the revolutionary subject needs to take into
account – as its utmost critical discipline – the universal mathesis of trauma. The revolutionary subject is
measured simultaneously by the concentration and involvedness (com-plexio) of traumas that position and
encompass it, bringing it in and out of focus. It is in this sense that our early emphasis on the position of
modern man qua citizen in the geophilosophical synthesis becomes evident. In its fuzzy collective and
individual field, the citizen of the modern state is an all-encompassingly traumatized horizon. But the
magnitude of its traumatization does not particularly bespeak its membership role in the set of the state.
Although the state is a set by the virtue of its citizens and its territorial field, the citizen quite literally
means nothing to the state. It is only the function of the citizen, that is to say the axiomatizing function of
citizenship, that is safeguarded by the state. The state is only interested in resting its purportedly
axiomatic and veritable interiority upon the axiomatic and veritable interiority of its citizens, namely,
citizenship as the given function of its human members. The citizen is not only the traumatized subject of
the state, it is also the focal point for the convergence of innumerable traumas:
As the event immanent to the polis, the citizen is the horizon whereby the trauma of the human organism
is transplanted within the territorial trauma of the city and the state. It effectuates the organic trauma
within the trauma of the human organism whose retarded (Bertalanffy, et al.) or fetalized (Gould, et al.)
slow pattern of growth exposes the juvenile human species to a wide array of traumas. During this
differentially retarded or neotenic period, the plastic traits of the human species including its neural
plasticity are still susceptible to change at the synaptic level and can be easily traumatized by external
familial, social and environmental disparities or excesses. The link between the brain regions with the
highest structural plasticity formed during the prolonged period of maturation, neurodegenerative diseases
and trauma events is yet to be fully explored. The slow formation of the human’s juvenile plastic traits
causes the traumatisation of the human (child) to be somehow invisible and occur at the level of what
Ferenczi might call ‘deep or phantom transplantations’ i.e. traumas which only later during adulthood – or
more politically speaking, during full-fledged citizenhood – will begin to burgeon and manifest. To sum
up, the organic trauma is nested within the homo sapiens trauma whose neotenous or retarded
neuropsychic traits are efficaciously configured with invisible traumas, the traumatized homo nervus is in
turn grafted onto the demographic trauma immanent to the territorialization of the human population by
the state; but this is not the end of the burrow yet. The trauma of territorialisation extends to the terrestrial
trauma whereby the surface biosphere is set against the exorbitant exteriority of the sun and stirred by the
inorganic chemistry of the deep earth. Both the sun and the planet earth are also, respectively,
traumatically conceived against their cosmic backdrop. Concentrated within this profound trauma of the
geographical territorialisation is the geopolitical trauma of the city where the human population is
eventually mobilized and distributed. The citizen is the contemporary terrestrial focal point of the
15
concentrated traumas of the polis and the human population. The trauma of the modern man qua citizen is
not only expandable to traumas of man and the earth but also extendable to traumas which plunge its
putative verity into cosmic depths. It is for this reason that, for the revolutionary subject who is
determined to deepen the geophilosophical synthesis of its regional horizon along the geocosmic
continuum through traumatic binding of the universal absolute, the citizen becomes the here-and-now
field of revolutionary synthesis. The revolutionary subject embraces the citizen as its designated zone of
binding, for the traumatic reality of the citizen is an abyss no political agency, whether of the state or the
nomad, is prepared to stare directly into.
The deepening of the ostensibly local traumas of the modern man qua citizen from the grounded earth to
the geocosmic continuum reweds the Copernican Revolution to the great chain of humiliations yet to
come. But, far from scorning and deriding man’s mortality and wretchedness, in chorus with the state on
behalf of a Leviathan who gorges and fattens on the fears of the ephemeral man, this is simply to turn the
perishability of man into the traumatic asymptote of the universal absolute, its interiority into the
homeomorphic equivalent of radical exteriority. In deepening and widening its traumas, the citizen
unbinds the will of contingent depths within its regional and territorial field. In doing so, the citizen
transcendentally extirpates the axiomatic function of its so-called veritable interiority upon which the
state grounds itself. By supplanting its territorial, organic, terrestrial and human verities with the ceaseless
self-renegotiating verity of the universal absolute, the citizen turns its axiomatic horizon into an antiaxiomatic surprise. For this reason, the deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis of the citizen – that
is, its relation to the territory, the state, the polis and the contingent natural history of the earth – through
remobilizing the mediating function of traumas is a dialectical synthesis in territopic materialism. By
undertaking modally unbound traumatic syntheses toward the universal absolute, the citizen comes into a
twisted immanence with the cosmic abyss. First, the citizen binds the exteriority of the geocosmic
continuum by unravelling itself along and through the traumas that encompass and conceive its regional
focalization. Through the mediating function and the nested logic of traumas, the citizen finds a
materialist asymptote with the universal absolute which is disenthralled from the necessity of embodiment
and materialization. It is a materialist asymptote insofar as it traumatically traverses the organic and
terrestrial horizons of the citizen as it tends toward the universal absolute where even matter is
traumatically conceived and enjoys no axiomatic priority or interiorized privilege. In short, the materialist
asymptote of the universal absolute is drawn by nested traumas which excise the citizen from the humanorganism and the earth-territory. As the citizen deepens its geophilosophical synthesis from what the state
has imposed on it, it also begins to realize itself as a materialist asymptote of the universal absolute. The
weaponized modern man transfers the territopic ambience of the universal absolute against axiomatic
verities and grounding determinations into the horizon that it traumatically cohabits with the state, a
horizon that is also traversed by capitalism.
At the height of its business acumen, capitalism is also a system for the traumatic binding of the outside.
Yet in complete conformity to its productive-antiproductive curve, the outside it binds is only an outside
by the virtue of its exorbitance, the trauma it embraces is the incisional cut that sets the terrestrial horizon
against a register of exteriority wherein the neutrality of the absolute is turned into an exorbitant event
horizon. Capitalism only undertakes its dialectical synthesis with the outside by heavily capitalizing on
the logic of exogenic tensions and their corresponding drive. In binding the exorbitant register of
exteriority, capitalism is able to present its dynamism as an intrinsic planetary system. In line with the
16
organism that circuitously evolves through the exorbitant influence of solar energy by weaving its
inevitable dissipation and internal conservative conditions together, capitalism develops a strategic
scenario wherein the annihilating exorbitant exteriority is only an excuse to economically afford more.
The traumatic binding of the exorbitant outside is a consumptive solution that can be entrenched deep
within various aspects of organic life because it already corresponds with the energetic horizon of the
organism. But this is not the only reason why capitalism adopts a model of accelerative dissipation. For
capitalism’s traumatic binding of the outside as an exorbitant exteriority does not simply turn the
presumed inevitability of dissipation into a strategy for affording more. Strategic capitalization on the
exogenic tensions of trauma and the exorbitant registers of the cosmic exteriority ensures that the
system’s dialectic with the outside is conducted only in a way it can afford and thereby, any other mode
of binding the outside extrinsic to this affordance is staved off.
Modes of traumatic binding which do not correspond with the exogenic tensions of the interiorized
horizon or are not in conformity with the economic qua affordable model of binding pose a threat against
the axiomatic function of the interiority and the somatic integrity of its horizon. Endogenic tensions, as
has been elaborated, challenge the axiomatic verifiability of the regional horizon’s interiority (such as the
earth or the human). But all systems of capitalization and strategic – that is to say, economical – binding
work precisely from a ground which is but the axiomatic verity of the interiority. A horizon can only be
capitalized on or strategically thought if its interiority and somatic integrity are taken as axiomatic and
veritable, only if the system is exposed to the freedom of contingent depths from its outside and not from
the inside. The axiomatizing system of capitalism can only function if it grounds itself on the ur-axiom of
capitalization and strategic qua economical binding. The ur-axiom states that the earth on which
capitalism expands its limits and horizon, does indeed enjoy a veritable interiority and axiomatic somatic
integrity. Accordingly, the ur-axiom posits the earth as the axiomatic resource of capitalism and the
ground upon which expansion of the horizon through the economical binding of the outside can be
conducted. The perishability of the planet does not essentially problematize the fundamental interiority of
the earth; it mainly reinforces capitalism’s search for new limits and expanding its horizon from this earth
to a new one. On the other hand, any endogenic tension that vitiates this assumed pre-given correlation
between the terrestrial horizon and the necessary ground on a regional level will terrorize the system as it
converts axioms to anti-axiomatic surprises. In tandem with Freud’s contribution to the great chain of
humiliations, the traumatized subject of the Copernican revolution no longer enjoys the self-centred
privilege of having an axiomatic relationship with the interiority of itself. When this vertiginous turn from
axiomatic to non-axiomatic is applied to the terrestrial resources of capitalism – earth, humans,
intelligence and so on – the blow will be less a humiliation and more a fit of terror. Ultimately, the reason
for capitalism’s traumatic binding of the exorbitant outside is to block alternative modes of traumatic
synthesis and inflection upon the universal absolute. By corresponding to endogenic tensions of the
horizon, such lines of exteriorization can emerge anywhere within and throughout the horizon and for this
reason, they are capable of replacing the axiomatic verity of any given horizon with anti-axiomatic
surprises, turning all potential resources of capitalism into forces of terror.
In order for capitalism to prevent its terrestrial resources from converting to toxic assets, it must first
isolate and abstract traumas so that one field of traumata can never be deepened to another field. If there
is a sustained form of suppression that capitalism exercises it is the isolation of traumas and topologies of
tensions – the active vigilance in isolating fields of trauma opened by science, in separating the trauma of
17
life, the trauma of the state, the trauma of homo nervus and the trauma of citizenship from each other. One
can say that in order to save its systems of capitalization and markets, capitalism must be, first of all, a
regime for calculative isolation and regulation of traumas so as to forestall the deepening of the
geophilosophical synthesis along alternative modes of binding. This is why the revolutionary subject who
deepens its regional horizon in the universal absolute through linking and mobilizing nested fields of
traumas possesses an irrepressible territopic import for capitalism. The revolutionary dialectic with the
absolute is reinscribed as a traumatic force that abolishes the axiomatic relationship with the interiority,
starting from a specific regional field and extending it to other horizons of interiority, turning the earth of
capitalism into a multiverse of traumatic vertigos generated by this sprawling shift from axiomatic
grounds toward freedom of absolute depths. Whilst being interiorized by capitalism as an axiomatic
resource, the revolutionary subject plants its ever-deepening and widening traumatic synthesis with the
absolute as a seed of terror within the order of capital. Everything in the vicinity of this bad seed begins to
clone its anti-axiomatic surprise through traumas that bind and transplant the regional fields of the
universal. Respectively, the citizen as the designated zone of traumatic syntheses for the revolutionary
subject as what inherently harbours a bad seed within itself that must not be extracted but be planted and
nourished within the state and the horizon of capitalism. A state that invests in the citizen turned into a
revolutionary subject of its traumatic field is a survivor of the cosmic deep trying hard to latch onto the
raft of the medusa. The contemporary ‘problem of citizenship’ already indicates the fear of the state from
concatenated nightmares yet to unfold in the wake of the remobilized citizen. We have already witnessed
a model wherein the citizen – albeit in a restricted fashion – binds its traumas: it is the logic of
hypercamouflage buried in the doctrine of taqiyya.
The weaponization of modern man not only enables the subject to drift away through the multiverse of
traumata toward the universal absolute, it is also an indispensable part of exporting the revolution, of
breaking and entering into isolated fields of trauma. Against this imperative and in line with the
therapeutic legacy of psychoanalysis which has recently paid some of its taxes to neuroscience,
philosopher Catherine Malabou warns us not to remodel or replicate the world in ourselves:
The problem of a dialectic of identity – between fashioning and destruction – poses itself all the more
pointedly as global capitalism, currently the only known type of globalization, offers us the untenable
spectacle of a simultaneity of terrorism (daily detonations – in Israel, Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan …) and of
fixity and rigidity (for example, American hegemony and its violent rigorism). It is as though we had
before our eyes a sort of caricature of the philosophical problem of self-constitution, between dissolution
and impression of form. Fashioning an identity in such a world has no meaning except as constructing of
countermodel to this caricature, as opposed simply to replicating it. Not to replicate the caricature of the
world: this is what we should do with our brain. To refuse to be flexible individuals who combine a
permanent control of the self with a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges,
for fear of explosion. (Catherine Malabou, What should we do with our brain?, 78)
Whilst in theory it is all right to confuse the difference between plastic and explosive, real plasticity and
plastic only by association (plastique), in real life such confusion, whether willful or inadvertent, is
harmful: it can literally blow up in your face. Only when the world is narrowly seen as “this world” or
even a wider world but not as a universal absolute whose regions are being mediated by traumas, can we
identify ourselves as veritable victims whose cerebral responsibility is to shy away from the traumatic
imprints of this so-called bipolar world. Anti-Copernican myopia is neither capable of seeing these
18
explosions as different yet inter-connected regional eruptions in the world, nor is it capable of envisioning
the world as a unified world where the cerebral, the territorial, the terrestrial and the cosmic are already
nested within one continuum. The illusion of the counter-revolutionary is that these daily detonations in
the streets and exploitations of capitalism belong to ‘a world’ (whether this or that world) that can be
extricated from the brain at the whim of the subject, the glorified “new wounded”. Or perhaps it is the
other way around: the subject believes that the cerebral world can be separated from the outdoor traumas
which are all spectacles of the same value anyway whether they happen in Israel, Iraq, Indonesia,
Pakistan … or in space. The individuum, as Freud, Ferenczi and Reich have emphasized, is precisely the
continuum of all these worlds, the brain, the streets, the earth, and the cosmos; it is a focalized gradient
from the universal continuum.
Our plastic susceptibility to forces of technocapitalism as well as different explosions in the streets and in
our neighbourhoods (if not in our houses) is an opportunity for the revolutionary subject of trauma. If
capitalism and terrorism are transplanted within us with such ease that we can no longer see them as
threat to the plasticity of our brains, so do the other traumas from which capitalism, state and religion run
away. As opposed to capitalism, the state and other grounding systems which preserve their verity by
isolating fields of trauma in order to protect themselves against syntheses of the universal absolute, the
brain has the ability to reconnect all isolated traumas within its plastic field and expand along the
mediating functions of trauma. The obligation of the revolutionary subject with regard to exporting the
revolution is not to shun traumas of capitalism and fundamentalism, since this refusal or disavowal
contributes to the strategy of capitalism and fundamentalism in isolating traumas, forces and resources in
order to govern and monopolize them within this or that world. On the contrary, the obligation of the
revolutionary subject is to absorb and interiorize traumas so as to expose ‘isolated traumas’ (this or that
regional world), interconnect them to its regional horizon and widen them across the geocosmic
continuum and deep into the cosmic exteriority. Modern man is a surgeon who does not amputate himself
from the worlds of capitalism and religion. Instead, he transplants himself and these worlds inside each
other in order to reconnect his actual regional horizon (cohabited with capitalism and fundamentalism)
once again to the freedom of absolute depths. To this end, the revolution on the geocosmic continuum that
is the revolution rekindled out of the Copernican commune should not be paved on the politicophilosophical corpus of those who impose on us wanton discrepancies and excesses of the earthly life but
those who delude us with the axiomatic verity of ourselves and reform the ground of the terrestrial
thought in one way or another.
***
In order to ensure the continuation of this rudimentary investigation we finally put together the thesis of
this essay in such a brief fashion so as to explicitly indicate that the Inquisition is far from over: (How
can) The revolutionary subject, through deepening and widening its traumas, attain(s) topological and
categorical equivalence with the universal absolute. Likewise, how can the regional horizon – as a
relatively open set excised from the universal absolute – find its equivalence with the absolute through
deepening its geophilosophical synthesis and stretching its nested traumas by dilating and twisting them?
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