So, I want to start this morning just on a short excursus to talk about a certain apocalyptic tone in speculative realist philosophy. As Morton mentioned yesterday, the fact that a lot of the writing that's been done has a certain kind of dark or gothic tone. And in fact to the point where if you read too much of it, it becomes kind of exhausted. You become a bit jaded of these conceptual horrors
heaped upon conceptual horrors. But it seems that this this affect is in some way tied to the operation that speculative realism is trying to perform. This disjunction of human correlated meaning and the autonomous being of things. And when Urbanomic did this event at the Tate last year, where we tried to bring together various artists who were interested in or who we thought reflected the themes of speculative realism. One of the comments that we got was, you know, okay, we understand the philosophical position, but why are all these artists operating in this kind of rather gothic
or aggressive or kind of dark register? And it's an interesting question, why this tome? Because as we said, with hyperchaos, hyperchaos can't be a style, there is no style. and the scientific image of the world, as we said, if it's indexed by these primary qualities which are inaccessible to imagination, which have no imaginative content, then how can there be a certain style? So it's just to register that there's already a kind of dramatization
or a narrativisation that's going on within the philosophical reflection on these ideas already. And whether that necessarily has to be Gothic or not is a different question. But there's already a kind of rhetoric, a style, a tone that happens in this work, which is an interesting thing in itself, I think. And I'd like to mention what perhaps is a rather obvious point, which is that the awareness that human life will only last a finite amount of time has been pressed on us in the last few decades so intensively and so repeatedly.
not necessarily that we have to subscribe to the most severe predictions of ecological scientists or indeed their amplification by a kind of hysterical media or a media who needs to generate hysteria. But the very cultural omnipresence of these possibilities, the faltering of this kind of repression, the repression of the knowledge that human beings are organic beings dependent on this planetary network. The fact that this can no longer be repressed and is present in culture all the time has irrevocably turned thought towards its material support, towards the tenuous network that suspends it above its object
and stalls its descent into the abyss of differentiation, indifferentiation. So our ability to differentiate ourselves and to hold ourselves above our material support is really faltering. And one book that I turn to many times as a kind of emblem of this is a book by Alan Wiseman, which is called The World Without Us. and this book describes in fascinating detail how long it would take once the human race disappeared for the various products of human civilisation to disappear. So how long will it take for the cities to crumble and be grown over by jungle? How long will it take all the plastic to degrade and so on?
And we're talking about these lengthy time scales which in a sense are the complement to the ancestral timescales which Meirsu talks about. But in a sense, this focuses precisely this point of coincidence between the cultural omnipresence of this knowledge that we're materially finite and the thinking of a world without us. And there's a kind of analog here, I think, with the way that Meisoo escapes from correlation, because it's the very fact of our being forcibly turned towards our material finitude
that gives us to think this world without us, that gives us the opportunity to think about the absence of the human. So if speculative realism consists in a will to counteract the tendency in philosophy to concentrate on the human relation to reality through the mediation of language, culture or phenomenality, the speculative realists ask how philosophical thought can access an indifferent reality that owes nothing to human thought the real that precedes thought and that will survive it this is precisely the world without us and I'd like to show a short piece of work by a Canadian artist working in London
Miko Kanini which I think distills this relation between the conceptual operation of speculative realism and the apocalyptic tone. So this is called The Black Sunrise, Miko Kanini. We've lost the audio. Okay, we run it without audio.
So as you can see, this work uses this very simple formal intervention to transform this journey through the city of London into, I would say, a reflection on pure objectivity and its related affect. So the notion that we might conceptually grasp a world free of all human mediation can be read through a radicalization of the sublime science fictional
trope of the deserted post-apocalyptic city, here just created through this simple cut. So giving this illusion of a reflective surface bisecting the image plane, cutting the world in half, excising the sidewalk and thus any human presence. and the kind of gentle undulations of this surface maybe suggest oil or water as an agent in whatever imaginary scenario we read into it some kind of fear of ecological catastrophe which compels us to contemplate the weird prospect of a world without us
but on a more formal level this visual device functions to empty out reality, suggests this removal of the subject so as to directly apprehend reality. And Canini is very interested in dread, the generation of dread, generated by this operation of thinking extinction, the way in which the extinction of the human is inherent to this operation of reason, this attempt to think outside the correlation. As we saw with Meosu, he describes hyperchaos in these kind of terrifying terms
and he describes mathematics as the realm of death. You go to the realm of death and come back again. and Canini is very interested in how this aesthetically gives rise to this feeling of dread or can be indexed with this feeling of dread. But then the other thing that you'll note is that the difficulty of performing this rational surgery, of making this cut, is suggested by the fact that when we watch it, if we watch it in the frame of this kind of science fictional scenario of the deserted city, what do we expect to see? Around the next corner, we'll always expect to see the few heroic survivors of the post-apocalyptic movie tradition.
So this way in which the abstract thought of speculative realism feeds into a kind of affect and a narrative and a tone, always, in a sense, betrays it because it feeds us back into certain orthodox scenarios, certain expectations that we have, these kind of default expectations. So it's just to really discuss a little bit that question of style, because today we're going to talk about Ray Brassier's book, Nihil Unbound. And this is very much a book that has a, well, like all of the speculative realist writers, it has a very singular tone.
And Ray's tone is incredibly dense, uncompromising. And the few kind of images he uses are images which operate so as to recuse the possibility of any image. That is, he uses images which disabuse us of the fact that we can have any image, which is a kind of paradoxical operation, of course. And he's really talking very much like Meir-Sue about this realm of the thought of science and the fact that it's inaccessible to our default human correlation with the world. We saw how Meir-Sue's approach to answering the question of speculative realism, how can thought access something that's not the product of the relation between the subject and the object,
when through the definition of correlationism and through a certain rationalism, it unveiled an absolute necessity, the necessity of contingency, that's not a necessary entity or a necessary law, but the contingency of all entities and the absence of all law. The work of Brassier, I think, has many points in common with Meir-Sue's identification of correlationism as a central problem. He also has in common with Meosu the making of what, up until a certain point, for philosophy had seemed like a deficiency in thought, making it into a positive exploratory tool. In Brasier's case, the theme that he concentrates on in the history of thought is nihilism. Now, nihilism perhaps seems rather, par se, rather toothless.
It's not something that excites us necessarily. We associate it with kind of moody teenagers, goths. It's kind of like a black leather jacket. Like at one time it signified some kind of danger, but now it's just worn by middle-aged men who write boring essays on Nietzsche. But Ray's point about nihilism is that philosophy itself has participated, has colluded in the defanging of this notion, this situation of nihilism. And so he acknowledges that nihilism has this kind of hackneyed quality about it. But he sets out to undo the domestication of nihilism and to posit nihilism as a positive principle rather than as a danger that we've overcome
or something that we can afford to ignore. Another thing that Brassier has in common with Meosu is that he sees the key challenge for philosophy as being to render a satisfactory account of scientific realism. And he sees much of 20th century philosophy as hiding from this task, as placing a premium on conservatively maintaining human life and the human relation to reality and meaning, overdrawing the consequences of what science tells us about the world. So Brassier associates scientific realism with nihilism, and it's not an uncommon manoeuvre, but as I said, he wants to draw out a positive sense, that is a sense that is speculatively productive for philosophy out of nihilism.
Where nihilism belongs is that gap that we talked about with regard to Meosu, the gap that opens up between the scientific account of being, the account of how things are, and meaning. So nihilism looms up from this chasm between intelligibility, conceptual intelligibility, and meaning, the possibility of making sense of something within our projects, within our life worlds, as the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for human ends. So this is quite apart from the actual effects of technology upon the Earth. And this is not a critique of technology. But science reveals things about the world that aren't useful for the human world,
and which indeed, to a certain extent, are indigestible for human thought. And this is a kind of vector that was developed for me through the subsequent volumes of collapse, because this volume on horror, volume four, I was really interested in connecting philosophy with artists, with science fiction writers, with movies in the horror genre because of the fact that what these people try to do, what these movies try to do, what science fiction tries to do is to create the scenario where we can inhabit and experience these impossible realities.
It tries to drive home to us what these discoveries of science really mean to us. So something like the fly, which Ray Brassier talks about, It tries to drive home to us the consequences of scientific thought. So this was this question of how do you imagine something that's unimaginable? How do you bring into the realm of the imagination these primary qualities? And then after that, this fifth volume was the Copernican Imperative. And the Copernican imperative being that you have to jettison any ability to imagine what you know.
So Copernicus, of course, told us the earth goes around the sun. This is completely opposite to our natural spontaneous sense of where we are, how we live. We see the sun rise, we see the sun go down. and yet we have to hold to this scientific truth that's delivered us through other means than our imagination and our immediate experience against our, in a sense, against our natural judgment. So there's this tension between the idea of trying to bring these, trying to bring the speculative realist thought into the imagination,
and the idea that to do that is very much to betray it. So I have a particular interest in this question. But Ray adds something which Mayer-Su really misses, I think, and that's that Ray has a strong interest in cognitive science, that is to say, the naturalisation of thought. a naturalization or a genetic explanation for thought. So this would put thought itself within the domain of the reality which we cannot spontaneously access. And Meissou, in a sense, is very French and very rationalist in the sense that he doesn't question the provenance of reason itself. So the more intelligible the universe becomes
by virtue of the mediation of this increasingly complex conceptual apparatus, of science, the more distant seems the prospect of its yielding any meaningful message for us. The supernova that happened four billion years ago doesn't tell us how to live, it doesn't tell us anything useful. And this transition between what there is and what we should do is, in a sense, what philosophy has always aspired to. But Brassier insists that this yearning for meaning and integrity that's still endemic to modern philosophy can only obscure the true philosophical significance of this evacuation of sense. Like Meissu,
he wants to rescue the speculative import of science, and especially of the naturalization of thought, thought as being something that is an occurrence within time, within a time that isn't human time. And apparently, paradoxically then, Brassier depicts his project as being a continuation of the core project of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, in our usual understanding, being the disjoining of human culture from natural history, the potential for self-determination through the new knowledge that's emerging. But of course, as we know, this new knowledge, the scientific apparatuses which we use to manipulate the world
are something which feeds into nihilism. But in Brassier's opinion, this isn't some kind of reversal, but this nihilism that emerges from enlightenment has to be affirmed. This brutal stripping away of everything that made humans at home in the universe is something to be affirmed. So that whereas often philosophers have depicted themselves as struggling against or superseding nihilism, where nihilism is understood as a historical phenomenon consequent upon the overturning of the human life world by the conceptual structure of science and its consequent technological effects, where philosophers have often tried to twist free of this or to overcome it.
Brassier insists that in doing so, in attempting to stem the tide of nihilism, they've only operated an anti-enlightenment revisionism, which risks depriving us of the possibilities that nihilism opens up. And it's important to say that I think like all of these primary works in speculative realism, Brassier's book is very much the kind of setting out of a program and the program is to explore these possibilities that scientific realism and nihilism opens up and like we saw with Meosu the project isn't completed, it's the announcement of a project really so since the enlightenment
And since, so to speak, the fruits of the Enlightenment began to turn bad, philosophy has developed various circuitous ruses through which normative philosophical reason has evaded or obfuscated the challenge of scientific realism. And this is, in a sense, a political point, because philosophy has used these dramatically negative consequences of the scientific image of the world as an excuse to abandon its alliance with the scientific, as an excuse to abandon the search for truth
and concentrate on human instrumentality, on what's useful for the human. And in a sense, Ray Brassier is a very traditional philosopher in that he's interested in the truth above what's useful for humans. And he's very much against this ethicisation of philosophy, the primacy of the political in philosophy, the idea that philosophy begins with a demand to draw out of thought something which is useful to kind of glue humans back together again. so philosophy has deprived us of what what brassier calls the invigorating vector of intellectual discovery offered by nihilism the reality unveiled by science might be refractory
to our norm our normal way of thinking but this isn't any reason to turn away from it nihilism that is to say the increasing disenchantment of the world and the sense that there's a gap between the spontaneous human image of the world and how we need it to be in order to thrive and the reality that knowledge reveals to us. This nihilism is an opportunity, not a dead end, but a rich vein of thought. And here's the core radical notion of Brassier's book and its contribution to speculative realism. The speculative kernel of enlightenment thinking, he argues, consists in its scientific realist positing of a reality which is intelligible yet is wholly autonomous from and indifferent to our thinking.
So nihilism is not some kind of spiraling into a subjective abyss. It's not an end of thought, but it's an unavoidable corollary. It's something that goes along with the conviction of realism. So Brassier, in a sense, discovers something just as terrifying as Meosu does. Enlightenment is powered by an engine of negation. because the claim that rational thought, that scientific thought, indexes a universe in which we are not represents nothing less than the cognitive anticipation of our own extinction. So as we saw with Meirsu when he describes mathematics as the realm of death, for Brassier too, the world, the cold world revealed to us by science
is nothing less than our own internal processing of the possibility of our extinction. And indeed, in a sense, the fact that we are already extinct. So the effect of science for Brassier is definitely horror. so I keep mentioning the word spontaneity and this concept of spontaneity is very important because of course in kind of neoliberal culture spontaneity is supposed to be a good thing because we're all supposed to be creative and there's a sense of positive spontaneity
but in speculative realism and in the veins of philosophy which have contributed towards speculative realism. Spontaneity has this other sense, has this sense of the spontaneous image of the world which has to be remediated by other types of thought. And we find this in Bachelard, the French philosopher Bachelard, with the notion of the epistemological cut. This is the idea that what science does is to make a cut through the body of knowledge, which is completely refractory to our normal image of reality.
So this concept of spontaneity should be understood in that kind of negative sense, really. and the way in which Ray speaks about it is in terms of the manifest and the scientific images of the world so the manifest image which would be the spontaneous image the image which we so to speak naturally have of ourselves how we appear to ourselves through reflection so I believe that I'm one person I have certain emotions, I have certain relations to other people I have certain beliefs about other people etc these are obviously historically mediated in some sense but nevertheless for us as individuals
they're spontaneous, they're manifest and then the scientific image the physicalised, mathematicised image and to a certain extent what Brassier is arguing is that philosophy is an extension of the manifest image or in certain respects has become an extension of the manifest image because it's allied itself with the manifest image over the scientific image. Now... You say that the example you did yesterday is what you call psychoacoustics. Yeah. The sound objects that we create, that would be an example of a spontaneous gesture, right? Exactly, yeah. That would be an example of the mechanisms of spontaneity, yes.
so how can this the manifest image and the scientific image be reconciled this is really the basis of the narrative of nihilism in philosophy is that there's this irreconcilable break between these two images but philosophy tries somehow to to remedy and for Nietzsche of course nihilism is a phase which can be overcome life can overcome nihilism and kind of digest it and make it a part of itself but for Brassier the negation of the manifest image is actually an opportunity to transform the human so it's not something to be overcome
because he doesn't see the scientific image as being this kind of he doesn't see the scientific image as being devoid of structure, devoid of interest. It doesn't see it as being simply a kind of undesirable, morbid pathology in the way that some thinkers have. Could there be a kind of management of this gap? Well, Brassier rejects this too, this idea that there could be some kind of management which went to and fro between the manifest and the scientific image and somehow made them work together.
He rejects this for the same reason as Meosu, because there can be no negotiation between science and the manifest image. Because the manifest image is also a theory. As you rightly say, when I was talking about Hecker's work in psychoacoustics, what psychoacoustics reveals to us is that our brain has a theory about objects. our brain is a kind of congealed theory, a congealed set of theories. So the manifest image is a theory as well. But this is where cognitive science and evolutionary science comes in because there's no reason why the theories of the manifest image should be right. Because they stem not from an objective examination of reality
but through the process of evolution. So once we insert thought into natural history, it loses its a priori purchase on reality, because we understand that the spontaneous models of reality that appear to us to be transparent, that appear to be spontaneous, are in fact theories just as much as the scientific images of theory. They're what we call folk theories. They're embedded in our brains in the same way as a scientific theory is embedded in a complex tool. Of course, they're a very sophisticated and successful theoretical achievement developed over millions of years. But nevertheless, they're theories that deserve to be compared to the scientific image and challenged.
They're based on survival, not on truth. and to side with the manifest image for philosophy would be simply to instrumentalize philosophy in the service of the survival of the species so philosophy would become an extension of the instrumental capacity of the capacity of the folk theories the manifest image to ensure our survival and for Brassier philosophy has no stake in life. It has no stake in our survival. Philosophy is about truth. And so in that case, we can't undertake to try and manage
this gap between the manifest and the scientific image. That's not philosophy's role. And furthermore, the idea of life itself, the idea of survival itself, is part of the manifest image. Another even stronger reason to reject this is that if we are with or without us, then we accede to the counter-enlightenment. Our spontaneous image of the world is something that's bequeathed to us by natural processes that have an investment in survival rather than truth. truth. This is something that Nietzsche revealed to us. Nietzsche introduced into philosophy the methodology of genealogy. So rather than treating concepts in a formal, logical way
of understanding how concepts are, how the concepts with which we operate are related to each other formally and logically, Nietzsche says, no, we need a genealogy of the concept, we need a history, a natural history of the concept. For each idea that philosophy is interested in, we need to give a history of how it was produced. And like Nietzsche, Ray is asking this question of genealogy, and I think he would hold that what's singular about scientific thought is that it has no genealogy. Okay, science has a history,
but the scientific concept doesn't have a history as such. So, in essence, why should we think that we would lose something? Why should we think that we should become worse by abiding by the scientific rather than the manifest image? At the root of this is this argument about the history of the 20th century, whether life has been instrumentalised at the hands of science and that's caused the disasters of modernity, or whether science has been instrumentalised by life
and that's caused the disasters of modernity and of the 20th century in particular. So Brassier rejects this kind of pragmatism that would manage the scientific and manifest images together somehow. And as I said, as in Meosu, he forces us into this decision because from the point of view of survival, however useful the entities invoked by the manifest image are, however useful they are to us, And certainly the notion of entities such as persons, morals, motives, sonic objects, they certainly seem to be of some use to us. Not always, because sometimes they are of use to our ancestors, but they're not particularly useful to us. But in some sense they play a purpose.
But their existence is flatly contradicted, or at least challenged, by science. So this is what Brassier means by nihilism being inherent to science. And this was something that was felt very keenly by thinkers such as Nietzsche. So this is where nihilism was an incredibly kind of sharp thought. But now we've kind of grown used to simply accepting this in a superficial way. We accept that science tells us things that we can't really absorb, and we just let them get on with it. And so this question of nihilism, the problem of nihilism, in a sense has been diffused because we don't even try to set these two images of the world against each other. We simply operate a kind of management of them. That's what we do in our everyday lives.
And I've spoken to physicists, cosmologists, doing interviews with people for collapse. and I've said to them, well, you know, you're working on dark matter. You're finding out these amazing things about the universe. How does that affect your life? And they just say, well, it doesn't. You know, I come to work, I do my work, and then I go home. My life's a different thing. And this reflects this kind of general management which we carry out, which has kind of kept at bay the question of nihilism. but what Ray wants to do is to force this decision and reject the recuperation of the scientific image back into life. For him the task of philosophy is to carry on this negational task
of ripping away what we know of ourselves. Philosophy is about what is, not what is useful. Thinking is not practical. But if this sounds entirely negative I think there's also, in a sense, an optimistic side to it. And that's that if our self-understanding is truly transformed, for instance, by neuroscience, by the overturning of common sense psychology, then it opens up this kind of speculative opportunity for a new type of human being. So I think there's both of these things. there's this kind of unwillingness to seed to practicality,
to the primacy of practicality, but there's also this potential vision of a transformation. so the real lesson that Brassier pulls out of cognitive science and neuroscience is we are simply not as we experience ourselves to be ok our image of ourselves as persons is simply overturned or at least problematized by what cognitive science tells us about how brains work. There's a real incommensurability between the phenomena we experience
and the neurobiological processes through which it's produced. So, interestingly, if we go back to when we spoke about Kant and the fact that Kant opens the way to speculative realism by inserting this transcendental layer between the being of the object and the subject, and that we have this schizophrenic sense of ourselves. We have ourselves as we appear according to the forms of intuition, but then there's this other self which is only an X. Well, in a certain sense you can say that neuroscience, that the science of the brain, is kind of elaborating this X. It's showing us this other mechanism which lies behind our spontaneous image of ourselves, how we experience ourselves.
So there's this disjunction between the phenomena, how we present ourselves to ourselves, and this other image. And Ray uses the work of neuroscientist and philosopher Metzinger, who wrote this amazing book called Being No One. in which he takes apart the sense of the self. He tries to explain in neurobiological terms how the sense of self is built, and that what seems like a transparent sense, it seems like we transparently know ourselves, is in fact, as he says, a special type of opacity. It's a type of barrier between us and ourselves,
but we experience it as a transparency, as an immediacy. So what Ray really has in his sights here, in this problematization of spontaneity and immediacy, is phenomenology. And as we said, phenomenology is the idea that we can rebuild philosophical thought on the basis of the immediate phenomena. And the immediate phenomena are intentional because we never experience the glass in time and space as a spatio-temporal lump of stuff. We experience it as something to drink. We experience it as something that's connected to our intentions, to what we want to do. So phenomenology, in a sense, tells us that we can rely on the transparency of the phenomena. We can, according to phenomenology,
we can reach a philosophical science by reducing out, by reducing all the extraneous conceptualization that we impose on the things themselves, the pure phenomena. But as Reyes is pointing out, this supposes that something guarantees our access, our transparent access to these things themselves. But if instead there's this opacity, there's this barrier, then phenomenology is just an extrapolation of the manifest image. It's just a long-winded version of folk psychology. The first-person viewpoint that it takes up, that appearances can only be understood in their own terms,
is simply a kind of... It's just like giving up the philosophical search for the real. at the first hurdle, in a sense. And I think, in that sense, phenomenology would be more of a practice of description than a practice of philosophical analysis. It would be a practice of describing the manifest image and how things appear to us. And in that case, a philosopher would become a novelist, in a sense, because the philosopher would simply be describing, in a very skillful and talented way, perhaps,
in a very acute way, the way in which things appear to us. And for Brassier, this is not what philosophy is supposed to be interested in. So now for Brassier, philosophy is an exercise in nihilism, and it's an exercise in alienating ourselves, in understanding that we are alien to the impersonal or sub-personal mechanisms that generate or produce us. We can't simply, or certainly we can, put the scientific image of ourselves at a distance. We can manage it and keep it away from us. But this is not what philosophy is about. What it's about is trying to draw out the consequences of this alienation and perhaps to transform ourselves in the process,
to experiment in some way. But to not do this experiment in thought is basically to be conservative, to value survival, to value the survival of the manifest image over the truth. So in this sense, again, Brassier is a very traditional philosopher in the sense that it's a kind of an asceticism, asceticism, a self-sacrifice in the service of truth. It's not good enough to protest that the image of man is being trampled on by science. Philosophy has to deal with it in full. And most of Ray's book is concerned with various attempts that philosophers have made to escape the consequences or to turn back. In various ways, they try to localize scientific reason,
to insist that scientific rationality is a subset of some larger, deeper, more important way of thinking. And perhaps as most important is this discussion in Nihal Unbound of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, a key work of 20th century philosophy. it's an attempt precisely to localize scientific reason as an episode in the unfolding of a more originary logic a logic ultimately that belongs to correlation and the key claim of dialectic of enlightenment is that the sacrificing of myth on the altar of scientific rationality
is itself still symptomatic of a mythical pattern of thought Adorno's notion of a dialectic of enlightenment really encapsulates the traditional thesis on nihilism that is the rise of conceptual thinking renders everything flat, equivalent, externalised and exchangeable and thus it has a certain affinity with capitalism everything incommensurable, everything unmeasurable everything unexchangeable is put out of the picture and we end up living in this deracinated, abstracted world. So scientific rationality, Adorno identifies with instrumentalism. With instrumentalism.
It's seen as a kind of annihilating pathology. And one which, for Adorno, essentially ends up with the gas chambers. and for Adorno it's reflection, it's historical reflection that gives us access to the history of nihilism and would enable us potentially to overcome this instrumentality so Adorno sees scientific rationality as a kind of assimilation to space a conceptual spatialisation it exteriorises everything into countable numerical units And this cancerous exteriorization even extends to the interior space of thinking.
So it kind of infects thinking, rendering reflection impossible. So it's a different type of thinking that renders a proper philosophical reflection impossible. So how does he try to fold this back into a more originary logic? logic. It's the logic of sacrifice. In sacrifice, primitive man tries to affect a commensuration between the incommensurable, between himself and the power of nature that he's not yet tamed. So the overwhelming power of nature. Sacrificial logic is a human logic. It's a different logic to that of instrumental scientific rationality. It magically commensurates a particular thing, the sacrificial victim, with the whole of the hostile nature. So society
gains a symbolic mastery over nature or over the gods by putting a part of itself to death. This is the logic of sacrifice. The trauma of being overwhelmed by nature, of being powerless, is overcome by sacrificing a part of the social, a part of human society. And Adorno links this with Freud's theory of the death drive. In the wake of World War I, Freud had worked with shell-shocked soldiers and he'd observed how in their dreams, rather than their dreams serving as a kind of fantasized realization of desire, they actually repeated the traumatic incident over and over again. And he believed that this compulsion,
this compulsive repetition, this making of the dream apparatus into an operation of bare repetition was an attempt to master the overwhelming event to master it, something that couldn't be bound by the psyche to master it by making it into small segments and experiencing it over and over again this kind of episodic discharge of the trauma that happened to them and he links this in this kind of very speculative theory to the origins of the organic he says how does the organic come to be it's because the outer shell forms as a protection
against the overwhelming source of energy so the source of energy for an organic being is also the source of its death and it has to sacrifice the outer part of itself in order to protect itself against the traumatic force of the thing which actually feeds it. So there's this kind of idea that sacrificial logic is a kind of cultural relaying of this death drive, this drive to repetition, this drive to self-sacrifice in order to survive. You sacrifice a part of yourself in order to survive. so that then according to Adorno scientific rationality through its enterprise of reducing everything to commensurable units
to creating this repetitive empty form it continues to symbolically sacrifice a part of reality in order to appease its essential incommensurability with nature the trauma of its encounter with nature and its attempt to defy it so science for Adorno far from accessing a real, beyond human culture, it remains caught within a mythical pattern of thought. And ultimately, this sacrificial logic, this sacrifice, becomes a repression of humanity for the sake of a future end that never arrives. We just continue sacrificing ourselves in this kind of pathological, compulsive way.
We continue to externalize ourselves and create this empty, repetitive, spatialized, exteriorized reality, which was originally, in a sense, this sacrificial logic. But we just become kind of completely compulsively driven by it. And in fact, we can never escape our own incommensurability with nature. We can never escape our infinitude. Man then ceases to know the difference between the purpose for which things are made and a pure functioning. So rather than understanding why we do science, why we make technology,
we just become ourselves enmeshed in this pure functioning, the pure functioning of this dead matter that we've made to protect ourselves. And this is technological capitalism. It's like an exacerbation of the human's attempt to master himself, in which, as Adorno says, he says that the self-preservation destroys the very thing that's supposed to be preserved. So that's nihilism. That's when we enter the phase of nihilism. And as I said, the possibility of hope, the possibility of a hope of escape from this, being kind of arrayed in this dead, exteriorized matter, comes from philosophical reflection. Because philosophical reflection can restore where there's this compulsive mechanistic barrenness of spatialized identity.
It can restore a true self-awareness. so we have the nihilistic pathology of science's unreflecting naivety its tendency to lay everything out into this reticulated spatialized form and according to Adorno this is essentially a disguised and unselfconscious mythical thinking made into an infernal machine of self-sacrifice and then there's real thinking reflective thinking and this very starkly sets out this divergence between philosophy and science. Philosophy is actually summoned to create this other type of thought, to save us from science. This sickness, this terminal exhaustion of reason
that's expressed in nihilism and in scientific rationality can only be cured by philosophical reflection, by realizing that scientific rationality itself arises within human history and is of human history. so we attempt to recuperate this pathology back into a healthy human spirit. Therefore, for Adorno, the predations of science appear like the work of a kind of possession, an alien possession, albeit one whose seat is a human compulsion, but it's as if this kind of infernal agency is acting through the human compulsion, causing not only humanity but we see in Adorno even nature itself to do violence to itself, to deny itself.
And in fact it requires a reflective thought to alter the scientific image of nature, to produce a new image of nature that's integrated with human history, with meaning and with significance. Basically a correlationist image of nature in which nature and man belong to each other. it's a kind of reconciliation and Adorno doesn't hold out a great deal of hope for this happening but it's this kind of meditation and constant self-reflection and commemoration of human history which is the only thing that philosophy can do so this is in fact a temporal transcendence it's the idea that through the human construction of the world through our inhabiting of human time
through our mindful inhabiting of human time in history, we can transcend this mechanistic image of nature. And for Brassier, this is a common feature of philosophical attempts to evade the consequences of science, is to create these philosophical images of time. We make time human. And we make time human so as to encapsulate scientific thought within the human time. But science, in fact, reveals to us a time that's precisely spatial, a time that does belong to this spatialized, exteriorized logic. That's Einsteinian space-time, time as just another variable in the equation. So we have scientific rationality as this kind of psychotic, schizophrenic dispossession by space,
in which reason slides uncontrollably towards an imminence which dispossesses it of its temporal and its reflexive self-differentiation. We can no longer differentiate ourselves as reflective beings. We become absorbed into this network of instrumental rationality which we've made ourselves, or which has been produced through us by this strange repetitive compulsion, which, according to Adorno, belongs to the human logic of sacrifice. But here, Brassier turns to Calois' discussion of the insect, a certain type of insect that mimics its own food and ends up, in fact, often devouring others of its own species.
So in miming so accurately its own food as an adaptive strategy, it ends up actually becoming its own food. And Kalwa links this to a general tendency of the disintegration of the organic into the inorganic. So this is again kind of related to this death drive. And he talks about this in relation to the schizophrenics feeling that they're being devoured by space. The schizophrenic has often this affect of being crystallized or being consumed by space and of not being where they are, of not having the self-reflexive capacity to place themselves where they are. So in the same way, according to Brassier,
the scientific image promises to satisfy the death drive, to dissolve the organic into the inorganic, to dissolve the self-reflexivity and differentiation of the subject into this flat plane of spatialized, exteriorized, space. And this promise, but importantly, of course, for Brassier, this promise is not a pathological projection of a fractured consciousness. It's not a problem of human history. But it indexes what he calls a voiding potency imminent to the object. So it's the object itself which is triggering this thanatropic mimicry on the path of thought. The real object somehow