Brassier - The Thanatosis of Enlightenment (Chapter from Origins and Ends of the Mind - Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis)

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment Ray Brassier I. Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment’s destruction of superstition merely reinstates myth: this is the speculative thesis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. My contention here is that this dialectic of myth and enlightenment is structured by an entwinement of mimicry, mimesis, and sacrifice which not only underlies the book’s ‘excursus’ on Odysseus and its celebrated chapter on anti-semitism, but arguably furnishes it with its fundamental conceptual core. Though each of these concepts are undoubtedly complex, mobilized to distinct purposes in different parts of Adorno’s oeuvre in particular, their deployment in Dialectic of Enlightenment seems to harbour the key to Adorno and Horkheimer’s speculative thesis. If, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, the concept of mimesis functions in five ‘distinct but nevertheless overlapping’ registers in Adorno’s work, three of these are fully operative in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the anthropological register; the biological-somatic register; and the psychoanalytic register. The argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment weaves these three registers together while distinguishing between mimicry, which ostensibly has a negative connotation in the book, and mimesis, whose speculatively positive sense may be glossed as similitude without conceptual subsumption. At the same time, the concept of sacrifice assumes its decisive import for the book’s speculative thesis as the paradigm of non-conceptual exchange. The entwinement of similitude without identity and exchange without subsumption provides the pulse of the dialectic of myth and enlightenment. Thus the book’s thesis can be paraphrased as follows: the sacrificial logic of myth is repeated in reason’s own compulsive attempt to overcome myth by sacrificing it. Enlightenment reiterates mythic sacrifice by striving to sacrifice it. But as a result it unwittingly mimes the fatal compulsion which it intended to overcome. Only by ‘working through’ the sacrificial trauma that drives rationality, a working through which Adorno and Horkheimer characterize Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press).  Andreas Huyssen distinguishes these five registers as follows: ‘[F]irst, in relation to the critique of the commodity form and its powers of reification and deception, a thoroughly negative form of mimesis [Mimesis ans Verhärtete]; secondly, in relation to the anthropological grounding of human nature which, as Adorno insists in Minima Moralia, is ‘indissolubly linked to imitation’; third, in a biological somatic sense geared toward survival, as Adorno had encountered it in Roger Caillois’s work […]; fourth in the Freudian sense of identification and projection indebted to Totem and Taboo; and, lastly, in an aesthetic sense that resonates strongly with Benjamin’s language theory, as it relates to the role of word and image in the evolution of signifying systems.’ Andreas Huyssen, ‘Of Mice and Mimesis’, New German Critique, No. 81, (Autumn 2000), 66-67.  135

Ray Brassier in terms of reason’s reflexive commemoration of its own natural history, can reason renounce its pathological compulsion to sacrifice and thereby become reconciled to the part played by nature within it. True demythologization—the dialectical resolution of the opposition between myth and enlightenment—would then coincide with the relinquishment of the sacrificial drive to demythologize, or in Adorno and Horkheimer’s own words ‘Demythologization always takes the form of the irresistible revelation of the futility and superfluity of sacrifices.’ Reason becomes reconciled to nature by sublimating its compulsion to sacrifice myth (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 42) In this regard, Dialectic of Enlightenment is an attempt to fuse Hegel and Freud in what can only be described as a ‘dialectical psychoanalysis’ of Western rationality. But everything hinges on the manner in which mimicry, mimesis, and sacrifice are dialectically entwined—more precisely, the book’s speculative coherence depends on the feasibility of maintaining a rigid demarcation between mimicry and mimesis, sacrificial repression and enlightened sublimation. If organic mimicry reduces to adaptation, then it falls under the aegis of identity, and anthropological mimesis can be confidently contrasted to it as a harbinger of non-identity, correspondence without a concept. But this neat distinction is far from assured. In the fragment entitled ‘Toward a Theory of the Criminal’, Adorno and Horkheimer explicitly identify mimicry with the death-drive: ‘[Criminals] represent a tendency deeply inherent in living things, the overcoming of which is the mark of all development: the tendency to lose oneself in one’s surroundings instead of actively engaging with them, the inclination to let oneself go, to lapse back into nature. Freud called this the death-drive, Caillois le mimétisme’ (2002: 189). But how is this explicit identification of biological mimicry with the death-drive related to the following cryptic formulation from the excursus on Odysseus, which seems to identify the latter with mimesis rather than mimicry? ‘Only deliberate adaptation to it brings nature under the power of the physically weaker. The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death’ (2002: 44). This could be paraphrased as follows: in sacrificing the mimetic impulse (blind conformity to nature, the compulsion to repeat) in order to ensure human survival, instrumental reason fatally repeats its own submission to nature. It has to mimic death in order to stave it off. This would seem to encapsulate the nub of the dialectical critique of instrumental rationality; a critique which identifies the latter as the root cause of Occidental civilization’s precipitation toward self-destruction. But there is another sense in which it also harbours the germ of this critique’s non-dialectical reversal: mimesis may have distinguished itself from mimicry, but mimicry does  Cf. ibid, 189. Adorno had reviewed Caillois’s 1934 text ‘La Mante religieuse’ (originally published in Minotaure 5 (1934): 23-26) in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1938): 410-11. Also relevant in this regard is Caillois’ ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’ originally published in Minotaure 7 (1935): 4-10. Both texts are included in Callois, Le Mythe et l’Homme (La Flèche: Folio/Essais, 1988). English versions can be found in On the Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, C. Frank & C. Naish (eds) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 136

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment not distinguish itself from mimesis. For the genitive ‘of’ in reason’s mimesis of death may plausibly be taken to be objective as well as subjective. As we shall see, the fatal reversibility of mimicry and mimesis, though denounced by dialectical reflection, is latent in the enigma of mimicry’s non-adaptive thanatosis, what Caillois called its ‘assimilation to space’, which transforms reflection itself into a purposeless instrument and signals the technological destruction of critique. Thanatosis signals the fatal equivalence whereby the logic of mimesis reverses into mimicry and critical negativity into the annihilating positivity of reason which the reflexive dialectic of myth and enlightenment sought to stave off. II. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment reason is driven by an inexorable drive to conceptual subsumption which subordinates particularity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity to universality, homogeneity, and unity, thereby rendering everything equivalent to everything else, but precisely in such a way that nothing can ever be identical to itself. Thus conceptual identification stipulates a form of differential commensurability which, in their own words, ‘amputates the incommensurable’ (2002: 9). ‘Instrumental rationality’ (which will later be called ‘identity thinking’) is an anthropological pathology expressing a materially indeterminate yet ubiquitous ‘power’ whose sole determination consists in its differentiation into dominating and dominated, rather than the result of any historically determinate configuration between conditions and relations of production. In the speculative anthropology proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, instrumental reason is the extension of tool-use and hence a function of adaptational constraints. The emergence of instrumental rationality is inseparable from the primordial confrontation between dominating and dominated power which primitive humanity experienced in its powerlessness before all-powerful nature. Sacrifice is the attempt to effect a commensuration between these incommensurables; between the omnipotence of nature and the impotence of primitive humanity. Yet from the outset sacrificial magic presupposed the logic of mimesis: ‘At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of kinship. Magic like science is concerned with ends but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object’ (2002: 7). Mimesis establishes the equivalence between dissimilars which provides the precondition for sacrifice. It provides a non-conceptual commensuration of particularity with generality thereby allowing one to serve as a substitute for the other: ‘Magic implies specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the 137

Ray Brassier God. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of the specimen. But the sanctity of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange” (2002: 7). Sacrifice’s magical power consists in establishing a correspondence between things for which no ratio, no proportion of conceptual equivalence yet exists. This is its quite literal irrationality. More importantly, mimetic sacrifice establishes the fundamental distinction whose rationality Adorno and Horkheimer believe enlightenment is in the process of eliding: the distinction between animate and inanimate: ‘mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive peoples. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places arises from this pre-animism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it’ (2002: 11). Moreover, if as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, myth already exhibits the lineaments of explanatory classification which will be subsequently deployed in scientific rationality, then this distinction between animate and inanimate marks a fundamental cognitive accomplishment which science threatens to elide by converting all of nature into an undifferentiated material whose intelligibility requires a supplement of conceptual information. Scientific conceptualization mortifies the body: ‘The transformation into dead matter, indicated by the affinity of corpus to corpse, was a part of the perennial process which turned nature into stuff, material’ (2002: 194) Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer insist, ‘the disenchant­ ment of the world means the extirpation of animism’ (2002: 2); it ‘equates the living with the non-living just as myth had equated the non-living with the living’ (2002: 11). Yet animism harboured a form of non-conceptual rationality precisely insofar as its practice of sacrifice established a principle of reciprocity between inanimate power and animate powerlessness. The rationality of sacrifice consists in this power to commensurate incommensurables: power and impotence, life and death. The speculative fusion of Hegel and Freud undertaken by Adorno and Horkheimer would seem to imply three successive strata of mimetic sacrifice and three distinct registers of exchange between life and death. The first strata, according to Freud’s own excursus into speculative biology in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, would mark the emergence of the organism through the sacrifice which secures the relative independence of its interior milieu against the inorganic exterior. Part of the organism has to die so that it may survive the onslaught of the inorganic: the organism sacrifices its outer layer to the inorganic as a ‘shield against stimuli’ (SE 18: 26-7). The second strata would mark the emergence of mythic exchange as the stage at which humans learnt to sacrifice the animate in order to placate animating powers. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, this is the sacrifice that establishes a reciprocity between dominated and dominating, victim and gods, and hence represents a gain in human autonomy: ‘If exchange represents 138

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment the secularization of sacrifice, the sacrifice itself, like the magic schema of rational exchange, appears as a human contrivance intended to control the gods, who are overthrown precisely by the system created to honour them’ (2002: 40) The third stratum would be that of the emergence of the self and the definitive separation between culture and nature. The permanence of the ego is secured against the flux of fleeting impressions through the teleological subordination of present satisfaction to future purpose: thus, ‘[t]he ego […] owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future. [But] its substance is as illusory as the immortality of the slaughtered victim’ (2002: 41). But where sacrifice had previously served as a means for mastering external nature, it now becomes introjected as the suppression of the power of internal nature. However, this sacrificial subordination of means to end in fact reverses itself into a subordination of ends to means, for in learning to repress the drives and desires whose satisfaction define it, the human organism effectively negates the ends for which it supposedly lives. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this marks the beginning of that dangerous substitution of means for ends, of the reversibility between function and purpose, which they see as defining the reign of instrumental rationality and which attains its pathological apogee in what they describe as the ‘overt madness’, ‘the antireason’, of technological capitalism. Yet the roots of this madness were already present at the origin of subjectivity: ‘The human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained, because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity, of which the achievements of self-preservation can only be defined as functions—in other words, self-preservation destroys the very thing which is supposed to be preserved […] The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice—in other words, the history of renunciation’ (2002: 43). Thus enlightenment becomes the sacrifice of sacrifice; its internalization. The separation between nature and culture, discipline and spontaneity, is secured by becoming internal to the subject. But in order to secure it the subject must imitate the implacability of inanimate nature; it disenchants animate nature by miming the intractability of inanimate force: ‘The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its rigidity, disintegrating itself as animistic’ (2002: 44). For Adorno and Horkheimer, this is the key to the fatal complicity between enchantment and disenchantment, myth and enlightenment. Enlightenment’s pathological reiteration of the logic of mythic thought is exemplified in its exclusive regard for the immanence of the actual and its obsessive focus on the ineluctable necessity of the present: ‘In the terseness of the mythical image as in the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the actual is confirmed and mere existence is pronounced as the meaning it obstructs […] The subsumption of the actual, whether under mythical prehistory or under mathematical 139

Ray Brassier formalism, the symbolic relating of the present to the mythical event in the rite or abstract category in science, makes the new appear as something predetermined, which therefore is really the old. It is not existence that is without hope but the knowledge which appropriates and perpetuates existence as a schema in the pictorial or mathematical symbol’ (2002: 20-21). Thus, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the abyss that separates science’s conceptual knowledge of the actual from ‘existence’ would be the abyss between the identical and the non-identical; an abyss of un-actual negativity whose inherently temporal structure only philosophical reflection is capable of recuperating. Reason can only overcome its self-alienation from natural existence, suspend the oppressive immanence of absolute actuality and redeem the possibility of hope, through the commemorative reflection of its own historicity. Given its crucial role in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, this ultimate denouement of the dialectic of enlightenment warrants quoting at length: Precisely by virtue of its irresistible logic, thought, in whose compulsive mechanism nature is reflected and perpetuated, also reflects itself as a nature oblivious to itself, as a mechanism of compulsion […] In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature, as in pre-history, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its supposed name, which in the guise of mana means omnipotence, but as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement of nature persists. By modestly confessing itself to be power and thus being taken back into nature, mind rids itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to nature […] For not only does the concept as science distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought […] it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured. Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, [it has] escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature’s own dread of itself (2002: 32). The reasoning here is impeccably Hegelian: mature reason achieves its independence from nature reflexively by remembering its own dependence upon it. But according to Adorno and Horkheimer, reflexivity is precisely what science remains incapable of. If, as they maintain, ‘all perception is projection’ (2002: 154), i.e. the mediation of sensible impressions by conceptual judgement, then an adequate cognitive reflection of things as they are necessitates bridging the abyss between sense data and actual objects, inner and outer. Thus ‘[t]o reflect the 140

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment thing as it is, the subject must give back to it more than it receives from it’ (2002: 155). But this is precisely what conceptual subsumption, whether positivistic or idealistic, is incapable of doing: ‘Because the subject is unable to return to the object what it has received from it, it is not enriched but impoverished. It loses reflection in both directions: as it no longer reflects the object, it no longer reflects on itself and thereby loses the ability to differentiate’ (2002: 156). Cognition becomes pathological when its projection excludes reflection. The privileging of reflection as the hallmark of rational sanity entails the pathologization of science’s ‘unreflecting naivety’ as an instance of ‘pathic projection’ which merely differs in degree, rather than in kind, from anti-semitism: ‘Objectifying thought, like its pathological counterpart, has the arbitrariness of a subjective purpose extraneous to the matter itself and, in forgetting the matter, does to it in thought the violence which will later be done to it in practice’ (2002: 159). The upshot of this critique is clear: reason’s reflexive mediation is contrasted to its irreflexive immediacy as health is to sickness: ‘The subject which naively postulates absolutes, no matter how universally active it may be, is sick, passively succumbing to the dazzlement of false immediacy’ (2002: 160). Adorno and Horkheimer counterpoint the healthy mediation of reflexive negativity to the sick mediation of total subsumption, just as they contrast reflexive consciousness’ ‘living’ incorporation of qualitative particularity to the latter’s annihilating consumption through mathematical formalization. In the final analysis, ‘only mediation can overcome the isolation which ails the whole of nature’ (2002: 156). And this mediation must take the form of remembrance: ‘What threatens the prevailing praxis and its inescapable alternatives is not nature, with which that praxis coincides, but the remembrance of nature’ (2002: 212). Such remembrance would aim at inaugurating a ‘second nature’: a nature mediated by human history and reinvested with the full apparel of human socio-cultural significance. Second nature would be nature reflexively incorporated and internally memorized, or, in the words of Jay Bernstein (one of its more enthusiastic advocates) ‘the nature whose appearing to us is conditioned by our belonging to it’ (Bernstein 2001: 191). Moreover, if we accept Bernstein’s suggestion that for Adorno “the living/non-living distinction is the fundamental one” (ibid, 194), then we begin to appreciate the extent to which the ultimate horizon of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of scientific reason is the rehabilitation of a fully anthropomorphic ‘living’ nature—in other words, the resurrection of Aristotelianism: nature as repository of anthropomorphically accessible meaning, of essential purposefulness, with the indwelling, auratic telos of every entity providing an intelligible index of its moral worth. Underlying the philosophical infatuation with lure of second nature is a yearning to obliterate the distinction between knowledge and value; a nostalgic longing to reconcile the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’; and to ‘heal’ (since nature ‘suffers’ in its isolation from human contact) the modern rift between understanding what an entity is and knowing how to behave toward it. Clearly then, this philosophical longing for second nature betrays nothing less than a desire to reforge the broken ‘chain of being’ and hence to 141

Ray Brassier repudiate the cumulative cognitive achievement which runs from Galileo through Darwin to Freud. The implicitly theological tenor of this reflexive commemoration of lost experience becomes explicit in its insistence on the redemptive value of memory. ‘Reconciliation’, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, ‘is Judaism’s highest concept and expectation its whole meaning’ (2002: 165). Judaic monotheism is to be admired for managing to ‘preserve [nature’s] reconciling memory, without relapsing through symptoms into mythology’, thereby prefiguring ‘happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth’ (ibid). Judaism prefigures second nature precisely insofar as it provides a prototype of demythologised religion. But if the Judaic Bilderverbot (the prohibition of images) is the seal of rationally disenchanted religion, its reflexive rehabilitation as the prohibition of the positive absolute marks the apex of mystification; a mystification sanctified in the critical absolutization of the difference between the knowable and the unknowable, the finite and the infinite, immanence and transcendence— the very distinction which science is deemed guilty of having disregarded. The critical interdiction of absolute immanence aims at the achievement of a second nature which would secure the reflexive redemption of the future on the basis of the present’s commemoration of the past. The qualitative substance of experience supposedly obliterated by abstract conceptual form is retroactively projected as the irreducible material of socio-historical mediation. But this substance of experience is itself a philosophical myth. For though the dialectic of myth and enlightenment may be formally plausible, it derives its substantive critical force from a conflation between dialectical form—exemplified in the analysis of the logic of sacrifice— and a positive content which is nothing but the retroactively posited residue of conceptual subsumption: the pre-conceptual experience of ‘meaning’ harboured in the perceptual apprehension of qualitative particularity. In this regard, Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis is vitiated by a constant slippage between two entirely distinct claims: the claim that scientific reason has occluded a meaningful experience of nature and the claim that it has obscured the experience of meaning as nature. To defend the first would involve a commitment to the primacy of some sort of pre-conceptual phenomenological understanding of nature—precisely the sort of stance precluded by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Hegelian emphasis on the ineluctable socio-historical mediation of experience. To defend the second would be to relapse into the kind of reductive naturalism exemplified by contemporary evolutionary psychology, whose positivistic precursors Adorno and Horkheimer abhorred. Yet in spite of—or perhaps even because of—this emphasis on historical mediation, the meaningful particularity of forgotten experience, whether ‘of’ or ‘as’ nature, is evoked as the content which science has lost by abstracting from it. But this meaningful content is supposed to be at once qualitatively and positively substantive—experience in the full-blooded phenomenological sense—and the negation of subsumptive abstraction. What is this dimension of meaningfulness which we have supposedly been deprived of if it is neither positively given as a 142

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment transhistorical invariant, nor some originary phenomenological datum, and if its determinate specificity is merely the shadow retroactively cast by its subsequent negation? Reflection provides the sole criterion of authentication for the memory that we used to have more than we have now; and this memory is all that can substantiate the claim that we have been deprived of something. But whose memory is it? In light of the critical prohibition of absolute knowledge, and hence of the inaccessibility of absolute knowledge’s self-commemoration, how are we to gauge the reliability of Adorno and Horkheimer’s speculative remembrance of human history? Dialectical commemoration should never be taken on trust. The ‘experience’ whose attenuation Adorno and Horkheimer lament seems to have no other substance than the one which reflection retrospectively imparts to it. In fact, the invocation of remembrance reveals how Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment is carried out from the perspective of the commemorative consciousness which feels its own existence threatened by the scientific occlusion of ‘meaningful particularity’. The critique proceeds from the viewpoint of reflection, which is to say, commemoration. It is nostalgic for an experience whose substance mirrors its own longing. It is fuelled by the yearning for the mythic form of history as experience rather than for any specific or substantive historical experience. Thus it criticises the sacrificial myth of disenchantment by rehabilitating a fantasy of rational enchantment which betrays its own pining for the reflexive redemption of experience. Accordingly, and by its own admission, it is incapable of operating as an immanent critique of actual experience, since reflection is precisely what the actuality of instrumental rationality already lacks. But this lack is imputed to it on the basis of an appeal to a reflexively recuperated and transcendent past. Thus critique is conservation; moreover, it is inherently conservative since its commemorative reflection desires to postpone temporal rupture in the name of continuity. The horizon of reconciliation retroactively forecloses the future prospect of temporal caesura. Reconciliation and expectation are the theological guarantors of redeemed nature. But science has no concept of ‘nature’, and this is precisely what dissuades it from stipulating any limit between the natural and the extra-natural: nature is neither more nor less than the varied discourses of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, ethology, astronomy, cosmology… the list remains necessarily open-ended. Where the sciences of nature are concerned, the irreconcilable is their highest concept and the irremediable their only meaning. Paradoxically, it is in the concept of mimetic reversibility that this irremediability finds expression. III. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the primary sense of biological mimicry would be that of an expression of the compulsion to adapt: organisms must either habituate 143

Ray Brassier themselves to their environment or perish. But mimicry in the biological sense spans a variety of different registers, from genetic replication, to behavioural compliance, to morphological imitation, none of which prove straightforwardly reducible to the logic of adaptation. It is this fundamentally non-adaptive character of mimicry which Roger Caillois draws attention to in his 1935 article ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’. In disguising themselves as their own food, leaf insects such as the Phylium frequently end up devouring each other. Their mimicry involves an uncanny teleplasty—a physical photography—which short-circuits any use value the mimetic realism might have had. In replicating its own food right down to the physical details of corruption and decay, the Phylium nonsensically locates itself as a dying semblance of its own living sustenance. The exorbitant accuracy of the insect teleplasty initiates an autophagy which becomes part of the organic coding of the physical photograph itself. Thus the symbiosis between the information of one organism—Phylium—and another—the leaf—undergoes an involution which simultaneously engenders the collapse of their identity and the erasure of their difference in the paradoxical convergence of organic verisimilitude and living death. In miming death in order to live—thanatosis—the Phylium becomes the living index of its food’s degeneration for its own vital appetite. This thanatropic mimicry marks the achievement of negativity in and for itself quite independently of consciousness. It realizes the indistinction of identity and nonidentity in complete independence of the concept. Far from being an instance of adaptation, thanatropic mimicry marks the compulsion whereby the organism is driven to disintegrate into its environment. At the root of this thanatropism, Caillois suggests, is an attraction by space: organic individuation loses ground, ‘blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu’, and is thereby precipitated into a continuously expanding de-individuated space. Caillois proposes that this ‘assimilation to space’ is the common denominator underlying phenomena as apparently remote from one another as insect mimicry and ‘psychasthenia’, particularly schizophrenic depersonalization. The schizophrenic is dispossessed of his or her psychic individuality by space: To these dispossessed souls space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from an indeterminate point in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which I owe this formulation to Nigel Cooke’s remarkable paper, ‘The Language of Insects’, Sandwich 1: Autumn 2004 (London: SecMoCo Publishing).  Phagocytosis is a process describing the engulfment and destruction of extracellularly-derived materials by phagocytic cells, such as macrophages and neutrophils.  144

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment he is ‘the convulsive possession’. All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species (Callois 1988: 111; my translation). This thanatropic dispossession at the hands of what Hegel referred to as the ‘concept-less exteriority’ of space explains the horror which mimicry inspires in civilization. It is not surprising then that the latter’s progress can be charted in terms of successive sublimations of the mimetic impulse, first through magic, in which mimetic logic provided the condition for sacrificial exchange, then with organized work, which marked its definitive prohibition: ‘Social and individual education reinforces the objectifying behaviour required by work and prevents people from submerging themselves once more in the ebb and flow of surrounding nature’ (2002: 148). Civilization proscribes mimetic behaviour as a dangerous regression. This prohibition is at once social and conceptual: social, in that mimetic behaviour signals a weakening or loosening of egoic self-mastery and a regression to animal compulsion (as exemplified by the criminal); conceptual, in that mimetic semblance is an instance of similitude without a concept. It is this latter sense that bears a particularly significant philosophical import for Adorno and Horkheimer. When something mimes something else, it becomes like it, but without resembling it according to any criterion of conceptual equivalence. Thus mimesis is an index of non-identity: it marks a register of indifference or indistinction operating independently of any conceptual criterion for registering identity or difference. Consequently, mimetic phenomena threaten both the social order and the conceptual order, exchange and subsumption. Yet the identitarian fear of mimesis is mirrored by the terror which mimesis itself provokes. For Adorno and Horkheimer, both mimesis and subsumption are intimately connected to fear: a nexus of terror connects civilization’s fear of regression, the individual’s fear of social disapprobation, the fear provoked by conceptual indistinction, and the prey’s fear of its predator. Whether sameness is established conceptually through the synthetic subsumption of particularity or organically via the imitation of the inorganic, it remains bound to terror. More precisely, the terror of mimetic regression engenders a compulsion to subsume, to conform, and to repress, which is itself the mimesis of primitive organic terror: Society perpetuates the threat from nature as the permanent, organized compulsion which, reproducing itself in individuals as systematic self-preservation, rebounds against nature as society’s control over it […] The mathematical formula is consciously manipulated regression, just as the magic ritual was; it is the most sublimated form of mimicry. In technology, the adaptation to lifelessness in the service of self-preservation is no longer accomplished, as in magic, by bodily imitation of external nature, but by automating mental 145

Ray Brassier processes, turning them into blind sequences. With its triumph human expressions become both controllable and compulsive. All that remains of the adaptation to nature is the hardening against it. The camouflage used to protect and strike terror today is the blind mastery of nature, which is identical to farsighted instrumentality’ (2002: 149). Thus mimetic phenomena are double-edged: mimicry is at once a defence mechanism and a weapon. It is exemplified by the prey’s miming of the inorganic in order to evade the predator, but also by the predator’s miming of its prey. But its ambiguity goes deeper: for it is the defence mechanism itself which converts into a weapon; the repression which served to preserve the organic individual against the threat of inorganic dissolution becomes its fundamental weapon against nature, whether organic or inorganic. Mimetic sacrifice effectuates a reversibility between the threatening power which is to be warded off, and the threatened entity which seeks to defend itself through sacrifice. It installs a reversible equivalence between dominating and dominated force, power and powerlessness, the organic and the inorganic. Ultimately, this reversibility renders the anthropomorphic vocabulary of fear and intimidation inappropriate: the organism’s putatively defensive simulation of the inorganic—the horned lizard which simulates a rock—flips over into the inorganic’s supposedly aggressive simulation of the organic—as in the case of viruses, which hijack their hosts’ cellular machinery in order to make more copies of themselves. In disregarding this fundamental reversibility between mimic and mimicked, Adorno and Horkheimer ignore the return of mimicry within mimesis, and the possibility that anthropological mimesis itself may be a mask of mimicry. Though they recapitulate mimesis’ anthropological and psychosocial aspects, they omit the first and arguably most fundamental strata of mimetic sacrifice: the biological level, in which Freud grounded the compulsion to repeat in his account of the organism’s emergence from the inorganic. Freud’s biological account of the death-drive remains an ineliminable prerequisite of their account for it explains the originary compulsion to repeat which is reiterated at the anthropological and psychosocial levels. Civilization’s embrace of lifelessness in the service of selfpreservation, its compulsive mimicry of organic compulsion in the repression of compulsion, reiterates the originary repression of the inorganic. Thus, if ‘[t]he reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite [but] is itself mimesis: of death’ this is because science’s repression of mimesis not only mimes death, inorganic compulsion—it is death, the inorganic, that mimes reason. Mimesis is of death and by death. Life was only ever mimed by death, the animate a mask of the inanimate. The technological automation of intelligence which marks the consummation of self-destructive reason for Adorno and Horkheimer is nothing but the return of the repressed, not merely in thinking, but as thinking itself. Enlightenment consummates mimetic reversibility by converting thinking into algorithmic compulsion: the inorganic miming of organic reason. Thus the 146

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment artificialization of intelligence, the conversion of organic ends into technical means and vice versa, heralds the veritable realization of second nature; not in the conciliatory aspect of a reflexive commemoration of reason’s own natural history, but rather in the irremediable form wherein purposeless intelligence supplants all reasonable ends. Organic teleology is not abolished through reflection, but through synthetic intelligence’s short-circuiting of instrumental rationality; a short-circuiting which overturns the sequential ordination of time and the future’s subordination to the present by reinscribing time into space. Dialectical thinking’s horror at this prospect is intimately tied to its desire to expunge space from history. Space is dialectically deficient because it remains mere concept-less self-exteriority. Thus for Adorno and Horkheimer, the sequential ordination of space via narrative is the necessary precondition for the irreversibility of historical time: ‘Laboriously and irrevocably, in the image of the journey, historical time has detached itself from space, the irrevocable schema of all mythical time’ (2002: 39). The topological reinscription of history appals reflection because it threatens to dissolve memory back into the concept-less exteriority of space. Moreover, if synthetic intelligence consummates thanatropic mimicry then Enlightenment’s topological reinscription of history does not so much reinstate mythical temporality as the dynamic of a horror story: human reason is revealed as an insect’s waking dream. The negative consummation of Enlightenment signals the end of the dream of reason as codified in Hegelianism and the awakening of an intelligence which is in the process of sloughing off its human mask. Yet one way of underlining the profound philosophical significance of Darwin’s achievement would be to characterize it precisely in terms of this reinscription of history into space. Natural history harbours temporal strata whose magnitude dwarfs that of the nature ‘whose appearing to us is conditioned by our belonging to it’—for it proceeds regardless of whether anyone belongs to it or not. Even if it remains irreducible to it, cultural history is mediated by natural history, which includes both time and space, biology and geology. So long as it remains uninformed by natural history, philosophical naturalism will invariably regress into natural theology. It is the failure to acknowledge the ways in which the sociohistorical mediation of nature is itself mediated by natural history—which means not only biology but geology—which allows philosophical discourses on ‘nature’ to become annexes of philosophical anthropology.  In this regard, the veritable analogue for the dialectic of enlightenment is not the Odyssey but David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), whose protagonist declares: ‘I was an insect who dreamed he was a man—and loved it—but now the dream is over and the insect is awake.’ 147

References Adorno T. & Horkheimer, M. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Bernstein, J. (2001) Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: CUP). Callois, R. (1935) ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. in C. Frank & C. Naish (eds.) On the Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Callois, R. (1988) Le Mythe et l’Homme, (La Flèche : Folio/Essais). Cooke, N. (2004) ‘The Language of Insects’ in Sandwich 1 (London: SecMoCo Publishing) Huyssen, A. (2000) ‘Of Mice and Mimesis’ in New German Critique, no. 81. 148