Identities
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism*
The legacy of the Copernican Revolution - that is the
revolution by and according to the open universe - is
comprised of three components: The speculative drive
of “an extreme line of thought”, the revolutionary vocation of “disturbing the peace of this world in still another
way” and the true-to-the-uni verse logic of delivering all
expressions of isolation and discreteness “remorselessly
into the open.”1 This text seeks to incorporate these three
components in order to construct a rudimentary model of
geophilosophical realism. According to this model, the
synthesis between the cerebral, the socio-cultural, the political, the territorial, the historic, the economic and the
geological is determined and driven not by a self-centred
or axiomatically veritable earth or horizon of interiority but by an open universal continuum.2 The universal
continuum is the unbound and continuous relation of
the universe to itself that is free from any intrinsic transcendental bound, absolute expression of discreteness
and fundamental obstruction. All general-particular and
global-regional dialectics signify the unbound and continuous relation of the universe to itself, or the universal
*
* This essay could never have been written were it not for the never-
ending moral and intellectual supports of Robin Mackay, Gabriel
Catren and Manabrata Guha.
continuum. In this respect, since geophilosophy examines the earth as the regional horizon of thought, it must
be pursued by means of a Copernican and coherent
thought of the universal continuum (i.e., the universe in
an unbound and continuous relation to itself). Therefore,
geophilosophy is no longer approached as a philosophy
of or for the earth; instead it is understood as a universally focused, or more precisely, systematically regional
philosophy capable of approximating an unrestricted qua
open conception of globality that cannot be exhausted
by the body of the earth or any collection of multitudes
therein. In this sense, geophilosophy reconstructs the universal field of thought by synthesizing regional fields into
a synthetic earth in a way that the earth is conceived both
synthetically (a sheaf of regional fields) and as a regional
site of alternative relations to the universal continuum
or the open. Thus geophilosophy is concerned not with
a true-to-the-earth thought but a thought whose topos is
a realist true-to-the-universe earth. Synoptically defined
as a realist philosophy that systematically broadens and
deepens the regional horizon of thought in relation to
the open, geophilosophy approximates an earth where
free expressions of the universal continuum interweave
with free or alternative regional relations (syntheses)
25
Reza
Negarestani
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
26
to the open. The introduction of this synthetic and fully
Copernican earth, however, requires a conception of terrestriality or regionality that cannot be thought in terms
other than the absolute reflexivity of the universe, that
is to say, the relation of the open universe to itself. The
terrestrial horizon as the regional horizon of thought or
what is required in approaching the global thought of the
open in a focused manner is then understood not in terms
of privatized or locally overdetermined relations but
strictly in terms of the unbound relation of the universe
to itself. For this reason, regionality (of the terrestrial)
is conceived bottomless-up from the abyssality implicated in the unrestricted relation of the universe to itself
- a bottomless reflexivity into which all local or regional
relations are perpetually descending. Geophilosophical
realism thus understands synthesis or the relation of a
regional horizon to the open in no terms other than the
unrestricted and abyssal reflexivity of the universe and
its universal synthesis. The peculiarly geophilosophical
question of synthesis, or more precisely, relation to the
outside (the open) ramifies into a series of topics which
shall be separately addressed and investigated throughout this text:
1. The relation of regional horizons and interiorized
enclosures - a wide range covering the cerebral horizon of the human, the interiorized domain of the
organism, territorial regions, states and the body of
the Earth itself - to the universal continuum (or the
open) from which they have been cut. Since the regional-universal relation is characterized by tensions
and syntheses, this open relation shall be explicated
in terms of a generalized conception of trauma or
cut.3 This is a cosmologically deepened account of
trauma drawn on the works of Freud, Ferenczi, Reich,
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
contemporary neuroscience, mathematics of unbound
continuum and a unified concept of astrobiology that
interconnects the particulate, the galactic, the stellar,
the chemical, the biological, the socio-cultural and
the neuropsychological within a continuous - albeit
topologically counterintuitive - universal gradient.
Here trauma is not a rupture marking the centrality or
discreteness of the regional subject with regard to its
outside, but a regionalizing cut made by a higher universal order in its own continuous field. Accordingly,
at this stage, the regional horizon or local interiority is
cut or conceived from the open universe in a way that
under no circumstance can the horizon be separated
from the abyssal relation of the universe to itself.
2. Not only speculative and synthetic opportunities
but also perils and illusions brought ashore by such
tensions and syntheses. The revolutionary import of
the universal synthesis especially in terms of its relation to the open demands a systematic scrutiny of
different types and valencies of tensions and syntheses. Moreover, since traumatic configurations or cuts
determine the position of regional or interiorized horizons - as well as their tensions and syntheses - with
regard to the outside, such critical scrutiny should be
construed as a general examination of different types
of trauma or cut.
3. The regional condensation of the universal synthesis or the universal force of openness associated
with an unbound universal continuum. How does the
universal synthesis engender its own revolutionary
subjectivity or regional condensation, and how can the
revolutionary subject - i.e. a subject revolutionized by
and according to the open - ofthe universal synthesis
Identities
Once the geophilosophical synthesis - as the drive of
earthly thought - is freed of its grounded relation to the
earth and absolutized by the geocosmic continuum, it can
be remobilized as a realist asymptote of the open - this is
the basic contention of this text: Constructing the asymptotic thought of the open and examining such thought’s
revolutionary import.
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, Sigmund
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 socalled 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
of the inorganic outside that is now - thanks to the topological militancy of trauma - dynamically posited inside
and outside the interiorized horizon. In the wake of trauma, in order to determine and capitalize on its interiority,
the horizon must stave off the ingressing flood of the
outside (überschwemmung). Yet even more significantly,
in axiomatizing its own interiority, the organism must
expose itself to the inassimilable index of the precursor
exteriority that is now resident within it because it could
never be completely assimilated by the temporal conditions of the organism.
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
continuum from which the horizon has been cut. In other
words, how do tensions and their respective syntheses
occasioned by the traumatic cut affect the axiomatization
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be mobilized? What is the shape of the revolutionary
subject or the realist local fibration of the universal
synthesis? Where is the site (earth) of the revolutionary subject? And what are the scientific, philosophical
and even socio-cultural outcomes of mobilizing the
revolutionary subject of the universal synthesis?
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
process whereby the horizon’s interiority is posited as a
veritable ground or founding axiom for its relationship
(synthesis) with the outside?
28
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:
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
2007, 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 reformulates the exteriority in terms
of capacity, hence the energetico-reductivist realization
of exteriority as exorbitance or excess. We can trace
different forms of the exogenic tension in the Freudian
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
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 or openness. This curious mode
of binding exteriority or openness, 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 exorbitant external world.
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 open
continuum as such. The trauma is but the self-excision
of the universal continuum into its own localized and
temporalized fields.4 Local and interiorized horizons are
excisions of the open universal continuum; instead of being posited against the open universe from which they
have been excised, they bring the unbound relation of the
universe to itself into focus through regional horizons.
Trauma as excision is, accordingly, the bottomless-up
relation of the universe to itself from an unrestricted
globality in the direction of localization and regional horizons (of the universal continuum). The self-excision of
the open continuum 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 and a contingency entailed in the
absolute freedom of universal continuum from the necessity of its multitudes and particulars. Self-excision of the
universal open into its regional fields in such a way that
the open retains its absoluteness both within the regional
horizon and beyond it, is what we should identify with
an absolutized variant of SandorFerenczi’sururtrauma
or archi-trauma/cut. The ururtrauma of the universal
continuum (the open) replaces the secondary function
of trauma as division (or secession) with the primary
function of the universal continuum’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 inter-connected traumas can be widened - it is the one that makes
sure the narcissistic wound keeps bleeding. The diagonal
immediacy of ururtrauma with the open and its universal
contingency bears a number of consequences:
(a) 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.
(b) The diagonal immediacy of ururtrauma with the
open or the universal continuum means that isolated
or single traumas do not exist - that is to say, trauma is intrinsically plural and traumas are but linked
and interconnected. This means that each particular
regional trauma should be understood and thought
in terms of the unbound genericity (or generality) of
the universal continuum or with reference to Charles
Sanders Peirce’s synthetic philosophy of continuum,
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
in terms of a supermultitudinous generic collection.
The supermultitudeness of the continuum means the
field of the universal - while determinate for itself - is
always indeterminate in size for its regional horizons
and particulars. In Peirce’s own words, “A supermultitudinous collection is so great that its individuals are
no longer distinct from one another.” (Peirce 2010,
192) The ururtrauma of the universal absolute, for this
reason, has a significant connotation: It suggests that
the transition from the universal to regional fields (of
individuals, particulars, etc.) and conversely, from local interiorized horizons to exteriority takes place in
terms of a truly generic - that is supermultitudinous
- continuum. Moreover, due to the genericity of the
continuum (i.e. its unbound and indeterminate order
of magnitude), regional fields and individual traumas
must be regarded only in terms of indefinite neighbourhoods (rather than discreteness), weldedness and
fusion (i.e. plasticity) and boundlessness with regard
to other regional horizons or localized fields of trauma
(i.e. unrestricted continuity to the universal).
(c) And lastly, in view of the previous conclusions,
every horizon or regional field of the universal continuum is formed by more than one traumatic cut, and
for this reason, the traumatic inflection upon the universal continuum does not follow a monistic or purely
integral regime of synthesis. To put it 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 open
universal continuum 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
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Reza Negarestani
30
entry within an interiorized horizon. In short, ururtrauma unbinds trauma as an alternative cut, a real
alternative posited by the absolute freedom of universal continuum (the open) and its line of synthesis.
Consequently, ururtrauma brings about the possibility
of an always-alternative system of traumatic synthesis or drive toward the open. The ururtrauma or the
self-excision of the absolute continuum redefines both
the reality and the function of trauma not in terms of
a pathologic/therapeutic system of anthropomorphic
emancipation but in terms of universal and contingent
transplantation of the exteriority and regional realization of openness. Trauma - in the sense of the open
continuum 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 Wilhelm 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
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
a contingently posited and gradationally accreted field of
complicities that has been excised by and out of the universal continuum along manifold nested traumatic cuts
(isotopic traces, fields of gravitation and chemical eruptions). The regional (the earth), in this sense, is a cosmic
constellation of alternating and nested traumata of the
absolute continuum which twist the shape of the regional
along their contingently erupting points of intrusion and
zones of transplantation. In this broadened scenario, the
terrestrial field of complicity is encompassed as much
by the stellar 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 marking the end of stellar
radiation) - the role of iron in gravitation of the earth, the
polymorphic presence of water and chemical processes
or agencies such as hydridic fluids which have formed
the planet and stirred 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 the open 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 axiomatic verity of the horizon’s interiority. Under the auspices of the
Insider, endogenic tensions call for a non-economical
inflection upon the absolute continuum that breaks free
from the models of critical emancipation and anti-critical
transgression: A revolution - that is to say an irreversible
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Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
and radical change - made by the openness of the universal continuum and instigated by a universal synthesis.
outside or inside the regional horizon, the synthesis or
relation to the open will be different.
Now we know that both endogenic and exogenic tensions
inherent to trauma are dialectical tensions between the
universal continuum and its regional fields. However,
the insurmountable traumatic tension 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
universal continuum (whose global 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 continuum and its regional field, a synthesis that determines the course and
the unbinding power of the dialectic with/of the absolute
continuum. Moreover, the type of synthesis or the relation to the open is also determined by the locus of this
lack or the insurmountable resistance to complete assimilation. Depending on whether this resistance takes place
With traumatic tensions being explained in terms of binding or unbinding different registers of exteriority, we can
now proceed to examine modes of synthesis or openness
associated with these tensions and the exact role of traumatic cuts in determining such syntheses.
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 - a global state
from which the regional horizon has been excised and
into which it must be loosened. 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” indexed by the inorganic. (Brassier
2007, 233�����������������������������������������������
) The binding of exteriority, accordingly, conforms to the synthesis (as the motor of the drive) between
31
The dialectical synthesis of the traumatic subject,
or: How can we tell the difference between
counter-revolutionary traps and revolutionary
tools?
Reza Negarestani
the interiorized horizon and the exteriority, or more accurately, between the universal gradient and its regional
focalization. The mode of inflection or openness toward
the open depends on the behaviour of the traumatic
synthesis which itself is determined by the complicity
between global and regional gradients. But the mode
of complicity between the universal continuum and its
regional fields is also contingent upon the traumatic remobilization of the absolute continuum and deployment
of the exteriority. It depends on how trauma posits the
absolute continuum in regard to its regional horizon. To
summarize, the traumatic binding of the universal freedom associated with the open continuum is, at its base,
neither the question of the subject’s strategy in binding
what lies beyond it nor the “�������������������������������
anterior posteriority” of radical exteriority, but the question of how trauma ushers in
the universal contingency of the absolute or unbound
continuum and the will of the open.
32
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:
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;
Georges 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
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
an exorbitant register outside and against the interiorized
horizon. It is identical to what Ray Brassier associates
with François
��������������������������������������������������
Laruelle’sunilateralizing cut of non-dialectical negativity which possesses “a power of incision
or dismemberment.” (ibid., 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 - an
instance of separation or scission. Yet more significantly, the amputating cut or 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 rearrangement of the universal with respect to the regional, positions the universal
absolute as an unbindable exorbitance on the geocosmic
continuum. In short, the unilateralized universal absolute
is reposited as an exorbitant external world or surplus
outside with regard to the interiorized or regional horizon which paradoxically cannot be successfully bound
but must be economically afforded as the only way out.
The unilateralized conception of the universal absolute
as the exorbitant - which the regional horizon can never
access except by means of dissolution - flattens the difference between universal absolute as exorbitant and
manifested exorbitance as the global expression of the
universal 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 continuum.
Identities
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 one-sidedness” at the cost of establishing a regime of exorbitance which can only be bound
through the synthesis of affordances inherent to the economical correlation between the interiorized horizon and
the exorbitant exteriority. (ibid., 147)
If the incisional mode of trauma contingently sets exteriority as an exorbitant index against the interiorized
horizon, this does not 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 dismembered universal over the amputated regional. For this reason, the unilateralized or
non-dialectical conception of exteriority associated with
the universal absolute 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. This economical
binding operates by affording (a dynamic expression of an
33
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.
Such confusion seems also to be at play in variant glorifications of excess and exorbitance such as Bataille’s notion
of general or solar economy. Capitalism feignsits universality and inevitability for Man by means of this traumatic
confusion between contingent and necessary manifestations of the universal absolute as exorbitant. Its machinery
continuously postulatesits excesses not as products of unnecessary processes and violent methods of conservation
and protection but as the unavoidable consequence of its regional binding of the universal, of its becoming-universal.
Accordingly, averting the path of capitalism is no longer
a matter of disobedience but the folly of the impossible trying to walk away from the world. 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 and unbind a
world whose frontiers are driven by the will of the open
and whose depths are absolutely free.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
34
axiomatic capacity) the excess of the outside. As a binding method, affordability regulates the course of synthesis
toward the outside according to the axiomatic function of
capacity. A synthesis not conforming to this dynamic capacity is avoided at all costs (viz. the horizon is open to the
outside only according to its affordability). For this reason,
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
in order to move toward the source of trauma whilst energetically preserving the cohesion of the traumatized
subject or the interiorized horizon. The synthesis between
the unbindable excess (the exorbitant external world) 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.
Daniel R. Brooks and E.O. Wiley find the biological expression of this affordable continuity in the cohesive but
economically conceived ontogenic continuity that blurs
the distinction between the boundary demarcated by the
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
originary excess that has been partially warded off and the
excess that simultaneously pushes the dynamic boundary
of the organism further (hence accounting for its dynamic behaviors) and eventually dissolves the organism.5
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 (umwege) simultaneously aims for regional complexification
and dissolution of the entire horizon. The acceleration,
or precisely speaking, the socio-economic and cultural
appropriation of such synthesis is therefore devoid of
any revolutionary potency with respect to the universal openness. 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 or
unbound in the first place. The psychological image of
this accelerative strategy is the isolated mad individual
reduced to a vegetative state or the incendiary hypermanictransgressionist - the 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
Identities
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 Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy and reappropriation of his architectonics, the revolutionary synthesis
is that of ternary logics. It extricates the synthetic 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 synthetic 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
symmetry-in-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 constructs its modally bottomless and
free relation to the open through interconnected webs of
traumata; it inflects upon the universal continuum through
the implicitly twisted logic of asymmetry-in-symmetry,
liquefaction-in-solidity, exteriority-in-interiority, universal-in-regional, global-in-local. Openness becomes as
much an asymptotic relation to the boundless universal
continuum (the open) as it is realized as the expression
of modal and relational freedom of the synthesis - that
is, openness by real alternatives instead of affordable
options.
II. Traumatic synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions.
Here trauma as the self-excision or self-reflection of the
absolute, transplants exteriority within interiority and
fabricates topologically nested gradients of the universal (examples: Ferenczi’s account of autotomia and the
35
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 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 and for this reason it is not unrestricted or
modally free. 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 radical 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 synthesis or relation to the open.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
36
Reza Negarestani
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. Perforation or the transplanting
cut is to amputation what the synthetic order of the third
is to the dyadic hierarchy. Through trauma as perforation,
the universal - contingently and from alternative points
of entry - transplants its global expressions and properties within its localized zones. The regional horizon, in
this sense, is a focalized gradient or continuum occasioned by transplantations and nested continuity of the
universal which bring 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
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
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 universal 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 the universal absolute (alternative
modes of openness). Complicities between the resident
indices of exteriority and the interiorized horizon, on
Identities
Within the post-Copernican universe, 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 or forces of the open. The revolutionary subject of
the Copernican project 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 unbound universal
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
37
the other hand, absorb this so-called inevitability merely
as asymptotic expressions of the universal continuum:
Interiorities as nested asymptotes of exteriority, embodiment as the traumatic asymptote of disembodiment (viz.
the unfeasibility of physical 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
open. This is why the revolutionary subject celebrates
the Copernican Revolution and its traumatic legacy as a
revolution by widening the regional across the universal
continuum and asymptotically approaching the open.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
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 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 different geophilosophical systems can be heard:
38
(a) A geophilosophical realism in which synthetic
relations with the source of trauma are conceived as
gravitational relocation in the universal continuum
versus a geophilosophical system in which the regional horizon (erde) changes its location according
to an exorbitant gravity (for example, the earth as a regional gradient of the cosmic continuum vs. the earth
as bound to the sun and its own ground).
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
(b) Two geophilosophical systems in which the exteriority has different effects on a given sphere (earth):
gradational changes versus rigid changes.
A geophilosophical synthesis whose science
of openness requires topological, differential
and categorical approaches and one that is
too confident in the axiomatic integrity of its
horizon to see perforations, lines of intrusion and
inassimilable residues of the outer space within
its own sphere.
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. This gradational transition owes to the general function of trauma as that which
mediates between the regional and the universal, interpolates discontinuities or ruptures, brings about all types
of eccentric neighbourhoods between regional horizons
of the universal continuum and establishes topologicaltransfers between seemingly discrete regional domains
- between “infant politics” (Robin Mackay), streets politics, geocosmology, biology, cerebral plasticity, etc. It is
interesting to point out that some of the psychoanalytical
explications regarding the realm of endogenic syntheses
brought about by traumatic transplantations are strikingly similar to deep earth and extra-terrestrial stories.
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
Identities
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 trans-vacuous 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 was never
meant to be a children’s story but a moral lesson on the
formation of the earth and its lively 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
Reich.6 Seemingly distorted by hyperbolic turns and
twists, Reich’s entire oeuvre should be seen as a meticulous 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 settled in Maine, his project took 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 were secret
facilities where humanity consolidated its last lines of
resistance against aliens: “There was no escape from
the fact that we were at war with a power unknown to
39
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 1995, 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 quasi-alien life is the outermost layer, the thin surface
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
40
Reza Negarestani
man on earth.” (�������������������������������������
Reich��������������������������������
1957)��������������������������
Everything that is developed during this period verges on pseudo-science and
cosmosophy: system-toxifying deadly orgoneradations,
gravity and anti-gravity equations, models of alien visitation, studies on the inherent susceptibility of water as
the vitalizing substance of the terrestrial life to extra-terrestrial 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
socio-political traumas - in his ufologic reports presents
trauma as a close encounter that relocates the subject (“the
Earthman”) from its totalized and discrete earth to a new
alien field of gravity where the subject is reconstituted
outside of its own center once and for all. (ibid.) The subject’s previous grounded horizon where the social sphere,
the home and the psyche were totalized into one veritable
earth, is now re-experienced and sighted from a synthetic
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
terrestrial and extra-terrestrial viewpoint.7 From here,
the earth is always a UFO, my home I can no longer remember or care for, myself is a continuously 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 universal absolute, and hence the question
of revolution - viz. universal change by and through the
open - is precisely the question of inflective relationship
of the subject qua regional with the universal continuum.
In light of a conception of trauma unbound by the universal synthesis and a Peircean thought of continuum (as
explicated in a deservingly exquisite fashion by Latin
American mathematician and philosopher Fernando
Zalamea), fields of trauma and tensions should no longer
be strictly subjected to the purported adequacy of analytical modes of inquiry. Psychoanalysis, political theory
and axiomatizing approaches possess neither the sufficient universal competency nor multi-modal synthetic
fields of inquiry for delving into the ramifications of
the Copernican Revolution and examining the nature of
traumas (whether of individuals or collectives). In this
respect, the so-called fertile syntheses and reunions of
analytical-continental philosophies which have been proposed by some as the veritable locus of realist thought
should be justly unmasked as a contemporary cubbyhole
for the exhausted survivors of both philosophical camps:
Either those who are myopic enough not to see the scope
of universal syntheses that passes through their regional fields of knowledge, or those who are conservative
enough to strategically safeguard the traditions of their
camps by being open only to certain facets of the opposite
camp so as to postpone their inevitable demise. To this
extent, a true science of openness built upon the legacy
of the Copernican Revolution and traumatic (that is constituted in ineradicable tensions between the regional and
the open) syntheses toward the universal absolute must
be conceived by an unrestricted synthetic vision. Realist
thought - the offspring of a science of openness and an
ethics of humiliation - is a modally unbound synthetic
thought. It is simultaneously an absolutely and transmodern thought. It is “absolutely modern” by the virtue
of “overcoming the Ptolemaic and narcissistic counterrevolution” and shedding its transcendental limitations
in its katabasis into the absolute. (Catren 2011, 338) It
is “transmodern” insofar as it is “essentially topological,
open to all sorts of continuous transformations (pragmatic maxim, triadic semiotic, classifications of sciences,
synechism, etc.), and … is particularly able to represent
a bimodal net (Petitot) of both differentials and invariants, providing a full understanding of the TRANSprefix.”
(Zalamea 2009, 118)
If both the emergence of capitalism and the inception
of Western (Greek) philosophy are - as Gilles Deleuze
and FélixGautarri acknowledge - outcomes of terrestrial
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
contingencies, then realist synthetic thought is also prone
to erupt from its own contingently positioned geographic
locations on this planet. Whilst the universal excises its
own regional fields and positions them according to its
own universal freedom, the regional fields also determine
- based on their constitutive universal contingency - their
sub-regional horizons and this continues ad infinitum.
The regional synthesis is consequently everywhere but it
is only highly mobilized wherever the transition between
regional fields and their tensions with the outside are
more convoluted, modally charged, topologically ambiguous and synthetically widened by condensed entangled
clusters of traumata (from individual to collective, from
personal to social traumas). Accordingly, if we choose
to roughly locate those geographical regions which are
more hospitable to the germination of true synthetic philosophies of trans-and-absolutely modern man because
they already - and of course, contingently - satisfy the
conditions for the emergence of such thoughts, we have
to make a new navigational map. On this map we do
not have points or discretely territorialized locations but
obscure and fuzzy regional gradients, contingently distributed tectonic subduction zones for the focalization
(rather than emergence) of the trans-and-absolutely-modernist thought, areas which are inherently susceptible to
give rise to carriers of synthetic thought, revolutionary
subjects of their regional fields of trauma - patient zeros
capable of blending in with the unsuspected terrestrial
population and embark upon pandemic syntheses. Patient
zeros of synthetic thought are epidemic phantoms, they
are untraceable links between regional outbreaks, highly
mobilized and contagious reservoirs of synthetic tensions
capable of linking isolated regional horizons to the universal continuum in the most improvised fashions and
esoteric topological configurations.
41
Identities
Reza Negarestani
42
On the geocosmic navigational map of synthetic thought,
the closer you get to the supposed centers of the world,
the weaker synthetic tensions become and the more difficult it is for the revolutionary subject to emerge and come
into focus. When you reach certain self-proclaimed discrete points like London, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Dubai,
and other so-called centers or capitals of the world, the
synthetic tensions almost verge on zero, the emergence
of the revolutionary subject becomes a distant dream and
narcissistic regional phantasms are feigned as universally modern synthetic thoughts.8 The liberalist illusion
of having real alternatives, capitalism’s accelerative yet
modally restricted synthesis, the bifurcated and hence
narrowly conceived tensions between the Left and the
Right in these regions circumscribe true universalist syntheses. The universal is merely reinstated at the level of
population diversity or in rare cases, at a culinary level
- the miracle of the so-called fusion cuisine is all that can
be afforded. Diversity becomes only an excuse to keep
other forms of universal syntheses bound or precluded
as unnecessary or potential threats. In such regions the
universal or realist synthetic thought is but a mirage, a
Fata Morgana to lure the clueless into the heart of illusion. On the other hand, on the same navigational map,
there are regions which are rife for outbreaks of synthetic
thought, broadening the scope ofgeophilosophical realism and developing universalist subjects. Although such
nebulous regional gradients cannot be geographically exhausted, that should not prevent us from applying vague
geographical names to these generic regions:
Latin America - “[w]here ubiquitous diagonal passages
have molded the Continent” and “‘transculturación’...
opens the way to transit gluingswhich escape dualisms
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
between foreign culture (‘aculturación’) or forced culture
(‘inculturación’).” (Zalamea 2009, 122)
Middle East - where excessive syncretism create dynamic and incessant antagonisms which explode into coiling
cyclonic transitives of distorted universal proportions,
and where everyday life is mobilized across integrals and
differentials of socio-political decay: The ever-shrinking
but integrally persistent residues of a despotic past (the
ruined) and germinal vectors of decomposition which
open differential continuities or alternative paths to
fresh air where “creativity can [finally] expand without
brakes.” (Zalamea 2011, 171)
Maghrib - where the everyday trauma of human survival
forces the subject to improvise life and tactics on a daily basis despite diminishing resources and tightening pressures.
Eastern Europe - where balkanization is no longer deemed
as an identitarian or national stigma (the crippling wound
of the victim) but as an expression of an entirely new
multi-frontal tactical formation against alien forces and
assimilation - fragmented shards whose lethality against
assimilation matches their diffusive versatility or what
Ferenczi identifies as the advantage of “creating a more extended surface towards the external world” and a complex
form of asynchronic distribution of effects and adaptive interactions between fragments. (Ferenczi 1994, 230)
The universalist subject conceived and mobilized by such
regions cannot be envisioned or realized in the confines
Identities
The synthetic horizon of the trans-and-absolutely man
generates various types of cobordism, nestedness, tangled
neighbourhoods, topological convolutions and porosities between the brain, the streets, the national territory
and the earth through which the revolution spreads from
one region to another. The differentials of the universal
synthesis - the revolution - cover and build upon integral
conditions of regional horizons while smoothly interpolating them and asymptotically approaching the open
i.e. the unbound universal continuum. Since it is driven
by syntheses of the open,the revolutionary subject is not
particularly prejudiced where the revolution takes place,
in the brain, in the streets or in space. This is because
endogenic tensions and syntheses render any disposition
toward a discrete or an axiomatic site of revolution problematic and precarious. What the revolutionary subject is
concerned with is how the revolution can be mobilized
from one regional gradient to another, from one interiorized horizon to another enclosure, from isolated fields of
trauma to the open. Far from credulously asserting that
scientific,social, cultural and cerebral revolutions are
identical or one essentially leads to another, the revolutionary task of the trans-and-absolutely modern man is
to find alternative transits and asymptotes, design intimate neighbourhoods and overlappings between various
regional loci and expressions of the revolution.
The investigation of therevolutionary subject - his traumas, his earth, terrain, everyday tasks and revolutionary
duties i.e. searching for alternatives (freedom) and ultimately, exporting the revolution or broadening the scope
of synthesis- is but the continuation of the Copernican
pursuit of the open by treading along the great chain of
humiliations: The orbital subversion of the geocentric
earth, the Darwinian erosion of Aristotelian essentialism,
the Freudian deprivatization of man’s inner sanctuaries, and the expropriation of discrete worlds or fields of
knowledge on behalf of an open synthetic continuum under the auspices of neuroscience, synthetic mathematics
and unified astrobiology. Consequently, the inquiry into
43
of geopolitical domains of revolution - let alone within
the well-wornsaga of world politics or the seemingly
street-friendly revolutionary politics of Britain which has
grazed on both the comforts and depressions of not having
a revolution. The modern man of these vague synthetic
regions neither basks in the postulated privilege of such
comforts nor is he distracted by the guilt associated with
the lack of revolution and comforts associated to it. Not
because he has gone through revolutions retrogressive or
progressive, but because he is no longer able to discretely
extract and isolate the everyday feats of survival from the
revolutions in the nervous system, from the revolutions
in the home, the streets, the continent, the earth and the
unbound universal continuum. Through their eccentric
historical topologies, their undulations between integral
and differential formations and socio-political traumatic
syntheses they harbor, these regions not only increasingly generalize the supposed veritable locus of revolution
but also blur their geographical location. Latin America,
Middle East, Eastern Europe and Maghrib are as much
geographic regions as they are generic synthetic models
of thinking, improvisation of everyday life, survivaland
multi-modal engagement with the world or being-in-theuniverse. The generic site of the revolution can only be
traversed by a general yet regionally appropriated model
of synthesis and a generic yet focused geography for the
mobilization of the revolutionary or the subject of the open.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
regional excisions of the absolute continuum (openness)
and correspondingly, nested traumatic cuts or regions
(fields for the alternative pursuit of the open) comes
into focus in the generic figure of the post-Copernican
revolutionary subject who widens his region across the
universal continuum through mobilizing endogenic tensions and syntheses immanent to his region. And in doing
so, he embarks upon a revolution that is constituted of
the line of universal synthesis - the modally free and nonaxiomatic force of openness. For this reason, in the next
section, we shall have the occasion to examine regional
horizons of the revolutionary subject more intimately and
inquire how such horizons are traversed or at times, overturned by the universal line of synthesis.
Unanchoring the revolutionary import 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
44
Only through dissecting the dialectical syntheses of
the traumatic subject with the open, can we identify
the revolutionary subject, i.e., the subject that brings a
universal and irreversible change by and through the universal continuum within its localized and temporalized
horizon. Through its dialectical synthesis, the revolutionary subject embarks upon the traumatic binding of
the geocosmic continuum so that the axiomatic verity of
its horizon is uprooted by the ceaseless self-renegotiating verity of the universal absolute.9 The revolutionary
subject breaks away from the isolationist regime of trauma and plunges into the ever deepening and widening
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
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 synthetic 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 universal continuum’s self-excision so
that the purported centrality of the subject to the universal continuum becomes the universal’s regional - that is,
contingent and traumatically concentrated - focalization.
In other words, the subject is but the traumatic focalization of the universal continuum. Its regional horizon
is no longer a somatically integrated earth, its interiority
is no longer axiomatically veritable, because it is now a
gravitationally bound cluster of traumata suspended on
the geocosmic continuum of the universal absolute. If
modern man is defined by traumas which take him in and
out of focus, then in order to reclaim him from current
planetary regimes of myopia (religious fundamentalism,
totalitarianism, rampant capitalism, ...) and finally from
his own arrogance, his traumas must be mobilized as
revolutionary dialectical syntheses toward the open. The
mobilization of modern man prepares him in his long
overdue run in the revolutionary course of the universal
Identities
The concomitant decentralization of the subject’s position in regard to the unbound universal continuum (the
open) 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
traverse it, bringing it in and out of focus. In its fuzzy
collective and individual field, the citizen of the modern
territorial system is an all-encompassing traumatized horizon. But the magnitude of its traumatization does not
particularly reveal the significance of its membership
role in the set of the state, or more accurately, the territorial system to which the subject belongs. Although the
territorial system is a set by virtue of its citizens and its
territorial fields, the axiomatized subject qua citizen quite
literally does not count except within the scope of its
membership. It is only the function of the citizen - thatis
to say, the axiomatizing function of citizen’s membership
- thatis safeguarded by the system. The territorial system
is only interested in resting its purportedly axiomatic and
veritable interiority upon the axiomatic and veritable interiority of its citizens, namely, membership in the system
as the given function of human subjects. Yet precisely
because of this axiomatization, the system cannot fathom
the bottomless relation of the subject with the open or
the universal continuum. One can say that citizen is not
only the traumatized subject of the territorial system; it is
also the focal point for the convergence of innumerable
traumas which hijack its axiomatic sphere into the open:
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 modern territorializing system. 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 highly
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 territorialisation
of the human population; but this is not the end of the
45
absolute where reactionary enemies abound and he himself is at the centre of fear and hostility.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
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 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 post-Copernican 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
traumatized figure of the citizen or the modern manappears as the here-and-now field of universal synthesis.
Brought into focus by innumerable traumas, the modern
manis an abyss no political agency is prepared to stare
directly into. The modern man is a designated zone of
universal synthesis or a non-trivial relation to the open.
46
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 in chorus
with political Leviathans who gorge and fatten on the
fears of the ephemeral man, this is simply to turn the
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
perishability of man into the traumatic asymptote of
the universal absolute, its interiority into the homotopy
equivalent of radical exteriority. In deepening and widening its traumas, the modern man unbinds the universal
will of the open within its regional and territorial field.
In doing so, the modern man transcendentally extirpates
the axiomatic function of its so-called veritable interiority upon which the territorializing system grounds itself.
By supplanting its territorial, organic, terrestrial and human verities with the ceaseless self-renegotiating verity of
the universal absolute (the unbound and absolute continuum), themodern man turns its axiomatic horizon into an
anti-axiomatic surprise. If we accept the non-controversial
and rudimentary formula “anti-axiomatic surprise (i.e. the
surprise turn from axiomatic to non-axiomatic) = terror”
then capitalization on the modern man as an axiomatic resource is a matter of binding terror in its Ferenczian sense.
Herethe Ferenczian concept of terrorsimply addresses a
vertiginous effect caused by the loss of the founding axiom and fraying into the open. This anti-axiomatic terror 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.” (Ferenczi 1994, 222-223) In the
same vein, the deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis of the modern man - 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 harbours a certain anti-axiomatic surprise or a
vertiginous effect. This, as argued, is an expression of the
non-local turn from the axiomatic (indexed by the territorializing system) to the non-axiomatic (inherent to the
universal synthesis of the open).
Identities
At the height of its business acumen, capitalism is
also a system for the traumatic binding of the outside,
a mode of openness, a search for fresh air. 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 openness of the universal continuum
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 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
47
By undertaking modally unbound traumatic syntheses
toward the universal absolute, the modern man comes
into a twisted immanence with the abyssal open. First,
the modern man binds the universal synthesis by unravelling itself along and through the traumas that traverse and
conceive its regional focalization. Through the mediating
function and the nested logic of traumas, the modern man
finds a materialist asymptote with the unbound universal
continuum which is free from the necessity of embodiment and materialization. It is a materialist asymptote
insofar as it traumatically passes through the organic
and terrestrial horizons of man as it tends toward the
universal continuum where even matter is traumatically
conceived and enjoys no axiomatic priority or interiorized privilege. In short, the materialist asymptote of the
universal continuum is drawn by nested traumas which
excise the modern man from the human-organism and the
earth-territory. As the modern man universally deepens
its geophilosophical synthesis, it also begins to realize
itself as a materialist asymptote of the boundless continuum qua the open. Yet this materialist asymptote of the
open indexes that terrible vertiginous effect caused by a
surprise turn from the axiomatic to non-axiomatic. As an
asymptote of the open, the modern man is pregnant with
this non-local twist from the foundation to the abyss, the
axiom to universal contingency; it carries an implicit surprise element within itself that is detrimental to systems
in general and capitalism in particular.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
48
Reza Negarestani
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 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 an 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 radically disturb 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 indexed
by the terrestrial resources of capitalism - earth, humans,
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
intelligence, technological sphere and so on - the blow will
be less a humiliation and more a terrible vertiginous effect
leading to “maximal pulverization.” (Ferenczi 1994, 223)
Ultimately, the reason for capitalism’s traumatic binding
of the exorbitant outside is to block alternative modes of
traumatic synthesis or inflection upon the open universal
continuum. 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 concatenated nightmares.
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 or connected to another field. This is because
the interconnection and deepening of regional fields of
traumas activates the universal line of synthesis which
instigates the revolution - i.e. change by and according to
the open - from “The inside”. If there is a sustained form
of suppression that capitalism exercises, it is the isolation of traumas and topologies of tensions. It is the active
vigilance in isolating fields of trauma opened by science,
in separating the trauma of life, the trauma of homo nervus and the trauma of the territorializing system from
oneanother. 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 universal deepening of
the geophilosophical synthesis along free or alternative
modes of binding. This is why the revolutionary subject
of the open who deepens its regional horizon through
Identities
The revolutionary unachoring of modern man not only
enables the subject to drift away through the multiverse
of traumata toward the open, it is also an indispensable
part of exporting the revolution, of breaking and entering
into isolated fields of trauma and broadening the scope
of the relation to the open. 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. In a conclusive remark
that signals a new phase in the life of anti-Copernican
celebration of discrete worlds and the reactionary fear of
the open, she writes:
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 counter-model 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. (Malabou 2008, 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 an unbound universal continuum 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 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-Copernican reactionary is that theblight of terrorism
in the streets and planetary exploitations of capitalism
both 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.” (Malabou 2007) Or
perhaps it is the other way around: the subject believes
49
linking and mobilizing nested fields of traumas possesses
an irrepressible anti-axiomatic import for capitalism that
is reminiscent of Freud’s account of “shock of the fall.”
(Freud 1914, 192) The revolutionary dialectic with the
universal 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 theearth of capitalism
into a multiverse of traumatic vertigos generated by this
sprawling shift from axiomatic grounds toward freedom
of the unbound universal continuum. Since modern man
is interiorized by capitalism as an axiomatic resourcebut
itstruth is determined by anti-axiomatic traumata which
form it, an entirely new interpretation of man - its capacities, roles and potencies - mustbe thought and developed.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
50
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
unbound universal continuum. Only the Ptolemaic advocate of discrete and centralized worlds is deluded with
separating these horizons and their influences from one
another. Rational confrontationwith the problem ofviolence - whether disguised as excesses of capitalism or
manifested as atrocities of terrorism - calls for stepping
out into the open and effectivelybursting the speculative
bubble-world of the pro-Ptolemaic dreamer once and for
all. Only in the open,myopic interests are expropriated,
grounds for justificationare shattered and fundamentalist axioms are evaporated. The protean continuity of the
universal continuum is able to magnify subtle webs of
causation and complicity behind planetary instances of
violence and bring into focus traces of hidden histories
of violence from the cerebrum to the streets and beyond.
If violent traces ofcapitalism and fundamentalism are transplanted in our daily spheres with such ease that we can no
longer see them as threats to the plasticity of our brains, so
do the other traumas from which capitalism, territorializing
systems and religion actively protect themselves. Within
the traumatic horizon of modern man, fundamentalism and
capitalism are exposed to contaminating neighbourhoods
where they can no longer stave off alternative modes of
openness or protect their regional horizons from the free
expression of the universal, or keep their isolated fields
of trauma (their colonies of capitalization) away from the
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
universal line of synthesis that breaks and enters from
one field of trauma to another by cutting through them,
synthesizing them, nesting them within one another. As
opposed to capitalism and other grounding systems which
preserve their verity by isolating fields of trauma in order
to shieldtheir horizons 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 postCopernican revolutionary subject with regard to exporting
the revolution is not to shun traumas, 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 modern 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 open universal
continuum. Modern man is a surgeon who does not amputate himself from the worlds of capitalism and religion to
isolate the trauma of his individuation from other traumas
and establish a new discrete world for himself. Instead, he
transplants himself and these worlds inside one another in
order to reconnect his actual regional horizon (cohabited
with capitalism and fundamentalism) once again to the
freedom of the universal continuum - the open. 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 politico-philosophical 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.
Identities
The unbinding of the universal continuum understood
as the principal drive of the Copernican opening of the
world is tantamount to the affirmation of a modally
unbound synthesis or relationship to the open and consequently, a revolution in breaking from the autocratic
interpretation of the world in terms of discrete regions. It
is an emphatic end to millenniums of acute myopia and
repression associated with isolating or treating regions
of the world as discrete points and the inability to grasp
the universal synthesis as the positive force of openness
that is primarily driven by the open rather than local necessities, interiorized capacities or regional imperatives.
The basic attribute of the universal synthesis is modal
and relational freedom insofar as the first expression
of universal openness - viz. the active renegotiation of
frontiers of the universal continuum - takes shape in and
between regional spheres. First and foremost, the openness or boundlessness of the continuum is realized as (a)
the relational openness between regions of the continuum
and (b) a thoroughgoing expropriation of any discrete existence or necessary bound on behalf of a public abyss.
Modal and relational freedom guarantees the synthetic
expression of the open by conceiving regional openness
(openness to other regions and to the outside) in terms of
universal synthesis - that is, in terms of modes by which
the universal continuum transplants its global properties within regional horizons and drives them toward
the open along paths or relations which do not strictly
conform to capacities and economical requirements of
regional openness. Therefore, modal and relational freedom cannot be solely thought in terms of boundlessness
as such, because it denotes the freedom of a synthesis
whose simultaneous expressions are the freedom of alternatives and the freedom of universal expression in the
regional horizon. Whilst according to the former conception of freedom, there is always another alternative
mode of openness by which the regional horizon can be
opened to its outside, the latter conception of freedom
denotes that the universal is able to transplant its global
properties in the regional horizon irrespective of temporal regional necessities and in unrestricted functional and
topological ways.
Modal and relational freedom is closely associated with
the realm of endogenic tensions and syntheses as the site of
the revolutionary subject, the trans-and-absolutely modern
man. The revolutionary subject thinks openness in terms
of alternative modes by which his region - his earth - can
be opened to other regions, deepened and widened into
and across the universal continuum. The trans-and-absolutely modern man is no longer the master or the victim of
his traumas; he is a universal vector of synthesis between
regional traumas - i.e. traumas associated with his brain,
his house, the system, the earth and the universe that is free
from his temporal necessity. Moreover, the revolutionary
subject does not abide by regional or earthly myopias,
since he is not anchored by a self-centred discrete earth
or a monad-point in the universe. On the contrary, he is
driven by an unbound universe and a revolutionary earth
whose hierarchies and histories are fields for the transplantation of global properties of the universal continuum
into the regional: The plasticity of the brain or the cerebral
region as the homomorphic equivalent of the global plasticity of the continuum; the organism as a region where the
inassimilable residues of global phases of the (external)
world are nested (“It is possible that we harbour in our
51
Closing remarks, or:
The Inquisition is far from over
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
52
organism inorganic, vegetative, herbivorous and carnivorous tendencies like chemical valences” (Ferenczi 1994,
229)); the modern city - the urban continuum - where convoluted neighbourhoods of different multitudes (human
or non-human) and manifolds result in numerous types of
cobordism, regional overlaps, exchanges, complicities and
collusions which highlight global-local passages of the universe. Every region of the unanchored earth is an asymptote
of the absolute continuum and hence, a locale for revolution and embracing the universal synthesis of the open.
Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism
The inception of the trans-and-absolutely modern man
takes place on this earth, in this brain and in this city
where the modal and relational freedom of the absolute
continuum can be easily expressed synthetically as alternative modes of openness. Whilst such alternative
modes of openness are brought about by the line of the
universal synthesis which breaks and enters on its own,
it is the effective regional binding of such alternatives
(beyond the confines of regional myopias and affordances) that incites revolution in the regional horizon. This
is a revolution that “pendulates between integrals of the
region and differentials of the open,” between synthesis
and analysis, between the contemporary politics of the
Left-and-Right and synthetic alternatives, between internalized and externalized indexes of cosmic exteriority,
subjective openness toward the universal synthesis and
being opened by the universal synthesis, freedom and
compulsion (i.e. a pull-back toward an absolute continuum free of its particulars and multitudes).10
horizons) where alternative opportunities for synthesis
are able to circumvent the economical double-bind of
“capacity/exorbitant external world,” it entails a mode
of thinking capable of germinating its viewpoints along
lines of complicity between antagonistic or incommensurable fronts (drawn on contamination), through the
medium of nested closures and continuous transformations (open to topological thinking) and through twists
(non-trivial dialectics between the local and the global).
Since the abyssal, unbound and continuous relation of the
universe with itself - i.e. the open universal continuum
- containsthe germ of all asymptotic behaviours, neighbourhoods, overlaps and universal passages between
regional fields, the responsibility of the revolutionary
subject is to adopt and grow these germs as alternative
modes of openness. Asymptotic thinking (asymptotic approach to extinction, contingency, radical exteriority and
the absolute) and search for non-trivial relationswhereby
the universal line of synthesis between different fields of
knowledge or regions of the world can be drawn typify
such alternatives. It is through such asymptotes, transplantations and regional fibrations of the open brought
by the universal continuum that the revolutionary subject
is able to - through deepening and widening its traumas
- attain topological and categorical equivalence with the
universal absolute. Through such alternatives, likewise,
the regional horizon of the revolutionary earth - as a relatively open set excised from the universal continuum
- finds its equivalence with the open through asymptotic
deepening of its geophilosophical synthesis and stretching its nested traumas.
Insofar as the revolution for and by the open begins
from the inside(viz. regional enclosures and interiorized
Just as a politics devoid of the logic of real alternatives
- concerned withboth the question ofmethodological or
Identities
Notes:
1. In order of the quotes: Freud 1961, 31, n.2; Freud 1977, 353; and
Ferenczi 1994, 93.
2�������������������������������������������������������������������
. On a systematic account of the open continuum as generic/supermultitude, reflexive/inextensible and modal/plastic, see Zalamea
2003, 115-162.
3. 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 regional condensation.
4. In order to understand excisional cut of trauma, it would be helpful to make an analogy with the excision theorem in algebraic
topology. According to the excision theorem, the subspace V can
be excised or cut from the subspace U of the topological space S
without affecting the relative homology: The closure of V lies in
the interior of U, and U lies in S. The relative groups h(S/U) and
h(S-V/U-V) are isomorphic. The excision of the set V does not
affect the relative homology.
5. The ontogenic continuity of the organism manifests in the way the
information content of the system is organized “in such a manner
that the organism exhibits spatiotemporal continuity during ontogeny and that each stage maintains the viability of the organism.”
The continuity of the organism in terms of the unity and organization of its information is manifested by “such phenomena as cell
adhesion and physiological integration”. See Brooks and Wiley
1986, 48.
6. 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’straumatics inside-out so as to transform it
into a Copernican recalibration of the earth in space.
7. 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.
8. The geophilosophical disillusionment of the “world centers” in the
name of the trans-and-absolutely modern man disabuses as much
the purported sponsors of culture and thought who are deluded
with the geopolitical glory of world capitals as it thwarts the alltoo-familiar scheme of those who search their own mastery and
independence in self-seclusion, the morality of self-victimhood
and the opportunistic discourse of the Other.
9. The self-renegotiation of the universal absolute does not slide into
anything other than or outside of its absolute field. Yet in so far
as it determinedly overcomes itself through ceaseless renegotiation of itself, it becomes territopic (rather than terrible) for any
regional determination imposed upon it.
10���������������������������������������������������������������
. On the synthetic thought of the universal continuum as a pendulum weaving between integrals and differentials, see Zalamea
2009.
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Catren, Gabriel. 2011. Outland empire: Prolegomena to speculative absolutism, trans. Taylor Adkins. In The speculative turn.
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___. 1995. The clinical diary of Sandor Ferenczi, trans. Michael
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53
trans-modalfreedomand the question of actively seeking
alternatives to its very own existence - is but a counterrevolutionary mantrap, a realist philosophy without a
science of openness and an ethics of humiliationcan
hardly be anything more than a testament to the overgrown lineage of planetary myopias.
Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8 / No. 2 / Summer 2011
Reza Negarestani
54
Freud, Sigmund. 1914. The psychopathology of everyday life, trans.
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____.1961. Beyond the pleasure principle, trans. James Strachey.
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