The Situation and State of Absolute Enslavement

The situation in Absolute Enslavement is that of a limit-situation, but in a sense every situation is a limit-situation, though this is not always transparent to those within the situation. In a transparent limit-situation something of the Absolute comes to the fore. It is my contention that the Absolute is that which partakes of the always excessive-to the-situation, or the Void.

Firstly the Void is not the classical physics notion of “Space”. Unformed matter, as Aristotle pointed out correctly, would be indistinguishable from such a concept of Void. Matter is formed space, as the fundamental particles of matter have no mass, and space has a “fabric” that can be distorted into form.

The Void, then, is punctual (there is a proof of this in the ZF system of set theory but I'll leave that alone for now). This point is, in itself, the point of Being, that is always in excess of any given situation. This is the Void, the unpresentable, the unnatural, the source of terror to any given Situation, that is hidden away by the situation's reduplication in the State.

The Site of the Situation is the proper place for some “thing”. Each situation has a “point of Being” that in a hidden way structures the Situation and makes it appropriate or proper for that particular being, yet always remains excessive to the Situation and therefore the point of that Situations finitude and destructibility.

Site and Situation come from the Latin Sitere, which also means to let, permit. “What is permitted” is what is appropriate to the situation. The State of the situation then is what is expressly permitted, while the Situation is the extent of the real possibilities inherent in it. In the M/s situation what is expressly permitted is up to the Master, and is made explicit in the slave's ongoing training. In this sense the Master is the State. In large part, then, the slave has to follow the Master's directions, however there are always things extant in the situation that are excrescent or singular to the State.

Depression, Anxiety and other Fun Stuff

Currently emmie and mitda are visiting emmie's new pdoc (psychiatrist). I am waiting at home, hoping things go well and that emmie can get a more viable treatment plan for her depression and anxiety issues. While she is bipolar other than blips mania hasn't been an issue for a long while. I am bipolar myself and having two bipolar slaves is an interesting, if somewhat difficult, task to put to oneself. While mitda was diagnosed years ago (myself hundreds of years ago) it is all very new to emmie, who was just diagnosed formally this year. We do attend a local support group on Monday's (although emmie and I were too tired to go last night, mitda did meet up with E. there – as the only normie in the quad it's great of E. to bother showing up to support the family).

Thought at its Limits

Foucault praises linguistics and psychoanalysis as examples of thought at its limits which discovers at the center of knowledge not humanity, but a sort of anti-humanity, a dead end if you will. Both linguistics and psychoanalysis find humanity suspended in a web of language, a language which mediates humanity and allows humanity to constitute an image of itself. But language is not such a stable support network; rather language's promise of solidity is something like quicksand, an infinitely regressing system which cannot comprehend its own foundation since it has no center or originary meaning to rest on. "From within language experienced and transversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their farthest point, what emerges is that man has 'come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of the origin interminably recedes." If humanity reveals itself only in and by language, humanity must accept a certain condemnation of silence to never be able to speak of its own origins and ends. Humanity is thrust into the foreground only to be distanced from its foundations, its background, a horizon which cannot speak and which, when approached, undoes thinking (as meaning is undone at the roots of language, the self at the roots of psychoanalysis), leaving only a horizon of the dead.

It is, then, in this context that Foucault speaks of humanity as a recent invention. Only with the elaboration of specific systems of thought which could inquire not into humanity's ideal or essence, but the functioning of the foreground and the silhouette of humanity against the enabling background. "We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science' exists, not whenever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis - within the dimension proper to the unconscious - of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents." The subject of humanity was constituted during a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is, an era which knowingly constructed its understanding of humanity "objectively," in between the spaces of representationality which show how humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, the human sciences address humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology, philology, and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning the functioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that basis rebuild knowledge by showing how a functional representation of humanity can come into being and be deployed (and thus, Foucault will later argue, perfect the techniques of normalization and socialized encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).

As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought and unthought, the Other of knowledge must give itself over to the Same. Where the limits of thinking reveal its own basis as its foundational limitations, a new way of thinking is constituted which, as Levi-Strauss says, "dissolves humanity." Foucault writes, "Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?" The "death of man" seems a relatively peaceful event, not where humanity explodes with enormous violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws into the background such that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault does not yet have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if such a unity of language is not philosophized, humanity will forever find itself in a dying state, undoing itself by its own logic without our awareness. Foucault seems to ask that humanity die gracefully so that we can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yet thought, and approach a new horizon of articulation.

Helplessness and the Passing Under

mitda in her current blogpiece talks about an experience we shared on Friday.  She had been rendered helpless in a play session completely, and suddenly "something" came over us.  I put something in scare quotes because it didn't have attributes or anything one could describe, it was just presencing pure and passing over, with a simultaneous (for me) passing under.  I have had this experience before but under very different circumstances.  I felt from it a huge sense of refusal, refusal of worship, refusal of description, refusal of communication.  It seems to be a rare occurrence, and one that one needs to be partially prepared for, but the preparation can never be enough, and it remains the most overwhelming, the definition of overwhelming itself.  The Abyssal.

The Abyssal

The cause of the irrupting of the Abyss is our urge to closure. Responsibility is in this sense an experience, something to be undergone, suffered, endured. And in the undergoing the something, in this case responsibility, itself comes to pass. There is no closure to experience, and this lack is itself the limit of experience. There is therefore only grasping of the experience in the as-if of the limit situation. Responsibility is responsibility only in the as-if of seeing no limits to responsibility, hence the arising of the Abyssal. But the Abyssal doesn't exist in-itself or as something apart from the experience that gives rise to it. The Abyssal's arising becomes the negative confirmation of that experience at the limit of lack of limits.

World as Abyss

What happens when World as the totality of meanings exhausts itself without finally providing the context for all our varied subtexts?  World as Abyss.

Does this mean, finally, that all subtexts are relative, and relative to something unknowable?  It seems to.  Does that relativize everything?  No.

Our responsibilities remain what they were.  Even in the situation where we don't, finally, know that we can be right.