through europe

 

What has become of lovers of knowledge today? What is the fate of those once revered and proud seekers of truth, those honest and upstanding journeymen of essences and universality? The shadows of these lovers of knowledge and wisdom appear to flit across the mirrors in which we seek ourselves, never leaving more than a fleeting impression, a muffled articulation that no sooner has found expression than it once more disintegrates amidst the determined babble of self-assured objection. And these shadows whisper to us of their own demise, of their submission to the systematisation of knowledge as utmost morality that rests never far from the surface of the façade which emerges of the demand and insistence for a unitary reality. If there is a philosopher of the future, their voice is meek amidst the uproar of accusation and blame; their gaze powerless when confronted with the piercing eyes of certainty; their will ensnared by the blockages and channels of a continually reinforced spiral of systematisation that sets before it the task of absolute universalisation.

 

Life forever holds within itself, coiled at the very centre of its unfolding, the fearful promise of death. That death, emerging from the shadows of the living, from the darkness that forever follows the living, brings about an absolute end-of-life, brings down its sickle upon the vitality of the existent in order to return it to nonexistence. Death then, the absolute, final end-of-life, is that nothingness, that emptiness, that hollow darkness, which is forever stalking the living, anticipating that twilight upon which it may exercise its right to return ashes to ashes and dust to dust, restoring that which is living to the barren desolation of the non-living.  This is the terror that has plagued the thought of the Western episteme since at least the conception of episteme as such.

 

Such a conception of death, as that which brings an absolute end-of-life, has been persistent, and for all good sense, and indeed philosophy, it appears as though it could be no other way. How can it be possible for one to speak of death other than as an absolute end-of-life? Is it not precisely a complete and absolute lack of life that is characteristic of death? It would appear foolish to attempt to think otherwise, to think death as something other than the final, absolute and total end-of-life. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent stupidity, its total lack of good sense, its absurdity, and indeed as some might say, its impossibility, that is precisely the task to now be placed at hand, that of thinking life and death tendentially; that is to say what is here sought is an interrogation of the tendential relationship between the living and the non-living. The failure of the Western episteme to think death in a manner other than what I shall be calling the finalist conception does it great disservice (and let me be clear early on that on the one hand there is indeed a episteme, the episteme—that is the episteme of ontology, metaphysics and logos—for in no other way and at no other time has episteme been thought as such, that is as episteme and as Western; whereas, on the other hand, there is indeed a heterogeneity of epistemes that is irreducible to an episteme, a difference that is not internal but rather demonstrates unavoidably the open and connective nature of episteme itself, that allows episteme to form from that which is other than episteme and forever prevents its closure). Such a conception, that of absolute death, paralyses thought under the stifling force of fear and sorrow, and leaves us unable to even approach questions regarding the living. Our minds, moulded as they are by the episteme of finalist death, reel in horror at anything that is not static, clear and oppositional, anything that approaches the fluidity of life and indeed its relationship with the non-living.

 

I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother, although much younger than me.

I cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is never the effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to “explain” death.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do what he did.

He was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feed format RSS, and a writer, an activist and also a Harvard researcher. Recently he played a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop online piracy act) which had a successful outcome.

Aaron was known – by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.

In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a research fellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journal articles via JSTOR.