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Fragments for a radically negative anthropology

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 11.02.2015

 

What follows are various fragments that emerged from the efforts to explore what a radically negative anthropology might be.  They were written a number of years ago now and are revived to assist in a rethinking of what the project of a radically negative anthropology might entail, that is if it is not to be abandoned. Pride and egoism had kept them from previously being made public as they are written with the naivety and arrogance that I’m sure I will always find in the writings of my younger selves. Further, I had previously sought a level of coherence that was unrealistic, and in fact undesirable. I have now made additions, corrections and further considerations in the footnotes rather than updating the original text as I considered it useful to be able to identify what has changed since they were written and what has not. A very few have been removed entirely as they did little to assist rethinking the project or simply regurgitated tired old motifs. As such there are times when the roman numerals for each section skip forward in the series. I have left the original numbers in order that the removals and absences remain identifiable and are not effaced. Finally, I would ask the reader to approach them with a critical compassion in as much as we may seek out what is useful within these pages, rather than focusing upon their obvious insufficiency and incoherence. To use Deleuze’s words, “Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything.”(1) Let us try and locate points of departure for creative lines of flight rather than obstructive blockages.  Let us enter the spaces of and… and… and…, whilst overcoming the not… not… not… Let us not succumb to the pits of nihilistic despair, but read these fragments as active and affirmative free spirits.

A Misosophical Confession

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 10.09.2014
 
“Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy:
everything begins with misosophy.”(1)

“As far as ‘thought’ is concerned, works are falsifications, since they eliminate the provisional and the non-repeatable, the instantaneous and the mingling of purity and impurity, disorder and order.”(2)

“I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty”(3)

 

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.

Tendencies of Life and Death

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 28.04.2014
 
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.
 

The Haunting of Man: on the possibility of a panecastic anthropos

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 11.02.2014
The question of the anthropos lingers on, it remains as the ghostly apparition of that which was never thought, it continues, resting beneath a thin shadowy surface concealing its phantasmagorical form, it hovers beyond the vision of those who would fain it realised. The questions and answers linger on, nestled deep in hauntologies of Man.
Proud exclamations continue to echo in our ears, sending forth disembodied promises of objects lost amidst the ever-rising heights of nebulous abstraction.
 
“Here is the human.
Here is the human.
Here is the perfect human.
We will see the perfect human functioning.
We will see the perfect human functioning.”[i]
 

A first (and failed) attempt at a manifesto for a radically negative anthropology

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 09.01.2014
Breathing has become difficult, almost impossible: as a matter of fact, one suffocates. One suffocates every day and the symptoms of suffocation are disseminated all along the paths of daily life … There are no more maps we can trust, no more destinations for us to reach.
 
-          Bifo
 
In everything I demand that there should life, the possibility of existence, and then all is well; we are not then called upon to ask whether the work is beautiful or ugly. The feeling that what has been created has life comes before either consideration and is the only criterion in matters of art.
 
- Georg Büchner
 
I
 
Everywhere we look there are crises. A banking crisis, a crisis in the Eurozone, an ecological crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a democratic crisis – crises in economics, crises in morality, crises in attitudes. Of course we know the power of the crisis narrative, we know that it is endlessly employed in order to perpetuate that which it presents as in crisis, in order to adjust itself an amount just small enough to avert collapse without any real change to form, we know that it serves as a scapegoat and a mass motor of subjectivity. But does this mean there is no crisis to be found beyond discursive webs? Does crisis simply remain a plane of discourse, some how separate from ontology? No. There are crises today, crises of subjectivity, discourse and ontology. We are in the midst of an anthropological crisis, a crisis of vitality, of the very foundations of intimate relations and of what it means to live.
 
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