Author Archives: Artxell Knaphni

This is a response to Dominic Fox, here.

[Dominic Fox]: “Now, it seems to me that for Laruelle, the Real is “like” (but see caveats below) a sort of global codomain that absolutely everything has an inclusion function into, since all “regional” domains are just subsets of this codomain. So for absolutely anything you like, it has both a “regional” identity (mapped by the identity function on its regional domain) and a One-in-one identity (mapped by the inclusion function from that domain into the Real).”

{AK}: Hasn’t this “Real” as “global codomain” always been in both formal & informal use, anyway, in practice?
The notion of “global codomain” as “Totality”; “Universe”; “Brahma”; “Being”; “Universal Set”; etc., with all their derived regionalisations, is not a novelty, & I’m not sure what Laruelle’s reinscribing of it, under the sign of “the Real”, can add to that?
The full panoply of such cartographic projections, of metaphysical contextualisation as perspective, between ‘atman’ & ‘Brahman’, for example, has been done, for millenia. It’s a necessary corollary of ‘meaning’; for ‘meaning’ is always selective; & a selection is necessarily a perspective.
Likewise, is a “principle of unilateral identity-in-the-last-instance with the Real” a uniquely necessary condition for inclusion?
I could accept it as a retention or reminder of initial region of origin, as it were, when speculative developments reach such levels of innovation as to form ‘regions’ in themselves, but I would think that the need for such reminders characterises the propensity to exclusionary dogma, the kinds of “tunnel vision” that actually do forget such constitutive delineations (regional origin > levels of innovation >>>>etc.,> new principle, or, new excuse for dogmatic ignorance).
It could be Laruelle’s way to lead those stuck in habitual metaphysical fixations to a looser, more flexible consideration, but really, is this necessary, in the 21st century, for those not so stuck?

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[Dominic Fox]: “the One is not”

{AK}: If read literally, as ‘the One IS Nothing’, it becomes the Sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism, or the ‘Neti, Neti’ of Vedantic Hinduism. Both concepts are at the borders of the determinate, they operate at the zone between the determinate & the indeterminate, neglecting neither, but not exhausted by either, whether singly, or in any combination.
If “the Real” & “the One”; both of which already, & do, function as synonymic moments of Sunyata or “Neti, Neti”; is, or are, Laruelle’s chosen & privileged signifiers for essentially the same referent & tasks as that which Sunyata or “Neti, Neti” already cover; then it seems to me, that Laruelle’s choice of emphasis runs risks of metaphysical fixation.
A Nagarjuna would say that the concept of “the Real” derives from the metaphysics of realisation & identity, i.e., the realisation of (an) identity. But identity is always supervenient, “dependently originated”, lacking the “own-being” of any ‘Absolute Substance’; in its limited & abstracted form, precisely as an ‘identity’, as an identified or selected variable or ‘thing’.
Thus, the concept of “the Real”, as derivation of such a metaphysics, is already implicitly determinate in a very particular way; & in a potentially paradoxical way; the ontological hunt for essentialised structures of the “Real”, or of “Truth”, is necessarily an ordering of metaphysical localisation, which contradicts its identification as general & global  all-inclusiveness. Through additional developments, ‘global all-inclusiveness’ is shown  as supervenient conceptualisation, too.
For these reasons, Laruelle’s choice, like that of the Speculative Realists, can be seen as a localised project of metaphysical nostalgia, one determined by histories of fixation that they as yet lack the theoretical understanding or inclination to think beyond or through, & whose local character they reject in advance, as such a localisation necessarily suggests explicit access to a terra incognita, an unknown terrain not susceptible to any effective utilisation or exploitation, not amenable to the replay of previously ‘successful’ procedures of the Enlightenment & Modernity.

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[Dominic Fox]: “the mathematical analogy breaks down, as we should probably expect it to.”

{AK}: This need not be the case for a future mathematics, no longer bound by habits of unthought ontological commitment, in a mathesis liberated from unnecessary metaphysical fixation.

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[Dominic Fox]: “We must not picture whatever structures we can imagine being stabilised, held fixedly within an underlying global order of structure that is just like them only somehow bigger.”

{AK}: Yes, I agree. It’s an implied corollary consideration, of what I was referring to here, on Terence’s “PRINCIPLES OF THE EMPTY SIGN”:

“Of course, one can ground all this with “emptiness” (or “empty sign”), but such a sunyata is at the root of every such ‘ground’. However, the “empty sign” cannot be uniquely identified as “the possible foundation of the mathematisation of the world without us”, alone, it is far more than just that, & far less.”

However, that is not to say, that ‘effects’ of such a hypothetical “global order of structure” are not produced (whatever those might be). Giordano Bruno’s: “The Universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, but whose circumference is Nowhere”, (Now Here?), is an insight that might well be relevant. Lol
It’s natural to import notions of ‘scalar magnitude’ into the metaphoric of topological distribution used in all theorisations, but they are supervenient constructions, too.

A bit of fun:

-3, -2, -1, ?0, +1, +2, +3
                @1,
                @2,
                @3, hree Domains