Alien Theory - Chapter III: Deleuze and Guattari's Absolute Hyletics - Part I

- ALIEN THEORY:CHAPTER III –
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI'S ABSOLUTE HYLETICS (PART I)
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Deleuze and Guattari attempt a 'materialist transvaluation of the transcendental'. Just like Kant denounced the transcendent use of synthesis against traditional metaphysics, D&G attack psychoanalysis and their transcendent use of Oedipal logic in the operations of the unconscious, insofar as the latter is grounded in individual consciousness. The result is an anonymous concept of the unconscious, where its latent form is capable of enacting automating materialist syntheses independently of exclusively subjective-conscious operations, and outside the purchase of representational mediation. Brassier describes this project as marking the task of the transcendental as being that of articulating conditions for real ontological actuality rather than ideal epistemological possibility; the transcendental syntheses are to describe the real processes anchored in the processes in material actuality rather than ideal conditions of access to the real realm through experience. Thus the transcendental does not imply the submission of the real to the ideal, objective to subjective conditions. The principal criterion becomes how immanence articulates the suspended and equivocal position of objectivity and subjectivity, in a realist-materialist critique of representation.

Transcendental syntheses which are not representational: that is the task set forth since Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense: “The error of all efforts to determine the transcendental as consciousness is that they think of the transcendental in the image of, and in the resemblance to, that which it is supposed to ground.” (Deleuze, 1990, p.105) This is precisely set to avoid the transcendent circularity whereby the transcendental is finally modeled on the basis of some transcendent empirical content which was supposed to be in turn grounded by the transcendental. The four kernels of the representational conscious-centered versions of the transcendental are:

1) Identity in the concept

2) Opposition in the predicate

3) Analogy in judgment

4) Resemblance in intuition

But the problem is that these conditions form a grid which channels the philosophical thinking of difference impossible outside of conceptual identity, external to opposition, independent of analogy in judgment, and unrecognizable by intuition. These four collars are paradigmatically modeled after the apperception of the cogito or conscious intuiting. However, the form of the Self is not a pre-given ground for speculation, but something that needs to be grounded itself. To deposit philosophical faith onto subjective consciousness is just a (correlationist) variant of the metaphysical appeal to God as transcendent principle; one which is furthermore made explicitly circular by furnishing the constituting act of subjectivity modeled after the ‘empirical’ realm it seeks to ground. Thus for example we can remember Heidegger’s famous analysis of the Zuhandenheit and the pre-representational sphere of being's disclosure within Dasein’s comportments (as opposed to apophantic Vorhandenheit) ultimately relying on ocular metaphoric appeals to the tacit non-reflexive sensitivity of functional categories (the blacksmith's functional integration to his environment...)

Suspending the first person phenomenological locus and its constriction of the transcendental to subjective individuation is thus Deleuze’s first critical task. To describe a non-subjective set of conditions for material and ideal individuation, which do not presuppose the circularity implicit in the doublet of the empirico-transcendental representational cogito at its centre: “the vicious circle which makes the condition refer to the conditioned as it reproduces its image.” (Deleuze, 1990, p.105) In this it resists even Henry’s purported materialization, by denouncing the form of the Self as paradigm of individuation. There must be incommensurability between a) the individuated realm of intentional consciousness or sub-representational enstasis and b) the pre-individual domain of subjectless singularities. Deleuze wants to go beyond a merely negative characterization of transcendental immanence as sub-representational, un-conscious and non-intentional; while moving towards defining an anorganic, impersonal realm of intensive virtual multiplicities:

“If it remains strictly incommensurable with the categories of representation it is because, pace Kant, it teems with a-categorial determinations and anomalous differentiations; if it remains rigorously irreducible to the dimensions of consciousness it is because, pace Freud, it is cosmic, anonymous, and anorganic; finally, if it remains utterly heteromorphic vis a vis the form of the Self it is because, pace Henry, it is comprised of impersonal individuations and pre-personal singularities. This pre-individual, impersonal transcendental field sought for by Deleuze, constitutes the empirically inexhaustible realm of virtual singularities, ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, nomadically distributed via the limitlessly productive, perpetually dynamic disequilibrium of an auto-differentiating, ontological ‘heterogenesis” (AT: Pg. 57)

Without the self to safeguard consciousness, singularities occur over an immanent deterritorialized unconscious surface or field, held together in dynamic auto-evoling processing which Deleuze calls 'nomadic distributions'. The form of the Self is produced in the actualization of these singularities, but these singular actualizations are different from the actualized intensities of personal consciousness. We only attain the transcendental’s dignity when we team up the world and this realm of nomadic impersonal singularities. This project consists of enacting, in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the threefold destitution of the Oedipal edifice: subjectification, signification and interpretation. Also, we obtain the self-assembling virtual singularities or multiplicities nomadically distributed in the plane of immanence in which they are rendered consistent and in which the actual empirical realm is produced as actual. This is the ‘machinic construction of the realm via connective/conjunctive/disjunctive syntheses of desiring production’ (AT: Pg. 58). Subjective individuation is to be shown as derivative with respect to the ontogenesis of differentiated singularities and impersonal multiplicities; the philosophical method becomes subject of the real and a function of the machinic construction and inscription on the unconscious plane of immanence: the real singularizes itself impersonally as an event of thought. This means immanence is realized as the realm becomes subject, enacts thought itself, rather than thought representing it, which Laruelle labels the 'technico-ontological / hyletic continuum'. This complicity of substance-subject is nevertheless anti-Hegelian since it does not submit to the figure of subjectivity or Geist as self-relating negativity in which externalization of nature is reintegrated as a moment in the history of the subject’s mediation:

“The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalisation in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of its free contingent happening, intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space. This last becoming of Spirit, Nature, is its living immediate Becoming; Nature, the externalised Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalisation of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject.”(Hegel, 1977, p.492).

On the other hand, Deleuze’s hyletics supports a becoming-substance of the philosophical subject and method, one in which the equivocal representational doublets (subject/object, thinking/being, noesis/noema) are subverted so that the philosophical Concept becomes a material category which maps the un-representable virtual real in a univocally determined field of immanence. This is relative to an intensively rather than extensively defined concept of materiality, in the active auto-production of the real rather than passive representation. From here we can advance towards an understanding of what Laruelle means by accusing Deleuze of ‘absolute hyletic idealism’. As auto-productive synthesis, intensive materiality is defined through ‘inclusive disjunction’ of difference in kind and degree, intensity and extensity, virtual and actual. And in this space outside analogical and categorical representational mediation, on the basis of negation and exclusion, logos/matter coincide in the infinite hyletic continuum or chaotic immanence. But this being the case, the materialism D&G envisage requires the reduction of the phenomenological/representational, an idealizing transcendental reduction, synthesis becoming only relative to itself or absolute, one which is univocally ontologically guaranteed through the plane of immanence and in which the Concept operates.

- The Plane of Immanence and Philosophical Decision -

The plane of immanence is at once what remains after the reduction of the empirico-transcendental doublet and the already-presupposed in place for the Concept to take place; it is both the result of a philosophical operation and the always already which grounds or institutes it. And this institution, broken off the shackles off representational mediation and the form of the World as our sense-giving background, will resemble a cognitive experimentation designed to subvert the stillness of epistemic guarantors with nomadic distributive dynamisms and epistemological enquiry with ontological auto-effectivity. But why would such an exercise count as idealizing? This concerns the self-positing aspect of the philosophical Concept which both pre-supposes the plane of immanence (relative) and which is constitutes through its self-positing, through its positing as limit through philosophical Conceptualization, in a strikingly similar way in which Hegelian logic constructs the future-anterior:

“The plane has to be philosophically constructed; yet it is also that which constructs itself through philosophy; it is at once ‘always already there’ or pre-supposed; and something that has to be laid out or constructed; which is to say, posed. In other words, the plane is pre-supposed only insofar as it ‘will have been’ posed; but posed only insofar has it ‘will have been’ pre-supposed.” (Pg. 63)

Just like the philosophical Concept, the plane of immanence must also be self-positing and self-instituting which renders indiscernible the pre-philosophical immanence and the crystallization through the concept which constitutes it. Since immanence is self-presupposing or causa sui in its indiscernibility from the Concept, the inclusive disjunction of positing and pre-positing, thinkable and unthinkable, most internal corner of thought and its unreachable external presupposition: “Within an immanent realm of this sort, the phenomenological and the materio-logical remain exactly coextensive.” (Laruelle, 1981, p.79). The plane of immanence thus subsists only tied to the experimental creation of the Concept as presupposition. The triadic structure of Decision thereby repeats itself here:

1) Immanence as deterritorialization, full Earthly body, pure unthinkable externality, inclusive disjunction of non/internal inside and non-external outside (non-mediation).

2) The philosophical Concept as indiscerning of presupposition (plane, non-relation) and supposition (conceptual, relation).

It is the philosophical Concept wherein the transcendental is synthesized bilaterally. The plane of immanence functions as real as it is presupposed in the Concept’s position. This ensures the co-extensiveness of the philosophical phenomeno-logos and materio-logos, as the plane transects the hyletic continuum, and slices the chaotic matter of intensivity. We will now focus on the aparallelism between virtual/actual, smooth/striated

-Parallelism and Asymmetry –

Attacking Heidegger’s equivocal ontico-transcendental ascription of Dasein as being-in-the-world and fundamental ontology’s attempt at reducing the ontic to the fundamental; Deleuze strips the ontic of categorical/phenomenological mediation in unified horizon of sense. Instead, he posits unidentifiable self-dissimilar dispersions shorn of all identity neither relative to another identity nor to themselves in a purely differential realm. The Being of simulacra is this sheer differing called Disparate or Unequal-in-itself, and through which virtual multiplicities actualize themselves. This presupposes another triadic distinction in Deleuze’s thought:

1) Intensive Differentiation – Virtual problematic Ideas which are determinate.

2) Extensive Differenciation – Actual extensive magnitudes which are determinable.

3) Different/ciation – Individuation as the determination of the determinable by the determinate where virtual intensities are explicated in actual extensity and the latter is enveloped by the former; reciprocal explication/implication in the circuit of problematic virtual ideas in the intensive spatium. This is the self-sufficient reason for intensive individuation, it is a hybrid structure which produces a circular feedback loop whereby the virtual becomes explicated in the actual and the actual enveloped by the virtual, reincorporated into the ever differentiating virtual anew in an infinite ontogenetic circuit producing new multiplicities.

“Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualised, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates. The total notion is therefore that of: indi-different/ciation” (Deleuze, 1994, p.246).

As a consequence, Brassier finds in individuation a distinctive reversible asymmetry: the virtual distinguishes itself from the actual in the same process whereby the latter becomes distinguished from the former. This does away with bi-lateral reciprocity, and the symmetrical reversibility between condition and conditioned, since both realms are clearly separated but reversibly so in indifferent/ciating individuation. However, this forces Deleuze into accepting the coincidence of virtual production and actual product; since the latter explicates the former and the former envelops the latter. Thus there subsists, says Brassier, a parallelism between the two in the ontogenetic circuit which directly leads from virtual to actual and back to the virtual. However, it seems deeply unclear at this point how this institutes a parallelism, given that no operation of identity or similarity is given between the virtual Ideal intensity and the actual extensity. One can only guess Brassier finds explication/envelopment to constitute relations which somehow imply a parallel between the two registers, since the fundamental reversibility of the two registers must entail their co-belonging (they can be mutually reinscribed into the other). It thereby retains a differential disjunction as a relation in the ‘between’ between condition and conditioned, one which must be invariably subject the transcendent empirical product or given term: the actualized individual is the hybrid structure in which the difference between the actual/virtual can be mapped, and the rhizome-branching of indifferent/ciation dubbed as presupposed in the Concept.

It seems unclear, however, why Brassier constructs this presumed parallelism on the necessary prioritization of the given actualized extensity rather than the virtual Ideal intensity; as the reversible asymmetry supposes. Why is it said to rely on an empirically given term to model the ontogenetic cycle? Perhaps it is because the dynamic process of indifferent/ciation can only be made constructed as the actualized extensity becomes conceptually available as implying a presupposed intensive envelopment, which reintegrates the actual into the circuit of differentiating virtual multiplicities. That is to say, without the actualized individual as given, the intensive envelopment which completes the catalyzing process of indifferent/ciation would remain impossible to construct conceptually; it is only through the lens of the actual that the extensity can be retroactively presupposed as an explicated intensity. It is this middle ground as hybrid structure which allows the communication between the virtual/actual to insist and repeat itself ad infinitum. This cyclic parallelism or co-implication becomes clarified in the relation between smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaus:

“[W]e must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space[...]But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact that the spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix [...]” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.475)

But since D&G cannot appeal to be simply tracing the instances of de facto instances from the de jure asymmetry, the latter must already be implicated in the former a priori. To abide to the notion of a ‘tracing’ movement would be nothing but to reinstate representational transcendent ideality. As such, both sedentary striation and smooth nomadism must remain co-implicated as it is reversible. In the end this reversibility remains habilitated to a descriptive register which is transcendent to the terms themselves, the distance of the survey and overview which marks the empirico-transcendental doublet in D&G’s edifice. Additionally, Brassier accuses Deleuze’s appeal of immanence-to-itself as instantiating an unobjectifiable transcendental immanence in which the synthesis of intuition/concept, presupposition/position in the plane of immanence is embedded. This is a form of transcendental objectivation, which Laruelle would think reinserts the plane of immanence into idealizing transcendence, or once again confuses radical immanence with transcendence immanence. It thereby re-envelops immanence in transcendence, one that nevertheless constructs the immanence as instituted presupposition through and in thought in the form of immanence-to-itself. This ‘to’ then targets the infinite folding of the plane in the reversible movements between actualization and virtualization, since without this infinite folding immanence ceases to be to itself: transcendence enters once the movement of the infinite stops.

The Concept is thus co-present in surveying the field with no distance to it, at an infinite speed, and becomes inseparable from the ‘fractalisation’ through which the plane folds and enfolds thoughts in the Concept (AT: Pg. 73). The infinite is finitely explicated in the concept, and the finite is infinitely enveloped in the plane, the concept of constitutive and comprised in the plane’s fractal curvature and standing for that indiscernible point of indifferent/ciation whereby finite/infinite become possible in and through the concept’s co-presence in its infinite self survey and constitution. This is because the concept at once expresses the infinite’s fold as actual/virtual dynamic movement, intensity enveloping the actual extensity, and extensity explicating implied intensity. It posits and presupposes the plane, constructs and expresses it. It is finally as such that the concept is part of immanence’s folding to itself: and transcendental inscription. This unobjectifiable but objectivating role of transcendental immanence is expressed by Laruelle powerfully, and symptomatic of D&G’s final reintroduction of immanence within Decision:

“The injunction to itself rather than to something else is certainly imperative, but it conceals an indetermination, an ultimate ambiguity. An amphiboly resides within the ‘to’ of ‘to itself’, one which reintroduces the pure form of transcendence itself as distance or relation, as surface or universal plane, in the absence of reified instances of transcendence. The philosophically normal but theoretically amphibological concept of a plane of immanence signifies that the latter still orbits around the plane and as plane; still orbits around the to (to itself) as axis of transcendence. Immanence thereby remains objective even if it is without an object; it remains an appearance of objectivity and gives rise to a new image of the Real and of thought. Instead of being absolutely faceless, unenvisageable, it takes on the facial aspect of a plane, of a topology, of survey and contemplation.” (Laruelle, 1995b, pp. 63-65)

Because it requires objectivation in and through the Concept rather than being given-without-givenness or being already-given, D&G cannot isolate the immanence from the idealizing gesture of Decision. Immanence is only construed as an instance of objectivising transcendence, which renders immanence subject to ideal ontological instantiation and results in yet another materiological register. Of course we must only anticipate the non-Decisional construal of immanence outside of Decision, even as unobjectifiable, which is yet to come in the next chapter.

Alien Theory -Chapter II (Henry's Material Phenomenology)

- ALIEN THEORY: CHAPTER II -

MICHEL HENRY'S MATERIAL PHENOMENOLOGY
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Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1928) equates the transcendental imagination’s schematizing temporal synthesis of concept-intuition with the temporalizing function of Dasein’s ekstatico-horizonal transcendence:

Transcendental split: phenomenon / in-itself = Ontico-Ontological split: entity / being

Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation questions that this allocation of the transcendental within ekstatico-horizonal temporality misses the radically transcendental atemporal essence of phenomenological being. Like Husserl, Heidegger situates the phenomenon within the worldly ascription in which the asymmetry of ideal ekstatic temporality apprehension and givenness to consciousness; and absolute immanence-to-itself as en-static auto-affection as real but non-intentional essence of phenomenalisation. Henry maintains that ekstatic transcendence distinguishes itself unilaterally from enstatic immanence, while the latter does not distinguish itself in return, it remains plainly indifferent. So ekstatic-visibility is constituted by enstatik invisibility, never disclosed within ekstasis: “It is only as an un-seeing, in not relating to itself in a seeing, in not revealing itself through a seeing, and thus as un-seen, as invisible, that seeing effectuates itself.” (Henry, 1990, p.111) This seems at this point all too reminiscent of the traditional Kantian appeal to a noumenal beyond which lays outside the causal realm of phenomenal experience; in an updated phenomenological register. But the idea is that this unilateral differentiation does not allow to posit the immanence of enstasis as that which is showing-itself, given to apprehension even as the backdrop of ekstatic phenomenal sense. However, as Brassier remarks, enstasis is auto-affecting and constitutes the phenomenon all the same, so it still functions in some way as a background, sense-giving constitutive split. Phenomenality in itself, as material real condition, is occluded by ekstatic differentiation; the former is nothing but auto-affecting absolved of empirical externality. It is auto-position and self-impressing, indistinguishing of given and givenness. But in order to reach these scandalous conclusions, we need some serious clarification, which leads the way to old Husserl’s theses on internal temporal consciousness.

For Husserl, consciousness temporalizes itself automatically, rendering all immanent flux intrinsic to the phenomenological and transcendental subjectivity of consciousness, the given coincides with the givenness, constituted with constituting, insofar as they are in and as consciousness of the living present. But this auto-temporalizing has three modalities of givenness:

1) The ‘now’ or punctual present.

2) Retention

3) Protention

Husserl acknowledges that this tripartite structure is interiorly implying instances of a noetic (constituted, thus not purely noematic) intra-temporal distinction in logical-order or sequence (a before and after) of these modalities (what is protended is after the pure now); and that which is given through the synthesis and that which does the synthesizing. But Henry identifies this latter divide as phenomenological-transcendental rather than logico-temporal, and acknowledging this fully makes impossible a logical-consecutive temporal articulation of the three synthesis as explained by Husserl. For to assume the logico-temporal ordering is to relapse to a ‘worldly’ transcendental-empiricism rather than transcendental immanent phenomenology: empirical consciousness retains synthetically in succession that which is given to consciousness in the present in succession; the noetic synthesis of ideas succeed the noematic impressions.

Husserl does this reinserting a continuous flux of undetermined ‘nows’ to be re-retained in the living present by retention in the form of a ‘noematic impression’. So he must presuppose the already constituted synthesis of the ‘now’, what does the constitutive is rather anonymous in this regard. In this sense, it is hard to make sense of Husserl’s insistence that the structures of givenness and those of the given cannot be isomorphic. This is so since the given presupposes its constitution or givenness in the immediate contraction of the punctual present, seized by retention continuously, and so transcendentally-reintegrated folded into what is always-already empirically pre-given in synthesis, rather than guaranteeing the gap and the immanent’s independence: “Husserl carefully traces the genesis of the given back to the originary noetic syntheses of givenness, only to collapse the genesis of givenness qua givenness back into the realm of the given.” (Pg. 39) This circularity conceals the auto-positioning essence of transcendental consciousness, shifting between phenomenological-transcendental conditioning and the worldly-empirical condition. Because it remains constrained to the punctual now qua ‘what’, constituted form of Oneness, rather than the pure ‘how’ of phenomenalization, of givenness as givenness, the absolute auto-position of the phenomenon’s enstatic immanence.

- Ur-Impression as Coincidence of Phenomenon and Phenomenality -

Henry detects the clue out of this circularity in Husserl’s own appeal to the Ur-impression as the non-intentional, sub-representational condition for ekstatico-horizonal transcendence and phenomenality: “Why impression is continuously there anew is something we have begun to understand: because nothing comes into being unless it be in the site wherein being first grasps itself in the pathos of its original Parousia. Because the origin is a pathos, because the latter is always in effect as such, nothing comes forth unless it be as an impression, which for that reason ‘is always there’” (Henry, ibid, p.49) Pure affectivity is an absolute pathos, the self-impressing, self-giving, and thus auto-affecting enstatic immanence which conditions intentional ekstatic time consciousness. The ‘how’ and ‘what’ achieve perfect synchrony in their auto-affecting ipseity, givenness is self-positing or self-impressing as the essence of the phenomenon and giving ekstasis the material background for its passive intentional syntheses and the temporal articulation of phenomena.

Heidegger failed to spot the true dichotomy was not between temporalized phenomenon (ontic time) and temporalizing phenomenality (ontological temporality). Rather, the real difference according to Henry is in the asymmetry of:

1) Temporalized and temporalizing ekstasis (ontological) vs. 2) Atemporal enstasis (ontic)

In Henry’s estimation, both Husserl and Heidegger fall to the trap of the circular, bilateral co-constitution of ekstatic conditioning temporalization and temporalized condition, where givenness is ultimately refurnished by the tropes of the given. Both in noetic-noematic intentional consciousness transcendence-in-immanence, and Dasein’s horizonal projection standing-out-of-himself are caught in the straightjacket of ekstasis in their hybridization of phenomenon and phenomenality. Additionally, Henry remarks this auto-affectivity is essentially subjective, an original Ipseity of self-feeling and absolute infinite enstatic Life in its immanent self-development, underlying finite ekstatic transcendence. It grounds the historic development of absolute Life, its non-spatio-temporal ‘kinematicity’ or perpetual self-impressing. Henry thus strives to root the finitude of Dasein’s ekstatico-horizonal transcendence and projection and the privilege granted to the future in the eternal affect of absolute immanence as unrepresentable past.

However, Brassier reminds us, we cannot simply compare enstasis and ekstasis as two metaphysical principles on account of the purported unilaterality separating only the latter from the former. So we must stipulate the dual hypothesis that even if one must ultimately agree in that the unobjectifiable withdrawal of ekstatic transcendence is distinguishable from the withdrawal of enstatic immanence, they are indiscernible. Brassier will retain the reworking of the transcendental distinction between real and ideal in terms of indiscernible difference or unilateral duality.

The Idealisation of Immanence: Laruelle’s Critique of Henry

Laruelle imputes Henry for phenomenologizing and thus ontologising immanence as absolute auto-affection, which devolves in an ‘ultra-phenomenological vitalism’. It thereby re-idealises immanence and re-envelops matter in-itself to the transcendence of the ‘as such’. Auto-position creates a transcendent hybridization of the immanence to itself which reproduces the transcendental coup on immanence. Brassier isolates two aspects in this idealisation:

1) Ideological/Superstructural – The arbitrary equation of matter with affect. This equation between matter and subjective pathos makes his ‘materialism’ suspect, insofar as it spiritualizes matter to the point where it’s irrecognizeable and insensitive to any the natural sciences might say of it.

2) Substantive/Structural – The ultimate complicity and inseparability between immanence and transcendence in the triadic structure of Decision. This is so since it is simultaneously autonomous and coordinated within the dyad constituting/constituted, absolute non-relation and the relation between invisible immanent essence and visible eksistence. The indivisible immanence in-itself is divided by the transcendental dyadic division between visible and invisible.

But of course, this seems sloppily argued at this point; since it is not clear how Henry’s appeal to unilateral distinction between immanence/transcendence becomes vitiated so that there is an idealizing ‘sub-division’ or bilateral determination of immanence. Brassier argues that the exteriority of ekstasis vis its ultimate exclusion from enstasis generates this bilaterality between immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative. In excluding itself from ekstasis it becomes relative to it again:

“Absolute immanence bears a latent, implicitly constitutive reference to transcendence within itself by very virtue of the fact that it expels it. As a result, Henry’s phenomenology of absolute immanence does not succeed in interrupting the quintessentially philosophical (or quasi-Hegelian) circle that always posits the relation of relation (transcendence) and non-relation (immanence); the ultimate relativity of absolute and relative.” (Pg. 47)

However, it seems strange to say that ‘the appeal to exteriority’ suffices to idealize Henry’s purported materialism. For it seems that there is no substantive distinction in saying real immanence is foreclosed to ideal transcendence and to say real immanence is not ideal transcendence. So when Brassier avows Laruelle’s construction of radical immanence around its foreclosure or indifference rather than exclusion or opposition to all dyadic oppositions: immanence/transcendence, thinkable/unthinkable, absolute/relative, unilateral/bilateral, asymmetry/symmetry, identity/difference; one can’t help but wonder how exactly this foreclosure can be effected whilst saving the possibility of distinguishing a real and ideal realm, or speaking of immanence at all. For such indifference, in not excluding itself from transcendence, would seem to risk its utter indistinguishability from it, not just unilateral distinction of the kind Henry proposes. This should lead us to anticipate the much hyped difference-without-distinction and givenness-without-givenness proper to Laruelle’s non-philosophical maneuver. Radical immanence, says Laruelle, must be neither thinkable nor unthinkable, it’s foreclosure must not determine its immanence. The nominal characterization of immanence as foreclosed to Decision does not retroactively constitute immanence qua immanence. The description cannot be held as constitutive without relapsing into idealism; not even the differance between the two terms. The immanent must remain indifferent to all nomination to break free of ideality. Presumably, it is this indifference which furthermore guarantees the possibility of adequation between ideal nomination and the real of immanence, although the explanation is left for later.

Henry’s absolute immanence, on the other hand and in spite of its unilaterality, is esteemed to crush the dyads together in mediation at the point of their enstatic ground. The problem seems to be that enstatic immediacy becomes co-constituted by dyadic mediation where immanence is unthinkable as thinkable and thinkable as unthinkable. This reproduces idealism, for Laruelle, since immanence is constituted as unthinkable through thought, as thought is constituted by unthinkable immanence (thus the alleged circular bilaterality inherent in all materiological efforts remains present). But this still seems quite unclear, since Henry is steadfast to point out that the unilateral distinction of immanence from transcendence is not reproduced in the distinction of transcendence from immanence. Here Brassier turns to Henry’s reconstruction of Descartes, and the appeal to a ‘primal sensing of thought to itself’ which opposes mere intuition. Accordingly, for Henry, thought’s self-sensing excludes ekstatic intuiting and by excluding it determines immanence as immediacy: “Thought’s essential self-sensing is not merely different from ek-static sensing; it excludes it, and precisely this exclusion determines the concept of immediacy.” (Henry, 1993, p.22). So enstasis constitutes thought’s immediate self-sensing and is construed as unthinkable as unrepresentable and invisible from the ekstatic realm, inhering in it as its invisible essence which remains excluded from it. It is this negative coincidence or inherence intrinsic to thought, insofar as it mixes together the self-affecting of matter with the self-affecting of thought that ultimately phenomenologizes matter and folds it back into idealism. Real immanence is only separable as unthinkable through and in thought; it is absolved by a transcendent operation. This ‘ideal inseparability’ is the negative exteriorization of the immanent in relation to thought; it is as thought’s putative exterior than immanence posits itself transcendentally as exterior to thought, and at the same time claims to be constituted by this immanence in return, effecting the bilateral determination Brassier and Laruelle deem responsible for the idealist coup. The positioning of immanence outside transcendence through thought’s purchase on the unthinkable qua exterior thereby co-constitutes the real immanence with transcendent ideality. Henry’s immanence-to-itself , self-inherent split of the immanent itself into its immanent and transcendental part- is thus vitiating the sought for materialism. Immanence phenomenalizes itself so it becomes the phenomenality of immanence as such and not immanence itself. Thought has ‘always already’ begun to think this immanence, tied to it inseparably as it is thought as unthinkable and external. So Brassier can conclude thus:

“Henry’s phenomenological immanence is posited as the absolute immediation of given and givenness; it is posited as absolute in virtue of a transcendent Decision through which the unilateral asymmetry between enstatic immediation and ekstatic mediation is surveyed from above, seen from a viewpoint of transcendent exteriority and circumscribed within an encompassing reversibility, an ultimately bi-lateral symmetry… Henry conflates the phenomenon of immanence as radically separate (but separate-without separation) and foreclosed to transcendence, with the phenomenality of immanence as absolute distinction that repels transcendence. The latter leads to an absolutisation of immanence through the expulsion of transcendence, but an absolutisation which merely reinforces the reciprocal co-dependence between immanence and transcendence; a reciprocity inscribed within the intrinsically circular structure of philosophical Decision as relation of relation and non-relation.” (AT: Pg, 49)

In contrast, Laruelle’s concept of immanence promises to be without all relation to self, with a phenomenal identity outside all mixture or hybrid: purely ontic and not an ontic-ontological hybrid. This it does by constructing a concept of immanence which does not exclude but gives-without-givenness transcendence’s relative autonomy and giving Identity without synthesis and Duality without distinction. The phenomenon without phenomenality unilaterally determines the Decisional mixture of phenomenon and phenomenality, the Real without givenness unilaterally determines the Ideal self-positing dual circularity between given and givenness. So it is capable of subverting the tripartite materiological crime mentioned above, to which Henry falls inevitably: “It deliberately synthesizes the real phenomenon of immanence ‘itself’ with the ideal phenomenality of immanence ‘as such’; it substitutes an ultimately bilateral co-determination of the ontologically ideal and the ontically real for the strictly unilateral determination of the ideal by the real; finally, it roots the unobjectifiable transcendence of ekstasis in the unobjectifiable immanence of enstasis only to render the ontological absolutisation of the latter constitutively inseparable from the former.” Interestingly, Laruelle detects here a development from vulgar Marxism in which the exteriority of being is posited at an empirical or ontic level. Henry instead posits the exteriority as the point of immediation of phenomenon and phenomenality, the essential ground of thought which is external to ekstasis and immediately grounds being and thinking as the self-sensing of thought.

Alien Theory - Chapter I

ALIEN THEORY - CHAPTER I

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“When, in its better moments, materialism abandoned its empiricist concept of matter, on the whole it never proved able to go beyond the hyle, the identity of thought and the real, of ideality and matter -the level of relative materiality or of materiality ‘as such’[comme telle] rather than of matter ‘itself’ [telle quelle] or absolute matter.” (Laruelle, 1981, p.78)

A non-relative materiality subverts the identity of thought and real, ideal and matter. In short, it replaces materiality ‘as such’ with matter in-itself, i.e. absolute matter. To conceive of matter outside the concept and distinct form every concept of matter, without thereby folding back into pre-Hegelian metaphysical innocence; these are the proximate goals expounded by Brassier through Laruelle. But we first go back to Kant’s transcendental difference between the inherently relational representational realm of the ideal given to the subject; and the real realm which is independent from the subject, negatively defined as the absence of relation, i.e. the transcendent absolute or in-itself. Hegel famously postulates that the split between ideal as relative and real as absolute is internal to thought: subjectivity is self-related negativity, self-synthesizing Notion which in a process of continual sublation Ideally relationally identifies ideal identity (relative) and real difference (absolute): the relation of relation and non-relation.

On its part, Heidegger inherits part of this transcendental-idealist legacy in its identification of phenomena as that which shows itself from itself, as a self-showing which is bound to the discursive apophantic logos of ideality. The self-showing or auto-positioning of the phenomenon coincides here with the self-saying or discursive conceptuality as the transcendental bond of phenomenon-logos. This bond is assured in the presupposition that the phenomenon needs apophantic disclosure to manifest itself as phenomenon, as some-thing in its coming-to-presence against the background of Dasein’s horizontal ekstatic opening of intelligibility: its being-in-the-world.

“The expression ‘phenomenology’ may be formulated in Greek as legein ta phainomena, where legein means apophainesthai. Thus, ‘phenomenology’ means apophainesthai ta phainomena -to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself… “The logos lets something be seen.[...]Discourse ‘lets something be seen’ apo (from itself) [...]that is, it lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about. In discourse (apophansis), so far as it is genuine, what is said is drawn from what the talk is about, so that discursive communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about[...] This is the structure of the logos as apophansis.”(Ibid, p.56)

The phenomenon is bound to every other insofar as it becomes disclosed in discursive apophasis, and so through the logos, as belonging to a structural whole. So phenomenality is bound to the relational ideal logos, the meaningful/intelligible holistic being-in-the-world. So Laruelle’s idea of a separable matter ‘itself’ from all relationality and every horizon of ideal/apophantic disclosure is a rejoinder to Kant’s transcendental workings, but radically different from Heideggerean phenomenology. Matter is different from all ideal sublation of difference in the concept, from all self-relating negativity, and an non-phenomenologizeable in-itself: ‘something’ which is neither a phenomenon showing itself from itself, nor even the inapparent phenomenality of showing as such.” That is to say, it is not a self-positing, relational structure of subjective mediation between ideal/real which furnishes the phenomenon. The latter is given-without-givenness, without ‘phenomenality’ qua conditioning givenness to mediate it. However, Brassier acknowledges the apparent difficulty of conceiving of such an idea, separable from all ontico-ontological differentiation. It is precisely this privilege to difference that Laruelle forces us to ask, considering that perhaps the transcendental separation of matter as such from matter itself needs to be rethought of in terms of immanence and Identity rather than transcendence and Difference. So maybe this separation can be carried in thought without going through conceptual thought, and not mediated by being-in-the-world. A separation anterior to transcendence and the World and which subjects them: matter as immanent Identity of matter-itself, rather than the transcendent difference of matter as such and matter itself. This requires us to subtract matter from idealized materiality of representation/intentionality and the subtraction of thought from reified ideality of phenomenological presencing:

“Only in this way does it become possible to forestall both the Hegelian identification of real and ideal within the domain of the Idea itself; and Heidegger’s phenomenological idealization of the transcendental difference through Da-sein’s unobjectifiable circumscription of the ontico-ontological caesura between real and ideal.” (Pg. 32)

Whereas Kant thought of the noumenon as a pure limit concept (that which remains foreclosed to phenomenality), Brassier follows Laruelle’s Principe de Minorite to realize Deleuze’s avowed liberation of the ‘prodigous domain of the transcendental’ from idealist relativity and think of matter in immanent Identity; without materiological subordination to the logos and access matter-itself. It is in this work that Laruelle begins to identify in every philosophical materialism the infection of ‘materiality’ qua transcendent ideal abstraction: they are really materiological idealisms. That is to say, in the last instance they subordinate matter to the logos instead of rendering it independent of it. Laruelle approximates the distinction between materialism and its materiological equivocations as follows, which we cite in full, with some clarification (Ibid, Pg. 34):

Materialism:

1. Primacy of immanence over transcendence – being as independent or the in-itself determines transcendental mediation or the for-itself, not the other way around.

2. Primacy of the real over the ideal – the being (ontic) is conditions onto-logical constitution; the phenomenon antecedes the discursive or ideal logos.

3. Exteriority of being to thought – being as immanence must be foreclosed to thought.

Materiology =

1. Confusion of real or ontic immanence with ideal or ontological immanence – One confuses the in-itself for the as such (Non-Decisional), the absolute immanence with relative ontological mediated immanence (Decisional).

2. Confusion of irreversible or unilateral determination of the ideal by the real with a bi-lateral or reversible co-respondence, whereby the real ends up being co-constituted in return through the ideality which it is supposed to determine.

3. Confusion of the exteriority of the entity ‘itself’, as instance of unobjectifiable immanence, to all forms of presentation, not just thought, with the unobjectifiable transcendence of the entity’s Being ‘as such’ relative to intentional consciousness. Confusion, in other words, of the unobjectifiable immanence of the phenomenon ‘itself’ with the unobjectifiable transcendence proper to the phenomenality (=Being) of the phenomenon ‘as such’. The key here is the complicity between the presentation of x and the transcendence of x vis its status as transcendent unobjectifiable excess to the phenomenon’s constitution as that which is negatively external to the phenomenon and ideally co-constitutive of it.

So we get finally three idealizing materiological confusions: amphiboly of ontic and ontological, real asymmetry and ideal reciprocity; indifferent exteriority of immanence and negative exteriority of transcendence. Materiology conflates the unobjectifiable dimension of real/ontic immanence in-itself with the unobjectifiable dimension of ideal/ontological transcendence ‘as such’; hybridizing or mixing the two in a bilateral co-constitution rather than in the unilateral separation required by unobjectifiable immanence. Unilateral asymmetry is therefore key in the separation of real and ideal for non-materialism. The unobjectifiable ontic immanence of the real is necessarily non-relative unlike unobjectifiable ontological transcendence, which must always remain negatively posited as dis-closed and co-constituted through the Concept.