On failing to be properly atropaic

On failing to be properly apotropaic: if consciousness is both irremediable hypostasis (Nietzsche calls metaphor a “full jump into another sphere” and Lacan speaks of the invasion of the signified by the signifier- opposite moments of the hypostasis) then it is also apostasy. It is continual struggle against an accusative and accusatory other whose location it is totalitarian to define- or whose location defines the beginning of the slide into totality. Totality, and the ‘originary’ hypostatic/apostate situation of consciousness are both unspeakable terms. Language does not need the violence of poetry not to mean anything. It does not mean anything.

The demonstration of this fact about language is the following. Dualism—as one world with two poles—is not dualism. Monism—as no poles—makes no reference to empirical (-ly dual) data. Unism (the preference for one pole over the other) fails; dualism (as two worlds) fails. Unism fails on the obvious absence of the referent. Dualism fails on the phenomenal success of the signified, which (by pushing away, by being apotropaic) causes the failure of unism, which, by the supremacy of the referent, causes dualism to fail (since the referant is accidental and imperfect, effectively effaced). The double-failure (along two axes) proves not the content (gesture) of either referant or referent but their actions as such; their gestures are immanent. And yet both gestures cannot fail simultaneously, since the failures refer to each other. They are not contradictory, then, but succeed each other. It is on the mutual impossibility of success and succession that the concept of time, coterminous with the consciousness, occurs. Time cannot take place within time; it is exoteric to itself.

The above paragraphs are intended, however fantastic it may seem, to be steps in the direction of a politics of sorts. They address the question of the possibility of (not) warding off evil. They seek, by painstaking examination of the immanent (even where it transcends) to speak a language that does not bind; they seek (but do not achieve) a rigorous separation of ontology and casuistry. They insist, but they do so strangely. They almost certainly do not persuade, but they have not been able to avoid persuading. One who is bound by them would have to be bound by meaning in general, consciously.