The Apotheosis of Nullity A Transhistorical Genealogy of Human Subjectivity American University Studies 1st editon by Bartosz Lubczonok 143313862X 9781433138621

1. The dark ground of the existence of God

2. The self-begetting of a second eternal will

3. The quandary of the second will and God’s contraction of Being

Intermezzo 1: Eternal divine nature as Deleuzoguattarian desiring-production

(a) Organs-partial objects and the connective synthesis

(b) The body without organs (BwO) and the disjunctive synthesis

4. The incessant rotary motion of eternal divine nature

5. The emergence of the third potency as spirit amid the rotary motion

6. The third potency as traversing the entire ladder of future formations

7. The Ent-Scheidung: the emergence of God as subject

Intermezzo 2: From the larval to the fully-fledged subject

(1) Toward the “larval” subject

(2) Toward the “fledgling” subject

(3) Toward the “fully-fledged” (molar) subject

8. The immediate consequences of God’s upsurge as subject

(i) The emergence of time from the deadlock of eternity

(ii) The degradation of the eternal affirmative will into a negative will

(iii) The denuding of God as subject of actuality

(iv) The emergence of space, nature, the organism, and molar machines

(1) Extension and molar machines

(2) The erection of the socius and the move to social production

Notes

Part One: The Primitive Regime

Chapter 1: A Cruel Mnemotechnics

1. The BwO of the Earth

2. The erection of the full body of the earth as socius

(i) Corporeal and sexual disambiguation

(ii) From intensive germinal filiation to extensive somatic lineage

(iii) The forging of alliance

(iv) From biocosmic to somatic and lexical memory

(v) Emergence of primitive forms of capital

3. Coding of flows, collective investment of organs, marking of bodies

(i) The coding of flows

(ii) The collective investment of organs

(iii) The marking of bodies

4. Cruelty, alliance, debt, lexical memory

(i) Debt

(ii) Lexical memory

5. The primitive semiotic: a savage theater of cruelty

(i) The phonographic couple

(ii) The beholding eye

(iii) The savage triangle

(iv) Activity

Notes

Chapter 2: Toward an Ethics of the Primitive Regime and Beyond

1. Debt, pain, and the absence of ressentiment

(i) The absence of ressentiment and revanchism

(ii) The cruel Nietzschean equation

2. The Nietzschean conception of the body

(i) Force

(ii) Active and reactive

(iii) Will to power

(iv) Affirmative and negative

(v) Sense and value

(vi) Sensation and sensibility

3. The becoming-reactive of force

(i) The perverse ascendancy of reactive force

(ii) Negativity of the will to power

4. The forestalling of ressentiment

5. The reactive unconscious and the positive faculty of active forgetting

6. Dereliction of the reactive unconscious-consciousness system

(i) Atrophy of the faculty of active forgetting

(ii) Ressentiment 1: topological and typological aspects

(iii) Ressentiment 2: the spirit of revenge

7. Toward a savage ethics of the primitive regime

8. The sovereign

9. History’s hijacking of generic species activity

10. The demise of the primitive regime

Notes

Part Two: The Despotic Regime

Chapter 3: Emergence of the Despotic Machine

1. Bronze-eyed artists

2. Double incest

3. The despot-deity filiation

(i) The Hittites

(ii) Vedic India

(iii) Zoroastrian Persia

(iv) Shang China

(v) Ancient Mesopotamia

(vi) Ngũgĩ’s “Marching to Heaven”

(vii) Kantorowicz’s Norman Anonymous

4. Infinitization of debt and the ruinous consumption of the despotic caste

(i) A debt of the existence of the subject himself

(ii) The subject sucked dry by the despot

(iii) The Vedic aśvamedha

(iv) Monotheism on the horizon

5. The full body of the despot as socius

(i) The Vedic King

(ii) The Egyptian pharaoh

(iii) Plowden’s Reports

6. The despotic State-formation

(i) A hierarchical State formation

(ii) Transmogrification of the three syntheses, from geodesy to geometry

(iii) Denigration of lineage 1: Chinese Legalism, Mao Zedong

(iv) Denigration of lineage 2: Catholicism, widowhood, spinsterhood, celibacy

(v) Denigration of lineage 3: Plato, Ottomanism and military slavery

7. The despotic semiotic

(i) The loss of independence between voice and graphism

(ii) From polyvocal graphism to linearized writing

(iii) The biunivocalization of the sign

(iv) The endless deferral of the signified

(v) Faciality

8. Despotic paranoia

(i) Canetti and the poetics of paranoia

(ii) Semelin and the politics of paranoia

(iii) Fromm and the psychopathology of paranoia

9. The impossible lust of corporeal dismemberment: Sade

10. Infinite suffering: Dante and Milton

Notes

Chapter 4: Transhistorical Sadeo-Deleuzian Fugue, 1. Despotic Paranoia

221–210 B.C. (Qin Shi Huangdi)

14–37 A.D. (Tiberius)

211–217 A.D. (Caracalla)

527–565 A.D. (Justinian I)

996–1021 A.D. (Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah)

1209–1242 A.D. (Albigensian Crusade)

1547–1584 A.D. (Ivan the Terrible)

1873–1874 A.D. (Robespierre)

1915–1916 A.D. (Armenian Genocide)

1928–1953 A.D. (Stalin)

1933–1945 A.D. (Hitler)

1949–1976 A.D. (Mao Zedong)

1975–1979 A.D. (Khmer Rouge)

1979–2003 A.D. (Saddam Hussein)

1949–? A.D. (Kim Dynasty)

Notes

Chapter 5: Trial by Ordeal and Homo Sacer

1. The fusing of desire to the Law and the Law’s essential vacuity

(i) Desire as the desire of the Other

(ii) The fusion of desire to Law

(iii) The Law’s essential vacuity

2. The eye that forewarns

3. Preemptive vengeance of the despotic caste

4. Trial by ordeal

5. The eternal ressentiment of the subjects

6. The Damocles’ sword of death and homo sacer

(i) The savage dread of dying

(ii) The despotic fear of death as terminal annihilation

(iii) The sovereign and homo sacer

(iv) Homo sacer and becomings-animal

Notes

Chapter 6: Despotic Dialectics of Subjective Self-Immural, 1. Hegel

1. The life and death struggle

2. The vanquishment of the proto-slave

3. Enslavement of the vanquished and the master’s life of sovereign plenty

4. The paradoxical advantage of the slave and the master’s near atavism

5. The self-justificatory ideologies of the slave

(1) Stoicism: Solzhenitsyn and Beckett

(2) Skeptical nihilism: Pessoa

(3) The unhappy consciousness

(a) Motions of the heart: monotheistic self-immolation in the Godhead

(b) Work and desire: deification of the world through labor

(c) Self-surrender: night of anguish and monotheistic masochism

Notes

Chapter 7: Despotic Dialectics of Subjective Self-Immural, 2. Nietzsche

1. The mode of evaluation of the artist-master

2. The mode of evaluation of the slave

3. The development of ressentiment and “Judaic” consciousness

4. From ressentiment to bad conscience

5. The hypermultiplication of pain

6. The development of bad conscience and “Christian” consciousness

Notes

Chapter 8: Exit Strategies from the Structures of Despotism, 1. Against Hegel: The Mosaic Revolution and St. Paul

1. The Mosaic Revolution

2. St. Paul

Notes

Chapter 9: Exit Strategies from the Structures of Despotism, 2. Against Nietzsche: Job and St. Paul

1. The defiant Job: no Hegelian slave, no man of bad conscience

2. St. Paul

(i) Against ressentiment and bad conscience

(ii) Toward affirmation

(iii) Against the Law

(iv) Against sin

(v) Toward a transliteral law of the spirit

(vi) Love

Notes

Chapter 10: Exit Strategies from the Structures of Despotism, 3. Kafka as St. Paul

1. The transcendent Law

2. The transcendent Law and the astronomical state of architecture

3. The astronomical state of architecture and the three possibilities in the Law

4. The subterranean state of architecture

5. The subterranean state of architecture in relation to the transcendent Law

6. From the transcendent Law to the immanence of desire

7. The Sadeian movement: indefinite postponement

8. The proliferation of series along a line of escape

9. Toward a Kafkan ethics

10. The Don Juanian movement: anti-conjugality

11. Beyond Don Juan: indexical homosexuality and homosexual effusion

12. Beyond homosexual effusion: the bachelor

13. Suicide: the self-willed damnation of Don Juan

14. The collective liberation of all imbeciles

Notes

Chapter 11: Demise of the Despot

1. Toward regicide

2. Exodus

(i) The death drive

(ii) The war machine

(iii) Kengir, May 1954

(iv) Moses

Notes

Part Three: The Passional Regime

Chapter 12: The Vertiginous Foray into the Passional Regime

1. The art of monotheistic desertion and the Great Theophany

2. The etiolation of personality and the solitudinous upsurge of Rosenzweigian “Character”

3. Character as unworldly defiance and unconditional will

4. Transmogrification of political defeat into moral triumph

Notes

Chapter 13: Essential Features of the Passional Regime

1. Foundation via a non-ideational exposure to an exterior

2. The face-off: concealing-revealing countenances

(i) Osarsiph and Mutemenet

(ii) The world of Carlos Fuentes

(iii) God, Christ and man

3. Secrecy

(i) Joseph and his brothers

(ii) Joseph and Jacob

(iii) Joseph, Mutemenet and Potiphar

4. Necessary betrayal and fulfilment only in betrayal

(i) Jacob, Laban, Rachel, Leah, Joseph, Dudu, Mutemenet, and God

(ii) God, Christ, Judas, and man

5. Subjectification: the doubling of subjects and the subject as double

(i) The God-man subjective double

(ii) The point of subjectification

(iii) Syntagmatic axis of consciousness and paradigmatic axis of passion

(iv) Jacob, Rachel, and Joseph

(v) The black hole of stochastic death

(vi) The Badiousian obscure amorous subject and death

(vii) Lévy: haematology, haematomania

(viii) Eagleton: the self-immolatory freedom of the void

(ix) Jacob, Rachel, Joseph and Mutemenet

(x) The Mad Lady, El Señor, Juan Agrippa, La Señora

6. Segmentarity of the regime

(i) Joseph and his brothers

(ii) The Puritan line to the New Jerusalem

(iii) Miscegenation with countersignifying and despotic regimes

(iv) Imbrication of passional and despotic regimes in Christianity

(v) Canetti, despotic-passional regimes, and stagnant crowds

7. Existence under reprieve

(i) Rosenzweig and the immortality of Character

(ii) Badiou and the immortality of the subject of a truth-event

(iii) Heidegger and the imperishability of Dasein as Dasein

(iv) Lévy and the aversion of death by animal cunning

(v) The Freudian death-drive and immortality

(vi) Jewish survival

8. Aphasia of the prophet and discernment of the puissances of the future

(i) Aphasia

(ii) The aphasia of Abraham, Jacob and Mutemenet

(iii) Discernment of the puissances of the future

(iv) The puissances of the future in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

Notes

Chapter 14: Transhistorical Sadeo-Deleuzian Fugue, 2. The Black Hole of Stochastic Death

c.4004 B.C. (Adam and Eve)

c.1078 B.C. (Samson)

c.1007 B.C. (Saul)

c.975 B.C. (Ahithophel)

399 B.C. (Socrates)

c.160–167 B.C. (The Maccabees)

33 A.D. (Jesus Christ)

73 A.D. (The Jews of Masada)

March 7, 203 A.D. (Vivia Perpetua)

October 10, 680 A.D. (Imam Husayn)

March 26, 922 A.D. (Mansur al-Hallāj)

October 14, 1092 A.D. (Hassan-i Sabbah’s Assassins)

March 16, 1244 A.D. (Esclarmonde de Foix)

May 30, 1431 A.D. (Jehanne d’Arc)

1555 A.D. (Protestant martyrs in England)

November 26, 1872 A.D. (Kirillov from Dostoyevsky’s Demons)

February 28, 1936 A.D. (Mishima’s Shinji Takeyama and his wife Reiko)

November 25, 1970 A.D. (Yukio Mishima)

November 18, 1978 A.D. (Rev. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple)

1980–1981 A.D. (Khomeini’s “Basiji” or child soldiers)

April 19, 1993 A.D. (David Koresh and the Branch Davidians)

July 1, 1993 A.D. (“The Giants of al-Qassam” of the first Intifada)

September 11, 2001 A.D.

Notes

Chapter 15: Transhistorical Fugue, 3. From Jewish Survival to the Survival of Humanity

1. Jewish Survival

c.4115 B.C. (Cain)

c.2588 B.C. (Noah)

c.2191 B.C. (Isaac)

c.2006 B.C. (Joseph)

c.1576 B.C. (The Mosaic Exodus)

c.538 B.C. (The Babylonian Captivity)

70 A.D. (The Roman destruction of Jerusalem)

1492 A.D. (The Marranos under the Spanish Inquisition)

1656 A.D. (The Chmielnicki Massacres in Poland)

May 8, 1945 A.D. (The Sho’ah)

2. Universalization of the Jewish survival of the Sho’ah to the survival of all humanity under Alexander’s “progressive” narrative

3. Universalization of the Jewish survival of the Sho’ah to the survival of all humanity under Alexander’s “tragic” narrative

4. Universalization of the Jewish survival of the Sho’ah in terms of the Badiousian event

(i) Propaedeutic: Badiou’s ontology

(ii) Badiou’s ontology, socio-historical situations and the State

(iii) The Badiousian singular multiplicity, the Nazi State and the Sho’ah

(iv) The collective of Muselmanner as a Badiousian evental site

(v) Evental site and Muselmann in Beckett’s Worstward Ho

(vi) From Beckett’s production of the Muselmann to the Badiousian event

(vii) The Sho’ah as Badiousian event and the universalization of Jewish survival

5. Survival of various human collectives in the wake of the Holocaust-event

(i) The survival of the Kosovars

(ii) The survival of the East Timorese

(iii) Reprieve from and survival of the death penalty

Notes

Chapter 16: From the Violence of Divine Love to the Redemption of the World: Rosenzweig, Lévinas, Derrida, Blanchot, Kierkegaard

1. The quandary of Character

2. The violence of divine love

3. Le visage

4. Illeity

5. Diachrony, visage, illeity

6. Judgment, sinfulness, shame, surrender and the birth of the Soul

7. From defiance to humility, faithfulness, diachrony

8. Il y a, dying

(i) Isaac’s dying words

(ii) Jacob and Joseph

(iii) King Philip II of Spain

9. Sprechende Sprache

10. Toward the Neighbor

11. Le tiers, distributive justice

12. The Akedah

13. Law, force and justice

14. The aporias of justice

15. Justice as à venir

16. El Señor

Notes

Part Four: The Capitalist Regime

Chapter 17: The Eviscerations and Entrapments of Capital

1. Gargantuan deterritorialization

2. The immiserations and eviscerations of neoliberalism

3. Conjunction of deterritorialized flows

4. The capitalist socius

5. Reconfiguration of filiation and alliance

6. The capitalist axiomatic

7. Purely economic extraction of productive surplus

8. The capitalist State apparatus

9. Social subjection and the recrudescence of machinic enslavement

10. The recrudescence of sovereignty at the heart of governmentality

11. The return of homo sacer

12. Neoliberalism and extra-judicial murder

13. The return of trial by ordeal

14. Decoding-deterritorialization/recoding-reterritorialization

15. The strange concomitance of cynicism and piety

(i) Capitalism’s “cynical” tendency

(ii) Capitalism’s “pietistic” tendency

16. The coincidence of decoding and recoding within a single subject: Daniel Paul Schreber

17. The subsumption of productive labor by capital and the collective disinvestment of working organs

18. Machinic enslavement in the information age

19. The production of the ascetic capitalist subject

20. Nihilism

Notes

Chapter 18: From the Self-Crucifixion of the Capitalist Subject to the Empyrean

1. Suicide

2. Micro-manifesto: the refusal of work

3. Toward a global suicidal State

4. Cybernetic machinic enslavement, cynicism, depression, passive nihilism, and the Last Man

5. Cybernetic machinic enslavement and the Man Who Wilt Perish

6. Midnight: transmutation in the quality of the will to power

7. Dionysus and Ariadne: full affirmation

8. Eternal return, Schellingian Godhead, BwO, Plotinus’ One, and the self-crucified ego’s immolation in Dante’s Empyrean

Notes

References

Index