Absolute Intelligence and Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)
The Change Machines: Gestell in Justice League (2021) and in Catherine Malabou's The Heidegger Change (2004).
Is there a one word teaching? The word ‘change’ exists. We can use it. We use it twice, it changes. Change therefore changes. From that one word, we know a fact. Already that single word is a machine, a change-machine. Now take the word ‘extinction’. Use it again, over here: ‘extinction’. It too changed. Extinction changes. Between its two occurrences, a meanwhile. ‘Pro tempo.’ That means it, the word and thing, does not exist. Extinction does not exist.
The Machines
Let us try to think the Mother Boxes in Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)—hereafter JL 2021. These boxes are also referred to in the film as ‘change machines’. In fact, the fourth part of the film is called ‘“Change Machine”’ in quotation marks (see above), as if the phrase offers and displays itself to thought. The thought-image ‘change machine’ is the theme of the fourth chapter, which acts as an explanation of the back story of what a ‘change machine’ is and of the decision to use one of the machines to resurrect Superman. Straightaway here the change-power of the change-machine is connected to the power to resurrect, to repeat at depth, and to de-extinct. The change machine goes all the way as a conversion-point in being able to reverse the obliteration of an anthropic power. In the change machine, essence itself, as we will see, is able to change. Just as in the present moment of NFTification and in The Flash (2022), everything is a lightning-point. As Hölderlin put it in Mnemosyne, all must enter in.1 Extinction (ex)changes.
When Hölderlin says in Mnemosyne all must enter in, what does that mean? On a simple level, it means that the thought-image is now—in the moveable but immensely static present—undergoing a complete formalization. In the fluidic fixity of this absolute formalization, every image-point is made to enter (back) in, and be retouched. On an even more basic level, this means that any image/relic/thought/concept/.gif/missing link/evidential circuit may now become itself as something else, namely, be ‘minted’ (a process I have analysed here). But what does this repetition-figure mean beyond mere throwback? At what point is the image-point changed (resurrected) and not simply emptily iterated (‘sold out’)?
It is impossible from a certain reading point of view to not connect Snyder’s ‘change machines’ with Catherine Malabou’s ‘change machine’ in her book The Heidegger Change. This book is itself a reading (change) machine (an ‘exegetical switching-on’) that attempts to explain what the change machine is in Heidegger’s text, and what it does to, with, through and after the ontology of change. In so doing it looks for a changed notion of Technology and a changed notion of Being and for a principle of ex(change) that is literally ‘astonishing’, namely, ‘the astonishing economy of an exchange before exchange and prior to all economy; one prior to money, price, and sex—prior, even, to commerce.’ This astonishing ex(change), prior to money and sex, is developed in what is perhaps the omphalos of the book, its intensely innovative reading and translation of Heidegger’s notion of Gestell as it can be found for example in the essay The Turning. I want to suggest that one translation for Heidegger’s term Gestell is ‘change machine’, which is to say, completed technology. The Snyder Cut is (as if) being ventured as a translation of Heidegger’s The Turning.
But before going on, examining the sliding parts as we proceed, what happens when a film translates a text it has, at least in terms of its direct process and production, had no literal contact with? The Turning may be read without being read, as may any text. Reading ‘heads’ spin into motion as they do when a computer reads data without need of left, right, verticality, or even light. The type of translation that may come of what happens between something called a ‘film’ and something called a ‘text’ is in this case certainly not an adaption but in fact something more intimate and more intelligently adaptive. Let us call this event an open figure of intelligence, which is to say the open figure of absolute intelligence as it evolves. As Malabou works on the open set of the change machine, the change machines chapter of JL 2021 slides across to form a kind of slanted phylum-change, or blooming, a one-off solvent event and transcript (Heidegger will calls this Ereignis and we now have no reason to not also translate it in turn as NFT-icity).
There is no need to be scared of the word ‘translation’ here (as suggestive of too much equivalence, for example), since in truth we hardly know what the word means in the first place (unless, say, we read Benjamin and de Man on this theme). Imagine instead a slow dragging across of two non-material domains at the apex and behest of which each is changing, in the same way that two galaxies can collide without actual ‘casualties’ (because each is so vast). This dragged-across quality is there from the start of the film, a prologue which is a survey of the past but also (as if) a sketch of the future of the plot: Superman encased, frozen, in slow-mo lightning. Is he in fact enframed in lightning? What plays across the surfaces here are perhaps different physics which are themselves capable of change. From the Atlantean to the Gothamesque, yes, but these are just variable examples, and some of the physics contained in the film might be imagined to be something else.
In terms of the something designated by Malabou that precedes money, this is what can be confusing about the NFT economy, that it appears to be (and no doubt in some sense is) a purely commercial apparatus. Coiners are people who make money, more money—potentially—and more easily—than civilization has previously allowed. And yet, at the same time, there is self-evidently something pre-economical about the thought-image of the NFT itself, regardless of particular and singular instantiations. In fact, the singular thought-image ‘NFT’ seems to be the image of a change-machine, if not that machine itself. The NFT qua NFT contains a change, not just to how art is done, and to how protocols are to be thought after material art, but to essence and presence themselves. Even though it looks like it, the NFT-object is not an art-object; even though it looks like it, the NFT-object is not a poor-image; even though it looks like it, the NFT-object is not a .gif. The NFT, let us begin to say, is an image of Being in the process of (ex)change.
What does this mean? In JL 2021, in some ways the plot is enveloped or even swallowed up by the business of the change machines. These boxes emit light, crack open to leak lightning of a type and range that is necessarily hard to read. The ‘light’ looks and is threatening, even though it is also that which may resurrect. The ‘alien technology’ of Snyder’s ‘change machines’ is just this Janus-headed ambiguity, alien and dangerous but also, to an extent, tried and tested. The story of the character Cyborg, who is the emotional heart of the movie, is of someone fatally wounded in a car accident and then saved when his father uses one of the Mother Boxes as a means of technical de-extinction. This gives Cyborg access to all points of technology, which is to say temporal and spatial. At one moment, the film depicts him as omniscient witness to his own resurrection on the grid of the change machine’s lightning-technology. This means that Superman will not be the first to be exposed to the change machine’s power to (ex)change extinction and resurrection in the place of Gestell.
For Heidegger, the term ‘Gestell’ is already a moving (and changing) part. As a lexical moment, it must (itself) change to come into the (the range of the) change-machine. That is, originally the word means something else and is then guided into abstraction under the exchangeable sign of ‘H’. Originally ‘Gestell’ means a display apparatus, for example a book rack or a picture frame, or even a skeleton. These are all things that frame and enframe. A skeleton, in its way, provides an enframing for the human soul and flesh. Yet in Heidegger the concept ‘Gestell’ is there from the beginning as paleonymic change. Gestell is switched on, in other words, as, in, and amidst lexical change. It betokens itself (it’s a coinage) as name for the change-machine by being a changed name. As Malabou puts it,
. . . the Gestell is in itself, right down to its name, a transformation. ‘Gestell’ can name ontological convertibility because its very name has been converted.
A changed and changing name for a changed being of a change-machine: this is how Gestell initialises. In this sense, the change-machines of Gestell, as read by Malabou’s exegetical change-machine, are not literally comparable with the change-machines of JL 2021, but, as noted, we can think about this in terms of an open figure evolving and being shared out, across frames, uncountable elements of reframing and post-conceptual montage. As one commentator puts it,
In the Snyder Cut, Cyborg explains that the Motherbox isn’t inherently evil, it’s just technology and at its core, it’s a change machine. This machine has the power to bring Superman back.
We can come back to this immensely complex Janus-headedness of the change-machines as we see them now (a)rise (for instance, in non-fungibility), but for now let’s stay with the idea that the change-machines by their very nature iterate their elements beyond the scope of simple identity (invariance) and reification (substance). Insofar as change machines change (which fact may be marked by a flash or lightning slow-mo) they enter into a kind of universal eidetic variation of individual elements which precisely within such a variation provide non-reifiable and thereby dissolved ‘data’. This happens here in the case of ‘film’ and of ‘philosophy’; the thought-image is no more primarily an image than the image-thought is primarily a thought. Since reification itself is an unreliable element, no one concept stands out and fully resists the dissolving force of variation, and this even includes the reification or one-off token ‘one-off extinction’. In the ‘Epilogue’ to JL 2021, we hear that the world is ‘hurt, broken, unexchangeable’. This non-variability of the world generates through its own vulnerability a Cinematic Universe of extensions and individual dissolves, which is to say that anti-life elements are subject to universes of unbound native resurrection. To repeat, since there is no reification, not even the label ‘one-off extinction’ exists. In this way, the figure of a de-extincted Superman is not just a narratological part or character but an extender in this universe of unbounded resurrection(s). When we look at and enjoy Henry Cavill as Superman, his steeliness is not a comic book fantasy and interpassive jouissance of the superhuman but an exact replica of what unbounded resurrection means, namely, the point where no one term holds still enough in the very place of reification to dominate, including ‘one-off extinction’, Being, or Singular Event. The cinematic universe of the fully extended Snyder cut therefore brings together by amateur fanfic hints a fully extended universe, a whole universe and not just its parts (the previous films and the non-Snyder cut for instance). We flash here and there between cinematic plasticity and all its figures and between all the tropes of philosophical plasticity as they substitute themselves for in and out of the places of both plasticity sets at once. This is the extent of what the change-machine comes to mean, whether in Part 4 of the film or in Malabou’s reading of The Turning in The Heidegger Change. The relation to Being itself changes, or is cinematic and extended through and through, and this means we may say the same of the relation to anti-life (extinction), and Heidegger does not fail to say this when he uses the phrase, which Malabou changes in translation, ‘where oblivion so turns and abides so that it is no longer oblivion’. Put never simply enough, extinction changes.
Just as the term Gestell is itself a term in place of itself in order to be switched on, so the language-element put in-swirl by a ‘film’ like JL 2021 distributes, magnifies, cuts up, montages, iterates, and dissolves a number of lexical bits and syntagma, for example the words ‘anti-life’, or the very term ‘change-machine’, not to mention ‘Motherbox’, and then implied and explicit elements such as ‘resurrector’, ‘extinctic’, ‘super-extinctor’, ‘if this is it’, ‘the not yet’, ‘the now’, ‘the now is you’, Einblick (entering, bleeping, insight), Einblitz (in-flashing), Being itself as einzig, and even the Joker’s dream question towards the end, ‘I often wonder how many alternate timelines do you destroy [sic] the world because frankly, you don’t have the cojones to die yourself?’ The Joker raises the question of extended, iterable perishability that is central to the film: in which universe, on what timeline, are we? Where Heidegger thinks the presence of the present that goes through the change-machine of Gestell as lightning, the screen of the extended cut of JL 2021 is often streaked with super-lightning. It is as if the Joker’s question is included all along, saturating all parts of the the whole Cinematic Universe as a matter of hopefree eidetic variation. This in turn is why the action happens to be on this Earth in the film in a way that is not just open to chance: anti-life is found here, says Steppenwolf to his master in what is a weirdly impassioned speech. In other words, the secret to the iterability of earth as itself a lightning-image stops and defines itself here—although at the end of the film it will of course be extended again with a multi-iterative ‘TBC’. How many timelines need to be destroyed, therefore, before the secret of iteration is embraced and affirmed in a hopefree fashion now? This is, after all, why Batman brings the Joker along.
Here is what Steppenwolf says:
I have found the primitive planet. The world that fought back. It is Earth. The Anti-Life Equation is carved into the surface of this very world. I have seen it, I have looked with my own eyes.
Steppenwolf is the envoy of the Darkseid elite, which is to say of the New Gods guided by his uncle the supervillain Darkseid, the brother of Heggra. In the film Steppenwolf is saying that Earth is the only world that Darkseid ever lost. Steppenwolf’s discovery, even in an extended universe where the change boxes are ‘anonymous among a trillion worlds’, is that Earth is ‘the primitive planet’. ‘Primitive’ here is a diss but may also be taken in the mathematical sense that Earth is a primitive in an unbounded theory of change sets. In Lincoln Michel’s ‘Worldbuilding Doesn’t Need to Build Everything’ newsletter, he discusses the functioning of ‘extended universes’, noting that what is possible is ‘a world in a single shot’. That is, the notion of ‘worldbuilding’ has itself been changing such that the extended universe which was previously only the domain of the nerd has now become part of the foreground. ‘The extended universe is no longer the extension.’ In JL 2021, which is the extension of the fifth film of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), this is the case in a more (and less) literal sense in that the already-extended-and-now-further-extended universe of the battle between New Gods and the Justice League plays out there where the change-machines sleep ‘anonymous among a trillion worlds’.2 When we think of Steppenwolf’s speech we can in fact think of the written notes of courses on the concept of nature give by Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in the 1950s. These notes focus on a posthumous fragment by Husserl known as ‘The Original Ark, Earth, Does Not Move’ and present a wholly new way of looking at the lifeworld of the Earth. For example:
But, no matter what idealization comes about, it changes nothing in relation to our primal coexistence on one Earth.
This presents the main view. In the same way that the extended universe is just that, anonymity elements being developed across sextillion worlds, so the camera and kinesis of phenomenological variation can only come back to the primitive planet. When we look at the primitive planet what we see in available variability is the anti-life equation, which is to say the faciality of geology as the graffiti matheme of extinction. This too is unchanged by no matter what amount of cinematic idealization. Cinema, after all, is the most magical and universal of arts (insofar as it subsumes all the others), but also cannot be dissociated from the entire arc and ark of light production, namely the immortal jouissance trapped in ‘stored sunlight’ that defines carbon transfer to the atmosphere and also film stock itself, digital or otherwise. Cinema, even in its most primitive forms, begins as de-extinction and pure abstraction, and this both removes it from the predictable round of idealization and yet also means it comes back to this point of origin as a struggle. The Superman story in Snyder’s hands, for example, begins with a scene of extinction on planet Krypton, which is destabilized from mining of the planetary core. But the question is still the Joker’s one, how many iterations before the sense of ‘extinction’ itself is changed, including from the meaning ‘extinction’ itself?
The Absolute (Absolute Intelligence)
Well, let us say that the theory of large cardinals is certainly as real, if not more so, than the big bang of the universe or global warming.—Alain Badiou, L’immanence des vérités, my translation
Well, let’s just say that the theory of large cardinals is definitely as real as death, if not more so.—Anonymous, ‘Towards A New Theory Of The Absolute’
The variability of elements is not (yet) (fully) limited by finding itself back on a ‘primitive’ earth (this one, our own). Perhaps instead this is where the change machines are most at work and most incredible. Both the New Gods and the Justice League are, as it were, obsessed and magnetised by the Earth, despite the anonymity of a trillion worlds, and this is no doubt because as Merleau-Ponty said already,
Every other planet is earth.
This statement (all too simple, not simple enough, more simple than the simple itself, and quantically simple) is a gathering-point, where again we must all enter in, serpents dreaming on the mound that is Heaven-on-earth, or the ‘V’ of absolute formal ontology. The mound here could be the scene where the League gathers to contemplate the mechanism of the change-machine and recognises that the procedure may be repeated with Superman. But it’s also the mound that repeats throughout Close Encounters of the Third Kind (you have to be indoors and take over the house with soil to see it echo on the TV). The movements in JL 2021 come together with the assertion that every other planet is earth being shared among the activants on all sides, since both Steppenwolf and the Justice League recognise that the end of the world is happening in a way that is cosmopolitically monogeologic—on this earth alone among the trillion worlds. The contrast with Melancholia here is instructive. In von Trier, we know for certain that life is only on earth and not for long. Despite a second rogue planet appearing and triplicate moons (if we include that rogue planet), the film’s vision is strangely monodic (pure monogeologism). In JL 2021, on the other hand, it is as if we imagine world(s) there so that Earth exists for us in its (their) image. The earth is given to what the Husserl fragment calls ‘reiterability’ or to what Reza Negarestani in Intelligence and Spirit calls after Kant ‘collective productive imagination’. Earth travels, as it were, through trillions of available positions (‘worlds’ and ‘universes’ of unbounded sense) to indicate, as Negarestani puts it, that ‘what seems inevitable in our world is avoidable if not extinct’. Such a use of the cognates of ‘extinction’ is always perhaps slightly unfortunate, confusing ‘death’ with actual ‘extinction’, in a sphere in which variability seems to risk the life out of itself, and yet what we are saying is that this otherworld integration is part of the change-machine and may change and disintegrate the term ‘extinction’ itself.
At a crucial moment in ‘Datum 10’ of Intelligence and Spirit Negarestani refers to ‘what Sellars—following Plato—calls cosmopolitics or cosmological politics’. The allusion here, despite Negarestani’s sometime ban on the ‘continental’, could just as well be to Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. In fact, it is hard to not argue that Husserl’s posthumous fragment on the ark of the earth remains the most advanced formulation of the eidetic availability of the earth among a trillion anonymous worlds. It gives that availability itself sense, just as the Joker’s presence (facing away in the dream) conjures the Batman to determinate speech. The fragment anticipates not just JL 2021 and cosmopolitical collective imagination but Laruelle’s recent work on the shift from the dimension of the World to the dimension of the Universe. Since everything goes via what Husserl calls ‘foundational investigations of the phenomenological origin of spatiality’, i.e. Nature as such, then his own formulation remains foundational (his text contains, by implication, a reduction of Einstein). Derrida will devote a long footnote to the fragment in his ‘Introduction’ to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and write as follows (please forgive the long quotation, which is here necessary):
But toward the end of the text, the Earth takes on a more formal sense. No longer is it a question of this Earth here (the primordial here whose factuality would finally be irreducible), but of a here and a ground in general for the determination of body-objects in general. For if I reached another planet by flying, and if, Husserl then said, I could perceive the earth as a body, I would have ‘two Earths as ground-bodies.’ ‘But what does two Earths signify? Two pieces of a single Earth with one humanity’. From then on the unity of all humanity determines the unity of the ground as such. This unity of all humanity is correlative to the unity of the world as the infinite horizon of experience, and not to the unity of this earth here. The World, which is not the factuality of this historical world here, as Husserl often recalls, is the ground of grounds, the horizon of horizons, and it is to the World that the transcendental immutability attributed to the Earth returns, since the Earth then is only its factual index. Likewise—correlatively—humanity would then only be the facto-anthropological index of subjectivity and of intersubjectivity in general, starting from which every primordial here can appear on the foundation of the Living Present, the rest and absolute maintenance of the origin in which, by which , and for which all temporality and all motion appear.
The earth here is the only factual index of worlds, which is to say of our universal sense of worlds, or even logics of worlds. Even if there are other earths, named in whatever way, arising before me, at whatever time (past, present, to come), there is still only one earth, but this Earth is in fact already not this one, my earth, but the sense ‘Worlds’. Let us hold off on a full philosophical exposition by diving back into the worlds of the change-machines which, as we have been saying, have the capability to change at deep levels, including the ability to change the terms of change themselves. As Aurora Brainsky-Roth puts it in ‘True Demon Ending: How Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne Perfected the RPG’, the question of the absolute or of an absolute change is reached in gameplay when a decision is reached about how ‘not only to change the world, but to change how it changes’. Just as ‘Being’ and ‘Gestell’ themselves are subject to change, so change itself. And so, for now, the Absolute. Change itself changes in the change-machines. Perhaps it is only change that changes, ever. It hands itself over again and again as point of invariance amid fragments to available reiterability.
Again, therefore, let us recall that this is how Superman is de-extincted. The changeful change technology had varied outside itself once (with Cyborg) and so may be used again, this time with Superman. All enter in to make the fragment-Decisions of the Absolute:
At this moment instead of arguing with one another, the soon-to-be Justice League all arrive at the same conclusion as the audience. ‘If it was used to bring Cyborg into this world, it can be used on Superman too.’
What can be varied, will be varied. Since the word ‘extinction’ exists, it (word and thing) can be and will be repeated. As it may be repeated, it is no longer directly reifiable (extinction is not a word). What this means is that language is already a cosmology, grammar already a cosmopolitics. We can vary a single shot or take it to be a whole extended universe (with or without nerdy detail), or we can work back from the sense of ‘worlds’ already contained, from the point of view of a certain transcendental childhood (what Badiou calls the ‘school of decision’), in the word ‘earth’. Badiou has a rightful place here since this primary in-variance is also the rightfully beauteous place of the empty set: here is a set into which any set of any type of thing may be placed, including the set, and the place of the set itself, ad infinitum, and so on, etc. There is something belonging to eternal childhood, then, in the very thought of what a set is. When it comes to the end of the world, we can always reply with a primitive. The danger here is not in an escape velocity into the infinities but in (not allowing) the truth that we can always just think more infinities.3
Primary in-varianceness leads us in the following direction: let us say we take the word ‘extinction’, then such taking means we can vary the word ‘extinction’. We may also turn the word into a single letter, for example ‘e’, which is to say an elementary matheme for the word ‘extinction’, a cypher. As we have been saying, the action film in its extended universe status plays with this matheme constantly, just as it plays with letters.4 From Man of Steel to JL 2021 we are playing (seriously, and not) with the notion of saving the world. When the young superman is pictured reading Plato’s Republic in Man of Steel he is interrupted (just as Lois is when she about to spell out ‘super’ from Superman’s chest), but this is also the origin of the super(man) story as the whole story of republican idealisation, what Derrida calls the ‘whole story of the eidos all the way up to the Husserlian interpretation of idealisation or production of ideal objects as the production of omnitemporality, of intemporality qua omnitemporality’. Again, all we need here is a single word, in this case eidos. The eidos is the whole story because it contains every super-story to come, which is to say every type of variance. The earth—our earth—is an otherworld for Steppenwolf and yet it becomes the primary earth for him because on it is written the equation (matheme) for anti-life (extinction qua iterable extinction). In the same way, in Man of Steel when Zod and his crew escape the Phantom Zone and travel to Earth, Earth again becomes the only planet on which other planets, regardless of their factual existence or not, can be thought. In a sense, what we are saying is that every other planet is every (bit) (an) other planet, and when Zod enters the space of our homeworld with a global broadcast address demanding the surrender of Superman or war, we experience the montage of worlds as sheer eidetics, that is as the moment when two Earths as ground-bodies rise up in vision. This is perhaps why the klaxon broadcast across the world’s TV sets of ‘YOU ARE NOT ALONE’ is so thrilling, not just because it is the moment of evidence that you really are not, but because the experience of two Earths as ground bodies is inherently exciting.
We think of Melancholia again, perhaps this time less as a contrast. The sky with triplicate moons (two moons and an extra planet), and the oncoming planet Melancholia means the earth is felt and seen in this moment of eclipse as if we consider it, the homeworld, as an otherworld. The unbounded experience of this turning around and back and out (in-variance) is exciting because it allows one to speak again of anonymity and of a world anonymous among the trillion. Badiou speaks of the generic set as the ontological designation of the universal, as ‘something sufficiently anonymous to exist in another world or in another context, exactly like a universal truth can be recognised as such in very different civilizations’. This is akin to Superman’s ‘S’ symbol misread in effect by Lois, this ‘S’ which also turns out to mean in this world exactly what Lois chooses it to mean, even though it remains an anonymous Kryptonian symbol for ‘hope’.
The change-machine in both Snyder and Malabou is a converter (Wandler, in Heidegger’s German changed so much by Malabou’s reading). The ‘S’ is variable and anonymous (in-variant), mixing the omnitemporality, intemporality, omnitemporality, and intemporality qua omnitemporality that the young Derrida carefully describes in the interplay of earth-bound and non-earth-bound idealities (closed and unbound) that go to make up the birth of mathematical objects. In the same way, the ‘e’ or ‘E’ or even ‘ext’ is variable, passing out of its present genre into other forms, changing, and changing its own change and tokens. What would the plural of ext be? The historicity of death, the absolute universality of extinction. And what this means is the going itself: to go, to change out, to change out of a present genre into another, to be available to another, to dissolve, to be adamantine in impermanence. What we glimpse here in a change-machine that is a hybrid of the cinematic and the philosophical in the same way that Superman is a hybrid of Earth and Krypton is that extinction thought to the end, in the retake, takes us to how the letter (‘e’ for example) becomes one phenomenon among others. A limit is reached, an epilogue. As Badiou puts it, anonymously, a limit really is reached to the number of infinities, and this is where V marks the finitude (of infinities). Heidegger read by Malabou expresses this limit as a change to oblivion itself. We can also express it in terms of purely formal ontology and set theory and say that ‘e’ cannot be a truth in the domain of the absolute because of the ordinals. Or, that it may become such a truth but at the cost of superfluousness. The larger infinities are there too, in that domain, and counted, hence the letter becomes, pro tem, changeful, inoperative.
Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked
The fruits and tried on the earth, and it is law,
Prophetic, that all must enter in
Like serpents, dreaming on
The mounds of heaven.—Hölderlin, Mnemosyne (tr. Hamburger)
This might be a good moment to reread the end of Ray Brassier’s essay ‘Jameson On Making History Appear’: ‘But the evocation of “flashes of light” registered in a “diseased” and presumably unseeing eye seems to imply some sort of transmissibility across disconnected worlds. Is this transmission due to some unknown kind of causation?’’
Infinities, and not finitude, are the only resource.
Think of the scene in Man of Steel where Lois Lane (Amy Adams) asks what the ‘S’ symbol on Superman’s chest stands for. Superman states that it is not an ‘S’, but rather the Kryptonian symbol for ‘hope’. Lois is about to say it could stand for ‘sss . . . ’ and then there is an interruption.