Be absolute.
Where we are now, living under possible end of the universe conditions as if under a sky nobody may turn their eyes to, conditions which are not and not not that, I would argue that where we are now, what this place allows, for the moment, what this place allows for in a meanwhile is nothing more than the ongoing and absolute availability for claims to be made; it allows for more claims to be made—for claims to be made on and about the absolute, about the absolute as end, about the end as absolute end of all ends, the end as a musical end of time, the end as a form of musical telepathy, the end as what comes when we are not here to be concerned by it, the end as what comes after interrupted teleology as the AI of a physical God, the end that is not for everybody, that end that is not even for nobody at all, the end that long ago was unable to combine telos and goal, the end where one must be now as some kind of place and placing. As one feels it, there is here, if here still is, and assuming a human reader is still available, the loss of an absolute before any I can think it, and the potential loss of an absolute just as the I is about to think it. Where we are now is therefore perhaps this: my claim is on the absolute, the absolute universal of this universe’s end, the absolute end, the absolute coincidence of anthropic and universal time, and I, the speaker who makes this claim and makes it clear and is left with only this claim, am absolutely the one who saw this lucidly—no one saw the end of the universe qua absolute except I, this will have been the secret of a lifetime that may now be threatened as such, the meaning of the angel, the last angel, the post-final angel, the angel that came after the afterlife angel, the angel that saw all the way through several internets and allowed the internet to see all the way through it, the angel that came after heaven had stopped starting, to make all these claims, and to say something that wasn’t even love, this angelic end that will be the end after the end that is not the end of the end, this End that will have had nothing to do with us. Therefore,
my claim is on the absolute and only I can and will have made it.
Bernard Stiegler wrote before his death of a movement ‘ultimately, of the universe as a whole, which once again becomes the kosmos insofar as it invites, hosts and in some way houses the negentropic’. Stiegler’s effort, especially when very late on in his writing trajectory he allowed the absolute claim and lesson of Greta Thunberg’s speech to make itself heard, was to bring a sense of a universe ending back within the fold of the cosmological. What is forgotten is extinction qua extinction and yet within that, perhaps even more so, what is forgotten is the granularity of extinction and the way it repeats and stretches out to the universal horizon, replicating there, merging sidereal memory rituals and mechanistic forgetting. This claim on the absolute—made by ‘I’ alone—may resemble the opposite of a politics or it may resemble an uncomfortable echo of all in politics that currently pretends to be too absolute, and yet this view itself is perhaps not complete enough.
Todd McGowan, in his Emancipation After Hegel , writes:
When we refuse to think absolutely and remain content with some particularity, we create the space in which other particulars that want to impose themselves on the world can arise. The absolute idea reveals the lie at the heart of all such particulars and shatters their fantasy of triumphing over the trauma of contradiction. The risk of fascism doesn’t lie in the direction of the absolute but in the turn away from it. The path to universal freedom lies through thinking absolutely.
Let us not avoid the absolute, in time, all in good time, just in time. If we know to say this absolutely, it is because we know to say it from the beginning. The claim I make on the absolute is a pathway to freedom because it allows me to construct the absolute, to repeat it, and to make it subject to shattering, to format it into dissolution (the absolute qua end of the universe conditions becomes generic), to correct the aspect ratio, to sign it (#on this or that), and so on. The end of the universe I claim can absolutely be repeated, I claim. Extinction qua end of the universe conditions manifests itself as the freedom of a claim precisely to the extent that it contains reiterableness within its own domain, whether that domain be merely lexical or even non-linguistic or absolutely neither of the two. Thought’s own freedom, the freedom to think the absolute qua extinction as end of the universe conditions, is what allows intelligence to co-opt niche finality, and to not turn away from it. The absolute as thought’s absolute freedom to think iteratively is the freedom in which the end of the universe qua end of the universe may have a voice, be a claim, and find itself there, like an infinite softness, and with this one word alone (extinction, say) perhaps be disbanded.
But may extinction be repeated? This is the absolutely cosmological question. Between the absolute beginning and the absolute end of a world, there is already the minimal (perhaps always already multiversal) space of a repetition. Or, to take advantage of a certain atomic simplicity and even be impressed by something more simple than simplicity, repetition of extinction may introduce itself just if the level of saying extinction, and then extinction, and nothing more, is a level that is intelligible. The first of these extinctions, distanced in the space and time of the surface of the screen or page only by a micrological leap or pause, finds itself repeated, and soon again, in the second of the extinctions, finding the same, as if we encounter an important triplicate. In Lacan the freedom to write out is an eminently mathematical freedom; the absolute matheme is first of all an absolute right to formalization. As Alenka Zupančič puts it in What IS Sex?,
This is what Lacanian mathemes are all about. A matheme is not simply a formalization of some reality; rather—and as Lacan himself puts it—it is the formalization of the impasse of formalization.
The turn to mathematizable science in language is not a casual hobby or side interest on Lacan’s part, nor a stylistic fancy, but an expression of the pressure impossibility imparts to and impresses on experience in the zone of signification, there where mathemes and poetic claims may accrue. The subject in Lacan, one might say, is never the one who thinks or the one who says it all, but the one who is encouraged to go there in good time and make a claim on the absolute and to do so clearly as nobody else save I can or will. The impasse the subject here finds could hardly be more compacted and poignant, the crossing point as well as difference between extinctions of worlds and extinction qua end of the universe conditions as extinction of universes.
From the point of view of a Lacanian handler of the claim, what passes here might pass quickly, and necessarily so, as a mathematizable claim about the end of the universe qua absolute and its reiterableness in the impasse of at least one matheme. We can name extinction, for instance, with the letter e, in the style of Lacan’s mathematical writing wherein a letter may also be, in effect, a number. E may be placed right next to, almost on top of, e. Like a zero and a one.
The impasse in this case is impossible repetition. We already have two extinctions, or even two ends of the universe qua absolute. The matheme of the end(s) of the universe qua absolute scarcely adds anything save repetition, just if it is considered as a writing of the absolute as freedom: go ahead, formalize, be absolute, and do so in a mathematics with which nobody can be completely familiar in good time, but even so, there is still a need to go. For Stiegler towards the end of his life, the analytic pass he took was to see the matheme of the absolute qua end of the universe as finding its origin in Greek speech (Sophocles’ Antigone) and its update in Greta Thunberg, who is an Antigone caught in the impasse of much more than a threat to the burial rites of her city. In essence, where Antigone concerns herself with her brother Polyneices, Thunberg is positioned by the impossibility, the impasse, of formalizing the (transcendental perhaps of the) end of the universe in speech. Polyneices represents the rightful burial of the immediate generation to come, who are in fact assured to come—such is the Greek kosmos in its most obvious codified sense—whereas Greta’s lesson has to do with having no (future) forbears or genealogical consistency at all, since life itself and its possibility may be about to be cut off. In other words, the end of the universe qua absolute comes into view at something like a bottleneck of competing claims about the absolute, about finitude, about quantum longtermism, about the transcendental perhaps, and about the availability of the sense of extinction. The speech of Thunberg is for Stiegler speech making a claim on the absolute just if speech itself may allow itself to be shattered against what the end of all life and the end of the possibility of life would mean. Antigone moves within the family circle of death, Greta within the shattered openness of the moment where extinction qua end of the universe cancels death (filiation) itself.
Be, absolute.