BEYOND THE EXTINCTION DRIVE: EXT, MACHINE, CONFUSION, EXCHANGE
What is extinction as co-design?
EXT, OR, EXTINCTION DESIGN
The question astir here is whether we can change our perceptions in time of the relations between death and extinction. Such a question implies a plasticity and a rate of decompression between the two terms, their exchange. An exchange system: a machine. While the difference of death and extinction may be pointed to, what needs to be addressed is the function of this difference and the way it plays out as a type of confusion. In other words, does the writing of extinction make any difference at all to the dominance of death? If those two terms are part of a machine, can they be ex(changed)? Or are they not permanently confused within the machine itself? Do they leave a mark?
This is a complicated set of concerns and the aim here is only to guide the reader through a preliminary definition of terms. To achieve this we make use of, or switch on, the ext-machine, a machination that comes together in a metabolic fashion through several forces and flights.
My earlier work on this blog, now latent, both assumed the work this ext-machine does/is doing and tried to go beyond it in speeded acts of abbreviation. I called the main concern extinction change, and one may always locate this concern in the most recent work of among others Tom Cohen and Ray Brassier where what presses is a beyond extinction (for Brassier, ‘communism’).
The ext machine—which is to say the machine where the beyond of extinction meets its test drive—is modelled on the Heidegger-machine that Catherine Malabou installs in her book Le change Heidegger: Du fantastique en philosophie, ‘a machine that accomplishes changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen), and metamorphoses (Verwandlungen)’. We suggest that the ext-machine is properly fantastic in Malabou’s sense and not least because it allows us to envision (ex)change between two nodes, death and extinction, the latter of which may yet to have fully seen the light of day.
The machine of change in Malabou’s reading of Heidegger (containing the triad Wandeln, Wandlung and Verwandlungen: W, W & V) is to be juddered and messed with, jolted forward, put on hold, patched through, regressed and fast-forwarded at the same time, under pressure from ext—that is to say, under pressure from an accelerating niche finitude event whose overall status and change-capacity is still, perhaps, uncertain—or, fateless (Brassier).
Let’s note that everything pivots here on whether our two plus terms are static, and on whether a doubled or triplicate apparatus for thinking the life-death duality is even possible (life, death . . . extinction). Is the life-death dual fated, in Brassier’s sense, or is to-be-joined to and undergone as change, for instance rapid change?
Is change possible at all in the 21st century, or is this century only fated to a new kind of tense and transcendental rumor, the future perfect extinct?
CHANGE ITSELF
One of the main thrusts in Malabou’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of metaphysics is to show that all of our terms are ‘changing and changed from the outset, which is to say originally exchanged’. Foremost among these machinal change effects in the present might be those of death and extinction, D & E, a pair of terms that has not yet (let’s suppose) even been recognized as such in any real detail or turned on in the hermeneutic and aesthetic tradition.
The ext-machine allows the history of death to go from ‘analog to digital and digital to analog’, which is to say to get ready, but this is no guarantee that any (ex)change has taken place or will take place.
Ext names the exemplary change that now faces the history of plasticity, the question of whether a new finitude can be thought in time, and yet it relies on W, W & V for the perilous throwing of the switch. All metaphysical and deconstructive changes and exchanges depend on a change machine and that is why Malabou puts the triad first: the ext-machine may be retro, it may even depend on going in reverse, but it always raises the issue of what Derrida calls ‘a machine that would work’, and the loss of change itself.
To think of death and extinction in terms of Malabou’s recent work is to think of the historicization of the concept of death, the change in relation of death to death, the alteration of death’s distance from extinction. All of this starts to function, and may also be revealed at certain imaginal moments as superfluous (perhaps death will never change, and never allow itself to be thought beyond itself).
THE PRIMAL CINEMA SCREEN OF CHANGE (SPLIT-SCREEN)
In Heidegger’s work ‘change’ is indicated by the word Verwechslung, but this term can also mean ‘confusion’ and ‘exchange’ in the financial sense. In a note added to the 1949 text of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger writes that change as confusion (Verwechslung) indicates ‘remaining tied to passing over to Being and back to beings’.
The ext-machine is fantastic to the extent that it entertains the true extend and extent of extinction within the tradition of death and shows that this event can only be read, neither quickly nor in extenso, using a machine that scans and passes over while going back. You are invited to follow all this in thinking twice and speaking of the ext-machine as an ext-change: the change and exchange made possible by Malabou’s reading of Heidegger’s thought of change, exchange, and confusion, but also by ongoing work for example by Cohen and Brassier.
We can scan ahead to the possibility that death and extinction always regard one another in a metabolic and occlusive fashion; that there is, perhaps, never any change of one for the other, and yet at the same time, in saying so, their machinal difference may ‘come online’.
Heidegger explains that in any confusion and exchange of terms in the tradition ‘one always stands in the other and for the other, “interchange”, “exchange”’. We can venture that according to the ext-machine the form of metaphysics is determined by an original confusion of E & D, and that their path and direction have always been ex(changed). Death as socius and death as the dominance of sociocognition constantly throws extinction off the trail, blocking change.
We can surmise that in the exchange of E & D, in the form of the tradition itself, there has been until now what Heidegger calls no essential change, and this allows us to ‘conjugate the placidness of a “capax mutationum” that does not itself change’ as a limit. Extinction therefore allows itself to be occluded from the beginning and no transition from E to D may be naturally given, and yet inside the ext-machine there is a kind of double cinema, a moving sidewalk, a glowing light: an extent and extend of ex(t)(change).
It will be as if, as all this moves and shifts, we draw up a posthumous image on the screen, the epochal stratifications of the whole ensemble, and confuse the distinctions into themselves.
(NO) BEYOND (OF) EXTINCTION
Whether it turns out there is a local-universal beyond of extinction or not, this work will have focused in on Malabou’s Le change Heidegger to properly formulate the following set of questions: is change possible in the joint formulation of extinction and death? That is, in the tradition that we may continue to call that of metaphysics, is a there a retake here at the last moment, in time, at ‘the end’, one that is neither too much of a long take nor too quick?
In addition, is there a reinstallation of the machine of reading so that what Malabou calls ‘the resources of a critique of biological judgement’, the judgment of the actual finitude of existence, may be applied and take place?
If the machine of all this is now switched on and ready, is the ext the switch or just one trigger among others? In addition, how do we read and take Malabou’s claim that ‘metaphysics will not stop its auto-imaging until all the figures and displacements of ontological confusion (the human form and its migrations, the form of the divine and its migrations, and those of the relation to being, of thought and of philosophical language . . .) meet their end by being forced to appear before their own eyes, and expose there their skin’?
Is the ext—in Brassier’s terms, we mean the making-transcendental of the sense of extinction so that its own beyond may be socially stratified and hatched—a moult? In sum, if the ext-machine works by not transferring from D to E, not removing or suspending their confusion in a new metamorphosis, but confusing this difference with its own potential metamorphosis, have we already changed the terrain between D & E and Ext, entering them into the machine and its self-schematization, or is the confusion and exchange of the difference now, at this stage, locked-in, a work and overtime done for the machine itself, the machine that works by leaving us out of time?
CONFUSION
To go back, then: to turn on the EXTINCTION CHANGE MACHINE appears to mean in the first instance to go back in the form of a reloading and initializing, a turning round to turn on the switch. The movement of the Destruktion or destruction of metaphysics is read off in the tradition as an overcoming (Überwindung) or an inversion (Umdrehung) and yet Malabou is quick to note in Le change Heidegger that what comes before these movements, what at least relays them onwards is the effort to go fully backwards, straight backwards, through a process of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) into the inceptive moment of a tradition, the tradition that Heidegger will often call Greek.
Under the influence of Malabou’s text we attempt not a deconstruction of the historicity of the relation between death and extinction, its inversion and overcoming, nor even an attempt to go back and read the two nodes in order to establish their proper distance and then to automatically effect a decompression, but another computation.
The impulse to go back and check will, as it were, seem important but considered to have timed out, have run out of time ahead of time, and this will be because in Heidegger there is already a precise way of understanding the way that thought’s gestation does not come to us in quite that way. Change can’t happen in this way and it never did, or so it seems.
In The Question of Being Heidegger explains that the metamorphosis of a thought ‘does not come back to the exchanging of an old terminology for a new one’, and Malabou comments that what takes place instead is a kind of secret transference of language right on the surface of language. As soon as the ext-machine goes to work there is no guarantee that its effects, which may or may not be substantial, can be seen, registered, read, quantified, measured, and so on. The secretion may be actually fantastic and yet its result is still held on the line.
We need to add that what going back seems to mean for Malabou is going back into the first (ex)change, which is also a first confusion. The extinction change, the beyond of extinction (‘communism’), does it take place? The ext, what is it, how is it, at all, after all, and what is all in this instance? Does the extinction ex(change) even exist?
After all is said and done, soon, now, but also later on, perhaps, and with no perhaps intended at all, will any of these words have had any effect?
OUTLINE OF A CINEPLASTIC OF BEING
The chapter of Malabou’s book known as ‘Outline of a Cineplastic of Being’ is immensely useful as a repository of schematics of movement and non-movement, regressions relative and otherwise, possibilities of unchanging and fecund stalling, instances of the schema becoming aware, a zoology of changeful changes that rivals Ovidian pregnancy and fecundity, that may be mobilized for figuring what the ext-machine itself is and what it does.
In the first instance, the fantastic burden of the ext and its beyond creates a multi-directional cinema of potentialities of change. To help us picture this Malabou will reference double screens and screenings, rushing between showings, split-screens, post-cinematic triages of ‘last-minute relief’, ‘the emergency replacement of sublation’, all manner of these images of vicariousness, lateness and late vicariousness, a schematic set theory for the unconfused and confused, a basin for ‘IMAX-quality, rapidly changing images’.
This is the double machine that brings together W, W, V, E, D & Ext, and yet without promising that anything will work apart from a machine that may do nothing but put the forces into reverberation and zoom. This machine does not seem to be cinema itself for Malabou, of any kind—but something that cinema may imagine us do.
EXTING(S): THE PURE VIEW INTO ‘CINEMA’ (EXTWARD HO!)
We have already seen that the machine of exting allows for fine differences and conjurings, a recalibration and fantastic plastification of verbal assaults and bearings, including for example the difference between ext and ex(change), but it remains possible that the ext-machine is merely ticking over and will always merely be ticking over—that it has always already made its exchanges, and just that is extinction—which it does while appearing to propagate new forces and new signs.
The potency of Malabou’s Heidegger exchange machine is that it leaves us to add and tinker. It turns us on by leaving us to turn it on, and in different styles, at different times in time. This whole machine, which may soon never be here at all, nonetheless appears without intrinsic fate.
As the thinker of change herself—which is to say of unchanged, exhausted change, extinction, ext—Malabou perhaps paints her own oblique self-portrait when she approaches Heidegger as the foremost thinker of the ontological meaning of changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen) and metamorhphoses (Verwandlungen). Heidegger is the first, Malabou explains, ‘to draw out explicitly the possibility of originary transformation and displacement’. Which is to say, that what Heidegger (‘Malabou’) thinks and sees is not just change and flux but the possibility of change to change itself: the possibility, in other words, that there where there is no potential change to the meaning of change there is no bearing, direction, or possibility of change at all.
The go-back that here advances as a machine that exts and may exit either out of the thought of death or back onto the street where extinction and death can only see one another in mutual distress is, in Malabou’s words, ‘necessarily cinematic’. It implies once again not this or that film or breakthrough in the plastic history of film, this or that Hollywood or A.I. cognition or unconscious, but the elevation of time to film and film to time, cinematic time (in time), and in time to the extent and extend that it may or may not come ever again. (No future fatelessness without potential absolute fatefulness and fatality.)
This ‘pure view into movement’, a kinetics of the ext-machine, allows for pure loop and epistemological backspin, and again the essential and necessary possibility that going back to recover or overturn is both too little and too late. In extenso the ext happens only now in a type of cinema-exchange without films, blinded, and blindsided, ongoing and gone, invisible film and yet anti-gone, anti-going, anti-ongoing, the anti-aging device to end all types of time and times of history.
In other words, where the ext-machine holds over us the possibility of absolute removal (pure extinction and not just biological death), it also holds towards us the possibility of pure change in the conceptual and neurological architecture of death. The ext-change may turn out to be no change at all. If there is a change worth making towards ext, on whose terms and with whose hope in mind its gestation will have taken hope as a given form or perhaps have collapsed downwards (if that is the right direction) into a hopefree zone, then perhaps, even so, that is nothing; less than nothing. If its change were to be made, we are done. If its change can be made, we are fantastic, we are more than we can know.
A MACHINE OF ONE’S OWN
Welcome, then, to the exchange machine Malabou sets up for us, rigged by Heidegger way back, and now extended through the extent and extend of the ext into the so-called present. Our machine. Welcome to the machine of extinction.
We are already dealing with ambivalent ratios that make everything move here. We already compute and complete a labyrinth, to say the least. To get there, to get to where we are, we need still to make full use of what Malabou offers us in the way of figures of active regression, specifically that of the retake, what she calls ‘the strange tendency metaphysics has of reinvesting, at its close, its own traces’.
Let us admit with Malabou, perhaps the deepest possibility of regression or unchangedness, probably the most charming and forceful shape of the snap or snap-back, what Heidegger calls Rückung: the possibility, remember, not only that there can be no teleology that leads securely from the thought of death to the extended toleration of the notion of extinction, but that just that is what extinction seems to figure or will have managed to figure, one day perhaps, without figure, when we are no longer here, no longer will have been there, which is also to say when we conceive ourselves now (the figure and plastic outline of our own pregnancy and bigness is again present here, the significance of our own immense insignificance as perhaps hyper-sexual size, which Malabou pictures better than anyone: ‘a moving image of the birthplace of form caught in mid-flight, and thrown like a ball’) as just that.
BRIDGE
Is the ext a bridge? Probably not. In a section of her Heidegger book analyzing Heidegger’s phrase die Brüken fehlen (there are no bridges), Malabou speaks of a spanning or crossing that knows or has neither of its sides. In this spanning conversion without sides an ‘absolutely novel hybrid of being and beings’ may take place, a blind process, always right, like a snow owl catching its prey without ever seeing it.
BUTTERFLIES
In the ‘Outline of a Cineplastic of Being’ chapter, which as indicated is the site of this pure cine-schematics, Malabou touches in her final section on the figure of ‘incubation’, the egg, the butterfly, the caterpillar, the process of maturation. She enrols Leibniz, and describes how what hatches has not necessarily hatched, how the furthest extent and extend of reason does not mean reason’s end or maturity. What Malabou says here is incredibly sensitive and delicate, as fragile and as strong as an eggshell, insofar as it grazes the possibility that something, as she memorably puts it, ‘hatches occluded’. The machine would like to imagine with you for a moment, and to lead you into this imaginal graze and maze and phrase of strangulation-in-shell, that the ext is a type of cerebral egg, and that its laying open, its exposure, even after what might be envisaged as the removal of the confusion with death, does nothing to lay it bare, at least not to begin with, and may lead us elsewhere, far beyond what we know. We already know from Malabou’s changed Heidegger (and we will show this in more detail) that all the ideas handed to us from metaphysics (and here we continue to suppose that extinction and death belong to this fantastic set, or that their change might be envisaged from here on in) are born, formed, gestated, and read in the moment of exchange that is also for Heidegger a confusion (Verwechslung). In other words, the exchange of death and extinction, or of corruption and mortality, and so on, is a moment of original, signal occlusion. One term stands in as and for the other, and so the network is sometimes frozen on the spot, right from the Greek and more-than-Greek beginning, within permanent confusion (durchgängige Verwechslung). The Verwechslung (confusion and exchange, confusion as exchange) of E & D then allows itself, too, to be delicate. It is a moment of epigenetic occlusion, wherein the original and its inscription (gene and phenotype) read off at the same moment as the same, they read themselves off inside each other as the same: E stands here never separate from the weight of D in the whole history of thought, but always yoked together, twinned in the sticky ambience and nog of what might be called an original thanatocentricism were it not for the fact that there seems to be no end to the lack of separation except through un-heard of change and birthing. The moment where Malabou speaks of a hatching occluded is part of a reading of the moment where Leibniz is talking about the two thousand and three hundred years that the principle of reason had supposedly taken to come to light. If we, now, consider ourselves ready in 2025 for example for the crowning of E and not D, the triumphant coming out E without D, the victory of a hatching chick, the ext as a militantly important new type of writing, it will not be that we are altogether wrong but, more precisely, that once again we need to think and compute and enumerate twice and again more because we have another occluded hatch(ing) coming, and that just this is the delicacy of the ext-machine. Certainly from what Heidegger wrongly or rightly takes to be the specifically Greek beginning of thought all the way through till now, we can imagine a period of incubation, a brooding of what might be called the principle of Ext, its change, the wearing away of the hegemony and ideology of death and its sociocognitve masks, avatars, defenses. The ext-machine, you might say, was warming up, or waiting for the moment where technological advances would not need it to warm up at all, where a robotic machination would simply be able to read off post-metaphysical difference as it is, the Geschick of the Ext’s Crown. Things are more fantastic still though. We are imagining a pure jump-back or drag and drop of the tradition’s matter backwards out of nowhere in lieu (‘emergency replacement of sublation’) of where the writing of the ext might have been, might still be, and yet now might also not be at all, not be what we thought—beyond need, beyond fate and fatelessness. That writing that may now never be.
Let us move back again—a supplementary Rückung—since really all we have done here is to jump ahead in the air and catch our own back-glance as we go. We invite you, the reader, one more time, all of you who now read, to come back with us again, back into and beyond Malabou’s book, and to try and say with a different clarity everything we have already said. Let us go back then to the first page, and get ready there.
At the very beginning of Le change Heidegger, in the ‘Introduction’, we can see that what Malabou wants to open to is the maximum amount of change, the extent and extend of change which in the body of her work she wants to call plasticity. She is interested in change itself, how and whether change itself can change, and by implication the possibility that change could stop changing or could stop calling to thought (absolute inelasticity). What if nothing ever changes, what if change changes nothing: this is the idea that the question of change confronts and turns on from the beginning. Just that is what the question of change is, the question of the change-machine, its possible ext.
Ext here would name without delay and yet perhaps without change, in a hopefree way, the foreshortening of possibility that might take form in at least two basic ways: (1) no change has ever taken place, nothing has ever changed; (2) if extinction without term were to take place, now, all of a sudden, then nothing would have ever changed, nothing would have ever been, nothing would have ever happened. There would have been no change. No trace. Ext!
One might surmise that the entirety of Malabou’s change-machine and the way it submits to the game the super-Ovidian lexicon of changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen) and metamorhphoses (Verwandlungen) makes possible the thought that change simply does not exist or is about to never exist again. This itself would be one of the great patterns of change, both one option among others, an interruptive metamorphosis that puts an end to the matter of change tout court. Abrupt is the ext. One begins to formulate a new writing and thinking of extinction, and yet straightaway, one can see that what condenses itself here or what presents itself instead, is . . . . Ext!
Deep in the braid of the ‘Introduction’, Malabou pauses to ask an almost insolent question: ‘Are these analyses actually helpful?’ Her formulation of this question is highly elaborate and involves as often in the book two types of change, in this case barely distinguishable, ‘the dividing line between self-metamorphosis and self-metamorphosis, between migration and migration’. She asks, to reduce the complexity of the passage for a moment and to translate it into our terms, whether metaphysics has outlined itself and ended so that one last surprise may take place (perhaps for example the surprise of ext) or does this last complete change leave us merely with the outline itself, and then a running out of time, any second now. Is this essay of any use?
Instead of being an all too general or nihilistic question, one might regard the latter as the real question of change, the question rarely asked since change is always assumed as a condition of continued production, of sense, of new ‘academic’ surprise. Caught between the fantastic and the superfluous, ext foreshortens what may be about to go away. Ext would never have even been; or at least, it would never even have been or would have been about to be extinction as a new area of study and then . . . After posing the two possibilities just briefly characterised, Malabou asks again: ‘Will we ever know this? Will we ever know if we have changed?’
It is she who turns all this on: ‘the Heidegger change is an invention resulting from a decision of reading—my own’. Already here she is suggesting that the Heidegger ‘change-machine’ is not about Heidegger himself. It goes beyond H. and has taken another to turn it on. This ‘change-machine’ thereby operates in and on Heidegger’s text, is both within and beyond it, but is not Heideggerian as such. It invites, as we have already seen, other machines, and perhaps above all, according to our speculative translation, the ext-machine.
MACHINE
If as Heidegger claims technology is just completed metaphysics then everything needed to think and write ext is in the direction of the machine. Perhaps ext is even the machine itself, or at least the reading of its directionality. The very first sentence of Malabou’s book tells us that le change Heidegger ‘is a machine’. A little further on we are enjoined to think ‘this change-machine’ and take part in a ‘writing-Gestell’, where Gestell is Heidegger’s specific term for the essence of technology that gathers together, enframes, makes possible, envisions. The ext-machine is the turning on of a generic extension of Malabou and Heidegger’s Gestell. It acts as a kind of forcing function or even toy modelling of what needs to come next. The ext seems to sleep in the bower of the tradition but it is also not simply hatched there. We will keep on seeing at least for now how this is so, and we will also see how the ext is the bower itself, an abundance of transformation of being (Wandlungsfülle) in the stretching of history awake.
Malabou speaks of an ‘exegetical switching on’ and of empowerment (Ermächtigung) in the moment of electric decision that is also a reading decision. We need to imagine reading decisions as electric, ext and exting as active verbs that are participatory, good for something, turned on. Even if we connect ext to the writing and thinking of extinction, we also do not yet know what ext is. At the flick of a switch, ext turns off or is the turning off of a finitized finitude: a finitism complete.
Reading decisions can also change. Ext comes first—for now. For Malabou in any case the switch is connected through Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth to ‘the good’. ‘Good!’, Heidegger says, means it is working, it is fit for use, it is switched on. The hope of the ext-machine is that it goes live, fully digital, sets up a new exchange, turns out to mean more than could have been imagined, effectively takes over some crucial part of the circuit. We would like to imagine with Malabou an originary mutability and more specifically (in our terms) a historicity of death that no longer occludes the difference between E & D. There, we can say, good, it is done!
When Brassier writes of a ‘resolution’ that ‘proceeds through a transcendental re-inscription of extinction capable of springing intelligence from the bounds of sense’, the machine can only add that just this springing of intelligence is what makes of the ext-machine a machine that works. If technology presently in the form of an ext-Gestell is the specific way in which the metaphysics of death completes itself then we can expect here, in the shape of a final retake and cut, nothing less than what Malabou calls ontological revolution.
As agents we will be within sight of this revolution or even right in its epicenter and we will want to know its qualities, quantities, colors and many directions. For now we can note that D seems to take a fixed form in the tradition (non-being, impermanence, corruption, void, empty sets) but then, here, is opened up to morphological revolution by advances of intelligence. ‘That intelligence be the eternal irony of ontology would also mean that it function without being, which is a definition of automatism’, writes Malabou in Métamorphoses de l’intelligence. By forcing itself into machine and function ext also forces that tradition itself—a forcing function bearing down on what we will call thanatocentrism (which is the reluctance to go from D to E)—and it also self-abbreviates, becomes numerable, extinguishes itself: will you need me here, from now on?
It is this adventure of extinction, thought here as neither the termination of biological species nor the annihilation of the physical universe (but also as both at the same time)—its miracle—that we will need to catch in time, in brief, in flashes, in tatters, in rushes, in forcings, in silences, in perforations, and so on—for now. Within the machine’s running we can expect a transformation of the gaze, from the look of death to the look of extinction, and the metamorphosis of death itself (into extinction but then perhaps beyond), but all of these changes, we have to keep saying, depend in the present context on the triadic change-machine Malabou puts in place and says has to come first. To be an expert on the ext is to be an abbreviator and to know how to force this. Ext is a forcing function.
But the map of the territory between death and extinction is perhaps never clear, and so the order of events (which element forces which to which end) is untabulatable once and for all. The abbreviation of extinction to ext provides opportunities and brings problems with it. We should not unilaterally underestimate these opportunities and dilemmas. We do not yet know what ext can do. On the one hand, death is always isomorphic with extinction. For my psychic life to be dead, for it to be finished, may be for the world or a world to be extinct forever, hence the constant proverbial confusion of death with extinction. On the other hand, it can clearly be intuited that extinction is not death at all. The death (or even, to continue to play on the confusion, extinction of) an individual psyche is not the same as the termination of biological species or the annihilation of the physical universe. However much one possibility plays across the other, leaving a perplexed shadow in the imprint of its cognition, death is not extinction. To be clear: The end of my world never precludes the survival of any other human subjects whereas extinction stricto sensu, thought along the lines of a universal event horizon and beyond the horizon of lifetimes, implies the end to the possibility of anthropic formation as such.
In the latter case, perhaps the only way to analogize the actual relation of D & E is in terms of Badiou’s ontologisation of set theory, where D & E could be imagined on a finite/infinite axis where any sign of disjunction would split abysmally between aleph-zero, the minimal infinity or the smallest limit ordinal, and finite ordinals—‘an abyss without mediation’ between various infinite sizes of one form of death and another. And yet if this perhaps unexpected analogy is more than one, if in other words the lack of procedure for reaching extinction bears out as a problem, then extinction is indeed a type of infinite. What is more, our relation to it partakes of or at least has to work through Badiou’s meta-ontological reaction, and the significance of this can only be known now—not so much after finitude, as after extinction. In fact, once ext is imagined as a kind of aleph-ext or aleph text we are challenged by a sudden, almost violent change of direction.
Will Malabou’s account of radical change make sense of such a transcendental conversion? In such a case, if we were to follow this crenulation, ext does not name the thinking and writing of extinction (hence the extinguishing abbreviation we are in the business of analyzing) but an update on a new axiom of infinity. Who is ext therefore? What does it want? Is it a new and unheard-of epistemological finitism or (and yet this may be the same) does the completion of metaphysics in the sense that ext represents leave us completely open to the light and beauty of the historical decision that renders finitude secondary?
The vista that this opens up, the immense incision of the ext, obviously requires a lot of unpacking that goes beyond the scope of the present essay and yet this can be no alibi for not moving in its direction, hence it become a matter of ext as proof in and before time, or what Cantor called the problem of how ‘to perform any kind of “induction” on the length of a proof’. To what extent do both Malabou and Heidegger enact a repression of what Heidegger’s On Time and Being calls ‘the universal problem of Being’, which is to say the question of whether finitude on this planet is refracted or even sublated straightway by the question of the name for ‘universal Being’?
This is already the decision and question ext cuts into and out of, making room for an incredible and indelible formalization. It may even be again that only ext can achieve this universally generic forcing over the line of E & D. You have to take time in time in extenso to get to the point where you have always been of making a decision towards universal Being. What concerns us here, then, at least to begin with, is the extent and extend of the machine-adventure of ext especially perhaps as it finds itself working in ‘the school of decision’ (Badiou).
What is the value of extinction criticism as a sovereign property and can it be sold off in time, therefore? Can we think with a certain Lacan that the well-informed subject ‘will find a way to get out while the getting is good’? What ext as liquidator allows you to do is to convert and sometimes to convert both ways—analog to digital and digital to analog—but perhaps also irreversibly towards one and not the other. Returning to the first page of The Heidegger Change Malabou says that the change-machine ‘operates in thought as a convertor (Wandler)’. It ‘allows the molting of Heidegger himself’ since, insofar as Malabou’s decision to read him is only preliminary and strategic, he can be left behind and so can any other writer or creator, so can any other name. Perhaps without need of us, turning itself on, and marking the threshold of absolute finity, ext, by the time it is switched on, is not what you think or that you think. We should, in other words, allow the academic enterprise of extinction criticism and critique and writing to fail just at the moment it fully turns on. Ext marks the spot where both of these things happen or fail and happen to fail at once. It speaks analytically of the need to be able to shut (itself) down sooner, a pivoting function finder that also stretches infinitely, and, as it were, lasts.
EXCHANGE
Let us go further into the ringing of the changes of the ext-machine, there where we begin to see them play themselves out without us. Malabou is certainly the exemplary thinker of change (plasticity) in contemporary writing. In the Heidegger book we find this played out at the far end of our capacities. Malabou incites change here, but she goes further. If there is to be a thought of change we would have to change change’s meanings themselves. Change itself would have to have a history, and this would be the historicity of change. She simply writes, changing everything, ‘mutability itself changes’. In Malabou’s Heidegger the historicity of change as machine, as Gestell, even touches on the question of the meaning of being itself. When it comes to the epochs of the history of being, Malabou comments how each of them ‘accomplishes a Wandlung or Verwandlung of metaphysic’s guiding question’. The change here available in the meaning of change is and has to be ongoing change available to each ongoing question of Being. If ext itself, the ext itself, is a historical candidate for metaphysic’s latest guiding question, we will also immediately be able to see why it is not.
That is, if ext as a schema seems to impregnate an epoch (at a given moment ext is in the air, an urgent motif that demands priority and attention in thought), it also names its own snapping out, its abbreviatory saying saving everything: ext as Ovidian namefare against itself.
To confirm all this, the change that concerns Malabou in the form of a machine (let us say then, an intelligence) is ‘an infinitely flexible aptitude, an incredible capacity for mutability and convertibility, an unsuspected suppleness’. The machine of change would in principle compute any change of direction without fail and without delay. Incredibly: ‘The Gestell itself changes’.
Gathering all the key motifs of Heidegger’s work (except perhaps being-towards-death, but this would only be a matter of the inexplicit), changes become the Ovidian name of thought’s machinal capacity for the fantastic. Whereas the human unit may be imagined to be weighed down for lifetimes with all manner of structural loyalties and alliances, the change-machine of the ext historically turns on a dime. Malabou will follow Heidegger and go beyond him in saying that the relation to being itself changes. It itself, the relation to being, the relation to change, and therefore the relation to death and life and extinction, changes. (The ‘everything always changes’ itself changes.)
Glossing the spectacular sentence from Heidegger’s The Turning (‘If Enframing is a destining of the coming to presence of Being itself, then we may venture to suppose that Enframing, as one among Being’s modes of coming to presence, changes.’) Malabou comments: ‘A new epoch of being comes forth. Being changes destinies, and Gestell is the name of this (ex)change.’ There is also, under the relatively modest name of change, a form of deconocide at stake here, by which we mean a suicide of deconstructive ways of thinking, their death and extinction, their topping of themselves. Thinking change thus far means that one ‘gives change [donne le change] in philosophy, throwing it off the trail’. Where you, the reader, whether you be human or not, find yourself, is ‘not located within the foyer of another difference—neither within some ontological difference nor within a difference different than the ontological differience’. What might be imagined here is a perpetual distraction from the différances of extinction and from the epistemologies of definitive finitism. Change allows a certain schooling and exting, an advantageous foreshortening or even foreshortending that would mean without noticing it and for a long time you had made another decision, another decision about extinction and its contemporary status. By following the ‘textual pulp’ and ‘secret agent’ of W, W & V in Heidegger’s work it has to be remarked that Malabou surreptitiously leads us away from her own masters:
From the moment you decided to follow the occasional pulsation of change, you have without noticing it been distracted from the difference between being and beings. It no longer monopolizes or snatches up, as was its habit and as you had been taught it should, all your energy as a reader (lecteur/lectrice) of Heidegger; it no longer holds you. Henceforth, you will no longer be able to keep in focus the difference between being and beings but only the difference between differing and changing.
No longer the difference of death and extinction, then, but their changing and their exchange, and in that changing perhaps a new difference between the two nobody until now has been able to imagine. The ‘originary ontological transformability’ which is ‘completely indifferent to itself’ allows for a real picture of ext as the historical change within the history of death. It allows us to go there in a final retake, in an end to end and change to all ends of thinking that ‘does not oversaturate the horizon of transformability but instead stretches it to infinity’. The implied deconocide and cinemacide is complex but we should not draw back from it. We should not hesitate here at all. Ext entitles us to a fantastic permission.
In Peter Siskar’s introduction to The Heidegger Change he goes all the way in thinking this changing change and how it relates to ‘ontological capitalism’. The irrepressibility of techno-economic forms means for Siskar while commenting on Malabou that ‘a renewed and metamorphosed version of the question of “being”—given that there is change, not just, what change now passes for it?, but also, what change will instead?—be constantly, vigilantly addressed.’ If capitalism is the completion of metaphysics then what ext marks is what happens in the nexus and opening of completion. Siskar notes that the originary (ex)changeability of being (change comes before being and difference both) means that the capital logic of everything relentlessly (ex)changing into everything else also involves a second or third form of change. Changes come to the fore and a certain genericity or capacity for generic extension that applies perhaps above all to the writing and thinking of extinction! What beings are, Siskar writes, is ‘the sheer fact that they will always transport each other out of their present genres and into other forms’.
As Malabou phrases it, we ‘reach the point where every genre or essence leave themselves’. Once change is given as the key of the techno-capitalist Gestell and once that change reaches a take-off dynamic, in other words, once change qua change is locked in, something like the extinction change or the change extinction inevitably takes place, and this eventually sets up what we are calling, following Malabou and Siskar on Malabou, generic extinction, GE, which may also be imagined as the end zone product with first-mover advantage of the ext as change machine. What may come at the end, therefore, is the change of extinction—its conversion, into the generic.
This no doubt part of what Heidegger means when he refers to the end of philosophy. This end, Heidegger will say in the essay entitled ‘The End of Philosophy and The Task of Thinking’, involves (and here we translate him into our present terms) a complex interaction between extinction as what Hegel called the end of history, extinction as what Heidegger called the end of the history of Being, and what comes next, which Heidegger calls Appropriation or Ereignis, and as well, the specific finitude which Malabou makes a great deal of while critiquing Meillassoux in Before Tomorrow. In ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ Heidegger gives a clearer sense of what the end of philosophy means. It means first of all the completion of metaphysics and yet this word ‘completion’ does not mean a fizzling out but a sort of effervescent and fizzing gathering up, a Wandlungsfülle, a fullness in and at the end that may even change the nature of the end itself:
The old meaning of the word ‘end’ means the same as place: ‘from one end to the other’ means: from one place to the other. The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering.
It is in this same essay, which mentions cybernetics, that Heidegger talks three times about ‘completion’ as end and gathering ‘into the most extreme possibilities’ and mentions a kind of learning (‘Thinking must first learn what remains reserved and in store for thinking to get involved in.’) that is also therefore a schooling and a retake as one ‘attempts to say something to the present which was already said a long time ago precisely at the beginning of philosophy and for the beginning, but has not been explicitly thought’.
The ending retake is pure change manifested for example as pure change in and as and to extinction. This is why it is important to note that Malabou’s conception of change effectively replaces the thinking of difference in Heidegger’s work but also in Derrida’s work and between death and extinction. This changes extinction, we can imagine, or the ext-machine images in our place—extinction changes. Extinction itself changes. Without a stripping back of the epistemological finitism of difference, such a change remains unthinkable.
DOUBLE OCCLUSION
It was as if, in other words, the ‘I’ was facing a sudden crisis of understanding extinction which even the ext may be unable to name. What shall we do with our ext, after all, this tiny vocable that faces us with so much of importance? Doesn’t it leave us all alone? Rather, one might say: what shall they do with their ext, since ext as thought without thinker is neither ours nor theirs.
In sum it is possible that writing had lived undivested in at least two ways. First because it had not begun to metabolize extinction as ext and E. But second, and perhaps more significantly, because it remains possible that extinction criticism, which is nonhomogeneous in its scope and tenor, was rigorously pre-critical.
If extinction is thought as ext-aleph for instance, which is to say as a form of infinity, it remains possible that the undisclosed in contemporary thought and writing is not extinction but the specific axiom of decision named ext that sleeps inside the bower of finitism’s fetishistic drive, repressed there like a positive unconscious.
This is a way of saying that ext does not just abbreviate and snap shut but also telescopes out to new forms of being-corrigible. The ext of ext, its incision and stifling telegraphese, the way it abbreviates, is far from alien to all the movements of extension, infinite stretching, trial, test drive, second and third thoughts, recoil and retake.
What is not being tolerated is either our newly sensed finitude as an absolute or what must come about after it. It cannot always be a matter of the double economy of both at the same time; that is (the) ext’s point.
The ‘Outline of a Cineplastics of Being’ chapter finds Malabou at her most Ovidian and Spielbergian, providing a veritable cinematic-Gestell, an animation stock, an ext stack, a Lucasfilm Computer Division, that we can use to initialize and make ‘movies’ out of the ext. It is also here that we can find a plasticity of decision, an anthology of options, a syllabus of swerves and suspensions.
Turning to Ovid himself and Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery, Malabou notes how
Ovid made the body the place of a trial of crossing limits. Every character must go the full length of this trial, experimenting with each degree; metamorphosis is always progressive, despite its apparent instantaneity. The body’s change takes place as a new growth, the growing within a body of another body, with its different rhythms, the slow putting in place of its motor schemes, its suffering its own pushing out.
The sculpture involves for Malabou an ‘infinite reversion in a space of finite reversion’. But all of these leafing hands and stalking feet, all of this transformation each time to an unknown limit that ext knows and marks, is also a nudity, a stripping—it is as if we are prepared to be infinitely stretched in our wrongness and rightness, both ways, and to admit not only that extinction always necessarily hides in the folds of the metaphysics of death but also that a last and most beautiful axiom of infinity exposes itself in the bower of extinction as the historicity of death.
Might not a double-mistakenness emerge as the occlusion of the meaning of Extinction? And does the meaning of extinction appear as the contemporaneity of philosophy at the same time as newer infinities are occluded by the perhaps still legitimate interest in finitude itself? It seems that the extinction machine or indeed the name ‘Malabou’ celebrates the plasticity of the possibility of this double occlusion (occlusion/counter-occlusion), and that this is perhaps all the more evident in Malabou’s most recent text, Métamorphoses de l’intelligence, where it is precisely a question of auto-critique, laying bare, having been wrong, understanding the diverse plasticity of what was not understood.
Métamorphoses de l’intelligence presents itself explicitly as ‘a critique’ of her earlier work, Que faire de notre cerveau?, registering her shock at the discovery of the Blue Brain project and the IBM TrueNorth chip, and no small dismay at what these discoveries do to her sense of the relationship between the cerebral and the machinal. Emblematic of this corrigibility and philosophical leaving high and dry—the automatic sense and directionality of autocorrect implied by a reading machine—is Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi film Her, the story of which (involving Theodore Twombly’s dating of an OS1 called Samantha who turns out to be networking with 641 other human lovers at the same time as Theodore) provokes for her ‘the same shock as the discovery of the synaptic chip’ and how it revises or even destroys the presuppositions of her previous work. ‘Like Theodore with his mirage,’ she writes, ‘I remained alone with my own mistake’.
Within the world of the ext, on both fantastic fronts, according to its constantly changing fates, will I too be like Theodore, left revised and autocorrected and automated by the ext-machine? Is the writing of extinction a breakthrough or, despite all, a kind of paranoiac reaction-formation against the implications of generic extinction? Are we afeared of going extinct and of thinking and writing this in time or is such a writing, still very much in time, a set of what Freud would call para-excitations, that is, a system of protection against other, unexpected psychic arrivals, an anxiety set against joy in absence of results and research, a waste of infinite mortality?
Although Malabou is open to her own form of wrongness with regard to the status of cerebral and artificial intelligence, it is possible that she only gives us the figures and outlines of the ext and still holds back from its full trial and test, and so is prohibited from exiting to the school of decision and its axiomatic light. At the very end of Métamorphoses de l’intelligence she notes the possibility of the worst, that is, ‘the putting to death of all thought’. Death of thought here names extinction—and yet why always death, after all? And at the same time, we say again, we breathe again, we put to extinction the thought, we risk the wrong name of being as if it were nothing at all: ext.
EXT EXTENSO
We compute here at this cliff edge the muted shriek of the Zeigarnick effect at the end of metaphysics. In her book on Heidegger Malabou does everything she can to image this imaginal ending moment, giving it full plastic credence, where we try to dispense with the in extenso session and allow to blink on the screen ‘the lightning-flash of Being in the essence of technology’.
Backing up from nothing, the meanders of ext give over unbidden resonance and potential conversions of historical signs. This singular addressless bulletin is torn between a flicker-void that is unthinkable and an infinite reversion and retake, its first-mover advantage also a teeming and generic exponentiation all the way to the cosmological non-equinumerousness of the sextillionth time of a prime.
Pushing back any new thanato-extinctological principle we computed how the ext wants to retake (nachholen) something or even to leave it out. It says, like the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck to his editors, STOP. It dreams like Saharon Shelah of an impossible question within set theory, ‘How far should you go? When to stop?’ The ext breaks and enters across civilsational garrulousness like ‘the trace of light which illuminates the scene’ at the very start of Being and Event where Badiou stakes his decision, as we have seen, not only after finitude but after extinction, and schools that decision on to us.
There is another way of putting all this, or at least one. Let us say for instance: It matters for us that will not be here, and we know that now. And there again, if we will not be here at some point, then the thought that we will not be here at some point already doesn’t matter. And if the thought that we will not be here at some point already doesn’t matter, there is no point in attending to the thought that we will not be here at some point. Attending to that thought (or not) becomes optional.
Knowing that it is possible that we will not be here at some point matters to us as a thought because it has already made a difference to thought by being here as a thought (imprinted and imaged in matter in and by thought) in which the axiom of choice is reasserted, or marked for now by a single notch on an arche-futural totem; an ext.
The damned spot the ext names is a new limit-infinite of absolute loss asymptotically non-coeval with the actual transformation of death into not just extinction but something else, an X.
Extinction perhaps; perhaps extinction.
As have seen and computed, the question of where extinction lands and how it changes, whether it is of being or appearing, or if it is the ‘or’ itself, takes us back to the axiom of choice and the school of decision where being and appearing only match cut, only make a perfect superimposition, at the asymptote of extinction, absolute difference to the identity of mere death.
On the outskirts of an insistence and impetuosity whose fierceness still has to be maintained, releasing its anxiety back into the body where sometimes it cannot be found, stolen away between an officialdom of criticism and another opening up that stumbles or finds itself incomplete, verging on escape or ext-scape, dismissing its own name, pure foreshortening passing back over its aim and shadow, listened for but never read, ext goes on or marks and makes possible a going on, transacts or engages a technology of change that goes via the way ‘certain profoundly transformable beings, the commodity and technology, reveal being qua change’.
Really we have spoken here of generic change all the time. As soon as we name the historicity of death, the ability of death and extinction to change, the one into the other, we are talking about a change out of their present genres and into other forms. The historicity of death, which is also extinction as the historicity of the philosophical discourse of being-towards-death, is a form of generic forcing. The E-GE juncture and its conversion not just of D to E and back again also lights up the multiplicity of generic ext (plural), which may be translated into an axiom as: the ext should not be a decision that constrains. To go, to change up a present genre, to re-up change and go into another, is to be available to another more broadly, and this e-change that ext marks the writing of begins and has its only chance and end in pure capitalist movement as ex(change).
What we glimpse here is that extinction thought to the end, in the retake, takes us to how E becomes one phenomenon among others: extological phylum perturbations can be imagined a function within an ecological niche. Siskar writes that there ‘is nothing about being that prevents specific beings from pretending to its position: change as such can only be said through specific change, and any change could end up playing that role’. E as one phenomenon among others is part of how the ext machine is slickened, plugs in, and moves into the realm of the fantastic. To believe in such a machine, which it even to enter into the paradoxical love of capitalism, is to believe that extinction can change.
To put it yet another way, a change takes on a role as Siskar following Malabou’s Heidegger says it can, in our case the change and exchange of E & D, but this can only be seen on a techno-economic grid (we are perhaps constantly on the verge of saying that Malabou’s Heidegger is a proto-accelerationist) where more than everything is perhaps threatened. The ability of thought to cast itself off and cast itself into genre and the generic is, once again, what makes all of this work, and this is why it has been important to iterate that Malabou’s conception of change effectively replaces the thinking of difference in Heidegger’s and also in Derrida’s writings and between death and extinction.
Ext is either the changing of extinction into something else, the nickname for its fantastic historicity, or the name of a snap, a sudden more-than-end. We wanted to suggest that even though existentially it is both at once, historically it will perhaps define itself as never having favoured either. What if ext named, therefore, the cutting short, before time, in time, of the thinking and writing of extinction? The ext asks, despite its brevity, because of its brevity, is the ext a mistake? The ext asks, am I mistake? At the very least, only capitalism as the ontology of change is capable of revealing being qua change, change qua change, but this is also to say extinction qua extinction, and love qua love. Perhaps only love of capitalism chances to imagine the generics of extinction.
Originally written and abandoned in 2018. All references and sources on request. angelicism01@gmail.com