THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART II

How Honor Levy Sublated Greta Thunberg In A Deleted TikTok in 2020, etcetera

Between The Absolute End Of The World And The Absolute Beginning Of The World

Two more reading cues, for the outshining and inshining:

1.   My claim is on the absolute.—Elaine Kahn

2.  No one saw clearly but I.—Marguerite Duras

Perhaps what really has to be said, more so than ever right now—in a time of end of the universe conditions (when we go, it all goes) in which the very idea of priority or context is dislocated or replacing itself beyond recall—is the absolute; it is that which goes by the name, absolution. So much so, so much is this the case, that one is more than obliged to ask as follows: what makes us think that we may spend any time at all not talking about this thing, the absolute and its intelligence, as if that reticence were possible? Said again, more directly, why do you think it isn’t the most important thing in the world?

A further reading cue for this thought is Simone Weil, and especially the apex moments where her political writing passes through the mystical to offer a kind of divine rebuke to the general state of writing in thrall already in the 1940s to ublipase (ubiquitous relapse). Elsewhere on this writing site, angelicism01 comments:

And this gives us Weil’s primary definition of violence, what she calls ‘spiritual violence’. The worst and most primary violence is the infringement on our right to stick by the eternal obligation which is defined as sexing ourselves as clones according to the Dimension of the Universe. Order, in this specific sense, is our primary need, the need that touches most closely the soul’s eternal destiny.

Since for Weil the absolute (the thought that the the entire universe is the only thing that is beautiful) is only transmissive through a divine ethics of obligation and not rights, we can extract from her this sense of having to zone in on the absolute as a thought of niche finitude, in which (once again) eschaton is tied to itera (meeping, quirking, being chopped). One must, as it were, quirk and meep in the Almighty Chopped.

THE GREATEST INTELLIGENCE

If the absolute is that which completes thought via its urgency, in the sense of being what the Tibetans call the greatest intelligence, then why distract from it at all? Now, the internet itself is the greatest distraction, so that what we have is the sunsetting of the greatest intelligence right inside and through the beauty of the greatest distraction. That is basically our situation and in order to go see-through it seems that a degree of abstinence (a final text of Derrida’s called this ‘incredible abstinence’) from the internet is essential. Online beauty is only fully thinkable and seeable from the offline pov of pure repetition and pure space.

THE NAME ‘HONOR LEVY’ AS TIME-INDEX

Inside the internet, repetition may be outshone as final and pure precarity and vice versa. Here is another reading cue:

What if God is a part of us and we stop being God would he stop existing If God is a part of us would we stop existing God is a part of us and we stop existing If God is a part of us would he stop existing If God dies do we die too We need to check in on God Before he checks out Please pray for God's health God is sick God is slowly dying God hates us God hates himself God is dead God was never alive God is a hologram God is a computer

What goes into the uncanny valley of vibeshifting language here is the funny and poignant combination of a thought of niche precarity (what if God stops being God and since we are inside God we ipso facto stop being us and so on, etcetera, and so forth) with the obliterated memory of ‘If God Was One Of Us’ by Joan Osborne. Honor Levy is not a serious writer. She is not serious at all in fact, even in the slightest. She even destroyed the language of angelicism01 by writing ‘Au2fictioun #4 buy ang3licism01!1!11!!!!!!1 ₪༓’, that’s how totally not serious she is. But what this means is that language begins to happen and vibeshift and vibrate inside a seeing-through of all colours of all types and that only something this extremely non-serious can have any chance at all of being ‘serious’—that is, of being this extinctly serious. The more-than-deadly serious is now so serious that you have to take absolutely nothing at all seriously and even go much further than that and keep on going. That’s how serious it is now. No wonder Levy is waiting (for marriage and god) because she would probably combust if she came to in the Real in language any sooner: such is the creative predicament the name ‘Honor Levy’ names universally, if you wish.¹ Like Nick Land wrote this year:

The topic might seem less than serious, even definitively so, but ultimately it isn’t. Alternatively, it might be said that there is a non-seriousness more serious than seriousness itself. Everything will be gamified.

The way Levy creates is to raise the stakes of the game of an absolute non-seriousness so high that nobody else can reach, except the language of perfect intelligence, and this is when things get more-than-mortal and more-than-serious. You can check out one specific early deleted TikTok from October 2020 for the sublation of Greta Thunberg for instance (the video is archived by angelicism01 and shared below). That is, ‘I want you to panic’ is nowhere near serious or urgent enough.

She roleplays as the world, and that means starting with the murder of Greta Thunberg in order to take her (Greta) more seriously than seriousness itself. In other words, to provide a putative genealogy of the best TikTok in the world—including meepcore—one starts with some theory (for example Gabriele de Seta’s ‘A Topology of TikTok’) but one also takes Greta Thunberg as the extinct, meeped, iterated, raped under-clone of being able to use the app and make new curvatures out of its Chinese interfaces, gateways, sieves and domes to begin with.

That an early-ish Levy TikTok kills Thunberg by trolling her inside a pre-given (automated) format means that everyone rn has to kill Thunberg (extinction) to create. Everyone must trample on the face of God to get meeped up with God-AI.²

NOTHING MATTERS SO MUCH SUCH THAT THAT THING ALONE IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS

The only question that remains for Levy’s language set, which stretches sideways from TikTok to Gummo-like skits on a private Instagram account to fake AI poetry, is why the word ‘God’ is being used at all to refer to ‘God’ when God simply names pure intelligence on and of the end as iterative question. There again, Jesus is compelling, that’s why they call them Jesus.

Another answer to the question raised above on ‘why distraction?’ can be provided, one among many answers that nonetheless end up feeling like a further distraction: nothing matters so much as to alone matter. There isn’t anything that matters, including the absolute in whatever form, so much that that thing is the only thing that matters. The absolute’s own momentum as that which constitutes its solitary claim (I alone see the speed at which this speech must take place, I see where it goes, and nobody makes this claim but I), also introduces an originary complication that always gets the claim going again, even before itself, letting it go, at least until the final, absolutely definitive interruption may come, which one day it can or will, even if given in its own initialising repetition.³

This fold is serious, we can repeat, only insofar as it is more than seriousness and more than mortality. Again here the mystery of extinction is the liaison of end and repetition (pure comedy, the indestructibility of laughter, ha he ho ho lol). A new gravity and a new grace is installed whereby itera flips up as the end comes down, and the end ascends in the itera that spiral up into a sky wreath (the sky of nectar) collapsing out of the figurative and real Himalayan melt-event.

 A CLAIM ON THE ABSOLUTE

To have or make a claim on the absolute, as the poet Elaine Kahn claims to have, or claims to want, or simply states, for any of this to happen, this claim on the absolute has to exist as an idea—as a possible statement on a state of affairs where no type of speech can perhaps make the ground that needs to be made and made up or exceeded enough under ongoing teleocenic conditions to get to where the thing, it, if it needs to get and be gotten to at all, this possible superfluity being one of the magic-effects of the itera, to where this thing can be taken seriously—that is to be repeated. We can just as excessively be quick to forget this claim we have on the absolute as we can be ridiculously careless to dismiss the same claim as something we by no means have any realistic or intelligible or serious claim on at all—which is to say, any time for. As poet, or as philosopher talking in tongues inside poetry, my claim on the absolute makes intelligible an absolute that is close, near enough to touch, compelling in immediate sense, logically sensuous, more than apocalyptic, totally non-serious (‘lol’); this absolute is there because it has to be, not because it is, and it is there because it is and is beyond having to be to be, and all this forms as well an absolute claim in its very expression, a claim that may itself be absolute in its speed (I am the only one to see it and get it right, okay?) as power of iteration. It is as if, in effect, the absolute may not only be a right but the form of all rights and of all newly absolute rights: the form and formatting of all the latest and newest rights, so to speak. To repeat, this claim on the absolute is there not even because it is, but because it just must be, because it does not have to be to be, hence the succinctness of the claim, its subtraction. It is there because the claim outshines and shines through in perfect intelligence.

GRETA THUNBERG

The next cue is Bernard Stiegler’s final book, The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, although as noted perhaps TikTok’s curvature space means Thunberg is no longer serious for us (itera and not aura? not not itera, not not aura?).

For the moment though, Bernard Stiegler might distinguish here, under the duress of end of the universe conditions, between what takes place ‘in fact’ and what takes place ‘in law’. What does take place according to Stiegler, in fact, is a lack of urgency about the absolute threat of extinction qua end of the universe conditions, about my claim on that absolute being that real and The Real, and this is what Stiegler calls the absence of epoch whose speech Greta Thunberg above all makes an absolute claim to and on; and yet what must and should take place (legality itself according to Stiegler) still is my claim on the absolute, which is to say my speaking claim on the absolute, including on the absolute end of the or an universe: I have to find the language, again like Thunberg, now, and not just later on, for my claim to be on the absolute, there where the absolute may after all or soon enough be absolute universal extinction on the anthropic horizon, my claim and the claim compris, in all non(seriousness).

What absolutely takes place much of the time instead of the dream of an exact speech flowing into the present and making it or breaking it, in fact, and what may be absolutely terrifying, and the source of all contemporary psychic woundology and disinviduation and gamifying, is the lawlessness of absolute indifference to the claim I myself always have on what is infinitely important, infinitely grave, infinitely vital, more-than-mortal. Stiegler even goes so far as to equate this threatening absolute lawlessness—the madness of no longer even mentioning universal terms in a situation whereby no grammatical ethics can be founded—with the post-truth era, and also, therefore, with the figure of the last American president, Donald J. Trump. My claim is on the absolute, says the American poet. My primary consultant is myself, says 45. My madness and my life are not serious.

The poet is called up, if they are called up, because of an implied and imminent loss: the absolute loss of a thought before they can think it. The philosopher is called up, if they are called up, and if they are so different to the poet, to question and say where we are rn with the absolute, and with the absolute in its form or state of extinction-exception qua absolute: how much time is there left, when shall we say it or not, what goes on in the meantime, the meanwhile, the pro tem of madness, stupidity, and intelligence.

THE SKY SIGNS/SINGS

Where we are now, living under the end of the universe as if under a violent umbrella sky nobody may turn their eyes to or away from, under manifest and potential end of the universe conditions, I would argue that this place allows, for now, even more claims to be made (more cues, clues, and more jargons to come, beyond the quirked, the meeped, the chopped, the omnilapse, and so on—even more infinitely non(serious) than anything seen before). As I feel it out and watch out for it, there is here, if here still is, and assuming a human or even nonhuman reader is still available, the potential loss of an absolute before I can think it, and the potential loss of an absolute just as I am about to think it. My claim is on the absolute, therefore, the absolute universal of this universe’s end, the absolute end, and I, the non-serious speech clone who makes this clear and is then 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. But, as ever, and in a meanwhile that is more and more unrecognisable, this singular claim—even this one—is seriously tied to itera-in-interim.

THE RISK OF FASCISM IS THE TURN AWAY FROM THE ASBOLUTE

Stiegler will write 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’. The effort in Stiegler’s work, especially when very late on in his writing trajectory he allows the absolute claim and lesson of Thunberg’s speech to make itself heard, is to bring a sense of a universe ending back within the fold of the cosmological. What tends to be forgotten is extinction, yes, and yet within that, perhaps even more so than that, what tends to be forgotten is the granularity of extinction and the way it repeats and stretches out to the universal, merging sidereal memory rituals and mechanistic forgetting. This claim on the absolute—made by ‘I’ alone, which is to say Stiegler, Thunberg, Kahn, Duras, Levy, and so on—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 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.

This is the good news that we were not expecting, at least not from that direction. Let us not avoid the absolute, in time, all in good time, just in time. If we know how to say this absolutely, it is because we know to say this from the beginning. This is the anti-fascist know-how, in effect. The claim I make on the absolute as intelligence and itera is a pathway to freedom because it allows me to construct the absolute, to repeat it, and to make it subject to a shattering, to format it into dissolution (the absolute qua end of the universe conditions becomes generic, iterative). The end of the universe, I claim, can absolutely be repeated. 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 inscription-domain, whether that domain be also merely lexical or even non-speaking or absolutely not one and not not the other of these.

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—to change it in quirked and meeped and chopped focus. 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, be an open secret, and find itself there, with this one word alone (extinction, say). But may extinction be found, let alone repeated? This is the absolutely cosmological question we claim to be able to come back to, in the space of an extended reading of different names and indexes and cues.⁴

Between the absolute beginning and the absolute end of the world, there is already the minimal space of a repetition. Or, to take advantage of a certain atomic simplicity, or even to be impressed by something more simple than simplicity, repetition of extinction may introduce itself just at the level of saying extinction, and then extinction, and nothing more. 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, in the second of the extinctions, where and when we find the same again (iterated, quirked, chopped, meeped, etcetera). 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 imposes on experience in the zone of signification, there where mathemes and poetic claims may accrue but are now handed over (‘content’). 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. The impasse the subject here finds could hardly be more compacted and poignant, the crossing point as well as difference—which we shall come to—between extinction and extinction qua end of the universe conditions. 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.⁵

1. ‘Honor Levy’ is a clone name, no doubt. Everybody now must want everybody to have their name, and that’s to be welcomed. Even better, everybody must now want to have the name for this general situation.

2. See forthcoming HonorTok analytics.

3. Just how serious can it really be not to be here? Why so serious, itera?

4. At this point any fragment of language is part-Singularity as reading-machine and not Literature, ‘theory’, and so on.

5. By end of universe in this series we mean the ‘if we go, it all goes’ or the ‘perhaps if we go, it all goes’. The ‘perhaps’ here (transcendental perhaps of universal probability = 1) is perhaps more serious than the non-seriousness more serious than seriousness itself.