On The Non-Fungibility Of The Human

For The Universal Scene, And M.B. On Her Birthday, An Absolute Formalisation of Where We Stand.

Anthropic existence is per definition unique (subject to contrary confirmation) i.e. non fungible. The status of non-fungibility is uncanny, to say the least. It runs like glinting obsidian though prime non-probability i.e. anthropos as one-off enough to not be subject to a probability calculation at all. (The Drake equation fails its proof, in theory.) (‘Us’ is not a percent.)

At some point, a technologically mature civilisation—our own is the only visible example—breaches the Singularity filter; that is what Heidegger calls Gestell, the essence of technology which may change (see Malabou’s The Heidegger Change).

At this moment of intense singularism as speculation the surface of ‘man’ fizzes, and the mimesis of the eidetic breakthrough as such flowers in perfect omnitemporality as what are taken to be lethal forms (petalos, ‘outspread’) of fluid invariance (NFTs or Pindar’s ‘gold’ as a name of Being). Super-rare ‘tokens’ seethe and teem; the phenomena feel like an essential leak; peak civilisation is peak anthropocene bring-the-heat, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and so on.

Bear in mind the carbon mask, and that Heidegger already understands all this in Sophocles’ Antigone as located in the human being as both ‘the uncanniest’ and ‘the most violent’; Antigone herself as the supreme deinon. The Sophoclean locus classicus is read and translated in turn by Hölderlin, and then by Stiegler, reading all of that together with Derrida’s superior text in hand.

To understand deinon, think of Ian Curtis dancing as human doll on late night BBC at the origin of Internet. Suicide met by midnight and economic exchange. Joy Division, the Nazi whore house, followed by New Order and disco, and then, in time, SoundCloud Rap. (Again, the whore of carbon. The ‘bitch’ of #dripwave. Covid 911.)

Whence our sleeplessness in ‘lockdown’ as a specific iteration of this echoed reference to the to deinotaton that is the human being in the language of Sophocles and the chorus of Antigone, ongoing. Hölderlinian obsidian. Radio, live transmission.

The Schlafstörungsstarrsinn of TFW ‘I don’t want to sleep but I don’t know what I am waiting for’. Staying up in dms because this time it might be it. As Woeser puts it in a yet to be published poem:

In my heart, I’m reluctant to part with anyone.
It’s as if I’m bathing in tears.
Our time in this life grows shorter and shorter.
I can’t help it, I go to sleep later and later,
and the amount I sleep grows less and less. It seems
this is the only way we can prolong our being together.

11.3.2021, 7.25 am