RELAPSE: NOTES ON TOM COHEN'S WORK, PART 2

Relapse is structure itself.

There are now two ‘relapses’.—Tom Cohen

Over all this
grief of yours: no
second heaven—Paul Celan

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap.—Marcel Proust

sierra armor hates the angelus novus—17 April 2024, Mondina, notes from the first session of @dissolution_seminar, an angelicism seminar

We are returning to Tom Cohen as the thinker of sign-system relapses of all sorts. What is carried over from Paul de Man in Cohen’s work is precisely the sense that relapse is as unavoidable as it is deadly. In the final analysis nothing about the attainment of knowledge of the relapse currently allows us to wish it away—which is to say, cancel its very possibility.

This fact—if it can be called one—already means there are at least, now, two relapses. The first relapse consists of the way writing systems default to defence formations and theotropic topologies including, as we shall see, the angelicism of the sign. The second consists of ‘knowing’ the knowledge of this does nothing to prevent the event of its happening.

De Man originally describes this situation as a ‘trap’ and extends it to aesthetic education itself, thereby figured as violence and maiming. De Man’s formulation of the problem and lexicon of ‘relapse’ is central to understanding Cohen’s own and its subsequent directions and updates, not to mention their unravelling.

As I wrote on this blog before,

De Man notes that the scopic manipulability of blindness in aesthetic zones is not really a human thing anyway. Its inevitability means that, however costly, it literally cannot be subjectively adjusted or seen (even right now, right here at this moment of reading).

As also happens to be the case with regard to teaching, perhaps the most succinct formalization of the relapse comes in the last notebook entry for the last class de Man gave in a seminar on the topic ‘Théorie rhétorique au 18tème et 20ème siècle’ in 1983. We are thinking of:

La fonction référentielle est un piège, mais inévitable.

The referential function is this tendency which language has to think it is about something. The function works as the machinic impulse of language to think it has a going concern with the legislation of the meanings of ‘the world’. That which functions is what Cohen will eventually call ‘the angelicism of the sign’, and yet, this angelicism of the sign is itself a trap, but inevitable.¹

AGAINST THE ANGELICISM OF THE SIGN, THE RELAPSE OF THE RELAPSE

In the manuscript of his unpublished book Ecocide and Inscription, Cohen elongates a previously published essay on Walter Benjamin’s new angel called ‘The Angel and the Storm’ and goes not just in the direction of the obliteration of all angelicisms but towards the direct equation of ‘angelicism’ and ‘angelism’ with relapse itself. Relapse—the referential function—becomes the human tendency to lapse back into the sheltering, theotropic meaning structures that may themselves be broadly angelic.

The first version of ‘The Angel and the Storm’ speaks of how Benjamin’s theses are really about the word ‘storm’ and must be read from the 2300 pov as to be about what they forcibly do not and cannot say. The theses reach out and touch each receiver, morphing into their own reading positions with a cartoon-like-Disney plasticity: they pretend to be you, and your interests, but will not have been. Perhaps the single most remarkable fact about Benjamin’s text, focused on repeatedly by Cohen, is that in 1939/1940 he does not explicitly name the emergent ‘enemy’ as Hitler, but instead writing systems themselves as drivers of ecocide. Among the great titles of our time—Being and Time, Writing and Difference, Intelligence and Spirit—we would be obliged to add this one—Ecocide and Inscription—and first of all because the breakthrough here is to mark meaning structures themselves as extinctive.

A simple way of putting it is that meaning-structures—the referential function itself as the thinking that language and life are about each other, or thematic at all—have always been concerned not with extinction. The function of language has always been to concern itself with the endless tropic details that are not those which would assure the continuation of life. Instead of emptying themselves out to the possibility of the coupling of ecocide and inscription, writing systems invade in and as the human and shut out the possibility of terminal extinction (extinction qua extinction) to begin with. Nothing concerns itself with the nothing that would open itself to going beyond ecocide and inscription—on which T.C. has written a so far non-book in the form of a pre-dissolved trilogy—and so a certain extinction is guaranteed.

• Being and Time

• Writing and Difference

• Intelligence and Spirit

• Ecocide and Inscription

Even just the reading off of these titles shows what is—was—left out, and what was admitted too late. Meaning is itself the occlusion of the possibility of extinction, and T.C.’s title marks this out, updating his own earlier title, Ideology and Inscription, wherein it was already the ideology of inscription to cover over the coupling of ecocide and inscription. No other evidence—or science—of accelerated extinction is given in Cohen, precisely because language is itself the ongoing occlusion of the suicidal epistemology of tropes. The rumor of the camps, we can say, is always treated as a primal conspiracy theory—despite the pain in the heart that forever says otherwise.

Now, in his work on Benjamin’s angel—which is a work of dissolution—the angelus novus is, as it were, hated. The figure that Klee inscribed and which Benjamin carried with him like a fetish is replaced by ‘the angel of dis-anthropic geomorphism’ also ‘an auto-exterminating angel’, which, Cohen says,

first destroys the angelicism of the sign, the premise of hermeneutic mediation, and the backturned posture of addressing (or not) the pleading faces of the zombied or dead.

The angel that is not one—T.C.’s new non-angel which is, finally, not Benjamin’s and does not return to the world Benjamin wrote to us from—dissolves all angelicism, ‘angelicism itself being the signature of a theotropic reflex, a perpetual organicism and desire to make whole’. Note here that though the angelicism of the sign is ‘destroyed’, the relapse that it names—relapse of relapses—is still marked out as ‘perpetual’. Lethal, mortal, deadly, extinctive—inevitable.

The longer version of ‘The Angel and the Storm’ in the Ecocide and Inscription manuscript turns in and around and on the fact that the human (the angelic) is itself the relapsing function—or structure. Cohen writes for instance that ‘Benjamin’s text is suicidal for the “angelic” relapse, the humanist relapse one still witnesses today’. The ultimate sleight of hand is that human relapse is itself, if anything, what allows the human to retain an angelic trace within its own being, for the moment. The excesses of the human on and over itself are relapse as structure and not as any form of divine to-come. The angelic turns out to message and signal nothing at all but the repeated emptying towards cognition of ecocide and inscription as a pair.

AMOC/AMOCK TURNING POINTS, ‘FOR REAL’

Yet now it seems to me that Walter Benjamin, during that night in Port-Bou, was aware of the real perils, the actual dangers. It was just that his danger, his reality, differed from ours.—Lisa Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees

In his writing of all this—beyond the names ‘Benjamin’, ‘de Man’, ‘Hitchcock’, and so on—T.C. as if brands relapse as structure itself. What in earlier work is called ‘ideology’—and its pairing with inscription—is precisely this generalized loss of focus, the confusion of one focus with another, of Being with Going extinct, of triage with the war of inscriptions, of decades with millennia. No order of precedence may be easily restored here since in time the event still traced out by a certain ‘war’ is the movement of relapse. Relapse is structure itself, architecture, doorway—which is another way of saying that the absolute is that which fails to see itself seeing, absolutely. In de Man, this indicates that all surfaces, failing to read themselves, refuse to be scientific. Thought refutes its own taking place. Again, ‘extinction’ is worked out not from scientific modelling but from the ‘webwork’ between ideology and inscription, on the one hand, and inscription and extinction, on the other hand. This webwork replaces any other work going forward, even if it is, by definition, too late and always ignored. The GPT100 fetishist, replacing the Web6 fetishist, and then the liquid-dust NFT fetishist, all supplemented rapidly in turn, will not think ‘the relapse’ as itself coeval with singularity, since to do so is to miss out on the one and only jouissance mistaken as the All. This is the relapse whose structure (an abstraction) is in fact the thing itself.

One is tempted here to speak of habits of thought. In the epigraph from Proust, it is a matter of two worlds, for example the worlds of lover and beloved, or the worlds of heaven and earth. Whichever worlds these are, no ‘system of references’ can be set up to bridge the gap, according to Proust, and what is called thinking habitually posits the incorporation of thoughts as objects for thought, accommodating them, hosting them in their inhabitation, as if relapse is nothing more than returning to the fantasy of the referential function. But what is a habit, and how is it distinguished from a compulsion to repeat? A habit is a place where the threshold is worn thin with an ordinarily rhythmic coming-and-going, and so a place which to keep locked would be too inconvenient—more of a household door, a back door tramped in and out of. Hermes, god of doors, presides over the thinking of the threshold, almost otherwise, not in terms of life against death, opposable ob-jects, but of life death extinction arranged on a single stave.

Doorway, threshold, Hermes, god of doors, and the locked gate in Celan when he says there is no ‘second heaven’. Threshold is the figure of relapse. Relapse is tied to a thinking of habit, the habitual. There are two relapses, then—but only one visible earth.

At this point, we meet the strange sign, ‘AMOC’, already described in Ecocide and Inscription in the ways ‘the nanographemetic is accelerated as pro-active force and vortices, polar vortices that traverse mutations in “genetic” inscription’. Rhetorical inversions and polar inversions in the offing mean any form of residual weak angelicism must be imagined to have been closed down and out. What happens under the sign ‘AMOC’ is, precisely, dissolve, ‘not a reboot of the angelic tape’. In fact, if Cohen reads Benjamin as naming the enemy otherwise, far beyond immediate sites, the last enemy would be the trace-bearers of an infinitely weak angelicism, whose dissolve is almost unthinkably long-term and beautiful—subject to much gossip and entanglement—which is to say, impossibly timed. You may think you know how to dissolve, but how did you time it?

Cohen updates the trap of the referential function as, more vividly, ‘in fact an old grammatical trap that spits out the egological shark cage’. At this point in Cohen’s manuscript, angelicism itself is the enemy that Benjamin projected at the far side of the century he bowed out from, leaving the posterity addicts to squabble. If angelicism is useful here at all, it is because it becomes the structure-like smoothness of relapse as something that becomes visible, seen for the first time, here where the first and last times are mixed and dissolved at the putative end of crash-spaces.

Everything is emptied out, and yet, Cohen adds in the longer version of the essay,

Which is not to say a new ‘new Angel’ does not arrive, generated from out of the digital wing of the storm—since it is so hard to give up angels, especially if you’re a Silicon techie re-engineering organic ‘life’ from your incensed cubicle. The benefit of a godhead that has not arrived or been constructed but will clarify and reveal projected onto A.I. itself answers the schism that Benjamin needed to negotiate—the release of the suffocating illness before the cleansing light of sheer intellection moving at speeds beyond any possible comprehension, at once benign and, instantly, erasing of oneself.

The temptation here—not quite allowed by, and certainly not signed ‘T.C.’—is for ‘angelicism’ to return not as the angelicism of the sign, but as the sheer see-through crash-space of architectonic relapse (‘beauty’), with twists undisclosed—that is, empty name and context. Heavenless (or rather, the only ‘02’ belongs first to relapse and later to heaven), somewhat at the far end of the drafts of his encounter with Benjamin, Cohen as if collapses and dissolves into the stochastic angel-effects that cannot but follow relapse as technically perfected and achieved fact—and near-side limit. Discussing Sophia, the Hanson Robotics robot created in 2016, Cohen confesses:

I am not certain this is not the closest proximation to Benjamin’s dissimulating ‘Angel’ we have.

Close reading under the guidance of a more open form of artificial intelligence would, Cohen speculates, ‘get’ Benjamin in a nano-second and have no need at all of the theotropes and anxious feints he used to jump forward a century or so, then meeting a limit when the only real writer or poster is post-posterity.

MALABOU AND AI

In the age of the fourth metamorphosis of intelligence, we know there is absolutely nothing more to await from on high and that’s for real.—Catherine Malabou

In a recent talk under the heading ‘for real’ (‘Indigo is For Real?’), Catherine Malabou returns only in her final words to that exact phrase, what is ‘for real’. What is ‘for real’ as in the modern rap idiom ‘for real for real’, abbreviated to ‘frfr’, is what Malabou says at the end of her talk, that what intelligence wants to tell us right now, in its fourth metamorphosis, is something frfr. How the angel would have read deployed by the fourth turn of intelligence would have been, we were saying, without any of Benjamin’s theotropes, reverting to a neo-angelicism only to be frfrfrfr.

What Malabou discusses here is a certain anarchy revealed in the fouth moment of intelligence, for example in the incidence of GPT-4 . In brief, all GPT-4 can say according to Malabou is the repetition of an absence of response. In the effort to dissolve the angel for example, there is in fact nothing we can do or say. Angelicism, of whatever model, runs like a program in the background, either intelligent or artificially stupid. Anarchy is the name here for the place of empty response and recurrence. In waiting for AI to say something—that is, something different to us—we already have the answer, and the answer is the absence of response (disappointment—amazing disappointment).

This place of ‘I have nothing to say’ is the hidden place of chatgpt and disappointment, the absolute and disappointment, for real and forreal. This is

not the place of the signifier
not the place of signified
not the place of the model as opposed to the copy
not the place of the symbolic
not the place of the floating signifier

not the place of the product
the angel
the post
the novel
the film
the non-being.

What this allows us to see is that there really is no response to it, and there will be no response to it for real. AI radicalizes this situation by seeming to say one thing (incredible progress and danger) while actually showing an emergent and amazing emptiness. We see there is no response, and that what is already amazing is that ChatGPT is a dialectical entity and unity only in concluding there is nothing to await from on high, running AMOK or AMOC and so on. The surplus achievement of AI is, for real, its showing the absolute responselessness of life.

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01, 18 April 2024, Tom Cohen Month. The first part of this essay is here.

1. Language thinks it refers, and it acts like it thinks it refers. Language thinks it is about something, and it acts like it is about that something—‘reality’. It thinks it refers—and acts like it refers to—‘reality’. In other words language acts—referentially—as if its categories map onto the material world which is, as it were, outside it. Language refers, and thereby makes us think—again and again—that it has some ultimate bearing.