THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART VIII

Dissolution. The School. Counter-Devastation. On having to end without knowing the number of extinction.

THE SCHOOL

We promised to speak of the school and its dissolution. We were thinking of Lacan’s Letter of Dissolution from 1980 which is the very end of his writing trajectory. This is where he makes the blow, the shunyata (emptiness) gesture:

There is a problem with the Ecole. It’s no mystery. Consequently, I am addressing it, none too early.

The problem is revealed as such, as having a solution: which is a dis—a dissolution.

This is an object-lesson in seeing it ‘none too early’. The whole focus here is on acting as one sees, and seeing as one acts. The thing is not just to address it, but to do so ‘none too early’.

For it to be a dissolution, you have to address it ‘none too early’. The mystery is not in the dis but in the timing of the untying. In knowing how to see and make it happen, we do it before it cannot be (un)done.

I am thinking of how to untangle all movements and gestures, in one’s life or on a larger trajectory, before it’s too late—none too early.

I am thinking of how that happens under what might be called spectacular conditions—we can call these conditions the number of extinction.

THE NUMBER OF EXTINCTION

The number of extinction is the number of extinction we are in. As if we are having to decide the Drake Equation—the equation that works out the exact number of other habitable earths in an open universe/whether there are any at all—none too early.

In some ways, this is a decisive affective question that has not been allowed to be decisive yet. We spoke about it in Part V on Universal Being. There we said:

Put in simple terms, if the Drake Equation were to be answered tomorrow in the positive, or if we were to have in our hands pictures of countless superhabitable planets that newly invented time travel technology now allowed us to reach, how would the urgent question of going then be seen?

The Drake Equation is decisive as a question of dissolution because it would—if answered with a positive result—potentially alter everything we know about existential devastation. Devastation on this planet may be said to exist as a feeling because it still remains possible that the Drake Equation will be answered in the negative. That is, if we cease to be here, there will be no more Anthropoi elsewhere. We would have been the only ones, and so our going would unfold a numeric feeling of devastation.

This would mean that extinction is a one-off. The count provided by the idea of a ‘sixth extinction’ would be largely false because none of the others would have removed life conditions as such. A Drake equation answered in the negative would mean the absolute sacredness (universal probability = 1) of this life, right here, on this Earth.

In terms of number and the Drake Equation, the negative result is expressed as: if it falls below a certain number, this really is the only time we’re here.

DIFFERENT SCHOOLS

This is about different schools. For example, wasn’t the university dissolved in the last year or so and yet many were unable or unwilling to act ‘none too early’ and follow the dissolution? It seems so, yes.

There is still a sense of life going on without consideration of what is really the only bearable question, the question of the number of extinction.

The fact that this number of extinction/devastation is mathematical is reflected directly in the work of Grothendieck, who we discussed here in preparation.

Grothendieck’s work aims to get to a place of stopping and dissolution. What he really does is dissolve mathematics itself so that the question of the number of extinction can be focused on. This is not an exaggerated interpretation. It is literally what he says in 1970 at the breaking point, in the paper ‘The Responsibility of the Scientist Today’, when he gave up:

Must we argue true causes indefinitely?

What he means by ‘true causes’ is what this newsletter calls the pedantic or detailism: the endless cultural and social issues that crowd out the question of the number of extinction. These are the arguments over ‘true causes’ that block dissolution.

Here is our reading cue, the moment where Grothendieck says what we are saying:

Compared with the imminent destruction of this extraordinary heritage of life on earth, how insignificant the conflicts of contemporary societies seem, fought in the name of the most diverse ideological principles: communism, capitalism, the free world, white solidarity, Islamic socialism, the yellow peril, Aryan supremacy, Jewishness, class consciousness, the ‘American way of life’, . . . . I do not mean to suggest that these principles are necessarily valueless or necessarily equivalent in value, but rather that (as in mathematics) finite quantities, though strongly unequal among themselves, are all equally negligible in comparison with an infinite quantity.

To repeat and complete the reading cue:

that (as in mathematics) finite quantities, though strongly unequal among themselves, are all equally negligible in comparison with an infinite quantity, in this case the question of the number of extinction

There is a strange link here between Grothendieck and Simone Weil, since Grothendiek proved some of the Weil conjectures, which were postulated by André, who was Simone’s brother. It is as if Simone Weil passed on the question of mathematical dissolution through her brother to Grothendieck and to us.

We are now in the school of the number of extinction. You could say that we wish to learn this number none too early. Or rather, that we need to learn what to do about this number. Or even, perhaps we will see that this number, known or unknown, is dissolved in the nothing nothing nothing in advance (see Part Part VII).

UNTYING AT COLONUS

Lacan was talking about the École freudienne de Paris (EFP), which was then replaced at the point of dissolution by La cause freudienne. In other words, the point of untying opened out into a binding again, carrying along those who counted.

Reading cue for serene independence:

I don’t need many. And there are many whom I don’t need.

The preference is to keep the group small or even a group of one(s). Perhaps this preference finds itself matching the desire to know what the number of extinction is, and to know what dissolution/untying of the number of extinction is.

We can add this reading cue from our own developing sense of things:

I prefer dissolution.

Perhaps the profound preference here is to not to need to know, but to know how that is needed, and how to dissolve and decide it no sooner/no later. ‘I prefer dissolution’ would mean knowing that answers to the number of extinction are dissolved in advance in the great mind of the open intelligence of spontaneous great bliss seeing the lucidity of pure space.

THE GROUP AND AND THE ONES

The formation of any group (save a group based on emptiness emptiness emptiness as a praxis of clonal ones) would be the problem. Hence what Lacan says:

I don’t need many. And there are many whom I don’t need.

He then adds:

I am abandoning them here so that they may show me what they can do, aside from burden me and turn to water a teaching in which everything has been weighed.

It is a matter of solitude and its beyond then, the solitude Lacan touches on in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in relation to Oedipus at Colonus:

The heroes are at a limit that is not accounted for by their solitude relative to others.

In the Letter of Dissolution it is as if Lacan is at Colonus. As if he is literally only concerned with the blind old man at Colonus. Why so? Because dissolution in the Letter is a matter of disseverance, of severing the father:

If I persevere [père-sévère], it is because the experiment completed calls for a compensatory counter-experiment.

Preferring and recommending dissolution is persevering and severing. It is having no father at all. It’s flatlining genealogy.

THE POSITIVE ANSWER TO THE DRAKE EQUATION

Imagine, on the other hand, a positive answer to the Drake Equation. All elements in the equation are filled in a mathematically sound way and it turns out there is a positive projection of almost infinite life on an infinite number of other habitable and superhabitable planets, including compact multis with better solar positions and absent carbon and silicon base elements. To what extent would this change current cognitive settings around extinction affects, melancholia, emptiness, and so on?

First, shunyata (emptiness) is not emptiness in the Western sense, so one thing that would perhaps not be fundamentally altered by a positively fulfilled Drake Equation is our sense of emptiness emptiness emptiness (see Part VII).

Second, desire seems rigged up to a sense of emptiness as negative emptiness (doom, dark dream, negative vitality, concealed nihilism, cosmic aloneness, void, nothing, and so on). A positive reply to the Drake Equation would potentially shatter the claustrophobia of subjectively overbearing meaning systems. Knowing for certain one is part of an infinitely open and life-filled universe would mean relearning lack-based experiential reactions completely. It would perhaps be the only available emotional and sexual total revolution.

COUNTER-DEVASTATION

In Part VI there was a focus on the difference between devastation (Verwüstung) and destruction (Zerstörung) in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and this reading cue from them:

Destruction is the precursor of a concealed beginning, but devastation is the aftereffect of an already decided end.

As we describe some kind of sense of the affective import of the Drake Equation and its dissolution one way and/or another, we also encounter another sense of devastation.

This other sense runs counter and is as follows: the real devastation astir is not that of a negative Drake Equation result (one-off and absolute omnicide, humanity as absolute singularity) but of what would come of a positive result. The most devastating would not be a realization of absolute finitude, but the counter-devastation of turning out to be wrong in assuming for example that terms like ‘universe’, ‘going’, ‘extinction’, ‘number’, and ‘absolute finitude’, have any sense at all.

In effect, the reading cue to come will be:

there is no universe

In Heidegger there is something called errancy and we can simply rename this emptiness emptiness emptiness. In other words, emptiness emptiness emptiness is the freedom to have been absolutely wrong in any direction at any point in history about anything. And emptiness emptiness emptiness is also the dawning insight that any insight is going to be radically wrong. We can even say, being absolutely wrong is the only joy, the only freedom.

On the other hand, the counter-devastation in emptiness emptiness emptiness seems to mean being not right in anything and yet being not not right. Heidegger’s ‘errancy’ was a kind of unnecessarily complicated forerunner of this thought. His argument was something like: how could anyone think absolute devastation without an inhuman display and permission? With regard to errancy, Heidegger writes that ‘what is most essential and at the same time most rare, what is necessary for the kindling of this struggle over the awakening of the question-worthiness of beyng, is what we call the courage for error.’

The courage for error, for being wrong for example about the possibility of absolute devastation, is a courage that may end up by being objectless (since devastation may be a phantom, or a psychology based on category errors). The danger is that we ‘will no longer tolerate what could place such sovereignty in question’: that we will no longer bear thinking what risks losing us entirely. Or, to perhaps be more precise, what has already found us entirely.

The difference here is subtle, between one devastation (Verwüstung) and another devastation (Verwüstung). Can you hear it? I think you can. I think you can because I can. Suddenly we find out that things are nowhere near as bad as we thought and that this is the beginning, ‘none too early’, of true devastation.