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Article Excerpt
Manlio Sgalambro's analysis of the concept of 'truth' and Giorgio Agamben's reflections on the categories of human language provide a critical intersection by means of which important aspects of Western metaphysics concerning the problem of metaphysics and language can be reconsidered.
The approach to metaphysics that these two Italian philosophers have developed has never been the object of a comparative study, and although they differ in terms of conceptual means of enquiry adopted, both thinkers represent a genuine example of critical meditation concerning the object of the oldest among human sciences. The line of argument of this article studies the concept of transcendence as informed by the idea of a double counter-transcendence. The first set of concepts which defines counter-transcendence will be found in Sgalambro's idea of the ongoing process of destruction of the world's inorganic matter. The latter is understood as that which counters the position of a transcendent principle of the world's beginning and its organic manifestations. Similarly, the irreducibility of the cosmos' inorganic events to rational laws opposes the transcendental construction of the intellect through the language as its system of knowledge. The second set of concepts defines the idea of counter-transcendence through Agamben's analysis of the plane of semantic articulation of human discourse, which also includes that of metaphysics, and that of a semiotic dimension of words (signs) conceived as the pure elements of language. For Agamben, any human discourse counters the forgotten reality of the semiotic plane of unconnected words. The latter, represents the pure potential of language's transformability beyond the categorical utilisation and fixation of its terms: namely, the state of 'infancy' in opposition to that of 'history'.
1) Writing in philosophy
The philosophical and theological themes of Sgalambro's works reintroduce an attention to the concept of truth towards which, he says, man no longer feels any emotion (1). Truth, in his view, has become a question of scientific assertions, more or less verifiable by logical procedures (2). Whereas, for him, its content is not reducible to any alphabetical or numerical codification: "Let us suppose that the eternal truth is this: the truth is against you." (3) On this ground, Sgalambro's work unravels speculatively finally arriving at the individual, sociopolitical being's incapacity to understand the evidence of this truth. Sgalambro's stylistic and conceptual thought is that nowadays it is still possible to write (4) philosophy as an attempt to re-establish a vision of things that avoids political anthropocentrism and the social and technical outcomes that it entails.
Philosophy, he says, is not a form of knowledge to be elaborated through a continual series of timely interpretations. The spirit of any given philosophy is unattainable by any other. The idea of a progressive historical advancement of thought threatens knowledge itself. In the Western historical re-presentation of thought there is an erasure of the necessary inexactitude of those few moments in which and by which an intuition is given. In other words, for Sgalambro, philosophy has to be subtracted from the system of positive knowledge that has nothing to do with its content, which is openly contrary to the ideal of life's conservation. This 'positive' aspect of knowledge is reflected in the predominant entrepreneurial and managerial attitude of the academic organisation, (5) whereby the content of what has already been thought (the peace of what is known) (6) is continually re-confronted with 'new' analyses (7) to which Sgalambro does not attribute a necessary role for the extension of knowledge (8). On the contrary, he says, the necessity of such pre-supposed development is only a value induced by the system of 'Kultur' in 'Zivilisation'.
The writer o f philosophy does not establish relations between different philosophical systems, but practices philosophy only as a 'work': "Always the same matter and absolute novelty of the form, this is the philosophical work, points out Anatol. [...]. Thought seen as unlaced from the needs of the insect-social intellect and obedient only to problems of style, rhythm, eternity." (9) The truth of a system of thought cannot be conciliated with any other system; and for Sgalambro this reflects the principle of its absolute adversity to man. Truth cannot have an author since it hits by chance (the wearing out of the body, the thermic death of universe) and its concept cannot be produced on demand. Truth is 'objective' but not as the object of a specific knowledge, which needs the proof of experience to be recognised. It is, instead, 'objective' regardless of any principle of experience (10), as it unleashes itself violently near to something, or it carves its evidence onto the cortical elaborations of a brain. It follows that, for him, the historical projection of different philosophies is possible only in virtue of a 'methodical emanatism': "Whereby the lining up of enthymemes is no longer simultaneous, but reflects back the faint stages of consciousness, it is scanned through its rhythms, becomes an order, that is a former and a latter." (11)
2) Simultaneous contrariety of truth
What is meant by 'simultaneity of philosophy'? If the autoconsciousness is the subject's intimate apperception (12), the folding of the awareness in itself which opens up its inner dimension of time (13), then simultaneity, in contrast, does not imply internal time reference. The conscious element to which the subsequential movement of events has to be referred in order to be perceived is absent. Simultaneity is constant presentiality, the blind state of the a-subjective event; it is the form in which any event and its terms are inscribed into the joints of their phenomenic existence. What is more, simultaneity cannot be perceived but, I could say, 'it perceives', and that is why for Sgalambro, truth, considered as an empty concept, becomes laughable, since it refers only to motionless content: "It is the world without man." (14)
For him, it is only in relation to human pain that a state of harmony and its brokenness can be measured; and this is when the 'thing in itself' bursts in, breaking down the system of representation (15). The idea of 'interruption' is unveiled to man as a tremendous thing. The compactness of the representation, in which the subject was enveloped a while ago, frees the annihilating power that it carries within itself. That is, somewhere, simultaneously to the subject's self presential state of consciousness of a given moment of its experience, conditions for new effectuations of truth's outgrowth are being prepared (concatenations of lived experiences or processes of geo-morphological decomposition). This truth takes form in each simultaneous happening of the world and is a quantum of accumulation (an outgrowth sack) which originates in each of such happenings. Then, abruptly, the accumulation of its material reaches its maximum limit hitting against the extreme peripheral zones of its containing 'field' of events and pours out, overflowing into the contiguous perimeter of human-lived experience, revealing all its unknown tremendum.
The impersonal character of truth, says Sgalambro, undermines the so-called 'world of theoretical contents', where the products of the subject's knowledge are simulacra, fainting shadows. The act of knowing a determined thing does not grasp its original form insofar as a simulacrum gives itself impersonally. To know is then to contemplate, as things contain an impersonal region (16) to which the 'subject' participates in a limited way. The subject relishes very little of the original and what is given in each element of knowledge, namely in each of its objects, is given altogether with the distance from its 'in se'. For Sgalambro, even though the subject, in perceiving the object, functions as a theoretical medium it can only touch upon that original world in which the object as such exists. What is left out of the 'object' is a marginal fragment, not an original form. This means, according to Sgalambro, that the function of the subject as 'theoretical-medium' does not cover that role of 'subject-of-transformation-of-the-object' which praxis has always attributed to it. (17)
Hence, truth is an 'out-side', timeless suspension of uncognizable elements ready to hit in the infinite power of a constant simultaneity of happenings. Likewise, the living core of a philosophy, for itself, is to be contemplated and not disjointed by means of technical analysis, which fosters a distributive use of its overall content into a historical narration. In Sgalambro's thought, these two themes necessarily overlap one another. More to the point, for Sgalambro, the threads which compose an initial definition of truth interlace with the a-conscious, the element which soothes the 'spirit' until this is re-absorbed within the initial inorganic stasis from which it once originated.
3) A renewed cosmological idea of the 'inorganic"
Sgalambro asks: what would put man back into a direct auscultation of the cosmoses' tremendous truth? "Being--without images--is the essent (18). Only the intelligence, which deals with inert things, can therefore understand it." (19) But philosophy is not a dialogic discourse around separated and inert 'things' that have to be ordered in a system of rational connections; rather, it is a monologic form of expression and being, although traversing the world's heteronomy of facts, does not allow for any subjective consciousness to legitimate the possess of its threatening entireness. These reflections pave the way to a new cosmological 'idea': "It is not us who nullify the world, but it is the world which nullifies us." (20) Hence, human events are not to be brought back into the process of history. On the contrary, these should be calibrated to the world and to the cosmos' greatness, where their 'essential' importance vanishes: "The cosmologic experience binds up with the object-like condition of the inhabitants living in the society at its completion, into Zivilisation. Subjectivity is the quick consciousness of being as objects." (21) The truth of a cosmos where solar systems move clumsily and without order and in which thermic cooling (22) will cause the organic absorption into the inorganic transcends man and his praxis on every side.
Along the line of a re-evaluation of an unsettled cosmos, irreducible to the laws of the intellect (23), Sgalambro extends his concept of truth's contrariety to a reflection concerning the role of mathematical sciences. (24) For Sgalambro, the amount of spirituality (25) required to conceive of numbers does not correspond to an equal (or either increased) amount in the 'real' transposition from their idea to written numbers and operations and, therefore, from signs to the world's things. A number in itself is an 'interruption' of living flux, a fixation of the 'thing' and of nature which, in this way, becomes separated at different intervals which solidify and: "[...] exactly whilst the intellect is operating, spirit is transformed into matter." (26) In the passage from the theoretical intuition of mathematical relations (27) between beings to written formulae (and to external fixation of beings themselves), the vivified spirit cannot be maintained; the formula does not add any linguistic or numerical meaning to unveil the hidden sense of 'reality'. Therefore, in the relation between scientific concepts (the intuition of numbers) and their external manifestation as formulae and beings, no subject can be operating and therefore mathematics has to admit that within the signs of its 'language' no thought as such has ever been contained. (28) The universe, says Sgalambro, is what counters thought, and mathematics has to ratify this state of things (29). Consequently, man is only a marginal perspective with respect to the cosmos and he can say that mathematical signs are like the dolorous singing of a species, (30) the vain attempt to understand the immutable and undeterminable laws of reality. (31)
If this is accepted, then mathematics necessarily relates to the process of 'becoming-a-thing' where the object, as a solid and lasting being, conforms to its adequate adaptability for scientific use. But, for Sgalambro, it is exactly this reification (32) of the thing operated by science that unveils the objective negation of will. (33) It is will that attempts to become a thing and to be re-absorbed into what it is not yet, to eventually find the eternal peace of the original inorganic stasis. In one word, the process of objectification, whilst it may appear to be a way of mastering and manipulating the world, is an unconscious echo of the total objectification of the inorganic.
This suspension of life, as the actualisation of mathematics' power to turn reality into things (objects), exemplifies the degree of discontinuity of material information on the base of which science works. One's own self nullification as an object makes the external world appear conform to the lasting solidity of its beings and, together, extremely fragmented insofar as these beings are necessarily separated from one another. Hence, for Sgalambro, a clear contrast emerges...
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