[D66] Less Than Nothing: Den or Othing

[Antid Oto]

(Ik sta volledig achter Zizek's opvatting, als materialistisch beginsel, dat we
moeten denken tegen de taal in. Vandaar ook de recente animated gifjes... In
deze trant kunnen we wellicht hopen op enige progressie. Als we D66 beschouwen
als nothing, dan is 66 misschien less than nothing, den 66, Tone or Otone, Fluke
or Fluks, Oto or Doto...)


Uit Zizek's "Less Than Nothing" (pg. 59-60):

Democritus took recourse to a wonderful neologism "den" (first coined by
Alcaeus), so the basic axiom of his ontology is "Nothing is no less than
Othing", or in German "Das Nichts existiert ebenso sehr wie das Ichts".
It is crucial to note how, contrary to the late Wittgensteinian thrust towards
ordinary language, toward language as part of the life world, materialism begins
by violating the rules of ordinary language, by thinking against language.
(Since med'hen does not literally mean "nothing", but rather "not-one", a more
adequate transposition of den in English would have been like "otone" or even tone.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for nothing, meden and ouden, which stand for
two type of negation: ouden is a factual negation, something that is not but
could have been; meden is, on the contrary, something that in principle cannot
be. From meden we get to den not simpy by negating the negation in meden, but by
displacing negation, or, rather, by supplementing negation with subtraction.
That is to say, we arrive at den when we take away from meden not the whole
negating prefix, but only the first two letters: meden is med'hen, the negation
of hen (one): not-one. Democritus arrives at den by leaving out only me and thus
creating a totally artificial word "den". Den is thus not nothing without "no ,
not a thing, but an othing, a something but still within the domain of nothing,
like an ontological living dead, a spectral nothing-appearing-as-something. Or
as Lacan put it: "Nothing, perhaps? No-perhaps nothing, but not nothing"; to
which Cassin adds: "I would love to make him say: Pas rien, mais moins que rien
(Not nothing, but less than nothing)"- den is a blind passenger of every
ontology. As such it is the radical real, and Democritus is a true materialist:
"No more materialist in this matter than anyone with his senses, than me or than
Marx, for example."
In characterizing den as the result of "subtraction after
negation"(something-nothing-othing), Cassin, of course cannot resist the
temptation to have a stab at Hegel: "It cannot be dialecticized precisely
insofar as it is not an assumed and sublated negation of negation, but a
subtraction after negation"
The rise of den is thus strictly homologous to that of objet a which , according
to Lacan, emerges when the two lacks (of the subject and of the Other) coincide,
that is, when alienation is followed by separation: "den is the "indivisible
remainder" of the signifying process of double negation. The later reception of
Democritus, of course, immediately "renormalized" den by way of ontologizing it:
den becomes a positive One, atoms are now entities in the empty space, no longer
spectral "othings" (less-than-nothings).
The neologism den evokes density and thus points towards the primordial,
pre-ontological, contraction: den is, arguably, the first name for Lacan's Y a
d'l'Un--there are ones, minimal points of contraction, of ens which is not yet
the ontologically constituted One.

In other words, den is the space of indistinction between being and non-being,
"a thing of nothing", as the undead are the living dead. (The well-known "Panta
rei, ouden menei" of Heraclitus can thus be read as: "everything flows, nothing
remains"-- "nothing" as the very space of indistinction of things and no-thing.)

Predictably, the Eleatic Melissus, in his critique of Democritus, dismissed den
with the scathing remark that "far from being a necessary existent, [it] is not
even a word. "In a way he is right: we need a non-word to designate something
that, precisely, does not yet exist (as a thing)-- den lies outside the scope of
unity of logos and being. Democritean atomism is thus the first materialist
answer to Eleatic idealism; Eleatics argue from the logic impossibility of the
void to the impossibility of motion; Democritean atomists seem to reason in
reverse, deducing from the fact that motion exists the necessity that the void
(empty space) exists. The ultimate divide between idealism and materialism does
not concern the materiality of existence ( "only material things really exist"),
but the "existence" of nothingness/the void: the fundamental axiom of
materialism is that the void/ nothingness is (the only ultimate) real, i.e.,
there is an indistinction of being and the void.

In order to get from nothing and something, we do not have to add something to
the void; on the contrary, we have to subtract, take away, something from
nothing. Nothing and othing are thus not simply the same: "Nothing" is the
generative void out of which things, primordially contracted pre-ontological
entities, emerge-- at this level, nothing is more than othing, negative is more
than positive. Once we enter the ontologically fully constituted reality,
however, the relationship is reversed: something is more than nothing, in other
words, nothing is purely negative, a privation of something.

This, perhaps, is how one can imagine the zero-level of creation: a red dividing
line cuts through the thick darkness of the void, and on this line, a fuzzy
something appears, the object-cause of desire--perhaps, for some, a woman's
naked body (as on the cover of this book). Does this image not supply the
minimal coordinates of the subject-object axis, the truly primordial axis of
evil: the red line which cuts through the darkness is the subject, and the body
its object?

[...]