[D66] Less Than Nothing: Den or Othing

[Antid Oto]

EVENTS IN LONDON


15 June-16 June

Café Oto, 18 - 22 Ashwin St, Dalston, London E8 3D

Hegel 101 seminar, 24 hour reading of LESS THAN NOTHING & talk by Zizek. Details coming soon on versobooks.com



On 20-5-2012 7:40, Antid Oto wrote:
>
> (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?
>
> [...]
>
>
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