[D66] Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis

[Oto]

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/worlds-without-end/


    Worlds Without End

By David van Dusen.


*Louis-Auguste Blanqui, /Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical
Hypothesis
<http://contramundum.net/catalog/current/eternity-by-the-stars/>/,
translated by Frank Chouraqui, Contra Mundum Press*


  *I*

Last November a researcher at Berkeley, Erik Petigura, published a
scientific paper titled “Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting
Sun-like stars
<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/31/1319909110>.” According to
/The New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html>/,
the immediate result of this mildly titled contribution was that “the
known odds of something – or someone – living far away from Earth
improved beyond astronomers’ boldest dreams.” Petigura’s new
astronomical model adopts the premise that “Earth-size planets are
common around Sun-like stars,” and accordingly predicts the existence of
up to 40 billion Earth-size planets in our galaxy alone. Of these 40
billion, roughly 12 billion could be expected to harbour some form of
life – or at least, to be habitable.

That a planet is Earth-size says relatively little about its
habitability. Habitability is determined by an array of “planet-specific
properties,” writes Petigura, and crucially by its orbit falling within
the “habitable zone” relative to its sun – not too distant, not too
close. Only an Earth-size planet situated in a habitable zone and
capable of preserving liquid water on its surface will qualify as
“Earth-like.” Case in point: days before Petigura’s article appeared,
the/Times /related
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/science/space/astronomers-find-earthlike-planet-but-its-infernally-hot.html>
the discovery of planet Kepler-78b, which shares a number of Earth’s
compositional features but is “one of the most hellish planets” in the
galaxy. An Earth-size but /not/ an Earth-like planet, Kepler-78b is
totally uninhabitable – a globe of molten rock 400 light years out that
circles its sun every eight blazing hours.

It was only in mid April of this year that the /Times/ reported
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/science/space/scientists-find-an-earth-twin-or-maybe-a-cousin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0>
on NASA’s data for a planet called Kepler-186f, which is orbiting a sun
some 500 light years away and is – though “not a perfect replica” of
Earth – the nearest thing to a replica that has ever been sighted.
Kepler-186f is not merely an Earth-/size/ planet, then. Rather,
preliminary data suggests that Kepler-186f may be an Earth-/like/
planet. Kepler-186f seems to orbit its sun in the habitable zone, and
since its composition is likely to include liquid water, it may host
life on its surface. “Perhaps it’s more of an Earth cousin than an Earth
twin,” says astrophysicist
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/science/space/scientists-find-an-earth-twin-or-maybe-a-cousin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0>
Thomas Barclay, but Kepler-186f is a planet that “really reminds us of
Earth.”

Nearly a year before he announced Kepler-186f, Barclay presented the
findings on yet another Kepler planet – this one designated 69c – in a
paper titled “A super-Earth-sized planet orbiting in or near the
habitable zone around a Sun-like star.” If this year’s Kepler planet is
an “Earth cousin,” then last year’s is a cousin at one farther remove.
But what Barclay and other astronomers are hoping to identify is not a
distant Earth cousin, or even a close cousin: Barclay wants to locate
what he calls an “Earth twin,” and more precisely, the “first true
Earth-analogue.” If Petigura’s new model is accurate, such analogue
planets should be superabundant. Nevertheless, Earth’s first twin – as
Barclay wrote in /The Astrophysical Journal/ in May 2013 – “has yet to
be discovered.”* *

*<http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIGURE-1-cover-photo.jpg>*


  *II*

“At the present moment, the entire life of our planet, from its birth to
its death, unfolds, day by day, on myriads of twin-globes.” This is one
of the last sentences of Auguste Blanqui’s /Eternity by the Stars: An
Astronomical Hypothesis/, which appeared – like Barclay’s report on
Kepler 69-c – in May 2013. Or rather, the first English edition of
Blanqui’s book appeared last year. Blanqui’s original, /L’éternité par
les astres – Hypothèse astronomique/, dates back to February 1872. It is
fortuitous, but not for that reason uninteresting, that the release of
Blanqui’s /Eternity/ in English should coincide – nearly 150 years on –
with astrophysicists’ highly publicized
<http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/02/monster-planet-godzilla-earths-kepler-10c>
talk of “Earth twins,” since Blanqui//posits an infinite number of
“twin-globes” or “globe-doubles” in infinite space.

In /Eternity by the Stars/, Blanqui wants to demonstrate the necessity –
the strictly materialistic necessity – of an emergence and re-emergence
of “billions of earths, absolutely /identical/, personally and
materially,” in limitless space and time. Our cauldron-like skies
produce – and must cyclically reproduce – “billions of earths by
/repetition/,” Blanqui argues, because an “infinity of globes can only
arise by the infinity of repetitions.” Thus, whereas contemporary
astrophysicists search for a “true Earth-analogue” in deep space, by
which they only denote a spare set of parallels – distance from a sun,
atmospheric enclosure, evidence of a rocky surface, etc. – Blanqui
asserts nothing less than the necessary existence of a “genuine
earth-double” in deep space.

Barclay’s casual mention of an “Earth twin” to reporters is obviously to
be taken casually. Blanqui, however, leaves no doubt that Earth must
have a twin in the strictest possible sense: a “double” (/sosie/) that
could only be distinguished from our Earth by its location in space.
Blanqui’s /Eternity/, towards the close of the 19th century, is meant to
“open wide the doors of the Menaechmi” – a classical allusion that will
slip past most 21st-century readers, but is worth getting hold of.
/Manaechmi/ is a Latin comedy by Plautus (on which Shakespeare modelled
/The/ /Comedy of Errors/), and the Manaechmi are twin boys separated in
infancy, raised in different cities, and finally – after a day of wild
confusion in the same city – introduced. “Believe me!” one character
swears to a twin in /Manaechmi/’s revelation scene, “Water was never
more like water, or milk like milk, than he is to you and you are to him.”

The Manaechmi are more like mirror-images than twins. Or as Shakespeare
describes the Dromio twins – his own Manaechmi – in /Comedy of Errors/,
they are “one in semblance.” When Blanqui speaks of “twin-globes,” he
means it in that – on the face of it, farcical – sense. Yet Blanqui
assures us that “all of this, joking aside, is very serious.” Deep space
is actually /Manaechmi/ territory. Unknown to us, we have
hyper-identical “brother-stars” in a host of star systems. This is not
the only place where a Plautus contrived /Manaechmi/ and a Jesus of
Nazareth was crucified. This is not the only place where a Kardashian
girl married a Kanye, a U.S. Secretary of State is outflanked in a
brutalized Near East, and your alter-ego is now scanning the words “your
alter-ego is now scanning the words” in /3:AM Magazine/.


  *<http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIGURE-2-Blanqui-1805-1881.jpg>III*

If Blanqui is right, we have dead ringers in the sky. “But who,” he
asks, “shall believe it?” Apparently, no one has believed it – or at
least, not exactly.

In the superb introduction to his translation of /Eternity/, Frank
Chouraqui lays out the evidence – much of it from Nietzsche’s papers –
that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” was lifted from Blanqui. A decade
after Blanqui announced infinite replication in space, Nietzsche
promulgated infinite replication in time – and Nietzsche appears to have
logged an 1883 encounter with /Eternity/ in one of his
/Zarathustra/-period notebooks. Chouraqui is non-committal, but it is
clearly possible that Nietzsche transposed Blanqui’s /spatial/
replication-effect onto the /temporal/ plane to get his “eternal return
of the same.” And in any event, neither eternity-concept is entirely
novel. Blanqui’s replication-effect in /Eternity/ recollects Epicurean
physical theory (see Lucretius’ /On the Nature of Things/, book 5, lines
1341–49), while Nietzsche’s recurrence-effect in /Zarathustra/ revives
the ancient notion of a recurring “Great Year” (which Cicero calculated
in cycles of 12,954 solar years).

In the 20thcentury, Blanqui’s devotees include Jorge Luis Borges and his
protégé, Adolfo Bioy Casares, both of whom used /Eternity/’s//hypothesis
to structure their fictions. It is Blanqui’s notions of bifurcation and
replication that Borges exploits in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and
“The Library of Babel,” and /Eternity /provides Bioy Casares with the
speculative conceit of a supremely melancholy 1940 novella, /The
Invention of Morel/. As Borges informs us in his preface to /Morel/,
“Bioy renews in literature a concept which was refuted by St. Augustine
and Origen, and studied by Louis-Auguste Blanqui.” Several years
previously, in a /History of Eternity/ he published in 1936, Borges
observes that “all principles of eternal return” have been “justified by
‘an algebraic principle’.” Borges cites the return-concepts of Plato,
Blanqui and Nietzsche, before concluding that the “best reasoned of
these doctrines is Blanqui’s.”

Perhaps Walter Benjamin would have concurred with Borges’s judgement in
the 1930s. He effuses about Blanqui in a 1938 letter to Max Horkheimer,
for instance, in which he describes /Eternity/ as a “rare find” which
“has been as good as ignored to the present day.” Benjamin came to
regard /Eternity/ as an emblematic text of the modern epoch, and hailed
Blanqui as “the bronze voice that shook the 19th century” – yet
/Eternity/ is still, to this day, “as good as ignored.” Whatever else
Benjamin may get wrong in this letter to Horkheimer, it is suggestive
that for him the really “shocking thing” about /Eternity/ is that it
“lacks all irony.” In other words, Blanqui’s subtitle is on the level:
his hypothesis is not ironical or allegorical, but astrophysical.

This /is/ the shocking thing. According to Blanqui, eternity is being
actualized by distant globes on which our “existence doubles out” in all
its glistering and horrifying specificity. Eternity is an infinite
effect of the “permanent reproduction” of suns and their satellites –
and therewith, of life. Eternal life is real, for Blanqui, even if it is
a matter of what Bioy Casares – rephrasing Blanqui – calls “/external/
identity.” There is no substantial immortality of soul or body, yet
there is a simulacral immortality//of body /and /soul. “The number of
our doubles is infinite in space and time. In all honesty, one could not
demand more.” Blanqui is a materialist who prophesies “worlds without
end” – to recall the Christian formula – by means of replication in
space, not resurrection in time. And as astrophysicists continue to sift
the spectral data from deep space, his bold wager on eternity is nothing
if not contemporary.

<http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIGURE-3-Chateau-du-Taureau-ou-fut-enferme-De-la-Chalotais-en-1791-et-Blanqui-en-1871.jpg>

*POSTSCRIPT: BLANQUI FROM ARCHIVES OF /THE NEW YORK TIMES/*

Auguste Blanqui has at least a double existence in the archives of /The
New York Times/. In the /Times/’ February 2000 review of Walter
Benjamin’s /Arcades Project/, Blanqui appears as “a bloody-minded
propagandist and fearless leader of conspiracies and secret societies.”
He is described – at once – as the most hermetic of the 19th-century
“utopian socialists,” and as a revolutionary of “unrelenting militance.”
It was Blanqui’s disciples, we are told, who spearheaded “a number of
uprisings in Paris, in 1830, 1839, 1848 and 1871.” Yet Blanqui the
bullish insurgent is also the author of “arcane texts,” and Walter
Benjamin’s “deepest … political sympathies” are reserved for one of
Blanqui’s texts in particular – namely,/Eternity by the Stars/.

Blanqui appears very differently in the summer of 1879, when the /Times/
of New York reprinted a London /Times/ column titled:

BLANQUI INTERVIEWED. A TALK WITH THE FAMOUS CONSPIRATOR IN HIS PRISON.

Here, the British correspondent opens with a late-Victorian hook: “Never
have I witnessed a greater contrast than that between the man I saw
before me and the stir which his name has for the last few weeks
created.” After a detailed description of Blanqui’s “fanciful garb,” we
are given a verbal lithograph of the prisoner’s “physiognomy”:

His head is short at the lower part, broad toward the temples, and set
off with a bristly white beard. His complexion is clear and rosy, his
forehead broad, but low, and slightly compressed at the temples; his
ears are rather delicate, his eyes long and fixed; his nose is thin at
the top, broad and square below; his mouth wide, his lips red and his
expression, though sometimes lit up with an agreeable smile, shows a
kind of cynical curiosity.

Blanqui’s first words to the correspondent are meant to betray something
of this cynicism, since they gently mock the London /Times/: “You have
come here to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the great English journal?”

We have seen that in the year 2000, the /New York Times/’ Blanqui is
called a “utopian socialist.” This is of course Marx’s meanest slur, and
neither an orthodox Marxist nor a stock-jobbing banker can say “utopian”
without a curl of the lip. (Note, however, that Marx himself recognized
Blanqui as being “the heart and soul of the proletarian party in
France.”) In this 1879 interview, Blanqui presents himself as a
muscular, atheistic Republican in the 18th-century sense of the term.

I am not a professor of politics or socialism; I am a man of action.
What exists is bad; something else must take its place, and gradually
things will become what they ought to be. … First and foremost, France
must be unchristianized. She must be rid, not only of Catholicism, but
of Christianity. The Catholics are now the masters. We still have the
Inquisition. It no longer burns, but it imprisons. … Journalists are
condemned because they turn religion into derision. It ought to be
allowable to turn religion into derision in the name of reason.

When Blanqui is asked, “Would you leave the churches open?” he concedes:
“Yes, but [we would] watch the preaching.” When the correspondent later
protests that Blanqui would “destroy property,” he denies it outright:
he espouses neither a communist abolition nor a socialist
nationalization of property, but rather an “equilibrium” of property and
labour, with new tax codes to manage it.

He who works must be relieved … and [we must] restore the equilibrium. …
Taxation is bad, it must be modified. … I [would] chiefly tax capital,
and [would] forbid the reconstruction of large properties. There must at
the same time be perfect freedom of the press and public meetings to
discuss all the reforms.

When he is pressed on the question of total disarmament, Blanqui takes a
non-utopian line: France should not “disarm in the existing
circumstances,” but “she must be armed differently.” The French army is
“a cause of crime and a menace to liberty,” and should be drastically
restructured, but Blanqui repeats his formula a couple of times: “France
must be armed /differently/.”

Blanqui admits that his positions do not amount to directives for a new
political order, and quotes Voltaire: “I rid them of a monster and they
ask me what I shall put in its place.” He first wants to dismember the
clerical-capitalist monster. Further reforms will then be decided by
public consultation and free debate. And compared to this stance, it is
Marx – not Blanqui – who looks like a utopian socialist.


*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*
*David van Dusen***is a doctoral fellow at the University of Leuven. His
first book, //The Space of Time///,/ appeared in 2014. He writes with
some regularity for /Radical Philosophy/, the /Los Angeles Review of
Books/, and /The Times Literary Supplement/, and he skives at
@DuseVanDuse <http://twitter.com/@dusevanduse>.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, September 9th, 2014.

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