[D66] Fragment, Axiom, Diagram: A Review of 'Dag Nacht '

[René Oudeweg]

[GPT vergeet de cruciale oorsprong van het woord digitale, 
'digit=vinger'.  Ik heb nog twee exemplaren van het boek hier. Wie het 
wil kopen, met signatuur of opdracht: mail een reply...]


Fragment, Axiom, Diagram:
A Review of Dag Nacht


René Oudeweg

December 31, 2025



GPT 5.2 paper

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Below is a single, continuous review essay of approximately 3,000 words,
integrating conceptual analysis, critical evaluation, and a 
hermeneutical reading of the drawings in

Dag Nacht: De axiomatisatie van het digitale by
René Oto. All references are to the uploaded PDF

Fragment, Axiom, Diagram: A Review of Dag Nacht

1.1 Introduction: a book that refuses its own form Dag Nacht: De 
axiomatisatie van het digitale (2021) by René Oto is a deliberately 
unstable object. It presents itself as an essay, yet undermines the
continuity traditionally associated with philosophical prose; it invokes
axioms, yet persistently sabotages the very idea of a closed formal 
system; it combines dense theoretical reflection with a sequence of 
sparse, hand-drawn images that neither illustrate nor clarify the text, 
but rather place it under further strain. The book is best understood 
not as a treatise about the digital, but as an attempt to think from 
within the conditions of digitality—fragmentation, discreteness, 
iteration, standardisation, and abstraction—while simultaneously 
resisting their totalising logic.
The title Dag Nacht (“Day Night”) already announces a non-synthetic
duality. This is not the dialectical opposition of day and night 
culminating in a higher unity, but a continuous oscillation, a blinking 
or stroboscopic alternation. Throughout the text, Oto mobilises figures 
from German Idealism, Critical Theory, post-structuralism, media theory, 
and speculative philosophy (Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze 
and Guattari,Badiou, Critchley, Land), not in order to construct a 
system, but to stage what might be called a philosophy of breakdown: 
breakdown of totality, of communication, of system, of representation.
The book’s subtitle, De axiomatisatie van het digitale, is therefore 
deeply ironic. What is axiomatised here is not the digital as a coherent 
structure, but the impossibility of grounding it in axioms without 
remainder. The digital appears less as a technical domain than as a 
metaphysical condition that shapes language, memory, space, number, and 
subjectivity.

[...]

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