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<address><a
href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/worlds-without-end/">http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/worlds-without-end/</a><br>
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<h2>Worlds Without End</h2>
<div class="entry">
<p>By David van Dusen.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>Louis-Auguste
Blanqui, <em><a
href="http://contramundum.net/catalog/current/eternity-by-the-stars/">Eternity
by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis</a></em>,
translated by Frank Chouraqui, Contra Mundum Press</strong></p>
<h1 align="center"><strong>I</strong></h1>
<p>Last November a researcher at Berkeley, Erik Petigura,
published a scientific paper titled “<a
href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/31/1319909110">Prevalence
of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars</a>.”
According to <em><a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html">The
New York Times</a></em>, 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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/science/space/astronomers-find-earthlike-planet-but-its-infernally-hot.html">the<em>
Times </em>related</a> 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 <em>not</em> 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.</p>
<p>It was only in mid April of this year that <a
href="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">the
<em>Times</em> reported</a> 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-<em>size</em> planet,
then. Rather, preliminary data suggests that Kepler-186f may
be an Earth-<em>like</em> 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,” <a
href="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">says
astrophysicist</a> Thomas Barclay, but Kepler-186f is a
planet that “really reminds us of Earth.”</p>
<p>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 <em>The Astrophysical Journal</em> in
May 2013 – “has yet to be discovered.”<strong
style="text-align: center;"> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><strong><a
href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIGURE-1-cover-photo.jpg"><img
class="aligncenter wp-image-69021" title="FIGURE 1 -
cover photo"
src="cid:part8.02090602.09060404@ziggo.nl" alt=""
height="336" width="210"></a></strong></p>
<h1 align="center"><strong>II</strong></h1>
<p>“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 <em>Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical
Hypothesis</em>, 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, <em>L’éternité par les astres – Hypothèse
astronomique</em>, dates back to February 1872. It is
fortuitous, but not for that reason uninteresting, that the
release of Blanqui’s <em>Eternity</em> in English should
coincide – nearly 150 years on – with astrophysicists’ <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/02/monster-planet-godzilla-earths-kepler-10c">highly
publicized</a> talk of “Earth twins,” since Blanqui<em> </em>posits
an infinite number of “twin-globes” or “globe-doubles” in
infinite space.</p>
<p>In <em>Eternity by the Stars</em>, Blanqui wants to
demonstrate the necessity – the strictly materialistic
necessity – of an emergence and re-emergence of “billions of
earths, absolutely <em>identical</em>, personally and
materially,” in limitless space and time. Our cauldron-like
skies produce – and must cyclically reproduce – “billions of
earths by <em>repetition</em>,” 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.</p>
<p>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” (<em>sosie</em>) that could only be
distinguished from our Earth by its location in space.
Blanqui’s <em>Eternity</em>, 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. <em>Manaechmi</em>
is a Latin comedy by Plautus (on which Shakespeare modelled
<em>The</em> <em>Comedy of Errors</em>), 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 <em>Manaechmi</em>’s revelation scene, “Water
was never more like water, or milk like milk, than he is to
you and you are to him.”</p>
<p>The Manaechmi are more like mirror-images than twins. Or as
Shakespeare describes the Dromio twins – his own Manaechmi –
in <em>Comedy of Errors</em>, 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 <em>Manaechmi</em> 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 <em>Manaechmi</em> 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 <em>3:AM Magazine</em>.</p>
<h1 align="center"><strong><a
href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIGURE-2-Blanqui-1805-1881.jpg"><img
class="aligncenter wp-image-69024" title="FIGURE 2 -
Blanqui, 1805-1881"
src="cid:part11.00030402.01080201@ziggo.nl" alt=""
height="396" width="224"></a>III</strong></h1>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the superb introduction to his translation of <em>Eternity</em>,
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 <em>Eternity</em> in one of
his <em>Zarathustra</em>-period notebooks. Chouraqui is
non-committal, but it is clearly possible that Nietzsche
transposed Blanqui’s <em>spatial</em> replication-effect
onto the <em>temporal</em> plane to get his “eternal return
of the same.” And in any event, neither eternity-concept is
entirely novel. Blanqui’s replication-effect in <em>Eternity</em>
recollects Epicurean physical theory (see Lucretius’ <em>On
the Nature of Things</em>, book 5, lines 1341–49), while
Nietzsche’s recurrence-effect in <em>Zarathustra</em>
revives the ancient notion of a recurring “Great Year”
(which Cicero calculated in cycles of 12,954 solar years).</p>
<p>In the 20thcentury, Blanqui’s devotees include Jorge Luis
Borges and his protégé, Adolfo Bioy Casares, both of whom
used <em>Eternity</em>’s<em> </em>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 <em>Eternity </em>provides
Bioy Casares with the speculative conceit of a supremely
melancholy 1940 novella, <em>The Invention of Morel</em>.
As Borges informs us in his preface to <em>Morel</em>,
“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 <em>History of
Eternity</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>Eternity</em> as a “rare find” which “has
been as good as ignored to the present day.” Benjamin came
to regard <em>Eternity</em> as an emblematic text of the
modern epoch, and hailed Blanqui as “the bronze voice that
shook the 19th century” – yet <em>Eternity</em> 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 <em>Eternity</em>
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.</p>
<p>This <em>is</em> 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 “<em>external</em> identity.” There is no
substantial immortality of soul or body, yet there is a
simulacral immortality<em> </em>of body <em>and </em>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.</p>
<p><a
href="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"><img
class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-69017"
title="FIGURE 3 - Chateau du Taureau ou fut enferme De
la Chalotais en 1791 et Blanqui en 1871"
src="cid:part13.02030207.06000009@ziggo.nl" alt=""
height="259" width="400"></a></p>
<p align="center"><strong>POSTSCRIPT: BLANQUI FROM ARCHIVES OF
<em>THE NEW YORK TIMES</em></strong></p>
<p>Auguste Blanqui has at least a double existence in the
archives of <em>The New York Times</em>. In the <em>Times</em>’
February 2000 review of Walter Benjamin’s <em>Arcades
Project</em>, 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,<em> Eternity by the Stars</em>.</p>
<p>Blanqui appears very differently in the summer of 1879,
when the <em>Times</em> of New York reprinted a London <em>Times</em>
column titled:</p>
<p>BLANQUI INTERVIEWED. A TALK WITH THE FAMOUS CONSPIRATOR IN
HIS PRISON.</p>
<p>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”:</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Blanqui’s first words to the correspondent are meant to
betray something of this cynicism, since they gently mock
the London <em>Times</em>: “You have come here to satisfy
the insatiable curiosity of the great English journal?”</p>
<p>We have seen that in the year 2000, the <em>New York Times</em>’
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>differently</em>.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR</strong><br>
<strong>David van Dusen<strong> </strong></strong>is a
doctoral fellow at the University of Leuven. His first book,
<em><em>The Space of Time</em></em><em>,</em> appeared in
2014. He writes with some regularity for <em>Radical
Philosophy</em>, the <em>Los Angeles Review of Books</em>,
and <em>The Times Literary Supplement</em>, and he skives
at <a href="http://twitter.com/@dusevanduse">@DuseVanDuse</a>.</p>
<p> <small> First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday,
September 9th, 2014. </small> </p>
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