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11:38

(In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

Brassier’s dramatic achievements are that he attacks Kantian correlationism based on the assumption that thinking does not exist in relation to being, as Kant claims, but in relation to non-being. Only there does the possibility open up for a philosophical way forward, and it is relationalist. But even if his cosmology were to be physically correct – syntheist physicists such as Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose definitely do not agree with him – this does not entail that conscious people themselves need to behave as repetitive organons of some kind, replete with naked death drives (even if the elder Jacques Lacan toys with the same idea). Expressed in a Lacanian manner, Brassier thus constructs a kind of theology of the subconscious as an ethical guiding principle, but he attaches it to the same shaky place as 19th century socio-biologists did – when they lay the foundations for, among other things, 20th century Nazism – namely in the masochistic will to submit to, follow and amplify nature in exactly the same way that, on scientifically extremely shaky grounds, it is already assumed to be.