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Deleuze, Gilles
This requirement of a – conscious or subconscious – underlying metaphysics as a platform for all philosophical argumentation means that all speculation must start from an occasionally declared but at times concealed theological assumption. The two main alternatives that crystallise out from Antiquity and onwards are laid bare in the antagonism that arises between the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, where Plato launches the dualist tradition, which prizes cosmos over chaos, the idea over matter, and also foreshadows thinkers such as Paul, Saint Augustine, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and among contemporary thinkers Alain Badiou; while Aristotle represents the monist tradition, where chaos precedes cosmos and matter is primal in relation to the idea, and foreshadows thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. Dualism postulates that the idea itself is divine and as such separate from the worldly, and thereby secondary, matter; while monism postulates that the One, that which binds together everything in the Universe, and within which all difference is comprised of discrete attributes within one and the same substance, is the divine. Of course equivalent conflicts can be found in the history of ideas outside Europe. A clear and illustrative example is the Chinese antagonism between the followers of the dualist Confucius and the monist Lao Tzu.
The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.
Here syntheist thinking refers back to Zoroaster’s philosophical revolution in the Iranian highlands 3,700 years ago. Meillassoux gets inspiration from Gilles Deleuze, while Deleuze gets inspiration from Henri Bergson. Bergson in turn takes his inspiration from Baruch Spinoza, and Spinoza, for his part, was educated by Moroccan Sufis, who in turn relayed the legacy of Zoroaster’s immanent philosophy – the pantheistic branch of Sufism should be regarded as Zoroastrian philosophy hidden under the Islamic flag – the original divinology if any. Zoroaster’s concept of a coming Saoshyant denotes a utopian character created by mankind or rather by the future itself, that is, something quite different from Judaism’s and Christianity’s Messiah as a saviour sent by a god who has failed to complete his own creation in a satisfactory way. Since syntheism takes its starting point in Zoroaster, this means that in relation to its precedent Christianity, syntheism must be seen as historically and logically consummated Christianity, a kind of monistic and immanent Christianity that accepts both the Father’s and the Son’s death and which welcomes the divine manifestation through the Holy Ghost as their replacement. God springs from the meeting between the faithful and nowhere else. The Holy Ghost, without the Father and the Son, thus becomes merely the name for syntheism’s Syntheos.
It is eminently possible to use the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts to describe the current dialectics between eternalism and mobilism: eternalism is a territorialisation, a fixation of a specific phenomenon (which for example occurs when the interiority Atheos is applied to the exteriority Pantheos); and mobilism is a deterritorialisation, a shaking-up and setting-in-motion-again of the phenomenon in question (as when the exteriority Entheos is applied to the interiority Syntheos). Territorialisation is fundamentally preserving; deterritorialisation is fundamentally radicalising. Thus, to take a concrete example from netocracy theory, new information technologies are deterritorialising, while identity production in a society is territorialising. Movement within the syntheological pyramid is thus initiated by a territorialising (a preserving but productive fixation), but is concluded by a deterritorialising (a radical liberation of sundry expansive potentials in the direction of the absorbing utopia). Syntheism is supremely a theological Deleuzianism.
When Einstein proves that time is relative, he also proves that time elapses more quickly or slowly depending on the local context, but this does not change the fact that it still and always travels in one and the same direction through the Universe. Within syntheology one is careful to distinguish between time as a physical phenomenon and duration as the existential experience of the direction of the arrow of time. In any case, Entheos is the divinity of both time and duration, since time and duration present the clearest evidence that the difference is the foundation of identity production. We can talk about the arrow of time, duration, history – we find many names for the things we love – but what we are actually talking about is a recurring feedback loop with infinitesimally but – thanks to their identity-dislocating function – extremely significant changes for every cycle that occurs. Entheos is quite simply the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.
Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.
In the next step of the subjectivity process, the dividual, divided subject takes shapes as Entheos, and the collective, assembled subject takes shape as Syntheos. Here, it is Entheos that assumes the role of mobilism and Syntheos that takes eternalism’s role within the dialectics between mobilism and eternalism. It is, for example, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos that vibrates through Deleuze’s classic work Différence et Répétition. Entheos stands for the differences and Syntheos stands for the generalities in Deleuzian metaphysics. The second oscillation in the syntheological pyramid arises between these two poles. The first oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos revolves around the One, which expresses itself as a single cohesive substance with an endless quantity of attributes. The second oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos however lacks the One as a cohesive point of departure, since the multiplicity in question which takes its starting point in Entheos is irreducible.
If relativism is philosophy.html">process philosophy’s introductory stage, then relationalism is its consummation. And as philosophy.html">process philosophy’s theological extension, syntheism is the process religion par excellence. Syntheism not only distances itself from dualist totalism; it also rejects the recurring death worship that is closely connected with the totalist ideologies, that is, the anthropocentric and internarcissistic deification of the human being’s own existential effacement. It is our own mortality that makes us obsessed by nothingness and tricks us into regarding it as a reasonable ontological alternative. This is why as widely diverse thinkers as the Buddha, St Augustine and Meister Eckhart are fascinated by the god of negative theology. In various ways they are looking for the possibility to deify the moment of human death, turning death into God. And out of the reverse perspective, the desire is instead to make life and its intensity into the divine foundation for positive theology, whose more or less syntheist proponents include Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze.
Therefore syntheism finds ideological allies among mobilist philosophers such as Lao Tzu, Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and George Herbert Mead. All of these thinkers are veritable gold mines for syntheology. To take just one example: Heidegger and Deleuze shift the phenomenological focus to the oscillation between Pantheos (becoming) and Atheos (being). Heidegger calls this relational phenomenon finite transcendence, while Deleuze discusses the same thing under the concept of psychic individuation. And it is precisely finite transcendence and psychic individuation that makes possible the transition from philosophy.html">process philosophy to process religion. What then is process religion in practice, if not the collective name for immanent spiritual experiences?
Deleuze advocates a Nietzschean affirmation of the eternal return of the same in constantly returning loops of a kind, without substance of their own, with only minute changes for every revolution, which opens the way for the sudden genesis of emergent novelties, for example in the process-philosophical, artistic search for the genuine expression, or in the process-religious, spiritual search for the genuine impression. Therefore, artistic expression and spiritual experience strive towards the syntheist emergence made sacred, through which they can communicate an actual meaning, impart an existential substance, to the syntheist agent’s existence. The conclusion of this train of thought is that the credible spirituality of our time – which is important when syntheism is compared to competing religious and metaphysical alternatives – can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia (like holding on to the religion of one’s parents in spite of it having become irrelevant) or nonsensical superstition (such as New Age and other commercial, exoticised posturing masquerading as spirituality).
While Deleuze finds process-philosophical dynamite in Nietzsche’s thoughts on the cosmic drive, there is no support for a corresponding syntheist renaissance for Nietzsche’s concept of the cosmic desire, that which Nietzsche calls the will to power, his most famous idea. Nietzsche’s analysis of desire is founded in 19th century Romantic mysticism around power, but does not hold water in relationalist physics. His idea of the will to power as a cosmic struggle for finite resources in a finite universe should rather be viewed as relativism’s most magnificent phantasm. While the will to power can most certainly be used creatively as a social-psychological explanatory model for human behaviour – since we live in a world filled with acute shortages and murderous competition – it would immediately collapse as an ontological basis for a universe that is always expanding and growing in complexity, without the need for any specific will or power over an unfounded, presumed competition within a limited sphere that actually does not even exist. Since the Universe has of course no competition in its cosmological existence, projections onto the Universe that assume a fundamental scarcity-and-competition situation do not hold water either. The Nietzschean will to power is thus a psychological attribute, but hardly a universal phenomenon.
This means that the will to power is not any kind of cosmic drive, as Nietzsche thinks it is, but rather a necessary ethical principle, perfectly adapted to a finite creature on a planet permeated by a struggle for limited resources, a position for action and against reaction in the ethical collision between them. With the will to power as an ethical principle, syntheism is – as a doctrine created by people for people – for affirmation and against ressentiment. However, existence operates as an entity as one big oscillation between Atheos (non-existence) and Pantheos (existence) at all levels, with highs and lows of intense oscillations and oscillating intensities. In this Universe, there is only an enormous multiplicity for its own sake, without any need whatsoever of or opening for any particular will or anything to master and thereby have power over. The Universe has no direction whatsoever of the type that the will to power presupposes. Rather, Nietzschean relativism should be regarded as a particularly advanced precursor to the extended relationalism that Whitehead, Deleuze and their successors constructed in the 20th century – for example through adding Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s more radical protorelationalism to Nietzschean philosophy.html">process philosophy – where syntheism quite simply is the name of the process religion that accompanies the Whiteheadian and Deleuzian philosophy.html">process philosophy.
Barad’s agential realism may to good effect be pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s psychoanalytic version of the transcendental subject; syntheologically it would correspond to Barad’s Pantheos being pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s Atheos. It is historically necessary for Barad to act as a radical mobilist in order to once and for all divest herself of Kantian representationalism and think her way fully through the consequences of the quantum physics revolution. Rather, she therefore operates as a personified oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos. No thinker succeeded in taking mobilism to its furthest extremity before Barad – not even radical mobilists such as Whitehead and Deleuze – in order thereby to create the necessary opposite to eternalist thinking which together enable the syntheological consummation. Thus, Barad thus does not operate in any kind of opposition to Atheos’ two prophets Lacan and Zizek. Rather, she fills the tragically large intellectual void that is the necessary antithesis to their own highly intellectualised void within the syntheological pyramid.
Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).
The Lacanian Zizek often finds himself in dialogue with Deleuze in his books, for example in Organs Without Bodies (where Zizek also pursues an extensive dialogue with – in his opinion – the Deleuzian philosophers Bard and Söderqvist). A perfect example of a Deleuzian hybrid concept is the dark predecessor, which plays a central part in the construction of Deleuze’s dividual subject. The dark predecessor is most simply described as ontology’s own Higgs field. The real is that which prevents the world view from ever becoming coherent or complete. It is because we never can grasp objectivity that subjectivity arises. The subject is born in the same moment as we are confronted with disturbances and questions in relation to our world view and it is these recurring disturbances that keep the subject alive.
Deleuze prophetically sees how the onrushing Internet age – which he consistently refers to as capitalism with schizophrenia in his key works Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux, authored with Felix Guattari – rules out the classical majoritarian claims to power. Baradian relationalism goes a couple of steps further in the same direction. There are no secure majoritarian identities left when we start to apprehend the extent of the quantum physics revolution. All remaining identities, except the Universe itself, are quite simply minoritarian with Barad. In order to produce an identity other than that of the Universe, there needs to be a clear minoritarian difference, which is why only the strongest minoritarian identity can generate what Lacan’s and Zizek’s predecessor Hegel calls the universal singularity.
The unifying narrative can only be told by the subservient agent with which all other agents can identify. When the Deleuzian dividual is placed before the enormity of Pantheos, capitulation is the only logical response. But it is then not a question of just any old capitulation. Because it is about a kind of Spinozist capitulation, which in turn enables a dialectical continuation in the shadow of Pantheos through the establishment of Syntheos in conjunction with the other particularities of the universal subject. Therefore Zizek and Deleuze are united in their passionate search for the Internet age’s revolutionary utopia, where it is Deleuze in his capacity as the voice of Entheos – in relation to Zizek as the voice of Atheos’ and Barad as the voice of Pantheos – who is closest to the realisation of Syntheos within the syntheological pyramid.
For in the same way that the axis between Atheos and Pantheos vibrates in the syntheological pyramid, the axis between Entheos and Syntheos vibrates. Entheos represents immanent becoming and difference; Syntheos represents utopian being and identity. As Deleuze points out: Entheos always precedes Syntheos. First Entheos generates the Deleuzian dividual; thereafter Syntheos generates the revolutionary utopia. What is important is that syntheology places transcendence in becoming and not in being. There is no transcendental being within syntheism, which is a radical point of departure from all dualist religions. Transcendental becoming is instead consolidated in a radically monist and relationalist universe. Becoming is primary, but wills itself into being and does this time after time through perception’s creative eternalisations. This will from becoming to being is the movement from Entheos to Syntheos.
The Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist. There is no need for any religion whatsoever when existence is in a state of constant expansion. However, the moment we move from becoming to being, the theological perspective becomes necessary. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism requires a syntheological accompaniment. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos in itself gives rise to the metaphysical impulse. We express this by maintaining that being requires God. We see this movement with Hegel when he transports himself from Atheos to Pantheos and sees the World Spirit (Welt Geist) being born out of this movement. But the same thing also occurs with Deleuze when he moves from Entheos towards Syntheos and sees the plane of immanence being born out of this movement. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos is in itself the original sacralisation of existence, the birth of metaphysics. Through the process of eternalisation, chaotic existence is transformed into a single coherent substance, what the mobilist philosophers call the One. And the One is of course the name of immanence philosophy and process theology for God.
But inside the syntheological pyramid, there is also movement from Syntheos in the direction of Atheos. Therefore it is interesting to introduce and study a rigidly atheistic nihilist as an interlocutor to Deleuze’s and Barad’s relationalist metaphysics. The exceptionally learned and colourful Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound champions the thesis that Nietzsche and Deleuze guilty of a kind of wishful thinking mistake when they place existential ecstasy before existential anxiety. Like the Buddha, Brassier instead sees anxiety as primary for existence – pain always surpasses pleasure – and he constructs a kind of Freudian cosmology out of the conviction that the empty, blindly repetitious drive is the engine of existence. The focus of Brassier’s negative theology lies in the Universe’s future self-obliteration, which according to him must govern all values and valuations until then. Here he takes his starting point in the human being’s will to nothingness which emerges from the increasingly leaky subconscious and constantly makes itself felt as a theme among the rapidly growing subcultures of the Internet age.
Against the idea of the human being as a malleable creature subject to a fate which is paradoxically both unavoidable and his duty to create, syntheism puts forth the ideals of Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze: the human being as an affirmative activist battling against all that which she apprehends as nature’s – or for that matter even culture’s – systematic arbitrariness in the form of imposed rules of play. Rather, according to syntheist ethics it is precisely in the protest against the‘ given conditions of existence and in the human being’s civilizational redirections of history that she makes his imprint as an ethical creature. It is Man’s concrete actions in the battle against nature’s givens which subsequently generates ethical substance, which thus has nothing to do with any personal suitability for subservience. The same obviously applies for every thought of an indeterministic world where the task of ethics would be to call on the human being, against his better judgement, to behave as though he were deterministic after all; a position that can be exemplified by the vulgar and stupid imperative “Follow your nature!”. If existence indeed were deterministic, which it certainly isn’t, this call would be completely superfluous, since there are no alternatives. Nor any ethical problems to contemplate either.
Brassier has a hard time concealing his contempt for Henri Bergson’s classical vitalism. And physics of course provides no support for life having any kind of peculiar nature or special position in the Universe. Life arises under specific material circumstances, which does not mean that this in itself is some sort of great mystery. What is fascinating is thus not life itself, as classical vitalism maintains, but the enormous complexity and constant generating of even more complexity of existence, as Deleuze assumes in his revised vitalism. Instead of, in the manner of Bergson, anthropocentrically preaching vitalism as a life-affirming religion – with the motto that the more life forms that arise, the better – from the perspective of process theology it is more correct to speak of the enormous and expanding complexity of physics per se. Vitalism can only survive if it is expanded into a universocentric, general doctrine of multiplicity. If we are to speak of a credible vitalism in the wake of the advent of M-theory, then this vitalism must already regard quantum fluctuations in the great void as a kind of life form. And why not?
Beyond value philosophy’s traditional pair of opposites vitalism (Bergson) and antivitalism (Brassier), syntheism instead is based on the concept of pure complexity. It is about a complexity which, like Deleuze’s other differences, precedes the production of identity. It is the pure complexity in network dynamics that gives the agents and phenomena their value, not the other way around. For life is, regarded as just life, really not much of a life to speak of. It is mostly lots of death. Life is always based on an act of self-sacrifice and must therefore be regarded as an isolating breaking off from life itself. As such life is doomed to obsessive repetition of its own act of death. Vitalism only hits the right note when it ceases to deify life as higher in standing than non-life, and instead views life as large-scale, duplicate non-life, as yet another in a long line of pure complexities. For what is life other than a cloned, discrete feedback loop that happens to be able to multiply itself?
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
At the dawn of the Internet age, hardly surprisingly, we were inundated by innovative relationalist philosophy. The culture critic Steven Shaviro is inspired by Whitehead’s pragmatic world of prehensions and nexi in his book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics. He does not refrain from also investigating such philosophically controversial concepts as vitalism, animism and panpsychism in his work. In her book Vibrant Matter the Deleuzian eco-philosopher Jane Bennett champions the argument that it is time once and for all to abandon the anthropomorphic fixation with the axiomatic special status that life constantly has in the world of philosophy, and instead replace vitalism connected to life with a vitalism based on intensity in physics as a unifying factor. Bennett constructs a world of constantly vibrating bodies rather than isolated things as the eternalised forms of processes, but her bodies are both human and non-human, living and non-living, where it is precisely the vitality of the bodies and nothing else that is allowed to take centre stage.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.
The syntheist agent stands out even more clearly with Hegel’s successor Martin Heidegger. He mistrusts Buddhism’s idea of enlightenment as a possible and desirable consciousness beyond the subject, and argues that the subject is located in and expands from its formative illusion. With Heidegger, the illusion is the subject’s engine – that is, identical with syntheology’s Atheos – and not a problem for the existential experience. It is instead the illusory quality that gives the subject its – for Heidegger decisive – presence. Heidegger here stands considerably closer to syntheism than Buddhism. The syntheist agent’s character traits present themselves most clearly in her relation to her own transience. This is the engine of culture: our mortality and the mystery of death. Death is characterised first and foremost by its anonymity; the subject is dissolved at death into a pre-dividual anonymous dimension. To die is to be dissolved into the Universe, to become part of that which is universal, which already within the subject is greater than the particular subject per se. That which dies in death is dividuation and nothing else. According to Gilles Deleuze, the death instinct should primarily be understood as a lack of imagination in relation to the existential experience. A lack of imagination which the syntheist culture is more than happy to remedy, and where the point of departure is given: Be your desire, be your drive, ignore everything else so that you may live life to the full!
Love and mysticism in the infinite now constitute the very nucleus of the ethics of survival. Here, an alternative to all forms of moralism based on the preconceived state of things appears. That valuations that are loosely founded in the state of things being able to motivate a kind of “the future should be more of the same as now” as an ethical beacon, is not something that has any logical robustness. That nature appears to act in a certain way in a certain given situation of course does not mean that Man must have nature’s mechanisms as an ethical beacon. While amor fati is a dutiful love to the closed past, the imperative does not include the open future; rather, it implies a contradictory encouragement to break with everything that has been, that is, to expand rather than minimise the spatio-temporal multiplicity, as the arch-Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. Thus to act ethically is at least as often about violating nature, participating in and driving the cultural and civilisational process, as it is about following it. Nature is not any kind of Abrahamic god and neither is truth an ethical guiding principle.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
To philosophise is to metathink, and what Jacques Lacan calls the real and what Badiou calls the unnamable is philosophy’s eternal variability, its own built-in impossibility, its genesis that consistently avoids transitioning into a becoming. Here Badiou stubbornly opposes Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophical foundation: where Deleuze in following Spinoza states that multiplicity is identical with the One, that multiplicity is univocal, Badiou argues that multiplicity is undefinable. He accuses Deleuze of building a lovely constructivism that relies entirely on intuition, while he himself relies only on the stringency of mathematics. Against this Spinozist and Deleuzian multiplicity of the One (Entheos through Pantheos) he posits the multiplicity of emptiness (Entheos through Atheos), an emptiness that is a non non-being. Only in this ontological equation of multiplicity and emptiness does Badiou see the possibility of correctly reflecting the nature of multiplicity. It is only when somebody gets the energy from Atheos to formulate the truth that the truth becomes an event.
We return to syntheism as the social theory of everything, and of course it accommodates both the Deleuzian and the Badiouian variants of pathos. Deleuze’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Pantheos, while Badiou’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Atheos. Deleuze is the pantheological prophet, Badiou is the prophet of atheology, and entheology is the oscillation between these two antipoles; a movement that is completed through the addition of Syntheos to the syntheological pyramid. In the midst of this earth-shattering oscillation, Deleuze and Badiou, the event’s two prophets above all others, are in agreement that what is most important for the syntheist is the decision to enter at least one of the temples that is devoted to either Pantheos or Atheos and engage in its activities, while the ethically reprehensible thing to do is to remain passively outside. Both these temples are needed as foundations. Both these temples fill us with wonder and produce spiritual truth. Deleuze’s pantheology moves in the direction of Entheos, Badiou’s atheology reaches out towards Syntheos. It is pantheology that makes us appreciate the existential intensity of existence, to further develop pantheism into entheism, while it is atheology that drives us to long for the fulfilment of the utopia and which makes us consummate atheism via its deepening in syntheism.
Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.
Let us go to the history of philosophical vitalism in order to seek an answer. The difference between the individualist and the dividualist paradigms could not be any clearer than the difference that exists between the otherwise closely-related French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s classical vitalism steadfastly sticks to the idea of the sacredness of life as an ontological foundation. For Deleuze however, the celebration of life becomes yet another banal anthropocentrism in a Cartesian universe that has been closed off and anaesthetised for no good reason. Instead, he sees the active intensity itself as the Universe’s fundamental expression for its existence in relation to itself. Deleuze’s pantheist rather than anthropocentric vitalism therefore remain – in the narrative about the Universe’s magnificent capacity for creativity and multiplicity – as much with the marvellous in quantum physics and cosmology as with the marvellous in plants and animals. Therefore it seems quite reasonable that Karen Barad’s, Manuel De Landa’s and Robert Corrington’s intensity-fixated variants of relationalism start from Deleuzian rather than Bergsonian vitalism. It is nature and not what is most closely related to Man that is the vital, and nature is vital in itself based on its own intensity. Therefore Deleuze, Barad and De Landa are naturalist philosophers. The self-confessed syntheist Corrington even calls his philosophical orientation ecstatic naturalism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58