On the Darkness of Will by Nicola Masciandaro & Masciandaro

Author:Nicola Masciandaro & Masciandaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788869772078
Publisher: Mimesis International
Published: 2019-01-23T17:59:05+00:00

Things Cannot Be Better – Either the world is now at an end, or...

To see the universal materiality of sorrow, to understand it as an extra-human and general condition of things, constitutes a speculative solution of cosmic pessimism’s constitutive paradox and a creative resolution of its self-preserving predicament. Just as the interruption of the ‘see-sawing between metaphysics and fideism’ requires for Meillassoux that we ‘transform our perspective on unreason, […] project unreason into things themselves, and discover in our grasp of facticity the veritable intellectual intuition of the absolute,’235 so the materialization of the unreason of sorrow, its liberation from the logics of reaction and melancholic self-reference, is a portal opening the other side of the ultimacy of the worst, the place where the cosmically pessimal is not only actually but optimally true. To properly think through cosmic pessimism, as opposed to dwelling in it, will require a new concept and experience of hopelessness, a truer hopelessness that is at once more hopeless, because it is more real, and less hopeless, because it is less concerned with human identity. Such a hopelessness is unveiled when we peer through the precise blindspot or auto-eclipse of cosmic pessimism, its attachment to the total futility of its drama, famously professed by Lovecraft as ‘the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’.236 On the other side of this arbitrary collective limit lurks the more terrifying prospect that one’s (human) emotion does indeed have validity and significance in the cosmos-at-large, that it holds truths which infinitely exceed you, that subjective identity which, contrary to its most precious and self-defining pretenses, is already wholly lost to the universe. This is the greater horror still that cosmic horror perforce precludes and flirts with in the form of madness, namely, the fact that one’s pathetically finite human being is so abyssically in universe that neither is there anywhere to hide nor any reason to, because the life on whose behalf one trembles was itself never one’s own. Here we touch upon the higher form of cosmic horror, a horror-without-us that may be understood as the post-subjective affect proper to a ‘non-euclidean’ and anagogic cosmic pessimism, in the sense of that which inverts the axiom of its irrelevance and thus discloses the universal curvature of its own affect. Like the contemplative who finds himself raised up by what he seeks or the divinely bewildered who finds his own being inseparable from the multiplicative movement of the One,237 this cosmic pessimist plunges into a new order of the pessimal, one that is far worse than whatever is worst for him, a more perfect worst that could not be better.

In light of Lovecraft’s ‘fundamental premise,’ the universal reality of sorrow offers itself as a live medium for leaping through and resolving the apparently exclusive options of madness or neo-medieval retreat. Dialectially, it is a portal out of which spring the chaiastic twins of a new revelation of darkness and new ground for the ‘medievalization’ of science.

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