The Living and the Dead: An Essay on the Tendential Continuities of Life and Death by Austin Locke

Author:Austin Locke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Living and the Dead: An Essay on the Tendential Continuities of Life and Death
ISBN: 9781910924334
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 2016-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

The upsurge in what is referred to variously as object-oriented ontology and speculative realism among other names is significant. The current interpretation of this moment is perhaps one that many of the authors of these works would not themselves enact, or maybe even appreciate, but in the context of the current work, we can see in them a confronting of Man’s hyperbolic naiveté and rampant arrogance, and acknowledgement of the connectivity of durative-souls and the belonging of such souls to entities well beyond the human and life. At the basis of what has become called the “ontological turn” we find a confrontation of the tendential connectivity of the living and the dead, their inseparability and continuity. There operates in these perspectives a flattening of the hierarchies of substance that placed the noetic soul at the pinnacle of life and demeaned all other entities to positions of lesser significance.

This leads us to a situation where Gabriel Tarde’s considerations that all entities, not only the human, come together in ways that could be considered as social is reignited and reimagined. 117 In the context of human-animal relations this leads to a profound reconsideration of the hierarchy that placed the human at the pinnacle of life. Animals can no longer be considered lesser beings than the human; the Big Gaps that are endlessly functionalised in order to separate the human species from all other entities become recognised as continuous with chains of thought which exceed the bounded limits of the noetic soul. Eduardo Kohn has recently described such a consideration through the notion of the living thought. 118 Here, the consideration is that any entity that communicates through the use of signs should be considered as part of a continuous chain of thought, and the phenomenon of human thought and language is in fact only possible due to its continuity with this chain that far exceeds them.

Kohn’s work draws specifically on the field of Peircean semiotics and the more recent field of biosemiotics. In this way his work becomes limited to the fields of communication between signs. For all the brilliance of this work and its undoing of the hyperbolic naïveté of Man this foundation in semiotics fails to approach the true profundity of modes of communication which exceed the domains of signs. If we recall the reinterpretation of the famous statement that there is no outside text as referring not to the universality of language, but to its entanglement in becomings and connections that always exceed it, that are always lost amidst différance, that meaning is born of a context that exceeds the domain of the linguistic, and appreciate its implications, we begin to see that thought, life and death are entangled in tendential connections that will always exceed the sign. The unfolding of life into death, the continual feedback and interplay between supposedly distinct domains, the connection and swelling of durative-souls, all reveal modes of communication that go beyond the exchange of signs and cannot be encapsulated by them.

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