The Dash - The Other Side of Absolute Knowing by Comay Rebecca; Ruda Frank; Transition Stockholm Inst Of & Frank Ruda

Author:Comay, Rebecca; Ruda, Frank; Transition, Stockholm Inst Of & Frank Ruda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hegel; philosophy; dialectics; linguistics; em dash; Continental philosophy; absolute knowing; semantics; teleology; Zizek; Short Circuits series
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

But what are the atoms, philosophically speaking, that we take the dash to split? Ancient atomists, from Leucippus and Democritus onward, took atoms to be the indivisible units of which all matter is composed. But to account for the emergence of matter they needed to introduce another principle, namely the void that lies between the atoms and opens up the space for them to move. There is a split between atoms and the void. Atoms seem to fall on the side of being, the void on the side of nonbeing; the void names “the nothingness that is between the atoms.”36 But if the atoms are the components of matter, they must precede the formation of matter. And so, as the story goes, they have fallen in straight lines in the void, until there was a clinamen, a contingent swerve, a cosmogenic parapraxis that caused them to collide. What are the atoms and the void before their deviation, if neither the atoms nor the void are defined as material beings?37

Lucretius proposed a striking analogy between atoms and letters:38

Are many letters common to many words,

But yet you must admit that words and lines

Differ in meaning and the sounds they make.

Such power have letters through mere change of order;

But atoms bring more factors into play

To create all things in their variety.39

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