Foraminifederalogie contra Non-Economy.

Facebook discussion between Anna Newspeak and Achim Szepanski].

Anna Newspeak: Perhaps it is precisely nontological not to write, since not writing is closest to the movement of nothingness. It remains to be remembered that while Derrida grandly pursued the difference of voice and writing to the detriment of writing, it is nevertheless the case today that neoliberalism forces one to write. You must write to survive, or the market will kill you; or you will be told that you have committed the crime of not writing. You must write. You are supposed to write. Even if there is nothing new: WRITE! At the same time, perhaps against Derrida today, another difference must also be analyzed – that between writing and reading. Writing is superior to reading. Who writes at least still works a little (even if it is a despised work), but who reads is the ultimate crime of a non-work. In reading, nothingness “works” even more than in writing. Reading is the greatest threat to the hegemonic world equivalence chain. That is why there is the structural injunction to write obligingly. Writing today is forced labor (in the still metaphysical elaboration of this phantomality). WRITE!

Achim Szepanski: But even reading has long been work, hasn’t it?

Anna Newspeak: Well, that is the question. Work or rather forced labor. Speaking of “forced labor”:

It’s one of the most extreme results of negative deconstruction that it has to side with forced labor. Forced labor, then, for all? Isn’t that leftist totalitarianism? Well, no. Remember, don’t all totalitarianisms – whether fascism, capitalism, socialism, or theologism – side with labor? “He who does not work shall not eat.” Accordingly, forced labor is used against “the unemployed,” sometimes in weaker, often in harsher intensities. But a negative deconstruction of the labor/forced labor difference faces operating from forced labor. There has never been such a thing. Not even Derrida went that far, who in turn only got as far as mourning labor. But forced labor is even more negative than mourning labor. So the question is: negative deconstruction = labor camp for all? No. Forced labor must be understood in terms of a negative différance that has always been forced labor. Forced labor has always already taken place, long before the labor camp, long before the social construction of unemployment, because there is no unemployment at all, no inactivity, or rather it means – and everyone will find this infinitely difficult to understand – that doing nothing, non-work, inactivity are already forced labor. Inaction, non-work, inactivity – these are not unmoved things, but inaction, non-work or inactivity are the movement of forced labor before all work and even before all mourning work in Derrida’s sense. Forced labor establishes pesipalism – a negative capitalism of inferior value, counterfeit, abitrage, nerivate, etc.; “pesipalism” will therefore be the negative gramma that crosses all four totalitarianisms. Pesipalism (from Latin pes, foot) is thereby not a pure negativuum, but the movement of the negativity of all negativity, in which positivity occurs only derivatively. If Derrida was still a phantomologist, I will now have been a pesipalist. Pesipalism can therefore also be understood as a negative(er) phantomology of the ghost, which no longer draws on the still positive logocentric heritage (call, calling, profession, call of enjoyment, etc.) of capitalism, but already neconstructs it in all its moments, nontologizes it, niches it. … Will the left, which has always been the structural type of forced labor (hence all the exhaustion, the endless spread of depression, mourning, suicidality) go along with this new forced labor?

Achim Szepanski: Günther Anders on this: “Truly, one can become frightened when one realizes that even now, at this moment, hundreds of millions are engaged in such gymnastics, and that these hundreds of millions are even grateful that they, in contrast to millions of less fortunate people, the unemployed, are still allowed to do so: the unemployed, are still granted to do this gymnastics; and that they doggedly proclaim, indeed must proclaim, the right to this gymnastics as a basic political right, because without such futile gymnastics they would stand in nothing, or – but this ‘doing’ is only a dressing up of doing nothing – they would sit in front of the screen; and because they would be forced to eat their way through the time mash piling up before them anew every day. “

Anna Newspeak: That’s just the problem: forced labor has always been understood abscence-metaphysically as pure nothingness (that’s why Laruelle comes back to One, as I said, even with all non nevertheless). However, the abscence-metaphysical forced labor of totalitarianism has to be distinguished from a non-abscence-metaphysical, i.e. neconstructive forced labor. The latter will also have been the difference between left and right forced labor.

Achim Szepanski: Forced labor is the complement to free wage labor. Any variant, left or right, will remain entangled in this dialectic. Or let’s say difference. One must determine the place of différance, it is a form of movement of capital. The thinking of the One a radical break with such thinking and forms of movement. Transcendentally set, there is no other way.

Anna Newspeak: As I said, my reproach to this strategy is that it is abscence metaphysics – pure non, which in Laruelle means “One” or “transcendental”. That’s exactly why I have the BGB and the Laruelleians don’t. It is pure negativity that is propagated there. Neconstruction, on the other hand, knows no pure negativity, but always becomes even more negative, even emptier, even more nontological.

Achim Szepanski: The real is on the one hand transcendental, negative condition. On the other hand, given-without-given. Laruelle remains a materialist without becoming ontological. … More empty than empty? Against this even the Buddhist David Loy raised justified, materialistic objections against Derrida.

Anna Newspeak: For me this is just too materialistic. I would advocate an immaterialism that would be extremely anti-idealist (Hegel). Historically, idealism and immaterialism have always been fused. Here it is necessary to beat a negative difference, a foraminifederation and to pursue an immaterialism without idealism. … What objections does he have to this? By the way, “emptier than empty” is not Derridist at all, since Derrida always vacillates between emptiness and fullness, or strives against an absolute negativity, which would be precisely a negative theology. Derrida is still too Jewish there. It needs a Judaism without Jews and just an operation from such. The anti-Semitism fights the Judaism without Jews, the foraminifederalogical anti-anti-Semitism, on the other hand, fights the desire to erase the abscence, to finalize it. There can never be enough absent-mindedness, but must always become “more” (that is: less; but here we notice the metaphysics of absent-mindedness, with which we just have to struggle). The less is the beginning of the inferior, of the subplement (which would no longer be a supplement), the beginning of the world as a deduction of a deduction, precisely a negative difference. And that’s just no more Derrida and no more deconstruction, but a neconstruction, a negative deconstruction that begins not with difference, but with negative difference, nifference or foraminifederation.

Achim Szepanski: Yes, that’s also a reproach that Laruelle makes to him. However, comes to different conclusions than you do.

Anna Newspeak: Inferiority is the separation of a deduction, a negative, a less of itself. Thus a negative spectrum “emerges” that is not itself part of a superior (empty) set (the empty hegemony in Mouffe/Laclau), but a movement of non-sets into non-sets.

Achim Szepanski: What is negative difference? Isn’t that the same thing Baecker, Zizek and Arndt do when they subtract the absolute in Hegel? Here, however, it could be objected that such a (split) self-being of time – including the present – is only possible if a present moment (phenomenon) can be distinguished in real terms from another that is not yet or already was, and this always requires a standing now-time. If the present would be thought purely as the sequence of decaying now-moments (jumps from one to the other without knowing the moment of the connectedness at all), then one would have to really ask oneself the question whether there must not be a “now”, so that everything is not given over to the decay, which makes it only possible that something else is not yet or was already. There would then not only be the splitness of the present, but at the same time the standing now of the present, because otherwise we would indeed have to deal with the problem of absolute contingency and decay alone. But there is also always the “now” in the sense of simultaneity, which is read by us, however, as the problem of the temporalization of time….

Anna Newspeak: A negative difference is a decay that takes place in itself, a denial of the world. For example the difference A1/A2 is thought from the variable A. So the expressions of the variable A are A1 and A2. And these two are always in movement and re-constitution in relation to each other. This is how Derrida thinks with his difference. A negative difference, on the other hand, thinks further in that the expressions A1 and A2 themselves in turn become more negative and divide, which is why the expressions of the variable/difference A1 would be, for example, A11, A12, and A13, and A21, A22, A23, A24, and A25 the expressions of the variable or difference A2. Derrida in his conception sets the moments of difference absolutely negative and would stop at A1 and A2 and then go e.g. next again to B with B1, B2, B3, B4. …

I have unfolded this here on pages 35 to 45 and on 89 to 100: https://forsproject.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/vortrag_foraminiferderalogie_disvers_13022015.pdf

…The absolutely absurd thing is yes, that I could not/did not give the lecture at that time. The negative moment of the foraminiferalogy was “bigger” than the positive one. I am still somehow annoyed about it (I am so honest then), but on the other hand there could not have been a better justification for the foraminifer deralogy. As I said, the lecture – if I could have given it and been allowed to finish it – would have been ontological in its practice, which actually contradicts what I do. But so, absurdly, there has been a nontological practice as that of a non-lecture or non-lecture, an aborted (subtracted from itself) lecture, in that the “positive” was less than the “negative.” It is already crass.

Achim Szepanski: If the two terms A and B are given, representing concepts, objects, etc., then the difference itself (between A and B) is represented by A/B. The structure of metadifference now indicates the following: The difference in itself between the two terms (the complex term A/B) is distinguished from one of the two terms (A) (which it already includes) and it is identified with the other term (B). For the term B in the relation, one substitutes the whole expression A/B, so that the difference (A/B) is distinguished from the term A. The result can then be written as follows: A/(A/B). Here the term B remains relatively unanalyzed, or to put it differently, the process remains undecidable and leads to the bad infinity of A-B = A/(A/(A/B). We are now faced with the problem of the structure of self-inclusion, that is, a one-sided doubling of the difference; which is itself one of the terms. Thus, difference takes itself as its object and at the same time transcends its own objectification. This can be inscribed not only as meta-difference, but also as meta-relation: A-B. What happens if one of the terms of the relation is the relation itself? One takes the relation A-B for the term B, substitutes B with it and gets again the expression: A-(A-B). But what happens if now also the fixed term A iterates? Then we get not only A=A/B, but also B=A/B. (A is not equal to B.) We are obviously in a conflict here insofar as each of the two terms is the difference and the conflict itself. And nothing else represents the figure of the chiasmus. Ultimately, this means that the philosophy of difference cannot bear a real non-relationship. On the one hand, in the philosophy of difference there is the tendency (Nietzsche/Deleuze) to maximize the differences, insofar as the very first term of difference promises a superiority that can be driven to infinity; on the other hand, the first term can also remain relatively obscure in order to lead into a primordial ground, which for Heidegger is tautology (das Nichts nichtet). With Nietzsche it can be argued that the properties of a thing are only effects on other things. Now, if one eliminates the term “other thing,” then a thing has no properties at all, and the implication is that there is definitely no thing without other things, i. e., relations absolutely dominate, or in other words, thinghood dissolves entirely into the flux of differential events. With Heidegger, instead, the objective particularity of the relations must be thought of as dependent on the real, on a non-objective transcendence that separates each relation into two formally distinct sides, one side assigned to the unconcealment and concealment of the Being of Being, and the other side assigned to the object, which is indifferent to the other side. Regarding the second aspect, Heidegger poses the question of irreversibility as such, while not denying itself in the end. At this point, for Heidegger, the Kantian “thing-in-itself” is an essential and tautological subtraction in itself as the essence of being: nothing nichtet. Derrida, on the other hand, performs a complex mixture or chiasmus of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian models – he formulates the meta-difference of the two models. Difference, Laruelle’s summary critique argues, is a philosophical syntax sui generis and a reality or experience of the real, and thus a principle to be appraised as real rather than formal, and transcendental rather than logical. Difference, in representational mode, articulates a mixture as such, demanding the “neither…nor”, and at the same time a kind of inclusive disjunction, with which the “neither…nor” is so minimally negative as to produce indivisibility as One (Nothing as Being).

Anna Newspeak: Probably the next “stage” is that I will never be able to give my lecture on the justification of the foraminifer deralogy and sometime people on the basis of my Facebook and other discussions will write the book(s) or texts which actually – ontologically – I should have written. …

Achim Szepanski: Actually you are, see above, a flawless Nietzschean.

Anna Newspeak: Now you will laugh: I’ve never read much Nietzsche… another one of those nontological practices.

Achim Szepanski: That’s the strange thing, you’re suddenly something or someone you’ve never heard of.

Anna Newspeak: “I is not another” is the next generation.

Achim Szepanski: Okay. Whereby then again a dangerous proximity to Stirner opens up.

Anna Newspeak: Speaking of heard: here Althusser’s interpellation theorem fails, since a subjectivation without invocation takes place. That’s nonject(non)philosophy then, isn’t it? … Yeah, right. The “I is not another” must be distinguished from Stirner. It is about being “subjectivized” by nothingness or nonness.

Achim Szepanski: Nonject(non)philosophy. Okay I have to think about that. By the way, there are interesting reflections on Derrida by the system theorist Peter Fuchs concerning the unject. Kind of comes close to your stuff.

Anna Newspeak: I don’t know Fuchs yet. I might have to have a look at him sometime.

Achim Szepanski: http://www.velbrueck-wissenschaft.de/pdf_ausfuehrlich/978-3-934730-30-4.pdf

Anna Newspeak: I think the discussion between non-subject and subject is about the “sub”, which is not negative enough, even if the sub of the subject already points in that direction – supposedly. The meaning of sub is also strongly fluctuating in translation; it means both above and below, but often probably also rather below.

Achim Szepanski: For Fuchs, objects are ever already crossed out, that is, unobjects or transontological objects… Of course, this can also be applied to the subject. I think Fuchs is doing the same as you. Here is a Fuchs quote, “It is thoroughly resolved in the further developments of Luhmann’s system theory, which conceives a concept of system that is in principle non-spatial: system as difference of system/environment (S = S/U). The system thus becomes the expression of a difference, it is symbolized by the barre of distinction with which it is observed. It is thus not a place-bound ‘being’ but, as one might say, a trans-ontological ‘object’ or, as I sometimes call it: a unject. It is not available for relations of interpenetration and overlap.”

Anna Newspeak: “It is not available for relations of penetration and overlap.” That’s exactly where I disagree and would rather say that the penetration and overlap relations are just negative and nullifying, respectively. So, they make themselves negative and more negative, emptier and emptier. But the long quote above on Laruelle is interesting, of course, but doesn’t quite hit what I’m doing, but scientifically puts the competition, so to speak, to my thematization in the same field. The good thing about my non-existent Laruelle reading is that it doesn’t make me start thinking like Laruelle. One of the reasons why I also refuse as much as possible to read the philosopher-god Hegel. (If possible, then indirectly and not through male authors.) I’m afraid of adopting this thinking, of being occupied by it and then being trapped again in the disgusting Hegelianism and Hegel-Marxism.

Achim Szepanski: The quote above is from me. From my new book. Fuchs is more precise in the book mentioned above, where he says that the unject has the property of having no property. It always remains paradoxical or, as you say, negative. But in this case it also means always connectable. The thinking of the outside is then not in it. That’s where Dark Deleuze comes in.

Anna Newspeak: This reading strategy, this scientific strategy is institutionally very very resented by me, but I stick to it because the results are better because of it. I don’t chamfer myself with Hegel, but I increase the speed of the argument in such a way that it starts to become negative and I am so “fast” that I slow down more and more without ever stopping: I am slower than slow. That would be quasi also my contra-operationalization to the whole acceleration stuff. Perhaps the best way to explain this is to look at the circumnavigation of the earth: Let’s assume that an object orbits the earth and is so fast that it overtakes itself, even overtakes itself several times, and that this self-overtaking keeps increasing, then the effect is that the object is slower than itself, and that n-fold.

Achim Szepanski: When you say negative, you think only the inclusive disjunction, but never the exclusive disjunction.

Anna Newspeak: I always think negative as n-fold negative, that is, as negation of negation. For me there is no inside, but only deconstitutive outside of deconstitutive outside.

Achim Szepanski: That is not the question. Your fear of reading Hegel is well-founded. Galloway has shown that digital philosophy always begins with Hegel and always with the division of 1 and 2, all further divisions derive from it. For my sake, n-fold divisions.

Anna Newspeak: … and if the “object” is slower than itself, then it does not circulate, but the “circulation” dissolves more and more, a kind of emptying ring, so to speak. Of course everything without ring. (It’s an ever-nullifying flow.) … Somehow the conversations with you are always among the most “productive” things I do.

Achim Szepanski: On disjunction: while for Laruelle, given his preference for immanence, the question of the third does not even arise (superposition and idempotence require the following formula: 1+1=1), Deleuze/Guattari, when read beyond the logical figure of inclusive disjunction, insist on a quite interesting non-relationship between the first, the second and the third term, insofar as the third, the nomadic term, does not synthesize the other two terms, but radically separates itself from them. Here, two terms are conceived within a single object (for example, the liberal and authoritarian components of the state), whereas the third term of the resistive nomadic is not at all intended to synthesize the two terms or to perpetuate difference, but to establish a relationship with the outside. Contradictions must now be definitely thought outside of duality. The inclusive disjunction (neither… nor/ this or this and/or this) should therefore be replaced by the radically exclusive disjunction.

Anna Newspeak: I have also wondered about sending you the texts I have so “unfinished” for publication on NON. Where all the breaks, incompletions, splinters, oddities, etc. can be seen. That would be for me actually almost a nontological practice – and also much more extreme than what Sarah Kofmann does when she puts ellipsis points and breaks off in the middle of the text. It’s all still too clean, too calculated. It has to be much much dirtier, much more psychotic.

Achim Szepanski: Yes, okay, that’s good…

Anna Newspeak: When I do that, I get extremely much scolding from the scientific world.

Achim Szepanski: Fuck the science world.

Anna Newspeak: Again, you’re right. …. Thank you for giving me this freedom. No one else would do that.

Forced labor also establishes the dissolution of the current world value relation (because of me: of “capital as a total complexion”) and establishes besides BGE also a BGB, an unconditional land ownership through the creation of a new world currency, which does not – as otherwise always – try to translate the existing world value relation and thus take along the networks of domination, but it rebuilds, so to speak, the world value relation as a whole. Therefore, for a BGB, the hegemonic world equivalence chain in the existing economic world value relation does not have to be taxed (the absolute limit of the existing discourses critical of capitalism), but is set up anew by a world economic parallel world. This parallel world is the FORS simulation which replaces the reality of this world.

(By the way, it is one of my weaknesses that I do not manage to transcribe our conversations into mutual interviews that would be publishable on NON. I don’t know yet if I should think this absolutely sucks or if this is precisely my “superpower”. After all, nontology also changes social practice, which is of course ontological through and through).

Achim Szepanski: on the one hand, on the other hand….

Anna Newspeak: We wanted to talk more about derivative communism and unconditional land ownership. What is the so-called derivative communism for you?

Achim Szepanski: A-Mathematically, derivative communism is written as follows: A complex number has two parts: a real part and an imaginary part, so for example 2 + 3i. In geometry, if you draw a real line and put an imaginary line at right angles, then you can represent the complex number as a point on the graph (with its two axes). Multiplying a number by i and rotating the line clockwise 90 degrees from the origin, that is considered equivalent here. Further it can be written: 1 * i = 1i, 1i * i = -1 Because the square root of i is -1, so n * i * i = n * -1 = -n. Exactly this formulates the condition of speculative communism. To capture it briefly and succinctly as an open and cosmological circular form, which relies precisely on speculation and waste as negation and therefore is actually no longer a circular form: The real becomes the imaginary, the imaginary becomes the negatively real, the negatively real becomes the negatively imaginary, and the negatively imaginary becomes the real (of derivative communism).

Anna Newspeak: I would have some objections to this: the circular form, especially typical in the realm of economic questions and discourse, invariably remains metaphysical, even in its purely negative form. Historically and epistemologically, the more, the increment, the surplus was the formation of capital, which the left has always wanted to bring back into the circle, thus concluding its totalitarianism. It could never conceive of anything that was a lesser, an excrement, a lack, which turns out smaller than any circle and thus smaller than any point (the circle containing itself as a circle). Only with the beginning of a hole, which holes or has holes, the Minder can come down, which after its generalization as pesipal of all “capital” sorts also replaces the capital without closing the negative into a circle. Zizek is currently doing the same with a negative reading of Hegel, experimenting with negative syntheses, desontology, etc., but they all remain abscence metaphysical (cf. Zizek 2016).

Achim Szepanski: Capital does not process circularly, but spirally. If capital has the capacity to set itself as an end in itself in an excessive, growth-oriented and spiral movement (the circle is a special case of the logarithmic spiral, namely a spiral whose growth is zero) – the starting point here is the end point and vice versa – then it comprehensively dominates the sphere of production as a sui generis monetary process in order to integrate it into the primary “monetary circulation and distribution” G-W-G’.

Anna Newspeak: Regardless of whether the “capital procession” is understood as a circle or a spiral (or both), the more alias G’ alias S’ alias male enjoyment (the latter two Lacan) always offers itself as a deviation by pulling apart the circle or spiral. … Basically, this can only be countered by the economic capital as planetary total complexion becoming a commodity for all other commodities in monetary form and then in capital form (differential movement) in order to keep all signifiers/commodities/elements/gramma/spooks/differences/sections/axes/variables/sub-sets/etc. in a negative-spooky suspension, in which never an economic or an-economic form perfects and thus naturalizes itself….

Achim Szepanski: But capital as commodity is exactly what Marx describes as fictitious capital. In the Marxist discussion there is the debate whether one understands fictitious capital, following Hilferding, as money or as a specific commodity, money as capital. I register reservations against the notion of money as capital, which is a specific commodity. Marx has determined the exchange of commodity against money (if we disregard the exchange of the specific “commodity” labor power, which in the last consequence is not an equivalent exchange despite all Marx’s explanations) as an exchange of equivalents. The exchange of derivatives, however, is precisely not an equivalent exchange; rather, the goal of the management and exchange of derivatives here is clearly the realization of profits, which are realized in money. When Milios writes that derivatives participate in the production of profit as duplicates of the capital relation, it seems precisely appropriate to start from derivatives not as a commodity (nor as money), but as a specific form of capital, namely that of speculative capital.

Anna Newspeak: Of course, but the Marxist spectrum describes economic capital as a commodity for (!) economic (!!!) capital and all its “metamorphoses” or “crazy forms”, i.e. always for itself ( = moment of presence metaphysics) – and not for other kinds of capital, i.e. other signifiers in capital form (sexual capital, social capital, psychic capital, hanky-panky capital, cultural capital, etc.). – in short: all haunting ghosts – which can also transform themselves into their own fictitious and synthetic forms, just like economic capital, and which therefore in turn must also become commodities for all other kinds of capital, which they themselves are not, which then finally nontologically via the inferior value further leads to incessant depreciations, extravalls, derivations and deservings of nifferences and foraminifederations, respectively. foraminifederations, i.e. a nifférance as negative différance; among other things, this is why it was necessary to “justify” the foraminiferal deralogy, since hantology, phantomology of the ghost, grammatology, etc. can no longer grasp the horizon in which we move from now on, which will be the horizon of neconstruction, which no longer works with inversion and displacement, but with devaluation and nullification). That is the really all-important difference.

Achim Szepanski: What you describe is what Laruelle calls supercapital.

Anna Newspeak: No, it is not. You write about supercapital: “If the production/circulation of a physical economic object (classical commodities such as clothing, food, computers, etc.) is directly affected by a credit, and this in turn can be massively influenced by the price of its synthetic “replicant,” can one really maintain the previous hierarchical order of classes of exactly three economic objects, still speaking of the synthetic securities as purely derivative securities, derivatives? A table may well be a thing for providing a meal, but when factors such as interest rates on loans of the company producing tables, options and insurance on the price of wood, and finally currency fluctuations are superimposed on the corresponding factors in production, and this in the context of the production of further goods and services, a global banquet of monetary capital is nevertheless placed over the extremely modest table (as a physical object).” (Szepanski 2015: section 4) What is thus described with supercapital or with hyper-capitalism actually almost always refers to economic capital.

Achim Szepanski: That’s the functioning of economic capital in the 21st century, which determines all forms of capital that you list in the last instance….

Anna Newspeak: I do not share this determination in the last instance and consider it a reductionist economism, which only repeats old mistakes of main contradiction before secondary contradiction and base before superstructure.

Achim Szepanski: In the age of capitalization of everything and everyone, of genes, organs, wars and love, one does not really need to discuss the relevance of the concept of determination in the last instance any more, without now looking for the last criterion of truth for the theory in empiricism. But this figure also results quite compellingly from a correct Marx-reading, as I have proposed it following Althusser. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the economism of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals; rather, the theory of non-economics indicates the opposite. We assume the identity of capital and economy, so that necessarily there can be no non-capitalist economy or alternative economy, whether understood as a communal polity, a socialist economy, or a communist economy. Non-capitalism equals non-economy, and communism is therefore radically non-economic. Therefore, it is not enough to proclaim an ethically good economy, perhaps conceived as post-capitalism, a socialist market economy, or a post-Keynesian welfare state, because it is still based on the idea of a non-capitalist economy. That’s one aspect of the non-economy. Non-Marxism has to take this into account. The other aspect of non-Marxism calls for the construction of an economo-fiction as part of a generic science, which can only mean further pushing and radicalizing the Marxist critique of economics. This includes a critique of his many philosophisms that materialize in institutions, dispositifs, and the culture industry.

Laruelle, in his book Introduction to Non-Marxism, introduces the concept of “supercapitalism,” under which he subsumes the following facts: 1) The global functioning of contemporary “societies.” 2) In its generality not only the economy, but also the philosophy-form or form-world, which Laruelle characterizes as an internal duplication of the economy. 3) Its form as specified in a dominant way by the duality of capital and labor, with the economy having priority over the realms of politics, philosophy, etc. The notion of “supercapitalism” serves Laruelle to bring into play the problem of abstract functioning or the abstract machine, a machine that is in perpetual excess or in search of the permanent surplus that can in principle be extracted from anything, and here your forms of cultural and symbolic capital come into play, which in any case need to be examined more closely. Capital remains capital in all its methods, forms, and differential modes of accumulation, which in their actualization-virtualization interconnections also process the differential. And capital must be smashed.

Anna Newspeak: I’m afraid that your keyword of “smashing capital” ends up in the typical leftist abscence metaphysics that goes under the simple-minded slogan of “abolishing money.”

Achim Szepanski: Yes, it is absolutely necessary to abolish money, a monstrous act for any normal thinking person. The capitalization related to the future is based on the credit creation, the fictitious capital and the speculative capital and its risk models, which are taken from the probability calculation…value-at-risk. The realization or actualization of capital takes place in money, which is also the new beginning of the capital cycle. Purely liquid derivatives, on the other hand, are no longer realized in money. Derivative communism demands against the probable the improbable, namely indefinite and virtual nerivatives in the game of a free liquidity (without the realization of the derivative in money). The fact that production always takes place under uncertainty is taken into account by non-economics in particular, whereby this does not mean precisely that improvements take place through knowledge, information and and modeling, which, however, are not subject to capitalist efficiency considerations.

It is in the communist quarter turn always to think the improbable in the sense of Blanchot. From the point of view of process, it approaches the laruellesque quarter-turn, the real: -1=-n. From the point of view of the real in the sense of continuance it is 1=n. That contradicts of course completely the capital logic which injects into the tautology the surplus: G-G`. The real in Laruelle is unequal to the reality or logic of capital. The real is the result of a transcendental positing, it is given-without-given and at the same time defined as a negative possibility that stands for any “tangibility” of objects and for the rigor of thought itself. In short, it is about the One that is not (negative possibility), yet is real (given-without-givenness). Différance turned into negative, on the other hand, is the deterritorialized derivative movement under the conditions of capital. No wonder that Malik also describes it as such, but without finding a connection to the concept of capital.

Anna Newspeak: Wrong. I go further than Malik and Derrida, who both generalize capital as an archederivative or spectral ghostliness. However, at the moment when economic capital/money becomes a commodity for all other “signifiers” (which will then “be” empty voids), which in turn slip into all socio-economic and -an-economic forms in order to henceforth haunt together and all together as negative ghosts or to securitize themselves as nerivatives (negative derivatives) in negative-destineränzieller Schick- und Bestimmungsirre with negative-quasi-infinite divisibility (here a nontological “logic” of the post takes effect), the capital logic is overthrown, since a. ) economic capital is no longer the ultimate or predominant purpose of the movement of the world and also all other kinds of capital can no longer constantize an ultimate or predominant purpose for themselves, b.) economic capital just like all other kinds of capital only waft as negative relations/differences of negative relations/differences (nontological in-relation-settings of others among others without A/other, and be this A/other also absolutely negative like e. g. e.g. -1, empty signifier/hegemony in Mouffe/Laclau, JHWE, soil, ground, root, foundation, nadir, 0, foot, base, base value, underlying, sinthome, mother, etc.), c.) from generalized inferior value to generalized nerivative (neither of which are symmetrical reflections of surplus value to derivative and also do not represent or constitute a generalization of debt and indebtedness) only nullifying derivations of nullifying derivations take place and d. ) since the economic capital (and further every kind of capital) has become a commodity, the world-socialization of all money and all money-functions is realized, which de-materializes in BGB, BGE, money-, credit- and derivative-creation- and -destruction-possibilities within a world-black-market(in)balance between all negative differences. Black market also because the new digital world currency of the FORS behaves like a discarded or negative market vis-à-vis the white market of the globally more than 80 currencies of economic capital, whose collapse, contradictions and self-presence or self-absence it simultaneously intercepts (backup function), hostilely takes over (social struggle) and subordinates (nontologization of the re-productive forces and the re-productive relations, i.e. the world).

Achim Szepanski: Let us first come to capital: capital is axiom/law that defines that the meaning of the relation G-W-Gcontains a more, which is lacking per se. The presupposed signifier (money), to put it in the words of linguistics, without, however, proposing here a linguistic theory of capital, points to an invisible signified (Mehr), which is indicated in further surplus signifiers (Geld). The signifier of the more, which is contained in the signifier chain of the (advanced and the realized) money and yet remains invisible, indicates itself in further and further signifiers representing the signifier of the more, that is, we are dealing with a non-equivalent sliding figure, which can be written down as follows:

G G’

G’ G”

etc. etc, where one should think of an arrow from G’ at the bottom left to G’ at the top right – at the top the chain of money-signifiers, at the bottom the driving forces of money-signifiers…. The term “money surplus value” here sui generis conditions the (bourgeois) concept of surplus value, insofar as the latter has completely emancipated itself from the content, and this state of affairs implies, as a purely formal sliding process, the systemic “lack”, the “lack” of more or the famous immoderation of capital, whereby the anticipation of the more, oriented to the future, dominates the lack and not vice versa, so that a definition of lack inspired by Lacan or an account of the economy oriented to the explication of scarcity, whether it is conceived contingently or non-contingently, is excluded from the outset. The measurelessness (as an anticipation of the more) of capital or more precisely the more now dominates the scarcity and not the scarcity the more.

This would be capital as method or logic, from the point of view of lack and more. But it is in the last instance not to start from the single capital, but from the total capital, so that the three volumes of Capital are actually to be read from the back. The total capital is conceived as quasi-transcendental constitution, namely as a priori effect of the total capital on individual capitals, whereby the total capital is to be understood precisely only secondarily as the result of effects (of the strategies of the individual capitals) or as determination by the determined (this distinguishes the quasi-transcendental constitution of capital from the determination-in-the-last-instance by the real). Because of the consideration of the second moment (the strategies of the individual capitals) we speak just of the quasi-transcendentality of capital. Thereby the quasi-transcendentality is of course not grasped as Kantian subjective transcendentality, but it is to be understood as objective determination-in-the-last-instance, and this implies determined relations (given-without-given), which as givens, however, are each already effected, i.e. are effect of objectified (economic) “structures” (the total capital functions here as a negative possibility or as transcendentality). Total capital is precisely not a “thing” that could be transferred and moved; rather, as the dominant mode of production of every historically specific capitalist social formation, it is characterized by determination and virtuality, which is actualized via the competition or strategies of individual capitals. Through competition, the formation of a general average profit rate in the economically unified space of a national domestic market is produced in turbulent patterns and repetitions, which, however, always revolve around a center of gravity. The production of average profit rates is an emergent process, the non-intended result of a constant search for higher profits. The actualization-virtualization circuits of capital, which take place through the competition of individual capitals, constitute the temporalizing aspect of capital. The différance has its place in the actualization-virtualization circuits of capital.

Anna Newspeak: The thing about signifier concatenation and the proximity of S’ and G’ has also come to me… I would criticize this in both Lacan (who speaks of masculine enjoyment) and Derrida (who speaks of supplement), since the more is fundamentally, thus also “ontologically” false, although of course all ontology is characterized by the more (expansion of the universe, dissemination, becoming, etc.). The mistake of the poststructuralist generation was to think of the S, that is, the signifier, as materiality rather than immateriality in the sense of negative, denying materiality (and no, it is not a matter of idealism). We could also say more understandably: we are dealing with negative, empty matter. That is, not being/becoming/positive matter moves, but nothingness/negative matter moves. Because the latter is the case, we do not have to do with an enlargement/increase of the world, but with a diminution/reduction, which contains the enlargement/increase as part, but not majority. So not ‘S’ or ‘G’, but ‘S’ and ‘G’ respectively. With this, however, not only the surplus value (profit, yield, etc.) but even the Derridist heritage is destroyed, because the supplement (it is Er-gänzung) also belongs to the series of G’ and S’. Therefore, a negative deconstruction, i.e., neconstruction, comes into play, which must understand, for example, the movement of the world as “textual” subplementation (de-supplementation). Furthermore, the putting into commodity of economic capital for all other elements/empties/variables/signifiers/differences/oppositions/contradictions/sections etc. in capital form conditions precisely the overthrow of the immoderateness of economic capital, whereby the other kinds of capital in turn sink down to commodity for the respective others, so that the social world relation resignifies and reevaluates itself incessantly. An “abolition of money” as an abolition of every money form of every kind of capital, on the other hand, sets up noncapital (the empty signifier, absolute abscence, empty quantity, quantity of all quantities, 0, -1, etc.) as the new supercapital, that is, as supernoncapital, and subjects all social complexions to the measurelessness of a new n/ontological money form, which determines as ultimate purpose only another variant of a metaphysics of the abscence of presence and absence. This can also be understood as negative theology.

Achim Szepanski:

Theologically, as is not scher to prove, is the concept of differance. I think that one never escapes deconstruction when one engages in it. One is trapped. The différance is latched onto the meta-level as difference, or, in other words, the différance establishes as a meta-level the identity of difference. But if, qua such an identity, there were only the postponement of supplements, then, consequently, there should be no more supplements, because each supplement would be its own origin. And if the whole of the text disappears under the domination of the différance, then this would have to be true also for the différance itself. Therefore, the différance has to be stabilized by setting itself as absolute (albeit unspoken). Deconstruction thus remains an absolute process of the relative and cannot be held absolute without the reserve; it exists in the relation relative-absolute. Only this allows Derrida to determine that the continuum always involves a relation of connecting and cutting; the continuum is this relation and it sui generis relates to other continua in the same way. In this regard, all negative movements, such as those of postponement and deferral, are to be understood as instruments of a general A-economy, which may even have something in common with the figure of thought of inclusive disjunction as conceived by Deleuze/Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. This and/or that – that is the mode of inclusive disjunction. Différance would thus possess the same positive identity as Deleuzian difference, it would bring things together in a disjunctive mode at the same time.

Free liquidity no longer knows exactly this relation or, for my sake, this sliding process, and it would have to be examined whether Derrida’s différance is not precisely this sliding process. Against this, the communist A-logic of the nerivate has to be executed. The dispute about what the derivative is, after all, unwinds along the opposition of money (Hilferding & Co) and commodity (commodity as capital), the latter best elaborated by Milios. I think it is about a new form of capital, that of the speculative capital, which is deprived of the realization in speculative communism, with which it drops out as capital, then indeed the game with the negative relations begins, which however is no wafting, but remains related to the real. There is then no more capital, no more non-capital either, but the much more exciting game of nerivatives, which relies on free optionality. The idea of money as a substantial or valuable commodity is a relic of the Marxist labor theory of value, which one cannot get rid of even if one functionalizes money, as Simmel already did and Derrida takes to extremes. By putting a minus instead of a plus in money capital, nothing at all changes in the logic of capital.

Anna Newspeak: The naturalized construction of the difference between gainful labor and care work (labor and activity, production and reproduction, etc.) under the absolute domination of the former would have to be rejected in its entirety for the nontological work of mourning. Instead, it is necessary to pay for everything without exception, i.e., to assign it to the denaturalized world-value relation, under the all-encompassing presupposition of the commodification of money (of economic capital and, further, of every kind of capital) for all other signifiers/commodities that slip into money form in order to move henceforth as (negative) capital. The combination of historicity and valuation, which must be the decisive issue here in order to avoid valuation-less historicity (use value, need, self-sufficiency, subsistence, primitive communism, simple exchange of goods, abolition of money as differential movement and valuation, but also the valuationlessness underlying the monetary from the beginning by setting itself as a standard of final mediation without mediation as in-relation to other commodities/signifiers in the form of money), provides the structural liberation blow, which goes along with the disempowerment of the hegemonic world equivalence chain (so to speak of all capitals, in Mouffeian-Laclauian diction of all “hegemonies”; in Derridean diction all “presences”), the Unconditional Landownership of economic capital (and all other kinds of capital, whereas we hardly know anything about their BGB-form), the Unconditional Basic Income of economic capital (and all other kinds of capital, whereas we hardly know anything about their BGE-form either), an economic derivative communism (as a complete redivision and re-voluminization of all previous derivative volumes among all negative differences of the world for the purpose of de-teleologization and denaturalization of the sold future resp. time; whereby of course also derivative communisms are to be realized gradually for all other kinds of capital and the archederivat proclaimed by Suhail Malik precedes all this), under all negative differences in the disversum socialized negative-differential money-, credit- resp. dendit- and derivative- resp. nerivat-creation- and -destruction-“rights” resp. possibilities, a negative-destinarian world market imbalance between production sphere and reproduction sphere resp. between real “money capital” (de-realized-actualized resp. arte-facto-actu-virtualitarian capital; all assets, incomes and prices – and that even again for all “capital”-types, whereas we know even less here), fictitious capital (in actualizing-virtualizing resp. arte-facto-actu-virtualitarian de-realization; all fictitious assets, incomes and prices – and this again for all “kinds of capital”, whereas we know even less here) and synthetic “capital” (in virtualizing-actualizing or arte-facto-actu-virtualitarian de-realization; all synthetic assets, incomes and prices – and this again for all “kinds of capital”, whereas we know less than nothing here). However, since we have to start with the negative derivative – the nerivate – in order to understand the “nerivate comminusm” (the mistake is intentional: the coming of the minus or subtraction) as pesipalism (negative “capitalism” of the unvaluing of the minor as inferior, contrafit, nins, subminus, dedite, abitrage, deseignorage, etc. ) of the foraminifederalogy in the FORS-simulation, a disversal parallel world, we also start with the foraminifederation as a derivation of a derivation (an in itself negative difference), in which the ark-derivative is formed as an in conclusio about 1 quadrillion Euro heavy re-chaining and re-securitization of space and time. … All this has nothing to do with hyper-capitalism and super-capital of economic capital as an expanding world formation of capitalist total cannibalization of human and non-human life forms.

Achim Szepanski: Nerivate-communism indeed seems to me to be the better term… Well, let us first make a big demand, the direct and unconditional access to all money and all forms of capital, which henceforth process differentially negatively, or let us say it with Stiegler, process negentropically as a pharmakon, but only in order to replace them at the same moment by moneyless nerivatives. But let’s start with the small fish: The accelerationists and the leftists of all stripes are today frugal social democrats who are content to make petty demands, putting themselves in the position of the measuring and presumptuous creditor, all with moderation and decency. On the other hand, it is necessary to completely break out of the creditor-debtor relationship, on the one hand by propagating the debt strike, and on the other hand by liquidating the claim, either by exaggerating it to infinity, which I see as an objective of your project, or by remaining silent, that is, by not making any demands. Exactly in this silence then the revenge of the insurgents consists. Once the credit cycle is suspended, the derivatives or nerivatives come into play, whose optionalities refer to nothing more than to artifacts that are played out negatively, without synthesizing, as Marx still proposed in his somewhat naive remarks on communism.

There are generally two exclusively mutually exclusive lines: Affirmation-Ignorance-Value-Financial Supercapital versus Negation-Intolerance-Minus-Value-Speculative Communism. Speculative communism requires the destruction of this world, that is, on the one hand, the dismantling of the system of wage labor or of employment as well as the system of precarious, digitalized work, digitalized free time and knowledge, so that precisely on the basis of automation the individual brain and the collective body can be de-automated again, i.e. can be fed to a negentropic knowledge and a work which has interruption and free time as its basis, produces negentropic knowledge (that is why we consider the question of the reduction of working time and the unconditional basic income under capitalist conditions to be of secondary importance; Free time then only serves the further consumption of disposable gadgets). On the other hand, the politics of negation requires the unconditional smashing of all forms of capital including fictitious and synthetic capital, in concrete terms the global and unconditional expropriation of all millionaire and billionaire companies. This capital is transformed into derivatives or better into nerivatives, which, however, are no longer realized in money and thus both money and capital immediately lose their relevance. The indefinite, negative game (Fourier) begins with the nerivatives, which are related to coming nerivatives, without a synthesization qua speculative capital, rather a communist transindividuation is achieved with the nerivatives, which relies on free optionality. Free optionality contradicts the modeling of choice as propagated by financial mathematics or nudging, it also contradicts a mere increase in the number of choices, nor does it simply perfect the Deleuzian game of differences by deploying a deterritorializing war machine of exotic derivatives aimed at nomadic distribution, as elaborated by Benjamin Lozano, rather it is directed towards the luxury surplus that transcends the market, whereby processes of de-automation take place on the basis of automation, times of interruptions that lead to new acts of knowledge production in which one expands oneself and others via transindividuation. This is the liberation of the real itself, insofar as via nerivatives that open futures, precisely because it is assumed that the future remains schwrz, psychic and collketive objectives are organologized, think of libidinal desire, noetic labor, free time, resource consumption, technologies, etc. This goes beyond planning and cybernetic simulation models that map time dependence and relations between variables of the system being simulated, because the real and prognostic power of speculative communism is far greater. However, this needs to be elaborated in detail.

At present, the real is conceived purely as a mode of access to possibilities that must be actualized as money, an organological and technological mode of access in which the potential for transformations is a matter of the endless actualization of possibilities, and this within the framework of probability theory and precisely not speculation.

Communist speculation releases liquidity, which now functions as optionality on accumulated wealth under communism, where speculative justice consists not only in optionality on knowledge and wealth already accumulated historically, but also in optionality on wealth and knowledge to come (futurist negentropy). This optionality is produced through processes of psychic, collective, and technical individuation, and is negentropically sui generis as a transindividuation of improbabilities and interruptions.

Anna Newspeak: Yes, I am also concerned with free liquidity and speculation… If there had ever been such a thing as Left Randism (analogous to Left Schmittianism with respect to Carl Schmitt), then it would be more understandable if I said that free liquidity creates a truly “free market”, which, however, eliminates all totalitarian and metaphysical elements of Ayn Rand and Co. “Free market” thereby also has a closeness to “free association” and “equal attention” in Freud and to “free association” in Marx. However, the whole metaphysics in it must not be continued or repeated.

Achim Szepanski: On the other hand, speculative communism could also be described with Stiegler as processes of psychic and collective de-automation in processes of transindividuation. Here it is a matter of escaping market socialism on the one hand and the planned economy on the other. In this process, the most developed instruments of capital, the derivatives, are quantized and de-automated at the same time in processes of negentropic transindividuation. The question is precisely how to escape naturalization (measurement of quanta of labor, Cockshott) on the one hand, and the rewriting of forms of money and capital on the other (see Jiři Kostas market socialism and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins, etc.). Both are past-related automation processes that fall behind the present state of capital, which is sui generis related to the future, but always concludes it, that is, makes it probable, while speculative communism begins the game with the improbable (Blanchot) on the basis of automation and the de-automation of knowledge and nerivatives. … For me, however, derivatives are thereby anti-capital, an-economic, but by no means naturalized, but highly artificial negentropic forms of wealth. Liberated nerivatives are never realized in money, are therefore no longer speculative capital, but free liquidity, or, what is the same, illiquidity.

Anna Newspeak: Yes… put “capital” in quotation marks… Indeed, it is then no longer capital, because the unitarization of money as an overall social (ultimate) purpose is eliminated. But: It is still “capital” insofar as it moves differentially, more precisely: negatively-differentially. But it no longer moves purely or predominantly positively as any more-form (surplus-value, profit, yield, interest, seignorage, etc.), but negatively without absolute abscence. That is why I am trying to coin the negative gramma of the pesipal….

Achim Szepanski: Differenziäll yes, not in the sense of Lacan’s lack, for that is what characterizes capital as well.

Anna Newspeak: … Yes, not in the sense of abscentist lack, which starves us all/ wants to starve us all. On the other hand, I would rather say that capital suppresses and fights lack/minor in order to be able to realize itself as a more-form, that is, to expand. Capital is very “anti-scarcity” here….

Achim Szepanski: Yes, the surplus determines the lack, not vice versa. There is always a lack of surplus.

Anna Newspeak: If you didn’t conceptualize and understand the real so terribly metaphysically with Laruelle and Deleuze, I would say exactly the same thing. But for me it would be a “double” or nifferential real: once as a complete new symbolic order (the symbolic order falls into the real, which psychoanalytically corresponds to privation), but which at the same time falls again into the ever-next real (privation of privation), without ever being able to constitute itself again as a symbolic order. You think only the simple privation, which is also a psychosis. (That’s why you can’t say anything or almost nothing more about the “post-capitalist” economic events, but end up in the unimaginativeness in which all differences have collapsed into one in the real). The psychosis of the presence metaphysics or abscence metaphysics (One-in-One), which is to be fought, can only be escaped by an advancing psychosis from this psychosis, in which the difference re-establishes itself, now as negative difference, since the differences have all become real and no longer belong to the symbolic, which thus also no longer exists. Therefore privatization of the privatization… By the way, FORS or the Unconditional Landownership aims at destroying the current derivative concatenations of economic capital (as well as the derivative concatenations of every kind of capital), since in these past, present and future are already sold, not somehow, but almost completely along the hegemonic world chain of equivalence.

Achim Szepanski: Regarding the real, see above, it has a physical and a metaphysical component. But it is quite simple: by preventing the realization of the derivative by the nerivative, money and capital fail at the same time – a rather simple thought. It is quite wrong, as Zizek does, to identify the real with capital, which he then describes as ghostly, in order to save the real as the pores that capital cannot occupy or close. It would not occur to Laruelle to think of the reality of capital as even close to the real. His terms are therefore also better understood as references to communism than as analytical terms for representing and criticizing capital. One could summarize the real in Laruelle as follows: First, a universalization of the concept of base or infrastructure; second, the postulate of a base that remains closed to any superstructure; third, the postulate of a determination in the last instance, and as a kind of non-ontological causality; fourth, the unification of science and philosophy as objects or related to the unilateral causality that derives from the real. The concept of determination in the last instance must consequently be withdrawn from the social-historical terrain and include a kind of formal axiom that opens to the negentropy of speculative communism.

Anna Newspeak: … which perfects the abscence metaphysics. But it depends on being able to think a re-linking and re-securitization of the derivative or nerivative. Otherwise the much quoted lights go out… but that alone is only darkness/blackness. But it has to get even darker/blacker. In other words, it’s one thing to interrupt the “credit cycles” and let them fail, but it’s another to intercept this great collapse and turn it around negatively.

Achim Szepanski: That is exactly the point. If today all cycles of all kinds of capital are automated, what then? The demand for less work then goes nowhere, because it is immediately occupied by leisure capital. What matters is the de-automation based on automation, the negentropic interruption that is the precondition for creating labor as a noetic activity and the optionality of speculative nerivatives that conditions it.

Anna Newspeak: I’m not against de-automation in general… Can you elaborate on just this aspect of de-automation of chaining automatism? What does that look like in concrete terms?

Achim Szepanski: An a-economic epoch is something that breaks with an already constituted automatism, long socialized by capital, and has the capacity to produce its own de-automation through the appropriation of knowledge: The suspension of the social automation of capital takes place precisely when new asocial forms of automation appear. In this process, new forms of de-automation are released in the sense of negentropy in order to invent new social organizations of non-economy. Knowledge is always related to these processes, while stupidity benefits purely from automation.

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