The Tsunami and the Myth of the Water-Fish

translated by Jeremy R. Smith

“The Tsunami and the Myth of the Water-Fish: A Short Essay on Fantastic Zoology, to Add to Borges and Schrödinger” François Laruelle In Philo-Fictions 2 (2009), p.7-15.[1]

To Muriel Mambrini-Doudet

Abstract: As an exercise in philo-fiction, how does one multiply several means by one another, such as fiction, philosophy (which is already by itself ‘imaginary’), a certain scientific (quantum) use of the imaginary or complex number, in order to access an object which is no longer findable within one or another discipline? Multiplication here is a case in reciprocal translation of two discourses under certain conditions. These conditions are called generic: they allow the creation of entities with a double-face or double effect according to the way chosen to be repeated as regulating the functioning of the ensemble. In this way, because of this dissymmetry, philo-fiction is not a blend of styles nor a literary fiction on science or philosophy, nor a scientific and positive reduction of philosophy. Philo-Fiction is perhaps one of the only possibilities of invention which can succeed in the exhaustion as much as the excess of philosophy. What we call non-philosophy completes or is consummated within this type of invention which utterly reciprocally liberates the possibilities of philosophical discourse and scientific discourse.

Keywords: undulatory, superposition, tunnel effect, transcendental, immanental, generic man.

Non-Philosophy comes just after the crashing on the shore of the last wave which, according to Foucault, will carry the figure of man in sand. Our thesis is that this wave in its withdrawal does not erase man without letting a new figure appear. Like all philosophers, Foucault describes an archaic war of elements between the land and water. We ask if a special, more scientific complementarity of elements is possible, and not a treatise of provisional peace imposed by the victory of the ocean, but a new cooperation of the land and water, if we can hope for a new figure of man among land and water or, if you will, among animal and grace? It is at least utopia or fiction through which non-philosophy labours, a heritage of the last great revolution of physics as the better intelligence of man than mathematics.

What is the best use of the water, the drowning, the swimming, the navigation, intoxication, baptism? How does one receive a wave, enter into it, and exit from it? What distinguishes a philosopher as a transcendental swimmer, as hallucinated by the sea, and finally the white whale and the water-fish? What distinguishes these four things: the description or the painting of a wave, the noematic lived-of-the-wave of the swimmer, a quantum superposition of undulatory phenomena, the lived experience of a water-fish?

Portrait of the philosopher as a transcendental fish

Let there be a wave. Seen from the sky, overlooking from the sky, the wave is an object which possesses at least two faces: an ascending slope through which it emerges and rises from the bottom of the ocean’s passivity, and a descending slope, the front of the wave through which it is said to “fall-back” [re-tomber] through a curious repetition, since it does not already (as this wave) fall a first time. Insofar as a wave experienced by the swimmer, it ceases from being an indifferent and overlooked bi-face to be precisely lived as this duality of an ascending slope, whose immanence brings the swimmer and a falling front through which it falls (back) with the swimmer who thus partially objectivates it; the wave which falls (back) is for the swimmer a semi-object that they cannot perceive in a fully ecstatic way but that the swimmer crosses by struggling against and with the wave. This swimmer who has their head both under and outside of the water is the transcendental swimmer who follows an undulatory movement, and the swimmer sees the wave as a baptism administered by the divine personage of the Ocean.

Who would then be the fully generic swimmer or wave? A very special form of identity of the swimmer and the wave: the water-fish, undulating with or within the undulations of the wave. We will say in quantum terms that the wave and the fish are superposed within and by their undulations. Superposition is a principle which is valid for the concrete of the wave and the abstract of the wave function which is mathematics. Superposition is not a total or partial identification, but a special addition which qualitatively produces a result of the same nature as its terms or is idempotent. For example, two concepts do no superpose each other, they occupy a different space and exclude or prevent one another from being within an amphibology. Yet, a wave and a swimmer under the water can cease from struggling, superposing themselves, both occupying the same space without damaging each other on condition that the swimmer remains at water-level. If the swimmer’s head is outside of the water, the swimmer transcends the water all by remaining partially immanent to it; the swimmer is transcendental. The water-fish is generic or idempotent: it is superposed with its element according to a certain relation called ‘imaginary’ or ‘complex’ whose algebra has the measure [loi] (directed in the water like a hallucinated drowned) at once straight ahead [tout droit] and taken within the vortexes which ‘return’ it.

Why straight ahead? Undulation is oriented, from the slope of amplitude towards the falling front which comes last and closes it up. Realistically, the falling front is a completion or a scansion, not a closure over itself; undulation is constantly revived [relancée], it always has some movement, movement to go further. It is linear but at the point of being able to cross its own undulations or to interfere with them. Being like a fish in water, it is both to scour and cross undulation straight ahead through a tunnel effect proper to generic means, a typical tunnel effect of undulation, or again like the quantum particle crosses the mountains and is already found detectable on the other side. Rather, there is a chain of mountains or undulations, but there is also the seismic shift that crosses these mountains, making them arise and be displaced. This is what characterizes the seismic character or the undulatory shift which should be thought as generic.

The birth of the tsunami, undulatory distance and the tunnel-effect

Neither the water-fish (which is the ocean fashioning itself as subject) nor the ocean itself ‘throw themselves in the water’. Here, there is no subject pro-jecting a space before it to eventually be reflected or drowned in it, to be baptized there as a transcendental, the head under and outside of the water alternatively. A posed lived experience like undulation obeys no projection or phenomenological distance. Its structure is not difference or internal objective distance, division, nothingness, or the abyssal void. The wave-subject is full and filled with itself, constantly in progress with filling but without exceeding or lacking itself; the wave-subject can only be added or multiplied by itself. This is the birth of the tsunami and its subject, the water-fish.

The philosophers have their wave and their ocean: it is always a question of navigation along the coasts or the marking the ‘spots’ [fixes] or the fear before the high seas that one interiorizes along the edges, that one aestheticizes and metaphorizes. The physicists also have their wave and ocean with the undulatory principle of superposition through which they go beyond the sublime spectacle: the sea always begins again, the dead and scintillating calm. Quantum mechanics can explain the intensity of certain exceptional waves which send ships to the bottom. Let’s imagine a quantum phenomenology of the tsunami, a decoherent phenomenology of the Great Wave. It will have two principles: superposition, which constitutes and conserves the tsunami; and non-commutability, assuring its exceptional character and inequality with other waves. Phenomenally, it is each time a wave, proximal to its energetic quantity. This unique wave is neither the oceanic whole of undulations – the body of the ocean-without-undulations or the plain infinite – nor an individual undulation, the part of a whole or subsumable under a whole. It is the generic wave, once each time a wave. It concerns a Same which is neither purely analytic (it is not contained within a given wave) nor is it produced within another; this monstrous excrescence is neither molar nor molecular. There is a parousia of the water within the tsunami, but it is not that of Being; its law of formation is quantic and not philosophical. In several ways, it is possible to oppose the calm philosophical sphere of Parmenides whose Heideggerian ‘envoys’ of Being are the last barely sheepish echoes and a thought as a tsunami coming from nowhere. Heraclitus is perhaps the first thinker of the Giant Wave. It is true that we never bathe in the ‘same’ river twice but only once, in the river of the Same, the Amazonian river named the ‘Same’. Only once, already, under the strict condition that the bather themselves becomes a very special wave, that they alone can assume, at once a wave among the multiplicity of others and the governing wave, determining their dynamic. This figure of the philosopher as the transcendental swimmer is still that of the speculative swimmer occupying the current of ‘life’ or the highest eidetic flows. Yet, since they Platonize or Hegelianize, since they borrow from the airflows rather than the waves, the most celestial swimmer always remains transcendental or is in struggle with the wave. Within the swimmer is the wave which begins in becoming a subject. There still remains a last stage to cross, a swimmer capable of occupying the whole space of the ocean, the im-mense wave become the Last Wave. This is the swimmer this time called ‘immanental’ or again the water-fish.

The essence of the tsunami resides within the phenomenally invisible property of the crossing from a multiple of half-wholes, indeed quarters-of-the-whole, but never a complete Whole, like a ray which would only cross the half-droplet and never an entire droplet as the philosophers imagine it. Most philosophers know and practice a certain minimal phenomenological distance which conditions the appearance of a mundane phenomenon to the subject. This distance soars over a gulf or short-circuits an abyss, suturing the two edges of the river. Let’s oppose this to what we call the undulatory distance which is a half then a quarter of the distance, a division carried out not along it but within the depth of distance. Like a distance between two summits or two successive pits, a semi-ecstatic distance, the amplitude of an undulation does not go along its summits and its pits, it does not borrow their own movement to make a trajectory (as does a particle of matter), but seems to soar over them though immanently. If there is a special soaring over within the wave, it is not geo-stationary and therefore circular like the soaring-over of the concept by itself; it would rather be oceano-stationary, both finite and unlimited, the wave soaring over itself and crossing itself. The dynamic of the amplitude neutralizes the excess of transcendence in one direction [sens] or within another, ascending and descending from one side and the other on the middle line [ligne de Moyenne] which is like a sort of waterline of the wave on the ocean. Undulatory distance is an indivisible but immanent short-circuit, immanent to the diversity of summits and pits; there is a materiality of excess but not of lack as within philosophy (the undulatory pit is not a lack, it is an amplitude or makes a part of amplitude). Undulatory distance is not made through suture for there is only a suture along the edges of nothingness or transcendence; undulatory distance, rather, enchains the amplitudes by their immanent crossing, completes them without ever closing them: it is a tunnel effect from immanence through the obstacles.  The demi-whole and what’s more the quarter-of-the-whole soar over themselves perpendicularly without ever collapsing [se perdre] each other: this is the secret of the tsunami and its immanent force of propagation and absorption. The tsunami is a passive shift, an undulatory earthquake. Phenomenological distance does not cross its nothingness, it is its underside, the underside of the band (hence the transcendence within the Möbius doublet) while undulatory distance is an immanence which crosses the obstacle of the Möbius band. It is why the essence of the tsunami, when it is seized by lived and tears it from the individual, is a jection [jet] which generically traverses the linings of the ego or the cosmic wall which redouble one another. Undulatory idempotence is not content with remaining the same against the wind and tide of the world or Being; it is because it is the wind and tide which comes from No Where, from the Edgeless [Sans-Bord] of the ocean that it elevates to a myth, imposing itself as the impossible or imaginary measure which exceeds the imaginary itself.

As soon as idempotence makes a superposition or undulation of whatever property, as soon as it is interpreted phenomenally, it becomes a formal materiality. Thus, the undulatory as the before-first jection cannot be a conscious intentionality but an inecstatic jection, not closed, which is propagated transfinitely. The wave does not displace matter; it is the displacement (of materiality) of a form within the matter of the world, ‘transformation-in-person’ (idemmorphism). According to Bergson’s impeccable formula, it is an élan which crosses matter, except for this nuance that it is a concern for the élan of the lived, rather than life. We will add that if philosophy does not cease from turning around things including willing ‘the eternal return of the same’, the generic quantum places itself in a state of immersion (Dirac’s sea) to find the right environment [le bon milieu], the Same. In particular, the water-fish, as long as we imagine it, inhabiting the tsunami is what finds the most adequate environment such that it is no longer condemned to inhabit it. Philosophy turns to the Same as a circle, the wave is a Same without circle: all alterity is annulled by idempotence which is a demi-circle but neutralized or not developed; idempotence can be indefinitely prolonged. If philosophy, from a bridge, sutures the two banks that it confounds with the river, the wave within its seismic shift is a tunnel effect rather than a bridge effect, and crosses the mountains of water underground [or secretly, souterrainement] which dream of hindering it.

Within the history of the ‘evolution’ of the philosophizing species, the strictly human stage, whose model could be the water-fish, has been preceded by the philosopher stage strictly speaking. The philosopher has traits of the archaic (but not the most archaic) animal, striving to exit from its first element, the water, attempting to swim to ‘dry land’ to find foundation and dwelling there. It is an inexplicable motivation if it is not through a phenomenon of ‘decoherence’ or a process of the transformation of quantic nature. It is true that it is impossible to ground anything solid or ‘inconcussum’ on the water, and otherwise philosophy begins with the ‘interment’ [enterrement] of this question. Particularly, Descartes had proven and made a worthy effort for the first fish who have attempted to exit from the water and to stand on their two legs, thought and being. Yet the being-undulatory, its water or sound, is associable with different forms of matter and can provide an ampler model of the process of thought. For the swimmer, the wave is opened in-before-priority and the swimmer closes it through occasion. Superposition is then no longer an act of self-surmounting (like the will to power), furthermore not a transcendent or speculative eidos which would remain an a priori invariant despite and not only through the diverse phases, but consequently an act that crosses itself by the right angle [angle droit] or vertically. Waves or undulations are not the phases of an object posed a priori within a classical space of trajectories. Automorphism has become an idemmorphism, that of the quarter invariant from immanence.

Our undulatory and anti-Cartesian myth breaks the symmetries which would subsist within or without the transcendental or speculative eidos; the invariance is made unilateral or non-commutable. Integrally physical and positive, it suffices for the water-fish to swim [glisser] along its algebraic or idempotent form so that it becomes thought and lived, not remaining an object of mathematization. The matrix of thought is always with three terms: it is transcendental if it is philosophy or transcendence is redoubled, but it is no longer transcendental if it is the quantum or undulatory superposition that is repeated. It is then immanental. With this hylomorphism of the algebraic form which makes up the lived materiality of superposition, allowing to take the lived, rather than life or the geometrized object, as matter, it is a question of a phenomenology of-the-last-instance: it is lived and nevertheless objective immanently (algebraically). It is the completion or accomplishment of transcendental baptism.

The water-fish is the messiah of the ocean. The water-fish needs more than the closed space of an aquarium. The water-fish needs more than the lived experience of the swimmer’s wave, even if they had Captain Ahab’s telescope. The water-fish needs more than the closed enclosure or the ring of an accelerator. The water-fish also needs more than the waters of Lake Tiberias.[1] Any and all errors are my own. – Trans. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE
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The Tsunami and the Myth of the Water-Fish: A Short Essay on Fantastic Zoology, to Add to Borges and Schrödinger François Laruelle In Philo-Fictions 2 (2009), p.7-15.[1]

To Muriel Mambrini-Doudet

Abstract: As an exercise in philo-fiction, how does one multiply several means by one another, such as fiction, philosophy (which is already by itself ‘imaginary’), a certain scientific (quantum) use of the imaginary or complex number, in order to access an object which is no longer findable within one or another discipline? Multiplication here is a case in reciprocal translation of two discourses under certain conditions. These conditions are called generic: they allow the creation of entities with a double-face or double effect according to the way chosen to be repeated as regulating the functioning of the ensemble. In this way, because of this dissymmetry, philo-fiction is not a blend of styles nor a literary fiction on science or philosophy, nor a scientific and positive reduction of philosophy. Philo-Fiction is perhaps one of the only possibilities of invention which can succeed in the exhaustion as much as the excess of philosophy. What we call non-philosophy completes or is consummated within this type of invention which utterly reciprocally liberates the possibilities of philosophical discourse and scientific discourse.

Keywords: undulatory, superposition, tunnel effect, transcendental, immanental, generic man.

Non-Philosophy comes just after the crashing on the shore of the last wave which, according to Foucault, will carry the figure of man in sand. Our thesis is that this wave in its withdrawal does not erase man without letting a new figure appear. Like all philosophers, Foucault describes an archaic war of elements between the land and water. We ask if a special, more scientific complementarity of elements is possible, and not a treatise of provisional peace imposed by the victory of the ocean, but a new cooperation of the land and water, if we can hope for a new figure of man among land and water or, if you will, among animal and grace? It is at least utopia or fiction through which non-philosophy labours, a heritage of the last great revolution of physics as the better intelligence of man than mathematics.

What is the best use of the water, the drowning, the swimming, the navigation, intoxication, baptism? How does one receive a wave, enter into it, and exit from it? What distinguishes a philosopher as a transcendental swimmer, as hallucinated by the sea, and finally the white whale and the water-fish? What distinguishes these four things: the description or the painting of a wave, the noematic lived-of-the-wave of the swimmer, a quantum superposition of undulatory phenomena, the lived experience of a water-fish?

Portrait of the philosopher as a transcendental fish

Let there be a wave. Seen from the sky, overlooking from the sky, the wave is an object which possesses at least two faces: an ascending slope through which it emerges and rises from the bottom of the ocean’s passivity, and a descending slope, the front of the wave through which it is said to “fall-back” [re-tomber] through a curious repetition, since it does not already (as this wave) fall a first time. Insofar as a wave experienced by the swimmer, it ceases from being an indifferent and overlooked bi-face to be precisely lived as this duality of an ascending slope, whose immanence brings the swimmer and a falling front through which it falls (back) with the swimmer who thus partially objectivates it; the wave which falls (back) is for the swimmer a semi-object that they cannot perceive in a fully ecstatic way but that the swimmer crosses by struggling against and with the wave. This swimmer who has their head both under and outside of the water is the transcendental swimmer who follows an undulatory movement, and the swimmer sees the wave as a baptism administered by the divine personage of the Ocean.

Who would then be the fully generic swimmer or wave? A very special form of identity of the swimmer and the wave: the water-fish, undulating with or within the undulations of the wave. We will say in quantum terms that the wave and the fish are superposed within and by their undulations. Superposition is a principle which is valid for the concrete of the wave and the abstract of the wave function which is mathematics. Superposition is not a total or partial identification, but a special addition which qualitatively produces a result of the same nature as its terms or is idempotent. For example, two concepts do no superpose each other, they occupy a different space and exclude or prevent one another from being within an amphibology. Yet, a wave and a swimmer under the water can cease from struggling, superposing themselves, both occupying the same space without damaging each other on condition that the swimmer remains at water-level. If the swimmer’s head is outside of the water, the swimmer transcends the water all by remaining partially immanent to it; the swimmer is transcendental. The water-fish is generic or idempotent: it is superposed with its element according to a certain relation called ‘imaginary’ or ‘complex’ whose algebra has the measure [loi] (directed in the water like a hallucinated drowned) at once straight ahead [tout droit] and taken within the vortexes which ‘return’ it.

Why straight ahead? Undulation is oriented, from the slope of amplitude towards the falling front which comes last and closes it up. Realistically, the falling front is a completion or a scansion, not a closure over itself; undulation is constantly revived [relancée], it always has some movement, movement to go further. It is linear but at the point of being able to cross its own undulations or to interfere with them. Being like a fish in water, it is both to scour and cross undulation straight ahead through a tunnel effect proper to generic means, a typical tunnel effect of undulation, or again like the quantum particle crosses the mountains and is already found detectable on the other side. Rather, there is a chain of mountains or undulations, but there is also the seismic shift that crosses these mountains, making them arise and be displaced. This is what characterizes the seismic character or the undulatory shift which should be thought as generic.

The birth of the tsunami, the undulatory distance and the tunnel-effect

Neither the water-fish (which is the ocean fashioning itself as subject) nor the ocean itself ‘throw themselves in the water’. Here, there is no subject pro-jecting a space before it to eventually be reflected or drowned in it, to be baptized there as a transcendental, the head under and outside of the water alternatively. A posed lived experience like undulation obeys no projection or phenomenological distance. Its structure is not difference or internal objective distance, division, nothingness, or the abyssal void. The wave-subject is full and filled with itself, constantly in progress with filling but without exceeding or lacking itself; the wave-subject can only be added or multiplied by itself. This is the birth of the tsunami and its subject, the water-fish.

The philosophers have their wave and their ocean: it is always a question of navigation along the coasts or the marking of the ‘spots’ [fixes] or the fear before the high seas that one interiorizes along the edges, that one aestheticizes and metaphorizes. The physicists also have their wave and ocean with the undulatory principle of superposition through which they go beyond the sublime spectacle: the sea always begins again, the dead and scintillating calm. Quantum mechanics can explain the intensity of certain exceptional waves which send ships to the bottom. Let’s imagine a quantum phenomenology of the tsunami, a decoherent phenomenology of the Great Wave. It will have two principles: superposition, which constitutes and conserves the tsunami; and non-commutability, assuring its exceptional character and inequality with other waves. Phenomenally, it is each time a wave, proximal to its energetic quantity. This unique wave is neither the oceanic whole of undulations – the body of the ocean-without-undulations or the plain infinite – nor an individual undulation, the part of a whole or subsumable under a whole. It is the generic wave, once each time a wave. It concerns a Same which is neither purely analytic (it is not contained within a given wave) nor is it produced within another; this monstrous excrescence is neither molar nor molecular. There is a parousia of the water within the tsunami, but it is not that of Being; its law of formation is quantic and not philosophical. In several ways, it is possible to oppose the calm philosophical sphere of Parmenides whose Heideggerian ‘envoys’ of Being are the last barely sheepish echoes and a thought as a tsunami coming from nowhere. Heraclitus is perhaps the first thinker of the Giant Wave. It is true that we never bathe in the ‘same’ river twice but only once, in the river of the Same, the Amazonian river named the ‘Same’. Only once, already, under the strict condition that the bather themselves becomes a very special wave, that they alone can assume, at once a wave among the multiplicity of others and the governing wave, determining their dynamic. This figure of the philosopher as the transcendental swimmer is still that of the speculative swimmer occupying the current of ‘life’ or the highest eidetic flows. Yet, since they Platonize or Hegelianize, since they borrow from the airflows rather than the waves, the most celestial swimmer always remains transcendental or is in struggle with the wave. Within the swimmer is the wave which begins in becoming a subject. There still remains a last stage to cross, a swimmer capable of occupying the whole space of the ocean, the im-mense wave become the Last Wave. This is the swimmer this time called ‘immanental’ or again the water-fish.

The essence of the tsunami resides within the phenomenally invisible property of the crossing from a multiple of half-wholes, indeed quarters-of-the-whole, but never a complete Whole, like a ray which would only cross the half-droplet and never an entire droplet as the philosophers imagine it. Most philosophers know and practice a certain minimal phenomenological distance which conditions the appearance of a mundane phenomenon to the subject. This distance soars over a gulf or short-circuits an abyss, suturing the two edges of the river. Let’s oppose this to what we call the undulatory distance which is a half then a quarter of the distance, a division carried out not along it but within the depth of distance. Like a distance between two summits or two successive pits, a semi-ecstatic distance, the amplitude of an undulation does not go along its summits and its pits, it does not borrow their own movement to make a trajectory (as does a particle of matter), but seems to soar over them though immanently. If there is a special soaring over within the wave, it is not geo-stationary and therefore circular like the soaring-over of the concept by itself; it would rather be oceano-stationary, both finite and unlimited, the wave soaring over itself and crossing itself. The dynamic of the amplitude neutralizes the excess of transcendence in one direction [sens] or within another, ascending and descending from one side and the other on the middle line [ligne de Moyenne] which is like a sort of waterline of the wave on the ocean. Undulatory distance is an indivisible but immanent short-circuit, immanent to the diversity of summits and pits; there is a materiality of excess but not of lack as within philosophy (the undulatory pit is not a lack, it is an amplitude or makes a part of amplitude). Undulatory distance is not made through suture for there is only a suture along the edges of nothingness or transcendence; undulatory distance, rather, enchains the amplitudes by their immanent crossing, completes them without ever closing them: it is a tunnel effect from immanence through the obstacles.  The demi-whole and what’s more the quarter-of-the-whole soar over themselves perpendicularly without ever collapsing [se perdre] each other: this is the secret of the tsunami and its immanent force of propagation and absorption. The tsunami is a passive shift, an undulatory earthquake. Phenomenological distance does not cross its nothingness, it is its underside, the underside of the band (hence the transcendence within the Möbius doublet) while undulatory distance is an immanence which crosses the obstacle of the Möbius band. It is why the essence of the tsunami, when it is seized by lived and tears it from the individual, is a jection [jet] which generically traverses the linings of the ego or the cosmic wall which redouble one another. Undulatory idempotence is not content with remaining the same against the wind and tide of the world or Being; it is because it is the wind and tide which comes from No Where, from the Edgeless [Sans-Bord] of the ocean that it elevates to a myth, imposing itself as the impossible or imaginary measure which exceeds the imaginary itself.

As soon as idempotence makes a superposition or undulation of whatever property, as soon as it is interpreted phenomenally, it becomes a formal materiality. Thus, the undulatory as the before-first jection cannot be a conscious intentionality but an inecstatic jection, not closed, which is propagated transfinitely. The wave does not displace matter; it is the displacement (of materiality) of a form within the matter of the world, ‘transformation-in-person’ (idemmorphism). According to Bergson’s impeccable formula, it is an élan which crosses matter, except for this nuance that it is a concern for the élan of the lived, rather than life. We will add that if philosophy does not cease from turning around things including willing ‘the eternal return of the same’, the generic quantum places itself in a state of immersion (Dirac’s sea) to find the right environment [le bon milieu], the Same. In particular, the water-fish, as long as we imagine it, inhabiting the tsunami is what finds the most adequate environment such that it is no longer condemned to inhabit it. Philosophy turns to the Same as a circle, the wave is a Same without circle: all alterity is annulled by idempotence which is a demi-circle but neutralized or not developed; idempotence can be indefinitely prolonged. If philosophy, from a bridge, sutures the two banks that it confounds with the river, the wave within its seismic shift is a tunnel effect rather than a bridge effect, and crosses the mountains of water underground [or secretly, souterrainement] which dream of hindering it.

Within the history of the ‘evolution’ of the philosophizing species, the strictly human stage, whose model could be the water-fish, has been preceded by the philosopher stage strictly speaking. The philosopher has traits of the archaic (but not the most archaic) animal, striving to exit from its first element, the water, attempting to swim to ‘dry land’ to find foundation and dwelling there. It is an inexplicable motivation if it is not through a phenomenon of ‘decoherence’ or a process of the transformation of quantic nature. It is true that it is impossible to ground anything solid or ‘inconcussum’ on the water, and otherwise philosophy begins with the ‘interment’ [enterrement] of this question. Particularly, Descartes had proven and made a worthy effort for the first fish who have attempted to exit from the water and to stand on their two legs, thought and being. Yet the being-undulatory, its water or sound, is associable with different forms of matter and can provide an ampler model of the process of thought. For the swimmer, the wave is opened in-before-priority and the swimmer closes it through occasion. Superposition is then no longer an act of self-surmounting (like the will to power), furthermore not a transcendent or speculative eidos which would remain an a priori invariant despite and not only through the diverse phases, but consequently an act that crosses itself by the right angle [angle droit] or vertically. Waves or undulations are not the phases of an object posed a priori within a classical space of trajectories. Automorphism has become an idemmorphism, that of the quarter invariant from immanence.

Our undulatory and anti-Cartesian myth breaks the symmetries which would subsist within or without the transcendental or speculative eidos; the invariance is made unilateral or non-commutable. Integrally physical and positive, it suffices for the water-fish to swim [glisser] along its algebraic or idempotent form so that it becomes thought and lived, not remaining an object of mathematization. The matrix of thought is always with three terms: it is transcendental if it is philosophy or transcendence is redoubled, but it is no longer transcendental if it is the quantum or undulatory superposition that is repeated. It is then immanental. With this hylomorphism of the algebraic form which makes up the lived materiality of superposition, allowing to take the lived, rather than life or the geometrized object, as matter, it is a question of a phenomenology of-the-last-instance: it is lived and nevertheless objective immanently (algebraically). It is the completion or accomplishment of transcendental baptism.

The water-fish is the messiah of the ocean. The water-fish needs more than the closed space of an aquarium. The water-fish needs more than the lived experience of the swimmer’s wave, even if they had Captain Ahab’s telescope. The water-fish needs more than the closed enclosure or the ring of an accelerator. The water-fish also needs more than the waters of Lake Tiberias.


[1] Any and all errors are my own. – Trans.

taken from here

Foto: Sylvia John

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