Backread on Reza Negarestani

Apropos his ‘Inhuman’ essay, I found myself in partial agreement with the necessity, as he put it, to cross the cognitive Rubicon; ‘a synthetic and constructible passage’, pertaining to the journey of intelligence itself (re: compare with the epigenesis of reason ala Kant) which, however, contra Kant, aims toward the impersonal overcoming of the human (‘us, as we stand here’, in Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit).

But for the most part of this journey, which involves a synthetic constitutive relation to nature, crossing ‘this’ Rubicon may amount to, as Vincent Le puts it in an essay, walking on the ‘thin tightrope of nature’s whim’, a precarious act of self-overcoming (reminiscent of Nietzsche’s rather un-performable crossing, for all intents and purposes). I would thus prefer Negarestani’s ‘hegemonic pointer’ showing the path that we must tread to cross the cognitive Rubicon be counterposed to a kind of ‘speculative attractor’ (Iain Hamilton Grant has made extensive use of this concept) which, I guess, more pointedly reveals the asymmetry of intelligence and nature, a duplicitous boundary that cannot be crossed as long as there is an organism.

In a section of my dissertation, I described it as a curvature, an arc of reality, deducing from Schelling’s description of organization (such as the human species) as an ‘arrested stream of causes and effects.’ This organization is intelligence itself. Schelling adds: “only when nature has not inhibited this stream does it fly forward (in a straight line) (in On the World Soul). At least, for Schelling, this is how the universe ought to be explained, according to first causes, which commences with intelligence. Intelligence introduces a rupture in nature’s straight-line causality through its own (organic) principles of causality, hence generating a precarious ‘curve’, an unstable arc sustained by, let us say, cognitive tensors.

Thus, my point: The arc best serves its purpose in preempting a total nihilism (in Negarestani, the ‘precipitation of various forms of tyranny and fascism’) that aims toward a synthetic unity (intelligence and nature) without reference to a state of absolute indifference. Suffice it to say this is as far as I can positively connect to Negarestani’s revisionary project of reason.