The developing ‘ecotic network’ undergirding the libidinal economy is grounded in what Rene Girard called “mimetic desire”, wherein our
neighbor’s desire serves as a model for our own, through which we ‘learn’,- that is, are normatively enculturated,- to participate in an ‘energetic
field of associable drives’, as the Lacanian school formulates the initial stages of corporeal re-composition through the four discourses. The
mechanisms behind this association, however, are not firmly regulated by any evaluative criterion besides that produced tautologically
(tautegorically) out of its own ‘syntaxis’. (Constituting a metalepsis, topologically analyzed in terms of a horizontal plane.) This associability
stabilizes a chiasmus, like that articulated in the Platonic account, wherein eros (desire) serves as a metaxy, [It is important to note here that the
Platonic metaxy does not yet achieve verticality, and must therefor be continually sustained by the eroto-daemonic circulus of the Socratic
dianoia, through which the vertical element is precipitated in materia,- the ‘simpliciter omnem rationalem substantiam’,- (The commentaries on
Aristotelian psychology and metaphysics, mainly those on the de Anima within the pseudo-Philoponus collection, elaborate a critique in terms of
an active intellect that separates perception from the sensory domain of the objects of perception, thereby reproducing a form of knowledge
identical to the res onta, or the ‘thing’,- the object of knowledge, having now been converted into an ‘image’ stored within the Intellect:
“Intellectum hic autem dicit Aristoteles simpliciter omnem rationalem substantiam, et hunc intellectum partem animae ait, abutens nomine. Non
enim est pars totius animae rationalis substantia : esset enim utique sic aut omnis anima immortalis aut omnis mortalis; pars enim toti est
homousion.” Themestius extrapolates the koine aisthesis as a Plotinian, spiritual faculty, whereby the field of ‘metaleptic discourse’, containing
diffuse, disparate and even contradictory impressions, as received by the senses, is unified through the pneuma, which ascends the vertical
Hierarchy of Being, like the metaxy of Plato, toward a “Truth” perhaps even more Parmenidean in type than Platonic,- that is, an ultimate
identification of Knowledge with its Object, insofar as the philosopher is able to self-reflectively posit his own self as just such an object, whose
identification would be precisely “Truth”.) and recycled, or, in Platonic language, ‘reincarnated’ until the mystery of the Forms is beheld, as does
the impossible union of transcendent and immanent, god and man, infinite and finite depicted in the Incarnation of the Word,- a charged
intersection indicated by the double-participation of lepsis and methexis which opens up the human limen to a “concipience” of the God-Man, ie.
a dual decipience-recipience. For more on this interpretation of Andrewes’ neologism, refer to: G. Atkins, in “T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and
the Word; Intersections of Literature and Christianity.”] or point of correspondence between the earthly domain and the Forms. (“The
vertical-daemonic element” within which eros propagates the pneumatic-seed of a new Universe,- a noesis counterbalancing the metaleptic
discourse, limited as it is to a dehierarchialized or ‘unlimited’ semiotic.) Desire is morally neutral of course, and self-propagates when detached
from external evaluative criterion like that of the Christian morality which, emerging from certain Platonisms, conceptualized a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’
desire,- an agape and an eros,- whose differentiation it was the task of philosophy to navigate and firmly ground, (Note the following paper:
Miles, “Facie ad Faciem”: Visuality, Desire, and the Discourse of the other. The Journal of Religion; 2007.) calling to mind the Dantean revision
of the philosopher-king, <!> who attends by a double end, the double nature of the human being,- an anthropos whose divine nature, carefully
differentiated, demands a theogon, though whose earthly nature demands an emperor who has borne the struggle with the mighty daemon and
learned the Height of Sovereignty, having mastered the reigns of finite happiness and earthly power, as indicated in the Monarchia, that a mortal
ethos might be articulated which, curbing the excesses of the instincts, does not reduce human nature to them: [ethos anthropos daemon]
Imperatore, qui secundum philosophica genus humanum ad temporalem felicitatem dirigeret. [Dante, De Monarchia.]
Desire is modelled, not through gesture, but through language; as our language models itself after that of our neighbor’s, so our desire models
itself after his desire,- a desire already distorted by the linguistic medium of the correspondence and the separation, tear, or ‘symbolic gap’
intrinsic to its signifying mode, for which the immediacy of more primitive gesture is entirely lost, with the ‘somatic’ or integral body fragmented
by the runaway somatomimetic transfer of Robinson’s evolutionary protocols. To paraphrase and re-read Armen Avanessian, in “Irony and the
Logic of Modernity”, we find that the difference of pathological or “merely human madness”, citing AGR, from the ‘divine’ madness of irony,- of
language’s triumphal self-perfection, which, bearing a song like that of the mad hope or mortale pensiero animatrici of Foscolo’s poetics,
“gladdens the howling desert and conquers time”,- (“… il tempo con sue fredde ale vi spazza fin le rovine, le Pimplee fan lieti di lor canto i
deserti, e l’ armonia vince di mille secoli il silenzio.”) or the final madness completed by the severance of the inscribed Self from the ascriptive
process, lies in the madness of language’s “repeated (ie. mimesis) self-reflection on its own madness”,- what we here indicate as an inflationary
mimesis. Continuing from “Irony and the Logic of Modernity”, we have the following: “Acknowledging its finitude, the self can laugh about
itself. Yet in doing so, it no longer laughs about itself in the service of the infinite but rather laughs against itself, so to speak,- this side of
madness.” The intensifying moment of linguicity itself, as Avanessian calls it, amplifies the distancing moment of language, that is,- the distortive
mirror or profane speculum of desire, out of whose image a new desire is torn from the mire of finitude and reformulated as a monstrous parody
of the divine, of God’s agape or love for man- an ultimate “irony” which, most of all, fueled the visionary ecstasies of the Gnostics. We might at
this point turn to Seneca’s theory of literary decadence, wherein we are provided with a “diagnostic tool” that, by tracing the desires and the vices
within an author’s character (even those of a Seneca himself) to the excesses and extremes of his linguistic appropriation and style, which Seneca
reads as psychological imprints, one might further go beyond the boundary of the text and continue tracing an inherent instability,- a
metastasizing irrationality,- emerging from out of the heart of the Word itself, whose latent bent were felt,- should it be excavated from the
‘ambient’ linguistic trends and signal boosted,- from individual, to society, to the structure of the cosmos itself, embedding itself within the
Proteus of matter and numbering the days even of the decaying proton. As to this re-reading of Senecan decadence, I refer to Robert John
Sklenar, in: “Plant of a Strange Vine; Oratio Corrupta and the Poetics of Senecan Tragedy”. [John Langan, in “Naming the Nameless: Lovecraft’s
Grammatology”, presents us with a very similar model of literary decadence as an evaluative modality for language’s intrinsic bent toward
destabilization and collapse, wherein we are told, succinctly, “Lovecraft’s language embodies the ideas that drive its fiction.”] Thus, drawing from
the work, we have the following: “The psychic disease of which licentia orationis is the symptom occurs in the environment of a diseased body
politic, the symptoms of whose illness are luxuria conviviorum vestiumque.” While the kind of moral systems indicated above might temporarily
regulate the mimetic propagation of desire, “This psychic disease, moreover, is widespread and impossible to quarantine; hence, oratio corrupta
permeates all levels of society. … Seneca’s earlier statement that one must court vice in order to achieve greatness now metamorphoses into the
bold assertion that vice is itself a component of virtue. Vice enters virtue from without, hence it originates as foreign matter, but once injected it
cannot be drawn back out.” This 'licentia oratio corruptis’,- this haunting instability lurking at the edges of language and, invisibly, peering out of
the “glimmering of things”, permeating them with a foretaste of its own immanentizing madness, is what Nathaniel Mackey calls, in
Engagements, the “creaking of the word”,- [Mackey: “… the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the
loom they weave upon sits. They call it the “creaking of the word.” It is the noise (recall Kunze’s “stochastic resonances or white-nose”) upon
which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords.
Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgement of
founding noise, discrepant engagement sings “bass,” voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning
depend.”] serving for the basis of a “discrepant engagement” which denotes, citing Paul Naylor in “The Mired Sublime of Nathaniel Mackey’s
Song of the Andoumboulou”, “a theory of cross-culturality” which, like that of Benjaminian translation, “enacts one (such a theory, eg. itself) in
the structure of its definition.” (Much as does the theorization of metalepsis.) Continuing from the same: “The crossing traditions of Dogon and
Western cosmologies and philosophies of language allow Mackey to present a second crossing, one in which traditions of sense and nonsense,
noise and word, encounter one and other.” Working from our terms set forth here, the eventuation of a free-mimesis indicates a final victory of
noise over word, nonsense over sense, chaos over order,- of lacrima over rerum, like that prophesized by Lovecraft. One need only note the
self-reflective irony (Refer to the following paper for more on this point: Jeff Lacy & Steven J. Zani, “The Negative Mystics of the Mechanistic
Sublime: Walter Benjamin and Lovecraft’s Cosmicism”.) of Lovecraftian prose which, by robbing the world of meaning, forces the reader to
cling to that meaning all the more emphatically, thereby experiencing what, in theology, is known as an apocalypse, or a glimpse of the divine,
though in this case Lovecraft has displaced the Sublime from the eidetic realm, re-inscribing it as a mechanical-material process which forces the
subject (To recall the beginning of At the Mountains of Madness, “I am forced into speech …”) to re-engage with the ascriptive text
(mythologized as the Necronomicon, for example) through which he organizes his human identity, that is,- the text of human history, science, the
“facts of life”, etc.
It is a curious thing, that Schlegel also found himself “forced into speech”, though in his case, this was phrased as being “forced to produce irony
against one’s will” by an “irony that has run wild and can’t be controlled any longer”, (while writing about the different levels of irony to which
the author might dare to climb, running the danger that at some point he would find himself “unable to disentangle himself from the irony
anymore”, and therefor compelled ineluctably, as though by some external power, to perpetuate it mechanically, ie. by a free-mimesis.) Along
these lines, Schlegel writes incomprehensibly of the incomprehensible in his “Essay on Incomprehensibility”, in which he expounds upon his
conceptualization of irony and the recursive ad infinitum of an “irony of irony”. To paraphrase the contents of this text: the world’s greatest truths
are quite trivial, boring, and forgettable most of all, thus nothing is more important than finding, through idealism, poetry, distortions, lies, and
ever greater paradox, (ever greater irony) ever more novel and absurd ways of expressing them, such that man does not forget these ignoble
‘truths’,- or simply become too disaffected to acknowledge them anymore,- upon which his life and civilization, tedious as they are, certainly
depend. It is, in other words, the incomprehensible basis of our own human nature, through which we discover the necessary parallel to World,
Truth, and God,- a profane analogia through which we might develop these absurdities, paradoxes, and artistic irony,- arriving therefor, at a new
understanding of our un-understanding, which is to say: arriving finally, at a mis-understanding (an irony) of this new understanding. (of
our un-understanding.) Thus, if the world were to ever become comprehensible fully, man would on that account cease mis-understanding
himself: he would then be completely unable to understand the world now grown incomprehensible, and would simply perish while attempting
to nourish himself with stones.
