Event and Machine

“Will we one day be able to, and in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine). For that, it would be necessary in the future (but there will be no future except on this condition) to think both the event and the machine as two compatible or even in-dissociable concepts. Today they appear to us to be antinomic” (Derrida, Without Alibi, p. 72).

“You can bet not only (and I insist on not only) will one have produced a new logic, an unheard of conceptual form. In truth, against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster.”

Not-All is Matter

“It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, we should apply Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion “everything is matter”(which relies on its constitutive exception – in the case of Lenin who, in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subect whose mind “reflects” matter) and the assertion “there is nothing which is not matter” (which, with its other side, “not-All is matter”opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena). This means that a truly radical materialism is by definition nonreductionist: far from claiming that “everything is matter,” it confers upon “immaterial” phenomena a specific positive nonbeing.” (Zizek, The Parallax View, 168)

“In Descartes, we find an intuition of the same order regarding the ontological status of truths. We know that Descartes gives the name of ‘substance’ to the general form of being as really existing. ‘What there is’ is substance. Every ‘thing’ is substance  it is figure and movement in extended substance; it is idea in thinking substance. This is why Descartes’s doctrine is commonly identified with dualism: the substantial ‘there is’ is divided into thought and extension, which in man means: soul and body.

Nevertheless, in paragraph 48 of the Principles of Philosophy, we see that substance dualism is subordinated to a more fundamental distinction. This distinction is the one between things (what there is, that is to say substance, either thinking or extended) and truths.

I distinguish everything that falls under our cognition into two genera: the first contains all the things endowed with some existence, and the other all the truths that are nothing outside of our thought

What a remarkable text! It recognizes the wholly exceptional, ontological and logical status of truths. Truths are without existence. Is that to say they do not exist at all? far from it. Truths have no substantial existence.  That is how we must understand the declaration that they ‘are nothing outside of our thought’.” (Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 6)