The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 8

Hegel's system was the maximal form of the ontologization of the second rung, and the nineteenth century spent itself trying to escape from it.

The Left Hegelians inverted the system. Feuerbach contended that the qualities Hegel attributed to the absolute spirit were merely reflections of tangible human characteristics; theology is anthropology viewed in reverse. Marx located the real motor of history in material conditions, production, and class conflict; the dialectic was kept, but its carrier was swapped. A first-rung substrate, matter, now in the form of labor and production, the ground of everything else.

The Marxist tradition inherits all the difficulties of a materialism that cannot account for the activity of the theorist who formulates it.

In Der Einzige und sein Eigentum Stirner argued that every abstraction the tradition had treated as real, such as God, humanity, the state, morality, truth, the spirit, and even Feuerbach's Man, is a spook, a ghost that individuals have constructed and then submitted to. The only reality is the unique one, the Einzige, in his concrete self-interest. This is the most radical deflation of the second rung produced in the nineteenth century. Stirner saw that abstractions are constructs; he called them by name and told his reader to dismiss them. What he did not do was examine the operation that installed them or analyze the Einzige itself with the same instrument. The unique one was posited as a given, a bare ontological fact to be asserted against the ghosts, and so the operation migrated into the assertion of the bare self.

Stirner's egoism generated its own family of constructs, which his analysis leaves untouched. My interest, my property, my power, my enjoyment, my own — each of these is an ontologized object in the life of the egoist exactly as duty or humanity are for the moralist. The egoist holds his own interest as reality, consults it, defends it, reorganizes his activity around it, and mistakes it for the immediate expression of the Einzige. The construct has the convenient property of flattering the subject, presenting itself as the emancipated voice and for that 35

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reason it is harder to see than the moralist's constructs, which announce themselves as obligations from outside. Egoistic constructs seem to be liberations, which makes them a more polished variant of the same mechanism. Ethics of the Abyss addressed the moral and ideological constructs at length and touched only lightly on this family.

Stirner's move was nevertheless important enough that Nietzsche read him and carried several of his instruments forward without the deflationary restraint.

Kierkegaard went unread for half a century. The Hegelian system leaves no room for the individual existing person, the one who has to live his life and make choices. No amount of dialectical reasoning about the universal can substitute for the decision this person has to make now. What Hegel described as moments of the absolute spirit are, in reality, the evasions by which the individual avoids his own existence. The essential truths are ones in which the knower is personally at stake. The counter-ground Kierkegaard installs is existence itself, the singular existing individual before God. The critique of the system is devastating; the replacement is another ontologization. The individual before God is a construct, and a particularly fortified one — it is protected by the category of faith, which by definition lies beyond argument. The sixth rung has been enlarged to absorb the weight the second used to carry, and the leap of faith secures the ontologization against any approach that would try to dismantle it.

Nietzsche was treated in Ethics of the Abyss under a different aspect, and the present chapter restricts itself to the main point. His work contains two distinct concepts that coexist in nearly every book he wrote and that his successors largely failed to separate.

The first is the operation of genealogy. Every concept the tradition had ontologized, such as truth or morality, is examined as a historical product with a traceable lineage. They were produced to serve specific functions, have since detached from those origins and come to seem natural. Nietzsche saw that the second rung is populated by products of recursive distinction that have been handed to the world and forgotten as acts. His perspectivism pressed further: there is no view from nowhere, no truth that is not a truth for a particular configu-

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ration of drives. This had never been done before, and it has rarely been done since with the same force.

He suggested that the fundamental nature of reality is the will to power and promoted eternal recurrence as a cosmological theory. The installation of the Overman was intended to serve as a benchmark for life. Each of these is a reinstallation of the procedure Nietzsche's genealogical work should have dismantled. The will to power is a pattern extracted from his observations of organisms, drives, and historical forces and then promoted to the ground of reality. Eternal recurrence is a cosmological ontologization of the structure of time.

The Overman is a normative ontologization of a developmental possibility. The same recursive distinction that produces justice or the Idea leads to these concepts.

The twentieth-century reception inherited the metaphysical slope and blunted the genealogical edge. Heidegger read Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West, the thinker in whom will to power completes the history of Western metaphysics by revealing its inner principle — a reading that treats the metaphysical layer and relegates the genealogical work to its preparation. The French reception, from Deleuze forward, worked with both layers but kept will to power as an affirmative metaphysical principle rather than treating it as a concept whose genealogy needed to be traced. Foucault pushed genealogy further than anyone else and brought it to bear on modern institutions and the construction of the subject. The method remained a given. The post-Nietzschean tradition has been running genealogies for a century and has produced invaluable material, but the question of what the operation of genealogy is, and who performs it has largely gone unasked.

Deleuze made the operation into a metaphysics. In Difference and Repetition difference is primary — prior to identity, representation, or the subject that would register it. Difference-in-itself, ungoverned by the Same, is the productive ground from which everything emerges. The operation of distinction, traced throughout this book as the subject's fundamental act, is taken up, stripped of the one who performs it, and embraced as a self-running process.

This is the ontologization of the operation, a fourth-rung move, or perhaps a shift that cuts across the ladder entirely by making the ladder's own mechanism

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into the substrate. The result is a philosophy of difference without a differen-tiator: a verb conjugated in no person. What Deleuze gained was an escape from every subject-centered metaphysics the tradition had produced. What he lost was the capacity to say who draws the specific boundary that matters here rather than there, now rather than then. A difference that differentiates itself everywhere and always has no reason to produce this world rather than another.

Deleuze filled the gap with intensity and the eternal return as a selective principle — each a further ontologization designed to do the work the absent subject used to do.

Deleuze tried three solutions. The virtual is a field of differential relations that actualizes itself into distinct entities — but actualization without a perspective is a production line with no foreman; it explains that things are produced, not why these things. Intensity is the engine of individuation — but an intensity that has no one to register the gradient is a number without a reader. The eternal return is meant to be selective: only what affirms its own difference returns.

But "affirms" is an active verb. Deleuze wanted more than blind filtering; he wanted an act without an actor. The work the subject used to do (holding the boundary, selecting the cut, sustaining the result) is renamed into mechanisms that describe it in the third person but leave it undone.