Negative equation is a form of statement
whose logic is both untenable and necessary, impossible and inevitable. It
represents a manner of discoursing about the real which lies beyond the
propriety of naming. It is a mode of assertive or cataphatic apophasis that,
rather than speaking away from language, stays within the negative curvature of
a space that is opened by twisting language against itself. In these terms,
negative equation proceeds as an intimate, confluent counterpoint to mystical
discourse itself.[1]
Where traditional mystical discourse orbits around the singular unspeakable
identity of the individual and God, the logical process of negative equation
discloses similarly remote planets of truth in more local or immediate regions
of being. The negative equation offers a kind of untenable yet indispensable
axiom whose meaning lies less in coherent statement
but in its speaking according to a
radically immanent yet inherently hidden or foreclosed truth. The intellectual
procedure of negative equation is thus also comparable to François Laruelle’s non-philosophical
concept of ‘mystic-fiction’ as a coming discourse which abandons the occult
status of the mystical secret in favor of its immanence as secret:
La pratique
future renonce à prétendre penser l’Un par l’Un, ou avec l’Un, et pense le
rapport au mystico-philosophique selon
l’Un, elle expose le Secret qui fait les Humains par axioms et theorems . . . Il
n’y a plus de secret ou de mystere ‘caché’ telle une boîte noire au cœur de
l’Un ou de Dieu, en réalité au cœur du Logos. Mais un secret qui reste tel
qu’un secret que ne transforme pas sa révélation ‘formelle’ puisqu’il est déjà
révélé. Un révélé-sans-révélation, un secret (de) l’Un déjà donné pour le
Monde, secret de l’humilité que sa communication n’entame pas.[2]
[The future praxis
renounces pretending to think the One by the One, or with the One, and thinks
the mystico-philosophical relation according
to the One; it exposes the Secret that makes Humans through axioms and theorems
. . . No more is there a secret or a mystery ‘hidden’ like a black box at the
heart of the One or of God, actually at the heart of the Logos, but a secret
that remains like a secret which does not alter its ‘formal’ revelation because
it is already revealed: a revealed-without-revelation, a secret (of) the One
already given by the World, a secret of humility that its communication does
not cut into.]
In place of an account or explanation of the Secret, the logic of negative equation offers a photographic
revelation of its identity, an irrevocable giving of its radical immanence.[3]
As a form of mystico-philosophical theorem, the negative equation sees with the sorrow of being, pro-viding it
in an accordant form that fulfills the simultaneous double sense of the exposure
here defined by Laruelle, namely: 1) exposure by means of axioms and theorems
of the Secret which makes humans; and 2) exposure of the Secret which makes
humans by means of axioms and theorems. It is precisely this doubleness of
exposure which is evident in the Cloud’s
definition of perfect sorrow as a definition one is to sorrow over: “And
whoever has not felt this sorrow, he should sorrow, because he has never yet
felt perfect sorrow.” To understand the sorrow of being requires participation
in this procedure of giving mystical truth, a giving which erases givenness and
sets thought in an immanent posture of non-difference vis-à-vis ontologically disparate
terms, in this case, feeling perfect sorrow and sorrowing that one does not
feel it. In other words, negative equation operates in participation with the mystical
text’s characteristic refusal of the epistemic normativity of philosophical discourse,
the textuo-intellectual charade of sufficiency which is thought’s evil, its
instantiation of “the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like
others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place
of things.”[4]
Like Meillassoux’s demand that we “project unreason into things themselves,”[5]
negative equation represents a (counter)intuitive speculative move that leaps
beyond the correlational structure of philosophical reasoning, the
philosopher’s decisional staying within the dialectical circle of having and
answering questions about the world.
The intellectual leap of negative equation is a form of definition that escapes
definition’s hermeneutic utilitarianism, its being for the sake of discourse.
Overstepping the pursuit of questions concerning the relation between seemingly
irreconcilable categories (e.g. individual and universal, thought and being),
it asserts the independent profound reality within the question’s essential
negativity. In sum, negative equation anchors definition to the openness of its
own ground: “We define only out of
despair. We must have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give
justification to the mind and façade to the void.”[6]
[1] This intuitive
hermeneutic strategy of negative equation is similar to that of ‘apophatic
analogy’ as articulated by Thomas A. Carlson in relation to an indiscrete
relation between Heideggerian being-toward-death and Dionysian
being-toward-God: “I find myself prohibited, by the very terms of the analogy,
not only from identifying those terms but
also from distinguishing them—for the terms themselves cannot be given
determinate, identifiable content; indeed lacking the determinacy or identity
of any ‘what,’ the terms indicate that which would remain, in and of itself,
unknown and unknowable” (Indiscretion:
Finitude and the Naming of God [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999], 17). Ultimately, this indiscrete relation exceeds restriction to the
theological and thanatological and opens to the “nonexperience at the center of
experience” (262). As such, the apophatic analogy offers a method of resourcing
the mystical tradition beyond its putative restriction to religious experience
and restoring the understanding of mystical truth to ‘ordinary’ experience,
where it is all along: “There is nothing irrational in true mysticism when it
is, as it should be, a vision of Reality. It is a form of perception which is
absolutely unclouded, and so practical that it can be lived every moment of
life and expressed in everyday duties. Its connection with experience is so
deep that, in one sense, it is the final understanding of all experience”
(Meher Baba, Discourses, revised 6th
ed. [North Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Foundation, 2007], I.7). In keeping with
Carlson’s privileging of the relation between givenness and impossibility, we
may say that the negative equation also offers a way of ‘giving’ experience to
itself via the ‘impossibility’ of its inherent non-identity.
[2] François Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des
contemporains (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 61.
[3] The immanent perceptual
essence of science as immanent knowing has been theorized by Laruelle through
the concepts of photographic-stance
and vision-force: “To the
transcendent paradigm of philosophy which remains within onto-photo-logical-Difference, we oppose the stance of the most
naïve and most intrinsically realist knowledge, a stance that appears to us
essential—more so than calculation and measurement—to the definition of the
essence of science” (The Concept of
Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK; New York:
Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011). The connection between science and mysticism in
these terms, as contiguous perceptions of an inherently divine reality, may be
found in Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of the scienticity of
experience: “By experience must be understood the entire mental product . . .
Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from, if not from direct
experience? . . . as to God, open your eyes—and your heart, which is also a perceptive
organ—and you see him. But you may ask, Don’t you admit there are any
delusions? Yes: I may think a thing is black, and on close examination it may
turn out to be bottle-green. But I cannot think a thing is black if there is no
such thing to be seen as black . . . It is the nominalists alone, who indulge
in such skepticism, which the scientific method condemns” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler [New York:
Dover, 1955], 377-8).
[4] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 14.
[5] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, 82.
[6] E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Arcade, 1975), 48.
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