u/bachozangi

I was thinking about incompossible worlds and I thought this up, I wanna see if you guys agree with me.

So let's take the proposition that "any variable with identical predicates is interchangeable" so A=B means that A and B are interchangeable because they are variables with the same predicates. For us to claim that these are truly interchangeable, we must impose a meta-logic or meta-world in which the predicates of A and B mean the same thing. Since the variable X can mean radically different things in 2 different equations, we can't quite assert that X=X since two variables that are written as X might function as X in two incompossible worlds that have nothing to do with each other, they can only be exchanged via being inserted into a secret third world that provides the equal sign. Is this how D&G would look at exchange value? 3 bushels of corn can only be exchanged for a horse via a secret third abstracting machine that reduces the heterogenous series of the corn and the horse into abstract exchange value, strips them of their unique multiplicity of qualities and violently "shoves" them into the framework of a certain form of market exchange. So it violently imposes a meta-logic of capital onto the incompossible series of two goods since the exchange value is not inherent in the goods themselves.

And a follow-up question: is money a direct expression of this violently imposed abstract exchange value on the market? In the Spinozian sense? Or is it that money itself as an object of exchange (like cash) is also a "victim" of this forced imposition that says that this piece of paper with abraham lincoln on it can be exchanged for a cheeseburger.

I was just doing some reading about the concept of "Less than Nothing" and I want to present my attempt to explain how Democritus would deal with Parmenides had he been the Zizekian Democritus. Maybe you guys can tell me how close I got, because I want to get a firm understanding of the Zizekian way of thinking (That's how I like to study philosophers, learning to think stuff through in the same way they would).

The negation of being would be non-being (I suppose interchangable with nothing in this case) which need not concern the Parmenidean, since it does not exist and is not included in any way, shape or form in existence. Democritus (and Leucippus, we don't wanna discriminate against atomists here) attempted to create an ontology in which movement, division and difference are possible, which entails a "way out" of the claim of Parmenides (that Being is and non-being is not) via a genetic critique and reconstruction.
Parmenides did a great job at proving that within the domain of Being, difference, multiplicity, change and movement are impossible since they require voids and gaps, AKA spaces of nothing which is absurd. Nothing is a negation of being, it is what being is not, it has no place wherever being is, whether it be thought or outside reality.

Democritus notices the problems in Parmenidean thinking, one of which is the incompatibility of the way of Doxa and the way of Truth. If all that exists is the One, it would be impossible to make false statements regarding Being, since a statement being false means that it entails something that is not, and since non-being is unthinkable and we cannot think what is not, it is impossible to make a false statement. So we cannot hold a false belief about a changing, becoming world, since such a thing is not. Since we are thinking it, it must be - at least in some way. If it is, then the thinkable argument of why it cannot be is no more privileged than the thinkable argument of why it is, since Parmenides has no meta-criterion for why one thinkable/sayable proposition is more "real" than another besides one having more argumentative support than the other, which also invites the same line of questioning. In the Parmenidean system itself, the doxastic claim that movement exists is just as acceptable as the rational argument that it doesn't. Therefore, Parmenides' worldview must account for the existence of this multiplicity in Parmenides itself. We need a genetic account for the coexistence of the Parmenidean indivisible One and the Parmenidean multiplicitous world of doxa. In order for these 2 categories to be "compossible" in the same ontology (if we dare borrow a term from Leibniz), the category of capital B Being needs to be a subtraction from a greater whole with that whole not being Being. Being is a privation of this space, not it's negation, yet the space itself can only be conceived of as a nothing, a non-being that is more than being (and that being is the result of a subtraction from). As a result, being is Less than Nothing (or less than non-being), it is subtracted from nothing, it is "den", the "and-one," AKA the "one" is a "leftover" in conjunction with nothing. This "domain" of non-being is like a structurally inconsistent space, by which we mean that it fails to coincide with itself at any given point, this failure is a structural feature of it. There is no reason to assert that the non-coincidence is restrained to one particular locality or something. We can call this space the not-all since it is an inconsistent horizon of non-being (I know this is an incomplete jump but the post will be too long otherwise). To be more precise, the space of non-being fails to coincide with itself at any given local point, since it has no positive content allowing for a coincidence and no properties allowing for self-sameness, so there are no positive criteria for it to verify it's self-sameness across different points. Each local failure of the not-all to coincide with itself, to be fully identical to itself is an atom, a subtraction from the not-all or the non-being.

So being and nothing are genetically intertwined; instead of being negations of each other and being mutually exclusive, they are parts of the same substance, the not-all, overcoming the genetic problems of Parmenides. So the most famous materialist theorized the concept of "den," the Less than Nothing in order to ground his materialist ontology.

I used Claude to check for errors and make corrections and recommendations but I wrote this analysis with my own 8 fingers and the occasional help of thumbs. The paragraph about meden from Zizek's substack essay on why we need philosophy more than ever was my primary source here along with the section in the beginning of "Less than nothing" and general knowledge from listening to Zizek's lectures on YouTube and stuff.

I was just doing some reading about the concept of "Less than Nothing" and I want to present my attempt to explain how Democritus would deal with Parmenides had he been the Zizekian Democritus. Maybe you guys can tell me how close I got, because I want to get a firm understanding of the Zizekian way of thinking (That's how I like to study philosophers, learning to think stuff through in the same way they would).

The negation of being would be non-being (I suppose interchangable with nothing in this case) which need not concern the Parmenidean, since it does not exist and is not included in any way, shape or form in existence. Democritus (and Leucippus, we don't wanna discriminate against atomists here) attempted to create an ontology in which movement, division and difference are possible, which entails a "way out" of the claim of Parmenides (that Being is and non-being is not) via a genetic critique and reconstruction.
Parmenides did a great job at proving that within the domain of Being, difference, multiplicity, change and movement are impossible since they require voids and gaps, AKA spaces of nothing which is absurd. Nothing is a negation of being, it is what being is not, it has no place wherever being is, whether it be thought or outside reality.

Democritus notices the problems in Parmenidean thinking, one of which is the incompatibility of the way of Doxa and the way of Truth. If all that exists is the One, it would be impossible to make false statements regarding Being, since a statement being false means that it entails something that is not, and since non-being is unthinkable and we cannot think what is not, it is impossible to make a false statement. So we cannot hold a false belief about a changing, becoming world, since such a thing is not. Since we are thinking it, it must be - at least in some way. If it is, then the thinkable argument of why it cannot be is no more privileged than the thinkable argument of why it is, since Parmenides has no meta-criterion for why one thinkable/sayable proposition is more "real" than another besides one having more argumentative support than the other, which also invites the same line of questioning. In the Parmenidean system itself, the doxastic claim that movement exists is just as acceptable as the rational argument that it doesn't. Therefore, Parmenides' worldview must account for the existence of this multiplicity in Parmenides itself. We need a genetic account for the coexistence of the Parmenidean indivisible One and the Parmenidean multiplicitous world of doxa. In order for these 2 categories to be "compossible" in the same ontology (if we dare borrow a term from Leibniz), the category of capital B Being needs to be a subtraction from a greater whole with that whole not being Being. Being is a privation of this space, not it's negation, yet the space itself can only be conceived of as a nothing, a non-being that is more than being (and that being is the result of a subtraction from). As a result, being is Less than Nothing (or less than non-being), it is subtracted from nothing, it is "den", the "and-one," AKA the "one" is a "leftover" in conjunction with nothing. This "domain" of non-being is like a structurally inconsistent space, by which we mean that it fails to coincide with itself at any given point, this failure is a structural feature of it. There is no reason to assert that the non-coincidence is restrained to one particular locality or something. We can call this space the not-all since it is an inconsistent horizon of non-being (I know this is an incomplete jump but the post will be too long otherwise). To be more precise, the space of non-being fails to coincide with itself at any given local point, since it has no positive content allowing for a coincidence and no properties allowing for self-sameness, so there are no positive criteria for it to verify it's self-sameness across different points. Each local failure of the not-all to coincide with itself, to be fully identical to itself is an atom, a subtraction from the not-all or the non-being.

So being and nothing are genetically intertwined; instead of being negations of each other and being mutually exclusive, they are parts of the same substance, the not-all, overcoming the genetic problems of Parmenides. So the most famous materialist theorized the concept of "den," the Less than Nothing in order to ground his materialist ontology.

I used Claude to check for errors and make corrections and recommendations but I wrote this analysis with my own 8 fingers and the occasional help of thumbs. The paragraph about meden from Zizek's substack essay on why we need philosophy more than ever was my primary source here along with the section in the beginning of "Less than nothing" and general knowledge from listening to Zizek's lectures on YouTube and stuff.

I've been reading some more and from what I can tell, the distinction between the virtual and actual is not dualistic, its not transcendental, its not a transcendental condition of possible experience or whatever, its not like the virtual world is a field outside experience generating actual objects given in experience. My best guess is that the virtual is the multiplicity given in the encounter (AKA experience, not that I load the word with stuff with phenomenological cliches like the experiencing subject and experienced world, consciousness, etc. I mean experience in the immanent sense, a sort of sense-world that gives rise to the subject and the object like in WiP) and the actual is a concept that we use to "solve" the virtual?? or like make it bearable? Are values virtual or actual? Cause values are given in the encounter and they force creation, don't they? Is the virtual the condition of real experience because the values in the encounter shape how we experience the world? If so, why posit these categories? Can't a new encounter, a shattering of the fishbowl from u/3corneredvoid -s example completely retrospectively change this genetic philosophy and make these categories irrelevant? can anybody just give me an explanation of what the virtual and the actual are? Sorry for too many questions but I feel like one clear explanation will clear most of them up.

I was reading "Differance" by Derrida and I came across this passage. It might be because of my flawed and amateurish understanding of Deleuze but I thought I was reading Deleuze for a second:

"Is not the whole thought of Nietzsche a critique of philosophy as active indifference to difference, as a system of reduction or adiaphoristic repression? Following the same logic-logic itself-this does not exclude the fact that philosophy lives in and from differance, that it thereby blinds itself to the same, which is not the identical. The same is precisely differance (with an a), as the diverted and equivocal passage from one difference to another, from one term of the opposition to the other. We could thus take up all the coupled oppositions on which philosophy is constructed, and from which our language lives, not in order to see opposition vanish but to see the emergence of a necessity such that one of the terms appears as the differance of the other, the other as "differed" within the systematic ordering of the same (e.g., the intelligible as differing from the sensible, as sensible differed; the concept as differed-differing intuition, life as differing-differed matter; mind as differed-differing life; culture as differed-differing nature; and all the terms designating what is other than physis-technē, nomos, society, freedom, history, spirit, etc.-as physis differed or physis differing: physis in differance). It is out of the unfolding of this "same" as differance that the sameness of difference and of repetition is presented in the eternal return."

The eternal return of difference and repetition? That's what I'm talking about. Are their philosophies as compatible as they seem here?

I've been looking more into Deleuze and from what I understand, Deleuze and Guatarri consider that there is a whole pre-experiential field of affects and assemblages and etc etc etc. I want to ask why this is necessary? Wouldn't a more immanent philosophy say that the only thing philosophy can do is deal with a series of "senses" that are assembled in a certain way and susceptible to radical shifts and stuff that completely reconfigure everything? And the past, present, future, subject, object, etc. arise within these series of senses and as soon as the series changes the entire structure may completely change. I feel like if we accept this we lose the certainty with which we can claim that "this is how sense emerges" or "the ground of multiplicity as given in experience is sense as it manifests for a consciousness".

Can anybody explain precisely how deleuze critiques Hegel's dialectic to go from negation to affirmation? I've been studying about it, reading Daniel W Smith's articles, reading parts of Deleuze himself and I feel like I understand 80% of it but that 20% is bugging me. I understand that for example in A=A, the minimal difference of the A that equals and the A that is equalled is the condition of the self-identity of A and since that difference is the condition of sameness that means the difference is primary and it produces the sameness. What I don't understand is what exactly Deleuze disagrees with Hegel about and why he disagrees so heavily? I know that he thinks Hegel is reactive and dialectics is slave morality and etc but can anyone give me a breakdown of the precise internal critique of Hegel that Deleuze produces just like how he inverted Platonism by sort of following Plato through to (and past) its farthest limits. What is the wall that Hegel crashes into that needs to be advanced beyond that neccesitates Deleuze's creation of the concept of Difference in itself?