An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism ^{1 This essay could never have been written were it not for the never-ending moral and intellectual supports of Robin Mackay, Gabriel Catren and Manabrata Guha.×}

 

The legacy of the Copernican Revolution – that is the revolution by and according to the open – is comprised of three components: The speculative drive of “an extreme line of thought”, the revolutionary vocation of “disturbing the peace of this world in still another way” and the true-to-the-universe logic of delivering all expressions of isolation and discreteness “remorselessly into the open.” ^{2 In order of the quotes: Freud 1961: 31, n.2; Freud 1977: 353; and Ferenczi 1994: 93×} This text seeks to incorporate these three components in order to construct a rudimentary model of geophilosophical realism. According to this model, the synthesis between the cerebral, the socio-cultural, the political, the territorial, the historic, the economic and the geological is determined and driven not by a self-centred or axiomatically veritable earth or horizon of interiority but by an open universal continuum. ^{3 On a systematic account of the open continuum as generic/supermultitude, reflexive/inextensible and modal/plastic, see Zalamea 2003: 115-162.×}  The universal continuum is the unbound and continuous relation of the universal to itself that is free from any intrinsic transcendental bound, absolute expression of discreteness and fundamental obstruction. ^{4 Here the universal is defined as that which is free from the necessity of all its particular instances while all particularities partake in it. The universal can neither be exhausted by any collection of multitudes of particularities nor is it reducible to commonalities between them. But as it shall be argued, it is only through an analytico-synthetic lens focused on the regional and local connectivities that the Universal can be asymptotically approached. Analytic in that such an approach needs to take into account local exigencies and synthetic or integrative in that a hegemonic mobilization of local domains is neither a simple addition of local differences qua particularities nor can be effected by way of what these local fields have in common. This is synthesis in its Peircean sense that indexes not only invariant aspects but also ruptures, tensions and complex tendencies of various regional spaces.×}  All general-particular and global-regional dialectics signify the unbound and continuous relation of the universal to itself, or the universal continuum.

The Copernican universe cannot be thought except within and as a universal continuum where the universal fibrates into its various modalities, general and particular instances, global and regional horizons. In this respect, since geophilosophy examines the earth as the regional horizon of thought, particular instances of the universal’s unbound relation to itself). Therefore, geophilosophy is no longer approached as a philosophy of or for the earth; instead it is understood as a universally focused, or more precisely, systematically regional philosophy capable of approximating an unrestricted qua open conception of globality that cannot be exhausted by the body of the earth or any collection of multitudes therein. In this sense, geophilosophy reconstructs the universal field of thought by synthesizing regional fields into a synthetic earth in a way that the earth is conceived both synthetically (a sheaf of regional fields) and as a regional site of alternative relations to the universal continuum or the open . Thus geophilosophy is concerned not with a true-to-the-earth thought but a thought whose topos is a realist true-to-the-universe earth. Synoptically defined as a realist philosophy that systematically broadens and deepens the regional horizon of thought in relation to the open, geophilosophy approximates an earth where free expressions of the universal continuum interweave with free or alternative regional relations (syntheses) to the open. The introduction of this synthetic and fully Copernican earth, however, requires a conception of terrestriality or regionality that cannot be thought in terms other than the absolute reflexivity of the universal where the independent relation of the open universe to itself takes shape. The terrestrial horizon as the regional horizon of thought or what is required in approaching the global thought of the open in a focused manner is then understood not in terms of privatized or locally overdetermined relations but strictly in terms of the unbound relation of the universe to itself. For this reason, regionality (of the terrestrial) is conceived bottomless-up from the abyssality implicated in the unrestricted relation of the universal to itself – a bottomless reflexivity into which all local or regional relations are perpetually descending. Geophilosophical realism thus understands local synthesis or the relation of a regional horizon to the open in no terms other than the unrestricted and abyssal self-reflexivity of the universal and its universal synthesis.

Universal synthesis is the non-subjective synthetic environment of the universal; it is synthetic insofar it encompasses all general and particular instances of the universal in an interweaving relation to one another. Accordingly, universal synthesis as the veritable continuous environment of the universal – in its global-local dialectics and general-particular instances – posits the non-trivial conception of the open for any regional field or particular instance (the subject, local horizons of thought, regional fields of knowledge, etc.). The relation to the open is, therefore, understood as a local synthesis whereby the subject simultaneously brings into focus and loosens into the synthetic environment of the universal. Since the synthetic environment of the universal (or universal synthesis) is not a priori given for the local horizon or the subject even though the local subject belongs to the synthetic environment of the universal continuum, local synthesis should be interpreted as a systematic way to reconstruct universal synthesis and approximate the scope of the open. The peculiarly geophilosophical question of local synthesis, or more precisely, regional relation to the outside (the open) ramifies into a series of topics which shall be separately addressed and investigated throughout this text:

1. The relation of regional horizons and interiorized enclosures – a wide range covering the cerebral horizon of the human, the interiorized domain of the organism, territorial regions, states and the body of the Earth itself – to the universal continuum (or the open) from which they have been cut. Since the regional-universal relation is characterized by tensions and syntheses, this open relation shall be explicated in terms of a generalized conception of trauma or cut. ^{5 Here, trauma should be understood not as what is experienced but as a form of cut made by the real or the absolute in its own unified order; a cut that brings about the possibility of a localized horizon and a regional condensation.×}  This is a cosmologically deepened account of trauma drawn on the works of Freud, Ferenczi, Reich, contemporary neuroscience, post-Peircean mathematics of continuum and a unified concept of astrobiology that interconnects the particulate, the galactic, the stellar, the chemical, the biological, the socio-cultural and the neuropsychological within a continuous – albeit topologically counterintuitive – universal gradient. Here trauma is not a rupture marking the centrality or discreteness of the regional subject with regard to its outside, but a regionalizing cut made by a higher universal order in its own continuous field. Accordingly, at this stage, the regional horizon or local interiority is cut or conceived from the open universe in a way that under no circumstance can the horizon be separated from the abyssal relation of the universal to itself. A general theory of trauma, therefore, becomes a transcendental program for navigating the open through regional tensions, both local and non-local syntheses brought about by various forms of regionalizing cut or trauma.
2. Not only speculative and synthetic opportunities but also perils and illusions brought ashore by such tensions and syntheses. The revolutionary import of the universal synthesis especially in terms of its relation to the open demands a systematic scrutiny of different types and valencies of tensions and syntheses. Moreover, since traumatic configurations or cuts determine the position of regional or interiorized horizons – as well as their tensions and syntheses – with regard to the outside, such critical scrutiny should be construed as a general examination of different types of trauma or cut.
3. The regional condensation of the universal synthesis or the universal force of openness associated with an unbound universal continuum. How does the universal synthesis engender its own revolutionary subjectivity or regional condensation, and how can the revolutionary subject – i.e. a subject revolutionized by and according to the open – of the universal synthesis be mobilized? What is the shape of the revolutionary subject or the realist local fibration of the universal synthesis? Where is the site (earth) of the revolutionary subject? And what are the scientific, philosophical and even socio-cultural outcomes of mobilizing the revolutionary subject of the universal synthesis? the shape of the revolutionary subject or the realist local fibration of the universal synthesis?

Once the geophilosophical synthesis – as the drive of earthly thought – is freed of its grounded relation to the earth and absolutized by the geocosmic and ultimately universal continuum, it can be remobilized as a realist asymptote of the open – this is the basic contention of this text: Constructing the asymptotic thought of the open and examining such thought’s revolutionary import. Insofar as the scope of the open that is given for the local subject is both trivial and restricted, the task of geophilosophical realism is to extricate a non-trivial account of the open prior to establishing any consequential socio-cultural, political or philosophical pursuit of the outside or fresh air.

Trauma, or: It is not the psychoanalyst who knows the difference between amputation and transplantation; it is the surgeon. And it is the revolutionary who can’t tell the difference between one and many, not the psychoanalyst

Less than two years after the Great War, in his trenchantly written Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud presents an energetic model for the dynamism of the entire array of organic struggles on earth. According to this model, the emergence of the organic from the so-called originary inorganic state can be seen as a trauma which marks the temporary estrangement of the organic from the inorganic, the transient establishment of a zone of interiority excised out of its inorganic precursor. The traumatic scission, accordingly, brings about the possibility of life and concomitantly, a roundabout regression to the inorganic source from which the organic has been distracted, temporarily and under external influences, and to which it must return by any means and at all costs. Hence according to this model, the organism is energetically driven – in the sense of being relentlessly pulled back – toward the inorganic whose reality cannot be experienced and whose incommensurability with the temporal verity of the interiorized horizon generates a form of tension and subsequently a form of synthesis. This tension is produced between the reality of the inorganic that cannot be experienced (because it is diachronic to the organic subject) and the interiorized horizon or the subject of experience. In short, this tension is the expression of the incommensurability of the diachronic contingent reality of the inorganic outside that is now – thanks to the topological militancy of trauma – dynamically posited inside and outside the interiorized horizon. In the wake of trauma, in order to determine and capitalize on its interiority, the horizon must stave off the ingressing flood of the outside (überschwemmung). Yet even more significantly, in axiomatizing its own interiority, the organism must expose itself to the inassimilable index of the precursor exteriority that is now resident within it because it could never be completely assimilated by the temporal conditions of the organism.

The traumatic cut, accordingly, generates two modes of tension for which two corresponding syntheses toward resolution are subsequently formed. We will carefully examine these two tensions and their corresponding syntheses. This step is necessary to evaluate the implications of these regimes of synthesis for the economy of the interiorized horizon and the binding of the universal continuum from which the horizon has been cut. In other words, how do tensions and their respective syntheses occasioned by the traumatic cut affect the axiomatization process whereby the horizon’s interiority is posited as a veritable ground or founding axiom for its relationship (local synthesis) with the outside?

The traumatic cut brings about the possibility of two tensions which, as we shall see, correspond to the function or topology of the cut. These two tensions are exogenic and endogenic. Each category of tension in turn conditions its own regimes of synthesis, or synthetic operators. As the exteriorizing absolute (the unified and absolutized universal continuum) excises itself, the interiorized set or cut is exposed to two registers of exteriority:

I. One register exerts the external reality of exteriority in the form of an energetic index that is exorbitantly set against the outer threshold of the horizon, moulding it from the outside. Correspondingly, a form of tension emerges as the horizon tries to preserve its somatic integrity against the exorbitant index of exteriority that simply engulfs the interiorized horizon. This is the exogenic tension often associated with sublime force or exorbitance. This exogenic tension is the product of a traumatic cut that splits or creates incisions that unilateralize the exteriority as an external excess or “an influx of excitation vastly in excess of the binding capacities” (Brassier 2007: 236). It therefore corresponds to an incisional form of trauma that simultaneously separates the interiorized horizon from its exterior backdrop and sets it against the exteriority which is posited as external and exorbitant. In short, exogenic tension is an economical tension insofar as the incisional cut reformulates the exteriority in terms of capacity, hence the energetico-reductivist realization of exteriority as exorbitance or excess. We can trace different forms of the exogenic tension in the Freudian account of shell concussion, the protectionist strategy of the vesicle through the auto-mortification of its outermost surface, and ultimately in the relation between the terrestrial biosphere (the history of earthly thought included) and the sun. Once we have inspected the second register of exteriority, we shall have occasion to examine these forms of traumatic cut more carefully. We will be able to see how the traumatic synthesis or drive corresponding to exogenic tensions is indeed the motor of a peculiar mode of binding exteriority or openness. This curious mode of binding exteriority or openness, it will be argued, is not only at the base of all strategic modes of thought or systems of binding (from libidinal materialism to capitalism) but also is the ultimate counter-revolutionary tool whereby the system, instead of staving off or dismissing exteriority, economically binds it within the affordable duplicity of capacity and exorbitant external world.

II. The other register of exteriority does not exercise an exorbitant influence; quite the contrary, it is the concomitantly neutral and incommensurable identity of the open continuum as such. The trauma is but the self-excision of the universal continuum into its own localized and temporalized fields. ^{6 In order to understand excisional cut of trauma, it would be helpful to make an analogy with the excision theorem in algebraic topology. According to the excision theorem, the subspace V can be excised or cut from the subspace U of the topological space S without affecting the relative homology: The closure of V lies in the interior of U, and U lies in S. The relative groups h(S/U) and h(S-V/U-V) are isomorphic. The excision of the set V does not affect the relative homology.×}  Local and interiorized horizons are excisions of the open universal continuum; instead of being posited against the open universe from which they have been excised, they bring the unbound relation of the universe to itself into focus through regional horizons. Trauma as excision is, accordingly, the bottomless-up relation of the universe to itself from an unrestricted globality in the direction of localization and regional horizons (of the universal continuum). The self-excision of the open continuum is rooted in universal contingency, that is to say, trauma is the very expression of contingency in the gradational transition from the universal to the local or the regional and a contingency entailed in the absolute freedom of universal continuum from the necessity of its multitudes and particulars. Self-excision of the universal open into its regional fields in such a way that the open retains its absoluteness both within the regional horizon and beyond it, is what we should identify with an absolutized variant of Sandor Ferenczi’s ururtrauma or archi-trauma/cut. The ururtrauma of the universal continuum (the open) replaces the secondary function of trauma as division (or secession) with the primary function of the universal continuum’s self-experience or self-excision. No matter how originary and precursory a trauma is, there is still another trauma to which it can be deepened, another trauma by which the infinite inter-connected traumas can be widened – it is the one that makes sure the narcissistic wound keeps bleeding. The diagonal immediacy of ururtrauma with the open and its universal contingency bears a number of consequences:

(a) The contingency of trauma not only means that it can happen anywhere and at anytime, it also means that trauma transplants universal contingency into regional spatiotemporal fields.

(b) The diagonal immediacy of ururtrauma with the open or the universal continuum means that isolated or single traumas do not exist – that is to say, trauma is intrinsically plural and traumas are but linked and interconnected. This means that each particular regional trauma should be understood and thought in terms of the unbound genericity (or generality) of the universal continuum or with reference to Charles Sanders Peirce’s synthetic philosophy of continuum, in terms of a supermultitudinous generic collection. The supermultitudeness of the continuum means the field of the universal – while determinate for itself – is always indeterminate in size for its regional horizons and particulars. In Peirce’s own words, “A supermultitudinous collection is so great that its individuals are no longer distinct from one another” (Peirce 2010: 192). The ururtrauma of the universal absolute, for this reason, has a significant connotation: It suggests that the transition from the universal to regional fields (of individuals, particulars, etc.) and conversely, from local interiorized horizons to exteriority takes place in terms of a truly generic – that is supermultitudinous – continuum. Moreover, due to the genericity of the continuum (i.e. its unbound and indeterminate order of magnitude), regional fields and individual traumas must be regarded only in terms of indefinite neighbourhoods (rather than discreteness), weldedness and fusion (i.e. plasticity) and boundlessness with regard to other regional horizons or localized fields of trauma (i.e. unrestricted continuity to the universal).

(c) And lastly, in view of the previous conclusions, every horizon or regional field of the universal continuum is formed by more than one traumatic cut, and for this reason, the traumatic inflection upon the universal continuum does not follow a monistic or purely integral regime of synthesis. To put it differently, there is always an alternative mode of traumatic synthesis by which an interiorized horizon can be opened to exteriority, an alternative way by which the open universal continuum inflects upon itself from the same regional field. To this extent, the non-exorbitant – that is the neutral and absolute – register of exteriority is nested along multiple interconnected points of entry within an interiorized horizon. In short, ururtrauma unbinds trauma as an alternative cut, a real alternative posited by the absolute freedom of universal continuum (the open) and its line of synthesis. Consequently, ururtrauma brings about the possibility of an always-alternative system of traumatic synthesis or drive toward the open. The ururtrauma or the self-excision of the absolute continuum redefines both the reality and the function of trauma not in terms of a pathologic/therapeutic system of anthropomorphic emancipation but in terms of universal and contingent transplantation of the exteriority and regional realization of openness. Trauma – in the sense of the open continuum and not in the sense of the economical capacity of the interiorized horizon – is perforation; its method of cutting is not incision and splitting but piercing from multiple points of view, and nesting; it does not amputate, but transplants. Accordingly, the tension that “trauma as perforation” creates is endogenic. Such a tension originates from the remobilization of the universal as the regional and the transplantation of exteriority within interiority.

Examples of endogenic tensions are to be found more in Ferenczi’s and even Wilhelm Reich’s later writings than in the works of Freud, in particular in their accounts of child abuse (Ferenczi) and the myths of UFO abduction (Reich). Freud’s insistence on seeing exteriority in terms of exorbitance and trauma as splitting – the former rooted in an embryonic physics of thermodynamics, the latter in the now questionable division between inorganic chemistry and biology – prevented him from foraying into the realm of endogenic tensions associated with ururtrauma. The earth as conceived by ururtrauma is not a scar formed upon the solar electromagnetic inundation; it is a contingently posited and gradationally accreted field of complicities that has been excised by and out of the universal continuum along manifold nested traumatic cuts (isotopic traces, fields of gravitation and chemical eruptions). The regional (the earth), in this sense, is a cosmic constellation of alternating and nested traumata of the absolute continuum which twist the shape of the regional along their contingently erupting points of intrusion and zones of transplantation. In this broadened scenario, the terrestrial field of complicity is encompassed as much by the stellar trauma of the sun as it is by the trauma of stellar death via the effective binding of iron (produced in the silicon burning process marking the end of stellar radiation) – the role of iron in gravitation of the earth, the polymorphic presence of water and chemical processes or agencies such as hydridic fluids which have formed the planet and stirred life from within and without.

Endogenic tensions express the inassimilable presence of the universal continuum within the regional field, a resident yet alienating presence that has been bored and nested into the horizon from different angles, contingently, gradationally, infinitesimally. We call this resident yet inassimilable index of the open that can neither be expelled nor reintegrated within the interiorized horizon, the Insider. It will be argued that endogenic tensions wrought by the Insider deform the interiority of the horizon beyond recognition and necessitate forms of synthesis that progressively sabotage the axiomatic verity of the horizon’s interiority. Under the auspices of the Insider, endogenic tensions call for a non-economical inflection upon the absolute continuum that breaks free from the models of critical emancipation and anti-critical transgression: A revolution – that is to say an irreversible and radical change – made by the openness of the universal continuum and instigated by a universal synthesis.

Now we know that both endogenic and exogenic tensions inherent to trauma are dialectical tensions between the universal continuum and its regional fields. However, the insurmountable traumatic tension here cannot be explained in terms of a full dialectical sublation. Why? Firstly, because the interiorized horizon and the precursor exteriority are not precisely antithetical (one is merely the inflection or focalization of the other). Secondly, because the reality underpinning trauma cannot be sublated through assimilation or cancelation. The reality of the inorganic qua precursor exteriority is only interiorized through the remobilizing and redeploying power of trauma, but due to its diachronicity and exteriority cannot be fully assimilated in any way whatsoever. Therefore, the traumatic topology of tensions is dialectical insofar as the universal continuum (whose global index is, in this case, the inorganic – the precursor exteriority of the organism) sets itself against its extensively realized horizon (which in Freud’s biological account is the organism). Trauma is the self-dialectic of exteriority. Yet what is amiss in this dialectic is the sublation. That is to say, all that is present in the exteriorizing dialectic of trauma is the insurmountable tension immanent to the absence of any possibility for sublation. This necessary and irreversible lack fuels a synthesis between the universal continuum and its regional field, a synthesis that determines the course and the unbinding power of the dialectic with/of the absolute continuum. Moreover, the type of synthesis or the relation to the open is also determined by the locus of this lack or the insurmountable resistance to complete assimilation. Depending on whether this resistance takes place outside or inside the regional horizon, the synthesis or relation to the open will be different.

With traumatic tensions being explained in terms of binding or unbinding different registers of exteriority, we can now proceed to examine modes of synthesis or openness associated with these tensions and the exact role of traumatic cuts in determining such syntheses.

The dialectical synthesis of the traumatic subject, or: How can we tell the difference between counter-revolutionary traps and revolutionary tools?

Regardless of its nature, the traumatic tension must be brought to a resolution in one way or another. But what is this resolution? Freud relates this resolution to the restoration of an earlier stage before the conception of the nervous system or the organic horizon – a global state from which the regional horizon has been excised and into which it must be loosened. The tension drives the horizon toward a resolution, which in Freud’s account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is the full restoration of the reality of trauma qua the inorganic. The reality of inorganic exteriority is, however, diachronic in time and exterior in space with regard to organic interiority. For this reason, the synthesis toward such reality neither strictly conforms to principles of the interiorized horizon nor the unconditional neutrality (or nullity) of the “anterior posteriority” indexed by the inorganic (Brassier 2007: 233). The binding of exteriority, accordingly, conforms to the synthesis (as the motor of the drive) between the interiorized horizon and the exteriority, or more accurately, between the universal gradient and its regional focalization. The mode of inflection or openness toward the open depends on the behaviour of the traumatic synthesis which itself is determined by the complicity between global and regional gradients. But the mode of complicity between the universal continuum and its regional fields is also contingent upon the traumatic remobilization of the absolute continuum and deployment of the exteriority. It depends on how trauma posits the absolute continuum in regard to its regional horizon. To summarize, the traumatic binding of the universal freedom associated with the open continuum is, at its base, neither the question of the subject’s strategy in binding what lies beyond it nor the “anterior posteriority” of radical exteriority, but the question of how trauma ushers in the universal contingency of the absolute or unbound continuum and the will of the open.

In order to see how amputating and transplanting modes of trauma determine the type and mechanisms of traumatic binding of the universal or the dialectical synthesis with the absolute, we shall examine the syntheses of exogenic and endogenic traumatic tensions:

I. Traumatic synthesis where trauma incises exteriority from the interiorized horizon and thereby generates exogenic tensions (examples: Freud’s account of the vesicle whose baked-through [durchgebrannt] crust shields the organism against the flood of excitation and energy; Georges Bataille’s earthly life or grounded biosphere as the scar of the Sun upon the Earth): The traumatic cut is in this case a form of splitting that sets the exteriority as an exorbitant register outside and against the interiorized horizon. It is identical to what Ray Brassier associates with François Laruelle’s unilateralizing cut of non-dialectical negativity which possesses “a power of incision or dismemberment” (ibid: 146). The unilateralizing traumatic cut amputates the universal from the regional; consequently, it creates a grounded level of interiority in relation to the surface or the plane of amputation – an instance of separation or scission. Yet more significantly, the amputating cut or the unilateralized difference between the interiorized horizon and the exteriority economically reposits the universal absolute as that which is now outside the affordances of the traumatized horizon of interiority. This external rearrangement of the universal with respect to the regional, positions the universal absolute as an unbindable exorbitance on the geocosmic continuum. In short, the unilateralized universal absolute is reposited as an exorbitant external world or surplus outside with regard to the interiorized or regional horizon which paradoxically cannot be successfully bound but must be economically afforded as the only way out.

The unilateralized conception of the universal absolute as the exorbitant – which the regional horizon can never access except by means of dissolution – flattens the difference between universal absolute as exorbitant and manifested exorbitance as the global expression of the universal absolute. The one-sided or amputating traumatic cut creates an amphiboly within the economic semantics of the interiorized horizon: The contingent traumatic position of exteriority as an exorbitant index can no longer be distinguished from an economic condition wherein the exorbitant manifestation of exteriority is but the necessary essence of the absolute continuum. Although the amputating trauma contingently realizes the universal absolute as an exorbitant for the interiorized horizon, it also opens a new outside for the regional horizon wherein exorbitance is necessarily correlated to the absolute. This flattening of difference, or to be more exact, the confusion between the necessary and contingent positions of the absolute as exorbitant resides not only at the heart of contemporary capitalism and its excesses but also in the bone-marrow of the history of philosophy – especially when it comes to the relationship between thought and the Earth or what can be called the geophilosophical synthesis. Such confusion seems also to be at play in variant glorifications of excess and exorbitance such as Bataille’s notion of general or solar economy. Capitalism feigns its universality and inevitability for Man by means of this traumatic confusion between contingent and necessary manifestations of the universal absolute as exorbitant. Its machinery continuously postulates its excesses not as products of unnecessary processes and violent methods of conservation and protection but as the unavoidable consequence of its regional binding of the universal, of its becoming-universal. Accordingly, averting the path of capitalism is no longer a matter of disobedience but the folly of the impossible – trying to walk away from the world. In the next section of this essay, we will argue that only by rigorously embracing this folly can we develop a genuine non-restricted dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and unbind a world whose frontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths are absolutely free.

For the geophilosophical synthesis where both the individual organism and the surface biosphere are under various energetic influences of the sun, the confusion between contingent and necessary positions of the universal absolute as inherently exorbitant leads to a chronic form of terrestrial myopia: The universal absolute cannot be thought except as an exorbitant index of exteriority. Likewise, in the same myopic vein, cosmic exteriority cannot be inflected upon except through a sun or an energetic equivalent whose excess blinds the interiorized regional horizon. The sun becomes a blind spot barring the scope of the abyss. Ironically, the unilateralizing cut only “sharpens one-sidedness” at the cost of establishing a regime of exorbitance which can only be bound through the synthesis of affordances inherent to the economical correlation between the interiorized horizon and the exorbitant exteriority (ibid: 147).

If the incisional mode of trauma contingently sets exteriority as an exorbitant index against the interiorized horizon, this does not mean that the exorbitant exteriority is non-dialectically posited. On the contrary, since the interiorized horizon cannot successfully bind the exorbitant exteriority and simultaneously, the pull-back toward the reality or the source of trauma is inevitable, then the horizon has no choice other than affording the excess. The interiorized or regional horizon gradually and indirectly – that is, in conformity with its own economic terms and conditions – binds the excess of exteriority over interiority, the dismembered universal over the amputated regional. For this reason, the unilateralized or non-dialectical conception of exteriority associated with the universal absolute is translated into the energetic dialectic of the interiorized horizon. The unbindable exorbitance of the unilateralized or amputated exteriority determines the affordability of the interiorized horizon and demands an economical binding. This economical binding operates by affording (a dynamic expression of an axiomatic capacity) the excess of the outside. As a binding method, affordability regulates the course of synthesis toward the outside according to the axiomatic function of capacity. A synthesis not conforming to this dynamic capacity is avoided at all costs (viz. the horizon is open to the outside only according to its affordability). For this reason, the incisional traumatic cut and exogenic tensions entail a type of synthesis which is but an economical solution to bind the exorbitant index of exteriority.

Therefore, the synthesis inherent to exogenic tensions becomes that of constant translation of exorbitance to affordances of the regional horizon. It accords with what Freud recognized as energetic re-experiencing (simultaneous affirming and buffering) of the traumatic incident in order to move toward the source of trauma whilst energetically preserving the cohesion of the traumatized subject or the interiorized horizon. The synthesis between the unbindable excess (the exorbitant external world) and the horizon of interiority forms a fully bilateral type of economical correlation between the sources of tension. On the one hand, what we have is an exteriority whose external excess to the interiorized horizon coercively necessitates the economical binding (i.e. affordability) of the unbindable exorbitance as the expression of its inevitability. On the other hand, the regional horizon economically assimilates the aforementioned excess as the basis of its drive, establishing an affordable continuity, between the negentropic excess (originary trauma) and the entropic excess that will eventually dissolve it. Daniel R. Brooks and E.O. Wiley find the biological expression of this affordable continuity in the cohesive but economically conceived ontogenic continuity that blurs the distinction between the boundary demarcated by the originary excess that has been partially warded off and the excess that simultaneously pushes the dynamic boundary of the organism further (hence accounting for its dynamic behaviors) and eventually dissolves the organism. ^{7 The ontogenic continuity of the organism manifests in the way the information content of the system is organized “in such a manner that the organism exhibits spatiotemporal continuity during ontogeny and that each stage maintains the viability of the organism.” The continuity of the organism in terms of the unity and organization of its information is manifested by “such phenomena as cell adhesion and physiological integration”. See Brooks and Wiley 1986: 48. ×}

The entropy production associated with structural formation within the system is dissipated into the system itself. It becomes part of the boundary conditions (history) of the past state of the system and simultaneously becomes part of the system. Since entropy production is a manifestation of the system’s history, this results in at least part of the system’s history being incorporated into its causal makeup. Such systems should exhibit both “thermodynamic” and “dynamic” behavior, and the distinction between “initial conditions” and “boundary conditions” will be blurred; initial conditions could well be termed historical boundary conditions. The important distinction will be between historical and nonhistorical causal influences. The historical influences will be axiomatic because entropy production dissipated into the system must always affect the future system. (Ibid. 33)

The synthesis brought about by the unilateralizing excess is realized as an accelerative curve of conservative-dissipative rates circuitously constructed through regional affordances of the horizon. This synthetic curve (umwege) simultaneously aims for regional complexification and dissolution of the entire horizon. The acceleration, or precisely speaking, the socio-economic and cultural appropriation of such synthesis is therefore devoid of any revolutionary potency with respect to the universal openness. The embracing of the traumatic binding of the exorbitant exteriority via an accelerative synthesis of exogenic tensions either switches affordances for those which afford more or unleashes the anarchy of exorbitance within the system. But the anarchy of exorbitance is merely an extreme form of conservatism since it dissolves the system according to its own economical ambit. The outside it opens up for the horizon is merely an exorbitant manifestation which was never absolute or unbound in the first place. The psychological image of this accelerative strategy is the isolated mad individual reduced to a vegetative state or the incendiary hypermanic transgressionist – the burnt-out and violent sides of the same coin, the productive/anti-productive double-bind.

The dialectical synthesis built upon exogenic tensions with the unilateralized qua exorbitant exteriority is not just impotent, it is a counter-revolutionary trap. The traumatic binding of an exorbitant manifestation of the outside is limited to the economical correlation between the mandating excess and the conservative sphere. In short, the synthesis is limited to the available affordance between the interiorized horizon and the exorbitant exteriority. But what are the implications of this conformity to affordance or economical correlation? It means that the traumatic subject will be forced to bind the universal absolute in one way and one way only. To put it differently, the interiorized horizon follows a mode of binding or a type of synthesis that can be afforded and for this reason it is not unrestricted or modally free. The organism wishes to die in one way and one way only. The traumatized subject only wishes to bind the exorbitant source of trauma by re-experiencing it over and over in dreams. Any other mode of binding that does not correspond to the economical correlation between the conservative ambit of the interiorized horizon and the exorbitant manifestation of exteriority is forestalled. Such alternative modes of synthesis would generate radical disturbances in the axiomatic economic sphere of affordances. Accordingly, the dialectical synthesis toward the universal absolute through exorbitant manifestations of exteriority is characterized by its intrinsic closure toward alternatives (i.e., modally unbound syntheses). The adherents of such a counter-revolutionary dialectical synthesis – whether disguised as systems of thought, orders of change or ways of living – are distinguished by their reactionary and restrictive attitude against alternatives, their dismissal of tactical improvisation and unwritten plans, and their fear of asymmetrical fields of synthesis or relation to the open.

The revolutionary dialectical synthesis of the traumatic subject is marked by its ability to unbind alternative modes of traumatic inflection upon the absolute and by its improvisation in the science of asymmetrics. Or, in allusion to Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy and reappropriation of his architectonics, the revolutionary synthesis is that of ternary logics. It extricates the synthetic third out of the first (the uno) and the second (the duo) by meshing relational and modal webs wherein the mediating function of the third unifies all regional perspectives and localized hierarchies into a synthetic global or universal function. To this end, we shall argue in the next segment, concerning the type of synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions, that trauma as a transplanting cut precisely assumes the role of this mediating and universalizing function between regional horizons. It beaks the symmetry-in-asymmetry of the dyadic cut by arranging and negotiating the relationships between the universal and the regional, exteriority and interiority, via transplantations and the plastic logic of gradients and nestedness. Correspondingly, the dialectical synthesis brought about by ternary logic constructs its modally bottomless and free relation to the open through interconnected webs of traumata; it inflects upon the universal continuum through the implicitly twisted logic of asymmetry-in-symmetry, liquefaction-in-solidity, exteriority-in-interiority, universal-in-regional, global-in-local. Openness becomes as much an asymptotic relation to the boundless universal continuum (the open) as it is realized as the expression of modal and relational freedom of the synthesis – that is, openness by real alternatives instead of affordable options.

II. Traumatic synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions. Here trauma as the self-excision or self-reflection of the absolute, transplants exteriority within interiority and fabricates topologically nested gradients of the universal (examples: Ferenczi’s account of autotomia and the alien will in which the autoplastic [as opposed to alloplastic] nervous system of the child is moulded around the inassimilable presence of the abusing adult; Maria Torok’s theory of deep burial of traumatic humiliations in vast inter-vaulted ego-crypts which have their own cryptonymical patterns; and the so-called “chthonic” geochemical determination of life and its various aspects as the regional expression of cosmochemical processes and events such as isotopic fractionations during the formation of the solar system out of the molecular cloud): Trauma as the regionalizing self-reflection of the absolute draws a third function from the unilateralizing function of radical exteriority and the interiorizing function of the regional horizon. It synthesizes the extensive incision with the intensive interiority of the regional horizon and brings forth the perforating cut. Perforation or the transplanting cut is to amputation what the synthetic order of the third is to the dyadic hierarchy. Through trauma as perforation, the universal – contingently and from alternative points of entry – transplants its global expressions and properties within its localized zones. The regional horizon, in this sense, is a focalized gradient or continuum occasioned by transplantations and nested continuity of the universal which bring about the possibility of regional grades. Accordingly, the transplanting mode of trauma does not unilateralize exteriority; it can be defined as a nesting function that changes the local gradation (with regard to the universal), or more accurately, the plasticity of the regional horizon. The synthesis associated with endogenic tensions, for this reason, should be understood not in terms of regression or unsuccessful attempts in reestablishing the precursor exteriority, but in terms of gradational changes in the plasticity of the regional horizon as it asymptotically approaches the universal gradient from all directions. This is how the deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis into the geocosmic continuum by way of transcending the dialectic of endogenic tensions occurs: Regional horizons whose endogenic tensions are generated by traumatic transplantations across the universal continuum can also gradationally reflect upon the universal through the continuous and mediating function of traumas. But this emphatically means that the universal absolute is reflected upon not as external or exorbitant, but as that which is infinitesimally and gradationally both within and outside the regional field.

The dialectical synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions is characterized, firstly, by its unbound modality. If the ururtrauma of the absolute unbinds the trauma essentially as an always alternative way for transplantation of the universal inside the regional and nesting of one regional horizon within another, then the synthesis of endogenic tensions toward the absolute is identified by its asymmetric approach toward the absolute across and through multiple non-isolated fields of traumata. Secondly, the dialectical synthesis originating from endogenic tensions is not constituted on the primacy of the inevitability of pull-back toward the universal absolute (the inevitability of extinction, the inexorable reckoning day); it is built upon the complicities between the regional horizon and the universal, the interiorized horizon and indices of exteriority already nested within it. Acceleration toward the inevitable, as it was argued earlier, is not only an impotent avowal of the conservative-dissipative ambit of the interiorized horizon, but also a counter-revolutionary trap by virtue of safeguarding the horizon against alternative ways of inflecting upon the universal absolute (alternative modes of openness). Complicities between the resident indices of exteriority and the interiorized horizon, on the other hand, absorb this so-called inevitability merely as asymptotic expressions of the universal continuum: Interiorities as nested asymptotes of exteriority, embodiment as the traumatic asymptote of disembodiment (viz. the unfeasibility of physical embodiment in the pure extensity of expanding space) and so on. Complicities or dialectical synthesis immanent to endogenic tensions deepen and widen the regional interiorized horizon across the universal gradient and along these asymptotic lines. The asymptotic approach of the traumatic binding/synthesis means that the complicities of regional horizons with the universal absolute along zones of traumatic transplantations are no longer emptied of significance or purpose. Everything matters, every complicity counts, every field of materialization or materialist perspective has a global import, every regional function has a value to be mediated with the universalizing function of trauma and interpolated by the asymptotic synthesis toward the open. This is why the revolutionary subject celebrates the Copernican Revolution and its traumatic legacy as a revolution by widening the regional across the universal continuum and asymptotically approaching the open.

Within the post-Copernican universe, the revolutionary dialectical synthesis widens the regional horizon as an asymmetric tactical field. Each trauma that mediates the regional and the universal, each zone of traumatic transplantation, is a field of tactics opened by complicities of the regional and the universal, the local resistance of the former within the traction of the latter. The alternative traumas of the regional horizon constitute its tactical dynamism within the universal continuum. Since the propensity of tactics is to fade away from the sight of command and endanger the integrity of the ground control, the tactical mobilization of trauma reinvents the regional horizon outside of its grounded field as a platform for complicities between anonymous materials or forces of the open. The revolutionary subject of the Copernican project restlessly searches for alternative syntheses or modes of traumatic inflection upon the universal absolute. It improvises out of its traumas, or to be more exact, out of traumas which mediate between its regional horizon and the outside: Endogenic tensions generated by contingent and alternative traumatic cuts nourish the drive for partaking in complicities with different indices of exteriority across the unbound universal continuum.

The dialectical synthesis associated with exogenic tensions always takes the form of a compulsion to repeat the originary trace of trauma qua incision. Since the originary trace of incision is traumatically conceived as exorbitant, this compulsion to repeat is always performed energetically, namely, by means of affording the unbindable exorbitant trace of trauma. The energetic reexperiencing of trauma concomitantly buffers the excess and circuitously moves toward it. Correspondingly, the synthesis firmly reestablishes the interiorized horizon as the ground or the central sphere from which – in a Ptolemaic fashion – contact with the alien outside should be conducted. Once it is denuded of its complexity-disguises planted along its economically detoured path, the course of exogenic synthesis is revealed to be obsessively straightforward. The interiorized horizon is not allowed to relocate its position outside of itself on the universal continuum; instead it must locate itself with regard to the exorbitant gravity of trauma. Moreover, since the unilateralized exteriority enjoys an exorbitant external ubiquity, its impact upon the horizon is mainly that of what Freud identifies in terms of scarification, scorching and rigidification of the exposed regions. Whereas for transplanting traumas, the effects of the inassimilable exteriority and universal hijacking of the regional horizon are gradational and zonal changes in the plasticity of the horizon, or even sometimes contingent anomalies in the internal topology of the traumatized sphere. Finally, since the dialectical synthesis emerging out of exogenic tensions is determined by the externality of the source of trauma and the economic internality of the regional horizon, its logic is foreign to the possibility of nested spaces (or multi-connected traumas) and the possibility of universalization of regional categories (or trauma as a mediating function between regional gradients of the geocosmic continuum). In short, the dialectical synthesis inherent to the trauma of exorbitance is allergic to three branches of the mathesis of trauma: (1) topology where local neighborhood substitutes fundamentally discrete points and global invariance is captured beyond the flux of differences, (2) differentiable functions where transits between local manifolds and fields are understood as local expressions of various layers of non-local continuity, and (3) categorical morphisms as alternative passages between local fields of trauma.

In the above differences and characteristics of the two traumatic syntheses – one modally unbound and the other modally restricted – echoes of two different geophilosophical systems can be heard:

(a) A geophilosophical realism in which synthetic relations with the source of trauma are conceived as gravitational relocation in the universal continuum versus a geophilosophical system in which the regional horizon (erde) changes its location according to an exorbitant gravity (for example, the earth as a regional gradient of the cosmic continuum vs. the earth as bound to the sun and its own ground).

(b) Two geophilosophical systems in which the exteriority has different effects on a given sphere (earth): gradational changes versus rigid changes.

A geophilosophical synthesis whose science of openness requires topological, differential and categorical approaches and one that is too confident in the axiomatic integrity of its horizon to see perforations, lines of intrusion and inassimilable residues of the outer space within its own sphere.

The realm of traumatic syntheses is that of a geocosmic expanse where the transition from the nervous system to geophilosophy and geophilosophy to cosmology becomes increasingly blurred and porous. This gradational transition owes to the general function of trauma as that which mediates between the regional and the universal, interpolates discontinuities or ruptures, brings about all types of eccentric neighbourhoods between regional horizons of the universal continuum and establishes topological transfers between seemingly discrete regional domains – between “infant politics” (Robin Mackay), streets politics, geocosmology, biology, cerebral plasticity, etc. It is interesting to point out that some of the psychoanalytical explications regarding the realm of endogenic syntheses brought about by traumatic transplantations are strikingly similar to deep earth and extra-terrestrial stories. Ferenczi’s theory of alien transplant develops an alternative account of traumatic synthesis for children who have been victims of sexual abuse. According to Ferenczi, the psychic plasticity of the child is mainly susceptible to take forms (autoplastic adaptations) rather than giving forms so as to make self-destruction and self-recreation unnecessary (alloplastic adaptations). In confronting with a force whose communication is ambiguous (meaning either it cannot be separated into its characteristic components or the child cannot determine the nature and category of this communicating force), the plastic psychic horizon of the child takes the shapes of the force. This communicationally ambiguous force that leaves its deep imprint on the child’s plastic neuropsychic structure is the adult’s act of molestation which in families is usually disguised under different semiotic patterns of parental love, playing and adult punishment all at once. Since this adult presence cannot be reintegrated within the psychic structure of the child while it has already been interiorized as a component of the self, it begins to change the cohesion of the psychic horizon according to its inassimilable negativity. It commences its course of deterioration by entirely changing the formation of the psychic sphere from inside-out. It sinks deep within the psychic horizon and produces an inner gravitational core that differentiates the child’s psychic horizon to different strata of an “individuum” (Ferenczi 1995: 10). Each stratum is formed out of the complicity of the psychic fabric with the contingent will of this alien transplant. Even the immediate external atmosphere of the growing child which is formed by alloplastic adaptations is also determined by this sunken alien core. The alien transplant now determines the psychic life of the child from inside and outside, in all directions, and through different spaces that it has improvised out of the available “material resources” of the psychic sphere. The only stratum that is left relatively untouched so as to properly shield the alien will and supply the individuum with some sort of quasi-alien life is the outermost layer, the thin surface of personhood. The outermost layer of the individuum is constituted of a surface biosphere where the person carries out its everyday life. It is a seamless façade of superficiality where nothing is out of the ordinary, even though at times its trans-vacuous consistency is challenged by displacing volcanic eruptions of burnt-out ashes of the original person and purposeless energetic discharges. To be exact, on the surface the sky is calm. This was never meant to be a children’s story but a moral lesson on the formation of the earth and its lively biosphere.

The degradation of the terra verita of the psychic sphere from the inside through contingent complicities of an alien transplant with horizon’s axiomatic components undergoes a full-blown eversion in the later works of Reich ^{8 Eversion is the process of turning inside-out. Here it denotes Reich’s concomitant turning of Ferenczi’s theory of child abuse into an account of alien abduction and turning the deep-earth model immanent to Ferenczi’s traumatics inside-out so as to transform it into a Copernican recalibration of the earth in space.×} . Seemingly distorted by hyperbolic turns and twists, Reich’s entire oeuvre should be seen as a meticulous exfoliation of the same philosophical flower. First, there are psychoanalytical, vitalist and anti-state works. Despite their controversial nature, Reich’s writings prior to his move to the United States possess a robust coherency. These earlier works can be seen as a continuous series of inquiries into the effects of energy disturbances, traumas and repressions within different spheres of earthly life: sexual, physiological and socio-political domains. However, as Reich sets foot in the United States, his project took a drastic turn – unusual even in terms of his European adventures in eclecticism. For one decade from 1947 to 1956 (up to the completion of Oranur Second Report), Reich’s writings, research and personal life were secret facilities where humanity consolidated its last lines of resistance against aliens: “There was no escape from the fact that we were at war with a power unknown to man on earth” (Reich 1957). Everything that is developed during this period verges on pseudo-science and cosmosophy: system-toxifying deadly orgone radations, gravity and anti-gravity equations, models of alien visitation, studies on the inherent susceptibility of water as the vitalizing substance of the terrestrial life to extra-terrestrial chemical forces, theories of desert formation and the clandestine role of UFOs in desertification processes on a cosmic scale. We have heard about tales of alien abduction as refabricated accounts of sexual child abuse developed by victims. In these scenarios, the worldly and everyday reality of adult exploitation slowly twists into extra-terrestrial events of alien sighting, contact, encounter, abduction and return. Rather than energetically re-experiencing the trace of trauma in dreams, the sexually abused subject twists again and again the incident of the “close encounter” – the trauma of molestation – into an extra-terrestrial odyssey. The so-called grades of the encounter (the first, the second, the third and so on) delineate the order of the traumatic synthesis whereby the subject sights the alien on the earth, in its home, in its innermost horizon, next it is visited by the alien, then it is abducted by trauma, taken out of this world, reconfigured and brought back to the earth where now everything is twistedly alien, that is to say, human. Whereas Ferenczi’s account of trauma is concerned with alienation of the internal sphere/erde, Reich – himself a molested victim of socio-political traumas of capitalism – in his ufologic reports presents trauma as a close encounter that relocates the subject (“the Earthman”) from its totalized and discrete earth to a new alien field of gravity where the subject is reconstituted outside of its own center once and for all (ibid). The subject’s previous grounded horizon where the social sphere, the home and the psyche were totalized into one veritable earth, is now re-experienced and sighted from a synthetic terrestrial and extra-terrestrial viewpoint. ^{9 This synthetic perspective especially becomes evident in the claims of those who return from abduction. Their physiology and somatic integrity have apparently been left intact save for inexplicable subtle changes experimented on their reproductive organs during abduction. The abductee is a mongrel capable of reproducing synthetic populations / perspectives which are neither strictly human nor purely alien proper. ×} From here, the earth is always a UFO, my home I can no longer remember or care for, myself is a continuously relocating extra-terrestrial field of observation, the groundless base from which all planets are and will be alienated.

These are no longer bewildering fictions of psychoanalysis but fully-fledged cosmological scenarios unraveled by the mediating function of traumas and their universalizing syntheses.

❦❦❦

Now we know that the question of dialectical synthesis or binding of the universal absolute, and hence the question of revolution – viz. universal change by and through the open – is precisely the question of inflective relationship of the subject qua regional with the universal continuum.

In light of a conception of trauma unbound by the universal synthesis and a Peircean thought of continuum (as explicated in a deservingly exquisite fashion by Latin American mathematician and philosopher Fernando Zalamea), fields of trauma and tensions should no longer be strictly subjected to the purported adequacy of analytical modes of inquiry. Psychoanalysis, political theory and axiomatizing approaches possess neither the sufficient universal competency nor multi-modal synthetic fields of inquiry for delving into the ramifications of the Copernican Revolution and examining the nature of traumas (whether of individuals or collectives). In this respect, the so-called fertile syntheses and reunions of analytical-continental philosophies which have been proposed by some as the veritable locus of realist thought should be justly unmasked as a contemporary cubbyhole for the exhausted survivors of both philosophical camps: Either those who are myopic enough not to see the scope of universal syntheses that passes through their regional fields of knowledge, or those who are conservative enough to strategically safeguard the traditions of their camps by being open only to certain facets of the opposite camp so as to postpone their inevitable demise. To this extent, a true science of openness built upon the legacy of the Copernican Revolution and traumatic (that is constituted in ineradicable tensions between the regional and the open) syntheses toward the universal absolute must be conceived by an unrestricted synthetic vision. Realist thought – the offspring of a science of openness and an ethics of humiliation – is a modally unbound synthetic thought. It is simultaneously an absolutely and trans– modern thought. It is “absolutely modern” by the virtue of “overcoming the Ptolemaic and narcissistic counter-revolution” and shedding its transcendental limitations in its katabasis into the absolute (Catren 2011: 338). It is “transmodern” insofar as it is “essentially topological, open to all sorts of continuous transformations (pragmatic maxim, triadic semiotic, classifications of sciences, synechism, etc.), and … is particularly able to represent a bimodal net (Petitot) of both differentials and invariants, providing a full understanding of the prefix” (Zalamea 2009: 118). TRANS

If both the emergence of capitalism and the inception of Western (Greek) philosophy are – as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gautarri acknowledge – outcomes of terrestrial contingencies, then realist synthetic thought is also prone to erupt from its own contingently positioned geographic locations on this planet. Whilst the universal excises its own regional fields and positions them according to its own universal freedom, the regional fields also determine – based on their constitutive universal contingency – their sub-regional horizons and this continues ad infinitum. The regional synthesis is consequently everywhere but it is only highly mobilized wherever the transition between regional fields and their tensions with the outside are more convoluted, modally charged, topologically ambiguous and synthetically widened by condensed entangled clusters of traumata (from individual to collective, from personal to social traumas). Accordingly, if we choose to roughly locate those geographical regions which are more hospitable to the germination of true synthetic philosophies of trans-and-absolutely modern man because they already – and of course, contingently – satisfy the conditions for the emergence of such thoughts, we have to make a new navigational map. On this map we do not have points or discretely territorialized locations but obscure and fuzzy regional gradients, contingently distributed tectonic subduction zones for the focalization (rather than emergence) of the trans-and-absolutely-modernist thought, areas which are inherently susceptible to give rise to carriers of synthetic thought, revolutionary subjects of their regional fields of trauma – patient zeros capable of blending in with the unsuspected terrestrial population and embark upon pandemic syntheses. Patient zeros of synthetic thought are epidemic phantoms, they are untraceable links between regional outbreaks, highly mobilized and contagious reservoirs of synthetic tensions capable of linking isolated regional horizons to the universal continuum in the most improvised fashions and esoteric topological configurations.

On the geocosmic navigational map of synthetic thought, the closer you get to the supposed centers of the world, the weaker synthetic tensions become and the more difficult it is for the revolutionary subject to emerge and come into focus. When you reach certain self-proclaimed discrete points like London, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Dubai, and other so-called centers or capitals of the world, the synthetic tensions almost verge on zero, the emergence of the revolutionary subject becomes a distant dream and narcissistic regional phantasms are feigned as universally modern synthetic thoughts. ^{10 The geophilosophical disillusionment of the “world centers” in the name of the trans-and-absolutely modern man disabuses as much the purported sponsors of culture and thought who are deluded with the geopolitical glory of world capitals as it thwarts the all-too-familiar scheme of those who search their own mastery and independence in self-seclusion, the morality of self-victimhood and the opportunistic discourse of the Other. ×} The liberalist illusion of having real alternatives, capitalism’s accelerative yet modally restricted synthesis, the bifurcated and hence narrowly conceived tensions between the Left and the Right in these regions circumscribe true universalist syntheses. The universal is merely reinstated at the level of population diversity or at a culinary level – the miracle of the so-called fusion cuisine is all that can be handled. Diversity becomes only an excuse to keep other forms of universal syntheses bound or precluded as unnecessary or potential threats. In such regions the universal or realist synthetic thought is but a mirage, a Fata Morgana to lure the clueless into the heart of illusion. On the other hand, on the same navigational map, there are regions which are rife for outbreaks of synthetic thought, broadening the scope of geophilosophical realism and developing universalist subjects. Although such nebulous regional gradients cannot be geographically exhausted, that should not prevent us from applying vague geographical names to these generic regions:

Latin America – “[w]here ubiquitous diagonal passages have molded the Continent” and “‘transculturación’ … opens the way to transit gluings which escape dualisms between foreign culture (‘aculturación’) or forced culture (‘inculturación’)” (Zalamea 2009: 122).

Middle East – where excessive syncretism create dynamic and incessant antagonisms which explode into coiling cyclonic transitives of distorted universal proportions, and where everyday life is mobilized across integrals and differentials of socio-political decay: The ever-shrinking but integrally persistent residues of a despotic past (the ruined) and germinal vectors of decomposition which open differential continuities or alternative paths to fresh air where “creativity can [finally] expand without brakes”. (Zalamea 2011: 171).

Maghrib – where the everyday trauma of human survival forces the subject to improvise life and tactics on a daily basis despite diminishing resources and tightening pressures.

Eastern Europe – where balkanization is no longer deemed as an identitarian or national stigma (the crippling wound of the victim) but as an expression of an entirely new multi-frontal tactical formation against alien forces and assimilation – fragmented shards whose lethality against assimilation matches their diffusive versatility or what Ferenczi identifies as the advantage of “creating a more extended surface towards the external world” and a complex form of asynchronic distribution of effects and adaptive interactions between fragments (Ferenczi 1994: 230).

The universalist subject conceived and mobilized by such regions cannot be envisioned or realized in the confines of geopolitical domains of revolution – let alone within the well-worn saga of world politics or the seemingly street-friendly revolutionary politics of Britain which has grazed on both the comforts and depressions of not having a revolution. The modern man of these vague synthetic regions neither basks in the postulated privilege of such comforts nor is he distracted by the guilt associated with the lack of revolution and comforts associated to it. Not because he has gone through revolutions retrogressive or progressive, but because he is no longer able to discretely extract and isolate the everyday feats of survival from the revolutions in the nervous system, from the revolutions in the home, the streets, the continent, the earth and the unbound universal continuum. Through their eccentric historical topologies, their undulations between integral and differential formations and socio-political traumatic syntheses they harbor, these regions not only increasingly generalize the supposed veritable locus of revolution but also blur their geographical location. Latin America, Middle East, Eastern Europe and Maghrib are as much geographic regions as they are generic synthetic models of thinking, improvisation of everyday life, survival and multi-modal engagement with the world or being-in-the-universe. The generic site of the revolution can only be traversed by a general yet regionally appropriated model of synthesis and a generic yet focused geography for the mobilization of the revolutionary or the subject of the open.

The synthetic horizon of the trans-and-absolutely man generates various types of cobordism, nestedness, tangled neighbourhoods, topological convolutions and porosities between the brain, the streets, the national territory and the earth through which the revolution spreads from one region to another. The differentials of the universal synthesis – the environment of revolution – cover and build upon integral conditions of regional horizons while smoothly interpolating them and asymptotically approaching the universal in its unbound and open conception. Since it is driven by syntheses of the open, the revolutionary subject is not particularly prejudiced where the revolution takes place, in the brain, in the streets or in space. This is because endogenic tensions and syntheses render any disposition toward a discrete or an axiomatic site of revolution problematic and precarious. What the revolutionary subject is concerned with is how the revolution can be mobilized from one regional gradient to another, from one interiorized horizon to another enclosure, from isolated fields of trauma to the open. Far from credulously asserting that scientific, social, cultural and cerebral revolutions are identical or one essentially leads to another, the revolutionary task of the trans-and-absolutely modern man is to find alternative transits and asymptotes, design intimate neighbourhoods and overlappings between various regional loci and expressions of the revolution.

The investigation of the revolutionary subject – his traumas, his earth, terrain, everyday tasks and revolutionary duties i.e. searching for alternatives (freedom) and ultimately, exporting the revolution or broadening the scope of synthesis – is but the continuation of the Copernican pursuit of the open by treading along the great chain of humiliations: The orbital subversion of the geocentric earth, the Darwinian erosion of Aristotelian essentialism, the Freudian deprivatization of man’s inner sanctuaries, and the expropriation of discrete worlds or fields of knowledge on behalf of an open synthetic continuum under the auspices of neuroscience, synthetic mathematics and unified astrobiology. Consequently, the inquiry into regional excisions of the absolute continuum (openness) and correspondingly, nested traumatic cuts or regions (fields for the alternative pursuit of the open) comes into focus in the generic figure of the post-Copernican revolutionary subject who widens his region across the universal continuum through mobilizing endogenic tensions and syntheses immanent to his region. And in doing so, he embarks upon a revolution that is constituted of the line of universal synthesis – the modally free and non-axiomatic environment of the open. For this reason, in the next section, we shall have the occasion to examine regional horizons of the revolutionary subject more intimately and inquire how such horizons are traversed or at times, overturned by the universal line of synthesis.

Unanchoring the revolutionary import of modern man, or: It is time to take the revolution out of the streets and into space, or: Revolution was never meant to be strictly terrestrial

Only through dissecting the dialectical syntheses of the traumatic subject with the open, can we identify the revolutionary subject, i.e., the subject that brings a universal and irreversible change by and through the universal continuum within its localized and temporalized horizon. Through its dialectical synthesis, the revolutionary subject embarks upon the traumatic binding of the geocosmic continuum so that the axiomatic verity of its horizon is uprooted by the ceaseless self-renegotiating verity of the universal absolute. ^{11 The self-renegotiation of the universal absolute does not slide into anything other than or outside of its absolute field. Yet in so far as it determinedly overcomes itself through ceaseless renegotiation of itself, it becomes territopic (rather than terrible) for any regional determination imposed upon it.×} The revolutionary subject breaks away from the isolationist regime of trauma and plunges into the ever deepening and widening universal constellations of traumata. To put it differently, through the traumatic binding of the universal absolute, the revolutionary subject deepens and widens the geophilosophical synthesis of its horizon into and across the geocosmic continuum. In doing so, the revolutionary subject finds an asymptote between its horizon of interiority, its regional horizon and the universal and exteriorizing absolute. The unbound dialectic of the latter with itself becomes the regional dialectic and the synthetic drive of the former.

Here we should pause and in order to avoid possible and further misunderstandings define the subject that we have been exploiting so far in conjunction with the word revolution. The subject is only constructed traumatically along the lines of the universal continuum’s self-excision so that the purported centrality of the subject to the universal continuum becomes the universal’s regional – that is, contingent and traumatically concentrated – focalization. In other words, the subject is but the traumatic focalization of the universal continuum. Its regional horizon is no longer a somatically integrated earth, its interiority is no longer axiomatically veritable, because it is now a gravitationally bound cluster of traumata suspended on the geocosmic continuum of the universal absolute. If modern man is defined by traumas which take him in and out of focus, then in order to reclaim him from current planetary regimes of myopia (religious fundamentalism, totalitarianism, rampant capitalism, …) and finally from his own arrogance, his traumas must be mobilized as revolutionary dialectical syntheses toward the open. The mobilization of modern man prepares him in his long overdue run in the revolutionary course of the universal absolute where reactionary enemies abound and he himself is at the centre of fear and hostility.

The concomitant decentralization of the subject’s position in regard to the unbound universal continuum (the open) and deaxiomatization of its somatic integrity through traumas constitutes the very identity of the revolutionary subject. If the subject can no longer be critically and universally investigated without traumas that contingently and convolutedly determine its horizon, then the mobilization of the revolutionary subject needs to take into account – as its utmost critical discipline – the universal mathesis of trauma. The revolutionary subject is measured simultaneously by the concentration and involvedness (com-plexio) of traumas that position and traverse it, bringing it in and out of focus. In its fuzzy collective and individual field, the citizen of the modern territorial system is an all-encompassing traumatized horizon. But the magnitude of its traumatization does not particularly reveal the significance of its membership role in the set of the state to which the subject belongs. Although the state system is a set by virtue of its citizens and its territorial fields, the axiomatized subject qua citizen quite literally does not count except within the scope of its membership. Simply put, the citizen means nothing. It is only the function of the citizen – that is to say, the axiomatizing function of citizen’s membership – that is safeguarded by the system. The territorial system is only interested in resting its purportedly axiomatic and veritable interiority upon the axiomatic and veritable interiority of its citizens, namely, membership in the system as the given function of human subjects. Yet precisely because of this axiomatization, the system cannot fathom the bottomless relation of the subject with the open or the universal continuum. One can say that citizen is not only the traumatized subject of the territorial system; it is also the focal point for the convergence of innumerable traumas which hijack its axiomatic sphere into the open:

As the event immanent to the polis, the citizen is the horizon whereby the trauma of the human organism is transplanted within the territorial trauma of the city and the modern territorializing system. It effectuates the organic trauma within the trauma of the human organism whose retarded (Bertalanffy, et al.) or fetalized (Gould, et al.) slow pattern of growth exposes the juvenile human species to a wide array of traumas. During this differentially retarded or neotenic period, the plastic traits of the human species including its neural plasticity are highly susceptible to change at the synaptic level and can be easily traumatized by external familial, social and environmental disparities or excesses. The link between the brain regions with the highest structural plasticity formed during the prolonged period of maturation, neurodegenerative diseases and trauma events is yet to be fully explored. The slow formation of the human’s juvenile plastic traits causes the traumatisation of the human (child) to be somehow invisible and occur at the level of what Ferenczi might call “deep or phantom transplantations” i.e. traumas which only later during adulthood – or more politically speaking, during full-fledged citizenhood – will begin to burgeon and manifest. To sum up, the organic trauma is nested within the homo sapiens trauma whose neotenous or retarded neuropsychic traits are efficaciously configured with invisible traumas, the traumatized homo nervus is in turn grafted onto the demographic trauma immanent to the territorialisation of the human population; but this is not the end of the burrow yet. The trauma of territorialisation extends to the terrestrial trauma whereby the surface biosphere is set against the exorbitant exteriority of the sun and stirred by the inorganic chemistry of the deep earth. Both the sun and the planet earth are also, respectively, traumatically conceived against their cosmic backdrop. Concentrated within this profound trauma of the geographical territorialisation is the geopolitical trauma of the city where the human population is eventually mobilized and distributed. The citizen is the contemporary terrestrial focal point of the concentrated traumas of the polis and the human population. The trauma of the modern man qua citizen is not only expandable to traumas of man and the earth but also extendable to traumas which plunge its putative verity into cosmic depths. It is for this reason that for the post-Copernican revolutionary subject who is determined to deepen the geophilosophical synthesis of its regional horizon along the geocosmic continuum through traumatic binding of the universal absolute, the traumatized figure of the citizen or the modern man appears as the here-and-now field for local unbinding of universal synthesis. Brought into focus by innumerable traumas, the modern man is an abyss no political agency is prepared to stare directly into. As a concacatnated configuration of traumata endowed with a regionalizing function, the modern man is a designated zone of universal synthesis characterized by its non-trivial relation to the open.

The deepening of the ostensibly local traumas of the modern man qua citizen from the grounded earth to the geocosmic continuum reweds the Copernican Revolution to the great chain of humiliations yet to come. But, far from scorning and deriding man’s mortality in chorus with political Leviathans who gorge and fatten on the fears of the ephemeral man, this is simply to turn the perishability of man into the traumatic asymptote of the universal absolute, its interiority into the homotopy equivalent of radical exteriority. In deepening and widening its traumas, the modern man unbinds the universal will of the open within its regional and territorial field. In doing so, the modern man transcendentally extirpates the axiomatic function of its so-called veritable interiority upon which the territorializing system grounds itself. By supplanting its territorial, organic, terrestrial and human verities with the ceaseless self-renegotiating verity of the universal absolute (the unbound and absolute continuum), the modern man turns its axiomatic horizon into an anti-axiomatic surprise. If we accept the non-controversial and rudimentary formula “anti-axiomatic surprise (i.e. the surprise turn from axiomatic to non-axiomatic) = terror” then capitalization on the modern man as an axiomatic resource is a matter of binding terror in its Ferenczian sense. Here the Ferenczian concept of terror simply addresses a vertiginous effect caused by the loss of the founding axiom and fraying into the open. This anti-axiomatic terror is “described as a frightening whirlwind, ending in the complete dissolution of connexions and a terrible vertigo, until finally the ability, or even the attempt, to resist the force is given up as hopeless, and the function of self-preservation declares itself bankrupt.” (Ferenczi 1994: 222-223). In the same vein, the deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis of the modern man – that is, its relation to the territory, the state, the polis and the contingent natural history of the earth – through remobilizing the mediating function of traumas harbours a certain anti-axiomatic surprise or a vertiginous effect. This, as argued, is an expression of the non-local turn from the axiomatic (indexed by the territorializing system or the state) to the non-axiomatic (inherent to the universal synthesis of the open).

By undertaking modally unbound traumatic syntheses toward the universal absolute, the modern man comes into a twisted immanence with the abyssal open. First, the modern man embraces the universal synthesis by unravelling itself along and through the traumas that traverse and conceive its regional focalization. Through the mediating function and the nested logic of traumas, the modern man finds a materialist asymptote with the unbound universal continuum which is free from the necessity of embodiment and materialization. It is a materialist asymptote insofar as it traumatically passes through the organic and terrestrial horizons of man as it tends toward the universal continuum where even matter is traumatically conceived and enjoys no axiomatic priority or interiorized privilege. In short, the materialist asymptote of the universal continuum is drawn by nested traumas which excise the modern man from the human-organism and the earth-territory. As the modern man universally deepens its geophilosophical synthesis, it also begins to realize itself as a materialist asymptote of the boundless continuum qua the open. Yet this materialist asymptote of the open indexes that terrible vertiginous effect caused by a surprise turn from the axiomatic to non-axiomatic. As an asymptote of the open, the modern man is pregnant with this non-local twist from the foundation to the abyss, the axiom to universal contingency; it carries an implicit surprise element within itself that is detrimental to systems in general and capitalism in particular.

At the height of its business acumen, capitalism is also a system for the traumatic binding of the outside, a mode of openness, a search for fresh air. Yet in complete conformity to its productive-antiproductive curve, the outside it binds is only an outside by the virtue of its exorbitance, the trauma it embraces is the incisional cut that sets the terrestrial horizon against a register of exteriority wherein the openness of the universal continuum is turned into an exorbitant event horizon. Capitalism only undertakes its dialectical synthesis with the outside by heavily capitalizing on the logic of exogenic tensions and their corresponding drive. In binding the exorbitant register of exteriority, capitalism is able to present its dynamism as an intrinsic planetary system. In line with the organism that circuitously evolves through the exorbitant influence of solar energy by weaving its inevitable dissipation and internal conservative conditions together, capitalism develops a strategic scenario wherein the annihilating exorbitant exteriority is only an excuse to economically afford more. The traumatic binding of the exorbitant outside is a consumptive solution that can be entrenched deep within various aspects of organic life because it already corresponds with the energetic horizon of the organism. But this is not the only reason why capitalism adopts a model of accelerative dissipation. For capitalism’s traumatic binding of the outside as an exorbitant exteriority does not simply turn the presumed inevitability of dissipation into a strategy for affording more. Strategic capitalization on the exogenic tensions of trauma and the exorbitant registers of the cosmic exteriority ensures that the system’s dialectic with the outside is conducted only in a way it can afford and thereby, any other mode of binding the outside extrinsic to this affordance is staved off.

Modes of traumatic binding which do not correspond with the exogenic tensions of the interiorized horizon or are not in conformity with the economic qua affordable model of binding pose a threat against the axiomatic function of the interiority and the somatic integrity of its horizon. Endogenic tensions, as has been elaborated, challenge the axiomatic verifiability of the regional horizon’s interiority (such as the earth or the human). But all systems of capitalization and strategic binding work precisely from a ground which is but the axiomatic verity of the interiority. A horizon can only be capitalized on or strategically thought if its interiority and somatic integrity are taken as axiomatic and veritable, only if the system is exposed to the freedom of contingent depths from its outside and not from the inside. The axiomatizing system of capitalism can only function if it grounds itself on the ur-axiom of capitalization and strategic qua economical binding. The ur-axiom states that the earth on which capitalism expands its limits and horizon, does indeed enjoy a veritable interiority and an axiomatic somatic integrity. Accordingly, the ur-axiom posits the earth as the axiomatic resource of capitalism and the ground upon which expansion of the horizon through the economical binding of the outside can be conducted. The perishability of the planet does not essentially problematize the fundamental interiority of the earth; it mainly reinforces capitalism’s search for new limits and expanding its horizon from this earth to a new one. On the other hand, any endogenic tension that vitiates this assumed pre-given correlation between the terrestrial horizon and the necessary ground on a regional level will radically disturb the system as it converts axioms to anti-axiomatic surprises. In tandem with Freud’s contribution to the great chain of humiliations, the traumatized subject of the Copernican Revolution no longer enjoys the self-centred privilege of having an axiomatic relationship with the interiority of itself. When this vertiginous turn from axiomatic to non-axiomatic is indexed by the terrestrial resources of capitalism – earth, humans, intelligence, technological sphere and so on – the blow will be less a humiliation and more a terrible vertiginous effect leading to “maximal pulverization” (Ferenczi 1994: 223). Ultimately, the reason for capitalism’s traumatic binding of the exorbitant outside is to block alternative modes of traumatic synthesis or inflection upon the open universal continuum. By corresponding to endogenic tensions of the horizon, such lines of exteriorization can emerge anywhere within and throughout the horizon and for this reason, they are capable of replacing the axiomatic verity of any given horizon with anti-axiomatic surprises, turning all potential resources of capitalism into concatenated nightmares.

In order for capitalism to prevent its terrestrial resources from being converted to toxic assets, it must first isolate and abstract traumas so that one field of traumata can never be deepened or connected to another field. This is because the interconnection and deepening of regional fields of traumas activates the universal line of synthesis which instigates the revolution – i.e. change by and according to the open – from ‘the inside’. If there is a sustained form of suppression that capitalism exercises, it is the isolation of traumas and topologies of tensions. It is the active vigilance in isolating fields of trauma opened by science, in separating the trauma of life, the trauma of homo nervus and the trauma of the territorializing system from one another. One can say that in order to save its systems of capitalization and markets, capitalism must be, first of all, a regime for calculative isolation and regulation of traumas so as to forestall the universal deepening of the geophilosophical synthesis along free or alternative modes of binding. This is why the revolutionary subject of the open who deepens its regional horizon through linking and mobilizing nested fields of traumas possesses an irrepressible anti-axiomatic import for capitalism that is reminiscent of Freud’s account of “shock of the fall” (Freud 1914: 192). The revolutionary dialectic with the universal absolute is reinscribed as a traumatic force that abolishes the axiomatic relationship with the interiority, starting from a specific regional field and extending it to other horizons of interiority, turning the earth of capitalism into a multiverse of traumatic vertigos generated by this sprawling shift from axiomatic grounds toward freedom of the unbound universal continuum. Since modern man is interiorized by capitalism as an axiomatic resource but its truth is determined by anti-axiomatic traumata which form it, an entirely new interpretation of man – its capacities, roles and potencies – must be thought and developed. Ultimately, the fate of the state as that which banks on the concept of citizenhood or the axiomatic function of its citizens is akin to that unfortunate sailor who in order to escape the cosmic deep is trying hard to latch on to the raft of medusa.

The revolutionary unachoring of modern man not only enables the subject to drift away through the multiverse of traumata toward the open, it is also an indispensable part of exporting the revolution, of breaking and entering into isolated fields of trauma and broadening the scope of the relation to the open. Precisely speaking, it is a universal-oriented and non-local synthesis between disparate local orientations, loci of operativity and sites of tension. Without a systemic program of universal synthesis, every emphasis on the local or a site of action remains structurally and functionally trivial. Against this imperative and in line with the therapeutic legacy of psychoanalysis which has recently paid some of its taxes to neuroscience, philosopher Catherine Malabou warns us not to remodel or replicate the world in ourselves. In a conclusive remark that signals a new phase in the life of anti-Copernican celebration of discrete worlds and the reactionary fear of the open, she writes:

The problem of a dialectic of identity – between fashioning and destruction – poses itself all the more pointedly as global capitalism, currently the only known type of globalization, offers us the untenable spectacle of a simultaneity of terrorism (daily detonations – in Israel, Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan…) and of fixity and rigidity (for example, American hegemony and its violent rigorism). It is as though we had before our eyes a sort of caricature of the philosophical problem of self-constitution, between dissolution and impression of form. Fashioning an identity in such a world has no meaning except as constructing of counter-model to this caricature, as opposed simply to replicating it. Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we should do with our brain. To refuse to be flexible individuals who combine a permanent control of the self with a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges, for fear of explosion. (Malabou 2008: 78)

Whilst in theory it is all right to confuse the difference between plastic and explosive, real plasticity and plastic only by association (plastique), in real life such confusion, whether willful or inadvertent, is harmful: it can literally blow up in your face. Only when the world is narrowly seen as “this world” or even a wider world but not as an unbound universal continuum whose regions are being mediated by traumas, can we identify ourselves as veritable victims whose cerebral responsibility is to shy away from the traumatic imprints of this so-called bipolar world. Anti-Copernican myopia is neither capable of seeing these explosions as different yet inter-connected regional eruptions in the world, nor is it capable of envisioning the world as a unified world where the cerebral, the territorial, the terrestrial and the cosmic are already nested within one continuum. The illusion of the counter-Copernican reactionary is that the blight of terrorism in the streets and planetary exploitations of capitalism both belong to “a world” (whether this or that world) that can be extricated from the brain at the whim of the subject, the glorified “new wounded” (Malabou 2007). Or perhaps it is the other way around: the subject believes that the cerebral world can be separated from the outdoor traumas which are all spectacles of the same value anyway whether they happen in Israel, Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan, … or in space. The individuum, as Freud, Ferenczi and Reich have emphasized, is precisely the continuum of all these worlds, the brain, the streets, the earth, and the cosmos; it is a focalized gradient from the unbound universal continuum. Only the Ptolemaic advocate of discrete and centralized worlds is deluded with separating these horizons and their influences from one another. Rational confrontation with the problem of violence – whether disguised as excesses of capitalism or manifested as imperatives of fundamentalism – calls for stepping out into the open and effectively bursting the speculative bubble-world of the pro-Ptolemaic dreamer once and for all. Only in the open, myopic interests are expropriated, grounds for justification are shattered and fundamentalist axioms are evaporated. The protean continuity of the universal continuum is able to magnify subtle webs of causation and complicity behind planetary instances of violence and bring into focus traces of hidden histories of violence from the cerebrum to the streets and beyond. This is a protean continuity insofar as it is endowed with comprehensive intermediary ranges between the continous reflexive relation of the universal space to itself and its particular instance, between the continous and the discrete, between the generic and the exact, the global and the local. The protean continuity, however, does not allow to think a-priori a transfer from the global to the local or vice versa, because the structure of continuity entails assymetry, diachronicity, twists, deformations and limits whose corresponding navigational methods must be procedurally constructed.

If violent traces of capitalism and fundamentalism are transplanted in our daily spheres with such ease that we can no longer see them as threats to the plasticity of our brains, so do the other traumas from which capitalism, territorializing systems and religion actively protect themselves. Within the traumatic horizon of modern man, fundamentalism and capitalism are exposed to contaminating neighbourhoods where they can no longer stave off alternative modes of openness or protect their regional horizons from the free expression of the universal, or keep their isolated fields of trauma (their colonies of capitalization) away from the universal line of synthesis that breaks and enters from one field of trauma to another by cutting through them, synthesizing them, nesting them within one another. As opposed to capitalism and other grounding systems which preserve their verity by isolating fields of trauma in order to shield their horizons against syntheses of the universal absolute, the brain has the ability to reconnect all isolated traumas within its plastic field and expand along the mediating functions of trauma. The obligation of the post-Copernican revolutionary subject with regard to exporting the revolution is not to shun traumas, since this refusal or disavowal contributes to the strategy of capitalism and fundamentalism in isolating traumas, forces and resources in order to govern and monopolize them within this or that world. On the contrary, the obligation of the modern subject is to absorb and interiorize traumas so as to expose “isolated traumas” (this or that regional world), interconnect them to its regional horizon and widen them across the geocosmic continuum and deep into the open universal continuum. Modern man is a surgeon who does not amputate himself from the worlds of capitalism and religion to isolate the trauma of his individuation from other traumas and establish a new discrete world for himself. Instead, he transplants himself and these worlds inside one another in order to reconnect his actual regional horizon (cohabited with capitalism and fundamentalism) once again to the freedom of the universal continuum – the open. To this end, the revolution on the geocosmic continuum that is the revolution rekindled out of the Copernican commune should not be paved on the politico-philosophical corpus of those who impose on us wanton discrepancies and excesses of the earthly life but those who delude us with the axiomatic verity of ourselves and reform the ground of the terrestrial thought in one way or another.

Closing remarks, or: The Inquisition is far from over

The unbinding of the universal continuum understood as the principal drive of the Copernican opening of the world is tantamount to the affirmation of a modally unbound synthesis or relationship to the open and consequently, a revolution in breaking from the autocratic interpretation of the world in terms of discrete regions. It is an emphatic end to millenniums of acute myopia and repression associated with isolating or treating regions of the world as discrete points and the inability to grasp the universal synthesis as the positive force of openness that is primarily driven by the open rather than local necessities, interiorized capacities or regional imperatives. The basic attribute of the universal synthesis is modal and relational freedom insofar as the first expression of universal openness – viz. the active renegotiation of frontiers of the universal continuum – takes shape in and between regional spheres. First and foremost, the openness or boundlessness of the continuum is realized as (a) the relational openness between regions of the continuum and (b) a thoroughgoing expropriation of any discrete existence or necessary bound on behalf of a public abyss. Modal and relational freedom guarantees the synthetic expression of the open by conceiving regional openness (openness to other regions and to the outside) in terms of universal synthesis – that is, in terms of modes by which the universal continuum transplants its global properties within regional horizons and drives them toward the open along paths or relations which do not strictly conform to capacities and economical requirements of regional openness. Therefore, modal and relational freedom cannot be solely thought in terms of boundlessness as such, because it denotes the freedom of a synthesis whose simultaneous expressions are the freedom of alternatives and the freedom of universal expression in the regional horizon. Whilst according to the former conception of freedom, there is always another alternative mode of openness by which the regional horizon can be opened to its outside, the latter conception of freedom denotes that the universal is able to transplant its global properties in the regional horizon irrespective of temporal regional necessities and in unrestricted functional and topological ways.

Modal and relational freedom is closely associated with the realm of endogenic tensions and syntheses as the site of the revolutionary subject, the trans-and-absolutely modern man. The revolutionary subject thinks openness in terms of alternative modes by which his region – his earth – can be opened to other regions, deepened and widened into and across the universal continuum. The trans-and-absolutely modern man is no longer the master or the victim of his traumas; he is a universal vector of synthesis between regional traumas – i.e. traumas associated with his brain, his house, the system, the earth and the universe that is free from his temporal necessity. Moreover, the revolutionary subject does not abide by regional or earthly myopias, since he is not anchored by a self-centred discrete earth or a monad-point in the universe. On the contrary, he is driven by an unbound universe and a revolutionary earth whose hierarchies and histories are fields for the transplantation of global properties of the universal continuum into the regional: The plasticity of the brain or the cerebral region as the homomorphic equivalent of the global plasticity of the continuum; the organism as a region where the inassimilable residues of global phases of the (external) world are nested (“It is possible that we harbour in our organism inorganic, vegetative, herbivorous and carnivorous tendencies like chemical valences” [Ferenczi 1994: 229]); the modern city – the urban continuum – where convoluted neighbourhoods of different multitudes (human or non-human) and manifolds result in numerous types of cobordism, regional overlaps, exchanges, complicities and collusions which highlight global-local passages of the universe. Every region of the unanchored earth is an asymptote of the absolute continuum and hence, a locale for revolution and embracing the universal synthesis of the open.

The inception of the trans-and-absolutely modern man takes place on this earth, in this brain and in this city where the modal and relational freedom of the absolute continuum can be easily expressed synthetically as alternative modes of openness. Whilst such alternative modes of openness are brought about by the line of the universal synthesis which breaks and enters on its own, it is the effective regional binding of such alternatives (beyond the confines of regional myopias and affordances) that incites revolution in the regional horizon. This is a revolution that “pendulates between integrals of the region and differentials of the open”, between synthesis and analysis, between the contemporary politics of the Left-and-Right and synthetic alternatives, between internalized and externalized indexes of cosmic exteriority, subjective openness toward the universal synthesis and being opened by the universal synthesis, freedom and compulsion (i.e. a pull-back toward an absolute continuum free of its particulars and multitudes). ^{12 On the synthetic thought of the universal continuum as a pendulum weaving between integrals and differentials, see Zalamea 2009.33×}

Insofar as the revolution for and by the open begins from the inside (viz. regional enclosures and interiorized horizons) where alternative opportunities for synthesis are able to circumvent the economical double-bind of “capacity/exorbitant external world,” it entails a mode of thinking capable of germinating its viewpoints along lines of complicity between antagonistic or incommensurable fronts (drawn on contamination), through the medium of nested closures and continuous transformations (open to topological thinking) and through twists (non-trivial dialectics between the local and the global). Since the abyssal, unbound and continuous relation of the universe with itself – i.e. the open universal continuum – contains the germ of all asymptotic behaviours, neighbourhoods, overlaps and universal passages between regional fields, the responsibility of the revolutionary subject is to adopt and grow these germs as alternative modes of openness. Asymptotic thinking (asymptotic approach to extinction, contingency, radical exteriority and the absolute) and search for non-trivial relations whereby the universal line of synthesis between different fields of knowledge or regions of the world can be drawn typify such alternatives. It is through such asymptotes, transplantations and regional fibrations of the open brought by the universal continuum that the revolutionary subject is able to – through deepening and widening its traumas – attain topological and categorical equivalence with the universal absolute. Through such alternatives, likewise, the regional horizon of the revolutionary earth – as a relatively open set excised from the universal continuum – finds its equivalence with the open through asymptotic deepening of its geophilosophical synthesis and stretching its nested traumas.

Just as a politics devoid of the logic of real alternatives – concerned with both the question of methodological or trans-modal freedom and the question of actively seeking alternatives to its very own existence – is but a counter-revolutionary mantrap, a realist philosophy without a science of openness and an ethics of humiliation can hardly be anything more than a testament to the overgrown lineage of planetary myopias.

 

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This geophilosophical treatise was originally written for the “Dark Materialism” conference at Kingston University London, 2009 and published in the philosophical journal Identities, issue: 17 / 2011: “Heretical Realisms”, (Euro-Balkan Institute), pp. 25-54.