Nodocentric Self

Like life, love, and the universe: Barely contained chaos, indistinct among the particle stream, the universe is a system that is far from an equilibrium; it thwarts explanations not only its origin but also its persistence.

Our world produces flux at a constant speed, where one advances without taking a step. Becoming without ever undergoing the test of loss, loving without venturing outside oneself

The owl of Minerva symbolizes in vain while owls in flesh and blood are dying.

What does it mean to live as out-siders caught in the time and the history of an existential plane?

For thought does not define the outside, but prolongs it, draws it out. Thought experiences the outside around which it is formed; this formation is nothing more than the simple fact of existence.

“Where am I?” Cloud thinks to themself, waking with difficulty. They don't recognize the room, the spaces around them. It is too dark; lingering parts of the dream slip into the surroundings, giving them a strangely worrying air.

Cloud feels like they have been awake forever, working without the limit of time, excessive light, excessive information, captured in a constant flux of everchanging realities. A saturated immanence. The strangest thing is that it always feels the same, nothing ever really changes. The only constant is the flux. Cloud remembers a time (place?) in the future, when they are nowhere. Outside of this suffocating hyper-presence. All they feel is the pure noise of being, unmediated by packet switching, the alterity of it enveloping them.

At first Cloud was one voice, then more voices, all demanding a story, an odyssey in meaning and in image. Together, these existences murmured to each other: What there is takes time, nothing happens all at once. Cloud thought they remembered something about a sun and moon in an eternal dance. There are beings who come into the world and worlds that demand to open. One by one, they added: I exist, I am outside, I wait for you, I smoke a cigarette, I think of later, how did I get here, am I outside? And they responded, a little later: I’m still coming, I’m not there yet, and maybe this will never end, even if it stops it will start again, elsewhere, otherwise, with someone else. Cloud begins to compose a song, an existential one, and then they began to become disillusioned—thus, in turn, simultaneously, in turn, alone and together.

Cloud thinks to themself -- let’s start again. I exist, I am outside even when I am inside, we call this exile and the right country is only the one that supports me, there is no other, no better, and each country is numerous, we’re numerous outside, even if it’s better to be outside inside when it’s cold, or when there are roundups, the outside insides have to be welcoming, hospitable, there must be thresholds to put me in relation to others, estrange me at the threshold of the Stranger I will never be, these thresholds must be guaranteed, they must be, this is the Justice of the Outside and it’s the only one, there is no other, no better justice, so that those of the outside aren’t sent outside, it’s complicated but it is like this.

The individual enters. To exist, or to be outside, is necessarily to encounter people, to be several, even when I was Inside there were already at least a few. And even if I don’t want to meet them, they will be my ghosts, spectres of a renounced common, reduced to silence but full of words that had been said and will maybe be again. Existence will always have been multiple, everywhere.

Cloud adds: There is an owl in the garden and wolves at the edge of the forest. I can hear them, they are probably like us, of this place but not in it.

And hears a response: There are walls of words in the networks.

Cloud thinks: Closer in myself than my own closeness... A fortress that compels every entrant to strip from themselves. gods incarnated to the point of their own death, light upon light, texts without end. And telluric points, gods in all spaces, objects and animals that are more than objects and animals...

And another responds: spectres become animated, more real than the real, they say unthinkable words at the edge of the void, they announce nuptials and ruptures, they hold their breath when their daimon asks them to, they take part in assemblies, in the creation of laws as in the extraction of new minerals.

A multiple. A multiplicity beyond all count, made up of existents past, present, or to come, stretching temporality in every direction to the point of sending it outside itself. Becomings: One never changes without the other changing too. Confusions: The production of substance spilling over its bounds, hardly changing from one difference to another; the unaware crossing of thresholds, as if they were nothing; the abolition of binary divisions without the creation of remarkable singularities—a nightmare that no unity could ever interrupt.

Impossible to know in advance, or even after the fact, what assembled beings can carry as common load, to make reference to community. We can only consider it. There is nothing outrageous about this: the thought of community will have always called for a metaphysics, that is to say a science of imaginary variations submitted to the Principle of reason. And the Principle of reason opposes the Principle of identity, it only acknowledges that there are some things rather than nothing...

Things, living and artificial beings, are inclined towards each other, using all possible prepositions. If we were to speculate, or to think to excess, we might as well leave free a share for that which leads beings to coalesce. This is to say, never to reduce the common to interests or identical intentions. Let us call coalition this ensemble of beings inclined one on the other, an ensemble bearing uncertainty without undermining the possibility of a being-in-common. From the corporeal absence of the common, a coalition is woven in all material forms, some crystallized by loves, wars, chatter, writings, magazines, assemblies, collectives—but always of the One un-filled several times and in all ways, letting the wild depths that give the coalition its sovereignty emerge.

Subjective trajectories can advance, thanks to coalition. They advance by their projections, ideal or real. Each coalition goes forward, at the same time, in the form of an endless loop (a spiral), in each trajectory that goes forward or back. The spiral of coalition is the place of the formation of the double advance. The absence of coalition does not mean the return of a subject to its pre-subjective animality, but reduces the trajectory of existence to the ideal projection of a subject—its quixotic aspirations, its securing narcissism, its lack of love.

To confused coalitions, which deny thresholds, smother singularities, produce hybrid confusions in which each object would be lost in another object, where absence has become the nightmare of a malleable diversity, let us oppose not clear and distinct coalitions, which would annul community in its very principle, but those that recognize and celebrate their excess. Excess of a politics that liberate existence, an economy commensurate with the abyss. Or the symptom of immune nations, stolen mediations, private finances, pharmacies of forgetfulness, controllers of fictions, image re-valuators, butchers of processed foods, neuro-cognitive specialists, and logicians of the spirit strain to forbid and to make impossible. Rather than these inertial fixations, which produce this intravenous absolute, let us wager on the living flesh of adventurous coalitions.

As a non-state politics, coalition demands organization. But no organization is desirable without the adventure of the collated. Without the free expression of that which is projected with others toward a good cruelly absent. All alliance must remain an adventure.