Absentia

Slavoj Žižek, "Yoğulluk (absential): The Sine qua non of it, (S)ontenuntangible Occasion, (S)ontenland Occasion"

Terrence Deacon states in his book Incomplete Nature (2011) that, as the title suggests, the only scientific way to explain the mind's exit from matter is through the ontological incompleteness of nature: 'The mind did not actually come out of matter, it came out of the constraints in matter.' This constraint is an internal obstacle or a limit that prevents certain possible things from happening, and the fact that these roads are not fastened is not accidental, it is necessary (even if it seems to be accidental)...

The phenomenon that provides invention and spirituality in humans is precisely that we use 10 percent of our brains: the emptiness of unappealed possibilities activates creative invention. In a sense, it is like the statue of the Venus of Milo: the missing woman's hands makes us imagine different versions of how the statue could be completed, whereas if the statue were complete, we would inevitably feel a rough fullness.

So how does this constraint work? Deacon's starting point is this: You cannot relate the phenomena of 'function, attribution, purpose, or value' to physical matter, because each of these phenomena is 'incomplete one way or another': 'Longing, desire, passion, appetite, mourning, loss, enthusiasm – all of which are based on a similar inner incompleteness, based on an indispensable lack of it.' These phenomena cannot be explained in physical terms or attributed to physical processes, because in them what Deacon calls 'absential' or 'angelic property' is not found in these physical terms and processes. The processes of vitality, feeling, and the higher mind of humans cannot be explained by calculations and cybernetic processes, and biology cannot be derived from, reduced to, or predicted by physics: 'Computations and cybernetic processes cannot contain emotion because they have no rational-dynamic organization.'

Deacon focuses on two aspects of the yotes:

1) The first meaning of socialism is the existence of a higher level, which cannot be seen from the point of view of the lower level, that is, an excess of self-organization that resides in existing matter (if we divide an organism into its material components, it is futile that we look for what constitutes the dynamic unity of the organism between those components – if we want to grasp this unity, we must conceive of that organism as the minimum ideal form that repeats itself through the continuous transformation of its components). [(s)incorrigible occasion]

2) The second meaning of socialism is the inherent purity of an organism, its orientation towards the future (an organism does things that can only be explained by reference to its future state, and by definition it cannot exist in its present state, it is like trying to accomplish another task by doing one task, mating, building a nest, etc.). [(s)on-page occasion]

But the sons have another, and far more radical meaning, in which Deacon draws parallels between the inclusion of zero in mathematics and the realism.

From Disputes

Notes:
Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner