At the origin of cosmology, Anaximander describes the earth suspended in a nothingness. This geometric inscription of a sphere in a void—this originary articulation of a luminous life-world suspended in a boundless abyss—is the ‘boundary giving boundary’ by which origin and end are drawn together: temporality is articulated against an absolute horizon in which it is eclipsed.
Hegel, writing on Anaximander, affirms that the infinite abyss is thereby always-already the negative principle on which any articulation of difference is first posited. Bracketing history at both ends, the arche-inscription that enframes all subsequently differentiated space-time is articulated first against a horizon that is void—an “abyssal cosmology”, whereby finite differentiation is predicated on a boundless abyss, which thus implicates finitude as always-already effaced—because the abyss is the negation of that very conceptuality by which the threshold of the horizon is first articulated.
This tragic vision thus posits a “negative horizon” that is the unground of any and all inscription and therefore any memorialisation on which narrative identity may be poised. Thus the optico-geometric boundary of the perspectival cosmos—both the circle of origins and the entire program of cosmotechnics that follows—delimits the threshold of luminosity against this horizon of darkness.
“In the firmament that we observe at night, the stars shine brightly, surrounded by a thick darkness. Since the number of galaxies and luminous bodies in the universe is almost infinite, the darkness we see in the sky is something that, according to scientists, demands an explanation […] the explanation that contemporary astrophysics gives for this darkness [is that] in an expanding universe, the most remote galaxies move away from us at a speed so great that their light is never able to reach us. What we perceive as the darkness of the heavens is this light […] moving away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light.” (Agamben)
[…]
Reality is presented to consciousness as like a multi-faceted crystal.
This cosmotechnical play of infinities is not present to consciousness through any simple reflection (because simple reflectivity is primarily negated through this play), but moreover by a technique of gazing that would be as though through the negative prosthesis of a “clear mirror”. Through this gaze the crystalline interface of the temporal horizon may be brought to the light of consciousness fractured and spectralised in its reflectivity, apprehended, then, as an ‘imperfect tense that never becomes a present’: thus Nietzsche identifies contemporaneity with the crux of the matter on which one must stand in dys-chrony.
‘This light that strives to reach us but cannot - this is what it means to be contemporary’ (Agamben). The immediacy of the present is the coming face-to-face with the fixed stars in infinite regress: an in/determinacy, which is the tragedy of apeiron. Thus the revelation of contemporaneity is that ‘the limit is beyond the limit’: knowledge apprehends the limit such that the cosmological horizon converges with the simulation of a “black light” (Virilio). […] Even as boundary-making cosmotechnical instrumentation may effectively ‘pour negentropy into the vessel’ (like Maxwell’s demon), any explanation of reality must include this black light of the non-conceptual void.
And here, at this limit where light-time crystallises, meeting its shadow—de-void of conceptualisation, void of spatio-temporality; suspending the totality of that which stands-in as totality, as its excess—here the gaze of consciousness crosses the barriers of immanence in apprehending the spectral play of lights that overflows that very horizon. The limit-horizon of the crystalline edge is disappropriated by the surplus infinity that is present to consciousness in spectrality (just as ‘it is precisely the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced’ - Levinas). Thus the surplus infinity of our passion is revealed to consciousness via phantasmagoria spectralising at the limit.
(edited July 2022)