Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance

Urbanomic/Sequence Press

by Gabriel Catren, Thomas Murphy Jr. (Translator)

Gabriel Catren is a philosopher and a physicist working at the Institut SPHERE—Science, Philosophie, Histoire (Université Paris Diderot—CNRS, Paris). The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativization of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone—the shipwreck of Mallarmé's Coup de dés . In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new “phenoumenodelic” solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation. Mobilizing a formidable knowledge of the major currents of modern thought, deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism, phenomenological reduction and scientific realism, Catren argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the “exquisite crisis” of modernity. Instead, the “shipwreck” is to be understood as a suspension of finite subjectivity in the fullness of a “phenoumenodelic pleroma,” an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities. Announcing an ambitious program for the renewal of transcendental philosophy, in Pleromatica Catren recomposes the primary elements of modern thought into a startling new configuration, introducing a vivid constellation of new concepts with which to map out and navigate the vast space of this “worldless daydream.”

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

512 pages, Paperback

Published August 29, 2023

Reviews

[anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fractal Anatomy of Melancholy of theory for the 21st c. theorist in the age of Second Religiousness. It is a "systematized" Deleuzean-Joycean-Grothendieckian-Hegelian-Mallarmeanism with communion-ontology Christianity, in compilative (almost Urbanomic-specific) editorial-patois; a clarion-call (trumpet and all) to polyvalent thought, acceptance and 'sublation' of all previous vantages into what the author appropriates from a recent trend and strand of mathematical-philosophy, from Topos theory: the Functor (also referred to by it's more specialized case, the Sheaf). The Functor (or sheaf) is, indeed, a beautiful concept, a maximally elegant one: the answer to a problem where differing modes of 'rationality' conflict (systematic incompatibility across multiple local contexts) —

[the main example being, simplified and not true Topos-theoretical usage of the functor, the movement or field extensions of number systems, from natural numbers (ℕ) to integers (ℤ) to rationals (ℚ) to the real numbers (ℝ) to the complex numbers (ℂ); or the 'speculative extensions' from Euclidean to Projective geometry, the former not being able to solve an 'exception' in the fact of Parallel Lines never intersecting and so never creating a dot, an asymmetry 'breaking' the point-line duality which says, compressedly, "two lines make point; two points make line", solved by the latter's introduction of "Points-at-Infinity", at which lines may intersect, and sublate the previous Euclidean geometry into the 'projective plane'; likewise, whereas before a strange exception was present in Conics and their asymmetry in being open or closed curves(ellipse – closed curve, parabola – open, hyperbola – open) now, points-at-infinity unifies the curves as closed (ellipses intersect the line at infinity at 0 points, parabola – 1, hyperbola – 2)]

— a solution that is not simply that which is Invariant surviving all variations, the "invariance-under-transformation", it is structure-preservation in all morphisms between categories of solution-sets of invariances-under-transformations, with each vantage it's own set, seeing all suitable domains at once, so the solution is the entire "functorial assignment", the "functorial parallax structure", and when shifting position, the set of solutions change (yet are not invalidated), in a systemic/Functorial way, such that all possible vantages co-exist via system interrelata, the 'speculative extensions' sublated — a veritable Indra's meta-net.

This is the [first] crux of this book, which may better have been called the Functor-Pleroma, or "the Sheaf-Pleroma", or any such differing parsings, which help map the Kantian 'lineage of givennesses', mobilizing the transcendental architectonic into all it's possible 'developments, interpretations, refinements, relativisations, naturalisations, and historicisations' of the 'relativised a priori', the Copernikantian Shift leads to the transcendental mobility of "Pleromaship Earth" [evoking Fuller's Spaceship Earth, the act of conceiving of Earth as navigable through Universe], and with this, the prose enters the register of most reverie & manic 'phenoumenadelia' (or phenoumenology, the neologized phenomena+noumena) at these stages, imagining (& evoking the ready adept to fully sketch in) lofty heights for the possible dimensional and positional actions one can take when given this 'space' (perhaps a bit unearned, but are natheless well-cohered). Two other lineages: a lineage of phenomenologists (Heidegger to Marion), and a lineage of thinkers (Löwith to Derrida) that can cohere these modes into the polis:soul dyad-tesselations catalogued later give the book the same compilative Burton-feel. Though what intersublates the encyclopedia, & the Dialectic, it'd seem, is the Functor: "from variations in imagination to variations of imaginations." Topos Theory the Zohar to Bourbaki's Talmudism of ZFC's Torah; bind, codify, liberate.

"So much epoche, so much givenness"; givennesses figure/ground as Is institute and worlds constitute.

The metacognitive faculty is given operators and direction, longitude and latitude, to play, to affirm, to navigate, in the phenoumenodelic insubstance, irrigated by 'transcendental plasticity', to accept 'saying Yes', again and again, Jesus is no longer Jesus but 'Yesses'. The book's true 'crux' is this Yesses, this emblematic meta-pun, the ideational entheogen [a recreated entheogen at the philosophico-logical level] compressing everything into the Joycean [Wakean] crystal-language, resurrecting the 'disligated' subject from the pains of finitude. All keys are pressed on at once with this Pun, and it is very quite powerful, grimoiric.

The metaphysics of "yes": this "Yesses" figure densifies all this book's registers at once, this amphibious Yesses, the "IChThYs" avatarically-incarnated Fish in the waters of Mat[t]er, transcendence in immanence, phenoumenodelically, to sublate yet understand each local node, to not immerse and begin monolithizing an Ur-Tone or an Arche-Earth to stand on, maintaining the flux afloat the Waters of the "Ma(t)ter"-matrix. The mastery of psychoanalysis, and the end of the psychoanalytic session, is knowing Loss, & Traversing the Fantasy (guided by the mantras "don't cede ground relative to your desire" and "only love makes jouissance condescend to desire."), and if World is Dream, thereby an 'ontological psychoanalysis', it deploys the inverse of "waking up to reality", but is now the Epoche that deepens the field of possible-Givens to uncover, reveal, dissect, filter through sets-of-solution-sets, the Imagination [Einbildungskraft] irrigated may outpour, move, fibrate.

An algebraic topology of poesis [Variables Spatially "Bracketed" Off] is occurring here: the Yesses encapsulates many of the book's threads into a sheaf:

—Hegelian speculative-sciens of logic (speculum = mirror) & his idea of religion as "cultus" of love (that pilots the transcendental-mobile of Kant's architectonic),
—the Imagination [the Fichtean Einbildungskraft] piloting the Faculty of Reason's transcendental limits,
—mathesis as medicine
—holistic biology, creatures as 'holobions', under the rubric of symbiosis, autopoeisis, Uexkullian 'umwelt'
—aboriginal "belonging to the land" rather than ego conquero's "land belongs to me" [figure/ground of figure/ground] ["Tupi or not tupi!"]
—the Wakean crystal-language in general,
—Deleuzian+Spinozist immanental positive-outpouring (yes, and... + yes, and...; desire as productive, "conatus", phenoumenadelic "insubstance" univocally modulating into the sensorium-affectum-logos-textum-socius, increasing "flows" or "lines of flight", "scientia vitae in vita scientiae", natura naturata/natura naturans),
—the communion-ontology of Christianity & it's Borromean "perichoresis",
—the splintering "declensions" of the Kantian categorical imperative ("Thou shalt") into: [Lacan's "don’t cede ground relative to desire", the materialist "Thou Shalt Live!", the Christian pleroma of love beyond the law, Augustine's "Love, and do what thou will."]

& each of these ideas many-fold into a heightened register of something genuinely 'mythopoeic', only possible, perhaps, in the 21st c., at this resolution: the extended Ocean-metaphors, anagogical analogies, imagination-scenes structured by Biblical imagery-meditations that attempt to carry all these concepts at once, half-disarmingly with their childlike quality (rainbow-dolphins, the Unicorn drinking from the fountain), almost hypnotically (Elsinore-entrancingly) where one pilots their Noah's-Ark ("noetic arkana!") on/in the waters of Ma[t]ter, triune "coninsubstantiality"-rings in metaphysical Hand[s], in the phenoumenadelia of spirit, the transcendental reflective ∧ refractive mediation-tandem as the ungrounding speculum, done akin to the Reals (ℝ) that must elaborate themselves to find the exception (x² + 1 = 0) that eventually helps it find the extension (i = √(-1)) that allows it to reach the imaginary-unit that Births the Complex-Plane in ℂ [and all such speculative-extensions of number-systems, all such extensions of the po[i]etic Mathesis.]

The Borromean-perichoretic triune sierpinskiing that occurs in the latter half of the book attempts to reconcile all trinities from Christianity to Levinas (inbetween sit Kant-to-Hegel, Buber, Lacan, Wilbur, even an ayahuascan-shaman Vine-trinity, &c), these become the love of life, "in the double sense of the genitive, love as the meta-idea of reason, the triple-religating & refracting ∧ reflecting Love of the Yesses Crystal [yeshua christ], the entheogenating Idea

now very roughly, to catalogue in full—

[the matter-mutter-mother hypostases, the father-son-holyspirit, the preworldly-worldly-transworldly real[m]s, the universal-particular-singular, the empire-antichrist-parousia, the imaginary-symbolic-real, the naturanaturans-naturanaturata-supernature, the personal-impersonal-transpersonal, the I-I/I-It/I-Thou, the I-We-It, the beget-reveal-redeem, the différance-difference-differônça, the body-soul-spirit, the founding-preserving-revolutionary violences, the respect-rights-responsibility, the labor-defense-spirit, the ayahuascan-shaman mariri-chacruna-daime, the carnival-caliban-cannibal, the dharma-buddha-sangha, the unconscious-conscious-supraconscious, the dionysian-apollonian-tragicsynthesis, the phil-of-nature--transcendental-philosophy--philosophy-of-identity, the life-of-experience--experience-of-life--absolute-experience or the absolute-finite-communal Is, the infrasensible-soil--worlds-of-revelation--supernaturalsky, the invisible-visible-flesh, the originary-actuality-eschaton]

—each in all and all in each for all in each as each Alls. scramble, flux. scintillate. flow.

I've personally been searching for these ideas, structured as such, for many years, through intimations of a "metahistorical medium as matrix of all-possible-thoughts", a psychoanalysis of world-as-dream, a Wakean meta-dialecticism. My critiques & extensions must be relegated to after fully accepting all the golds these idea-webs left me.

To add to this book, as I'd like to contribute, from being so affected and breathed-through by it, to not ossify but Poessify—so close and intimate is it's style and ideas with my feeling-tones and long-standing aspirations—would be to connect this Avataric meta-figure of the "Yesses" to Finnegan and his Wake itself: the Yesses-crystal [Jesus Christ], the crystal formed of Yesses, and Yesses' crystal, the crystal posessed by Yesses, is the "negation of ends", as fin negans in latin means 'end-negating,' the end-negator, is the beginning-affirmator – "Finnegan's Wake" then translates to "The Awakening of the End-Negation" (in all it's amphibolies), and you, [two], reader, ideaer, aethyr, can accept Yesses into your heart as lord & savior: as initiation, as spark, as philosopher's stone, as universal medicine, as elixir of life, as psychotropic, as entheogen, as pharmakon, as drinking go[l]d, as arche-Cure—and enter the crystal-fractal-pleroma-speculum-sheaf—simply say "Yes."

—avoidbeing

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am of two minds regarding this work which I waited years to read. Unfortunately, this being of two minds, undecided...

Catren's book suffers from its excesses. The project of returning to Greman transcendental thought is certainly imperative, and linking it to Spinoza makes all the sense in the world (there is nothing novel in this - it was the path of Schelling, of Hegel, amongst others). But the "speculative" element of Catren's work perhaps extends itself too far - his consideration of the transcendental at times appears to divert from a proper understanding of just how it is that the transcendental is related and not related to the empirical. That is to say, the leap into transcendental experience of alterity, to experience the experience of other existants, remains to be proven (transcendentally) possible. Yet Catren takes it as (transcendentally) given. A proper explication of how such an alteration of transcendental conditions is possible remains to be given, for those given herein strike one as petitio principii, begging the question of the "phenoumenological" pleroma which is abstractly assumed rather than actively attained.

Catren's style is also frustrating - not in his "voice" as much as his manner of writing. By this I mean his fondness of citation in the place of explication. What is the worst, however, is the persistent alterations to the citations, forcing them to say what Catren says that they say, often divorcing them from what they would actually say were they properly quoted (the example of Artaud comes to mind, as Catren disfigures his words to the point of making Artaud out to say the opposite of what his words actually say). One might as well utilize no citation at all, given how the plurality of voices herein are but a dissimulation - it is only Catren speaking, betraying any other voice as a mere ventriloquism of the worst kind.

Related to this citational practice is Catren's (mis)appropriation of far too many positions and figures. For example, he speaks of and employs elements from phenomenology quite often, though far too loosely for the rigorous practice of this mode of thought. Catren only employs those elements cherry-picked and abstracted from the context which give them their value as a practice. And precisely as a practice - for phenomenology is not a theory, an abstraction, but a practice of abstraction in order to ascertain the real. This is lost in Catren's account entirely.

Catren's other major fault lies in the explication of his method. That is, he presents a transcendental framework in "the abstract" (as he calls it), but does not bind the "phenoumenological" to any experience (even qua transcendental possibility). This ultimately leaves it as more of a mythical construction of figures (though at the transcendental level) - a fictioning, without any transcendental evidence (in Husserl's sense) of its real possibility (distinct from actuality). Just because Catren replaces the word 'fictioning' with 'speculative' does not alter its figural account. There is no experiential ground for this fictioning, as references to fiction count for little when fiction plays no transcendental role, and references to shamanism without any experiential grounding amount to little more than abstract fetishism. This ultimately produces an elaborate transcendental metaphor, which, though interesting, remains subject to the critique of such figures as Lacoue-Labarthe and his thought of mimesis (whom Catren, in speaking of tragedy, gravely misunderstands, revealing a surface level reading which accuses Lacoue-Labarthe of saying nearly the opposite of what he means).

This book loses what it has of value and interest when it strays too far into the territory of the speculative, while still taking its accounts to be evident beyond the leap through the mirror(ing). Losing the fictitious excesses and cutting out the unnecessary repetitions (the book really only need be half the length it is; Part Two, especially, is far too repetitive, and bears its fault opening in trying to relate itself to nearly every trinitarian element discernable to the author). Tightening up what is evidently a much researched and considered project, trimming the excess and replacing it with the lacking experiential element would greatly benefit this work.

But enough - this already sounds far too much like a professorial assessment, which is never what I meant to produce. I wanted so much more from this work, I still see its potential - it just needs to be sifted out from the quackery and baseless pas au-delà...

[Human · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gabriel Catren's project (as well as the work of Francois Laruelle) represents a continuation and radicalization of the Kantian/Copernican turn in philosophy that can be called meta-transcendental. If Kantian transcendental philosophy is an account of the conditions by which experience and knowledge are possible, then meta-transcendental philosophy is an account of not just the genesis of the conditions by which experience is possible but the genesis of all possible conditions of experience. Insofar as the practicalist Aristotelian/Fichtean/Kantian orientation subordinates intelligibility to sensibility and roots experience in sensible intuition and apperception (rather than the Hegelian account of the self-determination of normativity, in which sensibility is subordinate to intelligibility), it then follows that possible experience is concomitant with possible sensible intuition, and given that the conditions of sensible intuition cannot be self-determinate, experience can be determined in the last instance by an external entity or unilateral immanence rather than a self-determinate universal totality and thus engender a multiplicity of possible forms of experience in which human experience is but one transcendental perspective among many.

In Catren's rewriting of Christian trinitarianism, the multiplicity of transcendental perspectives or types, what he calls the transcendental landscape, is knit together into a collective patchwork subject by Eros, understood as a force of binding together and integration, which is primary over the force of Thanatos in Catren's inversion of Freud. "..the drive par excellence is no longer the death drive but the drive for life (Eros). The will to remain relegated to the impersonal life, far from taking the form of a death drive that pulls the individual back to the undifferentiated one, manifests as an erotic desire to engender and federate the separated living beings into higher forms of living unity." (Pg 359) The weak point of Pleromatica is that, due to Catren's yolking intelligibility to the sensible, the speculative import of the transcendental landscape is rendered absurd as alien transcendental types become empty abstractions we can know and say nothing about that mirror Hegel's description and critique of the thing in itself as "total emptiness, only described still as an ‘other-world’ the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought".

[No · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hope this book proves me wrong about Gabriel Catren. So far he has published a bunch word-salad high-on-narcissism essays. He clearly has a talent as a physicist, but less so as a philosopher.