Cosmic Austerity

Abstract

This essay has a fabulist tone that blends philosophical writing with literary expression. It is an attempt to compose memory assemblages through poetic plasticity tied to the play between retention and retrieval. This play is based on the logic of addition, as conceived by Bensusan in Memory Assemblages: Spectral Realism and the Logic of Addition. With this aim in mind—an aim that is simultaneously ethical, political, and aesthetic — I divide the text into six more or less connected parts. The opening section functions as an introduction to the ineffectivity of knowledge in the face of the vastness of the cosmos. The second part constitutes the first assemblage of the text: here, I attempt to show the creative character of retrieval, which adds origins to a single history or different histories to a single origin. The third part refers to the second assemblage, where I retell a love history constructed through the logic of addition: this spectral history deals with the non-reciprocity between the self and the other in the kinetic and poetic composition of a fluid relation with the memory of the disappeared who, although expropriated from the future by the rupture of the present, still possess an ancestral genealogy to be retraced on account of a somewhat unreasonable feeling, namely, homesick. The fourth part of the essay corresponds to the third assemblage: in it, I seek to retrace, through the errancy typical of cockroaches, the possible genealogies of the disappeared. More precisely, drawing on cockroaches, I argue that spectral ultrametaphysics is a submetaphysics, since the transcendence pertaining to the addition of errancy takes place in cosmic immanence—or better, along the path of horizontal displacement toward the multiple recesses of the world that open by the exercise of the future-and-the-past, i.e, the agglutination between the future and the past. The fifth part of the text is the fourth assemblage: at this point, I return to the love history previously narrated to retell it under the sign of Saturn, the planet of slow revolutions and delays. In this assemblage, I attempt to indicate the extent to which the ineffectivity of Saturnine love corrodes the ethos of capitalist despair. Finally, in the last breath of the text, I seek to quickly explain what I understand by cosmic austerity and how it relates to the spectral demand for justice.