Has Death no Future?  Cybernetics and the Hecatomb

The paper begins with a first section that examines the confluence of several discourses in their concern with death: cybernetics (regulatory systems), psychoanalysis (instincts and drives), philosophical science (the quest for the real) and emerging technologies (the horizon).  The history of cybernetics reveals a tenacious concern with the possibility of controlling or limiting otherwise fatally stochastic processes, and the discourse of psychoanalysis is concerned, in a comparable way, with the codification of processes disguised as accidental factors.  Yet the rigorous play of death in the philosophical tradition continues to trouble these otherwise powerful conceptions.  The point in this section is to establish a philosophical account of the experience of death, as an experience of fundamental limitations on experience, and to recall classical attempts to transgress or to transcend their limits.

A second section examines the role of language in relation to death, and outlines the conditions for a transition between linguistic elements (speech, writing and symbolic signs) and electronic media and images.  The philosophical relation between death and language, especially in writing, is well established.  It is now a matter of clarifying this relation in order to follow a line of questioning concerning, for instance, the relation between death and the digital imaginary.

Death, classically, occupies a sphere elusive of both the regulative orders of logic and language and the imaginary, accidental elements of an individual’s pleasures and desires.  It can thus emerge in the irruptive form of the real in various ways.  With this pattern of relations in view it is possible hypothetically to explore the role of death in the codification of contemporary culture.  The paper concludes with some experimental and critical readings that attempt to uncover some aspects of this codification.   The aim is not, however, to proceed as if a positivist account is possible or even desirable, but to establish again the insistence of the essential passivity of an experience that a subject can only fail to grasp.

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