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 2009; 46)
But what does it mean that this context in which being is suspended (in the bubble of a cosmotechnical life-world) consists, for consciousness, in relation to the limit-threshold of light-time?
The cosmological horizon—being the horizon articulated by the totality of illumination that is the knowledge of space-time in so far as it is presented to consciousness—is demarcated in relation to the limits of informational transmission (light-speed). The instrumental inscriptions performed by cosmotechnical apparatuses thereby determine a logosphere qua light-time that is suspended within a boundless non-conceptuality that consists beyond this limit; in the indeterminacy of that of which consciousness knows no-thing.
The limit-horizon therefore has two sides that are modulated through a kind of pharmakological flux, which is the perspectival work of cosmotechnical inscription (a play of limits; a play of the void): a relative, interior conceptual field of space-time and an absolute exterior, which negates conceptuality as such; an interior probability field and an exterior that maintains as the ‘beyond’ of the play of the determinate and indeterminate.
Our relation to this horizon, which is brought to bear by the pharmakological play of limits, infinitely calls logos into question because in knowing the universe we gaze towards that of which we know nothing. Penetrating every act of instrumentation as its unground and imminent prior (the prior of finite inscription; the immeasurability implied by any measure; the boundless field in which entities both arise and die back down) implies a surplus infinity that permeates the very core of matter. Hence why totality and separation appear equally phantasmic: meaning arises out of a contradictory relationship between presence and absence: that which appears harmonious at a certain level is paradoxical at another. Thus 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 2009; 46). 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 2009; 52). This is what it means for history to have hit a “cosmological limit”. 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. That is, the limit-horizon of the crystalline edge is dissapropriated 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 1969; 21 and 26). Thus the surplus infinity of our passion is revealed to consciousness via phantasmagoria spectralising at the limit.
Moreover, through the paradoxical thought of this limit, which is the tragedy of space-time, the sensuous plane itself reaches its intensity with an-other. Such passion, which is insubordinate to any use value, is the subject of our care because what is at stake at this horizon is, precisely, the interface between one and an-other that implicates the infinitisation of the infinity of the cosmos itself. Through this care the rainbow edge of articulation is opened: a leakage of infinitisation into the cosmos that overflows, producing the sensual delirium that is both un-conditional and, as imminent surplus, is capable of generating anthropological altarity. Thereby escaping from necessity, consciousness assumes its cosmic character in passion (in the passion of care): ‘it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys’ (Bataille 1985; 82). In this way consciousness as such, emptied of conceptualisation, negates technological programmaticity through relationality with an-other.
Thus, in pharmakologically tracing the limits of reality—construed according to the informational limit-horizon of light-time— consciousness delays the articulation of the limit, making a break at the threshold between embodied conceptuality and its emptiness. By tracing the play by which the clear mirror may be brought into view and made susceptible to this gaze, we open our passion onto that negative horizon of conceptualisation such that consciousness can pass-through the crystallisation of light-time de-void, spectralising at the interface of infinite space.