Transfer idioms and the metalanguage of firstness.
"Qui perd gagne," "the first shall be the last," "or how to regress before the scene happens."
Following Eric Gans’ recent chronicle, Qui perd gagne: Antisemitism and the Victimary, we are going to expand on the implications of originary firstness. First, let us discuss the originary scene and firstness.
P.I—Originary Firstness
The originary scene initially began as a minimal hypothesis about the origin of language. This was done precisely to handle the difficulty (and taboo that evolved out of that difficulty) of talking about the origin of language—if we cannot test for the origin of the language we use, how do we develop a theory of the origin of language? So, the originary hypothesis is developed only as an ongoing hypothesis and not an exact theory, per se, because we cannot produce an exact experiment to “prove” our own capacity to use language; this means, more or less, that a theory requires a field of testable events—that come after the first hypothesizing of such events—and provides a narrative to explain those experiments. To test a theory is, on one hand, to be attentive to the experimentation of that hypothesis, but it is also a demonstration of faith that a hypothesis has any “reality” whatsoever. (This was the topic of Gans’ Science and Faith.)
To be a theory of the origin of language it must be in some way testable, but the test would have to—by necessity, by the most minimal implication of the hypothesis—be surrounding the paradox of formal linguistic usage as it happens. In this way to be an originary thinker is to be a lover of the first instantiation of a hypothesis’, for it is to love the hypothesizing of language as it comes to us and as we use it formally. To test the originary hypothesis and provide an originary theory is to use the minimal paradox of formal linguistic usage as it happens, which is the upmost paradox of paradox. Which is why, the originary hypothesis is not completely minimal, escaping the scientific experimentation of “finding the first act of language”, and comes to explain the origin of language as scientifically and historically accurately as it can. Otherwise, it is simply paradox.
Firstness: resentment of language or love of the scene?
To take this hypothesis about the origin of language, and then run with it, by dedicating attention to it as if it is true (to test it) is to love it and it is to try to think about language as you use language. Imagining the originary scene—which is to imagine the deferral—the hypothesizing of peaceful appropriation of an object—the abortion of the gesture of appropriation—is to envision language, itself, as it first emerged. As the originary hypothesis has been suggested over the years the exact categories and narratives we use have changed, as it updates to different scientific or institutional normative; however, what has remained unique is this fundamental paradox language represents.
This paradox is similarly the paradox of intending an object—the hypothesizing of it—and the conflicting attention directed to the object and the desire as if you actually already have it—such is also the paradox of firstness. Firstness itself is originary in that it is this paradox of possessing a quality on a scene that includes others that do not yet have this quality but can and eventually do obtain it just as well. To be first in animal terms never really happens, as you are always subject to being usurped by another animal, who changes the hierarchy to fit its own needs, as if you never existed. They do not have a history of firstness, only the actual appropriation of things. To be first, in originary terms, is to allow a second to happen, and can only be named as firstness once it is shared— while it is maintaining that you have done something they could not do in the moment, you are only first if you entertain that they will do it too, thus no longer being the first and only become first once you are second, hence the paradox.
Gans and Love
Linguistic practices are not always this simple. If I say “it’s getting cold in here,” I’m probably inviting you to do something about it, like shut the window. Austin generalized this apparent exception to constative objectivity into the theory of speech-acts, in which the intended effect of my words on my interlocutor is formalized as the illocutory force of my utterance. In so doing, he turned the attention of analytic philosophers to the reality of speech (la parole) as opposed to language “as such” (la langue).
But at the origin of language, the distinction between tool and use, langue and parole, cannot be made. The first linguistic sign is both performative and constative. On one hand, in the characteristic mode of the constative, what is designated is present independently of the sign that designates it. But on the other hand, the sign is the bearer of human meaning. Before the object became the referent of the sign, it was merely one focus of appetitive interest among others; now it is singled out as the unique object of significance.
—”I love you”, Chronicle 4, Gans.
Aimez ce que jamais vous ne verrez deux fois! Love what you will never see twice! Vigny’s line directs us to love not the eternally renewed ephemerality of nature, but our human historicity. By raising my fellow mortal to the source of meaning, I recreate the permanence of langue from the scenic event of parole.
—Resentment and Love, Chronicle 6, Gans.
[R]ather than everything in the world conspiring to exclude you, you and your beloved can benevolently include the entire world in your love. Love, it seems—although this is not explicitly said—makes each a sufficient center unto the other, hence guaranteeing one’s own centrality, which is to say significance, and even immortality.
This dialectic between resentment [the animal “sin” of desiring an object before others] and love [the transmission of that desire among all the others on a scene] is very compelling, . . . We can see this is the description of what I referred to above as “constitutive resentment,” [is] that constant and continually renewed resentment driven by noticing new centers of attention indifferent to oneself . . . So, there’s a slippage here between a kind of “stripped down” resentment resulting from the elimination of intermediate orders articulating individuals with the center and an “originary” resentment presumably applicable to all instances of resentment.
This is to say, “originary resentment” begins as ones own appetite and the problem of its deferral, the problem of using language, and constitutive resentment as the awareness of the resentment of others; it is this originary fear that they might break the “love” or the sharing of the deferral of violence.
The protection of the other in her vulnerability, a vulnerability that, paradoxically must be preserved so as to guarantee love’s significance, is also insisted on in #6, and this is a much more sustainable model of love, one that can remain unaltered even in the face of alterations. . . But there’s no transition to a “public” form of love, and since private love affairs can hardly provide for a sufficient haven against the heartless world of public resentment, we can see why this dialectic never made it past these early Chronicles.
But we can imagine something analogous if we push Gans’s description of love to one of love as the deferral of our own resentful desire to possess the other unto [their extinction. That is to say, to resolve our own paradox of having to defer appetite for the sake of others by eliminating the other.] This understanding of love can apply to public as well as private . . . Only, though, given the triangular rather binary nature of desire. . . if there is some other Other to which both parties can refer. Then we might think of a love for the center in a dialectical relation to our resentment of “usurpations” of the center (which are, indeed, as constant as the objects of resentment in Gans’s model of constitutive resentment). If our only reaction to any occupancy of the center is unremitting resentment—well, that way lies madness, does it not? Madness from which no private love can even extricate itself, much less save us.
—On Love, Resentment and the Early Chronicles, GA Newsletter, Bouvard.
Firstness is a metalanguage in the sense that to be recognized as first you must already be second and have some meaning or history to “verify” firstness. Firstness can only exist once the originary sign has already been recognized, thus the resentment constitutive of the origin of language, the fear of someone’s indifference to our deferral, only happens once we already are on a scene, and already recognize our own part that we play in the shared use of language between members on a scene. We cannot truly resent other humans without first knowing love. The idioms such as “the first shall be the last” seem to emanate this primordial aspect—to be first you must share firstness with a second—and, it ultimately represents what it is to be a victim in relation to the scene of two members putting faith in each other—to be a victim is to fear your own usurpation—so rather than shun victimary culture, we should institute a love for firstness, for metalanguage, and remind us all that we can only fear what we once have already held, and can only fear once we have felt love. To create new love is to overcome the fear of being first, and to share among the second.
We can look, with renewed vigor, to Gans’ Qui perd gagne: Antisemitism and the Victimary,
Resentment of firstness as the foundation of antisemitism, which was barely acknowledged by the organization that published our book, let alone by the various Jewish organizations, many of which are unwilling even to affirm Israel’s originary status in its ancient homeland, should be considered the “original sin” of Western or Judeo-Christian civilization, a sin that only now, after the Holocaust, we can begin to face directly. The identification of the Jews with the “canary in the coal mine” is demeaning rather than insightful. The Nazis may have exterminated Gypsies and homosexuals, but they were not the point of the Final Solution. That Israel remains the pariah of the UN, and increasingly, of the Democratic Party that something like 75% of American Jews still vote for, is not just “regrettable,” but follows directly from our book’s basic thesis, which is that antisemitism is the model, if not of the epistemology of resentment per se, then of its historical manifestation in Western Civilization . . .
Need I point out that the originary contrast between Jews and Christians was in the latter’s liberation from the infinitely detailed “law” of the Old Testament—which the Haredim still seek to obey in all its particulars? But I very much doubt that Jesus would have looked with favor on those of today who so distort his efforts to transcend resentment through love.
P.II—Epilogue
Here are what spurred on this article; these are a couple of X posts I had written up that are relevant to the above. Next article we will be writing on mystic currency as an expanded but separate hypothesis to the firstness transfer idiom. After that will be our annual review, which will be in the form of an autobiography and review of my past theories, following to the present date.
The State of Dissident Politics and Anti-Semitism
The fate of "illiberalism" and "post-liberalism" is still embroidered in the fabric of Axial Age thought (its structure of conscious apprehending of the world). It sets its view in the rear, [and] cannot be fully present, to every actor [that] we encounter—[especially] in our day to day lives. The borderline obsession with internet parasocial relationships has devolved them into, while increased membership to their substacks, a movement that cannot sustain genuine intellectual rigor.
[I later learned that Mari Ruti has this nice idiom called “gender obsession disorder.” Rather than a gender obsession disorder, we might suggest a “hierarchy obsession disorder”, here. Whether or not these hierarchies are the gender hierarchies that obsess over the phallus—or the alpha male—they all lack the imagination to work with new individuals (Jews, queers, the disabled); these new individuals would and did present a threat to the current currency of the hierarchy. Thinking through Ruti’s gender obsession disorder, now, we could also say it is the cultural currency that is found in emasculating gestures, in the shaming of males by other males by equating them to females. It acts by expanding language to try to overcome constitutive resentment, which by using language to address this fear of usurpation it seeks to dismantle any threat to the current hierarchy, or perspective that the individual making the demeaning remark could ever be thought of as a second—which as we’ve shown is antithetical to firstness, anyhow. It is not the sharing of firstness but an expansion of male domination and fear of love. This fear of being made second had deprived women of having any positive currency in the “patriarchy” at all; the same applies to the gender queer or the gender ambiguous and other individuals outside heteronormative currency; although Ruti expands on this in a lot of other interesting contexts, it seems relevant here, to liken antisemitism to the same remarks made by corny “alpha” males, who use language to stave off the insecurity of being vulnerable, and to reject the love that comes with vulnerability.]
[To continue:]
What survives of the former collective of the post liberal group has splintered off into a Judaic-ambivalent head and then a broadly antisemetic-affirming right wing. That wing not so coincidently had once been obsessed with the cold, brutish technological fetishism of fascist regimes (also not so coincidentally conducting study groups into the phenomenologists, and Heideggerian-adjacent field of philosophy); it is no wonder they could never drop their antisemetic subscriptions to openly Hitlerian race obsessed politics. They continue to participate in the victimary and "binary" identity politics that critical theory, and post structuralism, sought to address and amend. Is it any wonder, that I ended up splintering off—with a love for anthropology —into the hypermodern crowd? (Those "object oriented ontologists" and "ecology", which corrected the victimary Heideggerian World-Picture.) As Sloterdijk did through his philosophy of transference, sought to ground us away from "metaphysical dualism" and center ourselves around our fellow beings in the anthropocene.
You cannot continue to hold onto these broke, old worldviews, that resent the new anthropoetic relationships of individuals in the current world, without maintaining a degree of intellectual instability. Sure you can harden and sharpen your intellect, and do your best, but if you are against the reconfiguring of roles, you must be against singularized succession in perpetuity. You must admit, on some level, the current world-picture has collectively duped everyone in existence. To me, that came across as insufficient. To lead a new governing structure, one that is genuine and stable, it cannot completely resent the center but must affirm it. The resentment of all hierarchy and of all centeredness was originally the key unifying force behind that group. But, I suppose it would make sense that what is left, of that membership to "being a post liberal", only survives on the neoreactionary absolutist subreddit.
[Consider a currency founded on the generation of firstness, it would absolve old markets and old currencies, while letting the love that connects scenes together, operate as a new currency. That new currency of firstness would engender more healthy relationships to flourish, as we begin to discover on small scenes, sample scenes, what it means to use language, and be the first to differ.]
[Following] Gans new Chronicle we can sum up the transfer idiom that defines the positive and affirmative post-liberal vision (the one that accepts Judaism as a valid form of religion, culture and transcendence). You must accept firstness, and through love, transcend the resentment of being put on the periphery. That! Is the final word I will have there. Everything else that is to be written about dissident politics will stem from that intuition, and from that transfer idiom. I'm willing to grant every one of them credence, and to allow them back into this "research task force" that is slowly developing around generative anthropology, but we never ignore the scenic, or the love, the defferance, that is inherent in it. Antisemetic views are backwards facing, and ethno-nationalism is a cope of an outdated world-picture. I would rather continue to build the positive, loving relationships I have in the moment, than allow a hate filled (that is to say, obsessively critical: taking the sample of a group and stratifying it as a general rule of all the members of that group) task force dedicated to dismantling every aspect of Judaism to take up my thoughts one second more. If they come to me, I will treat them like people, and give them the due diligence they deserve, but I won't entertain these intellectually bankrupt, old ideologies. You're free to peddle them, but keep them "off my lawn."
Cleansing the Temple and Anti-Semitism
“And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables: And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise. — John 2:15-16”
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said to them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves. — Mathew 21:12-13”
. . .
“But our interpretation of the text is the right one! The declarative one (gasp!)—”see, the money lenders are the Judaic covenant”—the one filled with resentment to the lenders.”
. . . Christ doesn’t hate them, but it was written: the temple is for prayer. As such, my temple has a currency, too . . .
I am not Christ but I try to imagine how he would respect his teachings have been taught. If I am to call upon them and spread them, like I’m doing above, especially. The scenes have value in the cultivation of their currency. The temple is for prayer, not money-lending. Christ gives himself up in self-sacrifice, in total love. His act in the temple is a self-sacrifice, he does not wish to do it, and it could lead to confusion: we would imagine in a perfect world he would prefer to offer the salesmen a place outside the temple. The problem is in part that they are currently in the temple that is dedicated to worship and already have been devaluing its theological currency for a while now. So, he engages them in a way they have not yet done.
But, the theme you guys expound from this is that "each should rule his own nation: expel Juden" when in fact, the Bible teaches not to exhaust the love for God (the act of protecting prayer in temples) for the love of a nation. You have already missteped and ignored the deeper epistemological value. Of course, we are not Christ, and so it is natural to pervert his teachings, which is why he saw it necessary to give himself up, willingly, to the Judaic covenant he sought to separate from. You cannot escape the maxim of firstness: first to do an action, first to be on the periphery, and first to overcome the resentment inherent in being on the periphery. Antisemitism is antithetical to the event at Golgotha: the martyring of Christ. He gives himself up remember. As "Christians" you sure miss the biggest, most literal, teaching of Christ. I am sorry for your confusion. May you pay your respects one day, properly. What goes around comes around, anyways, and you kill off higher identity, metalanguage, the higherself, in service to being obsessed with your own victimary status.
…
While the above makes a good statement to my readers, it does at times lack the profound, positive, affirmative vision that I spoke of, when I said, “They continue to participate in the victimary and "binary" identity politics that critical theory, and post structuralism, sought to address and amend.” The irony is that a post-victimary world is one that affirms and strengthens societies true victims against the strengthened majority. Is it not the sweetest irony that the Nietzschean right participates in the same loving of “the herd” that is exemplarary in heteronormativity and patriarchal thinking? It is a kind of immune response to protect ones vulnerability and to try to maintain the value of its own currency. There’s actually a great originary satire here with the recent memes that focus on the accuracy of queer-affirming theories and the excellence of queer peoples outdoing those stuck in reactionary structures of identity—the irony is that those on top are often the most insecure about their usurpation.
We should follow the transfer idiom of love for firstness, the love for metalanguage, not the constitutive resentment of reactionary structures of politics. I will eventually add some more dialogue on Mari Ruti’s book Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings about this, eventually. I have many reasons for this, and for this shift into gender theory that I have been doing recently; I will expand more on it when we get to it. Have fun and love firstness in all the ways it comes to you.
Check out this short video of an interview with Sade--