Page 263 - Cyberculture and New Media

254 Desistant Media
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2. The ‘subject of the imitation’ therefore must be a ‘being’
(in the sense of being something which is, an essent)
originally open to (ouvert à) or originally ‘outside itself’,
ek-static. This is precisely what Heideggerian Da-sein ‘is’.
But this ecstatic (de)constitution has itself to be thought as
lack or insufficiency – according to a strict thinking of
finitude. The subject is originally the infirmity of the
subject and this infirmity is its very intimacy, in a state of
dehiscence. Or, in other words, difference is inherent in the
subject, forever preventing it from being subject […] The
‘subject’ desists. This is why it is fictionable at its very
origin and […] In other words, it remains paradoxically
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constitutive.

The paradox of the mirror is not only a contradicting or surprising
opinion (out of the ordinary and shocking). It implies a passing to the
extreme, a sort of “maximization”, as is said in logic nowadays. It is in reality
a hyperbolic movement by which the equivalence of contraries is established
(probably without ever establishing itself) – the contraries themselves pushed
to the extreme, in principle infinite, of contrariety. This is why the formula
for the paradox is always that of the double superlative: the madder it is, the
wiser it becomes; the maddest is the wisest. Paradox is defined by the infinite
exchange, or the hyperbolic identity, of contraries. This paradoxical logic,
finally, Lacoue-Labarthe calls hyperbological, properly abyssal. The
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hyperbological is unceasing, endless, which also means without resolution.
A conclusion can be drawn: hyperbological abysses form the desistant mode
of media, when the actual crossing is mise-en-abyme.
The space in media is not to be proclaimed only by onto-typological
relation to the image, although some have said cyberspace is “Platonism as a
working product”. Here, “with an electronic infrastructure, the dream of
perfect forms becomes the dream of information: filtered through the
computer matrix, all reality becomes patterns of information. Here the idea of
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the universe as imagined by Plato takes shape”. This forming is against
something Benjamin described as his work’s pedagogy: to see dimensionally,
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stereoscopically into the depths of historical shade.
Lacoue-Labarthe claims that image or figure is never one, neither is
the one of man. It is always and already dimensional: every angle shows only
another, endlessly. This is mise-en-abyme in where Benjamin’s pedagogy
lays shattered: in mimesis without origin there is no myth, of man, of
mankind, neither there is an awakening. Man is not asleep, as Benjamin
figures; man’s purpose is to measure his actions without such a mythical hi-
story. Depth (of times) is not as much as concealed as it is rising through