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10. The ’Pataphysics of Auschwitz
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10 The ’Pataphysics of Auschwitz This chapter will proceed to open as a wound to be sutured somewhere between a telephone and a bathroom door. Part I: The Fraternal Contaminant: A Definition Followed by an Entertaining Prelude Ever since the mind developed as a machine to think without fingers, ’pataphysics , the science of imaginary solutions, has been around as a renegade rationality whose project has been the ludic anamorphosization of truth, science, and their reactionary structures, regulatory ideals, and compromise formations. Ludic? By all means ludic, yet a strict tenet of imperturbability is fundamental to all ’pataphysical endeavors. ’Pataphysics is serious, for to effectively debunk the serious it must itself be taken seriously. Neither parodic nor partaking of the logic of the absurd, ’pataphysics operates as a decidedly unofficial contaminant, generated within, and as a part of, all or any scientific production. Installing itself within those rational endeavors of syllogism, ratiocination, and truth production , it asserts its own status as an essential and part-constitutional pollutant . Operating within these patriarchal terms, ’pataphysics eludes the power of both the scientific and the rational; it subverts their scope and complicates the limits of their dominance, subjecting them to a festive pulverization that opens up the implications of their discourse and thereby relativizes their dispensations . Locating its activity in the membranous space between scientific and artistic spheres, ’pataphysics continuously resuscitates a rational impertinence, a fulguration against the cogito. ’Pataphysics does not describe an historic moment but rather marks a transhistoric state of mind in which the covering law of ’pataphysics is totality. Everything is ’pataphysics, either conscious or unconscious . ’Pataphysics and its presidential choreography of the inclination ensure that the ’pataphysical is and always will be the rogue operative among scientific endeavor. 168 Chapter 10 And so be it. ’Pataphysics historically and consciously originates within the mind of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) whose own definition of the term occurs in Book II of his neo-scientific novel The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician, which was published posthumously (three years before Stein’s Tender Buttons) in 1911. Jarry writes: ’Pataphysics, whose etymological spelling should be έπι (μετà τà φυσικά) [epi (meta ta phusika)] and actual orthography ’pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun [patte à physique], is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental , ’pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. ’Pataphysics will examine the laws which govern exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws which are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of the unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality. (Selected Works 192) “’Pata”invokesasubtledeclensiononthegeneralorderof theprefix—from“meta” through “para,” beyond and beside, to their fusion in a spatial logic that demolishes alike (as will be soon disclosed) in the revolutions of a “physic-stick” and the historic moment named Auschwitz. As the science of the particular aimed at examining laws that govern exceptions , ’pataphysics operates under the strict aegis of two appropriated laws: those of the syzygy and the clinamen, both of which pertain to the broad relationship of matter to motion. In its astronomical use syzygy refers to a conjunction or opposition of the systems of two planets in their orbit around a third; in biology it denotes the conjunction of two organisms without the loss of identity. As a governing law of ’pataphysical methodology, syzygy promotes those momentary oppositions as conjunctions in verbal meanings (such as puns and portmanteaux) that always characterize the scientific discourse of imaginary solutions. Jarry’s most famous contribution in this area is the semantic conjunction of space and [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:04 GMT) The ’Pataphysics of auschwitz 169 time, ether and eternity, to produce the semantic twin of “ethernity,” which is a momentary conjunction in a logical space that carries along with it the cataclysmic breakdown of a coupled opposition. The clinamen derives from Lucretius’ Roman version of classical Greek atomic theory. Lucretius (ca. 95–55 C.E...