Threads

A model of the cosmos as an assembled, intelligible engine, and the cosmopoetic allegory of that model. The name, machina mundi, comes from Lucretius, and the idea of the world as the work of a craftsman from Plato’s Timaeus. Ptolemy’s astronomy supplied the edifice of concentric spheres around the Earth, which the manuals, from Sacrobosco to Pedro Nunes, taught under that name. In poetry, from Dante to Camões and Drummond, it is the scene in which this model is offered to a man’s understanding.

The contemporary difficulty of forging figures that can mediate the old ambition of making the whole intelligible, now that every representation of totality is recognized as structurally incomplete. Born of the passage from world to universe, the scarcity coexists with the persistence of the desire for totality and with technical allegories, the mediations through which science makes parts of the universe imaginable without offering a common image of the whole.

The regime of figural mediations through which science makes imaginable and communicable models whose formal structure exceeds sensible intuition. It is heuristic by constitution, and all its efficacy lies in the access it opens. The thesis calls it the form allegorical scarcity takes on the side of science, a local mediation that still works, at the opposite end from the noemaphage.

An image-concept that the thesis puts forward as a new allegory of the Machine of the World. It starts from a minimal figure, the hyperbola that approaches two axes without touching them, the axis of objective knowledge and that of subjective inquiry. It names a form of orientation, that of a frontier which recedes as we approach it and guides knowledge without ever becoming a possession.

The event in which a figure is realized with such intensity that it comes to expose the excess of the object it meant to contain. The figure goes on working only by admitting that it no longer fits the regime of representation that produced it, and this is what allows the Machine to open without breaking. The thesis gives it geometric form in Gabriel’s horn, a solid of finite volume and infinite surface.

The limit-condition of knowledge, the point at which knowing meets what makes it possible without being able to turn it into an object. In the figure of the horizon, it is the origin where the axes cross and where knowledge of the world and knowledge of oneself would coincide, an unoccupiable place, known only through its effects, with no outside from which to see it. If the physical singularity prevents observation, the epistemic one prevents reference.

The movement by which a name, thrown against the limit of knowledge, returns twisted upon itself and settles as an outline. The concept loses its referential direction and begins to orbit its own impossibility of referring. The thesis finds this fold already in the word universe, which includes itself in the whole it names, and recognizes it whenever a totalization tries to include itself among its objects.

The figure that discourse fabricates in place of an impossible referent, when the outline of a limit comes to count as content. It has the form of a noun and devours the condition under which anything could appear as meaning. The epistemic singularity is the same limit as long as the figure that names it remains avowedly a figure; the noemaphage begins when that figure starts to circulate as evidence, as a cause that ends the chain of whys.

An epistemological and ethical position that follows from inhabiting the asymptotic horizon. It recognizes the asymmetry of positions before local regimes of verification and the symmetry of subjects before the incompleteness of the totality. Truth as totality remains inaccessible, while error can be recognized locally, and what has been falsified stays falsified. Dogmatism and relativism make the same error of figure, taking the limit for a place, and asymptotic realism keeps the direction without promising an end.