The Big Bang of Self

“Everything living dies of internal reasons,” Artaud thought. It is the law of being which states that all matter, organic or not, has no presence to the other except as an outer, remote appearance. This appearance was but a coincidental appearance, which was incapable to revert itself to the deliberate action of essence. Sartre had stated something along similar lines, he remembered, but of course, to Sartre the essence had been the self, and the appearance had been the impossibility of love. Death was the negation of the subject of the other, turning the other into a state of object. It was not enough therefore that dark matter constituted only eighty percent of the matter in the universe, according to estimates. It was obvious in Artaud’s understanding that the universe itself was only a representation of the self and that this, true to its nature, was fully unknown. The dark matter of the universe together with ordinary matter did not even exist. The Big Bang had come into being by the immaculate conception of theoretical physics, but this ontological myth had as little to do with science as the religious myth of Creation. God created life, but as Artaud believed, the I was destined to die. Artaud concluded therefore that perhaps a lot of things didn’t make much sense, or at least not right now, but as soon as he would unravel the mystery of death, the last missing chapter in his Theory of Life, the pieces of the puzzle would automatically fall together.

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