From the Stoics to Onco-Ontology: A Few Considerations Toward an Ontology Based on Cancer

Kane X. Faucher

Onco-Being is “already-there”, an inhuman and infinite resource in which all events and beings-of-sense participate.  By this view, the cancer-effect is fatalistic, deterministic. It presupposes all possibilities because it is the principle by which they manifest. Things come to be and pass away on account of this principle, and these are but two sides of the same event, an event that happens in simultaneity. The differing trajectories of generation and corruption intersect among one or more things in their relation. The animal goes toward death as much as a parasite comes into being, and perhaps they mutually or partially cause the advent or decline of the other. Perhaps this is no clearer than in the relation between Thought and Life: thinking is essentially representation and hierarchization, the mode of the ascetic that has receded from life; it is an apoptosis that seeks to etiolate life, reduce it to a series of repeatable experiments or submit to overreaching concepts that seek to dictate by explanation. By contrast, and generally speaking, life is metastatic since it is the single one-all case of seemingly (according to categorical thought) anarchic growth. Life is a meta-state, and cancer is its analogous principle of dynamism. But if life-as-cancer is the one-all state which explains and determines all, how can there be something called Thought which does not submit to such a determination? Is Thought a consecrated special case that throws the notion of a one-all into logical error?

No. It is not Thought qua thinking that is at issue, but our belaboured image of Thought that is in error. It is the very possibility of error that indirectly supports the proof that all things are subject to metastasis. There is this other image of Thought that more embraces its own nature as paradoxical, contradictory – in sum, more “lifelike”. To believe that the Idea will govern and direct life is precisely just a belief, and one that does not accord with life. The biconditional of the Real and the rational falls apart; the Real is the event of paradoxical and indefatigable growth, and Being is its expression as sense. It is the impulsion of growth that dissipates all limits that characterizes Being as sense, this perpetual movement that can only be limited by relations with an “exterior” force, either by the necrotizing force of apoptosis or the stronger active force of another being whose growth cannot admit of any obstacles. One sees such a particular case of the latter when looking at the way a tree may grow and, in pursuing its own growth, choke out all sunlight from other plant life that does not have the same rate of growth. It is not that one force seeks to dominate another (for this would be to index growth to the reactive destruction of an other), but rather the sovereign aspect of growing in general.

The impulsion of unchecked growth is not something anyone or anything can choose; it chooses us. I cannot choose to grow, but I can choose not to grow by halting the flow of nutrients, denying myself of the materials necessary for growth, and thereby inhibiting growth. It is the same with Thought: one can think life is subsumable to categories of variety, thereby limiting what Thought can do since it will not engage in life as it is, but rather stake illusory fences around existence that will be made to conform to myopic perception. But perhaps there is no more pronounced case than that of cancer since it embraces the paradox of growth and dying simultaneously. With cancer, the body is in the process of dying, and yet cancerous cells enter into unprecedented growth. Social critics and moralists alike may find the same paradox in the mechanical hyper-production of commodities and a degenerative erosion of public health. It is indeed akin to Carroll’s Alice who is both growing and shrinking at the same time.

The proposition of “x grows and dies at the same time” will be nonsensical unless we consider it on the order of sense, and if we give privilege to verbs over the regime of nouns. For it is the ephemeral nature of verbs to unite nouns into a relationship without themselves remaining present. The event of the verb is the flash of meaning between nouns, and orients them. Without verbs, nouns would be barricaded from any relationship with one another. Nouns are more like monads, and verbs are more like nomads.

There has only been one morphogenetic force that keeps bodies from falling apart, and it is the Stoic pneuma that assures that things can subsist as it is derived from the immanent seed of archai, the “eternal reason” which shapes and maintains things according to an inward- and outward-bound plan. This pneuma is the intangible relation of forces that express a body’s ability to affect and be affected upon, granting the tensility of objects. But since this is a perpetual process, there is no real beginning or end. Pneuma stands as a kind of transcendence-in-immanence factor that motors all that exists in a cosmological teratologue of bodies – and, in fact, all that exists and subsists is held within this envelope of a teratologue. This “teratologue” is underwritten and maintained by a kind of “cellular time”.

The vague cell, the ambiguous cell, the cell-as-sign capable of a rigorously indeterminate generality that manifests in all existents as particularities and singularities, borrows heavily from the Stoic ontology. A cell is an aleatory point in an already aleatory body, the body a composition of convergences, whereas the “malignant” cell is a point of divergence or bifurcatory departure. The cell is like a pre-individual singularity that remakes the body in its being expressed anew. A cancer cell returns to primal subdivision, a pure dedifferentiation. In dedifferentiating, the cell resists the genetic hierarchy of predicate distributions; no longer a bone cell, a skin cell, a lung cell, but a cell of pure generality which subdivides freely without hierarchically assigned or nutritive apportioned restrictions. It knows not of temporal limitations, beginnings or endings. A skin cell is told when to stop growing, the skin of the body is told when to replace less cells than those sentenced to death. However, a cancer cell knows only the pure present of continuous and subsistent growth. It is an event without origin or purpose beyond this growth. “The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us”.[1]

All events, including cellular events, occur in time, but time as expressed by its new relation between Chronos and Aion: “Whereas Chronos was inseparable from the bodies which filled it out entirely as causes and matter, Aion is populated by effects which haunt it without ever filling it up. Whereas Chronos was limited and infinite, Aion is unlimited, the way that future and past are unlimited, and finite like the instant. Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents…Aion stretched out in a straight line, limitless in either direction.”[2]

Time remains a problem that impedes the Platonic and Hegelian ontologies for similar reasons. Where there is time, it is the linearity of a dialectical succession, as if time operated on matter by way of blocs, jumps, stutters, or as developmental phases in a project. Motion, in this way, is choppy, dialectics being a kind of precursor to film, a connection of frames or points that stand as monadic and static moments that share their borders by contiguity without anything passing through them. Chronos is the dominant present, making past and future relative subjugations. Chronos makes the past and future “remainders” of the “passionate” present (i.e., when the mixture of bodies occurs, there is never a full catalysis since the remainder of what-was and the not-yet remains). As Chronos proceeds by means of being an infinite yet limited present, it encompasses all presents within itself and relies on a scorched earth policy by recourse to some transcendent measure (the “perfection” of the present as an immanence is illusory since a unity of presents presupposes either a destiny or a necessity). There is no actual becoming in Chronos, but a feigned one, a falsely named becoming: the has- or yet-to- become. It is a Hegelian becoming: an event rigged from the start, subjugated to the living presence of the Now. In Chronos, mixtures occur, but the becoming of their correspondence does not reside here in the present. What will become of this mixture is also excluded. The verb that unites two bodies in becoming has already evacuated or is yet to become. Without the verb, the becoming correspondence between bodies is left as dry, fossilized nouns. What we are left with is a simulated time masquerading as the temporal guarantor of all bodies.

Such temporal “deductions” are reductions. To reverse the reserve tucked into the shadowy motivation of Plato’s strategy of division is the task of the Stoic, to renounce the construction of universals as a figment of the imagination. Within a world is indeed hidden these Platonic divisions, attributing the broken pieces categorical status by naming them Form, Copy, and even that carefully concealed sibling of Simulacrum that the other two metaphysical siblings are too embarrassed to speak about. In true Platonic form, when the matter of the simulacrum emerges in the discourse, Plato (behind the mask of Socrates) resorts to myth just as a politician would a joke, a rhetorical deception, or a meandering homily in order to secure escape from a tricky argumentative corner. But it is in the interplay of sense and Simulacrum where we encounter the delirious and vertiginous becoming of Being. Simulacra are the exiles, the nomads, the xenoliths lodged in the crust of Platonic metaphysics.

Form and Copy have traceable lineages, a demonstrable heritage. Simulacrum has an oblique familial connection. Myths and jokes turn an argument back to its presupposed conceptual foundation, refreshing its connective lineage. It is a part of the dialectical bag of tricks, and dialectics in this case “is a type of self-defence used only by people who do not have any other weapons.”[3] Myth has proven to be the most effective “syllogistic knife” in the arsenal of dialectical division. But lacking a third term, as Aristotle pointed out, is to stand a metaphysics upon a tripod with only two legs.

Which is the Form and which the Copy between Plato and Socrates? A wrong question when we consider their sense which has no tolerance for before or after, or the fixed qualities of subjects. They may as well be simulacra of each other. They are each other’s “othering.”

With myth as foundation, the Form gives birth to a well-founded “just” Copy. The simulacrum is the “false pretender.”[4] Simulacra are unlike copies. Copies are under the jurisdiction of resemblance whereas simulacra “are like false pretenders, built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or a deviation” and “they pretend to [the object] underhandedly, under cover of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion, ‘against the father’, and without passing through the Idea.”[5]  In this way, simulacra are a product of a kind of “divergenesis”.

A cancerous cell is such an aggressive insinuation, and it pretends to the object of normal functioning cell, that cell based on the Idea of composite organism and genetic code (Code = Form). Simulacra are every bit as dangerous to an established system of knowledge as the cell is to organism, as the Man is to the image of God. They are images without resemblance. It is “demonic”, every bit as demonic as Nietzsche’s famous demon’s question (a question that, by its dangerous insinuation, invites rupture and aberration of an established and improperly posed order). Can one affirm what one is, to which the reply, if affirmed, comes out that one is a Being of Becoming, not static Being. The demonic and the demonic question that is elicited from it “converts” or re-orients the perspective of that which hitherto resided in a stable and obedient system. It is to revolt against organization and organism. With Form and Copy etiolated, we are left with a flurry of simulacra, and its order proceeds not Form-Copy-Emulator or Idea-Quality-Aspirant, but rather as image-imitator-imagitator. This is granted by an innate heterogeneity which renders all bodies as the othering of all their others.

The heterogeneity must already be an internalized component or installation within the genesis and continuity of the system. Heterogeneity, by way of divergent series and distributed potentials must be constitutive. The “healthy cell” is “converted” according to a new code of health, that of expressing metastasis, the illimitable, the infinitely big and the infinitely small.

If the world is onco-ontological, the telos may be entropy brought about through the complete exhaustion of resources and the over-saturation of all space through this metastasis. However, this presupposes a finite World or that zones are not in perpetual shift and re-encoding. The onco-ontological process dominates without seeking full domination (it is a coincidental outcome of pure striving). It destroys one body that a new and different one emerges.

For Neoplatonists, all Being is derived from the One. The attributes of this mystical One intrigues us for their similarity to what we are advancing; namely, that both the One and the cancer principle cannot be said to have figure, shape, weight, quantity, doxa, number, magnitude or intention. In the place of this Neoplatonic One, we propose the principle of an oncogenesis that, like the Deleuzian “virtual”, is already the fully determined and the very given of the given. All manifestations of this oncogenesis (beings) are akin to tokens (in the Greek sense of symballein) where the connection is already presupposed (thereby making beings themselves symbolic extensions of the principle of an oncogenetic and onco-ontological virtual determination). This does not suggest that there is some form of semiotic transfer of reference to object (a decanted form of the Platonic Form-Copy relation), but rather—if we speak at all of a semiotics—a semiotic transit; i.e., the principle manifests itself by the development that inheres and virtually constitutes beings. As such, an onco-ontology appears to skirt the notion of allegory insofar as beings as symbolic manifestations of a principle in actu can be causally traced back to a primary instantiation where a “natural path” is discovered. However, since the principle is manifest in all beings, even the principle itself (a kind of being, and a principle akin to deconstruction) is conditioned by itself as well. Attempting to isolate the principle apart from the objects it conditions is impossible, a task freighted with a desperate circuitous algebra of spirit that is forever incapable of bridging the gap between an unknown quantity x and what the equation makes reference to. A study of the principle of this nature only goes so far and can only be analyzed in its effects: the threshold or limitation is that there can be no true dissociation between the object of study and all that “object” conditions. Such a principle resists reduction because it is immanent, and so all explanations are by necessity reduced to approximations.

Like Kant, we are dedicated to this “vacant space” where there is some Ding an sich that cannot properly be an object of knowledge. However, despite subsequent attempts by Hegel in attempting to prematurely put “the old metaphysics” of form and content by the curbside with the false revolutionary gesture of dubbing it as being merely of historical interest, the tenacious grip of metaphysics still obtains beyond being merely a curiosity or novelty. Even such overarching attempts to declare the death of such a metaphysics as advanced by Jarry in hitching it to the rise of technology as its heir always refers back to a primary instance where the old problems still need be addressed in some fashion. Contrary to Kant, however, the wizard behind the drapery of phenomena is not the things-in-themselves as if they were static absolute unities residing in a transcendent milieu, but rather all that can be called virtual or transcendental (rather than transcendent) is a grounding principle that conditions phenomena and is itself conditioned as a meta- or ur-phenomena. Sense, raised to this level where what determines is itself fully determined echoes what Deleuze will call transcendental empiricism and perhaps also demonstrates a more rarefied mechanics to Nietzsche’s will to power. For Deleuze, the transcendental principle that attends and inheres in sense is later identified as affirmative desire. Deleuzian desire as a keystone in the logic of sense connects Stoic “affection” (and subsequently his later work on Spinozist dynamism) with a higher empiricism to produce what he calls a “pure affect”. As well, Deleuze avoids merely constructing another phenomenology which would otherwise bring us back to the conflict between phenomenology and metaphysics—a false dichotomy that Nietzsche was among the first to shatter with the insistence of his hammer blows, identifying such a split as a false problem and another anachronistic idol in the irrelevant pantheon of philosophy.

Indeed, a cancer principle operates in similar fashion to Deleuzian desire since both stand as transcendental conditions of all experience. Since both are fully determined, they are not subject to a notion of lack (and, hence, affirmative differences prevail and can be said to truly “make the difference” since differences are not subject to the hierarchy of representation, are not “incomplete” according to a stable fixity of norms). Neither must they be recruited to be “reconnected” to phenomena through a deductive enterprise since this would presuppose incompletion and privation on the part of either the principles themselves or the objects they are said to condition. The principles and the objects would be regarded by negative difference as incomplete and so therefore imperfect, but it is the case that true difference revels in a state of perpetual becoming and transformation without teleological direction. It is, in Deleuzian parlance, a question of the relations of speed, a kineticism: “the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between [infinite] particles…it is not defined by a form or by functions.”[6] What goes for bodies equally applies to minds since Spinoza does not state that these are substances, but modes. If applied to all phenomena, we may speak of the relative speeds of the cancer-effect on the development of beings: metastasis is the “quickening” in the velocity of affection between and within beings, and apoptosis is the decrease in the velocity (attempts to arrest the affective relations and speeds of beings from “being” in the sense of the verb, a kind of apparatus of capture that puts a false crown on the regime of nouns). Metastasis increases the pace of dynamism while apoptosis slows or limits it (albeit without ever fully vanquishing it since apoptosis can only limit particular active relations between and within beings). This forms a kind of ethology of the cancer-principle’s effect on beings, a kineticism (speed and slowness) and a dynamism (to affect and be affected). Moreover, the selective aspect of the Nietzschean eternal return gives way to an aspect of distribution: the in quale aspects of beings is distributed as in-discrepant “essences” over the in quid of beings themselves to determine it in terms of its velocities and relations of encounter. These accidental properties of Being, expressed as speed and relation are themselves the distributive aspect that grants an immanent “transcendentibus”. Relations and rates of speed are not properties of Being, nor are they mere accidents, but rather determinative instances that express Being. In this way, Being’s expression need not fall under the fourfold similitudes of representation; i.e., it cannot be reduced to convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, or sympathy without addressing the slippage of affirmative difference that constitutes Being on an alternative order.

Oncontology and Différance

Without relying too heavily upon tantalizing hints or circumvention, the matter of oncontology’s relationship with Derridian différance is a requisite step in understanding exactly how the subversion of linguistic foundation occurs with respect to the “cancer-effect” of language. And, in fact, if it were not for the more robust incorporation of a Deleuzian transcendental empiricism functioning as a kind of parallel virtual determination of Being as such, this project of oncontology may be hastily mistaken as a mere ornament or embroidery upon the “project” of deconstruction. However, oncontology deals—akin to, but not following, the Heideggerian method—with the question of the constitution of Being as such, and not primarily with textuality, of which we assert is but a mode or manifestation of a larger “ontological” project. In this sense, we wish to explore the aspects and dimensions of how the cancer-effect is manifested in the linguistic or textual domain, and for this it will be heuristic to make a comparative alignment with Derrida’s difference. However, in order to show some degree of loyalty to the Derridian “method”, it is necessary to demonstrate how this “being” can be said to be both cancerous without falling back into a metaphysics of presence.

From sign-systems to sign-symptoms

One of the principal features of Saussure’s coinage of “semiology” was his attempt to ground a science of linguistic signs according to the means by which they are constituted in language. It was this movement that produced the genesis of crisis, primarily between the relationship between an arbitrary signifier (word token) and an arbitrary signified (referred concept). This crisis was punctuated in Saussure’s dictum that there was no inherent, innate, and fundamentally fixed semantic rule for the multiple proliferation of words as they continued to differentiate themselves through the consensus of use in a given time, across languages, and in subsequent mutations of the word-referent’s connection to the concept. In essence, Saussure’s project measured the motive imitative effects of language that provided the “rules” for the arbitrary game of language. In this way, all signs reside within a framework or system, outside of which such signs would be mere acoustic cacophony, a kind of aphasic vacuum where only pure affirmative differences exist without any stable anchoring referent. To reside outside a system of signs, asserts Saussure, is to be in that impossible realm where language does not exist; but such “outside” or “prelinguistic” zone does not and cannot exist. As Lacan will indicate in his usage of Saussurean linguistics in psychoanalysis, we are all thrust into a system of language that is already-there.

Signs as such exist in three states, of which Saussure concerned himself with the latter: the indexical sign depicts a causal relationship between phenomena (such as in superstition: the black cat is the causal connector to one’s bad luck), the iconic sign the relationship between a representation and its object (a painting of Van Gogh is the resemblance of Van Gogh, and refers to that specific individual), and finally the symbolic sign where gestures and acoustic speech activity denote concepts (giving the “finger”, saying “get lost” etc.).

Saussure’s aim was not to ground any truth to a science of signs as such, but to demonstrate the “coding systems” of reference that produce the possibility of a language of signs. However, this structural linguistics bears in Saussure’s work one aperture where these codes fall into dissolution: the anagram. The anagram produces infinite multiple differentiation of the sign through an ars combinatoria of the orthographs in any sign, producing new semantic relations within a text (forecasting what Derrida himself will engage in the process of deconstruction, as well as reminding us of Borges’ famous Library of Babel).

Enter Derrida. In Of Grammatology, he unseats the hitherto far too conveniently harmonic relation Saussure assigns to the sign as merely another logocentric inscription of privileging phone and the logos over writing and the trace. In the place of the problematic seme, Derrida introduces the silent gramme which “functions” as the sign of an absent present, indicating that a thoroughgoing privilege on voice-as-presence does not necessarily unveil the “truth” unless one’s conception of truth is metaphysically narrow (and therefore an elision of truth by the instauration of a centering monolith, or transcendental signified). Beneath this presence is merely the play of privileged signifiers. Différance is the non-word and non-concept result of Derrida’s destabilization of the classic signifier-signified relationship insofar as the notions of trace and the production/dissemination of differences are what preceded the very possibility of our constructing any notion of a metaphysics of presence, not the other way around. In “différance” there are two spatial qualities and one temporal: to differ in terms of quality or form, differe as in dispersion or dissemination of differences, and finally the notion of deferral—namely, the idea that the sign’s referent can be written while the object to which it refers may not be present (and one is reminded of Chrysippus’ objection of whether an actual chariot passes between the lips when the sign-word is invoked in speech). In this sense, the traditional take on linguistic “signage”, itself laden with the usual metaphysical and ontological baggage of Western philosophical language, is shown to be little more than a production of non-referring differences, motored by an absentee trace that functions akin to force, with neither existence nor essence, and so a wild concatenating play of differences that elude any centering and structuring attempt to reign the sign under the banner of a stable hermeneutic.

In this sense, the sign becomes a symptom of play rather than a system of meaning. This rather hasty leapfrogging from Saussure to Derrida is necessary to foreground the claim that the play of signification abides by a kind of communicative “law” of the production of cancerous multiplicities.

Cancer Event Horizon

However, in order to give validity to a claim that the cancer-effect is what functions as the motive- and sustaining-force of language, what is required is to locate some kind of “event horizon” where this occurs. This event horizon will not be spatial inasmuch as this would make such an eruption of force a spatially originating phenomenon, but rather that it is a roving series of multiple “targets” that occur wherever there is language…and language is spatially nowhere, but is in itself in time. These “hyper-dense regions” of metastasizing forces appear to function akin to super massive black holes, and it is in this way that nothing can escape their pull. In the densest regions of text there appears to be the highest incidence of observable cancer-effect, or its possibility, as language itself collapses into a kind of force-mass that draws into itself text, twisting and distorting it (thereby producing new variations of text).[7]

With all this palaver on the linguistic end of the cancer-principle, what we should bear strongly in mind is the relationship this turn to language actually has with a way of thought. For in the very constitution of Thought and Being there always exist irreducible remainders – a point already well advanced by Nietzsche, Bergson, Bataille, and Deleuze. These remainders cannot be reabsorbed into the pure concepts of the understanding. Certainly, Kant could ferry creativity (one such non-absorbable remainder) into the realm of sensuous intuitions modified in part by the analogies of experience which would then make it an object of judgement. This can be performed much to the satisfaction of Reason, but at the violent expense of seeing such things as creativity, monstrosity, abjection, obscenity, and ambiguity in the wan light of axiological consideration. It would be dolorous for some to abide by the very idea that something as metastatic as creativity should be made to serve the Understanding, that it is in fact deduced from it. In the end, the lineage is illegitimate; creativity may subtend the understanding, but has the familial relationship to it that Form and simulacrum do. Perhaps there is something salvageable in the Kantian philosophy, especially in terms of the ideas of pure reason. In the transcendental dialectic, an absolute whole determines the sum parts in the aggregate – so far, no victory for metastatic difference... The ideas of Soul, World, and God, are not objects, but have a regulative function in pure reason as postulates of practical reason. Since Soul concerns substance, World concerns causality, and God the notions of freedom and necessity, could we not also append this cancer principle to the triad? This would fail for at least two reasons: 1. the cancer principle could potentially be held or explained by Reason under the three ideas; and, 2. To label this cancer-principle of existence its own category is to contradict all that we have so far achieved in explanation, installing a soi-distant transcendent principle, constructing a hierarchy, and granting some degree of purposive telos to the principle itself. The one road Kant conveniently affords us is the dynamical antinomy where what Reason and logic may consider opposition (say, the contradiction it may read between difference as affirmative or difference as negative) may in fact be compatible. It is the same with metastasis and apoptosis, creation and critique, each their own dynamical antinomy that are potentially compatible views on the grounds that each are essentially one movement with two perspectives or effects. There are at least two ways of resolving an antinomy. One is to rephrase the problem with a clarity that no longer pits two terms or propositions unduly in opposition, and this is generally the tactic of trumping both formulations with a higher principle. Second is to abandon the fear of antinomious statements and embrace them, and the method of embracing antinomies as celebratory is to give them a different expression outside of that domain of stultifying logic.

Kane X. Faucher (BA, MA, Ph.D) (1977- ) was born in Ottawa, Canada. His activities span academic and creative projects, most notably in writing, continental theory, visual art, and music. He has a doctorate in Theory and Criticism, as well as two degrees in philosophy. He has published over 500 pieces in several journals, magazines, anthologies, and books.  He currently lives and works in London, Canada.