God is a number you cannot count to
god is a number you cannot count to
- marilyn manson
if the image of manson was to precede the statement he makes, most people would at first glance (at least) dismiss his words simply as an atheist or god-hating sentiment. it’s not hard to understand, given the “bad name” on postmodern pop culture these days.
i’m not a fan nor a scholar of lacanian theories. but if anything, there seems to be a continuity between the posthuman sentiments uttered by manson here and that of the real order.
that is, suppose the real was something transcendental - beyond the limits of human comprehension - numbers which are part of our social vocabulary form pretty much part of our language and therefore of the symbolic order.
and if lacan was an willy old man to be trusted, then this utterance/evocation of “god” is simply an expression of the symbolic - therefore almost already punctuated by loss and absence. (i would even go as far as to say “god” (word) is merely a metaphor for what it wishes to signify but never truly simulate)
derrida’s idea (differrend) that language is structured around absence haunts this cognitive space: difference and deferment.
god then becomes an entity beyond language, a presence that absence (in the symbolic) can only try to “count” up to, but never really reach. like the last sheep in one’s sheep-counting attempts. before we sleep/slip into another plane of reality, there’s always this last sheep we cannot “count” nor capture in the imagination.
before anyone dismisses “pop culture,” think again. i am not supporting “radio trash” or “commercialized crap,” but neither am i playing the long-lost son of adorno. yet, something needs to be said about this postmodern/posthuman epoch we find ourselves plugged into.
