Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik, Vol XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.
The path of the void and of non-being is the path that one cannot possibly adopt and therefore one must not adopt it (‘it must not be’) – but why the prohibition since one cannot conceivably adopt it at all?
Why prohibit something that cannot be anyway?
The tacit presupposition of the first statement, its implicit assumption, is that one must act in favour of being to counteract a possible catastrophe, to abjure the void. One is on a battlefront, and being is a weapon one has to use against an unfathomable enemy.
… being would be like a defense mechanism against the void, and by presenting being as a matter of choice and decision there is a disavowed primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos.
So how did the void come about? It came about as the discourse of being as the defense mechanism against the void.
Atomism emerged as a reaction against the Parmenidian assertion of being, not accepting the choice and the alternative, but taking both paths at the same time, … it introduces the void as the essential component of being. … one posits the non-being at the core of being
atomism includes a certain insight that Hegel sees as valid and far-reaching, namely that there is a principle of negativity which moves both thought and being, and that this principle forms the inside of both at their core,
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The Lacanian real – and if there is a Lacanian materialism, then it pertains to the notion of the real – is neither a thought, an idea, nor a being (nor matter for that matter), but something emerging precisely in their rift, something that gets lost in the subsequent self-evident division into being and thought and their opposition.
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So what is indivisible to Hegel is neither the one nor the void, the indivisible is the division itself.
However far we seek for a minimal element, we never arrive at a one as the minimal and the indivisible, but at the division. … what cannot be divided any further is the division;
Against the Parmenidian exorcism of the void, he takes up the atomistic espousal of the void as the way to address the basic matrix of being.
Against the exclusion of the void, there is the inclusion of the void into each particle, the missing half of anything positively existing, of any manifestation of being, and this invisible missing half endows being with Unruhe, its unrest, its restlessness, its being ever propelled, the fact that it can only be addressed in its becoming, its production and its incompleteness.