Non-Mother/EvePrime: Technesis without Entropy

(or a Philo-fiction about Future Silence)

By Yvette Granata




Introductory Note:


We have a phrase: ‘Kill Deleuze like Jesus,’ in which we are the Romans and Deleuze is Jesus. This is how we say ahead of time: we are not innocent. We are aware of the blood on our hands. What we are working on is a non-Philosophy apocrypha, written as books in which a ‘book’ refers to a set of writings in a larger book, such as the Bible. We will spend the next fifteen to twenty years writing and rewriting the Book. As of now, the first book is called the Book of Zero (‘Book 0’). In it, we propose a concept called ‘Eve Prime.’ This paper stems from the work on this book and includes a small introduction to the concept of Eve Prime. This paper is not in the Book, but is my interpretation.

Part I

Jean-Francois Lyotard asks: Can Thought Go On Without a Body? A thought that continues ‘without a body’ is located outside of the body, outside of the skin and skeleton.

But where is this thought without a body? Is it a computer? A computer is a body the same as the body with organs and skin. It is just a plastic body with wires and silicon chips. This pair of things, ’thought without a body’ and a ‘thought within a computer’ is a category of thought that is recognizable only because it is thought of as already inside of bodies, whether human or plastic body. Computer bodies and human bodies are not that different. They are that which is within a recognizable body-based and earthly economy, otherwise known as the solar economy.

The solar economy is the condition of exchange on Earth which bends always towards an exchange that increases entropy. This lays down a rule for a future in which machines will be made to crunch data in greater complexity and as always moving towards the singular goal of increasing entropy. The relationship of greater complexity producing greater entropy in effect produces the grand assassin of artificial intelligence — animals, humans, and machines in an interspecies production of a death drive-based intelligence, all towards the production of greater entropy. To follow the solar economy in its relation to machines and entropy,  the singularity, is then always an intelligence machine beyond humans - and “phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve… Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” The point of no return occurs when the human produces the machine that produces more entropy than humanity.  But what?

Haraway says ‘all of our technologies are sunshine’. Kittler starts his analysis of fiber optic algorithmic wars as beginning with ‘the cult of the sun’. The technological singularity begins with the sun and ends as intelligence unbound from the body-in-a-solar-economy. In other words, The solar economy shapes our concept of thought, technology, intelligence, rationality. Sun thought assumes thought as that which has been reduced already into a recognizable form of intelligence and on the free unregulated neoliberal market, not bounded by the numerical gravity of inflation bubbles. Global negative interest rates all point to another singularity: the Meltdown is relative. Entropy is time-dependent, a vector that can only move in one direction. As Isabelle Stengers points out: the arrow of time is entropy, entropy is the arrow of time. Because of this, the solar economy can only logically produce a machinic ordering of the dissipation of energy. Or As Villem Fluser says — the devil is Time. The question that I seek to answer departs from the vector of entropy embedded in the solar economy and instead traces the possibility of another technological singularity.  

‘Capitalism’ is endlessly conflated with life. Only something living can have the function of dying. Dissipation and death turn around each other the way the terms ‘political’ and ‘economy’ twist and turn together. Bataille’s solar economy is based on the food chain, conceived within the hieracrchies of apex predators. But what are predators when they are not assassins? They are hoarders, so that — a domesticated dog will also eat itself to death if you let it. In this way, Captialism also induces a non-knowledge unrelated to survival and consumption — a useless skill, a worthless habit, just a strange form of gluttonous boredom.


What then is a technesis without the solar economy?

Part II: Prions.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about prions. I’ve been obsessing about them actually, because they terrify me. Prions are what cause mad cow disease and other degenerative brain diseases. Scientists are not in agreement about whether they are a category of life or something else. They are a protein structure that cause all other protein structures to warp into the shape of themselves. Unlike a virus and bacteria, they do not have or use DNA. They do not feed on life, they only mutate life into the shape of itself. Prions are neither alive nor dead but a non-life. They can move in between living and dead things, and you can’t kill them. They survive fire, chemicals, and even radiation. They never ever ever die. And they can lay dormant in anything, forever.




Prions are a non-entropic process. They do not seem to live within the rules of the solar economy, but something more akin to an economy of gravity.


The prion is an inversion of Maxwell’s demon, not release of energy through the production of work, not the recursion of reason nor fractals deployed through a looping function. It is an aleatory darkness,  a 3Deification of the nano, where tiny dark particles open and close at once, rather than appear and disappear. Prions are not entities like electrons, but spatial gaps that tear open the light, as if an inverted lightning streaking the non-geometry of the plane of existence. Energy is not dissipated here but contracted, compacted into a crystalline form, like a jet black battery-diamond.


Stated differently, Prions are not like entropy — which is the second law of thermodynamics —  but are instead more like the first law of thermodynamics: like energy, they are neither created or destroyed. In this way, thinking about prions has revealed to me: that it is the first law of thermodynamics, and not the second, which is truly horrifying.

Part III: The Non-Mother, or Eve Prime.

There are many figures for the solar economy, for the second law of thermodynamics, such as Prometheus, the transhumanist, Nick Land’s disembodied floating head as an anime meme, but there are few figures that represent the first law of thermodynamics. I’m making Prions one. Another one is the monstrous mother. The Greek goddess Nyx, the personification of night, the mother of the gods and the beginning of creation, mother of Sleep, of Thanatos (death), Erebus (darkness), and Zeus. She has no predecessor and is born out of chaos itself. She is a great and terrible power and the world would not exist without her. She is the first technology, and the only figure that Zeus fears. Zeus on the other hand is seen as the king of Gods and the ruler. The trope of Nyx enables the argument of Zeus as the ruler because of the personified gender quality of male as orderly ruler, and female as embodiment of the destruction of chaos (aka all of Jordan Peterson’s argument). The other figure is Eve in the garden who represents the birth of all of humanity’s death.

Eve, Medusa, Lilith, Echidna, Nure-Onna, Cleopatra, Cassandra, the Devil. This imagistic denigration from benevolent to devilish has haunted theology and western philosophy. their iconic association, the omnivoracious mother, and slippery materiality. The opportunity for feminist philosophy to critique and correct sexist and patriarchal constructions in theology and philosophy has been vast.

There are many figures for restoring the feminine image by feminist theorists working from within the conditions of the solar economy. Often it is the figure of the reclamation of the monstrous mother- the medusa, haraway’s cyborg. Helene Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa” speaks through this image and the snake-monster that medusa is, in which repression of body turns body itself into a medium. She utilizes the female body not as foil but as a medium of communication, a tool through which women speak, a new writing of the Word of God. The body-medium vehicle drives upwards, transcending the boundaries placed on and created by its materiality. For Cixous, a feminine writing practice is always undefined, so as to be a resistance, impossible to capture. A feminine practice of writing into obscurity, an unknown, an apophatic mysticism. Irigay instead makes a feminine divinity in order to restore the image of woman.

This reclaimation of the mother monster in this way aims to remove the theological kernel of androcentricity by removing the distinction of naturalized essentialisms of the sexed body, and replaces philosophy’s androcentric theological core with a material fluidity. In breaking apart this originary hierarchy, it removes or makes obsolete Western theosophy’s exclusive central categories of analysis, its central images. This is the method by which feminisms have repaired or reformed the damage produced by an originary hierarchal violence. In which ”philosophy becomes cannibalised by feminism”.

But what if I am a feminist and I am not hungry to eat this philosophy? Can this philosophy within the solar economy just eat itself without my having to eat it?

A different ancestral image is proposed with the figure of Eve Prime. Eve Prime is formed in a cosmopolitics of instability. Eve prime is a non-philosophical proposition. It proceeds without expecting reaction, or as a ‘feminism-without-example’ and without restoration or retribution.  Eve 1 is “sexed” only inasmuch as it is a generic technology of self-replication, similar in kind to prion structures. It is terrifying but consumes nothing.

Held as a conceptual (non)sex of the universe, not a gender nor a body to restore to dignity, not a female to restore to divinity, nor a category to renounce biologically or materially.  Eve1 is an envelopment and a bracketing of the a priori position of “entropy”.

Eve prime is a non-mother.



Eve1 is not a foundation for the conceptual production of politico-philosophical justice, nor a thought even for human bodies per se.




Eve1 is axiomatic, without a philosophical position.




Eve1 is not Mother Earth, but a dumb DNA-less structure that endlessly repeats forever.




Eve 1 is not Gaia. Eve prime hates Gaia and is anti-gaia.




Eve1 is not an artificial intelligence but an intelligent fall out shelter. 




Eve 1 Prime is a form of non-silence.

Future Silence

Asked to comment on the future, Francois Laruelle replied, “no.”


Rather than imagining the future or an analysis about a future, Laruelle poses non-philosophy instead as ‘future-thought’.


What are ‘future thoughts’ as opposed to the imagining of the future? What is a concept that takes place in and not just in preparation of the future?

No no no no no no no.

Eve prime is a concept created in response to Laruelle’s proposition; of this singular response of ‘no’ in answer to thinking about the future.  It is a philo-fiction of the silence of a future thought — or a non future in answer to the question of the future within the answer of no. Eve prime is an a prior no future. No no no no no no no no no no no no no. The synthetic a priori is not Kant’s discovery of the operations of reason, but the failure to recognize the operative function of the negative knowledge of the non-solar economy. Like the deep silence of prions, that neither live nor die, you can only learn the non future of Eve prime by learning that you can never ever experience it.