Always Already
Were I to condense critical theory down to its most basic element—critical theory in a nutshell—that basic element would be the common refrain always already. To use in a sentence: You are subject, always already, to forces that precede your reckoning, if not your existence. While the existentialist claims that existence precedes essence, the practitioner of always already, on the contrary, claims that the Real precedes existence; what the philosopher calls being is but a mere predicate added to always already, ad hoc and after-the-fact. Any attempt to gain knowledge or establish reality will always be late. Always already is isometric; operating at the scale of political economy, as in Marx, or on the scale of individual helplessness: for example, you are subject to your parent’s desire, always already. Always already is the time of psychoanalysis: the (rather long) process of becoming aware of what has happened to you, always already. Nachträglichkeit, the psychoanalyst’s notion of time—the retroactive time of trauma—is an early version of always already, although by no means the only one; and that is itself derived—probably—from medieval Kabbalistic notions of emanation and belatedness: waking up to exile; creation proceeding from catastrophe. Now, always already is a whole zeitgeist and mood, as when the psychonaut describes modernity as coming-too at dusk, after the biggest trip of all time, seeing the colors in the sky and understanding that something enormous has happened, but never sure quite what it was. François Laruelle may be said to have founded an entire non-philosophy upon such unilateral emanations and his central notion of Determination in the Last Instance is a concrescence of always already, but now with an added future-forwards indeterminacy, or swerve…
