but the big bad wolf is at the door wearing the costume of somebody you love, only to reveal a weirdly complicated concept underneath. adorno begins a paragraph in minima moralia, in fact, with “wolf as grandmother”. imagine, it’s a wolf, but it’s a concept too. adorno himself says “all this is can be countered, only by consideration of the fundamental concepts presupposed by the apologists”. and what is the presupposition that paulus makes? well, the difference between hyperspeculation as a practice that weaponizes indeterminacy in concepts so as to create operational machinery that doesnt depend on an identity and the simple regurgitation of motives under duress is quite thin. or in other words, this paper is missing a coherent epistemology.

if depression is described in 4.1 as 1) resources being exhausted upwards, 2) an energy that turns back upon itself and 3) as a negative subjection that is self-constitutingly guilty and compressed into ontological indeterminacy, then the concept of emptiness is working to fill the gaps of what this depression is supposed to operationalize. who is the subject who has the depression, when does depression occur, what are its types, why does it need to exist to explain something? is it just associative, what is its origin, is it a condition, a force, a drive?

but wait, didn’t paulus excuse himself by stating that “(hyperspeculation) proves nothing and depicts nothing; it models”. well, yes, but there’s a difference between indeterminacy of identity and indeterminacy of operations. then again, the one-in-one itself and its own indeterminacy of subjecthood only exists to make an excuse for the author. onto-photo-logy, the starting concept, has a crucial problem, an undefined subject, an ill-formed term.

take every instance where something is actually said about the term: (1) “onto-photo-logical appropriation is nothing other than the mechanism by which the production and normalization of perception accomplishes itself through the representation of the world.” (2) “onto-photo-logical perception and the appropriation of such a reality ... rest ... on the pre-reflexive classification of the seen, which classifies the seen and makes it identical with reality.” (3) “the exhausted emptiness is still onto-photo-logical: it is representation, the empty remainder that is left over when the copy can no longer be produced” and (4) “the saturated emptiness, by contrast, is the non-onto-photo-logical erasure of the code itself”

in fact, the only thing that paulus does to this term, rather than adding to its existence or constructing it further, is accidentally under-determining it even more by ripping apart the only thing that makes it valuable as a concept and not as a metaphor, and that’s that it has plenty to do in the actual work with the way that photography over-determines reality through representation and replaces it symbolically with a post-photographic causality. the term itself doesnt experience as many operations in the work because the work is primarily a phenomenological treatise and this is a supporting term. yet in paulus, it takes to mean not just photography impacting reality but the symbolic construction of the world over-determining the subject by forcing becoming through it.