Suture is stitching. It is suture to name someone or something. The name and body of the sutured thing are stitched together. Symbolic aspect of suture is the object’s name, real aspect of suture is the object itself [1].

Sudur is emanation, emission. The initial sense of sudur is a physical emission. Examples of physical sudur: Light illuminating its environment, electromagnetic wave propagating in its medium, nuclear radiation, emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The religious and philosophical meaning of sudur refers to how the multiplicity in the universe emanates from the singularity of God. This notion is explained by physical metaphors: Just like a light source, God originated from a point and reached almost everywhere in the universe. God not necessarily reaching everywhere accounts for the dark places in the world where evil lurks.

Another meaning of sudur is the publication of a book in the printing press on behalf of a publisher or the publication of a text on a webpage. This conceptual similarity explains the fact that throughout history the most enthusiastic clients of the printing press have always been religious book publishers.

Another meaning of sudur is symbolic sudur, namely the aura that envelops an impressive artwork. According to Walter Benjamin, symbolic sudur has decomposed and dissipated in the age of mechanical reproduction [2].

According to Žižek, “sudur depends on suture”. He sums up their relation as follows:

This difference between (fixed) structural places and the (variable) terms that occupy these places is crucial in order to break the fetishistic coagulation of a term with its place, to make us aware of the extent to which the aura emanating from an object [its sudur] hinges not on the object’s direct properties, but on the place it occupies [its suture]. (Less Than Nothing, p. 600)

Let’s explain this using a famous example: By taking an urinal, naming it “Fountain” and putting it in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition as an artwork, Marcel Duchamp enacted a suture operation. Its sudur is how this artwork gradually became the turning point of modern art, the model for all the “installations” that will constitute the contemporary art decades later.

Confirming Benjamin’s narrative, in the case of “Fountain” we truly witness the decomposition of artistic sudur, but this decomposition does not dissolve and extinguish the aura that envelops the work. It’s more like radioactive decay or chemical disintegration: The more it fragments and crumbles, the greater the field its sudur covers.

The decomposition of symbolic sudur is the passage from alienation to separation in psychoanalysis, namely the separation of the object-cause of desire (objet a) from the desired object (artwork or beloved person). Mourning and dissolving the melancholic residue belongs to this very decomposition operation.

The property of sudur to propagate as it decomposes has a general name; it’s called entropy. In quantum physics this implies that the universe is emergent. The dependence of sudur on suture is the dependence of the increasing entropy on the conservation of energy. In economy, this is how labor-power is steered by money, it’s how “all that is solid melts into air” through capital accumulation [3].

Suture and sudur are two operations that cut across each other. The subject is at the exact point of their intersection. Here’s a diagram:

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “The Separation of Authorization (Symbolic Suture) from Embodiment (Real Suture)”, “Fütursuz Çağa Karşı Sütur”

[2] See “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin

[3] According to Erik Verlinde, gravity is entropic and emergent, see “Incomplete Universe: Energy & Entropy, All & Not-All”; about capital, see “The Perverse Core of Labor-Power: Making Oneself Used”