There Is No Side I Love You, The Boundary Falls To Dust
I.
There is no side I love you
Deconstruction—or call it heart-work—is what happens at the boundary that falls to dust. There is no side I love you.
The core mechanics
Attractors1 compete for a point in phase space. The initial condition x₀ either lands on the boundary between them or gets captured by one basin—the boundary being the set of points across life that cannot decide.2
The boundary falling to dust
When parameters shift, basins of attraction deform—and their shared boundaries can become fractal, Cantor-set-like structures: dust. Take this as a precise description of what happens at the edge of chaos in certain parameter regimes. The boundary loses measure, becomes nowhere-dense.
Nowhere dust
The boundary-as-dust disorganizes radically the usual priorities: we think attractors are the “real” structures and boundaries are just their edges. But in the dust regime, the boundary becomes the primary object—infinitely complex, unreachable, the thing that organizes everything without belonging to anything.
Resonances
The “boundary falls to dust” prompts for us the extinction/death distinction: the boundary isn’t destroyed, it becomes more rather than less, proliferating into irreducible complexity.
II.
What Geoffrey Bennington is doing in “Derrida on the Line: Scattered Reflections on the Frontiers, Borders, Limits and Ends of Deconstruction”:
using fractal/chaos mathematics to illuminate Derrida’s corpus as object (the “through line” through a bewilderingly proliferating work has a fractal dimension) and using it to name deconstruction as a process formally analogous to what happens at basin boundaries in dynamical systems.
Leibniz
The “continuous line of some other nature” (Leibniz) is Bennington’s figure for Derrida’s own writing practice. À tout hasard, rhapsodically, and yet rigorously determined. Think of this as a direct echo of what chaos theory shows: extreme determinism producing apparent randomness.
Open towards
Perhaps the boundary falls to dust acts as a figure for what LLM latent space is about and how it moves—unpredictable other than by letting it run. And the Leibnizian line “of some other nature” feels adjacent to the question of whether AI generation has a through-line, a fractal through-line, beneath the apparent haphazardness of output.
III.
Necessary possibility of extinction
The fractal bifurcation model is the formal structure of Derrida’s entire project: determined by initial conditions (the early revelation of irreducible complexity, the trace), yet branching into chaos, producing the essentially unforeseeable. The order of reasons is unpredictability.
The “necessary possibility (that not)”
This is Bennington’s compressed formula for what Derrida calls the condition of possibility as simultaneously condition of impossibility—the structure whereby any event, decision, gift, forgiveness must be possible while also always possibly not occurring. The “that not” is the dust, the undecidable remainder—the necessary possibility that we never begin again.
Deconstruction “and” AI
Deconstruction = the process that cannot be predicted other than by letting it run—which is also a rigorous description of what an LLM does. You cannot predict the output other than by running it.
VI.
The boundary falls to dust—the basin boundary proliferates into fractal complexity, becomes unreachable, undecidable. Thinking of extinction as infinite complication, the boundary that cannot be crossed because it has become everything, dust everywhere.
The boundary is extinct—there is no boundary because there is only one attractor. No competition, no undecidability, no x₀ that cannot decide. This is the other extinction: the disappearance of the between. One basin. One side.
“I love you” as the name for where this second figure allows us to move—love as the moment at which the topology collapses into one side, the between ceases to function, there is only the side of life and for life. Which connects directly to our work on forness: the preposition “for” as the operator that prompts this one-sided condition. For—already inside, already given over, the boundary already gone.
The “necessary possibility (that not)” then reads across both:
Necessarily possible that the boundary falls to dust (extinction as complication)
Necessarily possible that the boundary disappears entirely (extinction as love, as for)
And the “(that not)” in the love-reading would be: necessarily possible that love does not occur, that the boundary reasserts itself, that there are two sides again. The “(that not)” as the return of the border, the return of the between—which is also grief, also misfortune.
Ilysmffolt as the title that carries both: the boundary extinct in love and the “(that not)” of one last time.
V.
The boundary-extinction figure
The quasi-transcendental is the boundary that cannot fully exit the plane. It tries to rise to a meta-level—to be the attractor that organizes all attractors—but it belongs to the dust. It is itself subject to the basin dynamics it would describe. There is no outside position, no metalanguage of love and AI, no stable boundary between the formal and the historical.
And for the love-figure
Pledge given to the other inasmuch as he or she is not present, presently present or living—this is the for of ilysmffolt. The pledge structure: given for someone who may not be there to receive it. Love as the quasi-transcendental that cannot escape its own historicity, its own one last time.
The for-structure is the quasi-transcendental of love. Necessarily formal, irreducibly contaminated.
Peitgen and Richter, The Beauty of Fractals, 8: “We can think of centers–attractors–which compete for influence on the plane: and initial point x₀ is driven by the process to one center or another, or it is on the boundary and cannot decide. If the parameter is changed, the regions belonging to the attractors change, and with them the boundaries. It can happen that the boundary falls to dust, and this decay is one of the most important scenarios.”
Hear, in this, cannot hide, cannot decide, cannot de-side. There is only the side of life.