omnicidepodcast

The End On one night among many, a man sets ablaze a random building or village and then dances.

What persuaded this implausible design into incarnated possibility to become the exclusive signature of his touch? Another convenes a militia or a cult legion, donning long robes of self-deification. What folkloric principle or totemic theology could have drawn this otherwise unfathomable streak to the surface of his mind-body? A woman declares herself the enemy of certain archaic gods and stabs her forearm upwards with sacred weapon in hand. What gives her warrant to pierce the skies? These questions must be answered, for everyone's sake.

They must be approached through a detailed practicum of mania. Omnicide, the killing of everything What kind of miniaturist enchantment would lead someone to end the world? Hi, welcome back. I'm Robin Mackay, director of Arbenomic and you've just been listening to the voice of Jason Babak-Moharig reading from his book Omnicide, Mania, Fatality and the Future in Delirium recently published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press. In this podcast, Jason joined me for an in-depth discussion around this fascinating book, which is remarkable not only for its subject matter, but also for the way in which he negotiates it.

It's both a conceptual and a poetic work, but also a kind of grimoire or a recipe book, an enchantment and an apprenticeship in a certain very specific mode of thought. Through the lens of ten of the most intense poets and writers of the Middle East and North Africa, Omnicide examines the myriad ways in which an obsessional, manic focus can be transmuted into a radical impulse to destroy everything else in the universe, everything that stands in the way of the object of mania, even the manic subject itself. The book is a kind of catalogue of manias extracted from the work of these poets, magnified and intensified by Mohawk Egg's exacting interpretive procedures.

It opens with a table of manias, only a small fraction of which have been explored by the end of the book. An absolutely unique piece of work, which I spent much of the last year working on together with the author, and became absorbed by its strange texture and its very musical style. so it was a pleasure to be joined by Jason who among other things is a fantastic raconteur to discuss the motivations and influences behind the book and to ask him to expand on some of the implications of his work for the podcast we're also joined by Dr Amy Ireland you can find many of Amy's writings online including one on the Urbanomic website she's also editor of the collection

Aesthetics After Finitude published by Repress and she recently authored an amazing essay for the sleeve notes of Hecker's Inspection 2 CD just released by Editions Mago and Urbanomic. And I'm also working on getting my hands on her recently completed PhD on Xenopoetics, pneumogrammetology and intensity with a view to future publication. As well as being a friend, a regular interlocutor and also a translator she's currently working on francois jay bonnet's after death for 2020. amy is also along with reza negra astani one of the people who first introduced me to jason's work so it seemed appropriate to invite her along for the discussion too and as you'll hear it was quite

the lengthy discussion this is actually an edited version it did take place also across three time zones on Skype with me in the UK, Jason in the US and Amy from the sound of it on a traffic island somewhere in Singapore. So I'm afraid the sound quality isn't always great. But I hope you enjoy the extra insights into Mohawkig's omnicidal enterprise. For more information you can head over to the Urbanomic website where you can read my preface to Omnicide. There's also a video of Jason's presentation at Sequence Press's launch of the book in New York. You can find that at sequencepress.com. And by the way, this is quite an achievement.

This is the second podcast in two weeks, which hopefully is an omen of things to come. We hope to revive the website and get up some more documents and podcasts on there. The last year's been a bit of an arduous inferno of admin. as we try to rationalise and streamline the processes and fall into step with a new distribution arrangement, which hopefully is already getting the books out to more people in more places. And let me say thanks to Matt, aka XenoGoth, who's been a tremendous help getting through that process. We do have an amazing line-up of titles for 2020, and as we get more on top of the schedule,

we'll try to make sure that the release has become more regular and also hopefully readers in the US won't have to wait so long after the UK release as we go forward and as I said we'll try to accompany that with more podcasts documents and other fun stuff I will be talking very soon with Thomas Moynihan about his book Spinal Catastrophism if you want to be first to hear about what's going on please do join the email list you can do that on the website and i'm also going to try to start sending out more regular monthly email updates so i apologize for interrupting let's slide straight into this manic conversation with jason babak mohakhig and amy island on omnicide

mania fatality and the future in delirium The first thing that animated me was the challenge of deciphering how catastrophe becomes a form of elegance, if not the most elegant formulation of consciousness. In this sense, my first five books are each engaged with some overarching concept, chaos, violence, silence, extremity and disappearance, finally. And so with this book I was seeking a centrifuge, kind of, that would coalesce these five thematic elements almost simultaneously into a single gesture. And mania seemed to capture that combination rather powerfully, taking us across the rungs of a ladder from desire to annihilation. But just at the outset, to clarify the book's own definitional title, Omnicide for me, for

the record, was not about a nihilistic surrender to extinction. It's about precisely summoning the creative will to a certain threshold whereby it's forced to devise something fascinating in the face of imminent despair. In this way, it's a kind of perfect testing ground for the beauty of doomed thought. You ask what someone might dare dream when everything is collapsing around them, or an attempt to conjure lightning, sort of the lightning of radical originality within darkness and erasure. So again, omnicide is not a passive fixation of destruction, but rather a gamble that certain ultimate registers of creative possibility are reached only at the threshold of universal collapse. Somewhere I think in the book, Robin, I call it the visionary's last gift.

The idea that there's some rare, for lack of a better word, sacred geometry of intensity or becoming attained only amid the final throws. Or the paradoxical discovery of an avant-garde that emerges only at the moment of scorched earth events. So that's what I found with these figures, is that they stare into a world that's gone too far beyond the point of no return. And the almost miraculous thing is that they do fashion something. In the total absence of a future, on borrowed time and in states of almost incomprehensible solitude, and with no promised audience, in the wake of pure futility, somehow in the desolation they decide to dance or recite or sculpt something and show a heightened manifestation of their craft.

In the wake of catastrophic actions initiated by some obscure figure, rebel, mystic, insurgent, felon, artist, the ensuing social discursive panic serves only to cloak the more pressing question of how they were ever capable of this thing. How not in the scandalized moral sense, but in the predestinarian sense of an accomplished inevitability? What words or impulses effectuated the vital task at hand? We must therefore start by compiling an inventory of incandescent delusions, the personal derangements, myths, stories and legends one must tell oneself in order to become a dangerous phenomenon. What would suffice is nothing less than a catalogue of insane reinventions of subjectivity

in an always already insane world. Each example of Omnisai provides us with an inhalation-exhalation reflex. More specifically, together they chart the ever-contorted yet viable channels between some attractive universe of adoration, worship, intoxication or astonishment, and the overarching instinct to engender oblivion beyond that universe, through hatred, envy, indifference, rage or forgetting. which is the singular imaginative link between madness and vengeance. A prospective explanation for the origins of both terrorism and poetry. The literary figures that I chose, as you know,

there are ten writers from various locations of the so-called Middle East and North Africa. They all share a few things, but most importantly, in my mind, all of them have quietly sworn an oath to a challenge that was set forward by the ancients. Namely, they possess an acute knowledge of the fact that the earliest civilizations of the region, Babylonians, Sumerians, the Persians, the Egyptians, and this is a remarkable thing for me, that almost alongside the invention of poetic and cosmological writing, they gave rise to another genre of writing, which was doomsday visions. And so sometimes these were prophetic and embodied by strange gods or brutal natural forces. Sometimes they were forms of nomadic storytelling and narration. But either way, it's a millennially old game to contemplate this question of what words belong to the last night of existence.

And this is something that these authors carry right through the heart of modernity and beyond. And so despite the fact that every one of them has more sanitized public sort of perceptions, Every single one of these authors in Omnicide has at some fugitive hour composed a line or a verse that has this apocalyptic sensibility. So my job then was to hunt after those dangerous occasions and catch them in that split second of wrath or delirium when no one's noticing how far they're willing to take their talents. Sometimes it's more subtle. For example, it's kind of like a whisper of condemned breath, like when Furugh Farukhzad says, quote, and sometimes I weep for the garden. And sometimes it's more flagrant, like when Adonis, the great Syrian poet, says,

and I tell my brothers, bring your axes. But either way, whether it's soft or jagged, the book discovers them in those faraway provinces where they stand at the cliff's edge and unleash either the burning, freezing, flooding, poisoning, or disintegration of entire cities. And the way that I interpret that is that it's precisely how they measure their ability to become both enchanting and unstoppable. writing in the Middle East is no joke. I always say that. And it often comes at severe cost and a cost that seems foreign to us in the Western world. So the wondrous figures on that list of 10, however eloquent, however stunning, and they are among the most iconic and revered voices of their lands. Each one of them has experienced prison, torture, exile, famine, war, extreme

poverty and persecution beyond belief, which means that each of them has walked with omnicide as a kind of existential reality at various moments. Every poem or passage, and this is quite literal, every poem or passage that they conceive has the ominous potentiality of maybe being their last passage, which is why they are merciless in the way that they compose elegy after elegy, anthem after anthem, because they quite literally face unbearable circumstances and horizons. So this is another thing that I wanted to explore, which became an omnicidal principle, and I'll end with this point, which is that how these figures and these strands of thought or experience are only capable of becoming the most cruel because they've also been the most vulnerable. Selenomania, Obsession with the Moon

Opening quote by Ahmed Ashomlu To rekindle the moon, I climbed to the roof with agate stone and grass and mirror. A cold scythe passed across the sky that banned the flight of doves. The pine said something in a whisper, and the night watchman frantically drew swords upon the birds. The moon did not rise. we encounter our seventh selenomaniac in the midst of an esoteric ritual preparing certain occult ingredients for an invocation to recover lost moonlight he carefully places these formal articles into a black satchel and smuggles them to the rooftop

where some combination of potions tonics and sorcerer's words will come together to reawaken a past lunarity. However, it is also evident from the worried description above that we find ourselves in a deeply totalitarian interlude, an age of perpetual unglitering midnight masterminded by those who quote, banned the flight of doves and drew swords upon the birds. Meaning that the selenium maniac's right represents an outlawed act, something aligned with the old, expunged ways. This is not the only time this poetic figure references drawing blades on the moon, for elsewhere he warns the reader to quote, unfold your tent beside the night, but if the moon rises, draw your sword from its sheath and set it beside you.

This type of maniacal thought reminds us of Xerxes the Great, emperor of Persia and builder of the Hall of a Hundred Columns, who struck the Greek city-states with a convoy allegedly carrying a million soldiers, and led by an elite scale-armored band of fighters known as the Immortals, but who most tellingly, in the present connection, commanded his generals after a storm to lash a strait 300 times and cast chains into its waters as punishment for thwarting his efforts to cross it with his fleet. Thus the question is set before us. What is it exactly that occurs when one punishes an ocean channel with whips and manacles, or takes a steel weapon to the moon? Are the psychoanalysts right to pore over such dreams only to yield reductive interpretations of paranoia?

Or is there a grander cosmological tremor in play here? Some magnificent determination known only to mad emperors and sorcerer poets. A megalomaniacal gesticulation that actually makes viable for a split second what was otherwise foolish. Must not the will, in its most daring hours, aspire toward this fabulous extent? closer to fairy tale than reality principle blending extreme reservation that it might fail with extreme arrogance that it might succeed. For which certain hidden procedures and blatant confrontations might sometimes rest the most outlying phenomena

into the closest quarters. This is making me think of this story that you told me a couple of years ago that just stayed with me. It was about Ahmad Shamloo writing lullabies in his prison cell. It stayed with me. I've told it to countless people. I've also started kind of thinking about a project on lullabies with friends because it's haunted me so much. This kind of paradox of being absolutely deprived of agency, being maximally constrained in reality in a tiny cell. I'm not sure if it's the same story,

but I also remember you telling me about one of these poets being subjected to mock executions. Absolutely. Is that Shamnu as well? That is, indeed. Yeah. And so this kind of terror that was being enacted upon him by the guards, within that absolutely tiny space of free movement, the one thing that he found he was able to do was to compose these poems or works on his wall and chose the form of a lullaby, which is interesting. It has a really interesting history, the lullaby as well. It's a dark contract to deceive someone or send someone into the underworld. And I think it's kind of lost that element when we think about it in contemporary

contemporary culture. It's like a sweet kind of thing. But it really has this dark underside. And he uses this to, following the story or what I remember of it, to wrest some modicum of freedom back by being productive, by producing something within this absolutely constrained world that he was forced to live in. Even more miraculously, some of the guards became sort of complicit unexpectedly in smuggling his work to the undergrounds. And that's a deranged inversion. It's not that they suddenly believed in him or even stopped tormenting him. It's just the sheer rage and sophistication of a figure who they would bleed and extract things from and cut into every night. And he would somehow drag himself back from the torture chamber to his cell and almost

literally write in blood on the walls and inscribe these verses that were mystifying to them. You know, what the strategic and brilliant move that he makes out of necessity is precisely what you were saying, which is that before Shamlu enters prison the first time of three different occasions when he's in prison. But before the first time, he's, to some extent, he's never standard. He was never normal. But he's partaking of metanarratives of political struggle and resistance. He's a revolutionary, right? He's a great rebel. And so there's all of these sort of gargantuan archetypes of freedom and justice and the people. And that first night where they lock you in those dungeons down there, in that nowhere, and, you know, Iranian prisons are something of a different caliber and proportion

than what we might be able to fathom. I mean, there's no visitation, there's no trials, there's just the oblivion. You know, you're sent there to be lost forever. He decides that all of these epic anthems are not the correct genre anymore. I mean, the first time they lock those chains on you and you hear the iron bolts go and you're in that damp corridor, you suddenly lose all the ability to articulate abstract political metanarratives of society and the future and history. All of a sudden, you become very sensorially and phenomenologically attuned to minute details, like the fact that it's cold there and damp and quiet and you don't have something to sleep on. and the sound of screams and the sound of chains

and the footsteps of the guards. And the only genre that's able, as you rightly said, to encompass that kind of awe, that fresh awe that he was experiencing was the darkness of the lullaby. But there's something else that I would just say about that. And I've never mentioned this before, neither in writing nor publicly, but it's also because the lullaby has a kind of whirlpool effect, just like the forest for the child in the fairy tale. You know, it has a gravitational effect. And so the lullaby is the one genre that I can think of, as opposed to the novel or the short story or even poetry or philosophy, where there is no such thing as critical distance or intellectual objectivity. You have to join it. You have to enter the radical oblivion of the forest

or the desert with them. You have to swallow inconsumable doses and stare at malformed apparitions of the mind. and you only survive by bringing your own excruciating techniques of imagination. So you have to become one of them. That's what the author of The Lullaby does. And it's almost tribal or like being among wolves. They instinctively recognize imposters and they'll only tolerate someone of their own species. This perfectly connects to two things that I was thinking. When I brought up The Lullaby, by kind of talking about it as this contract where you send someone into the underworld, made me think of the process that's involved in writing these things. There is almost this Orphic problem of going, descending into the underworld. There's one of your earlier books, I remember you telling me, you became incredibly ill.

And you said something to me in an email when we were sort of talking earlier in the week that I wrote it down. You described the book as a work that sometimes cost too much and aged me irreversibly. So I wanted to ask you in relation to The Lullaby, this problem of being able to come back, and also the stylistic point of imminence that you just touched upon. The fact that it's not... Omnicite isn't a critical study. There's no distance between the object of interrogation, the method of interrogation, and you, the interrogator. The object is mania, the method is manic, and the interrogator is staking their sanity on the project. And so I guess my question in relation to all that is, did you make it back intact?

God only knows what that even means these days. No, there's irreparable damage that one does to oneself in the process. And I don't say that with any sort of dramatic sort of arrogance. I say that with the utter humility of someone who gets his back broken by the tasks at hand. And, you know, this is something I've done for a long while. I just know how to endure it better. It's not easier. It's just that I pace myself and I know my levels better. So the work that you mentioned where I ran myself sort of into the ground physically was Inflictions, which is about violence. It was my second book. And it was actually in service of a chapter that's called The Sharpening, which, my God, that one section is the byproduct of years of attempting to attain a register of absolute coldness in writing.

You know, something that really had ice in the veins, you know, in each line and that cut almost like metallic instruments. And the reason is because looming in the background of that chapter was an actual poem by a mesmerizing figure who was not an omnicide. And a Syrian Iraqi poet named Sargon Bullas, who just died a few years ago. And he composed this short, disturbing work called The Knife Sharpener. And it forced me to speculate on what it would mean on some bad night to actually stumble across this figure. Someone with their back turned to you, crouched over, carving a blade against stone over and again in a devastating repetition compulsion. And I started to picture their calm relentlessness, their focus, this knife sharpening, their brooding stare, their silence. They have no reason to speak by that. The event of what is to come completely supersedes the need to articulate it.

So this single image of the knife sharpener required a process of writing and an atmosphere of writing that in turn embodied a kind of sharpening. So I took endless stretches of time to build it, concentrating on the right tone, the right rhythm and it required immense precision above all else. Robin and I talked endlessly about precision in this work, I remember it became sort of the hallmark of this text. It actually, more than anything I've ever dealt with, madness requires a backbreaking level of precision to align the correct properties. Nothing is random in the best manifestations of lunacy. You know, you read Artaud, you read the authors in Omnicide in their altered states, everything burns the right way, everything tears the right way. It's a perfect mosaic or labyrinth. They know exactly what they're doing. And it's terrifying, but also an ecstatic

boundary when you realize the sheer amount of control it requires to fracture consciousness and turn it outside of itself. Meanwhile, I continued sailing along in my stone boat at zero latitude and zero longitude, while my compass, rather than pointing north, south, east, or west, was pointing in the fifth direction, namely straight down into the depths.

We encounter our eighth cartogramaniac incorporating the figure of the mapmaker into that of the boatwoman, for whom borders are but burning streams pouring in the fifth direction, inferno. Thus we revisit a strange literary theological tradition of underworld maps, nether cartographies that always start from the absolute nexus, zero latitude and zero longitude, always aboard vessels built to sink, the stone boat, and which transpose outward horizons into vertical downward layers, straight down into the depths. That maybe brings us to the question of the way you formulate on the side and the fact that unlike your previous works which were to some extent still disguised as

traditional academic books, Omnicide puts to work a peculiarly strict protocol whereby for each mania you select 10 passages from the poems and stories of these 10 writers you've selected and then you minutely examine, violently interpret, extrapolate and digress from those texts, yielding this series of poetic excursions, delicately differentiated insights into the same theme ten times over. What brought you to the realization that you would have to operate in a different way for this book? First and foremost, you're right that this is no longer encrypting or embedding sort of subtle passages within a more conventional discourse.

This is an overdose right out of the gates. It's flagrant at that level. But the key to it is actually beneath the smoke and mirrors and a lot of the flagrancy is the particularity, which is most essential, which is what you're alluding to. You know, there had to be an almost molecular specificity in each treatment, almost like designing a perfect little music box that plays and stops with each entry. So one of the fatal flaws of psychoanalysis, which I, you know, for whom I don't hide my awe or my vendetta in this work, was the moment when in order to build a coherent school for itself, all of the disparate madnesses that had been flung open suddenly had to be diagnosed into reductive symptomatologies and classifications. So there was this mass simplification that I take as an unparalleled cowardice

on the part of the early psychoanalysts. I mean, as much conviction and courage as they showed to go into those cellars of consciousness and excavate these strange forms, they then trembled before the very Pandora's box that they opened. They trembled before the unbound and the infant modalities of insanity. So my task was to restore this intricacy by following each one into its own separate domain and trying to show, again, the humility almost of a collector who prizes acute differences rather than sameness. So if I were, you know, flinging open the floodgates again, then the book would have to start from the gesture of a radical forgetting or at least suspension of everything I had learned from philosophy and literature prior. So that's the sort of suspension of the academic tone that

you've mentioned, meaning that I could assume nothing and take nothing for granted when dealing with these masters, knowing that each one had their own arsenal of tricks and inflections. And I had to accept, I say this at the most basic level, I had to accept the phenomenological humility at first of not trying to know, but just to watch. And then after watching for a while, I could move onward to encapsulate each variation in its own sophisticated domain. Does this really kind of great effect that becomes clear as you sort of start to realize that this is what you're pursuing. And it's that each categorical incision that you make each time you divide something up or specify something, this act of categorising building taxonomies, division,

actually undermines the whole role of categorisation in the first place. It becomes so wildly plague-like and proliferates so rapidly. But it was reminding me of the old geometrical method of exhaustion that you can keep cutting further and further but you will never actually exhaust the diameter of your circle or whatever shape you're trying to measure. And this is precisely because what you are dealing with is, and this is something that Robin has written at length about, and is obviously something that comes to the floor in the structuralist writers like Deleuze, you're dealing with intensity and intensity has this quality of infinitesimal about it.

The more you divide it, the less traction you have on it. It keeps dividing. That's, in a sense, the emergence of mania into mathematics. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the one kind of thing that this leads you to is that there isn't any essence. The only way you can determine these things is by understanding them in relation to each other, not by excavating any kind of essence. So your philosophy of madness or whatever you want to call it is fully relational and totally functional and practical, I think as you say several times, it's practical and quiet and never essential. Absolutely. You know, I don't want to make any direct parallel to any sort of works of great Western philosophy

that of course inform my thought. But, because one of my tricks is to simply leave them unnamed throughout. But obviously for me there was almost a very crucial war or dividing point between, in post-structuralism, that following Nietzsche's sort of announcement of the death of God, which we all know by extension the implications of that, you know, unchaining the earth from its sun, the loss of the center and all of that, you have a split, a real demarcation between, let's say, Derrida and Deleuze, you know, and the methodologies that one will, the former, will then take that as a kind of, again, I know the deconstructionists will get angry for this, but this is an excuse to descend into textual

esotericism that becomes these sort of apparitional riddles of the impossible and the unthinkable and the this and the that. And then, so it becomes all about absence. It almost becomes this ghostly, vacuous space where there is no, for me, the fatal flaw of deconstruction is the lack of experiential quality to it. Just the complete disappearance of sensation whatsoever. And instead, this kind of, this funereal atmosphere that's in the texts that are just entertained by their own supposed complexity. But with Deleuze, it's the exact opposite. It's this call towards then sort of the springboard of excess. So he's saying, so let's play, let's multiply. And so that's the first thing that if I had to connect it to that. But I would say this also, something that always fascinated me for a long time was

when you read esoteric medieval treatises, and I read sort of great Arab and Persian writers of the medieval era as well, I love this paradox of very wild, bizarre, outlandish texts on alchemy, astrology, whatever, but they're numerically oriented and organized with hyper-systematicity. You know, and so sort of almost like avant-garde manifestos. You know, you're going to say we come from Mars, and that's number seven, principle number seven. You know, there's a kind of a wonderful, wonderful contradiction almost in that, and I like that vertigo of appearances. of saying something that is seemingly completely irrational or speculative, but then with that. But the difference is, and this is where I fault certain authors or certain movements,

is when you fall so in love with your own jargon and you become so infatuated with your own technicality that you forget that you invented it. And you forget that there's a game-like element to it. Thousand Plateaus never loses the intuitive knowledge of the fact that they are making this stuff up out of thin air. And Freud loses that, unfortunately, along the way, but so do many authors today. They just become so, again, enraptured with their new terminologies, their new neologisms, their pseudoscientific kind of explorations that I just say, just go for it and say something bizarre. If you want to make a cosmological diagram and give it 17 different chambers of celestial, whatever, don't pretend that it's legitimate.

Don't even bother to sort of prove that point. That becomes a neurosis then that's at the heart of it. And that's what you read. You know, the term nerd comes from sort of neurosis etymologically. And there becomes a kind of nerdiness in some contemporary thought, but it goes back a long way too in philosophy, whereby they just become so invested that they're trying too hard to prove that it's real. and for me the game is lost when you're trying to prove that. What came out very clearly for me was this lucid temporal constellation between this sense of the old world, some kind of ancient inheritance of the Middle East and Jason you said the so-called Middle East and maybe that's something that we should talk about

but that's certainly an undercurrent in the book that there's this kind of ancient inheritance and as you said that includes this tradition of doomsday writing. Then there's the modern, the experience of these poets who have lived through a different modernity and who've gone through these acute existential trials and then there's the figure of the future and the figure of a possibly foreclosed future, a possibly doomed future and the question of how one can wrench something from that and that obviously then speaks to this this duality between an exhausted pessimistic view of the future as being a kind of post-modern grey haze where everything's leveled and there's nothing left to do and this other

possibility which you seem to suggest is is found in the middle eastern writing literature and thought which is able to by going to this extreme point is able to wrench something back and to produce some kind of polychromatic explosion out of what appears to the west to western eyes to be an exhausted doomed world about to end this kind of temporal constellation seems to me absolutely crucial to the book, the ancient, the modern, and this potentially foreclosed future? Well, I would say this, first off, that the poet in ancient and medieval Arabian tribes and North

African tribes was always considered a figure of possession. That's why some linguists have a kind of conspiracy theory that the actual etymology of genius comes from the Arabic word jinn, as in genie, because it means that otherworldly forces are whispering in your ear. Tribes believe that their poets sort of were ventriloquating tongues from some beyond, some unearthly sort of space. And that's always remained kind of the calling card of these poetic icons. But to do that, to be otherworldly, when you're quite literally writing, Ghadda Samon, a great Lebanese writer who's in there is writing in the midst of civil war. Mahmoud Darwish is writing under bombardment, I mean, literal bombs dropping on his rooftops.

Hassan Blasim, most talented Iraqi writer, one of the most talented short story writers in the world today, was a refugee escaping across border patrols and evading all kinds of detection from one European metropolis to another for years, Shambhu the political prisoner. And so it's amazing that they face these heightened empirical pressures and at the same time summon something that is beautifully irrelevant to them. And that's one thing that I wanted to say, which is that just in case people get this wrong. I often hear the term genocidal maniac with respect to political atrocities of the 20th century. You know, fascism, Stalinism, capitalism, all this. And I actually, I would like to disabuse

sort of people of the use of the term mania to describe political ideology. Ideology is psychotic, no doubt. Society is psychotic. What we call reality itself has always been since its very artificial inception. From the second we gave names to things, it's a desperately pathological affair. But those totalitarian delusions, which reek of neurosis again, are not even in the same universe to the typologies of what we're calling madness or mania in the book. My maniacs and their fictions are hypnotizing creatures that harbor, I don't want to call it an antidote or an escape, but they harbor a trap door sort of beyond all of these decrepit structures of today's so-called reality, which seemingly grow more

pathetic by the hour. So no, everyone might be delusional, but not everyone wills illusion. And this is something that has disappeared from Western philosophy. It's become kind of a curse word, and I don't know why. Nietzsche went to such glorious trouble to concoct his notion of the will, you know, and will that wasn't trapped in the metaphysics of free will. And then all of the delusions of grandeur or free will, but something that had sort of something involuntary, something that was extremely powerful, his will to power. And then because of the totalitarian abuses of the 20th century, that term becomes problematized into oblivion. Well, it didn't disappear from Middle Eastern writing. The figures who populate omnicide are of a very rare exclusive breed,

who, as Artaud would say, chose madness as a sign of valor. That's Artaud's great expression. They're not repeating tired words to the same old cancerous scripts. They're inventing their own breakaway spheres of time, space, sensation, desire. And so I don't even want to call those sociopolitical forms that we see today, or even the cultural haze of the postmodern, I don't even want to call them enemies of these poetic madmen and madwomen, since that would be to give them too much credit and resemblance through some false dialectical relation. So, yes, the poets are sometimes compelled into confrontation with these epochal realities, but their lies remain largely indifferent and irrelevant to what Kierkegaard rightly called the crowd's untruth. Okay, let's try and get nearer to why the question of this book

is an important one and why perhaps it might be an important one right now. In the opening pages, when you first ask how a mania can blossom into an omnicidal impulse, you immediately suggest that this question must be answered. You say this question must be answered for everyone's sake. And in the closing of the introduction, then you speak of the work that you do in this book as an imperative, which suggests that obviously the energy and the commitment that you put into this task means that this book is far from being some kind of trivial game. And it seems to me that there's a subtle sense,

which perhaps it's possible to miss on a superficial reading, in which what seems at first sight a kind of fantastic, extreme, deviant work, in fact can claim a direct contemporary relevance precisely because we are living in a world that's fantastic, extreme and deviant, a world that's ruled by maniacs in their fictions, in which, as you say in the introduction, the right fable is enough to place all in jeopardy. And to come back to Nietzsche and the question of will, it seems that omnicide connects the line between mania and omnicide to a capacity for untruth, to a capacity for willing untruth. And that seems to present a kind of selective trial

in a Nietzschean sense. Can we pass the test? Do we have the strength of will to make untruths real? Excellent. That was perfect. That seems to also apply on the level of civilizations, the level of this duality of civilizations, as in an address to post-modernism or the post-truth age, you're contrasting the twilight of Western modernity to some kind of different historical temporality inhabited by the Middle East by these poets and thinkers. Absolutely. Everything you just articulated is perfect and accurate and highly sensitive. The only thing then that I would say to sort of the only feature that I would clarify is we can't underestimate.

On our side, perhaps, in Western societies, we do face, again, sort of the imminent grayness sort of our nihilistic or cynical moment. Over there, you know, people die. You know, the Middle East is on fire from Libya to Palestine to Iraq to... And this is not a political thing for me. This is the fact that my favorite figures, the ones who I align myself with across the globe, their sensitivities are under constant threat. And I remember the first time that I read political prisoners like Ahmad al-Shomlu, the great poet, who, you know, he comes back one night from being tortured, and he's staring at his arm, and it's bleeding on the ground. And he's looking at these red droplets, and he goes,

my God, all of this so some guy can walk around and call himself king. Now, that's staggering, and it's a problematic that we still haven't resolved. So what this work attempts to do, Raman, as you rightly say, is that it doesn't entertain that the cure to all of those epochal violences of today are through discourse and dialogue and counter-ideologies. Instead, I say it openly, Omnicite is a deeply manipulative work, but I have no ethical problem with manipulation whatsoever, as long as it serves intensity. Shamans were manipulative, and they were essential to all kinds of tribal and social formations in the old world. But it's not manipulation as a form of sadistic authoritarian domination that tries to drain

the lifeblood of others or enslave them. It operates like all great trances. It attracts, lulls, positions, and it uses techniques of insinuation, seduction, encryption, whatever makes thought race and pound out quicker, more cunningly. whatever makes more complex and unique patterns. And that's a spell's primary function as well. You know, when it isn't to kill, it's to transform. So, no, it's not a dialogue or argument, but rather the entering of a site that has a decided outlook hovering above and in every corner. There's always in Middle Eastern poetics and literature, there's someone diabolical pulling the strings, playing puppet master. There are no accidents and nothing is incidental. Every line is doing something highly specific at multiple levels. in order to guarantee the success of the task at hand.

So madness itself, if you look at schizophrenics, they don't ask permission. Neither does fate or doom, which are the main players in my philosophical game here. So I follow suit. You know, you execute the affect by any means necessary, whether through extreme clarity or deception. And the work itself tells you what you have to do at any given moment, how much you have to give or take to the reader to grant them passage across. but always with the intent to leave someone stronger for having endured it. This is a paradoxical thing. It's kind of like the figure of the vampire where they don't ask consent to bite but the reason is because they already have an ethical decision that's linked to intensification. Their bite will enhance you, will accentuate abilities.

You can levitate, you can fly, you can read minds, you can escape finitude and death. Why would they ask you if you want it? And almost because they know something. which is that human beings are so pitiful in their self-preservation instinct and in their fear factors that they probably will say no to the bite, even though it serves them at every existential level. And so what is your ethics at that point? So I've gone wholesale in this book into a kind of an ethical stance of outright manipulation of the reader, of myself, of language, of thought, of the text that I use. And I do think that's the only thing that can summon the kind of force that can somehow counteract all of the bombardments

that we perceive and we experience in the everyday. Kinetomania. Obsession with continual movement. Opening quote by Joyce Mansour You don't live with the dead They slide on the rolling rug of forgetfulness Admire the movements of fatal augurs Worked up on the ceiling in their golden slippers We encounter our fourth kinetomaniac through the following triangulations of subject, object and space. One, the dead, the barefoot, the rug.

Two, the augur, the slippers, the ceiling. We can imagine, in the first instance of the dead, the paradoxical movement of the motionless, slipping across silk fabrics into the lost depths of forgetting. And then in the second instance, the spectacular movement of the seers, or augurs, as their prophetic gazes allow them to tread across slate awnings and balconies. Balcony coming from the Persian, Balakhaneh, meaning upper house. In either instance, we are compelled to revel alongside beings who motion either too high or too low. We are told that the ceiling-going augurs are somehow fatal in their future memorizations, while the dead have themselves endured fatality along the rolling rug of forgetfulness,

but in either case kinetomaniacal experience serves to turn axes of time and space upside down, shifting across both deranged ends of the vertical spectrum, that of the entombed and that of the uplifted. Unlike our conventional terrestrial model of the diamond, which is mined from below after having been compressed over great tracks of time, in other planetary settings they form in areas of the upper atmosphere known as thunderstorm alleys, arising suddenly from inclement weather patterns, a product of lightning, methane, and graphite placed under extreme aerial pressure. Ultimately, these uncut hailstones end up littering the planetary surface, giving off endless crystal reflections,

or they melt into a liquid carbon sea, thereby forcing our unclimbing eyes to accept the order of things annulled. Once the extracted upward, now the precipitating downward. What theories might future civilizations espouse about the cataractal movement of such gem showers? And you even speak openly in the book about the method as a form of magic or spellbinding, and encourage the reader to see the question, how does one pass from mania to omnicide as a practical rather than a moral question and you talk about it as a question of neo-magical practice.

One of the things that I was very struck by from the very start was the musicality of the writing that you have these refrains which come back and repeat the openings of each section and give the experience of reading this strong rhythm and a kind of hypnotic insistence. And then the deeper you get into the book, the more you discover more cryptic hidden motifs which emerge in completely disparate places. So to what extent is that kind of method related to specific practices of mysticism or ritual incantation? this kind of relaying of the auto-hypnosis of mania.

Absolutely, Ram. I mean, you read my hand perfectly, you know, at the strategic level. There are mystical currents, not at the level of belief, but at the level of methodology. That's what intrigues me always about mysticism, is how to devise rituals. I mean, my grandfather was among the most pessimistic figures that you could ever encounter, brilliant and wise beyond belief, but extremely skeptical. And he would tell me the stories of seeing Sufi mystics put blades through their bodies, burn themselves, and be able to sort of master the sensation, to not cry out in pain. And that always bewildered him. But it's not otherworldly and it's not supernatural. It's entirely grounded in a sort of form of empirical condition,

which is always what magic was. Magic is not sort of this fantasy realm of celestial properties. That's theology. Magic was always about, that's why you look at the kind of the almost alchemical qualities of witches' bruise, you know, and what's in the cauldron. They're always parts or tentacles or appendages of living creatures, you know, sort of a lock of hair or the leg of something or the blood of something else. If you read medieval talismanic books of the great Arabian and Persian doctors, they're also doing the same thing. They're not interested in esoteric debates about gods in the cosmos in their infinite transcendence. They're interested in what happens if I pour lead into a frog skull.

That's an actual smell. And the trickery behind it is it doesn't matter if it's actually literally correct. It only matters that you believe it. Or rather, it only matters that you act accordingly towards the world as if it's happening. That changes the game entirely right there. And we know this again from schizophrenics who believe that they see things in star formations, that they perceive numerical patterns in different things, and then they proceed quite physically into the world alongside in accordance with those matrices. So yes, you're absolutely right. Incantation, that there is a musicality, there's a rhythmic process, which is the process of enveloping and engulfing that all trances are sort of based in,

this gradual swelling to the point that it becomes sort of an exclusive perimeter or universe that obliterates the knowledge of all other things. And I would say this, you know, in fairy tales, you often have a figure, sometimes musical, sometimes sonic, like the Pied Piper, who leads the children beyond the city, you know, or the animals for that matter. But they're the ones who provide some type of distraction or diversion that gains you sort of a possibility of escaping those oppressive borders. That's the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, obviously. And so always on the lookout for an excuse. And I say this very, very tangibly, that it can save one's life at different times. There's a great figure named Darvish Khan who built a stone garden in northern Persia.

He was a deaf mute, never spoke, couldn't hear, but he would dance in a sort of delirious state all day long among these stone sculptures that he had created in the middle of the desert. No one knew what his intention was because he couldn't articulate it. No one understood what he was hearing that would make him dance. But I love this figure because he does this in the midst of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. One of the most volatile and cataclysmic events in the history of a 3,000-year-old nation. And he's completely oblivious to that transpiring occasion. And if any of the sectarian factions had tried to lure him into aligning with their ideological games, he would have been too busy with his stone garden.

He would have said, why would I bother to go to the cities and march and protest or fight or bleed or sacrifice? I have my stones. So for me, having your little game on the side, your obsessive sort of side chimera is absolutely essential to not falling prey to all of these formations and formulations that are trying to constantly sort of lure you in. You're insisting that this is the case even when you're imprisoned, tortured, when all of your degrees of freedom have been curtailed to such a radical extent. There's still this possibility for hyperstitional escape. It's infinitely harder, Robin. I don't underestimate the gravity or the pain that is required to actually convince yourself in those cages, in those locked spaces.

because you want to believe that the empirical means the real. And the toughest thing is to maintain that paradoxical recognition that this is happening, but it's not authentic. Because it's not motivated or originated in any type of authentic sort of impulse whatsoever. Reality is a cover-up. The political is just a massive concealment of the public secret. And the public secret is that we constructed this whole thing we call society and reality in order to kill time while time kills us. It's a hiding place. One of the few things that philosophers since the Enlightenment agree on. I mean, they'll kill one another in an elevator if you ever put them together. But the one thing that they agree on is that everybody's hiding from death. And that we're all shelving it, deferring it, just taking whatever reality will serve up

to completely elide the confrontation with our own mortality. So this is the tough thing, is to sustain the fact that this is happening, you are dying, you are bleeding, but that it's not authentic. It's in fact precisely the attempt to disguise and camouflage and conceal the only authenticity, which is the fact that you are on borrowed time here and that you don't know why. these stories about Shamlu that you told the other year were really influential in me in terms of thinking about the ethical implications of this and I very much agree with this kind of notion of finding the one thing that you still have

agency over, the one thing that you can do in this tiny space of non-freedom but I just can't deal with the word, the descriptor authenticity for that, I feel like there I mean in this paradigm of illusion how do you how do you decant the authentic reality from the the illusions that have become real I feel like it's better defined as something like um I don't know a kind of like a sliver of productivity rather than falling for the trap of resentment oh no this is this is exactly my point that there's no authenticity on either side. Poetics or literature or philosophy has not a shred of authenticity to it, in my opinion.

It's an invention. It's a contraption. It's an artifice. But that's precisely what makes it worthwhile. I don't want anything that sort of proclaims authenticity or credibility. That's precisely when you get into the mouth of genocidal utopian delusions. And so it's just counter mythologies, sort of, or counter apparitions that are going against one another. But there is a way of crafting something that, and I'll use Nietzsche's term of untimely, which is important to me. And it's, I'll give you an example. There's a figure who actually should, by every right, be within Omnicide, but he's not included. And that's Shamlu's master, Nima Yushij, who's considered the father of new poetry, Persian new poetry.

He's an absolutely stunning figure. He comes from the northern territories. He's not well-trained or well-versed in classical Persian poetry in the least. He speaks in grave kind of tomes. He actually was a shepherd who used to spend a lot of time in mountain chasms just overlooking these stone formations. And his poetry sounds like that. And he actually believed that he could summon winds and moons and clouds and things of that nature. The important thing with him is that he has a poem, a very famous one, that's called My House is a Cloud, which sounds almost like some childlike thing, but it's actually an apocalyptic, very short apocalyptic passage, in which he talks about drowning the world from his clouds. So he has this aerial perspective over a city, and he's made the decision before you enter the poem,

he's already made the determination that he's going to flood the city from above. But then out of the corner of his eyes, right as he's about to sort of unleash this torrent, he sees a flute player, he says. And this flute player is entranced in the kind of circular melodies of his own playing. He's spinning in a kind of weird choreography. And Nimo says something absolutely striking there. He says, I let him pass. So he takes time before this apocalyptic incident to allow this random flute player who seems to have no party in the innocence or guilt of the city. He's completely detached and disconnected in his own aesthetics. He lets him pass as the kind of state of exception from the event.

He grants him a kind of neutral distance from things. And that neutrality is something that has been fashioned by actually very persecuted figures. I'll just give you one last example, a very tangible one. When revolutionaries in Middle Eastern history tend to get arrested and then released, they often, unfortunately, tell very traumatic stories of their suffering, of their injustice, of things like that, which only serves to authenticate the regimes. But my favorite response is actually what the mystics do. When the mystics have their houses of worship, which are just simple, they're not temples, they're just sort of simple homes. When they have them raided and their elders are imprisoned and the elders are eventually released, if a journalist goes up to them and says, you know, how do you feel about

the fact that your houses of worship or your houses of gathering were disbanded? They say, what houses of worship? I said, there were no houses of worship. You're mistaken. like that ever existed. And they walk away with a kind of smile. To me, that is a very powerful gesture. That's not repression. That is denying the satisfaction of authoritarian modalities at work. And their sadistic sort of bloodlust. What do you do as someone who won't even acknowledge what you've done to them? But that takes a level of mastery. That takes an absolute level of mastery that is part of the, if you want to call it political ethics, you can't. The political ethics of forgetting. And I always took this very seriously when Nietzsche warned that beware thinking that memory, which is what has become now the kind of cliche par excellence,

everything is about memory, the memory of catastrophe, the memory of remembering of atrocity. And for God knows how many decades, if not centuries, people on the colonial side of the divide have always recognized that radical forgetting is actually the best methodology of overcoming. Yeah. There's also in the story about Shabudu and his prison song this kind of warring of mythical forces and his gesture this writing of these lullabies actually, I mean it seems to me from my recollections of you telling these stories it turns out to be the stronger mythology wins over the gods. Like you said earlier, they smuggle out his work or they cease torturing

him because his myth as this one very frail very limited person somehow overcomes the the myth of the regime that's that's instructing them to torture him and that's what i see is the like in this space where there is no freedom this way of constructing of freedom it's very minute it's and like you said you have to you have to somehow have some kind of mastery over these modalities and it's also totally counterintuitive but i feel like it's sometimes the only thing that offers any kind of glimpse of any sort of escape. And I love that story because it's so extreme. Absolutely. You know, there is another figure, Nazim Hekmat, who's considered the forerunner of the Turkish poetic vanguard.

I mean, he's a legend in Turkey, Nazim Hekmat. He spent, and I'm going to get this wrong, but I want to say between 13 and 15 years in prison, in Turkish prison in the 20th century. And he has a poem that is quite sort of brazenly titled, Some Advice for Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison. And to paraphrase it, he actually says he gives all kinds of instructions. It's almost an instructional manual of existential survival. He tells you don't spend too much time thinking of islands or forests or mountains. Don't dream good dreams, dream bad dreams, because it keeps you honest there. He has all kinds of little devices that will get you by. But he says, by all rights, you should hang yourself by the neck there.

But you will not do this. You will put your foot down and live for no other reason than to spite the enemy. And I take that with extreme gravity and respect for what he means. But the methodology to that is not courage in the kind of heroic archetypal sense, nor is it resistance in the revolutionary sense. It's derangement. Derangement gets you through a place where you should otherwise condemn yourself. Is there any part of that instruction manual for existentially surviving prison that couldn't also be transferred into a more general instruction manual for surviving life itself? Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, anybody who comes to me with some type of narcissistic, psychological sort of dilemma of who am I and what's my purpose in the world, my first, I never give advice because I can't stand advice, but the only thing that I give them as a direction is I say, pick some extremely esoteric particular detail. You know, sort of the phenomena of tidal waves, waves, the history of sword making, praying mantis style kung fu, you know, surfing, something like that. And then go into the archives of the library and spend all night long just drowning in information. And this is an old mystical idea too. When you go to the sort of the Buddhist monastery and you ask them, you know, I want to find enlightenment. They say, great, there's a

room to your right. Go into it. There's 7,000 candles there. Light every candle. And you spend all day lighting every candle relentless then you come out to the master and you say I've done it now what and he says now go blow out every candle you know and it's this it's this complete disassociation from the narcissistic grandiosity of existential purpose and existential meaning you just become consumed in the lighting of candles and it actually should say can save your life uh being able that's what that's what ritual at its most practical methodological level means and so that's what I take poetics as then or philosophy as a kind of ritualistic display that gets you out of entrapment for a while Colossomania

Obsession with Giants Opening quote by Gaddas Saman But in a flash we all understood the significance of what had happened. Some sniper had fired a shot at the rope and in doing so had demonstrated his prowess for everyone in the neighborhood to see. He'd said to us all, I'm capable of hitting any target, however tiny or delicate it may be. Every one of your hearts is within my range. I could put bullet holes through your arteries one by one. I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark. I can aim my bullets at any part of your bodies I choose. We encounter our eighth colossomaniac back in the throes of civil war,

as the tenants of a sprawling city remain locked away in their apartments, the Arabic hisar, meaning siege. They are each barricaded within the four walls of a home-turned-prison, with no assured release in store. They face either eventual starvation or grenades shattering through windows. The city itself is continually trampled by marauding sects who keep close from constant surveillance, making every street an incendiary battle in waiting. And poised above the rooftops stands a unique colossal force, the Sniper. The colossal is framed here as an occult endowment of both unmatched scope and precision.

I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark. It suggests an ironic interplay of omniscience, that the one who sees everything savours his ability to blind all others. Looking at this idea of the neo-magical that Robin brought up earlier, and that we've sort of been talking around this notion of sorcery, spellcasting, binding, myth-creating, as something that's associated with practical imminence rather than symbolic transcendence or doctrine or something like that. You write at the start of the book, when you're talking about what you mean by the neo-magical, you say, the prophetic without transcendence, for no higher power must intervene. The miraculous without belief, for no great leap of faith is required.

The sacred without law, for no dogmatic structure contained its ecstatic arc. Just the leanest mixtures of anomaly, revelation and disaster. and something that I started to pay a lot of attention to especially as I got up to some of the later parts of the book section 20 section that comprises monomania, isolomania, megalomania, cataptomania, isoptomania and colossomania the manias of aloneness, isolation, self mirrors giants started to make me think about how this practice these manic practices this imminent sorcerous practice relates to the self. And it seems to me it's very clear that your whole project

and the description of these manic practices tends towards a kind of dissolution or fragmentation of subjectivity, which is not necessarily the first thing that you might think of when considering manias, especially if you're thinking of them in terms of paranoid or neurotic modalities so a few questions like does this shift into a neo-magical or practical imminent way of wielding mythology and illusion the substitution of imminence for transcendence or this old world historical way of being to use your earlier term is it that that re-channels

the expected consolidation of subjectivity into a kind of dissolution um and then is this kind of related to the way that you talk about the relation of the book to the history of psychoanalysis um i think you said in your talk at the mcgwell library gallery in new york when you were watching the book that you viewed mania as not an interior phenomenon in the way that folk psychoanalysis has typically viewed it but as an outside phenomenon and it's the manic object and the atmosphere that dictate everything. So there's this kind of turning outwards of mania as it kind of like channels through this passage into annihilatory

desire as well that leads to this undoing of subjectivity so i mean when you kind of think about megalomania for example the first thing you think about is condensation of self-order identity but in your in your preface to that particular section you write of stealing psychoanalysis's favourite plaything the self in order to inspire in it maniacal post-psychological modifications and all of the following analyses emphasize this process of dissolution and fragmentation and exchange of places between the subject and it's like manic object of desire and there's this great line um in one of the analyses i forget which one where you write manic aloneness is the place where one answers no to the interior voice that wonders are you who you

are in fact to become monomaniacal is precisely never to be again what one is so can you talk a little bit about this your understanding of this relationship between mania and the manic subject and this sort of paradox between an expected coalescence or integrity of subjectivity and process of depersonalization. Absolutely, there's a lot there to unravel. The first thing is what you're quoting from is a very delicate process that I think is crucial to mania, which is the turning of subjectivity into an outer object of fixation. So you're chasing yourself, and I think this is actually what Nietzsche means when he says to become what you already are. And if you read

The Stillest Hour in Zarathustra, you notice that Nietzsche is speaking to himself from a voice from a kind of futural realization of himself. So subjectivity becomes this sort of quasi-familiar, quasi-foreign externality that is beckoning him or summoning him forward. But this actually works at the most tangible existential level. If you ever read the accounts of Jesse James, for instance, you know, famous outlaw, you would strangely enough discover that when he's telling a story of some reprehensible violence that he's committed. And so often the killing of an intimate figure, the killing of one of the members of their own gang, where his own gang would be sort of horrified and bewildered by why he would do it.

He would start to tell it and say, well, I went to his house and I started questioning him and I didn't like his answers and he seemed to be shivering a lot. And so I told him, let's take a ride on our horses and we went out into the forest and then Jesse let him take a few steps ahead of him and Jesse pulled his gun. That slippage, that very subtle slippage into the third person is what gives him a license to anything, sort of to infinite action. And you notice this at a more creative, that's at a destructive level, but at a creative level, this is precisely what happens in Akeoma when Nietzsche starts referring to Nietzsche. You know, in this sort of monumental, dramatic, dramatic but also hilariously performative way. It's also when Artaud refers to Artaud.

You know, it becomes this magnifying presence but not a form of interiority. It's now some exterior sort of magnification or incident that they've been able to fling out and then chase after. Like writing from the perspective of syphilis or schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, but even, you know, Kafka does it much more insidiously by just transitioning to the word it. You know, when he transubstantiates I into it, it sits with you here. It sits in a cabin in the woods. He means I, but I has now entered a kind of anonymous ethereal plane of the mist of the forest. And that is devastatingly eerie, you know, and powerful. And what I would say is that it overcomes this gesture of flinging or projecting subjectivity to a kind of exterior thing that you're then interpreting, deciphering.

It overcomes the Tower of Babel phenomenon that happened with modern psychology. The modern psyche was tragically compartmentalized into myriad levels of incommunicability with one another. What I mean by that is it is absolutely pathetic in my understanding that we are now capable of thinking things that we would never say or saying things that we would never do or doing things that we can't think about. You follow? This is a pitiful fragmentation that has taken place that is such an insult to the domain of animality that precisely synchronizes thought, sensation, desire, impulse, passion, need, everything working as a kind of symmetrical mechanism.

And here we are with all our doubts and neurotic. That's why Lewis Carroll gives one of the most brilliant laws, the only law at the outset of Wonderland. Otherwise, it's a kind of unbound sphere of infinite possibility. but only one governing law or rule to the game. Say what you mean and mean what you say. And for me, that is not a truth principle. That's not an enunciation of truth. That is a precise definition of magicality. You know, abracadabra, in the ancient Aramaic, abracadabra means I create what I speak. Meaning it's not about the aesthetics of the line, how poetic, how beautiful. It's not about the meaning of it. It's does it work? Does the line of the spell work to effectuate or occasion the transformation that is supposed to take place.

And so that's all that seems to matter. And that, to answer Amy and Robin's questions of before with regard to subjectivity, that has then a retroactive effect of completely dispelling the problematics of subjectivity, which is why when Alice starts saying what she means and meaning what she says, and she arrives at the threshold of the opium-smoking caterpillar, who, by the way, is Persian, I love to give that shout out to my heritage there. And he asks her what seems like a grandiose existential question, who are you? But he doesn't mean it in any grandiose. He's putting her to the test sort of at that moment. And she stutters in that great sense that Deleuze has a piece called He Stuttered. And she begins to stutter, which is actually the moment in which subjectivity

is becoming an obsolete commodity in Wonderland. She can't answer that question. And the last thing that I would say to that, and both of you may know this about me, that one of my favorite, somewhat exoticized examples is the medieval assassins. And particularly a figure named Hassan al-Sabah, who was a brilliant Persian visionary, but also a very lethal figure, who used to travel nomadically from one master to another for years, from Egypt to Baghdad to Persia, and then finally decided upon building a fortress, a kind of bastion in the mountains of Alamut, the mountain range of Alamut in northern Persia, where he stayed for decades, for 30 years, basically wreaking havoc upon the Persian Empire and beyond, and never leaving his place. He created the first group of assassins, and you may remember this story.

But essentially what happened is all these youth started gravitating towards this legend of this old man on the mountain who had created this fortress. He knew poetry. He knew mysticism. He knew philosophy. He knew theology. He knew music and dance. He was absolutely brilliant at multiple levels, a true polymath. And when they would enter, there he was. He was also, and it helps, he was also strikingly handsome and eloquent, they say. So there he is in these sort of long white robes and this long white beard. And they enter into this domain of this sage. And for days and nights, he would entertain them with banquets and feasts. He also had exotic animals that he had quite brilliantly and manipulatively brought from other places to mesmerize these young people. And then he would start slipping them hashish into their food and their drinks.

And they would start to have quasi-hallucinatory sort of experiences. And then eventually he would withdraw them and they would suffer withdrawal symptoms. They would start to sweat, they would start to tremble, and they would ask him what was going on. At which point he would disclose it and say, well, now I have to tell you what this place is. you've entered paradise and I'm the prophet and guardian of this paradise but you're falling from this heavenly sphere and they'd say well what do we have to do in order to to regain entrance and he would tell them you have to kill some people on my behalf and then he would send them on sacred missions it's amazing to know that by day he would teach them philosophy poetry music astronomy and then by night he would send them out on on missions and for the next 10 years

this group of assassins become so notorious throughout the Persian Empire, and they become so, sort of such perfectionists at their craft that they don't even need to kill anymore. They become such an ominous sort of shadow of the political sphere that governors give up their thrones just by seeing a silver dagger in their palace or in their home, because they knew that they were a target then, and it was imminent sort of destruction for them. And so what's amazing, too, about a lot of people that know etymologically that the word assassin in English comes from the Persian hashishin, those who smoke hashish. But what truly amazes me is when Marco Polo, who is a self-confessed liar by many levels, but when Marco Polo actually makes the trek, makes the adventure to meet the old man on the mountain, he goes up to Hassan Sabah's fortress,

and he stays with him for several nights in Alamut. He tells this story in a very obscure piece that's not often even included in his travelogues. It's almost apocryphal. But he says that there was one night where finally I turned to the old man of the mountain and I said to him, can I ask you a question? And he said, you can ask me anything you wish. And Marco Polo said, well, you promised not to kill me. He said, you're my guest. Don't worry, nothing's going to happen to you here. At which point Marco Polo leans in and in a whisper says, you know this is all a lie, right? I mean, you still know that this is just a mirage. You're not actually a prophet. These disciples of yours are not actually on sacred missions. This is not paradise. You've just created this sort of amazing simulation at the top of the world. At which point, and I've told this story in many places,

Hassan al-Sabob, he finds a black-robed disciple in the corner walking around, and he says, you over there, you jump off the cliff of the mountain's edge, and you'll fly into the night air. And Marco Polo, with terror, recounts the fact that this young man just bolts, without any hesitation, without any flicker of self-doubt, just with kind of a fanatical jolt. He just bolts off the edge of the mountain and disappears into the night air. At which point Marco Polo is sitting there trembling in absolute horror. And the old man on the mountain, Hassan al-Sawo, turns to him very, very serenely and says, now, what does it matter if it's truth or a lie as long as I can get him to do that? You know, this is the more sinister and also creative potentiality of what Badiou would love to dream of as the event.

But this is not an abstract event. This is not an event that requires great philosophical deduction. This is a command. And the question is, why is the command followed against every so-called rational impulse in the universe that would stop him and every psychological impulse towards self-preservation and survival that, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, should stop that young disciple from flying into the night air? But he gets the job done. And that is a very careful and complex procedure that brings someone to that point. Now I'm not calling for sort of the murderous intentionality of Hassan As-Sawa, but I take that he masters precisely the logic of Carroll's fairy tale or Nietzsche's philosophy of becoming.

Which is why, by the way, Nietzsche on numerous occasions quotes Hassan As-Sawa's last words on his deathbed, his alleged last words, which are, all is illusion, thus all is permitted. A lot of people don't know where that comes from. It comes from the Persian assassins. We've talked about trance, about neomagical practice, about the hypnotic nature of the writing in Omnicide. And in terms of its modes of analysis, its interpretation and commentary, It seems that Omnicide doesn't obey any rules, it has no time for norms of discursive argumentation, and it consistently refuses to be consistent in the way it addresses the literary fragments that it seizes, that it grasps.

It's a form of writing that demands a lot of attention on the part of the reader, because there are multiple forms of address happening within one paragraph even. And rather than being confronted with propositions or arguments, the reader is immersed in this continually shifting field of cross-cutting semantic forces as the interpretation of the text becomes over-interpretation, then outlandish extrapolation, digression, divagation. so as we've already discussed this along with this sense of potentially endless concatenation and and and this gives the text itself a performatively manic effect but i think is also

conceptual writing and i've spent a while kind of trying to clarify for myself what kind of conceptual writing is how you are handling concepts how concepts are produced in the context of this book. And it seems to me that rather than mobilising some kind of universal or general concepts which can be applied to all of these case studies that we present, it seems like each one of these miniature case studies gives rise to an overproduction of local concepts, or you could say minor concepts. And what's interesting about these concepts is their, to me, their impurity, they emerge with dirt, with shreds of viscera grit, with the smell of

bodies still clinging to them. They're incompletely separated from the context from which they're taken. Then there's never a complete abstraction. And actually the idea of the witch's cauldron, this kind of culinary metaphor, would also be a good one. This kind of bringing these heterogeneous elements and putting them all in the pot. And then in reading further you begin to recognise and become familiar with subterranean connections between them. So I guess in a quite a vague way still, I'm just trying to grasp, but what is this different mode of working with concepts? One that's not subsumption, ascending to greater abstraction, it's not a dialectical argument, it's none of the traditional modes

of philosophizing, and yet I feel it still has a relation to the practice of philosophy. It's precisely right, and it was perfectly articulated. I would note also that even within the instance of the authors themselves, each author themselves, they are not beholden to the principles that they infused or they invented in the passage before that I was interpreting. So at any given moment, they're perfectly willing to abandon their own sort of philosophical stances, depending on what new climate or atmosphere they find themselves in. Right, the idea of climate or what you've called elsewhere moodscapes, epistemic climates. You know, Heidegger at the end of his life had an inkling of this, that mood was perhaps

the great sort of unexplored conceptual territory of philosophy, and perhaps the most important. And I think also that, and that was his turn towards the poetic also at some levels. But Nietzsche already says it in Ece Homo. I mean, he says it kind of in a way to massacre and make fun of and mock philosophy. He says philosophy has ignored the most important idea that's behind all thought. He says weather. And then he goes on to brag elsewhere that he said, while some have an evil eye, I have an evil ear. And he says, like those dogs or those other beasts who can hear storms coming from afar, I also have that capacity. And, I mean, Nietzsche just, it's the most almost childlike understanding that your thoughts do change, whether it's raining.

or whether it's snowing, or whether you're in the desert, or the jungle, or the forest, or a cave, you know, or an island. You know, these climatological sort of circumstances matter for the types of, the types of coloring of thought, sort of, that take place. But what I would say is, yeah, if you take any of these figures for all of their aphoristic diversity, and you can find this in Nietzsche as well, where he can entertain multiple styles, multiple genres, multiple modalities of thought, many of which contradict one another. And why is it that you can always recognize that it's Nietzsche or Chamlu from a mile away? No matter what they're saying, no matter in what direction or sort of horizon of thought that they're catapulting themselves,

you can always recognize a certain signature, a certain sort of presence to them that hangs like a very sort of familiar cloud, even if they're amorphous, shape-shifting. And I think that's that's a paradox that I wanted to explore as well, is that I've tested myself. You can take these 10 authors and you can line up thousands of passages of each of them anonymously without their names attached to them. And I would bet on myself to get a perfect score of being able to identify who is whom. And that has to do with tone. That has to do with mood. That has a certain way of dealing with the concept as a way of carrying yourself in the world. And each one of them has their own way of carrying themselves. And this is why to go against sort of the platonic sort of privileging of depth, appearance

becomes vitally important to me at the level of what Nietzsche calls style. Style is not just some sort of flamboyant aesthetic property. It's an existential determination of how you're going to look in the world. And I always say this, there's a certain rare breed of my favorite writers, the men and women who populate my thoughts and haunt them constantly. They always look the way they're supposed to look. You know, Artaud looks like Artaud is supposed to look. Bataille looks like Bataille is supposed to look. You know, Kafka looks like Kafka. Beckett looks like Beckett. You know, Clarice Lispector looks like Lispector. And that is not an accident. And that's not just sort of my projection, they turn the face into an apparatus of conveyance so that the

so-called interior realm of thought actually becomes a kind of skin or mask that they are constantly sort of in the process of developing and they exude it. So for me, that is the notion of the concept. I do like the Deleuzian and Guattarian sort of notion of the concept as a passcode or a password that steals you into certain sort of territories, otherwise forbidden or otherwise unknown territories of thought. But then I like it even more as a kind of armor or disguise. You know, Michel Serres has a beautiful notion of the blank domino, sort of, or the skeleton key, as a kind of existential, I wouldn't call it metaphor, as a kind of existential action or process, whereby he says, you know, the reason why the skeleton key can open every door in the house

is because of its radical blankness, its smoothness. You know, it isn't any one thing, and so it can become everything. It's a very simple principle, but it's a quite essential one. And mania, for me, mania's treatment of philosophical concepts follows that kind of notion, that it invents a kind of disguise or a mask that serves the purpose of getting you through a terrain, often a very difficult terrain. And so that's the sort of the utility of the concept. at that level, and that's why it has to constantly fracture and bifurcate and transmutate into other concepts. Because you're not in the same, if you're doing the job right, and you're not in a philosophical vacuum, where you're just sitting in a room contemplating to oneself, you actually have to move in the world. Then you have to allow the concept to continually advance, evolve,

you know, sort of fall apart. Otherwise, you'll get owned and broken. Something that I noted down as your reference in the introduction to your literary and conceptual work as a martial art. In your other books, very explicitly, all the way back to the chaotic imagination, there's this emphasis on tactics, on literary and conceptual tactics. And tactics too, not strategy. So I find this very interesting, this kind of like metaphor with some kind of war-like situation, this need to survive long enough to get to the other side of a compromised territory. I find that a really compelling metaphor for writing. And I think that there has to be a consistency and continuity.

And that's what Robin picks up on when he talks about a sort of underlying continuity to the work that sometimes you find in disparate places. You find threads connecting or forming spider webs. but there also has to be an improvisational ability simultaneously, which go hand in hand. Every great mystic or martial artist or any great craftsman will tell you this, you know, is that you spend almost a lifetime being able to master the forms precisely so as to become formless one day. If they're a good master, that's their prescription. And that's the improvisational moment. Any great jazz musician can tell you that as well. You know the scales, you know the notes, and then you depart from them. at some point, and you improvise. But that improvisation is not the randomness or kind of cheap chaos of just finding a saxophone

on the side of the street and blowing noise through it. It's the process of precisely, again, that willed forgetting or willed oblivion. That's sort of the omnicidal moment that is the higher stages of creativity. And it brings me back to that Nietzschean aphorism that it's a straight line to the infinite. And that's Nietzsche's infatuation with tightrope walking, which is a very, very crucial balance, you know, sort of balancing act that then gets you to the breakaway or the faraway or the radical outside of thought and of being. one last question to kind of uh tackle possibly two misconstruals of of what you're doing in the book i think you've done a great job in disabusing us of the idea that this is somehow um a nihilistic

book in any kind of simplistic negative sense um there seemed to be to me to be two possible snares One would be to confuse the omnicidal impulse you're exploring here with a kind of romantic line of abolition that's very central to 20th century Western thought. And almost one could say has been revealed to be the core of the destiny of the West. and it seems to me that your proposal is that the literature thought and the poetry of the Middle East is able to wield the impulse to extremity in a very different fashion and then on the other side the other snare would be not to put it too crudely to somehow associate the

question of the extreme with the contemporary discourse on extremism for example we could say talk about the idea that wahhabism is inherently disposed to the germination of the maniacal and the omnicidal what we'd refer to as fanaticism and indeed that's connected to some of the figures of the imaginary of the middle east that you use in in the book for example the desert and so on and reza negaristani has written written on this in the past so i think it would be interesting to understand how you steer away from both of these traps and how neither of those is precisely what's going on in the book. So first to start out with, you in your preface, in your forward to the book, make a very quick

but essential, sort of you raise a quick but essential question of even to what extent must we try and perceive some type of perhaps dire connection or relationality, let's say between the thought of figures like Nietzsche and Bataille and fascism? Right. And I would say that there's a parallel in the same way that I would answer the question of how does a figure like Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, or Adonis or Joyce Mansour, any of those, how do they contend with ideological and political vehicles like that of Wahhabist extremism or Islamic extremism. And I would say it almost falls along the same axis, which is that there are false resemblances, because they seem to be both playing at intense registers.

But I would remind that Nietzsche is one of the most vulnerable and masochistic thinkers that you could possibly imagine. And so for me, I don't even see any parallelism to the fascist universe of utopia and racial self-exaltation. In the same way that Mahmoud Darwish lives among, quite materially, he lives in the, or he used to live in the Palestinian territories among individuals who he would know who would inevitably become suicide bombers. And he has poems, by the way, that are devoted to them, and that are devoted to a kind of dialogue with them. And it's a very careful one by which what I note is that he fully understands them. He understands the origin and atrocity of their being and their ultimate nihilistic

purpose. But he differentiates himself and he differentiates the poetic sphere entirely from the realm of the suicide bomber, even though he will write poetry to try and elucidate that phenomenon. And so I would say we have to be very careful because I precisely think that these are the figures who have maintained a kind of exceptional immunity, immunity to precisely the political and social plagues of modernity that you're alluding to. Even though it seems like they partake of the same currency sometimes of violent fantasy or sort of ideas of destruction. But remember, again, the other ones are usually utopian. Whereas the first people who fall under erasure in the apocalyptic poetry that I try and,

and philosophy that I try and clarify, are the poets themselves. You know, they're the first ones to disappear. They don't remain to rule over a dead world, which is the paranoiac fantasy of, let's say, a Stalinist. If you let that pathological neurotic paranoia of the dictator loose ad infinitum, ultimately he'll purge everyone until there's no one left on earth but himself to rule over a dead world, because that's the only truly perfect world where there are no exceptions of suffering, inequality, injustice, treason, is a dead world. And that is precisely the, I don't want to call it diametrical opposite, but in many ways it is the vitalism and enlivening possibilities that are attempting to be resurrected by these poetic figures. So there's that one thing.

The second is, I'm exactly with you that, no, this is not some fantasy of transcendence or aesthetic, sort of aesthetic transcendence that I'm trying to look after here. It's almost impossible to do that in the so-called Middle East, in those regions. Every day you are surrounded by figures with machine guns, with governments that are flagrantly apparent in your everyday world, with the possibilities of night raids of your apartment or confiscation of your work or, again, arrests. These things, they penetrate continually. So it's not as if these figures don't know what they're up against or feel like they've found some other place. I take Nietzsche's warning very seriously. I've never seen anyone quote this line. I think it's the most devastating and severe line that I could imagine.

He says, there is only one world. And the other half end of that equation is there is only one world and they own it. And so you have to be ultra vigilant and wakeful. You know, you can't entertain that. No, I'm just in my own mind. I'm in my own imagination. I'm in my own sort of artistic provinces. I can't stand that kind of hipster Western delusion that I hear articulated sometimes, which has pseudo-spiritual and New Age trash associated with it. Sort of New Ageism being kind of the stupid younger brother of mysticism. And so I look at it and I say, no, these are forms of ultra-vigilance. Because reality is already a house of cards built on apparitional forms. That's the emperor's new clothes. All it takes is the child's utterance, you know, saying that the emperor is naked.

And the whole thing collapses. because it's just a breath of air is enough to unmask the frailty of these sociopolitical forms that are lethal and are genocidal, but nevertheless built on nothing. Nothing but, again, diversions and self-delusions. So will delusion, again, becomes a kind of weaponry, or as Amy says, a tactical arrangement against these modalities. And for this, just to quote one other Western philosopher who I think is quite important here, I mean, you have Baudrillard. And Baudrillard, who absolutely thinks that the perfect crime, as he calls it, or rather the way of engaging the perfect crime of the murder of reality, is precisely by becoming a cipher. Becoming increasingly enigmatic, increasingly chimerical, increasingly illusory.

Sort of that's his prescription in the perfect crime in a chapter called Radical Thought. He says, don't decipher, cipher. Become more unintelligible. And I think that whereas for him it's a wonderful manifesto and prescription, as he sort of sketches all of the parameters of the age of simulation, I think these figures in Omnicide are the ones who actually devise the mechanisms and the performativities that get you from one place to another in a bad sense. I think this discussion is kind of recapitulating in a way the conclusion of the book which is this discussion of the end of the trajectory

of the maniac that this vector that you draw from mania to annihilation that you call manic fatality or sort of ultimately ending in this space of homicide. There's this kind of idea that everyone ends up, all of these maniacs, all of these manias end up with some kind of vision of the destruction of the world, which also computes as a destruction of totality itself or a symbolic destruction of the universal. But at the same time as enacting this vision, and in your conclusion to the book too where you list the different

speeds at which the end of the world might take place, the different times at which it might take place, the different moves under which it might take place this kind of like persistent perpetuation of the list into the very last pages of the book there's this impossibility of conclusion that's contained within the notion of the ultimate conclusion itself and I like that paradox it's this interesting kind of connection of mania to fatality through this oppositional structure that operates not as a division as most oppositional structures do but as a link so this kind of idea that the only way that you can think about the end of the world is to infinitely perpetuate the storytelling at the end

so when they talk about this kind of notion of the last storyteller are all storytellers wanting to tell the last story at the same time you're performing the impossibility of the last story ever taking place. Absolutely, and so to that I would just say you captured it perfectly, that first of all, we know avant-garde movements throughout history that found liberation in the burning of their own works. You know, they would set fire to their canvases, to their paintings, to their sculptures, to their texts, so as to guarantee another round. So annihilation here is not a one-time affair. It's not sort of the last annihilation. That's why it's not death. And that's why Socrates, I think, misstates the task or the imperative of philosophy as

learning to die well. I think it's actually learning to kill well and learning how to die many times in that regard, each one of them well in different terms. And so this is something that we don't need Socrates or avant-garde artists even to figure out. Children know this, again intuitively, in the most beautiful ways, the art of demolition. You'll spend four hours with them in their toy room building a city out of blocks, and then they'll stomp all over it and destroy it. And they do it joyfully. They do it in elation. And you're sitting there frustrated at the loss of productive time, and you think of it as waste. But they see that as the whole intent of the project to begin with. You only build sandcastles near the waves, precisely so as to see their disintegration.

And often the child cries, even though they intentionally built them too close to the waters, because that's also sort of the beauty and the tragedy of the mourning act that takes place, sort of the ecstasy and radical sadness, or what Nietzsche calls the drunken happiness of dying at midnight. So it's precisely what you've isolated here, which is that there is, it's only through willed annihilation or earned annihilation. You have to perform annihilation at its outer registers that guarantees you the right of return. Yeah. And so those two concepts is how I would end this, that it's only through the prism of annihilation that we find ourselves awarded with the ability to return. We seem to have traversed a span of subjects that does justice to the dizzying perplexity of this remarkable book.

And I think it's been, for me, it's been incredibly elucidating, and I hope that for readers of the book, it will provide some extra material to help them navigate the work. The book is Omnicide, Mania, Fatality, and the Future in Delirium by Jason Babak Mohakhig. Thanks very much, Jason, for joining me, and thanks, Amy, for joining too. It's my privilege to speak with both of you and my sincere thanks to those of you out there reading it and also to the two of you above all else for honoring this work. Thank you. It means a great deal. So it is that this archaeological inquiry into a certain fragile strand of thought positions

us at a point where one departs from the world and then takes the world down alongside itself in the name of the infinitesimal. The particular will forever menace the universal. The last conflagration spreads from the flares of a lone ember, or a match struck one night amid the metaphysical freefall of a lover, of staircases, mirrors, diagrams, clocks, ghosts, gold, etc. Anything might serve to undo the everything. Any seemingly innocent sliver of a wish that, having reached its highest elevation, then slides inexorably to the zero degree where no one dwells or the someone who has become no one.

For make no mistake, it lives here, feeds here, delights and dies here. It holds the rings of keys and falls beneath their weight. Perhaps the maniac is the only true keeper of the promise. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.