Negarestani-Leng-Tch e

Leng-Tch'e (A Thousand Cuts) "He began to describe to me Chinese tortures that he had witnessed in a Peking street. The victim, tied to a pole, was stripped with a penknife piece by piece of all his flesh, except for his nerves and his arteries and veins. The man became a kind of trellis made by bones, nerves and blood vessels through which the sun could shine and the flies could buzz. In that way the victim could live for several days." (Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt) Leng-Tch'e is not a narrated discipline on the body, coming with a Foucaultian approach; it is an architectural approach to Death, a technique of dimensioning and architecting Death: letting the bones (the architecture of the ossified structures) appear while the body is still alive, letting the corpus being articulated by the white bones and a thousand cuts (a play on wound as the republic of solid and void, or simulation of death on the living body). That is not to say, narrating death on the body but simulating death through dimensions and architectonic modes as of dimensioning and architecting methods in building tombs, arranging or dumping corpses over each other, erecting gallows, filming the pale nails while everything decomposes, etc. Leng-Tch'e is determined in deathsimulating techniques as a spectacle rendered exuberant. It rises from the architecturized death whose job is appropriating and erasing the anonymous histories of corpse-flow even by means of the dreadful body-invading architectures. It ascribes itself (its architecture, dimensioning methods, etc.) to a history which is (dis)simulated as the History of Death; but the History of Death is the history of the State and Power, Genesis project, Solidity, Survival Economy, Deathware, Dimensions and architected death, architecting everything it touches in a hysteric hunger for grounding. However, this architecture carries its own dangers, the dangers of all dimensions which are manipulated blindly for the sake of solidity and its n-plexed survival economy, for the sake of all architectonic approaches to Death. It is a danger of contamination, of implosion, of mess, of collapse and mushrooming night-mares in peace, the silent affirmation of all architectures to ex-humation.