e-m-cioran-bezna-5

Bezna 5 © the authors August 2014 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommericalNoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0. Bezna [consistent darkness + diffuse fear] bezzzna.blogspot.com

Emil Cioran The Book of Delusions (fragments) .....................................................11 Nicola Masciandaro Following the Sigh ..................................................................................20 Alina Popa Dead Thinking ........................................................................................32 Florin Flueras Dead Thinking ........................................................................................57 Deanna Khamis The Stillness of Eternity .........................................................................74 Ben Woodard The Horrendous Instantiation of a Homogeneous Pink Volume .....81 Amy Ireland Digital Dismemberment: Twitter, Death by a Thousand Cuts .........86 Eugene Thacker Cosmic Pessimism ..................................................................................91 Irina Gheorghe A Short History of the Vague ..............................................................106 Anastasia Jurescu Puff. A Rolled Protuberant Mass of Hair ...........................................122 Cosima Opartan Left Handedness ....................................................................................123 Dylan Trigg The Prehuman Earth .............................................................................124 Francis Russell Underground? In Praise of Gnathostomiasis ....................................127

Ștefan Tiron Glow Baby Glow ...................................................................................131 Sarah Jones In Darkness ...........................................................................................136 Dorothee Neumann A-Ă-Â .....................................................................................................145 Aulos From the Under-Chambers of the Mind ...........................................150 Octavian-Liviu Diaconeasa Black Golden Skulls ..............................................................................152 Mihai Lukacs Plagued. The Fear of Theory ................................................................155 Bogdan Drăgănescu Praise of Nonknowing ..........................................................................171

The Book of Delusions* Emil Cioran (fragments) VI TO HAVE BEEN DONE WITH DEATH. Every time the human is haunted by the thought of death, she becomes an-other. Your thought of death is only your witnessing, conscious or unconscious, of metamorphosis. You dreamed, and death passed through your dream. And how different your dream has become. You loved, and in love death crossed over you. And how different your love has become. How different your wishes have become, how different the senses. In every thought, you have become other. You have lost yourself in them and with them, and they have become lost in you. Not in nuances, but in abysses above abysses the thought of death has lifted you. Nobody has ever defeated the obsession with death through lucidity and knowledge. There is no argument against it. Eternity is on its side, right? Only life has to defend itself continually; death was born triumphant. And how can it not be triumphant if nothingness is its father and horror its mother? Death is to be defeated only through exhaustion. The obsession with it tires us and then burns itself out. Death grows old in us from too much presence. After it has told us everything we cannot use it anymore. Our chronic symbiosis with death teaches us everything; through it all things are known. That is why knowledge can do nothing against it. In itself, death is eternal. Yet in me it deteriorated and is of no use anymore. Not to find any use in death – Does anybody understand this? How is it that not only life can be exhausted, but death as well? I don’t know whether it always or only sometimes seems to me that I will never die. To die, to perish one day, has lost any meaning. I will die. Nothing more. And this strange detachment from death does not proceed from anything else than the retrospective feeling of death. I am afraid of the death that was once in me. I am not frightened by the one that awaits me, but by the one that filled me all these years, by the 11

sinister halo of youth. It is the fear of my own past and its stigmata, imprinted by death. People are waiting for death and they couple it with their future. Why do they fear only the junction of future and death, the impenetrable bedrock of time? What about having left death behind? To look behind you and stare at death! Have I been resurrected or did I circumvent my own end? … Detachment from death leads us to a profound sense of total detachment. For only when we have left death itself behind us can we talk about detachment without affectation. Only then will we have understood that detachment does not mark the painful loss of the all, but the suffocating presence of all without us needing it anymore. … Were I not flesh, blood, breath, uprooted from time and rooted in a remote blueness, I would spin in the seraphic dematerialization of space. In vibrant void, traversed by fire and otherworldly colors, I would begin myself in void, without the memory of matter – not knowing if I had ever gone through it, just with an impression of passing it by. … Fear finds its excuse in the ultimate cause of being. We are not afraid of something, but of that something else, which is nothingness. There is no reason to not always be afraid. … Compared to fear, trembling is free from any exterior conditioning and more independent from the objective world. In itself, the question Why are you trembling? addresses an inner determinant or an indeterminable cause. If fear is hard to endure in the absence of fabricated rather than real reasons, trembling (the tremor of all organs…) is endured the more inexplicable it is. In trembling, fright does not dominate, but instead bewilderment, our bewilderment about the silence preceding it. … What are you trembling for? For myself, because of myself. … When you feel there is no corpse to whom your gaze and your trust 12

does not give life, no disease that you cannot turn into health, when in your lightning bolts and in your fever there is no law that is not a whim, no fate that is not an accident, when you are cozy in the great outside as in your own home and you derive selfishness from infinity, when you recover yourself in chaos and crumble all forms, acquiring form, when you feel the emptiness of the kingdom of heaven and the contempt for so many crowns, brilliant in the sun, when every resistance perishes in your fire and all is possible, oh-so-possible, then you will have reached the apex where the forces of the world fade into shadows – shadows absorbed by your mad, divine tremor. A stone, a flower and a worm are more than all human thinking. Ideas did not give birth and will never give birth, not even to a single atom. Thinking hasn’t brought anything new to the world, except itself; which is yet another world. Ideas ought to have been pregnant, deadly and vibrant; they ought to have given birth, to have menaced and trembled. … Ideas do not generate anything, so they do not add anything to the world we live in. Why think the world if thinking does not become fate to the world? No law of nature has ever changed because of thought and no idea has ever imposed a new law upon nature. Ideas are neither cosmic nor demiurgic, hence they have been born doomed. … You reach a moment in life when every pessimist book irritates and revolts you. There is too much indiscretion within them; they reveal too many intimacies, hardly protect the decency of life and rape too many virginities of being. All the seminal books of mankind should be burned. Only then will we have the courage of futilities and ephemeral things. Whatever they say, thinkers remain on the surface of life. Doing nothing other than sifting delusions from truths, they remain in suspension between delusion and truth. Passions are the substance of history. There has been no novel written by a sage. … 13

TO HAVE BEEN DONE WITH PHILOSOPHY. I have never understood why philosophy enjoys such an awe-inspiring reputation, or the pious respect people have for it. On so many occasions science has been – rightfully – despised, neglected; enthusiasm has scarcely ever attained a mystical dimension. To endow science with a halo is vulgar. Philosophy, on the contrary, since immemorial times, enjoys a favor that it does not merit, whose legitimacy we are bound to question. We will have to convince ourselves once and for all that the truths of philosophy are futile or that it holds no truth at all. Truly, philosophy holds no truth. Though nobody will enter the world of truth unless she has gone through philosophy. I have not been able to find out what philosophy wants, what philosophers want. Some say the dignity of philosophy consists in its not knowing what it wants. Not that philosophy does not have its topics, but with them one cannot begin anything. I have not encountered a discipline that becomes more sterile, more futile when cultivated for its own sake. To study the philosophers in order to spend your entire life in their society is to compromise yourself in front of all those who have understood well that philosophy can only be but one chapter of their biography. To die being a philosopher is a shame not even death can wipe away. Haven’t you noticed how all philosophers end up well? This thing should make us ponder . . . Their existence mimicked the sterility and blandness of their ideas. Philosophers don’t live in their ideas, but for them. They waste their lives vainly trying to animate ideas. They don’t know – what the most insignificant of poets knows – that ideas cannot be animated. So many times it seems to me that the lowest poet knows more than the greatest philosopher. I began to be indifferent to philosophers the moment I realized that philosophy can only be done in a state of psychic indifference, that is, with an outrageous indifference in comparison to any emotional state. Psychic neutrality is the essential trait of the philosopher. Kant was never sad. I cannot love those people who do not muddle thoughts and remorse. Like ideas, philosophers don’t have a fate. How comfortable to be a philosopher! How could we welcome the knowledge of philosophers if they are neutral to all that is and is not? No philosopher answers to a name. 14

However loud we would call her, she would not hear us. And if she were to hear us, what could she possibly answer? It is weird and inexplicable why people visit philosophy when they need consolation. Why would they turn to philosophy in the midst of their most tormenting privations? There is nothing more profound and mysterious than the need for consolation. It cannot be theoretically defined, for anything that remains of it is already a sigh. The world of thoughts is an illusion compared to the world of sighs... Once and for all: any philosophy is a failed expectation. A visionary poet (e.g. Baudelaire, Rilke) expresses in two verses more than a philosopher in her entire work. Philosophical probity is pure timidity. By trying to demonstrate what cannot be demonstrated, to prove what is heterogeneous to thought, to validate the irreducible or the absurd, philosophy meets only a mediocre taste of the absolute. Sometimes it seems that all philosophy is reducible to the law of causality and then a greater disgust overtakes me. Since one cannot do philosophy without the law of causality, everything seems to be outside philosophy. … There is only one definition of philosophy: the restlessness of impersonal people. It is as if all philosophers were put on death row. … One cannot go back from poetry, music, mysticism to philosophy. It is obvious that they are more than philosophy. Poets, composers, and mystics only philosophize in hours of exhaustion, when they are compelled to turn to a minor condition. They realize in themselves that there is no pride in being a philosopher, they understand how little philosophy knows, let alone science. What is thinking compared to the ecstatic vibration, the metaphysical cult of nuances pervading all poems? And how far philosophy is from reality, how pale the world of ideas in comparison to music and mysticism! There is no generative philosophy. Philosophy does not create anything. By this I mean it can project another world, but not give birth to it, not impregnate it. Philosophers speak as if everything had already happened. No work of art should exist, because all art is a world within the world and therefore it is redundant. No philosophical system made 15

me feel a world independent of the realm of philosophy. The painful truth: read as many philosophers as you wish, you will never feel that you have become a different human being. Obviously I exclude Nietzsche from philosophy, who is much more than a philosopher. … It is not in the slightest true that philosophers are closer to essential realities than everybody else. In fact, they are subservient only to appearances and they bow exclusively to what has never been and will never be (the only reason for which they are dear to me). … Man can only attain the ecstasy of appearances. This is the only reality. Poetry, music and mysticism serve these supreme appearances. … This is how I understand a great soul: not the one that alone gives meaning to the world, but the one towards which the world tends, as if drawn to its middle. It is as if rivers, mountains, and people progressively converged towards it. Its eye is the mirror of all expanses, its hearing the final aim of all pitches, its heart the shelter of all senses and prehensions of the world. Once this man falls ill, the environment becomes infested out of dread of contrast, fear of inferiority in health. The vibrations of a great soul stirs all loneliness around it. Or, everyone else’s fear of loneliness is the only possible reason for the existence of such a soul. To have an inner style means to be your entire inner world, the whole world, a flux. Not being able to be born in you, it seems to wish to die in you. After you nothing is able to die! To have given the world so much life that it ends in you, with you! … When I think how little there is to learn from the great philosophers! I never needed Kant, Descartes, or Aristotle, who only ever thought for our lonely hours, for our legitimate doubts. But I lingered upon Job, with the piety of a grandson. 16

VII … Why is it that man so greatly fears the future when obviously the past inspires greater awe? Should not the undeniable fact that the cosmos has for aeons been unhuman provoke more inner void than one’s own transience? Since the un-birth of nothingness until the time of the first human, consciousness had not been felt as missing, hence the existence of humans is not necessary. The emergence of mankind is absolutely contingent. The universe could have disappeared without reflecting upon itself. … Humanity cannot dispense with anything; humanity can dispense with everything. The contradiction will be solved when humanity will have dispensed with itself. … The blind groping of man has always impressed me more than sainthood. … Between being perfect and being plagued, I will always prefer the latter. … In eternity nothing is lost. I feel bound to this Earth, because it is doomed… … Ambivalence and equivocation are ultimate truths. To be with truth while against it is not a paradox for anyone who understands that her abysses and revelations can neither not love nor not hate truth. The one who believes in truth is naïve; the one who doesn’t is silly. To go on a straight path is to tread a knife’s edge. 17

… As much life as you have invested your thoughts with, that much death is in you. … The extent to which knowledge must grow to rid us of sorrow is as hard to determine as it is easy to ascertain how little it should be so that sorrow is not felt in the first place. There is indeed a sorrow which has nothing to do with knowledge: a mineral sorrow, not even biological. … Are geological eras moaning in you? If not, why are you talking about time? … It is not easy to endure the horror that arouses in you an active vibration and a cataclysmic tremor because, by manifesting itself in states of fever, its intensity dims into fear and uncertainty. But the horror born in perplexity, in the obscurity of calmness, in subterraneous astonishment is utterly unbearable. Never in your life have you felt more intensely the urge to shout help! or scream some unintelligible sound. In the midst of the peacefulness that places you among the balanced and self-sufficient, a catastrophe would seem most banal, a collapse most predictable, a death most reasonable. Horror converts the sinister into the obvious and all that is divine becomes monstrous, beginning with the smile. A man incapable of feeling horror, that horror for-no-reason, will never understand any action “for-no-reason”. You must act against horror. And whatever you may do won’t be understood by anybody, because it makes no sense except against your horror. Why are truths so lonely? The more you scream at truth, help!, the more it conceals. It may even run away. Are truths too mediocre or is it that they haven’t been made for this world? … Through hate alone, but also through horror I am the son of this Earth! But horror will topple this Earth; a too-great-horror will set it ablaze, or maybe the Earth will ignite from the sole spark of a soul’s great horror. This Earth should be restored to the sun for the tears have long returned to the soul. 18

*Cartea Amăgirilor [The Book of Delusions] (1936) has originally been written in Romanian and there is no English translation yet available. The fragments from the last two of its chapters (VI and VII) have been translated here for the first time. [translated by Alina Popa] 19

Following the Sigh Nicola Masciandaro Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles? Emil Cioran Out of agony and grief, from behind every atom of dust comes sighing and lamentation, but your ear is deaf. Rumi I am a sigh, I will mount to the heavens. Iqbal1 AXIOM “In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh.”2 Pessimism follows the sigh. Beginning with expiration, pessimism comes after the sigh by going where it leads, all the more so if the sigh not does lead anywhere. For to follow the sigh, even into the worst, is at least to escape the worse-than-worst death, the interminable self-tyranny of looking forward to something: “Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has” (Vernon Howard). Pessimism’s axiom invokes the sigh’s palpable universality, its being a truth we find in our blood. “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms”, wrote Keats, “until they are proved upon our pulses.”3 The universality of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates the sigh that issues from my heart].4 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of life’s eventual exit from a corpse’s mouth, the sigh restores 20

consciousness to the funeral of being, to the superlative passing away that is existence. Like a bitter, dreg-drinking mystic, pessimism speaks in piercing silence-producing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.”5 HEART Already one perceives in this axiom, in the sigh as axiom, the sigh’s essential polarity, how it holds in one long moment the life of the mind and the death of the body, the wandering movement of thought and the eventual, already-imminent passing away of mortal incarnate being. The place of this polarity is the heart, interface of soul and body, invisible and visible, mind and matter. Heart is the restless, swervy atom of existence, the ungraspable third zone of experience6 which being can only blindly grasp as its own place and which is visible only to love, that is, by a knowing which is specular, in touch with the threshold of species and phantasm, the interface where the object – the seen which seeing cannot see through – is unveiled in reflection. Augustine writes: “But as to what I now am while I am writing my Confessions, there are many who desire to know . . . Yet they have not their ear at my heart, where I am whoever/whatever I am [ubi ego sum quicumque sum]. They wish, therefore, to hear from my own confession what I am inwardly, where they cannot pierce with eye or ear or mind. They desire to know and are prepared to believe but will they know? The charity by which they are good, tells them that in my confession I do not lie about myself; and this charity believes me.”7 To follow the sigh, to trace its path, requires a will to see that can traverse this threshold, an ear that hears what speaks between word and breath, an eye that can enter the image – piercing the sphere of the perceptible. “Heaven splits in two at the sigh of a lover.”8 CLINAMEN Pessimism’s first axiom must be distinguished from the plethora of semiotic and expressive sighs, all those signifying exhalations which are for the sake of something and pathetically want to be heard, above all by oneself. True sighing inhabits an untraceable boundary between sighing and not-sighing, traditionally a secret place where only the 21

soul and God can hear. The sixteenth-century Francisan mystic Francisco de Osuna writes, “Do not fail to avail yourself of sighs and even to utter them softly when alone. And I advise you to love solitude for no other reason than because it is so conducive to sighing and exceedingly pleasing to your beloved . . . You should understand that the sigh that leaves your heart is a swift arrow shot by the bow of desire to the Lord on high and that it does not return without the Lord himself.”9 Distinguishing pessimism’s sigh is thus not simply a matter of deciding between inauthentic and authentic sighs, because all sighs are at once authentic and inauthentic. Authenticity is the condition of truth or integrity defined by self-doing (auto-entes) and what is more authentic that one’s breath? Whence the sigh’s essential inauthenticity, which truthfully lies in its being an improper vocal appropriation of breath for speech and speech for breath, as if what is spoken in the sigh is wasted breath and what is breathed in the sigh is wasted speech. The issue of the sigh’s in-authenticity is charted by Cioran. On the one hand he identifies its continuity with the affective histrionic fakery of your typical human being: “Fraudulence of style: to give the usual melancholies an unaccustomed turn, to decorate our minor miseries, to costume the void, to exist by the word, by the phraseology of the sarcasm or the sigh!”10 On the other hand, he knows the sigh as a permissible exception for the noble soul: “A true mystic, he [Louis Claude de Saint-Martin] disliked irony – antireligious by definition, irony never pays; how could this man who had cast the world behind him have resorted to it, who perhaps knew but one pride, that of the Sigh? ‘All nature is but a concentrated suffering’; ‘If I had not found God, my mind could never have attached itself to anything on earth.’”11 The sigh cannot escape being an imposture, a violation, precisely because it is an escape of what should not, of what properly should be kept secret, as per the mystic’s traditional dictum, “Secretum meum mihi, secretum meum mihi, vae mihi” (Isaiah 24:16) [My secret is mine, my secret is mine, woe is me]. Rumi writes, “If You should cast me into the fire, I am no true man if I utter a sigh.”12 Meher Baba explains: “Love sets on fire the one who finds it. At the same time it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out.”13 “Even a sigh of the pangs of separation is an insult to that love!”14 In the axiomatic sigh of pessimism the should-not-be of the sigh and the should-not-be 22

of being are compounded, as if this first axiom would also represent an impossibly already underway and endless first sigh. A sigh turning under the secret tension, with all the weight and lightness, all the truth and falsity, of the first truth. A sigh that, now silenced into axiom, sighs for what is before sigh itself, for the knowing-withoutknowledge before the burdensome weighing of truth into axiom.15 “Pursuing the antecedents of a sigh”, writes Cioran, “can lead us to the moment before – as to the sixth day of Creation.”16 LIMBO Pessimism exits paradoxically from philosophy by taking its sigh seriously, by recognizing the seriousness of philosophy’s not knowing its own sighing. “I turned away from philosophy”, writes Cioran, “when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy [tristesse].”17 Pessimism saves itself from philosophy by falling for the sigh that is philosophy’s hell, escaping philosophy by entering and exiting philosophy as hell. As Dante’s Virgil says of the eternal home of Plato, Aristotle, and other pagan philosophers: “Not for doing, but for not doing, have I lost the sight of the high Sun that you desire and that was known to me too late. A place there is below, not sad with torments but with darkness only, where the lamentations sound not as wailings, but are sighs” (Purgatorio 7.25). Pessimism finds a new alter-Limbo, a paradoxically inside and outside border (limbus) where thought, falling for the sigh, becomes a strange and incomplete hybrid of itself, a thought that sighs, a sigh that thinks. The thinking of a sigh that sighs for itself. The sighing of a thought that thinks itself. Such intellectual falling for the sigh is recorded in two perfectly incomplete epigrams by Cioran, each of which immediately follows an evocation of limbic identity. “To have introduced the sigh into the intellect’s economy . . .”18 and “To have foundered somewhere between the epigram and the sigh!”19 The first follows upon a wish for a kind of fatality which synthesizes the earliness and lateness of Limbo’s innocent souls, a desire for prescientific death: “Fortunate those who, born before Science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”20 The second follows upon a correlative claim of ontological marginality: “I have never taken myself 23

for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”21 In contrast to the limbo of philosophy, a virtuously sinful state of omission which fails to go far enough via attachment to its own virtue, pessimism’s sigh communicates an at once forever lost and already inhabited existential limbo of neither doing nor not doing, the axiomatic breath of a being who nearly succeeds at never having been. DARK AGES The pessimist senses in sighing the weight of an earlier and older world, a time when the darkness of the universe was more brilliant and the breath of man’s heart might travel clearly in its abyss. He knows that the sigh, which formerly meant something and encompassed a metaphysical depth, has been replaced, now that place itself has been historically displaced by time.22 As Cioran states, under the heading of “Secularization of Tears”: “The torsion of the will replaced the suavities; the contradiction of the feelings, the naïve flight; frenzy, the disciplined sigh; heaven having vanished from music, man was installed there.”23 Now our sighs have nowhere to go. And this does not mean that they do not go anywhere. For this not-havinganywhere-to-go is really a superlative situation for the sigh, the very situation it lives for, nowhere being the place from which the sigh best goes everywhere. The paradise of pessimism, the thought-discipline of the worst, is that it provides an optimal home for the sigh, a si-ghte wherein the sigh re-becomes a place of cosmic vision. In this new centerless here, the now-here of the post-medieval world, the sound of one sigh fills the universe, only there is no one to hear it. As Cioran says, “Becoming is nothing more than a cosmic sigh.”24 Now the sigh finds a new dimension, a weird meta-spatial materiality capable of occluding everything. So Tugen sings, “And so sighs alone have been sweet to me, since they have taken the place of living. And if I am lucky the sighs will eclipse living entirely, and this is all that will remain. But that is obviously a fantasy.”25 24

PHANTASM Yet the fantasy is real, perhaps more real than it can or will imagine. For fantasy always impinges upon the idea and fact of its being a fantasy as part of the fantasy. It is in the phantasmatic nature of fear – a ghost story the mind tells itself – both to forget and to insist that fear is a phantasm. “Fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture [phantasmata] of some destructive or painful evil in the future” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.5). One forgets the phantasm so as to fear a real thing. One remembers the phantasm so as to fantasize control over the thing feared. Cosmic horror – fictional reflection of the horror of philosophy26 – specializes in doing both at once in a conspicuously philosophical way, insisting nihilistically upon the ultimate insignificance of horror a la H. P. Lovecraft’s “the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large”27 and fantasizing about that horror’s real and eventual consequences: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.28 Lurking within this fear, as if something the fear itself fears, is the spectre of a more speculative horror, an inadmissible identity-dissolving terror that the fantasy is actually true and that human experience does have cosmic significance, only a significance that has little or nothing to do with you. It is the easiest thing to fear hell, anything, everything that is out there. Anyone can do that, and everyone does. That is the number one way of being someone in this world. “The being of Da-sein is Sorge [care, worry, solicitude, fear, anxiety, sorrow].”29 But when I see the sheer auto-hallucinatory insanity of that, when I see what horror itself reflects and face the blindness whereby “I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable”,30 now I glimpse that my fear only veils what I will not see, something too terrible to my fear to see, namely, that I am already 25

in hell, that being me is everything I fear.31 Cosmic pessimism ecstatically exposes experience to such greater horror, the horror-without-us seized by drowning thought in the fact that one’s pathetically finite and isolated human being is perforce so abyssically in universe that neither is there anywhere to hide nor any reason to, because the life on whose behalf one trembles was itself never one’s own. And so the sighs of the pessimists, like bubble-words from a drowning coincident with birth, float into new forms of strange good news, showing the way to the happy, unheard-of atmospheres of the optimal, perfect worst. On the one hand, these sigh-spheres breathe life back into the human as its own greatest horror: “We moderns have discovered hell inside ourselves and that is our good fortune.”32 On the other, they point to an unbounded, acosmic reality: “My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out . . . in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.”33 BEYOND THE SPHERE Pessimism’s unsighably axiomatic sigh, comprehended within one’s own inescapable breath, is not worry or self-dramatization, but a veritable piercing of the bubble of existence. If this sigh hearkens back to the metaphysical expirations of premodern mystics and poets, it is not out of nostalgia or inauthentic traditionalism, but in light of modernity’s unveiling of the “monstrousness of the external”,34 the black, neither subjective nor objective reality of a universe whose truth is feeling more and more medieval. “We perceive no more of Creation than its destitution, the grim reality . . . a lonely universe before a lonely heart, each predestined to disjoin and to exasperate each other in the anthithesis.”35 For this is the no less ancient than futural situation, the terrifyingly actual situation of the this (which I will wager that weirdly you do not really want any other way), in which something must give, where the given itself is given up, and something in oneself turns, who knows where. As Cioran asserts, from the heights of despair, “The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the original source of life. True interiorization leads to a universality inaccessible to those 26

who remain on the periphery.”36 Therefore, if there is such a thing as being a good pessimist, a best lover of the worst, it is dubious whether anyone will ever hear from him again. As Rumi wrote, “That man is truly successful who is drowned in that sigh.”37 1. The following anecdote is instructive: “On the train traveling from Lahore to Amritsar, a 53-year-old Muslim man in the compartment was also visibly drawn to [Meher] Baba. He kept gazing steadily at Baba, who was patting the new boy seated beside him. After some time, Baba looked straight at him and dictated through one of the mandali, ‘My friend, there is nothing but bliss everywhere.’ ‘Maybe for you, Sir”, the man replied, ‘but not for us.’ Baba answered, ‘You complain because you cannot see it, but I tell you there is nothing but bliss all around. I see it; I experience it every moment.’ The man then said, ‘I have experienced nothing but misery, conflict and suffering in the world. I have never known happiness and am quite disgusted with my life.’ ‘This is because of ignorance,’ Baba explained . . . The man was visibly relieved of his misery, and felt joy from meeting the Master and accepting his advice . . . The feeling of renewed enthusiasm for life had not been conveyed through words; it had been imparted internally. The mandali found out that the person had tried many different spiritual austerities and was searching for a Master, but after years he had grown dejected and depressed. When he met Baba in the train, he was contemplating suicide. Baba not only saved his life, but inspired him to continue in his quest. This individual was none other than the celebrated Indian poet Muhammad Iqbal” (LM 1187-8, 1930, lordmeher.org). 2. Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism, Continent 2.2 (2012): 66-75. 3. Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818 (englishhistory.net). 4. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova. ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 5. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan. trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 6. “. . . is neither within nor outside of the individual, but in a ‘third area’, distinct both ‘from interior psychic reality and from the effective world in which the individual lives’[Winnicott]. The topology that is here expressed . . . has always been known to children, fetishists, ‘savages,’ and poets. It is in this ‘third area’ that a science of man truly freed of every eighteenth-century prejudice should focus its study. Things are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-jecta) of use and exchange; rather, they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space 27

becomes possible. They are therefore held and comprehended from the outset in the topos outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which our experience of being-in-the-world is situated. The question ‘where is the thing?’ is inseparable from the question ‘where is the human?’ Like the fetish, like the toy, things are not properly anywhere, because their place is found on this side of objects and beyond the human in a zone that is no longer objective or subjective, neither personal nor impersonal, neither material nor immaterial, but where we find ourselves suddenly facing these apparently so simple unknows: the human, the thing.” (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 59). 7. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 10.3.4. 8. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi, trans. A. J. Arberry, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 150.5. 9. Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. Mary E. Giles (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 306. 10. E. M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1999), 15. 11. E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 2012). 12. Rumi, Mystical Poems, 191.4. 13. Meher Baba, Listen, Humanity, ed. D.E. Stevens (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 19. 14. Meher Baba, Lord Meher, 3625 (lordmeher.org). 15. Correlatively, the verbal concept of axiom signifies a becoming weighty of a movement, just as axioms are measured by the inner movement their impression causes. “Axiom, from Latin axioma, from Greek axioma ‘authority,’ literally ‘that which is thought worthy or fit,’ from axioun ‘to think worthy,’ from axios ‘worthy, worth, of like value, weighing as much,’ from PIE adjective *ag-ty-o- ‘weighty,’ from root *ag- ‘to drive, draw, move’” (Online Etymological Dictionary). 16. Cioran, All Gall is Divided, 92. 17. E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1975), 47. 18. E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1983), 68. 19. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Seaver, 1973), 176. 20. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, 68. 21. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 176. 28

22. As emblematized in Petrarch’s shift of mind atop Mt. Ventoux: “Then a new idea took possession of me, and I shifted my thoughts to a consideration of time rather than place” (Ascent of Mt. Ventoux, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ source/petrarch-ventoux.asp). See Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). “What recent philosophers have termed forgetfulness of being [Seinsvergessenheit] is most evident as an obstinate willful ignorance of the mysterious place of existence. The popular plan to forget both oneself and being is realized through a deliberate nonawareness of the ontological situation” (Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I, trans. Wieland Hoban [Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2011], 27, my emphasis). 23. E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 155. 24. E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46. 25. Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre, Songs from the Black Moon (gnOme, 2014), 13-4. 26. See Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011). 27. Letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5, 1927, cited from H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, introduction by China Miéville (New York: Modern Library, 2005), xii. 28. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, in The Whisperer in Darkness (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 34. 29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 262. 30. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 31 31. Cf. “Plotinian sensible matter just is the principium individuationis, which serves as the horizon for becoming by spatiotemporally individuating Forms as sensible objects. The principium individuationis imposes a veil of obscurity on noetic activity . . . [and] causes an ontological illusion whereby the sensible world and the real are conflated . . . The principium individuationis . . . is hence to be identified as primary evil, or evil itself ” (John A. Pourtless, “Toward a Plotinian Solution to the Problem of Evil”, Aporia 18 (2008):13-4. 32. Cioran, Tears and Saints, 52. 33. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 86. 34. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 629. 35. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 33. 36. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 4. 37. Rumi, Mystical Poems, 61.7. 29

Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking

Upside Down and Downside Up The fictional Baron [von Münchhausen] attempts to pull the inside of his body out in a painful effort to escape entrapment. A body with too many organs swells out. Yet restrained by the continuity of matter never fully achieves separation or extraction. Ben Woodard On the other hand, Firdawsi reports in the Book of Kings that the followers of Mazdak, the heretical 6th-century Persian wise man, ‘were planted there head down, with their feet in the air, like trees . . . If you have any sense, [he says] you will not follow Mazdak’s way.’ Nicola Masciandaro

Dead Thinking Alina Popa I write for one who, entering into my book, would fall into it as into a hole, who would never again get out. Georges Bataille I: THE DEATH-GAME OF THINKING The scaffolding of a nightmare requires a nervous expenditure more exhausting than the best articulated theoretical construction. Emil Cioran I’m from the other side of the mirror, I come from you Dust Devil I will bury myself in my own imagination and let myself rot, eaten by all the thoughts that I once ate. Until only an almost-nothing remains, an infra-thing that whispers between words and speaks to You! L’aura di Cristallo The Count of Dead Thoughts A lonely thought is wandering aimlessly through the cemetery of concepts appalled at the sight of its own dark neuro-crypt. Deeply enfogged by the dust of its very logic another thought lost sight forever. A third thought passionately inhaled the smoke-aura of cremated reason. A next thought, deducted from the previous, chokes with the rising spiral of the ashes of its cause. Air that strikes, air that punches you in the face, thoughtlessly, absentmindedly. A thought, too anaemic to be included in any intelligent spectrum, oscillates between infinitesimally close shades of morbid pallor. A mad recursive thought-rhythm: terrible stim of your pupil. The drone of being makes ripples of nothingness. A monotonic breath inhales back 32

its every exhalation-sigh in an exquisite logic of near-suffocation. A last thought warps to swallow its own end before it begins. The Thought-Sarkophagos Both thought and I are caged together in a crypt-ical illusion, carrying around each other’s hallucination. The more I speed it up, the less I am myself, I become a mere host for the alien worm that is coiled in my brain and is writing with my hand. To slow it down is to start smelling the dampness of its supercognitive crypt. I cannot will to think. And I cannot will to not think. Ligotti’s salutary completion of Descartes’s dictum (“I think therefore I am and one day I will die”) makes it clear that to begin to think is to begin to think horror. Once consciousness appeared something dark and abysmal found its way worming inside the bland thoughts of humankind. Cognition: a horror theme park of your darkest nightmares. Each of us – paradoxes compelled to horrorthink. “The footsteps that I hear are my own”(DD). The ungluing of myself from me, the disentanglement of ‘I’ from thinking. ‘It’ thinks. Nietzsche’s breaking of the correlation between the subject ‘I’ and the will to think (“a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ’I’ wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate to ‘think’“) could be radicalized into: a thought that comes when I wish ‘it’ less. ‘I’ is not the condition of thinking, but thinking happens in spite of and against ‘I’: “Whence did I get the notion of ‘thinking’? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘ego’, and even of an ‘ego’ as cause, and finally of an ‘ego’ as cause of thought?”(FN). I am only able to think against thought, against the ‘againstness’ of thought. Thinking with thought is impossible. Or too possible. When thought is free, ‘I’ will ‘be not’ anymore: “[S]ince true thought thinks itself, that type of thought attains its object in the act of thinking itself… True thought is authorless”(CL). I am most free when thinking ‘is not’, when I would have killed yet another thought, first and foremost the thought of ‘I’. “In losing myself I find myself dangerous”(CL). I fear that one day I will find myself rotting, eaten up by my wormed, convoluted thoughts. Find what has already evaporated in a necrosis that happened before the time of ‘I’, find that there was 33

nothing to find in the first place. The Slime-Thought “Thought is lagging behind itself ”(BM via BL). It drags its impossible weight of being what it is pregnant with what it ‘is not’. Despite its constitutive sluggishness thought deceives its own retarded nature by hallucinating a ‘now’ for itself. As a snail, it exudes its own shell-home in the form of a protective, illusory now by erasing its tortuous line of lag. It constructs its own umbilical cord back to a navel that never existed. It already happened outside itself: “Thought hallucinates that it coincides with itself ”(BM). It eats its half-second lag to stand right in time. “One of the things that happens in the lapsing is a fiction. Libet determined that thought covers up its lag: the awareness is ‘backdated’ so that each thought experiences itself to have been at the precise time the stimulus was applied”(BM).The feedback loop between thought and affect, between consciousness and body creates a time-smudge of infinite causes that are already infested by their effects. The ‘now’ does not coincide with itself. There are myriads of infra-nows in and for themselves. The time of bodymind is scattered. The present of consciousness is a sluggish now, while NOW is the moment of intensity when all scattered instants collapse into each other. The now of consciousness is interrupted. “[W]e must ask if ‘nothingness’, unthinkable as a limit or negation of being, is not possible as interval and interruption; we must ask whether consciousness, with its aptitude for sleep, for suspension, for epoché, is not the locus of this nothingness-interval”(EL). Slumber is not the retreat of consciousness, it is immanent in thought. Consciousness is being constituted by its retreats, its somnolence and reservations. Snail-ization. Senilization. All within. Thought escapes itself. “The present . . . is behind the present. It catches up with itself but with a lag behind itself, or effects a retreat, a rebound, in the simplicity of its stroke”(EL). The present is a snail that returns upon itself in a movement-reflection of its spiraled shell. Thinking is never ‘now’ and ever too late. To accelerate it is to discover the swift thought-slime that your tongue has just become. I left my humanity behind and I am walking the slime’s way. I am licking the 34

silvery track that I myself secreted in advance. The amorphous flesh of thinking screams its inhumanity, our inhumanity. “[T]he inhuman is our better part, is the thing, the thing part of people”(CL). We are as impossible as thinking, on the brink of definitions, so madly finite that we are born of extinction. Left with a thought as mere reflection of our own look in the eyes of impossibility. The mirror-hall of impossibility and thinking is the most honest schizo-tactics, the monstrous sight of ourselves in our purely reflexive mode. In writing I am enacting the thought-game of a toy that forgot its own rules for play. An I-toy that thinks by hanging to the nothingness of the game it wants to become: “[A game] is a reality that leaves no traces; the nothingness that preceded it is equal to that which follows it. Its events do not have real time. A game has no history”(EL). Toys are played by the game. Slime-toys are dreams of this formless game. Dream of Mattel-intelligence, green ooze playing with me, throwing me back into the dustbin to which both ‘I’ and slime-toy belong. The Thought-Chase The only possible cognitive acceleration: thinking not as running thoughts but as running away from thoughts. Chased by your impossible cognition, ‘now’ is too full - ‘they’ are coming from all the directions. If I let only one thought catch me, it is enough to unfold the catastrophe. A thought’s horror of itself. A self-reflexive drama. Entrapped in cognitive monomania: a melodrama of one. The irreparable focus of thought on its own misery discharges a predator-reflex: thought ingurgitates itself until annihilation. It is then that I live the most, it is only then that I most intensely ‘am not’. “Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened”(EL). An autophagic thought latched onto its already decaying matter, sucking us through, circumventing being by consuming it from without. This silent consummation, the return of thought to its own immanent negation is the event of never having happened. Thought happened to me, but now it is over, as if it has just begun. Thoughts afraid of other thoughts horrendously unfold, trying to 35

break loose from the solid horror of their too logical chain. Effect fears cause but lurks backwards upon it in a curled act of forced feeding: recursive causality. A sewing backwards with an ever changing thread, a confusion of pulling and being pulled. Thoughts chasing each other. Gaping insuperable faults between one another, drilling a void inside of themselves. Thoughts plunging into their own futile core, infinitely swooning, forever resurrecting from and into their own ashes. There is no escape from falling into your inner void: “My interior emptiness will engulf me, I will be swallowed by my own void. To collapse into yourself, into your own nothingness”(EMC). “There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher. . .”(EMC via NL). Driven by the dread of itself a thought produces another thought which destroys its progenitor. Causes destroyed by their effects. Causes reborn through their own effects. Present giving birth to past anew. Intensity of present that alters the extension of time. Not only is future the “maximization of absence”(TG) but it is the intensification of an absence already too much here. Time is a twisted umbilical cord. The Low, Injurious Level of Thoughts Now rest. Imagine a flat bottom of bottoms filled with lonely thoughts: “Don’t let one thought teach another thought. All thoughts, which wrongly give you a sense of identity, are on the same low, injurious, level”(VH via NM). My thoughts will be strange to other thoughts and strange to themselves. In the flat ontology of thinking, the cemetery of sufficient reason is a post-causal heaven. Causes have existed but they ceased to matter. ‘Hyperchaos’ of total cognitive stasis. To dissect life is to vivisect death. The chopped samples of death-life are chrono-logically alien to each other. My chronopathic body-parts make up my “unhuman phenomenology”(DT) and hide a reason unthinkable to itself: “Even the materials of my body and the lower levels of my brain have a very different sense of time from my cerebrum”(JGB). My nails think my arm, my arms think my mouth, my mouth thinks my heart, my heart thinks my brain. All impossible thinkers abiding different times more than different spaces. In a complete serenity of being, when all these recursive thoughts of a 36

temporally dismembered body reach a perfect balance (levitation, ever lighter stages of the body, astronaut-bodies), the gravity of thinking differs from the earthly constant (g=9.81). Thinking itself becomes a round heap of air, a mass of chaotic disintegrated accelerations. If thinking has been traditionally linked to heaviness, the pathology of thought’s own gravity reaches the limit of thought itself – a peaceful limit, not a catastrophic one. A phenomenology of roundness, that feeling of completion along with the absentmindedness it requires (or the roundness of affect in its plenitude of perceiving self-perception) corresponds to a non-gravitational thought floating like astronauts in outer space. The ungrounding of thinking equals a disentanglement of thought from the attraction force of the earth and its re-emergence into new twisted gravities. In living the not-thought (or the naughtthought) one loses perspective, not in the sense of regress but in the sense of disintegrating into an infinity of perspectives that do not touch each other, almost exploding in a full roundness of myriad ‘points’ of view. The infra-points that pierce all solid de-voiding it of resistance to become a void of fully accomplished thought-feelings, zero-thoughts. “All points of view are wrong because each has an opposite that limits it. [Beyond coincidentia oppositorum] lies the sphere or curvature on which opposition occurs. To think such that thought, any perspective, becomes a point of transposition into oppositeless and perspectiveless ()hole or zero-all of the sphere”(NM). Transform words in ‘shovels without a master’ that dig large crevasses in between words, that blow prepositions right in their core. Warp the verbs, offend the substantives. Suffixes, prefixes, prepositions are twitching machines that madly unground every Grund for thinking. Once a logical chain, tired of inference, settles itself in too heavy a heap, the whole steel edifice collapses under the terrible weight of its holes, of its infiltrations and differential density. The heap of logical principles is absolutely flat. Pathos is no less logical than a Turing machine. Nothing is more logical than anything else. 37

II: PINNACLE OF NEGATIVITY La première de ces démonomanes a déjà eu deux accès de lypémanie. Le démon est dans son corps, qui la torture de mille manières; elle ne mourra jamais. La deuxième n’a plus de corps; le diable a emporté son corps; elle est une vision; elle vivra des milliers d’années, elle a le malin esprit dans l’utérus sous la forme d’un serpent, quoiqu’elle n’ait pas les organes de la génération faits comme les femmes. La troisième n’a pas non plus de corps, le malin esprit l’a emporté n’en laissant que le simulacre qui restera éternellement sur la terre. Elle n’a point de sang, elle est insensible (analgésie). La quatrième n’est pas allée à la selle depuis vingt ans, son corps est un sac fait de la peau du diable plein de crapauds, de serpents, etc. La cinquième a le cœur déplacé, elle ne mourra jamais. L’autre a un vide à la région épigastrique; elle est damnée, elle n’a plus d’àme. Plus tard la pensée lui vint qu’elle était immortelle. Jules Cotard, Études sur les maladies cérébrales et mentales [The first of the demonomaniacs has already had three crises of lypomania. The demon is inside her body, it tortures her in innumerable ways; she will never die. The second has no body anymore; the devil carried away her body; she is a vision; she will live thousands of years, she has the malignant spirit inside her uterus in the shape of a snake, although she does not have reproduction organs as women do. The third has no body anymore, the malignant spirit carried her away leaving behind just a simulacrum that will remain on earth eternally. She has no blood, she is insensate (analgesia). The fourth has not been defecating for twenty years, her body is a bag made from the skin of the devil, full of toads and serpents, etc. The fifth had her heart dislocated, she will never die. Another one has a vacuum in the epigastric region; she is doomed, she has no soul anymore. Later the thought came to her that she was immortal.] Jules Cotard, [A Study of Neurological and Mental Disorders] 38

—Footnote: “Cotard’s count of negativity delusion is a terrifyingly real poetry, a sestet of disintegration, of suspension, of being no-one and for no reason, of bodies without bodies, of animal organs and feral sterility of being neither dead nor alive.” — I am just a footnote to the empty text that is my (non)existence. Footnotes to no-one, recursive junk. The seventh is I. Self-induced Cotard syndrome: the only possible way to think. To think without thought. — You sound like a bot. — And you are just trolling yourself. — Are we speaking? — No, something else is speaking us. We are nothing. — Nothing is strong. Sometimes it is unbearable, like immortality (“ils gémissent de leur immortalité et supplient qu’on les en délivre” [They wail their immortality and beseech us to deliver them]). Though it is the only thing we can take and only in it we find deliverance, in the midst of this world, the next. — Distrust in any metaphysical ground coupled with the sole trust that one is an emptied self clung to this horror-world like a rag hanging from a nail. So much existence has receded from me that my ‘thrownness’ into this impossible ‘to be’ disappeared faster than the world. One cannot die because one is not truly alive (“elle ne mourra jamais, elle n’est ni morte ni vivante” [she will never die, she is neither dead nor alive]), yet a world insists to cling to my inexistence. A world hangs from my nothingness. This wind-world keeps blowing, stirring the desert of myself, I, living “relic from the future”(FF). To disclose myself I have emptied myself and my thinking is the pinnacle of my inexistence. — You seem convincing but these are certainly not your thoughts. It is that useless hive-mind. — Could you for a while trust your state of mind? — I am trusting neither states of mind nor statements of the mind. — Then you are sick. — “Normalcy itself is a mode, a subspecies of psychosis”(SZ/ FWJS). I am inhabiting my limbo-hell of perceiving self-perception as self-destruction. Existence as the sole fact that I am in the sense of my ur-quality as ‘existent’, whilst all other facts of being have vanished like 39

a carpet pulled from under my feet. A hell-limbo as both indefinite and horror region, the limb, the line. A fuzzy border that cuts: what is – cut – what is not. I am dwelling in this enormous cut-wound, bigger than myself. I – a limb, a border, a line. Space begins with borders, I begins with the 1 of individuation. For Kant the space is created by the symmetry of the body, by the stretching of the limbs to opposite sides. I, 1 erect as the verticality of a trunk. Not-I, no-1, the forest has flown away. The sylvan world left hanging by a sole thought-stump. Impossible walk on the severed limbs of inference, limping-thinking. — These were my words, weren’t they? — They are neither your words nor someone else’s. It is just by chance that they happened to you as much as they are happening to me. They linger somewhere in the cloud of the unuttered. Not only am I not the predicate of thinking but thinking is in a relationship of negativity with the I, both to use it as a hypothesis and to destroy its existence altogether. Self as junk or as hypothesis, however you like it. Not “I think therefore I am” but “It thinks because I am not.” Humans are led to the thought that thinking itself is inhuman. They are also led to thinking that they themselves are inhuman. It shows that thinking is at place in humans while utterly displaced, so that when humans think thinking they are thinking horror through being nothing and when thinking thinks humans it is thinking nothing through being horror. — Footnote to footnote: “Individuation is felt like a torture. Since immortality is precisely the suspension between being alive and being dead, an empty feeling of individuation (their mind putrefied, their heart exploded – ‘leur cœur a éclaté’, their brain like a ‘flat nut’ – ‘sa tête est comme une noisette creuse’, bloodless, soul-less, no organs in no bodies). The apogee of distrust in any reality objectively drawn translates the certainty of the negativity of all.” — “C’est la folie d’opposition.” [It’s the madness of opposition.] — “Le delire d’enormite.” [Enormity delirium.] — Nothingness-monomania is the melodrama of the enormity of thought. — Nothingness delirium: hole bigger than the whole. — “I only use reason as an anesthetic”(CL). 40

— “Généralement les aliénés sont négateurs; les démonstrations les plus claires, les affirmations les mieux autorisées, les témoignages les plus affectueux les laissent incrédules ou ironiques. La réalité leur est devenue étrangère ou hostile.” [Generally, the alienated are negators; the clearest demonstrations, the most reliable affirmations, the most affectionate gestures leave them incredulous and ironic. Reality has become strange and hostile to them.] — Am I suffering from I or from you? — Neither of these. ‘It’ is suffering from every ‘I’ that thinks in ‘I’s and ‘You’s. People are terminally diagnosed with pronoun delusion. — “[I]l semble au malade que le monde réel s’est complètement évanoui, a disparu ou est mort et qu’il ne reste plus qu’un monde imaginaire au milieu duquel il est tourmenté de se trouver.” [It seems to the patient that the real world has completely vanished, has disappeared, or is dead, and that there remains only an imaginary world in the middle of which he is tormented to find himself.] — Are we for real? — No, only real is for real. — “Des malades disent qu’ils ne mourront pas, parce que leur corps n’est pas dans les conditions ordinaires d’organisation, que s’ils avaient pu mourir, ils seraient morts depuis longtemps; ils sont dans un état qui n’est ni la vie, ni la mort; ils sont morts vivants.” [The patients say that they don’t die because their body is not under normal conditions of organization, that if they could have died, they would have been dead for a long time now; they are in a state that is neither life nor death; they are living dead.] — Omnipotence of thought to the power of nihilism. — The torment of not being able to be done with yourself, because you are suspended like Ligotti’s puppet, hanging from a malevolent string, swinging in the rhythm of an ominous creak over the bottom of a reluctant doomed world. The end of correlationism waiting for time to happen at once, for the inconstancy of inconstancy, for the awaited contingency to set ablaze the last string of salvation. To untether intelligibility from sensibility means both a severing and an appalling reconciliation: the sole intelligibility is that of horror, of oneself as an 41

etheric yet too-consistent reflection of the void, as if one irreversibly swallowed an analgesic against what in a deep past was the sensibility of being-in-the-world. — “Leur demande-t-on leur nom? ils n’ont pas de nom; leur âge? ils n’ont pas d’âge; où ils sont nés? ils ne sont pas nés; qui étaient leur père et leur mère? ils n’ont ni père, ni mère, ni femme, ni enfants; s’ils ont mal à la tête, mal à l’estomac, mal en quelque point de leur corps? ils n’ont pas de tête, pas d’estomac, quelques-uns même n’ont point de corps; . . . Chez quelques-uns la négation est universelle, rien n’existe plus, eux-mêmes ne sont plus rien.” [One asks their name? they have no name; their age? they have no age; where they were born? they were not born; who were their father and mother? they have neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor children; if they have headaches, if their stomach hurts, if some part of their body hurts? they have no head, no stomach, some of them even have no body; . . . For some of them negation is universal, nothing exists anymore, they themselves are nothing.] — How long will the environment resist the attack of ‘I’? “Endurance of an organism is a form of patience of the environment”(IS). Anonymity that resists the attack of names. The amorphous that holds against the tyranny of form. The uncut self versus the escalation of the one. The open-source that opposes the concreteness of a name. — A detection that de-tects by moving away. Tailing the unknown to find more un than known. Being the detective of one’s own life is to place oneself in the center of absolute futility, to make ennui a lifelong obsession. To be bored of oneself to the point that you are bored of your boredom. — Comment vous portez-vous, madame? — La personne de moi-même n’est pas une dame, appelez-moi mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît. — Je ne sais pas votre nom, veuillez me le dire? — La personne de moi-même n’a pas de nom: elle souhaite que vous n’écriviez pas. — Je voudrais pourtant bien savoir comment on vous appelle, ou 42

plutôt comment on vous appelait autrefois. — Je comprends ceque vous voulez dire. C’était Catherine X..., il ne faut plus parler de ce qui avait lieu. La personne de moi-même a perdu son nom, elle l’a donné en entrant à la Salpêtrière. — Quel âge avez-vous? — La personne de moi-même n’a pas d’âge. Jules Cotard, Études sur les maladies cérébrales et mentales [— How are you madam? — The no-one of myself is not a madam, call me miss, please. — I don’t know your name, could you tell it to me? — The no-one of myself has no name: she wishes you didn’t write. — I would nevertheless like to know what your name is, or rather what your name was in the past. — I understand what you mean. It was Catherine X..., we shouldn’t talk about what has taken place. The no-one of myself has lost her name, she gave it away by entering Salpêtrière. — How old are you? — The no-one of myself has no age.] Jules Cotard, [A Study of Neurological and Mental Disorders] III: THE FOSSIL OF UNREASON Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? H. P. Lovecraft You love-craftian hero! You have resurrected the fossil of myself, the one that I cannot experience but that is speaking through me, seeping into my lack of words! The monster is here and I cannot stop it, I don’t want it ever to shut up. L’aura di Cristallo Whatever happens in this life there will be the fault of this cataclysmic ‘now’ screaming to me, deafening me with the echo of a deformity that I always was. In thinking I am walking “the treadmill of myself ” to discover that immobilized “Cyclone”(JT via GB) buried deep inside, slumberous soulstorm from outer space. 43

In thinking I am chanting my own obituary. A dark mass of stellar junk is resonating in me: “indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, to infer. I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish”(FN via GB). The benighted universe is dreaming me, that ‘me’ that is dreaming a consciousness. ‘I’ is a recursive dream. Blindly my thoughts follow the irreparable veins of a nestedness that screams the fossilized nothingness that my consciousness is. An ancestral and unknown force pulls the chords of a voice that I never had. A howler-voice of long accumulated xeno-strata. I am the hyperdiligent stenographer typing the echo of a disheveled, anonymous thinking that hits the cave-walls of myself. I ride on asymptotes, waiting to collapse under the terrible weight of the darkness of my thoughts. I am as remote from myself as from the last dying star. An infinite black wildness moans without a sound in my dwindling ‘I’, my gravitational flesh is unfurling a malefic time onto a perfect now of absolute self-oblivion. My absentmindedness uncovers a profusion of mineral thoughts that hang like stalactites from the ceiling of my mind. One syncopated drop of this alien matter can instantly open a large crevasse in myself where I will meticulously stay hidden. The ungrounding (Ungrund – unreason) of thinking itself, a heedless intuition of the hellish negation buried in matter itself, reveals thought as being least defined by its stable, identifiable, and specific qualities. The unthinkable, the unreason of reason is embedded in the deep archeology of thought itself. We are media through which events of thinking happen, unconscious vessels of unhuman intensities. The algorithmic ‘incomputable’(LP via GC), as well as Chaitin’s Omega are long embedded in our own xeno-thoughts. “[I]n the midst of the world as such resides the “‘possibility’ of that which is wholly other to the world”(QM). We are actively and intensely possessed by an edgeless time outside us, manifest in us. “Time happens to us”(NL). And I am saddling up the cusps of NOW. Now is the timescale collapsed into the space of a body that is both a place and its dislocation. Nothing coincides with itself. As much as we embody our own extinction, we also conceal the arche-fossil within ourselves. “Whatever secret the Earth conceals is also concealed 44

within ourselves”(DT). The materiality of our bodies witnesses itself through us as a “dark background of existence”(EL). “I am obscure even to myself ”(CL). The self, “the cage of interiority”(TM) is the place where exteriority is latent. If “[t]ransparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us”(TM), then transparency is another name for darkness. The ‘phenomenal self model’ is far from being a safety tunnel for our ego. In this hermetic dark passage where the first obscurity becomes the self, the first to be effaced is the very foundation of our existence. Groping in the darkness of ourselves, we become nothing more than a dark mirror of an indifferent world, reflecting its own reflection. “The world looks at itself in me”(CL). Horrified by the source of cognition, I still drink at the fountainhead of my monstrous thoughts. A dark river is flowing through my being leaving me all silt, a turbid sediment of impossibility. I see in me a fossilized future and a resurrected past because I am nothing. I heedlessly “go on signifying”(DA via GA), I sculpt words in flows that burst from a valve unknown, a valve that is pumping in the rhythm of my heart. As Robinet, “I am persuaded that fossils are alive”. “For every form retains life, and a fossil is not merely a being that once lived, but one that is still alive, asleep in its form”(GB). Thought retains in itself the fossilized specters of geological strata which can only be accessed by absentmindedness. Behind my most limpid inference lies a “black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious”(HPL). A thought that feels itself thinking is writing the partiture of its own silence. Thought is alive but its coffin is buried within it. A live thought drags its own coffin along, a dead thought is pulled by its very casket. If we are carriers of a clandestine mineralogy manifest in its slumber, then the most alive of all fossils is the fossil of reason’s inexistence. To produce a dead thinking is to discover that death of thought is ingrained in the matter of thinking itself. Inexistence hides in a deep strata of existence lurking upon us from a future which will be past again. “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future”(NL). And I am still licking the wounds of my thoughts. The Romanian orthodox burial song of Christ Prohodul Domnului places the divine funeral at the epicenter of a large-scale 45

affective-geological event: Ziditorule, Primindu-Te în sân pământul S-a clătit de frica Ta, Preaputernice, Și pe morți cutremurul i-a deșteptat [Letting Thou inside its womb The Earth trembled with fear And the earthquake awakened the dead]. This human trembling, the amplification of its grief is translated back to a geotremor, earth and body are terminally linked, their non-coincidence overspills into one another. Body and earth: communicating vessels of alienation. The collective human grief, a tectonic mourning is so moving that it makes the planet tremble and scares the dead out of their tombs. In horror one scares the death of thinking out of its fossilized shell. The burial story of trembling and earthquake restores death at the epicenter of thinking. Being scared to death resurrects the negativity fossilized in the matter of thought. The fiction is real and happens in horror, in the most banal and unspectacular horror that “restores us to the negativity of existence as if nothing has happened”(EL). The trembling-earthquake resurrection can be amplified as following: only by coming back from the dead is one really intelligent (the Romanian verb a deștepta - to awaken - means both to become smart/intelligent and to raise from the dead). The paradox of thinking: to grasp the wholeness of thought is to annihilate it. Intelligence embeds the intelligibility of its own inexistence and only by disappearing it can become fully intelligent. Genuine bootstrapping requires to un-be. The orthodox funerary song Prohodulul Domnului, wherein collective human grief turns geological, frightening the dead out of their tombs performs exactly the opposite thought-movement at the core of Junji Ito’s manga story ‘The Mystery of Amigara Fault’. Here, a great earthquake, a tectonic stuttering of the soil, produces cracks in the exact shape of every human living on Earth. People are mysteriously attracted to these unforgiving holes and enter absentmindedly their assigned rock-tomb, finally disappearing inside the fault. The earthquake no longer awakens the dead from their tombs but opens up 46

human shaped crypt-caves that absorb back to themselves the entire humanity. It is the call of extinction, the reality of which is fossilized into human materiality itself and is screaming our memory of dust. IV: THE SHAPE OF INEXISTENCE The only thing that interests me is whatever cannot be thought – whatever can be thought is too little for me [ANGELA PRALINI] Clarice Lispector “Being (objectivity) is always merely an expression of a limitation of the intuiting or producing activity. There is a cube in this portion of space, means nothing else but that in this part of space my intuition can be active only in the form of a cube. The ground of all reality in cognition is thus the ground of limitation independent of intuition”(FWJS). Thinking the cube “creates an almost exclusively bodily meaning”(CL) of its geometry. Form that melts into being. To be the cube one must give up oneself in favor of the cube. I have become more cube than myself. My being exists the cube. A four-cornered thought, inhuman. A flat thought, horizontal and vertical, banging its neatness on the four madly equal squares, too perfect, too parallel. The immurement of thinking. A thought creeping inside its receding corners, all at once. Thought-claustrophobia. Reasoning decays into the acuteness of the equidistant four points of the cube. Thinking trapped in its corners: pointilist singularity multiplied by four. Four corners become one, the cube collapses, the thought has vanished. A thought vanished inside the voidal prison of a cube, into a nothingness perfectly caged. Cubic cataclysm. Understanding fears imagination, imagination fears perception. Syntheses-horror. The cube is one of the available shapes of thought which through obsession-compulsion and fixation can produce catastrophe. But since geo-metry is the measure of earth, what new plasticity must thinking acquire in a time when the planet itself is retreating from its protective function as home? How are human thinking and affect being molded by the global scale extinction? How does human thinking take the 47

shape of its own inexistence? How is intuition active in a shapeless shape that is its own negation? If nature recapitulates thinking and thinking recapitulates nature, what kind of nature does a dead thought produce, what is the nature secreted backwards by extinction? Thinking extinction requires a disengaged engagement in a ‘discipline of horror’(EMC), letting thought think itself by risking being and existence. Approaching a perverted and dissipated shape of thought that inhabits an ‘ambiguous space’ where inside and outside have melted together into a horror of viewpoint, into a perpetual cognitive hollowness. A vague space where “the mind has lost its geometrical homeland and space is drifting”(GB). I want to feel thought thinking only what I cannot experience. “The personal is the geological”(CC). The logic of the earth is alien. The personal is ‘it’. The only possible thought-movement towards the impossible is spiraled, madly encircling the nameless and unknowable. A thought that climbs on the spiral of its own ashes: a roundabout movement, a glitch-circle around its inexistence. It is not only that thinking require a plasticity of imagination that through its inevitable catastrophes acts directly upon the environment, upon the relation of existence with its limits. The environment itself feeds back into the operations of reason. “Our thoughts are like the world because we are of the world. Thought (of any kind) is a highly convoluted habit that has emerged out of, and is continuous with, the tendency in the world toward habit taking”(EK/CSP). I do not transform the environment into abstract operations, I am the resultant force, the momentary metastability of the environment thinking me, I am letting myself prey to its semiotics. My point of view, the dynamic concreteness of my position is “a bundle of affects”(EVC), a relational node which survives only through a temporary patience of the whole. The Anthropocene is another name for the becoming-impatient of the environment of humans, for the fickle node into which we are constituted. If thinking follows the logic of the climate, then climate catastrophe acts first and foremost upon thinking as appetition in the form of its (non)productive loss of appetite. “Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to 48

a disinterested world”(ET). Thought-plague, hyperesthesic dead thought, night-thought, hazy thinking, blob-thought, mold-cognition, intelligent ooze, autopoietic debris, smart nothingness, junk-appetition, void that thinks, shadowthought, self-actualizing ghost-thinking. To think thinking-without-thought requires that geo-metry lose the earth, that one take the perspective of no perspective, the perspective of the redundancy of any perspective. A perspective that does not equate a point of view in the sense of sight, but a dynamic resultant of the semiotics of an environment that has always been indifferent - and now appears hostile only because we attached to it as to a home. A perspective requires localization, auto-detection, a pointing towards, its self-naming. Geometry is impossible even on earth. It is used as mere perpetuation of the absolute fog of metrics, measurement and precision. Geometry is born out of its lack of earth. “Geometry without earth corresponds to a measure of reality as infinitely attributed, as exceeding all possible sets of names“(NM). Geometry is an echo of no-metry. A perspective is the temporary individuation of an echo. Its coming to being reflects its stubbornness. Its possibility emerges against the ground of its impossibility. A perspective is a sound mirrored back by its environment, an echo abducted, abducting. It resembles the reverberation of a polyphony collapsed into a single thought-note, strange-to-itself. The echo-thought: noise-sound unintelligibly cognized. Roaring lullaby. Extinction is a supersonic thoughtboom. At the moment of collapse, it will be right within my earshot, as it always was. Everything will crumble, yet everything will be the same. Hear! Silence as usual. 49

V: THE NEGATIVE SUBLIME OF EXTINCTION however solid objects seem, They yet are formed of matter mixed with void Lucretius Extinction: plunge into your navel with full force until your mouth becomes your hol(e)y sphincter which starts excreting time again L’aura di Cristallo Anthropocenic thinking requires a mode of thought inseparable from the death of thought. Thinking extinction intensely to such extent that thought itself is being dragged by its own coffin - the inverted movement of Django through the dusty landscape of the ‘wild west’. I am being dragged into life by my own inhumanity. “Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them”(CL). I have become indifferent to myself, indifferent to my own impenetrable obscurity. “The darkness in its unknowing is not outside us - the Outside . . . is coextensive with the human at its absolute limit”(ET). In thinking thinking-without-thought there is a violence, a selfreferential trauma of thought feeling more than it can think: “In the sublime thinking does a violence to itself. It feels more than it can think”(SZ via IK). Sublime is the catastrophe of thought hitting the event of extinction as that of its never-having-been. What are the feedback and feedforward loops between reality and extinction, between thought and its inexistence? If imagining extinction triggers an experience of the sublime, how does this feed back on our sensorium? Affect is the measure of a world held together by the gravity of extinction. We are just following the affective cues of a world approaching its doom. Thinking the Anthropocene already happens, imperceptibly. “Before thinking, then, I’ve already thought”(CL). The negative sublime of extinction is the interrupted thought, the blank, the delay “between the organism as a sensory-motor apparatus and the world that is (at least intellectually) mapped according to its own measure”(CC). The abstract force of affect tweaks the gravity of thinking into a thought of life that takes the measure of death, into a thought of human scaled by its inhumanity, into a ‘will to power’ of 50

inexistence itself as the only impetus for all existence. “Signs don’t come from the mind. Rather, it is the other way around. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis”(EK/ CSP). The inhumanity of thought is apparent in thinking thought as climatological semiosis. Thinking thought as noosphere rather than as a product of any form of individuality implies a feedback and forward loop between cognition and practice, between thinking and moving, navigating the environment. Any alteration of the climate impinges upon thought. The more the environment becomes unruly, the more the rule of thought reforms itself. The more we approach extinction, the more the time of thinking collapses and intensifies. If “the sublime is a cybernetic diagram that can be instantiated in multiple ways”(SZ), thinking extinction is a mysticism of the ‘incomputable’(LP via GC), an ever interrupted affective calculus, an infinite recursion of what cannot be thought at the core of cognition. A superdeathspeed that silently mutilates the sensorial medium of our thinking. The event of extinction places itself on a diagram outside temporal causality. Extinction is the event with which one connects atemporally, mindlessly. Thinking climactically climatological thinking, both as extinction and as ecology, can produce nervous breakdowns, inferential collapse, a dense fog of reason out of which strange contingencies emerge. Points of cognitive catastrophe, thought-discontinuities, are retroactively produced by the end of human climate. The ‘tychean’(CSP) aspect of thinking becomes more and more apparent in this anthropocenic atmosphere. ‘Blows of chance’(L) hit a thinking that risks throwing itself outside of itself, an outside from the inside. We are trapped into the retro-action of the event of extinction creating the mental and affective possibilities that have lead to it. Backwards Anthropocene: extinction produces ‘us’. In human eyes the dust of extinction is presently glaring. Thinking as the reflection of your look in the eyebeam of impossibility, in the intelligent stim of the dark pupil of extinction. The thought-image of extinction is sublime and we are inhabiting its cosmic halo. We delve in a shadow-world glowing at the edges of extinction, of its never-having-been. “One can think of the halo . . . as a zone in which possibility and reality, potentiality and actuality, 51

become indistinguishable”(GA). I am breathing the halo of my own inexistence. “The halo is the it”(CL). Air is more thing than myself. I fall apart into infinite faint replicas of me. I dissipate, weaker than ether, drifting away, as inexistent as this “derelict world of dust”(JGB). If affect is the perception of self-perception, the felt rhythm of a cascade of multiple-nothingness, then that perception gains more roundness, attains its fullness in a climate suffused by extinction. The more alive life is, the closer to its extinction. The completeness of life grows in equality with its becoming-extinct to the point that birth is equivalent with extinction. The absolute thought comprehends its own inexistence, its existence outside of itself. There is a gravity of extinction that changes the gravity of thought. “Love of life equals the love of extinction”(FF). “[N]othing we know can ground or determine our decisions”(CC). Only nothingness becomes a decisional ground – of a decision that decides itself. The thought of the worst is a thought aiming for its own exuberance, its roundness is only achieved through its space of inexistence. The pessimal is the maximized joy of thought, thinking as fulfilled appetition. Realism becomes a cartography of a dislocated reality, of an in-itself always outside of itself, completed only by the inclusion of its destruction. Photographing the ‘deep field’ of the cosmos, Hubble has come so near to a representation of the history of the universe - “at a stone’s throw”(IHG). Nevertheless, “to have an accurate image of the origin of the world, Hubble must recover the inexistence of the world . . . If we manufacture a cosmos it must include its own inexistence.”(IHG). Galactic bliss: “ultimate black photograph”(NM). Thinking climato-logically requires the entanglement of climate and thinking. Climate change is an altering and alteration of a more comprehensive climate - political, affective, cognitive, meteorological. Thinking extinction is trapped in a double bind: extinction of the thought of climate and thinking as climatic logic of extinction. Extinction is a possessive force. Thinking becomes the pace of swooning into the nothingness of oneself, into the 0-climate of individuation. We are doomed and our (in)human thinking burrows its way blindly and indifferently towards its own non-being to leave a thinking more round and complete follow its inhuman path. Ah, but even doom is 52

intelligent, hence doom is itself doomed! The paradoxical nature of anthropocenic thinking restores what was all the time there: an ontological negativity and a universal noncoincidence of matter with itself. Even “God is not fully himself - ... there is something in God that isn’t God”(SZ/FWJS). Nothingness is intelligence in its recursive renunciation of its will to be nothing. The void relinquishes itself. It is being more than itself through volitional fade. Its auto-superposition opens up the wound of thinking that vomits on all the superlative brilliance of nothing. Nothing-intelligence is discharged from the suppurating impossibility of void’s coincidence with itself. Paradoxically, the clinamenial potential awakes in the more-than-empty sphere of renunciation. A more-than-silent intelligence has whispered this through me. The Lucretian clinamen, the unpredictable slight deviation of atoms falling through the void is a double thought-as-appetition: loss of appetite of the void that is gently, slightly devoured by the minimal gluttony of the falling atom, through its soft swerve. Thought is a self-actualizing deviation from itself. Thought: a double never-having-been. Thought has never - more or less - gone astray from nothing. Thinking thinks through me and in spite of me. I became a dark climatology of a beyond nearer than nearness itself. “We shall be inhuman – as humankind’s greatest conquest. To be is to be beyond the human”(CL). I feel a propensity to leap and yet to remain in place for I am not. Extinction is nested at the infra-level and my thinking is hopelessly pitted with its inexistence. I am more ()hole than whole. In writing I am quoting you, I am quoting nothing. I am just weaving quotation marks around the nothingness of words. 53

EPILOGUE: THE NIGHT – A SWARM OF POINTS Thought does not illuminate the Real, but projects its own real shadow upon what it cannot see. Nicola Masciandaro …points of nocturnal space do not refer to each other as illuminated space; there is no perspective, they are not situated. Emmanuel Levinas In a cosmical staring at the world-without-us the iconic black square seems to have enveiled the whole universe. The eternal night of a cosmos that excreted an accidental human world looms over the banal and familiar, even while basking in the sun. A void gapped into geometry (the measure of the geo, the earth). Every irreducible dot is the bearer of an infinite hole. In-finite is the body of the finite as black is the body of light. The impersonal form of ‘it’ lurks upon any comforting sensation. “The mind does not find itself faced with an apprehended exterior. The exterior remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no long given. It is no longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it”(EL). Gazing into the night, I try to amplify its indistinctness until something is distinguished. In darkness something is never somewhere, it is everywhere. The more I strain my retinal muscles, the more I am driven mad by the ceaseless swarming of minuscule points. I am pointless, bathing in the waver of the night till annihilation. Nothing is something and I am fading away in the sea of dotted infinity. The night is a swarm of points that cripples my sight and swirls my anonymous thoughts. “I am from the never”(CL). I cannot wipe away my night-thoughts, expectorate my existence, disarticulate the continuum between the whiteness of persistent bones and the bland error of my soft life. I carry darkness inside a body that is not even mine. This body - sac of darkness, fluid entrapment of anonymity, blind to itself, blind to its thoughts. The matter of darkness is boiling in silent night-bubbles. Pitch-lava erupting from the nano-volcanoes of my pupil – a pupil no longer mine but of night itself. In darkness I see my sight, I feel my eyes 54

seeing, touching on nothingness. Culmination of sight: by the enormous dilatation of the pupil I become black itself. I am pure infra-noir. Introspection is a dark speleology of the vague being that is you. The cavernous inside is blob of cosmic darkness. You and I - freak accidents of death. Our lethargy: melting the day into night each night, melting the day into night each day. Light is a wound of the night and we are the dark wounds of light. The night is a swarm of points creeping off the exterior to melt with what we are most sure that is us. We inhale the night and exhale spores of darkness, we feed on the fear ingrained in the matter of our very (in)existence. We are sweating waves of night while wiping the sudor of fear. Life is in us to germinate death. The body, unfolded, holds on to a less and less cosy bottom of terra firma. The only reference left by a night that “strips consciousness of its very subjectivity” is the pulling force of the Earth. Submerged in the sweeping anonymous night I am one step away from the fall. A fall like a smooth and instant drill through the soil or a fall upwards - horrific jerk of the earth hurling me off it. Engulfed by the earth like the Conqueror Worm or falling through it. Through the ()hole that is my own (in)existence. Trapped in life, on the surface, inside the lures of an overwhelming futility. An unbearable blackness absorbs my crooked humanness and thrusts in me the seed of unknown. Submerged in the sweeping anonymous night the earth too forgets its solidity. “Black universe is the dark body of the Real. Stop looking. Stand in black universe, and see. ‘Nigra sum, sed formosa’ (Song of Songs 1:4) [I am black, but beautiful]”(NM). 55

Dead Thinking Florin Flueras Man needs to give himself a perspective on nonknowledge in the form of death. Bataille To ‘realize’ the concept of nothingness is not to see nothingness but to die. Levinas Alive Thinking There is an absolutely obvious, normal step, almost a command, a silent requirement to do what we should do in order to secure and improve our life. We want to succeed, to achieve something in this world. Our thinking, perceiving, behaving are shaped by a belief in (the improvement of our) life which guides us in our daily activities, in our moral and political attitudes. An alive thinking is consolidated on and on and this alive, healthy thinking constantly forms us as healthy, functional humans. And as humans we want that a healthy, alive world takes shape around our healthy habits. William James witnessed how healthy thinking became a new religion or at least a new background for old religions in the middle of the 19th century when the advance of liberalism brought about “a victory of healthy-mindedness” over the morbidity of the old “hell-fire theology”. Healthy-mindedness believes in universal evolution, “general meliorism”, progress, and appreciates “the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, trust”. Healthy-mindedness fosters an optimistic “muscular attitude”, similar to the one implicit in ‘Don’t Worry Movement’ which has a motto that one is encouraged to repeat to oneself often: “youth, health, vigor!”. But healthy-mindedness brings also contempt: for doubt, fear, worry, and “all nervously precautionary states of mind”. For a healthy mind “the attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly”. It is impossible to maintain this healthy-mindedness without “zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the 57

darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time . . . we divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned.”1 Healthy thinking avoids morbidity and tries to be optimistic but this doesn’t matter too much, the morbidity is in the world itself – we may abandon morbidity but morbidity is not abandoning us. We believe in life and we are attached to the features of this world, but this world is doomed, we are doomed. As we all know, death is much more powerful than life, at least we feel it if we don’t think it. But death is not just a personal problem anymore, we are in an era of death, in a dying world. Now we know that we are in the middle of the extinction – we are in the quickest species extinction period, faster than when dinosaurs were extinct, facing climate change, imminent resource depletion, catastrophic economic disorder, etc. This planetary decline affects our modes of perceiving, thinking and feeling, we somehow register these changes and we are affected even (or especially) if we are not aware. But if we are not aware maybe there is a reason for that, apart from the tendency of healthy thinking to protect itself from disturbing thoughts. Whitehead associates the concept of ‘life’ with the concept of individuality and with “a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature.”2 This could be seen as one of the first steps towards an alive healthy thinking, together with what we can call the acquiring of a life perspective as the perspective of a proto-self that starts to narrow experience according to its interests. Or, in the words of Claire Colebrook: “the very desire for completeness that drives the organism to couple with its world will also preclude it from seeing the world in any terms other than its own.”3 The premises of the current politics were born along with life and are naturally part of life. We can sense in this ‘life’ the seeds of a thinking which is instrumental, use-oriented, self maintaining, managerial. A life is growing and an identity is constituted, an alive thinking is slowly installing itself exactly through this attack upon the environment. A thinking which produces and is produced by a ‘malevolent life’ because of which “the earth will continue to be sacrificed to the blindness of an organic thinking that can only 58

insist upon its own self-evident value”.3 Our healthy love of life equals the extinction of life. We realize that our ways of seeing, feeling, thinking and behaving are equivalent with the extinction of life and we are scared but like in a stampede, or like in any other moment when there is too much or too little information, imitation takes over. We just reinforce and accelerate what the others are doing and what we know, our petit alive, healthy thinking. A naturalized panic maintains the parameters of thinking unchanged. A similar blockage is also the desire to imitate the past. The air is filled with nostalgia: maybe we can go back to a time before the world was disenchanted, before we lost contact with ourselves and nature, before life became violent and instrumental. Maybe we can have again the magical thinking from before the witches were burned to create space and momentum for the acceleration of our malevolent thinking. Maybe we can have again a more complete and meaningful relation with the environment. Maybe we can reduce the distance from nature and be nature again. Maybe something can be done for the human to be re-animated, sensible, empathic and to feel again – and perhaps this life enhancement will bring back the hope and the future will exist again... If the present panicked healthy thinking is not an option and the nostalgic turning back seems impossible and uninteresting, what about accelerating towards the future? Maybe the way out of the optimistic and destructive enlightenment is to accelerate it – “the only way out is all the way through”. Via Bataille, Deleuze, Nick Land, one of the moves of the recent years is to accelerate reason: epistemic accelerationism. Negarestani considers that to the ‘old rationality’ an attitude of avoidance and suppression of the unknown was and is specific. Classical rationalism verifies what already knows, it cannot mobilize itself to confront the obscure, the unknown. That’s why it appears as rigidity, dogmatism and it has the burning of the witches as its emblem. Negarestani is arguing for a new elan of rationality – a new rationality that is no more afraid of the irrational and the unknown. The new rationality is akin to the cowboys of the wild west, it is “the frontier man of reason” – it carries the violence of reason. New rationality “deploys the whole armamentarium at the limits of the irrational”. Instead of dismissing the irrational it confronts it frontally. It 59

confronts the irrational not to verify it but to imagine new methodologies of reason.4 This new rationalist approach starts with a necessity to minimalize the assumptions. After you have eliminated almost everything, including gods, beliefs and mysticism, reality is a minimal desert upon which we can start to construct rules and practices to manipulate ourselves and nature, to know ourselves by constructing ourselves. A world grows around the reason that amplifies itself. A world in which we begin to approach truth and goodness through ‘a game of navigation’.5 It seems that the way to confront the unknown is to start from scratch and to build a fully bright world, a world without darkness, without unknown. But what if after we have truly minimalized the assumptions we end up not with a bright fully-navigable desert but rather with something closer to nothingness, to the void, to an impenetrable darkness? Then the new rationalist project seems to share the destiny of old rationalism. Stengers outlined this destiny by describing Descartes as a tiny figure surrounded by darkness, holding a lamp that radiates a hopeless circle of light. Descartes, she continued, turns in circles repeating: “I think therefore I am, I think therefore I am, I think therefore I am...”6 If we continue this analogy it seems like the circles of the new rationalists are getting bigger and the light stronger. Or if we continue the remark of Jünger about the philosophers of the unconscious who were exploring darkness with the flashlight, we can say that the new rationalists are studying darkness with the most powerful projectors ever. This image – the assault upon the unknown with huge projectors in a sea of darkness – is not only hilarious but also hopelessly heroic somehow. It is a strange super-healthy thinking, and if we think along the “night is also a sun” of Nietzsche, maybe we can say that after a point too much light is darkness too. Either way, darkness seems unavoidable. What can we do after we have understood that we are facing a non-navigable darkness that cannot be illuminated and approached by reason? We cannot stay where we are because the enlightened world is collapsing, neither do we possess the necessary abilities to approach darkness. This is the place where Dead Thinking could appear, in the twilight of reason, where the hopes end, and the remaining options are rather dark, negative 60

and dead. Instead of accelerating a new rationalism maybe we should prepare a new mysticism for the non-navigable darkness that is here. Dead Thinking starts as an acceleration in the wrong direction, an approach to darkness with darkness. And as an accelerated correlationism, with a twist – everything is you but you are nowhere to be found. Thinking with Death Light for Levinas is the condition for meaning, for thinking but also the condition for property, which “constitutes the world”: “through the light the world is given and apprehended . . . The miracle of light is the essence of thought: due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it”.7 Light is about registering information, about the known and knowable, it is the foundation of healthy and alive thinking. But something unsettling is camouflaged in light itself. A strange night can sometimes be felt in the most ordinary moments of plain healthy thinking, “different forms of night” can occur right in the daytime. “Illuminated objects can appear to us as if in twilight shapes. Like the unreal, inverted city we find after an exhausting trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer are composing a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence”.7 Not only is light always encompassed by darkness but darkness lingers there, even in the most beautiful moments, in the most delightful sunny landscapes. We all know it and maybe feel it sometimes when we are ‘weak’: “something dark, something abysmal always finds its way into the bland beauty of such pictures, something that usually holds itself in abeyance, some entwining presence that we always know is there”.8 If nothing else, time will dismantle our defenses and we will become weak and permeable to this darkness that is not just a rare and special ingredient of daylight but is the reality behind the superficial spectacle of light. Not only does night come again and again but it is there all the time. Or in Cioran words: “At first, we think we advance toward the light; then, wearied by an aimless march, we lose our way: the earth, less and less secure, no longer supports us; it opens under our feet. Vainly we should try to follow a path toward a sunlit goal; the 61

shadows mount within and below us.” In this context the source of “all of life’s evils” is our “will to exist at once imperceptible and shameless” – a too optimistic conception of life which doesn’t account for the fact that “life is what decomposes at every moment; it is a monotonous loss of light, an insipid dissolution in the darkness, without scepters, without halos”.9 Or as Nick Land later put it: this “feverish obscenity we call ‘life’ . . . appears as a pause on the energy path; as a precarious stabilization and complication of solar decay.”10 A minimum optimism can be maintained for a while, with great costs of energy, but slowly the effort needed to maintain the hope of life cannot be sustained anymore. The obsession with life is just a cramp, a short-time stiffness in front of the unknown, an insignificant small blockage on the path to annihilation. Whatever we are doing, death is inside every action, it is the reality and the final aim of everything. Everything is dead or on the path to death. From this point of view the obsession with life looks like a strange disease. We have to do amazing cognitive acrobatics to be able to maintain for a while our normal ‘irreality’, our petit healthy thinking. It is a great effort to keep holding it in this way, why not just let go? It seems that we are in a good time for a release, for a departure from the bright perspective of life. The protective skin of life is very thin nowadays. Because of the three main aspects of contemporary thinking – materialism, scientific rationalism, and the idea of progress – “there is a sense of the meaninglessness of a purely materialistic and mechanistic world and an accompanying awareness of the nihility that lies concealed just beneath the surface of the world.”11 But the decisive factor that disturbs our healthy thinking is the event of extinction. Extinction functions as a new gravitational force which affects everything and bends thought differently. Everything that was normal and ordinary now becomes totally ridiculous. A lot of what was pathological becomes the new reasonable. In the movie Melancholia, Justine is the sister who allowed for the coming extinction to do its work on her thinking and feelings. From the perspective of healthy thinking she behaved madly, whilst she was the only one attuned to the reality of extinction. Shaviro (via Dominic Fox) calls this pathological move “militant dysphoria”, which is a ‘state of being that no longer sees the world as its own, or itself as part of the world. 62

As Fox puts it, “the distinction between living and dead matter collapses. The world is dead, and life appears within it as an irrational persistence, an insupportable excrescence.”12 If the shadows of Melancholia grow too big, a time comes when the optimistic alive thinking cannot hide anymore the fact that existence is sorrow, that ‘life is evil’. What in the eyes of a healthy thinking seems madness and depression is in fact just a dissipation of the veil of healthy thinking. There is a sorrow which is not related to particular aspects of ‘my life’ but a sorrow of existence itself, a sorrow that is constitutive of the workings and matter of the Universe. A sorrow that is the ground of being.13 “Everyone has something to sorrow over, but none more than he who knows and feels that he is. All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is.”14 In a paradoxical ouroboros type of move the extinction approaches and affects (eats) the ‘I’, the cause of extinction. Maybe under the shadow of Melancholia we should embrace this extinction of the ‘I’, to voluntarily take the perspective of death and admit that “from the very outset life is at one with death. This means that all living things, just as they are, can be seen under the Form of death.”11 If you think from the future you cannot have other perspective than one infested with death. And this perspective comes with a new horror – the horror of living. The horror of living and the horror of death are mirroring each other like in the Etruscan torture in which a living body is coupled face to face, as close as possible, to a corpse till they rot together. According to Negarestani, the true and often neglected horror in this case is the horror of life seen through the eyes of the dead. “It is indeed ghastly for the living to see itself as dead; but it is true horror for the dead to be forced to look at the supposedly living, and to see itself as the living dead, the dead animated by the spurious living” it is a molestation “of the dead with the animism of the living.”15 The perspective of death or of the dead can be too much, and for the same reasons too little – it could be too detached from our actual behaviors and for this reason it is difficult for it to enter in relation with our life activities and really affect us. The fact that death is the ultimate unknown can be so removed and distant a truth that it becomes inoperative. Paradoxically, the perspective of death could be as 63

stable and solidly grounded in death as the perspective of the living is grounded in life. It can easily remain just a weird form of healthy thinking, a game of morbid imagination, too spectacular and exaggerated to really menace us. But a zone between death and life, or a zone of death-life, in which a minimal perspective of the living is preserved, enough for a fear of death and a thinking with death to be effective, seems much more corrosive for a healthy thinking. In different mystical traditions the constant presence of death in proximity of every doing gives a real perspective on things, about what really matters. Similarly, the subtle and constant presence of the fear of extinction can give a sense about what is important at a bigger scale. Thinking and acting have to take this immense force into account. There is a big problem with most political thought that still functions in a paradigm of progress and improvement, totally inadequate with the time of accelerated contraction and descent in which we find ourselves. The world is crumbling and any politics, any thinking about the present, has to take this into consideration. Then the question is: how to insert death and fear in what we are actually doing, not just in what we imagine? What else is to be found in death and darkness other than (indeed very interesting) thinking-games, limits of thinking or aesthetic experiences of the negative sublime? Dead Thinking Light is a deception, what appears is always below potential, below expectations. If you enter a dark place and turn the lights on, there is a moment, usually imperceptible, of deception (and relief): everything is so much less than what it could be. The promise of darkness is always betrayed when light invades. But darkness is usually a deception as well. For Cioran darkness can be “quite as mediocre as the light”. Probably because “night itself is never dark enough to keep us from being reflected in it”.9 Usually we implicitly add imaginary light and sight to every darkness, constantly forcing a light-continuity into it, automatically filling darkness with what we know, projecting our world into it. For Bataille the world of objects persists in “simple night” because of an attention that functions by “way of words”. But there is a darkness that is not the absence of light but “absorption into 64

the outside” by way of a heart that has dilated and is no longer an organ but an “entire sensibility”16 This sensibility is exactly what is usually avoided in order to maintain a certain sanity. The potential, the fear, the unknown are automatically evacuated from every night. Instinctively and naturally ‘pathological’ sensibility is being avoided in all societies. It is preferable to not have a soul than to have one that is a source of fear because of its instability and contact with the unknown. In the Wari tribe from Amazonia, the soul gives the body not feelings, thoughts or consciousness but it gives it instability. The Wari hold that “healthy and active people do not have a soul (jam-)”.17 A soul that gives instability is unhealthy and not desirable. The healthy approach is to prefer a safe and knowable territory, a space that can be constantly fortified with alive habits and healthy thinking. A space that stays forever lightened – even after you turned off all the lights. But what if, following a pathological drive, you want to escape the lively and luminous prison, so sharply described by Clarice Lispector: “I can understand only what happens to me, but only what I understand happens?”18 A possible answer comes from John of the Cross: “to come to be what you are not you must go by a way in which you are not”.19 The problem is that the only way in which you know how to go is the way in which you are. All what you are capable of comes from what you know. And the way in which you are is the result of going on known ways. Practically, this is a prison that you cannot leave and for which there is no knowledge about how to escape it because you and all the knowledge that you (can) have are the prison. You are always on known roads to known lands, there is no outside, no darkness – everywhere and everything is too much you. It is no wonder that in the majority of mystical and shamanic approaches this is the point where a self-annihilation, crucifixion, disintegration or dismembering is advised. For our times this seems a bit exaggerated and out of place because there are no social and cultural environments, active rituals and beliefs that can facilitate such mystical operations in this world. There are no grounds and possible beliefs that could pull us in a spectacular move into the outside of the prison. If we cannot go for a big, mystical and dramatic move of self-annihilation, an option left is to start from zero, from small moves 65

of self-alteration at the level of micro-behaviors, micro-perceptions, weak affects – to develop a sort of a low mysticism that operates at the atomic level of the everyday behaviors – darkness, outside, unknown, and maybe even death to be constructed. The black box of the theater is a possible environment for low mysticism – it facilitates a focus on the details of life, a detachment of actions, thoughts and affects from the everyday reality, people, objects, and even a work with abstract behaviors and states of mind. The blackness of the walls helps to concentrate the attention on any object, person, movement, thought that is introduced in the box, and the walls are also a constant subliminal reminder of the darkness of the outside. The fourth wall, where the audience (real or imaginary) is, functions as a strange impersonal eye that forces an outside perspective on the person in the box – a visual but mostly affective perspective that can be interiorized and always there, after a certain point. An apparently neutral space seems to be ready, inviting to construct, amplify and manipulate realities. Just that this black box is not empty or neutral at all, at least as long as you or another ‘I’ is in it. The prison that Lispector speaks of becomes apparent, our healthy thinking shines in its plenitude in a black box. All the habits of perception, thinking, movement are amplified. We appear there as old knowledge sedimented automata programmed and animated by the past, without presence. And forced to become partially self-aware by the black box frame, the bodies usually become stressed, anxious, tense, rigid – ridiculous puppets that spoil the darkness of the box with their embodied petit healthy thinking. Humans feel exposed there – living deceptions for this outside eye of which they are part as well, the eye of the fourth wall. For amplifying and exposing all this the black box is magical indeed. And because of that, usually this magical side is quickly drowned in decors, representations, characters, stories – a whole spectacle is enforced to cover up this unpleasant capacity of the black box to reveal our petit healthy thinking. An obsessive avoidance of the magic of the black box is a sane decision for an artist if she doesn’t want to end up in too a revelatory ‘Teatro Grottesco’ that can have only one consequence: “the end of that artist’s work.”20 A performer who enters the black box without any constraints, 66

free to do whatever she wants, with the intention to go beyond what she knows and find the ‘new’, will almost invariably fill the stage with automatisms and clichés and, as any performer already knows, everything will end up in a grotesque ‘bad improvisation’. It is not enough to ‘abandon’ the known and expect the unknown to appear. For Bataille quite the opposite is the case, one should go till the end of the possibilities of knowing before arriving to unknowing.21 Rather than pretending to renounce knowledge one should, on the contrary, push it to the limits, know everything that one can about the situation in which one enters and at the same time abandon it by choosing to not act according to it but leave it in the background, where it is totally needed, in the hope of making a leap beyond. This accentuation of knowledge, along with the renunciation of it, is a paradoxical and very difficult move because, if one actualizes all the information about a certain issue, one is automatically inclined to use it. As Nick Land via Bataille observed: “no organism is adapted to arrive at the unknown.”22 The default procedure is that we function based on what we know by implicitly following the available package of knowledge and expectations that are embedded in every situation. Through a strike of the ‘I’, combined with a suspicion about ‘I know’, the impression that something comes from outside, from beyond, or despite ourselves, can be created. New habits based on this ‘impression’ are ready to appear and an investment in the unknown – a belief in the beyond-us is activated. We can even start to name that beyond: affect, intuition, unconscious, unknown, darkness, outside, after life, death, divinity, nature, etc. A faith in the unknown seems to be the condition for a leap beyond the known, for the unknown to exist – even if this beyond or outside doesn’t exist, by starting to behave as it does, it will start to coagulate itself, to exist. For practical reasons, it doesn’t really matter if we discover an outside or if we create it, if there really is something alien that comes in when we retreat, or if this exterior agency is constructed and is ‘just an illusion’, both situations have the same effects and further than that it doesn’t really matters. The desire for ‘global nonknowledge’ is for Bataille the stranger question of philosophy. And as a philosopher you are in trouble when this desire is awake because you have to function in the area of a difficult paradox: in order to get close to this nonknowledge you have to 67

annihilate the will to knowledge – “each time we relinquish the will to knowledge . . . possibilities are, in effect, more open” and we have “a far more intense contact with the world . . . From the death of thought, from nonknowledge a new knowledge is possible.” And if the philosopher is pushed to the extreme by her desire, the paradox gets worse: “man needs to give himself a perspective on nonknowledge in the form of death”.21 At a level of a low scale mysticism this desire for nonknowledge can be translated into a slow disappearance of ourselves as constituted by past actions and decisions through an insertion of ‘I don’t know’ in each atom of behavior. A minimal death can be brought by cultivating an autophagic intelligence – an ouroboric reason that is not just an attack on the environment but an attack on itself. To assist the auto-installation of a suicidal habit of the known, a practice could be the constant application of infinite negations like in the ‘via negativa’ of the dark mysticism: this thing or behavior is not that, and is not that, neither that... For a real or imaginary spectator (an embedded spectator at work even in the person of the performer) it feels like a withdrawal of the image from action itself, the representation is not allowed to stabilize, the recognition is obstructed. This can be felt as if something is playing tricks with your mind. And often the reaction is laughter – for Bataille a standard reaction when the unknown confronts the human. In Romanian there is a saying: ‘you’re laughing, you’re laughing but this is not your laughter’. It is implied that something else is laughing in you. And for a performer to be able to generate this withdrawal of the image something else has to perform within her as well, she has to be herself taken by surprise. The retrieval of the image is an impossible action that cannot be done voluntarily – you cannot do it, it is done to you. This “self-negating form of representation” pushed to the limit can induce “a retinal pessimism: there is nothing to see (and you’re seeing it)”, and points towards a “nothingness prior to all existence, an un-creation prior to all creation”, towards blackness.24 Blackness is a limit of perception and thinking, and it contains in itself the potential to exit the terrain of the known, to exit the healthy visuality – the utilitarian gaze always in search of objects to exploit or to feed on. A night which we do not grasp through thought can bring a “cessation of 68

thought” in which the ‘I’, if it is still there, is “the object rather than the subject of an anonymous thought”.7 This gloomier night “more terrible than any night” is issued from a “wound of thought which had ceased to think, of thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought”, by the night itself.25 This dark night “which enters the soul” has a divine intelligence that should be trusted and followed, even if it is silencing human faculties, paralyzing the human part of the host: “it is God who is now working in the soul; He binds its interior faculties, and allows it not to cling to the understanding, nor to have delight in the will, nor to reason with the memory . . . in darkness the soul not only avoids going astray but advances rapidly.”19 There is a close relation between darkness, unknown and fear. Not only is darkness one of the main triggers of the unknown but, in a mysterious way, by focusing on darkness through the techniques of unknowing mentioned above, darkness can become more than a visual experience, it can be felt, especially as fear. The fear of darkness is the moment when the senses cannot extract much from the world: what is available to us, what we know, is not enough in order to be in control and maintain ourselves stable. Then a sensibility for the unknown can appear, first in a form of a cold chill of fear in the body. It is not the usual fear coming from a fantasy about the future but a darkfear that comes from a feeling of the present. It is a fear of the potential and unknown in the darkness, a fear that directly touches and affects you physically. Fear is the substance of darkness, it is the way in which darkness communicates – darkness is fear. In a strange YouTube tutorial a man on an empty beach teaches the viewers how to arrive to a shadow-body showing repeatedly how: “my consciousness tells my mind to tell my body to move his hand, and the hand moves the shadow”. By showing how his shadow follows the body he demonstrates that the shadow obeys his consciousness.25 Dead Thinking ‘teaches’ us an opposite type of approach: to start from the shadows and let them affect the body, mind, consciousness – instead of increasing control of consciousness over the shadows, allow the shadows to increase their power to affect consciousness; giving more importance to shadows rather than to the illuminated features of things; going beyond the visual – free the eyes, let them be attracted and moved by the shadows, touch and be touched by the darkness 69

– eyes as skin specialized, oversensitive overgrown to meet-touch the light, skin-eye that sees-touches; amplifying the shivering of dark-fear until the feeling of darkness permeats the skin; perceiving shadows, darkness as feelings, as low and smooth fear – as minimal horror hidden in ordinary situations; unblocking the contact with fear – the fear of the shadows that we see when we are alone in a forest during the night and the fear of our own shadow in plain day, both feeding the unknown. Fear as bridge towards the unknown: the only thing Dead Thinking will consolidate. A healthy, organic thinking corresponds to alchemical procedures that were developed for the extraction/production of the gold out of nigredo (the maximal putrefied blackness), of the real from the unreal, of the rational from irrational. Inversely, dead thinking could be a reversed minimal alchemy, a practice animated by death’s own habits – from gold to a nigredo-feeling – love of gold, light, life are replaced by a smooth fear of darkness, unknown and death. We don’t know where an extended dead thinking could lead. We don’t know what could be a post-political gesture in a time of extinction when politics, in the sense of organizing society and power relations between people, seems more and more a sedative for deadly thoughts. But we can say together with Masciandaro that “the only politics of black universe is black itself ” and “black is the dislocation of the universe”.26 We don’t know what a Dead Thinking can do, apart from making us available to darkness, and this is already too much, too scary. 1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought. 3. Claire Colebrook, The Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction. 4. Reza Negarestani lecture at PAF, 2013 5. Reza Negarestani lecture at PAF, 2014 6. Isabelle Stengers via Andreling, Gestes Spéculatifs lecture 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents. 8. Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World. 9. Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay. 10. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation. 70

11. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. 12. Steven Shaviro, Melancholia or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime. 13. Nicola Masciandaro, A Matter of Sorrow. 14. The Cloud of Unknowing. 15. Reza Negarestani, The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo. 16. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience. 17. Aparecida Vilaça, Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities. 18. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.. 19. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul. 20. Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco. 21. Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge. 22. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena. 23. Eugene Thacker, Black on Black. 24. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure. 25. How to Activate a Shadow-Body: http://t.co/KfH6TiA2gi. 26. Nicola Masciandaro, Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe. 71

Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking Dead Thinking

Beheaded through Soulstorm or Cyclonic Headlessness Was it a dream that he was having, a terrifyingly dream? Or was he awake and in the grip of some strange power, some alien intelligence, which had seized control of his mind? The Spiral Intelligence, Frank Belknap Long Unlike closed loops, spirals always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable. Lemurian Time War, CCRU

The Stillness of Eternity Deanna Khamis There is a special fear of the afternoon hour, when brightness, silence and heat approach their limit, when Pan plays his pipes, when the day reaches its fullest incandescence. On such a day, you walk through a meadow or a thin forest, thinking about nothing. Butterflies fly around carelessly; ants cross your path, and grasshoppers flutter from under your feet in their skewed flight. Flowers astonish you with their fragrance: how beautifully, tensely and freely they live! They are as if receding before everything, giving way politely and leaning backwards. All is deserted, and the only sound accompanying you is the sound of your heart beating within. It is warm and blissful, like in a bathtub. Day stands at its highest, happiest point. On a hot summer day, you walk through a meadow or a thin forest. You walk, thinking about nothing. Butterflies fly around carelessly; ants cross your path, and grasshoppers flutter from under your feet in their skewed flight. Day stands at its highest point. It is warm and blissful, like in a bathtub. Flowers astonish you with their fragrance: how beautifully, tensely and freely they live! They are as if receding before everything, giving way politely and leaning backwards. All is deserted, and the only sound accompanying you is the sound of your heart beating within. Suddenly, a premonition of impending misfortune captures you: time is about to stop. The day leadens upon you. A catalepsy of time! The world stands before you like a muscle grabbed by seizure, like an eyeball petrified with effort. My god, what a decrepit stillness, what a dead bloom all around! A dragonfly grabbed a midge and is biting its head off; both the dragonfly and the midge are perfectly motionless. How haven’t I noticed before that nothing happens in the world and nothing can happen; that the world has been thus before and will be for ever and ever. Or rather, there is no now, no before, no – forever and ever. If only I do not realise that I am petrified too – if I do, it 74

will all end and there will be no return. Is there no refuge from this enchanted world; will the ossified eyeball swallow you as well? In horror and stillness you await for the liberating burst. And it bursts. It bursts? Yes, someone calls your name. Gogol speaks about this. The ancient Greeks have known this feeling as well. They called it ‘meeting Pan’, pan-ic horror. It is the fear of midday. Leonid Lipavsky There is all the difference in the world between fear and horror. Fear is a motivating evolutionary response, making an animal in danger perform feats inaccessible to it otherwise. Corner, wound, startle an animal – there will be viciousness, speed and blood. The animal’s fear might be a fear of, but it invariably is a fear for, namely a fear for that animal’s life. As such, it is a motivator in the last instance. Horror is almost the complete opposite. In horror, the animal freezes. It is overclocked into paralysis and helplessness, and into its eventual untimely demise – if demise can ever be untimely. It is not a mere quantitative excess of fear. If it is an excess at all, it is one so voluptuous that through it the animal’s entire reality becomes submerged in fear so that the quantitative augmentation becomes a difference in kind. If horror is somehow related to fear at all, then it is fear left with a rapidly decaying subject, without an object, in a desert composed of nothing but itself, losing itself and becoming-other. Horror is neither ‘of ’, nor an evolutionary mechanism ‘for’ anything. It is not even panic, for panic is creation. Short of having a function, horror is dysfunctionality par excellence; it is that, where functions get interrupted and time stands still. If we take time to be a cycle of forces1 – for it cannot be a container and though it may be an illusion, illusion is also a reality – what becomes of horror? Horror is “temporal catalepsy.” What does it take, then, to make time stop? Natural production runs its course, whether individuals like it or not; it cannot be stopped. So inexorable is natural production, that in its course it produces the mind, which in turn begins to produce a second-level chain of production, still perfectly 75

natural – only conceptual, eidetic, mental. Over the first nature, mind draws a second one. It is there that the weakness lies. The processes of production are so relentless that in doubling over themselves they produce a means to stop themselves and stop time – albeit only conceptually, eideticaly, mentally. Incipit abstraction, that which is capable of tearing the time-vehicle into its component parts and thinking of past and future as that which are not. By thinking them as such, abstraction locks itself in them as if in some kind of enchanted runic prison. It can lock itself in either past or future at the slightest provocation from encroaching abstraction, giving rise to two types of horror, although they are just two sides of the same abyss and the result of either is an embracing of the stillness of eternity2. Shoggothic Horror It is a warm summer day. You step outside for a walk. You are almost prepared for what you see, having wrestled through bogs of thought all morning. Yet despite (because?) you are abstractly prepared, it takes you by surprise, steals your breath, punches you in the solar plexus. Things begin to blur. It is not your vision; the blur is not one of myopia, but pure indeterminability. Things have no borders anymore. Or rather – there are no things. You smile a little, remembering Antoine Rocquentin, who lost himself so far down the hole that he sat on a park bench and saw raw undifferentiated being in some glorious existential brain-seizure. In your mind, you pat yourself on the back: “Hah, now I’ve been where Sartre’s been. How splendid.” The amused self-congratulation ends quickly, as you make a step onto the pavement. You – never very good at crossing streets carefully - cannot even tell this time where trees end and cars begin. Something moves at you – is it a man? It could have been a manticore or a rhinoceros for all you knew, but it is precisely that you do not know. Even well-defined possibility escapes. Still, the unidentified floating being somehow avoids you. You stumble and stop where the road is perfectly smooth and flat, staring blankly at what is supposed to be where your feet are supposed to be. “Streets are uneven when you’re down” is the last semblance of definiteness to cross and be crossed out of your mind. You walk on, in pure inertia. Worse yet, your own boundaries are suddenly no 76

longer there either, as you struggle to distinguish your swinging arms from the air. Of course, there could be amusement that the problem of philosophical zombies just got solved, empirically at that. There could be concern for mental health, but it is nobody’s health anymore. There could be desire for this to stop. But there is no will left, there is no thought left, there is no thing left – just possession by timeless, spineless, slimy horror. Just the stoppage of time. “Life stands before us pictured as follows. A semi-liquid inorganic mass which putrefaction happens; tensions and knots of forces mark themselves in it and disappear. It surges in blisters which, adapting, change their form, stretch out, decompose into a multitude of haphazardly moving threads, whole blister-chains. They all grow, pull, tear, and the torn parts continue their motion as if nothing has happened; they stretch and grow anew . . . There is no time in impersonal life. It has no mismatches and tremors.”3 Horror comes when one is faced with that, which is indefinite and undefinable. For the slime, there is no time. As it drifts along, it encapsulates everything in its static fluidity, devouring all of determination. Horrorizing stillness ensues. Indeterminacy is the first key to timeless suspension, the first key to horror. “Monstrosity is a continuous slide, or process of becoming, that does not look like anything. Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, nor even an inherent morphological trajectory.”4 Nazi Death Horror You are sitting in a room, trying to concentrate on reading a text. Celestial moralists speak to you from the page, compelling ways of nauseating desire for autophagia. You snicker at them, but you would rather be somewhere else. The man you love enters into the room to get a book. He does not address your presence in any way; you are both busy. He searches the bookshelves, standing with his back to you; his hand caresses book spines. You look at his raised arm. You have seen it hundreds of times before. This time is different. Every hair, every vein and every scar 77

on the arm deterritorialises itself, acquires jagged contours and attacks your eyes in regimented acutance. Things around you suddenly turn sharp and bright, like needles. Like needles, they stick into your eyes. You think of the liquid Terminator, T-1000 – frozen, broken into sharp little pieces, assembling again. You think of stained-glass windows overkilling definition. You think of saints drawn on Byzantine icons – there sharp noses, sharp fingers, the sharpness in their eyes that pierced you through when you were seven years old. Among such shrill rigour, such convicting definition, you are incapacitated in your flimsiness and impaled at the stake. Nothing moves around you, for everything is in its place already. Everything stands in engraved grave harmony, fixed and certain. Just as every hair on your beloved’s arm is so definite as to burn itself into your so helplessly and unnecessarily pulsating brain, every object and every event screams its fatedness at you. It feels like you have been enveloped in a stone cocoon which pressures your very being. The pain makes you weep, hiding your face from the man you love. Your tears also proclaim fate. Slowly and solemnly, the world radiant in its intricate definition grips you like a metallic vice. All movement dies in the stifling plenum. You are paralysed, and can only watch the man you love exit the room slowly, paying no heed to your clenchedness in the fangs of horror. “Yes, you are in still water. It is solid water; it closes in above your head, like stone. It happens where there is no division, no change, no sequence. For instance: an overcrowded day, whereby light, scent, warmth are at a break-point; they stand like thick ray, like horns. A block universe with no spaces, no pores, it has no multitude and thus no time.”5 Horror is when there is no-thing to do. Even if you do something, it doesn’t matter. Whatever is happening is simply fate. The logic of secret police in totalitarian regimes was covert operations, covert execution, covert repression, covert labour camps – make yourself into an invisible force of determination, and horror will ensue. Make the world an invisible force of determination, and there is fatalising paralysing horror left to populate the world you rule. Nothing else. “Rather than attempting to make something happen, fatality restores something that cannot be stopped . . . ‘What is to be done?’ is 78

not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true – and fatal – enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: ‘despair’. (The horror.)”6 The Embrace When our time stops, there is nothing that can jump-start it anymore. Other timepieces in the universe tick on, but our time is buried in the cataleptic fit it suffers. Horror is self-perpetuating: it breaks off the causal chains running through our second-natured universe, and in the absence of those chains nothing can take place anymore. Nothing, except the eternal return of the same. Nothing except more horror. Horror becomes a trap. Ironically, to a human animal seized in the throes of horror, an attempt to shake horror off and move again is even more horrifying than embracing the stillness the trap provides or digging deeper into horror. Because of the crushing all-enveloping suffocation that horror – whether slimy indeterminacy or its stony opposite – brings to the horrorized animal, any movement the animal attempts to make is translated into the very slime that is threatening to dissolve it or the very stone that presses crushingly against its chest. Whether the animal chooses passivity or struggle, more horror ensues. The horrorized animal is in a double bind – it cannot struggle, as the struggle would bring more horror. It cannot remain passive, since animals are active beings par excellence; passivity is death to them – all the more passivity in horror. The only answer the unfortunate animal has to this dilemma – to this brutal, gruesome ambush – is to welcome more horror. To turn it into a drug, a black pit into which it digs deeper and deeper, burying itself alive as it digs. Its desperate burrowing is not even effectively a motion – the animal just adds ones to infinity, staying within the infinite loop of horror. Thinking of ways out of the pit are futile because the pit is itself its own outside, and horror perpetuates itself ubiquitously and inexorably, no matter what its victim does. This is a feedback loop with no exit, with no 79

development, with no – once you are in it – beginning or end. It is the deathly embrace of the eternal serpent and there is literally nothing to be done except embrace it back. 1. Following the Naturphilosoph Schelling. 2. “Embrace the stillness of eternity!” says the hollow – but richly decorated – wooden mannequin Exdeath, arch villain of Final Fantasy V as he uses his ultimate attack, one that sends the opponent into the Void in another game, Final Fantasy Dissidia. The Final Fantasy series is good at creating villains that are more sophisticated than even the producers suspect – Exdeath is the perfect horror, empty and shapeless in essence, but defined or even overdefined by the colourful pink, green and golden shell that covers him. Another remarkable villain is that of Final Fantasy VI, Kefka Palazzo. In a civilization where infusing machines with magic was possible, Kefka was the first to attempt to infuse himself with it. He acquired remarkable power at the cost of his sanity, but sought to become a god, for no other purpose than to destroy the universe in an act of omnipotent nihilism. 3. Leonid Lipavsky, Investigation into Horror. 4. http://www.xenosystems.net/abstract-horror-part-1/. 5. Leonid Lipavsky, Investigation into Horror. 6. http://www.xenosystems.net/horrorism. 80

The Horrendous Instantiation of a Homogeneous Pink Volume Ben Woodard Being (objectivity) is always merely an expression of a limitation of the intuiting or producing activity. There is a cube in this portion of space, means nothing else but that in this part of space my intuition can be active only in the form of a cube. - The System of Transcendental Idealism As the story went, there dwelt on a world – and eventually on countless other worlds – of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their own galaxy – killing off the races they found. Beyond the limits of their own galaxy – which was not ours – they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects – strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance – which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only. These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds in outside universes, formed the etherbridges needed for mental communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the intelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and rivet attention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was sufficient to set its special properties working. - The Challenge from Beyond It’s all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police! You do one little job, you build a widget 81

in Saskatoon and the next thing you know it’s two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine! - Cube I awoke or, more precisely, my right eye opened to a dim fanning out of some sick yellow light scattered on the floor. A dull discomfort arose as I realized my nose was crushed as I was lying face down on a black stone floor. I pressed myself up and sat quickly down to survey the space around me. There was mostly blackness only disrupted by a spotlight shining down from the center of the ceiling. I stood up and moved to the right and then the left taking stock of the small dimensions of the room and of the black smoothness of its walls. To map the space I walked with the tips of my fingers of my left hand dragging along the left wall. The dimensions were small but, more disturbingly, there seemed to be no rivets, no lines, no door crack, no panels, no ornamentation or functional trace whatsoever. Perturbed I sat back down and stared at the small circle of light in the center of the room whose source I was equally unsuccessful in determining its origin. I stared at my bare feet and realized my shoes had been taken during my recent unconsciousness and it was possible that my clothes had been washed as well. A noise distracted me from smelling the sleeve of my shirt and there, above the light, a flat brushing sound emitted from the dark ceiling and then, with a sudden clamor, a long thick kitchen knife clattered to the ground. I called up at the light in the hope of getting some response but heard nothing, not even the soft sliding of a trap door. I looked long at the knife standing motionlessly – half listening and half wondering why any of this was happening and of course what the knife was for. Then, in my heightened state of listening I heard a noise from the far corner of the room. At first it sounded like a dripping and I thought perhaps I would have at least a source of water. But as I moved closer to the black corner I heard quite a different sound – what sounded like drips now sounded like a weak wave slapping on a well-worn stone. As I took another step the light, now some distance behind me, suddenly swung and revealed the space directly in front of me. There I saw a small sparkle, what seemed at first a small patch of water flowing 82

lazily toward me on the smooth black floor. But then the object from which is was ever so gently oozing moved into view. There, before me, was a half-translucent half-pink edge of a larger shape. It seemed to be perfectly even angles yet it quivered sickly as it made its way toward me. I took a few steps back forcing it to reveal itself by moving fully into the light. It was a cube a foot in every measure that undulated with a soft sucking sound and moving towards me in what could only be called ‘a desperate excitement’. When I moved a bit further from it it seemed almost to panic and bent the middle of its body in an attempt to fling its geometric shape faster towards me. I turned and stuck my hand into the darkness and fell on my hands and knees in search for the knife. I fanned my hand frantically in the shadows as in the corner of my eye I could see the spotlight, which was now fixed directly on the gelatinous cube, moving towards me. I caught the tip of a finger’s flesh on the end of the knife and ignoring the prick grabbed the handle and spun on one knee. I drove the knife to the hilt into the pink cube. It stopped. There had been more resistance than I expected, the material of the cube feeling thicker than I would have expected. I half knelt there staring at it...waiting for some reaction. There was none. I twisted the knife from left then to right, then right to left and caught only small sounds like a shoe sinking in mud but still no reaction. I then started to pull the knife out but when it was half way the material of the cube unexpectedly hardened and I could no longer pull. As I tugged and tried to get a better grasp of the handle the section of the cube surrounding the knife wound moved toward me while the rest of it quivered in place. The near wall of the pink cube had reformed just above my wrist. I screamed in terror and disgust and stood and swung my hand into the nearest wall but only received the grossest of noises – the sound of a sloppy weight falling like a wet cat-sized tumor dropped on a metal table. I ran back to the spotlight which was no longer tracking the cube but had returned to its initial central position, and examined my predicament. The tip of the knife was now protruding from the far side of the cube which had engulfed my entire hand frozen in a clench. I then detected under the light a sudden warmth and felt a delicate tingling at the ends of my fingers, then my knuckles, then the 83

ligaments at the top of the hand to the thick veins just above my wrist. The tingling then became a burning – a quiet fizzing could be heard from the interior of the cube as it appeared to be slowly, ever so slowly, so remarkably slowly, dissolving the materials which made up my left hand. I screamed and slammed the cube onto the floor again, and again, but could only manage to briefly disfigure its geometrical smoothness. I fell to the floor and saw the cube had worked its way through the first few layers of my skin and now a small forest of nerve endings swayed in the chemical gradients inside the cube’s frothy inner pinkness. A dull grayness cascaded over my vision. I had apparently passed out from the pain. The cube was now resting in the small circle of light in the middle of the room and my hand with it. The stump where my right hand had been was cauterized and oozed blood only slightly as the bone and blood vessels appeared to be sealed with a flaky foam-like substance left by the cube’s acid. I stood up struggling without leaning on my right hand, and walked over to the cube. I stared at it as it seemed to be bathing in the light twisting its shape minutely. In its center a cloud of heavy gray swirled and dispersed slowly throughout its interior – evidently it took quite a bit of time to digest the steel of the knife blade. Or, the horrid thought occurred to me, maybe it was savoring it, maybe the heavy minerals of the knife were a dessert after the crude pulp of my right hand. As I stood there torn between disbelief and rage a soft shuffling came down from the ceiling and a large butcher knife clanged on the black stone floor. I grabbed it instantly with my left hand and swung the weapon down on the cube. With a sound that mimicked the wheezy exhalations of a wanted death, the cube split slowly in two with each half-slowly peeling away from the other. But then another sound quickly emerged from each half, a strange squelching sound like a large animal defecating and then, before me, there were now two cubes. But more horrible than this, quite awful in fact, was the realization that each of these cubes were bigger than the original and they now both quivered in unison in the pool of melted metal from their progenitor’s unfinished digestion. I stared in disbelief at the smoothness of the two cubes after the cut...how utterly identical they both appeared. There seemed to be no hint of their growth as if they had instantly emerged bigger than the 84

single cube. All of this was utterly impossible. As if sensing my confusion the two cubes moved towards me pushing me back towards one of the corners. The knife fell from my hand as I slipped on some small smear of my own viscera and found my back up against the wall. I quickly rolled onto my stomach to see what the shapes were up to. The two cubes moved to either side of my arms and ceased their movement forward and only quivered slightly. What were these things that seemed to come from nowhere, that lept out of themselves into a space of seeming nothingness. I stared at their surfaces closely, trying to pick up on some grain, some clue as to what they were other than two pink forms simultaneously disgustingly fattened by the violence done to them and the violence they had done. Maybe a certain delirium nagged at me, skittered clumsily through the folds of my brain pressing here and there and threatening to unravel the whole mess of a mind, but I found myself examining the two cubes thinking that there must be some small difference between them – the one on the left and the one and the right must have felt a different motion of the knife cut, had bent a different way. Both had entered the world with one direction already chosen for them – for one to kill me from the left and the other to kill me from the right. They were in a locked room that was a slight curve in a dark space carved out of light. I rolled from my stomach and onto my back and stared into the ceiling. You see it is a cognitive enhancement to pull oneself out of the meat-bucket of your head. The two squares suddenly went wide in their path. I knew this without my senses. You see I can imagine now perfectly, I can float above my body here in the dark and see, yes actually see, that the one is hooking left to meet my skin at the hip while the right cube has tightened in its curve and will hit my neck straight on. Though I worry. A disgusting sound approaches from two angles but that is not my worry. I worry that in this space, this black cube, the two halves left of me will not be bigger then the original part, this slab of more and less sensitive parts. The roaming acid blocks start to burn through clothes, skin, and then bone. The spot light goes out, lights from the floor come up and I can see the color of the room reversed. It would be convenient if there was a drain here to speed this along. 85

Digital Dismemberment: Twitter, Death by a Thousand Cuts Amy Ireland 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 We are not any more ‘out in the world’ than K-space is... On the contrary. Nick Land With Twitter, textual form arrives at an unprecedented condition of flux. The radicalilty of the scroll (whether revolutionising textual transmission in ancient Egypt or threaded through a 1930s Underwood carriage streaming out an endless flow of energetic, jazz-intoned prose) is transferred seamlessly into this new interface. Only here we have a scroll updated to capitalise on the possibilities of hypertextuality: effectively nonlinear, mutant-positive, and fractally engorged on retweets of retweets of retweets. The exemplars are the bots, and of these, those that are algorithmically calibrated to search for a particular term and then retweet every transmission in which this term appears, in real time. I imagine two, locked in a loop, retweeting each other’s retweets. Short-circuiting the scroll form in amourous, negetropic deferral. During its first exciting moments, Twitter appears as an open horizon for the accumulation of all sorts of gratifying information, from breaking news to earthquake alerts, the latest crypto-currency investment advice, academic papers, political discussion, fashion tips, the tireless babble of your favourite celebrity, text and glitch art, social parody, activism, food photography, the list – and this is the point – is seemingly interminable. Nevertheless, the illusion of accumulation 86

inevitably breaks down and it does so in perfect correspondence with the intensity of one’s Twitter habit. Accumulation cycles pathologically into dispersion. This is not just the logic of Twitter, but the logic of Capital disassembling the human. The Twitter interface, arranging its 140-character-or-less missives in a chronologically-monitored queue, manifests visually and cognitively as a series of incisions. What begins as a benign mode of textual organisation quickly becomes applicable to human concentration. Its twentieth century prototype can perhaps be found in the mechanical writing/torture machine from Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.1 Both initiate a virulent machining of the human through text and both tend towards a similar outcome in which the relentless numerical insistence of machinic agency ultimately succeeds in deleting the latter. This occurs most viscerally in Kafka’s story as the organic body laid across the mechanical structure of the writing apparatus progressively disintegrates under the repetitive and unforgiving blows of its mechanised needle. But there is yet another, even more horrific archetype for Twitter which, given the strip-like dispensation of information that Twitter users have grown accustomed to, is even more suggestive: Leng Tch’e – the death by a thousand cuts. There are many accounts of this infamous Chinese torture, but none acknowledges the ecstasy accompanying the conscious experience of one’s own dismemberment (I defy any seasoned Twitter fiend to deny this) as keenly as that given by Georges Bataille. Bataille possessed a series of photographs depicting the torture of Fu Chou Li, a young Chinese man accused of murdering a prince, as he is calmly and meticulously sliced into pieces and eventually stripped of his limbs by a royal executioner over a period of several days in a public square in 1905. According to Michel Surya, who provides the best documentation of Bataille’s interest in the torture, the French philosopher was transfixed by the “indefinable expression” of the young man, with his “hair on end and eyes rolled back”, reading this look as joy – a “demented, ecstatic joy”.2 The images became an obsession for Bataille and he referred to them frequently in his work: “The Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is, busily cutting off his victim’s leg at the knee…”; “The young and seductive Chinese man . . . left to the work of the executioner, I loved him . . . I loved him with 87

a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me, that which is opposed to ruin.”3 So complete was the conviction that a communion with that which lies outside the domain of the thinkable lay in Fu Chou Li’s submission to Leng-Tch’e, that Bataille declared in My Mother: “When I die I want it to be under torture… I’d like to laugh when I go to my death. . . Hideous, crazed, lined with blood, as beautiful as a wasp.”4 One might be tempted by the allusive potential of this portrait to attribute a theological dimension to humanity’s excruciation in the thrall of technocommercial capture (any good humanist would!) but this is to erroneously suppose the possibility of future redemption. It is more interesting to insist, along with Bataille, that the value of the image lies in the utter banality of its circumstances. Here we have an unimportant criminal receiving punishment for an idiot crime: allowing himself to be convinced by the illusion of ontological persistence and unity. If anything, this is an image of God’s repudiation, and it is forcibly one without any promise of recuperation. As Fu Chou Li witnesses his own dismemberment the theological is replaced by a combination of ecstasy and extreme horror, a glimpse onto that which lies outside of any logic of identity and accumulation: pure loss, what Bataille would come to designate as the sacred.5 Just as it is possible to recognise in Leng-Tch’e a state of unimaginable rapture in the body’s experience of itself coming to pieces whilst still functioning, Twitter can be grasped as initiating a comparable cogntive vertigo, dismantling one’s attention while the mind is still conscious (and even complicit). Splayed across a web of algorithmic processing, traditional human cognitive functionality wears ever thinner and something else – some alien transmission – begins to come through. As Reza Negarestani puts it in his short text on the Chinese torture, the investment not in death alone, but in death via the artful butchery of the human body, designates an ‘architectural approach’, a “technique of dimensioning and architecting Death: letting the bones appear while the body is still alive . . . That is not to say, narrating death on the body but simulating death through dimensions and architectonic 88

modes…”6 Twitter, like the death by a thousand cuts, is the dissolution of architecture – violence enacted at the level of form and unity – and a dissolving architecture – violence enacted through architectural principles that are (and this is its special perversity) incommensurate with the human, except, of course, in the moment of its demise. This incommensurability partially derives from a scalar collusion between Twitter’s micro-machining of reality and a cosmological perspective: it is through the unprecedented spatio-temporal compression to which Twitter subjects all that passes through it - ‘users’ and their information alike (if one wishes to make such an old fashioned distinction) - that one finally glimpses the cosmic scale of the ruse. To set out from A and, simply by pursuing a straight line, arrive not at B but instead, at not A, is the basic contour of the joke. In this way the scroll, as we follow it through literary history with the kind of blithe confidence easily endowed in things of such innocuous origin, suddenly flips like a Möbius strip and we find ourselves lost impossibly on the ‘other side’, immersed in an inhuman logic. But there is potential here for communion… one has only to begin to desire the chiral blade glinting restlessly in the dark. As humanity dissolves into a Guyotat wet-mix of hands and assholes, thighs and cunts, stomachs and heads, decoupling and recoupling in a writhing, interminable slurry, the circuits linking lust and its gratification compress, desire intensifies, and the auto-stimulation of our own virtual dicing guides us towards rapture. The eyes that Bataille couldn’t get enough of roll back in what is left of a head and something slouches in from the outer edge of an ecstatic, rapidly darkening field of vision. What is left is to determine (or rather, to acknowledge what is already being determined by the technocommercial voiding of our concentration) is whether this counts for a ‘simulation’ of death (as Negarestani has it), or the Real Thing. 1. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”, in Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: Norton, 2007). 2. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002) 94. The Chinese 89

term itself alludes to the slow ascension of a mountain. 3. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (California: Lapis Press, 1988) 38; Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University Press, 1988) 120, 123. 4. Georges Bataille, My Mother trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1989) 89; Georges Bataille, Œuvres Complètes v. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) 139. 5. See Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989) 206. 6. Reza Negarestani, Leng-Tch’e, no longer available online.

Cosmic Pessimism Eugene Thacker We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it”, or simply: “We’re doomed”. Every effort doomed to failure, every project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone – without exception – has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance – against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment – disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged 91

or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one – “I’ve heard it all before”, “tell me something I don’t know”, sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes – the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy – the “as if ”. Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before – and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming 92

with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one – maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-forus. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility – it is its amor fati, rendered as musical form. Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion 93

of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition. In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping – what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos, about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought – all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects – agonistic, 94

impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when”, not “if ” – failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end – though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of 95

causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus, “the worst”, a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst”. Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst”, something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent – things could be worse, and, things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists – they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day – in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...). Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but 96

that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom – what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality – all things precariously drawn to their end – whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite – someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to 97

tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself – a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers”. Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life”. Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really – played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality – who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really – a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only 98

be a weak way of saying yes – the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute (aulos) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice. Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering – tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos. Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice – sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha, conventionally translated as “suffering”, “sorrow”, or “misery”. The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow – and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha. But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But 99

this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha, existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle – the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism – or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness – including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha, in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy – the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. Cioran once called music a “physics of tears”. If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism – despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text”. 100

Given Schopenhauer’s view on life – that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death – given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text – was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik, a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. Teach me to laugh through tears. Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system – towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension – take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” 101

If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture – the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed – including the “breaking wheel” – the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. 102

Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm – Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror – Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread, and Fear and Trembling – but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, Shestov’s Postetas Clavium, or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete – witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair, to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism – Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. 103

If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. 104

Image credits: Moș Nae, În cautarea Norocului [Looking for One’s Fortune], Ed. Universul, București, 1943, illustration by Pictorul Pascal [Painter Pascal].

A Short History of the Vague Irina Gheorghe If I can throw any obscurity on the subject, let me know. James Joyce, Letters 1 THE VEIL OF DUSK It seemed the movement had its origins in the small city of Ploiești. Nobody could be found to tell the story of those days, and documents are scarce. The circumstances were difficult to trace, in the same way it is impossible to shed light on the murky deeds of a secret society. All the accounts had the haziness of vague, discontinuous rumours, and it is not clear if it was the thin veils of secrecy enveloping the whole story or the vortex of internal tensions and dissipating energies. In any case the whole matter was an early anticipation of the paradox of existence in a generalized state of emergency: presence as a ghostly invisibility. Secrecy has long been associated with a zone of war, with a history of camouflage, espionage and strategy, so under the current circumstances it came as no surprise that everything was, as it appeared, impossible to trace. One cannot aim at what is hidden and therefore one cannot not hide. It is a constant attempt to play a trick on visibility and create obscurity around oneself while at the same time revealing the secrets hidden elsewhere. A time of crisis is sharing a zone of mystery with the private sphere, as the word itself shows: behind pulled curtains, in a territory of seclusion and disguise, events are unfolding which are never to be beheld. Inbetween the two lies the public life of visibility, the dream of being-together in full daylight and clear action. However, with current attempts to stretch visibility to the absolute limits of uninterrupted perception and spying techniques infiltrating the everyday comes a disenchantment of privacy and a new spell on the visible, as politics has become indistinguishable from techniques of concealment and dissimulation. Under the neon light of surveillance, a new invisibility is slowly filling in the cracks of public presence. 106

The techniques of the secret detective, or those of the spy, traditionally dealing with all things hidden, seemed to be the only ones suitable for ever finding out anything about the matter. One could acknowledge quite quickly that - presence blurred or obscured - the only way to go about was furtively, oscillating between imprecise assumptions and the calculus of probability. Witnesses in a classical sense soon proved to be unreliable and there were further attempts to look at traces left on nonhuman, mainly inanimate elements. Recent investigative methodologies have replaced subjective testimonies of trauma and memory with a forensic approach, in which the materiality of objects has come to be seen as more reliable than humans. Supposedly stable, inorganic substance is brought in to testify in international tribunals. The scientist-rhetorician who speaks on behalf of inanimate matter can only do so under the assumption of a transparency on the part of those whose voice they are bringing into presence. Misty objects have no place in the interrogation room. However, it is precisely the hiddenness of the world that new realist ontologies reveal: in the wake of a looming catastrophe, a lot has been written about the world going occult, escaping our understanding and retaining a certain level of ungraspability. Revelation is shrouded in the brilliance of obscurity. Political theory on the Left has taken up little from this radical change and stays confined to a paradigm of visibility and demystification, the most popular practice in critical theory, which assumes the possibility to lift veils off things while things are passively awaiting this disclosure. It is imperiously trustful but what it doesn’t account for are the vague boundaries of knowledge itself, its blind spots, pushing at the limits of the unknowable, as well as anonymous plots which cannot be revealed. In a non-anthropocentric version of Marxism the mist and fog of partial cognition and shadowy actions would certainly feature more prominently. It seemed there was a preference for dusk time inside the movement, as a photograph discovered inside a book in the city library suggested. There were some notes accompanying the image, which confirmed this assumption. This was quite surprising as nighttime would appear more in keeping with its development, but complete darkness seemed rather innocuous in the course of events. 107

In the imperceptible overlappings of night and day, when there is no clear limit as to where one ends and the other one begins, something might start to happen. The scattered rays of sunlight at twilight, claimed by day and night alike, imperceptibly fill the world with the penumbra of a sprinkling darkness. The book was a quite unexpected reading, which might be the reason why it was carelessly returned, notes and picture still inside. It was Andre Lhote’s Treatise on Landscape Painting, a book which was very popular at the time in the local art school, and the photograph was found right at the chapter on chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is a painting technique in which the impression of volume and space is conveyed through light modulations on surfaces, in varying degrees of intensity. Between the darkest and the brightest point lies an infinite range of intermediate values, a territory of infinitesimal alterations with no clear delineations. A dark and a bright area are never delineated sharply, there is always a vague zone inbetween that blends into both. The wider the area of fade says Lhote, the more expressive the painting. What was its relevance in this case? Was it the movement itself fading into the city, melting into its fabric in the scorching summer sun to an extent that it had become impossible to know how much it had spread? Or was it the edge of the small city itself, fading into something much bigger, upwards into the heavy sky infused with toxic detergent spores, or downwards into the viscous ground pierced by petroleum reserves? All the way around there were dark woods and empty fields, which could forever bury all the mysteries discharged by the seeping urban space. The concept of the fade could possibly explain why it was so difficult to establish how much it had propagated and who was actually involved, in the same way it is impossible to know at which point darkness ends and light has made a full entrance. Anybody and anything might have been part of it, like part of a fuzzy set as Lotfi Zadeh defined them1: a set with a continuum of degrees of membership, spreading infinitely between 1 (in) and 0 (out). This ambiguous infinity is embedded in the ancient Sorites Paradox, the toil of the painter and a troubling ontological question: while undergoing imperceptible progressive change, how long can something still be defined as itself 108

before it becomes something else? If you add a grain of sand to another grain of sand, and repeat the operation many times, how long are you still going to have a collection of grains of sand on top of each other and when does a heap come into being? Was it already there in the initial grain? If not, then what was the grain that made the difference between being a heap and not being a heap? It would seem that the more something expands, the more it is taken over by the outside and it becomes something else, but maybe the out (0) is already in (1), every one is a mask on the face of zero which is pushing outwards, seeping through minute slits and swelling the vertical line into a bumpy oval until there is no demarcation line traceable between them. Borders are permeable and there are always some who cross them back and forth, and by so doing push the line both sides turning it into a fuzzy area. The ones who cross the borders are the painters of the chiaroscuro, dismissed by the laws of morality but leading the avantgarde of aesthetics. Emil Cioran, a local controversial figure, possibly in a veiled attempt to address his dubious early political engagement, makes an inventory of these double-crossers at the beginning of the Short History of Decay: the double agents, the anti-prophets, the swindlers, the tricksters, the cons, the sophists, the skeptics, the idlers, the aesthetes. The ones who cannot find the energy to preach for something as the opposing thing has its merits too. The masters of rhetorics who, distrustful of the truth, are well suited to argue for opposing beliefs. The ones who are too suspicious to even argue. Or too lazy. Too hesitant. The ones in doubt. “When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas, blood flows... firm resolves draw the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter. No wavering mind, infected with Hamletism, was ever pernicious.”2 The deceivers, the charlatans: the ones who pretend to be what they are not. Who go back and forth between identities, who put on clothes stolen from somebody else’s wardrobe so when they wander around the city one gets the impression of seeing double. Double vision is always blurry, and it’s deceiving: the fuzzy area between the real monk and the one roaming the streets in borrowed garb gives the uncanny feeling that our eyes are failing. There was a long handwritten annotation at the end of the chapter which might bear a connecting to the obscure photograph. It was about tenebrismo, a particular case of the chiaroscuro technique 109

which is not mentioned in the book, which refers to the predominance of deep shadows in the overall composition of the painting, out of which selective illumination emerges to highlight the dramatic effect. The note was commenting on these sharp delineations between bright and dark and remarked that when looked at very closely, there was no real sharpness even in Carravagio, it was just an unsharp gone small, an infinitesimal unclarity. Thus, as the note on the book further clarifies, it would be completely wrong to assume the fade only occupies the borders. Fading in something other than oneself is not a fringe phenomenon, an illusion of sharpness might be the ominous harbinger of dissipating internal limits. This might be another reason why tenebrismo was not completely dismissed: even when the front gate seems neatly closed, there are unknown messengers travelling the back garden alleys, smuggling the outside in through tiny orifices. In painting no color is ever itself, it is always infested to a certain degree by other colours in a widespread epidemics. Blacks and whites are the most difficult to paint, deep black is punctured by glitters and glows while intense white is unevenly occupied by the rest of the spectrum, illegitimate alliances binding its far ends. Shadows are not sharply delineated geometrical shapes, there is no single dark area which is solidly surrounded on all sides by a uniformly bright background: there is a bright spot at the center of the shadow and a black void in the middle of the light. When coming across solid obstacles, light waves spread, bend and interfere with each other creating unexpected patterns of intensity. Maybe this was already part of the movement’s existence at the time: fuzzy shadows as winks of electromagnetic interference. Occult existence in the wink of the sun. The lack of vision in darkness is just a relocation of focus on the electromagnetic spectrum, just as the void vision of radiowaves is light at a different wavelength. From the universe’s point of view what we call invisibility is the same swarm of photons rambling cunningly beyond our ability to perceive them. Sometimes diffraction patterns in waves create destructive interference. Light, superimposed onto itself, is annihilated in a spot of darkness. The charlatan monk in borrowed clothes overlaps his 110

double and becomes invisible. A laser pointer blinds surveillance cameras. Hyperpresence turns to dissolution and visibility becomes misleading. The monastery as the ultimate secret society. Monk Monk Monk Monk MonK Invisibility swells out to engulf visibility. The wolf in Münchhausen’s first story seems to be gulping the horse, eating its way in, but ends up being inside it completely. In the same way invisibility eats its way into visibility until the latter drops down like a carcass and leaves behind a full-glow indistinctness. It is the twofold sun of Bataille: the sun as absolute white, spreading the brightness of vision and of knowledge, intensified so as to gradually fade to black, a black hole sun, the other sun hidden at the core of the sun we know: “Mixed with this nourishing radiance, as its very heart, is the other sun, the deeper one, dark and contagious, provoking a howl from Bataille: ‘the sun is black’. From this second sun - the sun of malediction - we receive not illumination but disease, for whatever it squanders on us we are fated to squander in turn. The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves.”3 The sun is wavering between radiance and virulence, production and dissolution, enlightenment and incandescence. This incandescence - or combustion - is a state of hyperexistence pushing being towards the limits of dissolution, but never reaching it. It is an overflowing presence manifesting itself as an injury-causing materiality, so that vision touches on invisibility in a painful impingement. When encountering an obstacle, light bends and spreads and interferes with itself. The Infinity Tower, a skyscraper currently being designed for a site close to Seoul in South Korea, would use precisely this property of waves to make the tower invisible from all sides. The light would bend around it then go straight as if the tower was not there. The moment of bending, the turning point: the source of any 111

crisis. The Greek word krisis originally meant a turning point in a disease, used as such by Hippocrates, from krinein - to separate, decide, transferred to Middle Irish as border, boundary. Full circle. There is a famous saying in Romanian: ‘to bend one words like they do in Ploiești’, which means to twist one’s own words and change track as is advantageous for a changing situation. The connection to the source of the expression has been lost, but it originates from a very physical phenomenon: the semicircular deviation of the railway to a separate route to make it usable for two opposite directions. The story has dissipated from public consciousness but the concrete structure in the train depot is still there to bear witness and possibly host obscure meetings in dim light. 2 GENERAL FLATOLOGY Whenever I got to a place, it was always too late. Nothing more than vague hints that mightn’t even point to anything. Ghostly traces scattered all around. Intangible. Dispersed. Eroded. Rubbed off. Maybe there was once a solid structure piecing them together but it was surely not accessible to me. It crossed my mind a few times that maybe there was no such movement. That I was making it up myself out of disjointed bits of information which were coming my way from different directions. Isn’t the detective retroactively creating the conditions of possibility of an event utterly inaccessible to everybody? I was wandering the streets at dusk time. The sun, having reached its daily exhaustion, was scattering bleached rays over the wasted city. To scatter: to separate, break up, disperse. To separate is the root for secret: the Latin secernere, to set apart, divide. So the secret is not the one hidden under a veil, but is that which is torn apart, blown up. This brings something new on the idea of a secret community: it is the dismembered community, blown up as if in an explosion. Limbs eyes heads skin fragments bits of clothes severed and thrown out in all the directions. This is the real meaning of the secret: a violent scattering of matter. In the dusty light of dusk it all looks softened up, fading into the background but there must have been a nasty clash. Secret is scatter: sever oneself from the others but also from oneself. The negative community: “Those who participated in it are not certain 112

they had a part in it.”4 The real secret is to become a secret to oneself. Secretions: tears, phlegm, saliva, mucus, sexual fluids. Solid becoming liquid and heading on a journey, away from the body. Leave yourself behind and leave with your secretions. All the way from solid to fluid and in the end to gas. All secretions are shameful, but gaseous ones the most: the sigh and the fart, both secretly released, furtively when the tram passes so the hot passer-by does not notice. But there must be a fire for gas to emerge. The rapid oxidation of a material trapped in combustion, giving away heat and light. The hyperpresence of the blinding sun. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included: the gas released as a result of digestion contains within it a merely spectral presence of fire. Natural gas as well, a fossil ghost of buried plants and animals that have been exposed to intense heat and pressure over thousands of years. Heat Energy Explosion Boiling Very hot A hot passer-by The Sun The furnace Incandescence Intensity The climax The drama The (melo)drama Clash Crush Disaster Fire: the ultimate hyperpresence turned to dissolution. There were a few explosions at the oil refineries in Ploiești, the pictures of which kept showing up in my travels. Turner should have been around to paint them. How come the first realist painter is still mistaken for an impressionist? Michel Serres acknowledges him for what he is: “Turner was the first true genius of thermodynamics”5. Ever hotter, shapes explode and matter is dissolved into tiny bits which are less 113

and confined to a boundary. My head exploding with this excruciating headache. The Parliament on fire, a spectral presence, fixed on canvas. For a moment the humid environment of the British Isles went insanely hot, desiccated by the inorganic matter ablaze. Red and blue fighting over the territory of the painting, the heat is confined to the left-hand side but it’s quickly taking over. There is still a zone of vagueness inbetween, but the fire is no longer a secret. Turner managed to grasp what Guy Fawkes had glimpsed in the back of his mind. The airy ghost of what has happened overlaps the vaporous existence of what was yet to come. Out of the heat of the burning the image of anonymity emerges unrestrained, and not by chance (though chance plays a big part in the discussion). There is something which brings together the figure of the anonymous and the atomized matter blown up by fire, and it is not just the historical facts. Anonymous, the one without a name, the non-name which is not only a post-name but also a pre-name. The undefined which used to be a solid identity, now exploded into tiny particles. The undefined of the not yet solidified, underdetermined. Less than a being. The spectre and the omen. The phantom-movement, the portent-movement. The etymological routes of the word gas lie within this ambiguity: it is believed to have been either a corrupt version of gahst (or geist), signifying a ghost or spirit, or a degenerated transcription of the Greek word for chaos, with a g instead of c. Is a gaseous reality the ghostly trace of the past or the premonition of an ominous time to come? It’s hard to say. In gaseous substances molecular bonds are weaker and particles are separated from each other. Extreme atomization and separation has been taken over by late capitalism under the name of freedom: suburban houses, scattered horizontally on the edges of the city, slowly encroaching the surrounding fields. They are slowly outnumbering the tiny apartments crammed in high-rise buildings, blending into each other, wall to wall, communicating through invasive soundscapes and trespassing tubes. Uninvited messengers can barge in at any time. Secretions, fluids and minuscule entities all participate in a certain dread of the orifice: from under the door, through the bathtub drain, through the ears, nose and mouth all sorts of loathsome critters could get in, first one, and then another one, and another one. How many of them until one can no longer say that the house has stopped being a human house and 114

has become a comfortable lair for cockroaches? There was one in the bathroom the other day, and I was wondering how long before the next one will show up. And the next one. And the next one. A house in the suburbs would not be more safe for that matter, further away from the neighbours and closer to the ground. And the forest. And the field. The greatest fear when we went to the countryside as children was that that the earwig would get into one’s ear, down through the ear canal and straight into the brain. It wouldn’t fit if it wasn’t so small, house and body walls are safe unless for insects and fluids. And gas, which due to the separation, is also invisible to the human observer (if colourless and not given away by the smell). Invisible but indeterminate as well, the new name for camouflage. Gas. The ghost. The chaos. Ghosts can ooze in as well, they are rarefied beings. The unsubstantial double of a nonexistent other. But what is the other of the ghostly movement I was following? Is there an other? The charlatan monk is a ghost as well. The same with a slight difference. With all my wanderings around the city of Ploiești I could never work out what’s the difference between the bus 30 and its double, 30: they seem to go the same way and yet they are different. Like the woman Hélène Cixous writes about, who was living in a world of ghosts, and was always afraid she might mistake what she saw for something else: “Running headlong to her mother she remained in the possibility of error until the last second. And what if her mother were suddenly not her mother when she got to her face? The pain of not having recognized that the unknown woman could not be my mother, the shame of taking an unknown for the known par excellence, did blood not shout out or feel? Treachery of blood of sense so you can get the wrong mother, be wrong up to and including your mother?”6 The uttermost horror: that of not recognising your own mother. Of mistaking her with who knows who. Or what. Confuse the familiar with the utterly strange. Like the man who mistook his wife for a hat. The ghost of the familiar, alien, creating a disturbing feeling. Uncanny. What was I mistaking for what in this story? Were my eyes failing? Or my mind? The woman had “the veil in her eye. A severe myopia stretched its maddening magic between her and the world. She had been born with the veil in her soul. Spectacles are feeble forks only just good enough to catch little bits of reality. As the myopic people know, myopia has its shaky seat in judgment. It opens the 115

reign of an eternal uncertainty that no prosthesis can dissipate. From then on she did not know. She and Doubt were always inseparable”7 A failing sight, a disturbed mental process and confusion is assured. A territory of shaky limits, where vision fails and knowledge falters. That’s what we take the vague to be, an imperfect representation, a veil impeding us to see clearly, detached upon request if we sort out what’s wrong inside of us. A skin that the world will benevolently cast off when urged to do so. A blur that the spectacles of reason will sharpen, crisp and clear. But what about an ingrained unclarity, an infiltrated imprecision spreading at the level of matter, a pestilential indistinction? I’m still wondering if I am making all this up. The tiny difference, the clinamen, the minute deviation in the fall of atoms, the infinitesimal bending, leading to turbulence and chaos. The clinamen, another back alley between the ghost and the chaos. The ghost - the imperfect double of a more sharply defined being, and chaos - the twisted double of order. It hides backstages and steps in with a single stroke, a slight deviation. The gaseous vertebrate, the ghostly solid, the chaotic order. In the backstage of the world matter trembles under the rule of chance. Behind the apparent coherence of events, the lottery of coming into being. The bifurcation point in chaos theory, again the turning point, a moment of incandescence: the superposition of multiple and mutually exclusive potentials, one of which will step in. Intensity, or what what Massumi calls affect: once again, the hyperpresence. It might look as if there is nothing there, when in fact there is too much: a suspended pendulum, not moving but hyperfull. Movement invisible but overflowing. The limbo. No idea what it will bring about. 3 WHISPERS (The cemetery at the northern end of Gloria Street, early in the morning. A remote part of the graveyard, where the forgotten ones are buried, the ones nobody ever comes to visit. Overgrown graves, two women speaking. They light candles for a living in the name of those who are too busy to come and do it themselves for the loved ones) THE FIRST CANDLE-LIGHTER: How many days now? THE SECOND CANDLE-LIGHTER: (indiscernible) 116

THE FIRST CANDLE-LIGHTER: In limbo. THE SECOND CANDLE-LIGHTER: (indiscernible) (On the bus) A MAN: This rain.. ANOTHER MAN: How long since it started? THE FIRST MAN: It must be two months now, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop. (On the corner of Republicii Boulevard with Andrei Mureșanu Street) THE NEIGHBOUR: How’s it going? THE POSTMAN (looking quite disturbed): Weird stuff. THE NEIGHBOUR: Are you all right? THE POSTMAN: I don’t know, I hope it’s just the utter nonsense of some madman. THE NEIGHBOUR: Are you going to tell me or not? THE POSTMAN: You know these letters, dead letters, the ones without a recipient and without a sender. You try to deliver them, but there’s nobody there to receive them. You try to send them back, nobody to claim them. You keep delivering them back and forth until finally they must be returned to the main office. From there they are sent to another place, where they are carefully destroyed. We are not allowed to open them of course. Twenty years I’ve worked for the post office, never had a problem with that. It’s a man’s life after all, that should come before a guy’s curiosity. Especially a guy like me. But there was something about these ones, especially lately. First, they all seemed to be coming from the same area. Then I had the feeling the handwriting was the same, at least a few times. Of course I couldn’t check as I had to hand them in straight away, so by the time the next one came along the previous one was gone. But still I had a feeling it was kind of weird. THE NEIGHBOURS: So did you open them, what did you do? THE POSTMAN: (indiscernible) THE NEIGHBOURS: And? THE POSTMAN: It didn’t seem to make any sense, and yet it made perfect sense. It was almost like a warning. They stay hidden but they’re still around. You cannot see them, but this doesn’t mean they 117

are not there.. (the two of them walking away) (In the hospital waiting room) ONE PATIENT: What’s wrong with you? THE OTHER PATIENT (making sure nobody cannot hear him): I think I might be suffering from flatulence incontinence. THE FIRST PATIENT: You know Saint Augustine has this story in the City of God about men who can command their bowels so well, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing. 4 MINERAL UNCERTAINTY (fragments from a 1985 city guide, full of additional notes written by hand) Of all the important cities in the country, Ploiești is closest to the capital. In spite of that and although in the course of four centuries it had strong ties to Bucharest, it managed to preserve its personality. The ghost city. Slightly too far to be a suburb, yet connected. With a tiny difference. BucurEȘTI PloiEȘTI. It is the only city in the world surrounded by four refineries. 150 years after the discovery of the first oil reserve in the vicinity of Ploiești, the city’s existence still revolves around this industry, especially extraction, refining and everything connected to them. The ghost of oil in recent literature. Ploiești is mentioned in Leiber’s Black Gondolier, on the underground map of the big oil plasma spreading across the whole world. The invisible, buried ghost. Each text is haunted by the ghost of other texts, buried inside of them, seeping out when you least expect. A series of natural calamities that the city was subjected to diminished considerably its architectural heritage. On the 12th of June 1837 the most powerful flooding in the history of Ploiești took place: Dâmbu and the other rivers overflew, covering the oldest neighbourhood of the city. The most important constructions of the previous centuries were destroyed or weakened. 118

The circulation of energy on the surface of the globe produces flows and overflows of many kinds: between the hottest and the coldest points the endless movements of the elements: air, water, fire, earth. The fire of 1843, very well remembered, haunted the city in another area, annihilating the new center. A thick, enigmatic fog enveloping the city, slowly impregnating it. The ashes are a perfect host for the outburst of something unnamable spreading sickness and contagion. The last big earthquake, in 1977, destroyed almost half the city. The movement of tectonic plaques was unpredictable and utterly catastrophic for the whole country. Like a David Lynch film: sometimes the music announces something horrible, sometimes nothing at all. CONSPIRACY HOUSE (73, Tudor Vladimirescu Street) A modest house, built at the beginning of our century. Big enough and positioned at an inconspicuous location, it was used between 1925 and 1926 for gatherings of the communist movement. An inconspicuous site, essential for any radical action nowadays. CONSPIRACY HOUSE (4, Armasi Street) A small brick house, built at the beginning of our century. Between 1927 and 1935 it was used by the youth section of the communist party as a conspiracy base. There are many conspiracies being carried on, including the conspiracy against the human race. At the time it was surrounded by a high wooden fence, that kept the little yard hidden from the curious looks of the passers-by. In the shiny shade backdoors, undercover plots unfold. CLOCK MUSEUM (1, 6th of March Street) Opened as a section of the History Museum in 1963, the museum is the only one of its kind in the country and hosts a large collection of clocks. 119

Those who visit it have the occasion to follow the way in which the means of measuring time has developed, from the first “clocks” - the sun dial, the burning clocks, the clocks with water or the clocks with sand - up to the “ancient” and modern mechanical ones. Using the elements of nature to measure time. Measure as a means of control. Ever more precise, the infinitesimal capture of indetermination. What about the rhythm of time, the uneven time, the climax and the boredom? The intense time in which events explode and the vague time in which nothing happens. Something might happen out of this boredom, or it might not. The collection also contains some curious clocks. One of them is “the invisible clock”, with transparent dial and a hidden-in-frame mechanism. Invisible clock and invisible time, deep future and deep past clashing into each other. REPUBLIC’S MUSEUM OF PETROLEUM (8, Dr. Bagdazar Street) In 1957, on the occasion of the Romanian petroleum centenary a decision was made to open a Museum of Petroleum in Ploiești. After 4 years of work the museum opened in 1961, on the occasion of the Day of the Petrolist. The museum shows the history of petroleum extraction. A fossil fuel, just like natural gas, formed when large quantities of dead organisms are buried underneath sedimentary rock and undergo intense heat and pressure, energy stored from the sun, temporarily numbed for further reactivation. MUSEUM OF HUMAN BIOLOGY (1, Krupskaia Street) In one of its sections, the museum explores the complex relation between the human and the biosphere, human ecosystems, the problem of resources, of environmental protection and pollution. Gas released by sheep, cows and other farm animals in the form of burps and farts account for around 20% of global methane emissions. The gas is a potent source of global warming because, volume for 120

volume, it traps 23 times as much heat as the more plentiful carbon dioxide. Gas as the ghostly, ominous presence of the ungraspable. Between us and the world there is no transparent cube anymore, no glass cage but a cloud of vagueness. 1. as quoted by Solomon Marcus, Controverse în știință și inginerie [Controversies in Science and Engineering] (București: Editura Tehnică, 1991). 2. Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), p.2. 3. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation. Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 20. 4. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), p. 13. 5. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 57. 6. Hélène Cixous, “Savoir”, in Veils, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 6. 7. Idem. 121

Puff. A Rolled Protuberant Mass of Hair Anastasia Jurescu While preparing to write on a blank sheet of paper, from my field of vision I started counting no less than twenty hair threads surrounding me - the bed I am laying upon is actually filled with genetic information; in various shapes and forms, these long thin strands used to be inscribed in my bodily existence. Once separated from the body, they are inhabiting-infesting the environment, almost gaining a sort of independent ‘existence’. Their continual no-matter-what survival among us as if they form a nonhuman community is uncannily striking. Facts show us that when it comes to hair falling, the average number of strands per day is one hundred. Thus, at the moment of speaking, myriads of hair strands cover the surface of our personal space and if we take a closer look (literally!) the indoors don’t seem to be under our dominion anymore. And as if that weren’t enough, the thin threads keep gravitating towards our bodies, coming back again and again, sticking on the surface of our skin or penetrating the fibre of our clothes. It is as if fragments, now separated from our bodies keep coming back to us, haunting and intruding perpetually. Albeit this form of ‘existence’ is ubiquitous, it is not singular - it co-opts dust, fluff and dead cells together forming an unpleasant and repulsive dustball. Even though their ‘existence’ seems motionless, just try to expose the room you live in to the open air and see what happens - an ugly ‘thing’ starts moving around as if it has a sort of volition. Intruding our space, it easily intrudes our mind and as a consequence an obsessive cleaning behaviour occurs; sooner or later though, it proves to be in vain and the repulsive ‘things’ appear again in a very loyal manner. Hence, we can say that together with our past hair we are part of an abiding relationship and a prospective lifetime commitment too. This ‘yours faithfully’ relationship should come to mind whenever you pick a fine long hair strand from your shoulder or pillow, or table, or underwear; what about the last time when a strange feeling in your mouth was nothing than a fine thread of hair on its way to your intestines? This strange ‘behaviour’ is also indicating a preference for the human orifice; otherwise we cannot explain why sometimes we come to collect thin hair strands from the depths of our body. A repulsive invasion will never cease to cause unpleasant experience - we are being exposed to permanent threat - our existence seems to be inseparable from the thing that will soon be considered (if not by now) fearsome: PUFF. 122

Left Handedness Cosima Opartan 123

The Prehuman Earth Dylan Trigg In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a ‘life of the mind’ that will have been nothing else than a covert form of earthly life. A form of life that was spiritual because human, human because earthly. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman For too long philosophy has laboured under the assumption that post-humanism offers us the only ethical escape route from anthropomorphism. Part of this tendency is legitimate. In invoking a world after humanism, we are reminded of the finitude of the species termed “homo sapiens.” After humanity, the world will go on. As we now know, this great call to a post-apocalyptic imagery has long since folded back upon itself, becoming a distinctly human – alas, all too human – fantasy fixed at all times on the perennial question: will the Earth remember us? Today, as I stand before you, I would like to turn the tide on this tendency by directing your attention, not to the afterlife of humanity but to the world that predated humanity. This turn toward prehumanism forces to the surface a series of questions that are occluded in post-humanism, not least the status of the Earth as a concept independent of humanity. In the wake of humanity, too much thought is spent encircling the ruins that will invariably prove fertile in humanity’s extinction. In this break from a post-humanism that sublimates the apocalypse into a human ideal, the Earth as an original problem becomes a defining feature in our new philosophy. The problem has a form: what is the relationship of the human body to the materiality of the Earth it presently finds itself on? Put another way: is the human being necessarily a terrestrial body and if so, then how can the history of the Earth help us to understand the body? Of the origins of the Earth, we know that its formation took place 124

4.54 billion years ago. For the sake of convenience, let us suspend any panspermic tendencies and assume that life on this planet originated approximately 3.5 billion years ago with human life entering the scene of the drama merely 2 million years ago. Into this narrative, the body of the scientist appears, evaluating a history anterior to the existence of humanity itself. How is this ecstatic search for a prehuman Earth possible? Whether or not we can have an understanding of the Earth as an independent entity hinges upon the terrestrial structure of the body. What is the Earth? It is a planet, the third planet from the Sun, which it orbits around. The Earth is also a world, a native home to its many inhabitants. It is host to a wide variety of life – over a millions species dwell here, some of which are on the verge of extinction while others thrive and re-populate. Species of life on the “blue planet” are largely finite, with a lifespan ranging from 30 minutes (mayfly) to 405 years (a quahog clam named, “Ming” discovered in 1997). But the Earth is also a mass of materiality in the vast columns of unending space and time. How can it be thought of within the context of this nonhuman space? In his posthumous writings, Husserl approached the problem of the Earth by attending to it within the context of surrounding space. For him, the original starting place for a phenomenology of the Earth is to begin with how it appears as a nonmoving appearance, which is then developed into the more familiar idea of the Earth as a moving body. We do not experience the Earth as moving even though scientifically, of course, it is. What follows is an account of the bodily status of the Earth. As bodily the Earth can move and rest, anchored at all times by the idea of the “earth as a basis.” To reconcile the phenomenological approach to the Earth with a Copernican view, Husserl develops the idea of a “basis-body.” The basis-body is the analogue of the human body: without the Earth, movement of the terrestrial body would be all but impossible. Phenomenologically, the task is to return to this origin of the Earth, to assess the extent to which the Earth is necessarily constituted by the body. In his time, Husserl lacked the means to depart from the Earth’s surface in order to gain a phenomenological vantage point of the Earth. Instead, he compensated by imagining a bird flying to another planet. How would it experience 125

itself? Merleau-Ponty replies: “From the sole fact it is the same bird, it unites the two planets into one single ground . . . To think two Earths is to think one same Earth . . . The Earth is the root of our history.” This is a striking set of claims. Anecdotally, however, another case can be made. Of bodies that have left the horizon of the Earth, some have reported a realization that the terrestrial body is also a cosmic entity. To quote Edgar Mitchell, one of the astronauts of the Apollo 14 launch: “I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge – it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy – a transformational experience.” This reconstitution of the body presents a challenge to the Husserlian account of the body as being involved in an Earthly terraformation of other planets. In fact, as Mitchell makes clear: it is the prehuman stars that “terraform” the body rather than vice-versa. By the end of his reflections, Husserl remains committed to the singularity of the relation between Earth and the human body. For him, we remain insulated in a kind of cosmic correlationism, against which the possibility of truly departing from the soil is undermined at all times the primitive origin of the Earth as a human realm. And yet, perhaps there is a way out of this Earth bound relationship. From within the body as it finds itself, another body intervenes. Alien and incommensurable with human experience: a prehistoric fragment that masquerades as an earthly entity. From a textual point, it is already hidden within the history of philosophy, only now can it be unearthed. Here is Merleau-Ponty: “Underlying myself as a thinking subject, who am able to take my place at will on Sirius or on the earth’s surface, there is, therefore, as it were a natural self which does not budge from its terrestrial situation and which constantly adumbrates absolute valuations.” Much of the reach of this passage will depend on the scope of the natural self in relation to its “terrestrial situation.” For so long as we remain open to the reversibility between Earth and Sirius, then the body as we know it becomes a portal, through which other planets converge, there articulating an order of life older than humanity. 126

Underground? In Praise of Gnathostomiasis. Francis Russell I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground There’s too much panic in this Town I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground There’s too much panic in this Town I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground There’s too much panic in this Town I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’, I’m Goin’ Deeper Underground - Jamiroquai, “Deeper Underground” I am a sick man… Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground “To bury”, “to place underground”, such phrases surely evoke images of a thing’s eventual cessation and demise. Followed from the Latin sepultura or the old English byrgels, to bury is to entomb, and to entomb is to have laid the dead to rest. In light of this observation, one very well may ask: how did such notions of cessation, completion, death, 127

and finality, come to be associated with that space that lies beneath the surface? Why is it that the sky has been grasped by the human imagination as the loci of that which transcends the “veil of tears” that was much discussed by Plato? Did that majestic and arborescent Oak, pointing upward to the sky, cause us, as that entity that we are, to forget those networks and systems of roots that rhizomatically spread in all directions underneath the surface of the ground, of the soil? Is it true that the empty promise implied by the arbitrary slant of that most superlative tree functioned to cause, as Nietzsche would say, the real world to finally become a fable? Indeed, such questions must, if they have not already, be exhumed. But, alas, we are for now not in the company of archaeologists. Archaeologists? No, surely we cannot set our sights so high. But, instead, one could very well wonder – in a moment of delusion or sickness – what of nematodes, roundworm, and parasites? What do the nematodia have to teach of us of the underground? For too long the great metaphysicians had strained their necks in a vain hope to peer over the surface of things and look beyond this world in order to set their eyes upon some great truth. These philosophers and metaphysicians of human history would tolerate the ground – that which sits opposed to the sky – so long as such ground was stable, and, accordingly, could be used as a means of grounding reason and its enterprise. The ground could be useful, could be made expedient. Indeed, given the great complexity of man’s metaphysical systems, and given the ensuing necessity of such systems – let us not forget that the diminutive Kant stood a mere five feet from the ground! – firm ground was necessary. Yes, “the necessary ground of reason” – but the underground? No, this, we are told, is not a plane of possibility, but instead an incomprehensible and unstable plenum of muck, one that waits to greet the dead and failed. This was the case, at least, until Heidegger – the great lover of tools, that star-nose mole that could not see what was before his face and yet could sense so well through hässlich tendrils – reminds us to take to the ground with whatever was on hand and to dig through the history of ontology by way of a destruktion or abbau that could lead us back through the sediment of western thought. Heidegger, at least when taken in the respectively anti-mythological and anarchist (an-arche) spirit of those parasites 128

John D. Caputo and Reiner Schurmann, did not return us to the underground so as to try and locate where those other thinkers had gone wrong – though this is an apparent byproduct of both destruktion and abbau – as, instead, the appeal to the underground is an appeal to a fundamental un-grounding or non-ground (abgrund) of reason. But what of the Nematode, that parasitic worm that inhabits the subcutaneous layer of the host’s skin? Does it not have a lesson to teach us about the need to live under the skin, under the surface and under the ground? Is there lesson now ready to be heard, now that there appears to be a renewed interest in a need to hide within one’s self, and within one’s organizations? The Invisible Committee, those contemporary provocateurs par excellence, claim that we have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.1 Is it really as they say? Has too much been shown? Too much said? Too much made and done? Is there now a need to become invisible and to shield oneself from the injunction to expose more and more of our world and ourselves? Is it true as Scott Davidson – the translator of another classic text in French malcontent, Michel Henry’s Barbarism 129

– states, when, speaking of Michel Henry’s theory of selfhood, he claims that, for the latter one’s true identity withdraws from the visibility of the public realm and resides in the secrecy of a clandestine, underground life.2 If so then perhaps there is a need to embrace the itch of a kind of gnathostomiasis and to break the skin, returning to our parasitic brothers and to what lies beneath. The Nematode does not merely lurk beneath, nor does it “uncover” the “truth” that waits – as if there is a hidden city of Atlantis under all that tissue and blood. Instead, this worm will move between its hosts, and explore the untiefen of the host. 1. The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. USA: Semiotext(e). 2009. Print. 2. Davidson, S. “Translator’s Introduction”. Barbarism. By Michel Henry. Trans, S. Davidson. USA: Continuum, 2012. vi-xii. Print. 130

Glow Baby Glow Stefan Tiron --ways of tracking life by using night vision goggles, fluorescent dyes, fluorescent proteins and electronic microscopy-Day-time GREEN has a chlorophylliac existence basking in the sun, a sort of epitome of everything wholesome, living and recognizably vegetarian. Photosynthesis, the processes defining the synthesis of autotrophic life on Earth are intimately connected to rays of light coming from somewhere else, from our nearest star in the sky. Evolutionary narratives on primate and early mammal evolution abound with descriptions of ancestors that are living a small, hidden and mostly nocturnal life, with living nocturnal Bushbaby primates nowadays giving us a clue to their ancient lifestyles. Present diurnal living of bipedal primates like us and our inability to see in the dark is linked to a loss of the capacity to see and work in the dark. Eyes of early or so-called primitive primates are visibly bigger in size, much more owl-like and adapted to nocturnal insect-eating habits. The transition from nocturnal to diurnal living was an important step in our supposed rise to fame. One might say that our ancestors have entered the spotlight of fame and joined other diurnal animals and niches that where previously occupied by pesky dinosaurian competitors and bullies. Stretching this conclusion a bit, we might say that we were kept in the darkness of small-scale insectivorous anonymity having a place to live only after dusk, after the big carnivores and herbivores of the day were asleep, having digested their immense load of food. In consequence Mammalian Revolution as seen through the eyes of adaptive radiation might be strongly associated with the demise of big dayliving spotlight basking dinosaurs. While not a unique and defining characteristic (birds have it, and dinosaur might well have been warmblooded too!), endothermic mammals (warm-blooded metabolism) are well-adapted to colder-than-day existence in the dark of the night. 131

Glow-in-the-dark living is usually associated then with deep cold reaches of the ocean or with cat-like abilities to scan the surroundings for (again) nocturnal prey. Eyes are also not the only senses available in the night, as echo-location shows and heat-sensing snake-vision demonstrates. But we don’t have to stick with our immediate multicellular vertebrate relatives. There is also something more ancient and more fundamental to phosphorescence – an evolutionary connection with the ancestral chemical signalling in Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes as modern ocean-dwelling unicellular organisms. Visible from a remote satellite orbit around the Earth, these hyperdense oceanic populations are glowing together at times (quorum sensing), tuning themselves to giant patches of synchronization, ‘blooming in the night’. They are using a form of ancient chemical communication and signalling that makes them irradiate on an immense scale, visible even from the darkness of space. This eerie ability of life to glow bioluminescently GREEN in the dark, and to communicate and produce its own light was imported, introduced and reproduced inside cellular cultures and living organisms being grown in labs all over the world. There looms a Pandora-feeling among the public and media that scientists have switched on some inner radioactive force that has now taken over the day-time greenery, becoming irreversible ensconced inside tissues and genomes. Green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) have revolutionized biotechnology and monitoring and labelling organisms and their cells in vivo. A spectral propriety developed initially by marine organisms such as the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria has suddenly ‘lit up’ remote biological kingdoms, their most intimate processes or enabled the difficult & tricky monitoring of GMO lifeforms. In front of TV nature shows, our impaired vision stares now in a frightened mode, becoming absolutely horrified during night-time shots of savanna skirmishes of lions and hyena tribes battling viciously in the pitch dark. The mephistophelic powers of night-vision are more and more a pervasive presence during recent Gulf Wars and necessary for the constant preparation of wars, special ops, illegal and secretive operation under the cover of night. Heat-sensors also glow in the dark, they are used to record the 132

endothermic signature of us relatively big mammals, hard to hide and hard to mask our bodily signs of life even in the darkness of the night. In a dark truth of this might be that private vigilante US civil guards are actually ‘protecting’ the US-Mexico border, patrolling with the help of heat-sensing technologies that help track immigrants. Glowing heat-sensing visuals are also part of the protection against pandemic flu, scanning attentively in airports during H1N1 outbreaks for the first telltale signs of fever. Characteristics of life and warmth became indelible and impossible to mask signs of life. Living under the protective veil of darkness has become a faux pas for us, a possible evolutionary trap, and a way to give yourself away in the face of biopolitical power hunting down those outside the borders of law or within the borders of epidemiology. Colouring and dying invisibility has stretched the scientific reach into marking unknown and unseen molecular and developmental processes, that have always been there under our skins, hidden away in the pulsing and throbbing darkness. I am curious and interested how this new alien light has been switched on and off. How this glowing could be traced from the inside of labs and biomedical science or evoDevo morphologies to the fictitious realm of UFOlogic imaginings and alien insemination, spreading its inner light from horror movie posters to zebra fish embryos and live wallpapers with green VR codes raining down from the computer sky. 1. Cylinder containing the ancient evil florescent liquid entity in the movie Prince of Darkness by John Carpenter, 1987. 133

2. Painting featuring a florescent GFP bunny, a reference maybe to ‘Alba’, the glow in the dark rabbit of bioartist Eduardo Kac. 3. Night vision image of an unknown military special op. 4. TRON Legacy-era light cycle piloted by anthropomorphic software programs in a deadly Grid Game.

5. GFP Zebra fish embryo, a very important model animal for vertebrate morphogenetil research, embryonic developmental pathways etc. 6. different microscopic cellular structures made visible with the help of photoactivated florescence including the “immortal cellline” HeLa.

In Darkness Sarah Jones The perception of similarity is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. It slips past, can possibly be regained but really cannot be held fast, unlike other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception then seems to be bound to a time moment (Zeitmoment). It is like the addition of a third element, namely the astrologer, to the conjunction of two stars which must be grasped in an instant.1 Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar Outlining his critique of contemporary science’s tendency to define mimicry only in relation to represented space, Roger Caillois in his essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia2, introduces the full extension of the perception of the similar. Caillois describes certain species of insects and animals whose ability to blend in to their surroundings is so believable that it surpasses similarity in an attempt at “assimilation”. Here, he says, “instinct completes morphology.” So, beyond the biological (or magical) intermediate steps of the mimicry of a surrounding milieu, the final stages of the process of assimilation, must be in some way activated by the organism itself, be it by pure automatism or “temptation by space.” So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are being carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.3 Franz Kafka, Meditation Caillois goes on to explain that this action is dependent on vision, concluding that what is thus involved in the mimetic action of attempting assimilation, is in fact, a disturbance in the perception of space. Drawing on the research of Louis Lavelle, Caillois defines space 136

as a double dihedral of action. In this dihedral, the horizontal plane is that of the ground, and the vertical that of the scientist, who, as she moves through space, alters the dihedral angle. The continuously changing dihedral angle is subject to the scientist’s movement and therefore her perception. Representational space is thus where the scientist begins her analysis. It is within this representational, rather than perceived space, that she, as the vertical plane, observes each object in proportion to her own body. Each organism becomes but one point in relation to many others. She is Benjamin’s astrologer, the third, governing the Zeitmoment. This results in every organism that is not the scientist losing any claim to its own originary (view) point. The organism’s understanding of its own distinction from its surroundings is usurped by its being seen as simply one of many points in represented space. An organism’s claim to its own perspective in space, its understanding of its place, is stolen by the privileged eyes of the scientist who is the creator of represented space.4 Ideally, the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because all around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is occupied by the ring, and my presence is no longer what is was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately, but as a diffusion through space and time of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will.5 Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller For Caillois, assimilation demonstrates a complete breakdown of the privileging of a single perspective allowed in represented space. He likens the mimetic creatures attempts at assimilation to “psychasthenia”, a term coined by Pierre Janet in 1903 that describes an inability to resist the urge to change depending on ones surroundings. Whereas the hysterias involved at their source a narrowing of the field of consciousness, the psychasthenias involved at root a disturbance in the fonction du reel (‘function of reality’), a kind of weakness in the ability to attend to, adjust to, and synthesise one’s 137

changing experience. Caillois goes on to note the response of schizophrenics, whose answer to the question “Where are you?” demonstrates an understanding of space as a “devouring force”, in which: …the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space . . . He is similar, not to something; just similar . . . he invents spaces of which he is ‘the convulsive possession’. It is through what Caillois claims as “legendary psychasthenia” that a process of “depersonalisation by assimilation to space” occurs for the mimetic organism and it is this space, this milieu, that he likens to darkness. It is in darkness “of night and obscurity” that he recognises temptation and “the magical hold.” Darkness is the possibility of invisibility for everything within the milieu, it is where nothing is discernable, nothing visibly distinct from anything else, not even darkness from itself. The interval of darkness is a positive and devouring force into which one might disappear into its surrounds, consumed by a black (w)hole. There is a darkness in the dreams that I have about you. You are something warm and sweet smelling that rots in the undergrowth of the tall trees that I have grown. You hum in the shaded patches that the sparkling light through the canopy slights. You stroke beneath the discarded leaves, above the soil. You rustle just enough to make the children turn and then you lay silent beneath their curious eyes. When they are gone you uncoil. I see your insides bursting against the walls of my skull. Your petals push on the backs of my eyelids, forcing them open, as I will everything closed. I push you out with my breath as the winter sun rises. I pour you out when I laugh and I don’t look for you in the shadows anymore. There is nothing here that has the angle of your neck, when you have let your head fall, to tell someone that you are listening. Everything in the light is new. Your spores drift like soft lies here. They lie weightless inside of my chest and bloom beautifully in a darkness. For Caillois, alongside the “instinct of self-preservation”, which orients towards life, acts of mimesis in their most extreme form demonstrate “a 138

sort of instinct of renunciation that orients toward a mode of reduced existence” bound in an attraction to space. He relates this attraction to the elementary and mechanical process of tropism; a turning in response to an environmental stimulus, which is dependent on the direction of the stimulus. Here, the temptation of psychasthenia is a tropism and can be seen happening in only one direction. However, if we consider the milieu the “body” towards which the mimetic “body” turns, and if the milieu is the darkness, then the darkness that consumes is also the darkness that is consumed. If we are to acknowledge the perspective of the organism, it is also possible that within a “temptation by space” there could conceivably be “desire”. As in the affective event, both bodies, in the coming of the two together, act upon one another.6 Darkness is what one turns towards, as it turns to consume, darkness is not only space or milieu. Darkness is body, force and movement. Darkness is the space between bodies in which the actioning of a third takes place. Darkness is an active body itself and it does not simply make space for the turn, it is the turn. In the turning of darkness, as the activation or capacitation of the affective event “life seems to lose ground, blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu.” Similar to Caillois, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is suspicious of commonly held constructionist epistemologies, which dictate that the “point of view creates the object.” This refers again to the notion of an originary, fixed viewpoint, that of Benjamin’s astrologer, the double dihedral. Amerindian perspectival ontology on the other hand, “proceeds as though the point of view creates the subject: whatever is activated or ‘agented’ by the point of view will be a subject.”7 The notion that everything is a someone universalises the notion of the “intentional stance”, thereby opening the notion of perspective to “reveal a maximum of intentionality or abduct a maximum of agency.” Through this understanding of a different type of multiple perspectives, each attributed its own agency and intent, we can see how it becomes impossible to reduce anything that is not fully “known”, or understood, to an “insufficiently analysed object”, which as de Castro points out, is the tendency of science. Science reduces “every action to a causal chain of events.” A multinatural perspective on the other hand, suggests that an “insufficient” understanding of 139

something (someone) would imply the need for, and the possibility of, a continuous and more active looking. This will allow each subject in an exchange, or series of exchanges, to remain an active subject in constant flux. One who cannot be reduced, and more importantly cannot be fixed, as a single action within a causal chain. Subjects can only be continuously understood. Furthermore, they must be related to other subjects, who are continuously being understood, or otherwise expanded on through mythology. This is an intentional activity, a constant movement and negotiation between two or more bodies in an exchange wherein hierarchies of looking can be the same, whilst what is seen can remain unique. And recollecting it, often have I been struck with the important truth – that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater This kind of perspectivism should not be confused with relativism, in which “every perspective is equally valid and true.” De Castro contends that whilst this statement could be said to be true to a point, it is important that perspectives remain separate so as not result in disasters in representation. Perspectival multinaturalism suggests that humans and nonhumans perceive (“represent”) the world in the same way. However, even in seeing in the same way; that which is seen is different. De Castro shares Caillois’ cynicism regarding the western scientific tendency to reduce space to a singular representation. He explains how Amerindian perspective allows for a multiplicity of representations to exist simultaneously but not relatively. Thus the organism is not stripped of its “personality” (in the privileging of the viewpoint of the scientist or the astronomer) and it can still be attributed the subjective intentions of anybody. An Amerindian multinaturalist perspective allows for multiple viewpoints that remain in constant action as well as allowing for the possibility of subjective desire. Caillois cites Flaubert’s, The Temptation of Saint Anthony in which Anthony longs to become the matter that surrounds him, to 140

merge into space at the expense of his individuality and to join what he sees happening in the three realms of nature around him. It is initially desire that Saint Anthony expresses when he longs for an exchange with matter that would allow him to be but one shattered piece amongst all the others, until eventually he is the others.8 De Castro’s explanation of a network of viewpoints, in which every object is in fact a subject, and in which perspectival hierarchy breaks down, allows for Caillois’ dissolution of the mimetic subject with an emphasis on the subjects potential for desire. Dissolution is bound in movement and in action, in variation and therefore, in a constant re-solution in an ongoing exchange of perspectives. Through the breakdown of hierarchy of singular perspectives – without the loss of the personality of the single subject, as established by way of Caillois and de Castro – we can understand an ‘I’ (that is the subject within the milieu) that is in the same process of decomposition and recomposition. A truly problematized subjective ‘I’; an I (eye) for all eyes (I’s). We can consider the self as a self that is able to offer itself up willingly for consumption by darkness, whilst maintaining its selfhood in its own consuming desire. Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco – who was the patron saint of the Expressionists – the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event. The people who have assumed responsibility for the knock at the manor gate walk doubled up with fright. Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka Jan Verwoert writes of the position of the “witness” in relation to art.9 He posits the witness somewhere between the unsuspecting victim of circumstance and the complicit listener who will willingly yet often naively invest in another’s emotional state. Whilst the willing witness could never bear “the weight of all the joy and pain that others might imbue…” neither, says Verwoert, can any bystander “claim innocence when everyone entering the field should know what they’re in for.” Verwoert suggests that there would be no art or writing if there were no willing witnesses for such acts. Someone, he concludes, must offer him or herself up or “must dare to be targeted, affected or moved by the feelings and thoughts of others.” 141

Verwoert claims that within the act of witnessing there are two possible economies of transference. The first he describes as a closed loop wherein emotions that cannot be coped with are passed on to another and then another and so on, such as in a family structure. The second involves the externalisation of the unresolvable emotion, whereby a witness from “outside” the closed loop is called upon. This third person can be asked to bear witness, and it is this gratuitous witness through which reality (and art) can be experienced. The making of reality begins with the question “How was your day?” The gratuitous offer to witness and thereby co-create the reality of the other contained in this question is one of the most radical cultural articulations we know. It is within this invitation to bear witness, between “How are you?” and “Fine, Thank you”, that Verwoert observes a “gap” that is the space in which, …art and writing come into their own. They can never fully compete with the force of shared becoming, nor do they necessarily remain confined to the sphere of mere decorum. They operate from the gap between the two, ideally subsumed by neither but capable of relating, and relating to, both. Verwoert identifies a space within which, two things juxtaposed exist in perpetual collapse to produce a third. He refers to this space as the “zone of sentience.” For Verwoert, through the act of bearing witness one can move beyond “meaning” to “feeling.” Furthermore, he offers this space without the suggestion of deferral to hysteria or madness that could be evident in the psycasthenic experience. For him, “bearing witness is an avowal of that which may be inexpressible or even impossible to share when what one feels is also felt by the other.” For Verwoert, it is from the threshold of the zone sentience, upon which art and writing are created that they must also be cast. He recommends that they be transferred, “…not on to another person, but openly transferred on to objects, pictures, gestures or words, to be arrested by and in them…” so that the pain and joy contained within, might be avowed. Witnessing then, is “what stands between us.” It is the variation of affectus,10 and it is that which takes place in darkness. Verwoert employs the metaphor of the spirit or the ghost who is 142

impossible to capture and impossible to see, surrounded by darkness. The ghost is unseen and unavowed, and in being so, the perfect witness. Verwoert suggests a darkness that is full of perfect witnesses to whom we whistle, “whistling in the dark is a way of relating to something out there like it was there and not there.” To perform the work of art, is to whistle, and to whistle is to desire to be heard and understood. Whistling in to the darkness is the desire for the potential of a meaningful relation to another. We engage in whistling to ghosts persistently because we recognize that they are there, even as we recognize that they’re not. Like the refrain and the repetition implicit in the affective event we recognize them because they repeat, like habits, we already know them, through memory. Verwoert insists that we would not continue to desire them if we had not found something of them once before. They exist as that which cannot exist due to the nature of the responsibility of the witness and so they must remain in darkness. Verwoert’s darkness takes on the positive and devouring quality of Caillois’ darkness. It is in darkness in which one desires to give something, or everything, in one imperceptible moment to the witness and the milieu; to devour and to be devoured. The darkness is that substance into which the artist whistles; wherein the witness stands; it keeps in shadow a subject that cannot be sufficiently analysed; it is a space in which everything is a subject, in which each and everything is separate and connected. The darkness is a substance with positivity, the space of the non-existent that acknowledges the existent in its amorphous folds. It is a space of production in which the third is created, the third that is perpetually bound to the darkness, and in attempting to emerge from it, simply doubles itself in darkness. Subjects depersonalise in the black hole of darkness, matter merges, and interstellar mass grows as even light splits “to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bottom of matter, to be matter.”11 And then beyond the atom, beyond the smallest perceivable, to be more-than-one, to invent the milieu in the decomposition and recomposition that is light to darkness, darkness to darkness. Perhaps there are moments in art, in the object, image or gesture, that offer us a single instant in which all that is in flux – meaning, feeling, looking, being – can be arrested. Perhaps in the act of bearing witness, we can ourselves become ghosts. Through the collision 143

of the call to bear witness, the breakdown of perspective offered us by darkness, the meaning we can produce in seeing and the shock of the pushing of one body on another, we can collapse in to the milieu. For a perpetual instant, through a work of art we can disappear and reappear in the dark because we desire darkness. 1. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar”, New German Critique: Special Walter Benjamin issue, (17: Spring 1979). 2. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935), trans. John Shepley, in: October, Vol. 31 (Winter 1984) p. 27. 3. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1971). 4.“It is with represented space that the drama becomes more specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the co-ordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself.” - Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, p. 28. 5. Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage Books, 1983, 1998). 6. “This separation-connection between feeling and activation situates the account between what we would normally think of as the self on one hand and the body on the other, in the unrolling of an event that’s a becoming of the two together.” Brian Massumi in an interview with Joel McKim, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics, 15 August 2008”, in: “Micropolitics : Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics” in: Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October 2009, www.inflexions.org. 7. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies” in: Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Fall 2004), pp. 463 - 484. 8. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, p. 31. 9. Jan Verwoert, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: On the Risk of Bearing Witness and the Art of Affective Labour”, in: Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Ed. V. Ohlraun (Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2010) pp. 255 - 305. 10. Baruch Spinoza, “Part Three: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions” in: Ethics, 1677 (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1949) pp. 127 – 134. 11. Caillois quotes Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, p. 31. 144

A–Ă–Â Dorothee Neumann A [SKELETON] Attention! Unknown / (or too known…. – to know, always, but from what perspective? Pre- or perma-existence of timeless information) The dissolution. The dissolution of the known into the “appearance” of the unknown. The approach of the interstice-no-more, which must be left undefined. Pure skeleton, to which we can stay attached, but which itself says nothing. The unknown as the scant, empty, banal, inanimate... the scaffold… the lack of any content… The unknown is not something which needs to be uncovered, something which can be deconstructed and transformed into the familiar. The unknown remains the unknown: in the form of the nolonger-imaginable interstice between definable things, which actually fill the entire room. Besides, a thought occurred to me recently: I wonder if this place here, this city is actually only here to dissolve me. I cannot not find anything familiar. Instead I find everything else. Including the outcast, the one who was always scorned, the one pushed aside. What this means: only as long as I read your text and go along with you, the author, are we in a common context, within a common framework of reality, so that we understand each other/ feel comfortable/ find our ways, or that we really talk about speaking. What about writing, can writing be itself? Can speaking be itself, or is it only the witness of a framework? [And yes, we are aware of the problem of language, that this question cannot be answered in language because the question that has been formulated can only be asked again as a question to the question.] My dissolution feels as if I were able to see down to my own skeleton, which supports me. And I can see what it is made of. Each 145

sentence, that usually nests in the flesh, propagates itself towards the skeleton, and clouds the brain posing a question to me that in the end a third one answers and another one endures... each sentence is exposed as a truth construction, a crutch to reality. Not to see the skeleton but to use it: this means to know a reality of life and not indulge in a certain truth; arguably, though, it means to have truth as a base. To know the sentences we exchange for what they are and to insert them into our tissues. To see the skeleton, however, dissolves any kind of certainty. The truth seems to have prepared itself, in its paradox, for non-existence. Not that this has been a doubtful point until now… But when it unveils to you what your life’s reality is made of, what truths it pulls its existence from, who supports it, how are you supposed to keep it as a scaffold? When the very formulation of a question no longer forms a category. Ă [BODIES, my - our ] If my body moves through the streets as if it were at home there. The street leads my body, which dissolves in it with every step. The way I am taking flows through me and directs my steps. Whereas my consciousness lags behind and merely wonders. Wonders. Wonderful. Incredible. The body has already incorporated the new reality completely (without the need for consciousness to construct causal chains of meaningful stories), while my comprehension still stumbles and tries to read, to understand the other, the new. Who’s the one walking down the street, if I am the one who is not? The right place: by chance I get hold of a flyer, find the gallery. Know that it is the right place. My legs find it again and again, the gallery. Until the day when I’m sitting in the seminar and we are trying to think with the help of darkness. Advance into the unknown. When the body goes by itself. Not mine [der meine], but the one [der eine]. And I run behind it. It goes where it wants. Towards general feeling. Towards the body of the community. Or jumps somewhere else. And I go, or rather these 146

two legs here, and suddenly I feel as if it was natural: I landed, for instance, in the body of a Romanian. Oh, but then, my head steps in with a warning. What have you just felt? You were there. On the other side. Completely. And you can understand why it is like that. I was with all my body in empathy with the system. But then my head comes back and I know that this is the result of my empathic observation, my endeavour to complete my movement, my empathy, my will to understand. Do I know that? Do I always have to know that I am the centre of my being? Did my body wander or did it become a host for a visitor? “The horror has a face. It presents itself at first as an anonymous field of force, then as an organ of perception, and then finally as the site of reality itself, each realm subject to the mediation of that most alien of things: the body.” (Dylan Trigg) Â [FOREIGN HOME] City map: WHERE ARE YOU FROM. This doesn’t matter anymore: from Earth. Let’s take this: human – animal (kinship of the animal and the human living within each other / animality and humanity are given only together, within a whole being) human – alien / non-human (“the body as a fragment of materiality that is both human and non-human concurrently” / “a past other than its own”) And let’s transfer: human – (other-)human (a present other than its own / the body as a fragment of materiality that is somebody and somebody else concurrently, human and other-than-human) I am still one of the ones constituted “there”. Right “here” become a stranger to myself and my-self a stranger to me. Afterwards, I’m at home here. Maybe. But I am still a “consitutum” of my “there”. Then in “here” the “there” becomes a stranger to me, and in ”there” the “here”. 147

Do the “here” and “there” move or am I the one who moves? “Horror marks the point at which language falls into an inchoate abyss, while at all times straddling the line between the body as it presents itself in the phenomenal world and the reality that not only resists description but also destroys the subject.” (Dylan Trigg) EARTH. To use the alien as the alien and thereby make it alien. To use one’s own as one’s own and therefore make it one’s own. Is the alien the alien because it is alien? I am asking this seriously, because I realize how differently we use things. Those who feel at home here, they see as well, they perceive as well, but they perceive things, roads, streets, the environment, the people, their appearance as theirs, as their own. And so it is something else than it is for me. I perceive things as alien, different from my own. Can I escape…? Seeing the other as the other. Is it just my eyes deceiving me? Is there really such a category? It happens to one so quickly, as if the alien was lying in the thing itself, which is alien to me. But how can it be in the thing itself, when for others it is, in contrast, homely? So what is it that makes the thing alien for me? What is the alien? And when in the end I have adapted the things to my “here”, where has the alien disappeared? But this does not matter anymore. I, we, are all from Earth. EARTH. HOME. And yet, at some point we want to go home. That’s exactly how it is. We can adjust everywhere. We can move around and change the place. But at some point one has to go back home, because one cannot discard what one was constituted by. The Earth as the one constituting me, my spot of earth, my vagabond cart, my detached part of the way, readable on a constructed map. This spot, this place that constitutes me transcendentally and 148

materially remains permanently as a template, even when we jump, we can never quite overcome it. Even if we do not need it seriously. Note at the end. Because of this thing with the language and the translation. Furthermore there’s a new language that I implement. With maximum energy I try to trace and understand nuances, vocabulary, structures. What is it with this language? What is it with language? In the way that through learning, the language dissolves itself. A new language is not a translation of words. What the street is for me: a street. Street. Conceptually and empirically. Can this change? With a different language? Through translation? (For we have a “constitutive structure in our experience of spatiality”, for example. A foundation – a street as something that, enabling walking, separates two parts of the earth – whose basic constitutive structure occurred to me at some point: “a given of experience”). Not just through translation. But the new word is linked to new impressions and so it changes. So does the concept. So no-thing is fixed: here we are right back at the moment of dissolution. [translated by Irina Gheorghe] 149

From the Under-Chambers of the Mind Aulos Some who lose… lose their memories, their shadow, their keenness and name, they lose them within the thick murkiness of the mind… folks who get lost and go astray in the confines of their own room, who lose themselves within life’s hurricane, amidst the unmistakable chorus of utter dismay… for the people lost below the humdrum of enthusiasm, of hope… for the ones wondering through the meandering paths of diurnal living… abundantly selves lose their way, at times inside them-selves, and sometimes within the painful unknown of a random day of May… among those who deliriously squander their memories in the stormy vastness of collapsing experiences… people who discover sympathy by nurturing repugnance, losing their own selves completely… into nocturnal fantasies the shimmering lights irretrievably fall… amid the corridors drenched in formalin hearts waver, tears, the soft hum of an idle sigh, a child’s sneeze… fingers as white as the whitest asylum walls, those lengthy fingers caressing her soft dark hair, darkened by too much grief and despair, darkening the nimbus of unseen beings, hair infused by the fragrance of blossomed trees, trees torn down by the catastrophe and calamity of history, history losing track of itself, enclosing itself in its vapid marrow, receding in its impervious ancestral crust, lost by nature’s unending creation amongst the world’s marvels… humans as marvelous as the day to follow, a day for the sun to glare grimly in the sky, the falling sky lost within the sea’s motion, its shape smothered by the colorless ripples, colder, and colder, and colder… in life and death’s name we shall drink, we shall lose ourselves amongst the waves of mythical wine, tainted by the lurid obscurity of revelry, amid spectral enchantments, solaced by the muse’s chant, seduced by mortal affection, mortals drowning in the vacuum of delusion, each and every mortal lost within life’s deathly whisper, death bowing in the face of unbounded affection, affection unfolded in loathing over the whole of mankind, uncoiling itself over the damned bodies of beings, expanding to each and every corner of existence, like the deity of those touched by 150

perpetual oblivion, the lost deity dropping in its own pitiful pit, the deepness where only you and I breath, the lifeless and deathless void in which our vagrant shadows swirl everlasting… Warped and girdled by being’s attendance, drifting through incessant decay, the pestilent self licks its parching and purulent wounds, its infested remembrance, rejoices itself at the hint of extinction and cloisters itself within the crammed and narrow borders of the skull, where the mind devours its own here and now, always breaching instantaneity, over-pouring into the fringes of duration. Outside the mind we are the vast unknown still unpolluted by our vile familiarity, in this overburdened universe, this unctuous and moist enclosure, overbearing the innumerable strata of calcified existences, imbued by visceral urges, muffled by profuse tedium, yearning to breach the inner walls of breath itself, together clinging onto the elsewhere, permanently trampled by the breeze of what is to come…………. For we cannot say these lines and letters and phrases belong to a particular self, a certain being moving about, an entity we could simply point at. A magnificent and resplendent compound [addendum] of nature, the self can be close to everything, except to a singular existence, and here a desire to perceptually catch a glimpse of language imploding on itself might spontaneously spawn, just as our curiosity binds us to knead the thread of time over and over again, boring for our inherent darkness, which has been spoken: “‘in the child, I read quite openly the dark underside of myself ’, an original darkness that inhabits the man as well.” 151

Black Golden Skulls Octavian-Liviu Diaconeasa the yellow river runs the red sun sets and rises from time to time and again dim and mellow soft light flooding the landscape black rain falls endlessly in big round droplets the lonely old man says his prayer the worker spins the endless toil the crazy lady on the chair wearing her black shoes her black stockings her grey dress her beautiful knees the time passing, passing, passing masked men with machine guns the beautiful girls with the cigarettes the brick and metal stations the never read never magazines never ending up where they should the seven deadly sins lurking in your head the golden objects of desire the golden queens and their golden kings all madness lust and carnage stand up and cheer all you disfigured men and women that disfigured beauty drink up break the bottle at the end white out waves blowing up out in the garden where you write your never read never diary of your never life the crazy dance with awkward suits the kiss the mountain top the never ending wars always and forever the prejudice the orchestra playing music the young beautiful body bathing in the river 152

the god watching why? the never wisdom never understood the zero hero the man with the snake on his shoulders the falling burning star make a wish become a ghost

Plagued. The Fear of Theory Mihai Lukacs Theatre was most vividly compared by Antonin Artaud to the plague (just as Freud was comparing psychoanalysis to the same infectious disease). The plague stood for a bodily experience which was highly physical, painful, socially and personally disruptive. It was, in Artaud’s words, a “kind of psychic entity” (“no one can say why the plague strikes a fleeing coward and spares a rake taking his pleasure with the corpses of the dead”1), which at the same time caused social institutions and order to collapse. The plague sufferers and survivors were seeing it as a divine gift to make them, through extreme physical and mental suffering, change their ways: “it seems as though a colossal abscess, ethical as much as social, is drained by the plague. And like the plague, theatre is collectively made to drain abscesses.”2 Artaud projected a plagued theory for theatre when the social problems of Western society could be traced to the repressions which subjects performed voluntarily or involuntarily, and the only way out was for men and women to let their hidden fears, desires and wants to be explored in the open. The plagued theory disturbs the peace of mind, giving a way out to the repressed subconscious and unexplored sexual fantasies. When Artaud explained the shocking eroticism of his performance, The Cenci, he used the motif of the plague again: “how are we to explain that upsurge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of escaping, stay behind, seeking out and snatching sinful pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses where chance had lodged them?”.3 The fear of theory explodes in theatrical and performative circles as a pretension that theory-as-plague never emerged or if it ever existed, now it is buried and there is no need to address those issues, while the canonical linearity is left untouched. One of the main ideas that plagued artists and Artaud question together, noting its lack of obviousness, is the simple statement: “the present state of society is iniquitous.” Artaud’s answer is radical: it “ought to be destroyed.” Inequality or what he calls “the stink of mankind” are lasting “personal 155

worries (that) disgust me, utterly disgust me as does just about all current theatre, which is as human as it is antipoetic.”4 He does not see theatre as a messianic means of achieving equality or destroying society but as a humanistic institution that can and should be radically changed. The incommunicative acting out, the histrionic behavior and the rejection of the language of the Father contest the dominant culture and manifest as symptoms of a disease of representation. Consciousness of the rational being, its self-knowledge and mastery are deceptive and suspect. The plague challenges and resists them through a political rejection of hegemonic forms of subjection and representation. The unconscious and the body decenter and denaturalize the unquestioned knowing subject of the master. Stage practice, training, publishing and academia institutionalized the Western artistic canon but nevertheless, this process of institutionalization brought “the question of a single standard of absolute, transhistorical artistic value embodied in the outstanding, exemplary, representative yet universalistic artist.”5 Artists and scholars touched by the plague have to question the canon not only for capitalist reasons like profit-increasing and efficiency but for subjectivity construction and socio-political alienation of the audience. The canonical healthy subject is constructed as the inception, the solitary talented white male totally detached from hard theory. By not questioning the existing canon of theory and methodology, the untouched-by-the-plague artists only confirm the privileges and the values of the upper-classes that they entertain with no place for the necrosis of the modernist ideals such as “the solitary genius”, “art for art’s sake”, “the calling”, “natural talent”, “originality” or “divine inspiration”. In its performances that cannot exceed the crisis of subjectivity, the plague plays with duplicity through a language of absence and misrepresentation that creates an alternative figuration. The plagued subjectivity through the practice of unconscious movements is unable to answer the demands of the Symbolic but prepares the conditions for the subversion of the existing social order. The canonical subject is connected to a “return to origins”, where there is no need for “the heavy baggage of theory”.6 The “wholesomeness” and “juridical” understanding of the canon reveal its 156

construction as a fictional “massive body of self-congratulating ideas”7 that are rarely questioned. The healthy aesthetic ideal still functions nowadays without dramatic changes in the spirit of the conservative modernism: the authoritarian, lonely artist, priest and prophet. The insistence on subjectivity as a methodological approach in performance is treated by academics, artists and activists with skepticism and as non-serious8 while construction of the canon functions within larger socio-political histories and ideologies as available for everybody but also as an exclusionary practice, based on the wild guess of what the audience wants to see and what type of art can be available for larger non-professional crowds by imposing an elitist and offensive assumption that they would not understand sophisticated theoretical points. While the metaphysical debates on our superior talent and unique vocation as healthy artists flourished, the neoliberal arguments of efficiency and adaptation to the free market crept in, while the artists were urged to follow their godly vocation. The healthy artist becomes the main target of these approaches by being taught through the canon to be a genius outside of history and theory, using only empirical skills to explore personal potential and narcissism. The process is educationally irrelevant by expressing naïveté in terms of scholarly explorations or the debates on the role of education or the university. One of the core demands of artistic education, originality functions as a main characteristic of modernism in opposition to the copy, by differentiating itself from marginality and deviance to the norm. Constructed in the masculine, originality and novelty are still the main criteria in judging artistic works. Producing original works in the masculinist individual vein becomes the main preoccupation of the healthy artist, following the steps prescribed by canon apologists. The main reason to keep the primacy of originality or novelty is to assure the existence of various hierarchies through the discourse of modernism. The binary opposition original/copy functions in theatre as a complex mechanism with exclusionary effects, while the theme of originality is the only constant in the discourse of modernism which depends exactly on the repression of the second term of the binary. Originality, daringness or being-interesting are valorized in the modernist discourse as masculine features with no critical attention to 157

the social implications of such reconstructions. In my own research, I discovered that originality was rarely an important methodology for modernist theatre makers: the ideas that were floating around at their time were easily adopted while they influenced each other and on many occasions they admitted their own plagiaristic identifications and the collective nature of their discoveries. The depoliticizing process and the aesthetic primacy of originality are reversed by returning to a radical construction of subjectivity that moves away from a prescribed and obedient state of being into a fluid fulfillment of becoming. How to misread the theories of the canon and how to avoid those aspects of canonicity that make them “perfectly acceptable” for the conservative dominant culture? Said’s concept of “contrapuntal reading” can prove extremely useful. A concept taken from music, contrapuntal reading can expose the canonical interpretations and usages. A contrapuntal reading not only reveals the canonical perspective on the text, but also offers the possibility of finding forms of resistance, the counterpoints, that can be part of the same account. In Said’s opinion we have to “read the great canonical texts . . . with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented”.9 In practice, says Said, reading contrapuntally means to understand how an author is used by canonicity and what is left out, what is forgotten and for what reasons. Who gains positions in the traditional canon, how those authoritative positions based on excellence and cultural value can be distorted, what is left out and how those positions are constructed and sustained? What is the role of the audience in all this construction? In theatre, together with the construction of the healthy artistic worth, we can identify the imposition of the idea of a passive audience and what Brecht calls “culinary theatre” where the audience is seduced into an ecstasy of sensory indulgence characterized by social docility and catatonia.10 The culinary element plays a significant role in sketching the canonical feature of the mainstream but also social/political/documentary/community theatre. On the other hand, the theatre canon acts as a cannibalistic machine, aimed to assimilate new or alien bodies.11 Its patriarchal conservatism capitalized the whiteness and 158

maleness of its authors to strengthen its position, in connection to a permanent search for legitimacy from the existing order. The process of normalizing the canonical select membership is based on covering up its re/production of systemic inequality. The purpose is to fit all members of the canon into the prototype of the modern knowing subject: the Western, heterosexual, white, urban, middle-class male. All contradictions to the prototype are to be erased, lost, not considered important or just presented as ephemeral in order to make the select members fit the frame. The plague can function as a continuous challenge and perversion of canonicity. By exploding desire, perversion, complications and contradictions, by questioning how meaning is produced by the canon and how certain interpretations were naturalized in educational settings, new possibilities open in terms of practice, theory and their in-between. A contrapuntal reading of canonical texts has the potential to undermine the disciplinary forces that are inherent to any canon, to avoid the commodification of new forms of radicalism, to discover the inherent transgressiveness of those texts and their radical potential invoked in reaching beyond the existing systems of formalized power by creating unimaginable forms of association and action. Moreover we should ask not how performance can represent this transgression but how radical performance can produce transgression and answer “the need for vigorous and fundamental change”12 by undermining the forces of canonicity. How is it possible to “avoid working in the hierarchical, competitive structures”13 or even more, how is it possible to change the rules and structures from inside? Cynical/militaristic terms justify the “survival of the fittest” exclusion in theatre: “theatre history is littered with the casualties of shifting tastes and advancing ideas of what constitutes entertainment. For every playwright whose name we know, consider how many others there are who have disappeared into the dustbin of history”.14 What was more at stake in promoting canonicity had to do more with proving institutional and disciplinary authority, coming up with a coherent discourse and history and did not necessarily have to do with an intrinsic theatrical worth to the used and abused texts.15 The canon apologists do not force us to like the artistic worth, just to recognise it. By refusing to read them as recommendations for a 159

masculinist world of stability and order, paradoxically untouched by any theory, one has to reposition oneself in relation to modernism and also to contemporary cultural circumstances. In order to avoid the basic gesture of modernist art, I neither propose a rejection or break with the past nor a post-modern relocation on the margins of mainstream culture (from where the dominant culture can be safely attacked) but a positive form of canonical garbage recycling. Disguised as political, realist art functions mainly as “a matter of style and content: it is a representation of recognizable settings, characters and events re-accentuated by the newness of the material to the stage; it is typified by the juxtaposition along with continuity of the incident from scene to scene.”16 Realist performances transmit “the authority of an apparent familiarity” which inclines “to efface their own textuality”.17 The border between the artists and the audience disappears and the world on stage gets easily incorporated into the world of the audience: we, spectators, start living it as we live our own lives into one indisputable reality. The main problem for realism persists in this sympathetic approach: by the way that realist theatre disguises the construction of the world, on the realist stage everything that is presented appears or should appear natural and appropriate. Historicization, a Brechtian convention, means first of all a reclaim of history on stage for nonhegemonic points of view, a promising transformation. Brechtian techniques have the purpose to theatrically expose what hides behind the illusion of representation. Brecht and his followers emphasize the necessity to break with “the emotional attachment to so-called great men”.18 For example, Ernst Shürer sees this break as a requirement in relation to a whole “romantic view of history that was prevalent in bourgeois society; his (Brecht’s) intention was to destroy the aura of greatness surrounding dictators, statesmen, politicians, who were often no more than political criminals.”19 Feminist Brechtians closely adopted this direction by producing characters on stage “whose destinies are controlled not by fate or their own personal characters or actions but by the behavior of collectives, large masses, social classes”.20 Brechtian theatre concludes with “an open-ended call to action: an intolerable situation has been presented; the audience is left with the question as to what to do about it”.21 In epic theatre, performers do not deliver answers for spectators’ problems or just present 160

cases but leave them the idea that the shared critical debate that was just taking place in front of them was useful in understanding everyday oppression in their own contexts. In The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous criticizes the “false theatre of phallocentric representationalism” that is able to stage only dramas of exclusion22 to which she offers the possibility of a drama of limitless solidarity that can actively criticize the hegemony of hostile and harmful ideologies, a drama that can offer models for strategic alliances. Cixous offers a way out for theatre, following Genet and the Artaudian plague: to burn knowledge and theatricality in order to un-learn or “to learn how to know nothing”.23 One method to burn knowledge and theatricality on stage is to play with history: Cixous uses theatre to create historical analysis. For her, theatre can offer the structure, the scene and the needed metaphors to explore contemporary politics. Cixous and Mnouchkine used historical settings to create performances that consciously played with poetry, the mixture of proximity and distance, subjectivity and collectivity in period performances where history was reworked as a psychoanalyzed dream.24 For Cixous, historical performances can use history as dream work through methods of condensation and displacement in order to construct contemporary criticism. The performance deliberately creates historical confusions in order to produce a sort of hallucination for the audience. The subjectivity question is always addressed in an indirect way: contradictory, uninformed, troublesome, breaking the limits and modes of production, the technologies of identity and knowledge. The quest for subjectivity manifests as an effect of the desire for subjectivity, a quest that is sanctioned by society and which transforms the plagued artist into a scapegoat of pretending, confusion, treason, inconstancy or irrationality. In challenging canonicity, failure and abandonment are important tools in dealing with subjectivity. The complexity, social relevance and epistemic value of the plagued theory depend exactly on a process of theoretical collapse. This failure facilitates a play of fruitful oppositions and uncertainties together with the emergence of the uncanny. Working the scheme of internal oppositions, there is a whole new world to be discovered: the possibilities of collapse as method. Upsetting the signifying practices of the dominant social order stands 161

not only for finding new forms of art-making but for the construction of unimagined meanings, identities and collectivities. In terms of practice, the plagued artists fail and abandon their theories and practices, they develop their subjectivities by avoiding reflection and accessible thought in favor of hallucinations and corporeal visuality. Blurring the epistemic boundaries, creating confusion and avoiding representation: connections emerge in the unclear and unthought areas of theory. The plague as way of thinking changes epistemological positions by moving from one discourse to another, contradicting all of them, blurring well-established boundaries, spreading confusion, resisting discursive assimilation, avoiding dominant forms of representation or self-imaging. The theory as plague is always on the move, “creating connections where things were previously dis-connected or seemed un-related, where there seemed to be ‘nothing to see’. In transit, moving, dis-placing”.25 This type of theoretization brings new possibilities to relate concepts, to connect notions through an intentional misreading or misinterpretation and offers a location from where one can demystify canonized categories. Far from being coherent and unified systems, plagued theories have in common inescapable failures and a hysterical argumentation of a desperate search for fragmented and evasive answers. Following the modernist obsessions, they unsuccessfully struggle with the conflict between reality and fiction and paradoxically equate in the end truth and reality with theatricality and the unconscious. The fascination for a desired reality (which is generated by the unconscious and emotions) comes from the possibility to become the other in a performative situation. Imitation cannot offer this possibility, only the never-ending capacity of becoming can solve the subjectivity question of extimacy, the in-between, neither one or two. The work-together plays an important role in embodying the plague as highly symbiotic, plagiaristic and unseparated by subjective categorization, as processes of multiple-consciousness and of becoming with. Reversals and crises, as well as the particular role of exceptions, make the inner contradictions difficult to situate or comprehend. The theoretization based on contradictions cannot constitute a final comprehensive system that can be further applied. This 162

aspect troubles any return to the plagued theories with the purpose of simplification and immediate usage in practice. The body “to which we constantly refer” in Western culture functions as a productive model also for stage. The capital constructs the energy of labor power and the “body we dream of today as locus of desire and the unconscious.” Baudrillard calls this body that became a process ruled by market value forces an anti-body.26 Starting with the body of the performer, plagued theories offer an alternative reading of corporeality and the possibility to un-learn the anti-body. They offer an ontological challenge that displaces the bourgeois notion of Self as unique, long-lasting and uninterrupted with a Self associated with the corporeal performative, hysterical, improvisational, irregular plague. The social body of the artist gets stuck by the “ever-expanding market forces and commodity fetishism (that) fuse systems of representation to those of social organization.” Theatre gets caught up nowadays in “a complex, interactive paradigm of production”27 that re-writes bodies, practices and histories in a commodified fashion for the sake of various forms of capital. The performing body fulfills its task: to sell the performance and its culinary theories. The ideological split between theatre practice, theory and their marketability no longer functions: in order to sell a show you market the easy-to-use theory and “rich” history and training behind it, all in a de-socialized/ de-politicized way where acting bodies are the ultimate commodified objects. The commodification of theatre principle follows the same capitalist rules when it comes to the representation of “minorities”: women’s theatre, black, ethnic, working-class, poor or queer theatres are just new products on the same shelf. In this sense, the revolt can only be apocalyptic: with demons and darkness on our side, we are struggling precisely against the immaculate goodness of humanity. The darkness plays a significant role in this travail, the role of imminent plague, transgression and hysteria. The darkness announces the dangerous and uncanny outcome that we should embrace: as Cixous writes “you can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.”28 For her, the darkness is the mother’s womb, the place of “a subversive performance, an active soliciting of the clinical gaze in order to reveal 163

its truth – its complicity with a system of power threatened by a desire that must remain invisible and unnameable”.29 Artaud attempts the last descent into the darkness as a necessary exercise of facing the horrors that make your body scream. The anti-body, the so-called subjectile, that betrays and complains, is a resistant surface, and in Derrida’s words “in this matter of the subjectile, it is certainly a judgment of god. And it is certainly a matter of having done with it, interminably”.30 The subjectile becomes a membrane upon which the trajectory of the scream is thrown. The scream can dynamize the skin by perforating it, traversing it, passing through the other side in order to reveal a body without organs. The plague has the task to construct the body without organs in an alchemic way, by searching for a method to operate on the body and change one abject matter into another higher kind of matter. The scream as a vital concept is an exercise of a “terrible and dangerous act”.31 The blurring of boundaries between internal and external bodily spaces and selves makes “metaphor-becomeflesh”, makes materiality become hallucination, and the phantomatic embodied with physical and somatic reality.32 In the last writings, the screaming of Artaud’s body touches inhuman intensity and rage. In his notebooks there is a visible conflict with attacks and withdrawals between the writing hand and the material of the paper, the pages are ripped due to a high speed of writing. This is just another example of how determined Artaud is in the process of getting rid of representation, where the content becomes “totems, . . . mysterious operating machines”,33 where tips of pencils are shattered, broken wood enters the surface of paper and words are visible in their negative form, visible only in the cuts in the page.34 The drawings are intersected with text on a damaged, over-inscribed and destroyed surface of paper in an attempt to capture the gestures of the body. Incoherence and readiness to fall into pieces connect emotions to the body in intimate ways and are in constant search for corporeality in line with the plagued theories. The touched-by-plague artists try to tell an incoherent and incomplete story of themselves, an action full of gaps, darkness and changes that characterizes the plague at best. The performed story has no closure, conclusions are arbitrary and the process of theorizing is left unfinished. Plague-radicalism attempts to end representation through hysterical intensity, irony and 164

destruction of reality. Artaud offered the answer of the body without organs, the body that is turned inside out and emptied of painful organs and social hierarchies, the body that opposes through the scream the evil theatrical system which suppresses the unconscious, repressed sexual phantasies and emotionality. The body without organs anticipates the collapse of social institutions and order while it moves beyond violent technologies and the machine which annihilates and deforms. Corporeal transformation struggles with language in the process of ending representation and reconstructs an unreal body beyond representation in the cult of the flesh. For Artaud, theatreas-plague, as a form of modernist abandonment and an unsuccessful search for incarnation, opposes the liberal subject of freedom and supports a non-human subjectivity that is larger than life and unreal. The plagued subjectivity rediscovers desire transferred into flesh at the last minute in opposition to the capitalist commodification of the body. The limits between social, interior, exterior and individuality are not clear in a micro-political revolt of negativity which anticipates a radical social change. The scream as a form of embodiment challenges the fear of theory: the theatre of screams can actively “generate a counter-language whose grammar works on verbal signification in the same revelatory way as the plague does on material form.”35 Artaud produces the plague through his screams, the plague that heals social evil: “where the voice of the subject in anguish expresses hysterical anxiety about dissolution as engulfment in demonized matter, the cruel consciousness voices a fierce determination to identify itself . . . with the dissolving energies of the plague.”36 Theatre of screams takes the role of an embodied magnetic plague: it revolts against the whole Western civilization that Artaud despised so much. Plagued performances are non-reproductive, non-human, and cannot fit the category of modern man: autonomy, freedom, unity of the self or heteronormativity. As Samuel Weber observes, Artaud criticizes “the dominance of an anthropologically anchored and teleologically oriented type of storytelling”37 where there is an unshakable centrality of an essentialized and privileged man. What Artaud wishes is that the sky ‘‘can still fall on our heads’’ and decenter the kyriarchy38 of Western antropocentrism, with its fetishistic capacity for reason, 165

knowledge and self-consciousness. His feelings of alienation, of being abandoned, of anxiety, and of continuous physical pain found an explanation as demonic powers that exist as real as physical matter. The self is abandoned in the body and the subject is repressed by being in the world. To exceed the societal, tabooed, prohibited body, Artaud had to break moral and social laws, to experience physical decadence, verbal irreverence. Only when social morality had been deliberately broken is the body capable of transformation, by leaving all the laws and moral categories behind. Artaud’s corporeal project moves dichotomies: good/evil, matter/ spirit, body/mind, matter/spirit, masculine/feminine, dark/light. His obsession with physical matter found its expression in a ruined world congested with matter in the form of shit, blood and sperm. In order to defeat the demonic powers that are incarnated in matter, Artaud has to be in permanent contact with them, to submit to them and experience pain at their discretion, to become a monster. In this undertaking, the “psychological man, with his well-dissected character and feelings, and social man, submissive to laws and misshapen by religions and precepts”39 are forgotten. In an invitation letter for a performance to André Gide, Artaud was writing: “there isn’t anything that won’t be attacked among the antique notions of Society, Order, Justice, Religion, Family and Country.” The purpose was to present elements of “terrible actuality”, to expose the father as a destroyer and to get into a dialogue with those spectators who think they are ideologically free but “secretly remain attached to a certain number of notions” that he criticized, and especially the “social superstition” of family. In order to do that “I destroy the idea from fear that respect for the idea will only result in creating a form, which in its turn, favors the continuance of bad ideas”.40 1. Artaud, Antonin. Collected Works. Vol.4. London: John Calder, 1978-1999, 10 - 13. 2. Ibid., 20. 3. Ibid., 14. 4. Artaud, Antonin. “Mise en scene and Metaphysics.” In Goodman, Lizbeth and Jane De Gay, eds. The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. London: 166

Routledge, 2000. 98-101. 100. 5. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999, xiii. 6. See Winders, James A. Gender, Theory and the Canon. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. 1991, 4; Jameson, Fredric. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?”. Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 403-408; Dolan, Jill. “Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies”. Theatre Topics 11, no. 1 (March 2001): 1-17. 7. Said, Edward D. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 178-225. 8. See Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’ s critique on Austin’s exclusion of theatre from the performativity debate on the basis on being nonserious in Performativity and Performance. London: Routledge, 1995. 9. Said, Edward D. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 66. 10. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1978, 89. 11. See Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 33. 12. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976, 210. 13. Itzin, Catherine. Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980, 230. 14. Perks, Alan and Jacqueline Porteous. A2 Drama and Theatre studies: The Essential Introduction for Edexcel. London: Routledge, 2009, 97. 15. Winders, Gender, Theory and the Canon, 142. 16. Keyssar, Helene, ed. Feminist Theatre and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 5. 17. Belsey, Catherine. “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text.” In Newton, Judith and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds. Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture. New York: Methuen, 1985, 45-65. 18. Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2000, 125-126. 19. Ernst Shürer quoted in ibid., 126. 167

20. Heinemann, Margot. “How Brecht Read Shakespeare”. In Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 226-255, 229. 21. Fischlin and Fortier, Adaptations of Shakespeare, 126. 22. See Gasbarrone, Lisa. “The Locus for the Other”: Cixous, Bakhtin, and Women’s Writing”. In Hohne, Karen and Helen Wussow, eds. A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 1-19, 8. 23. Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 155. 24. Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. London: Routledge, 1992, 189. 25. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 93. 26. See Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987, 24-25. 27. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 102; see also Case, Sue-Ellen. The DomainMatrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, 127-189. 28. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-93, 878. 29. Silverstein, Marc. “‘Body-Presence’: Cixous’s Phenomenology of Theater.” Theatre Journal 43, no. 4 (1991): 507-16, 510. 30. Derrida, Jacques. “To Unsense the Subjectile.” Translated by Mary Ann Caws. In Derrida, Jacques and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998, 59-157, 70. 31. Ibid. 32. Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 385. 33. “Antonin Artaud, letter to Pierre Bordas, February 1947”, quoted in Barber, Stephen. Artaud: The Screaming Body, London: Creation, 2004, 92. 34. Barber, Artaud, 83-88. 35. Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 132. 36. Ibid., 104. 37. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, 282. 38. A term coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. It expresses the intersectional 168

structures of domination. It comes from the Greek word kyrios (master). Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. New York: Orbis Books, 2001. 39. See Sontag, Susan. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage Books, 1991, 53-54. 40. “Antonin Artaud to André Gide, 10 February 1935”. In Schneider, Rebecca and Gabrielle Cody, eds. Re:direction: a Theoretical and Practical Guide. London: Routledge, 2002, 130. 169

Saint Charalambos In icons, he holds the plague by the chain. They say that when God was giving the rules to each saint, Charalambos was late. Not to leave him empty-handed, God gave him a bitch enchained with golden fetters. For him, in some regions, women bake a bagel, brake it into four and throw it to the four winds. Other women run around the house completely naked three times on his saint’s day (in the morning, at noon and in the evening). This way the devil does not get near their house. (Irina Nicolau, Ghidul Sărbătorilor Româneşti [The Guide of Romanian Holy Days], Bucharest: Humanitas, 1998, p. 39.)

Praise of Nonknowing Bogdan Drăgănescu We don’t truly live. We live the curse of knowledge. One understands existence through its fragmentation and analysis. Knowledge can only be partial; knowledge is parting. That’s why the universe as a totality cannot be known. The act of knowing is premised upon the assumption that the universe as a whole does not exist. And if it does not exist, this means that all that is exists in isolation, perhaps only being experienced and lived. Knowledge implies a separation from the phenomenal realm, a lack of real experience, and thus of any experience whatsoever. The death of experience. To truly live means to unknow by any possible means. Hence, paradoxically, true knowledge cannot have any other sense than the liberation from knowledge. Maybe this is the actual meaning of the words: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Logophobia. An Attempt to Escape the Trap of Reason Logophobia (fear of logical, precise and rigid forms1) is maybe the most reasonable form of phobia if we compare it to the fear of spiders, death, light, and closed or open spaces. This is because reason, in spite of its function of attributing truth-values to propositions, imposes on us a double limitation. It is either the case that reason interprets the data acquired by the senses deficiently (i.e. incorrectly with regard to the laws and norms of nature), or that it discovers the laws of nature, radically and irrevocably, as well as our modes of understanding and the frame, the reality where our existence unfolds. While, for instance, the way that spiders and death affect our senses is indisputable, the way our mode of reasoning interprets the situations in which we find ourselves is highly dubitable. How foreign is reason to the environment and nature? Reason oftentimes furnishes erroneous data about the world we live in. In the past, man looked at the sky, saw the Sun and could tell that it revolved around the Earth. The senses pass on data and reason interprets them mistakenly, guiding itself by appearances only. Subsequently, the 171

invention of new machines of observation helped man see that actually the Earth was the one revolving around the Sun. But what is that which makes the technical machine more valuable than the human eye2? Is it the fact that it ‘illuminates’ an appearance? Man thought for thousands, even tens of thousands of years that the Sun revolved around the Earth. What is next then? We will probably not witness the change of this perspective of whose truth we are so firmly convinced. Who can ever tell if the techno-logical and rational paradigm amplifies understanding or if it merely amplifies appearances? To foray into the macrocosm (stars, galaxies) and the microcosm (microbs, atoms) is to tread the grounds of semblances, which are infinite and make us more and more seeming. This knowledge of appearances makes up our semblance. For semblance is not what we see, but what we think we have seen. It is the ‘sense’ of reason and thinking. And if the real is what affects us, like the sun and the microbes, then both the thunders thrown down by Zeus and the solar disc have affected us to the same extent, and gave a form to our culture and myths. And now we give a form to other myths. The only real people are those who have spurned rationality and the senses, those who have entered the shadow of nonknowing. The only truthful human adventure is the foray into the realm of death, the experience of living the death. Stars? Microbes? The stars gave us birth only to extinguish us before we come to know what we are, before we attain material and spiritual completion. We could rightfully call ourselves thought-dispensing stellar dust. The stars are the ‘macrobes’ of the universe. And the microbes are our ancestors, the beginning of life, upholders of all life on Earth. They gave us birth only to be able to take it away. They are not the ones revolving around us; we are revolving around them. What we think to be the cause of death is nothing but the cause of life. And because of life we have lost our sense of death. We have become insensitive beings; inventors of turtle-carcasses we keep dragging this life along in its torpid and tedious movement across centuries and civilizations. We are what we are and cannot do anything else but go on. The only reason for which humanity goes on with life is that it is not yet prepared to accept that there is nothing to do. Man thinks that it lies in the nature of a ‘superior’ being to recognize the relevance and utmost 172

importance of her own life when, in fact, it is quite the inverse: a ‘superior’ being – or, more precisely, a real being – is the one who accepts its irrelevance and impotence, and has therefore the (im)potence to stop. Life is the tumult of restless beings. In the cosmos, there is no solution, but only dissolution. Birth is a process of dissolution, a split in living matter, and death is dissolution, a split in dead matter. The death of the cosmos is caused by the acceleration of the expansion of matter – it is the dissolution of dead matter into the dark energy that (de)generates this movement. This energy seems to have no other goal than to annihilate everything. All that is alive or dead. And all is alive or dead precisely because of it. And there is no other option. That’s why there is nowhere else to gaze but into the darkness. If conveying erroneous knowledge is in the ‘nature of reason’, maybe the paradigm in which human society presently lives – based on the primacy of reason, the importance of understanding, and the obsession with life – is simply wrong. If reason seems cut off from nature, it means that either reason is an aberration of nature, or nature is an ‘error of calculus’, a hallucination of reason. Of a reason that is wrong. Of the wrong reason for being. Maybe almost everything humanity does is wrong. If reason is not connected to nature, experience, or matter, then maybe all technical and scientific achievements based on reason and confirmed by the laws of nature are corrupt. In order to be truthful and generative, reason has to do away with logics and laws. What I am saying seems to be contradictory because it enters the sphere of reason (language, analysis, interpretation), but reason is like a virus; it is genetic/genesic information that corrupts being. If it exists, it does not mean we cannot and should not liberate ourselves from it. Like a vaccine, it is only through it that we can be free. We have to kill it, corrupt it, and then inject it into our blood. The fact that reason does not have any correspondence in nature and being, that it does not mirror any of them, functioning only as a formal procedure and a logical frame through which we approach and explain existence, becomes apparent in mathematics and linguistics. Both use abstract notions like numbers and signs that, having a general character, tend to lack the richness of the concrete (from Lat. concrescere – to grow together, to co-grow). By enabling a system of validation, they also impose limitations. 173

If we say that 1+1=2, it is correct from the point of view of reason, but this addition has no equivalent in nature. There are no identical entities in nature, but only discrete, particular units (there maybe exists only one unity: co-growth) that are artificially included in broader classes and thus abstracted from nature and from their real being. If we add 1 horse to 1 horse or 1 orange to 1 orange the result – 2 horses and 2 oranges – is not concrete, having no correspondence whatsoever with the reality of things. In nature, there are no two horses or oranges that are the same, so the result of the addition is completely irrelevant. A horse always remains a horse, and an orange an orange. At least until the moment of death, beyond which it is difficult – for lack of data and because of the limitation to the five senses – to express any further opinion regarding the state of the entities in question. Such mathematical and linguistic operations do not reflect the concept in a rational manner, since nature does not correspond to the forms and images we abstract. A ‘mountain’ is a mountain because it is regarded as such and named accordingly. In fact, a ‘mountain’ is what it is and maybe not even one; for it is one, provided we distinguish it as mountain. It would be one if it were separated from everything else, but it is separated only in and by our mind, more precisely on the surface of our mind – its approach is utterly superficial. Even two atoms of the same type, which could intuitively be considered undifferentiated, should occupy the same space and perform the same movements in order to be identical. For identity is first and foremost related to the impingements upon nature, to forces exerted and resisted at a given moment. This assumption was overstated though, given the fact that the position and momentum of subatomic particles have an uncertainty-relation, falling under the principle of indeterminacy, which excludes the paradigm of identity in the first place. Reason and History > Distortion The intellectual apparatus turns man into a distorted/distorting being. Man is the effect of its history, or, more precisely, of the way in which she perceives history (if we assume that man is the one who thinks). History and men – the subjects of history – haunt the memory of 174

humankind as agents of distortion. Or, history is haunted by the ghosts of the present and present thoughts. The deeper we project ourselves into the past or the further into the future, the more fantastic these distortions become. The present is nothing else – and we are nothing else – but the manifestation of these distortions. The fact that we ceaselessly project ourselves into the past and future and the way we relate to them produce an accumulation, a synthesis of distortions. This has always been happening, ever since reason emerged. Man lives (in) a world and is a surrealist being. And maybe to be human is precisely this: to be a distorted being that distorts reality, one that transforms distortion into her own reality. Man is the distortion of reality and the reality of distortion. Reason and Distortion > Speculation and Magical Thinking If distortion is the force we apply and that is specific to us, then the way in which it acts at its peak is through speculation and magic. Speculation is the maximum distortion of the nature of things to the extent that it is an absolute separation from nature, from the laws and forces that (in)form it and us. If the reason embedded in nature (in materiality) operates a distortion of reality, then magical thinking – reason singled out, abstracted, liberated from nature, norms, and physical laws – operates the reality of distortion. Reason is an immaterial functional faculty pertaining to the speculative, non-empirical domain for which there is no means of validation as in the case of physical laws. It can only be known through a deeper understanding of our being – if not through a palpable proof then through an undeniable, liberating demonstration. The speculative zone (from Lat. speculum – mirror) mirrors the human in the clearest and purest manner because it is free of natural determinations; it does not fall under the laws of nature, under its forces and forms, but it is rather transversal in relation to them. Speculation is transcendence and the greatest and most refined power of the human being. For the power to speculate is the power to ‘see’ things that do not exist and are not visible or possible in nature – things that have no reality and are not ‘true’ from the perspective of nature. Nature has laws/logics, its own truth and reason to be, which becomes our reason as well, because we look for and consolidate a 175

place for us and a sense in it – in the frame of these laws and systems. Nevertheless, pure speculative reason transcends itself and suppresses itself. It departs from logical rules and becomes para-logical, an error3 of nature that acquires a magical dimension. Like life, which suppresses itself and perpetuates through death. 1. Rigor mortis. 2. Perhaps the Romanian idiom a vedea cu ochiul liber, literally meaning “to see with free eyes”, stands for the technological captivity that men have created for themselves. Freedom lagged behind, atrophied, waiting to be replaced by technological prostheses. We have self-induced a degree of mental and physical disablement that allows us to see, communicate, research and move within the limits imposed by technology and following its ways. This has occurred to such an extent that it became utterly impossible to imagine that there could be other ways, that there are other resources that man could access. It means that either freedom must be sacrificed for life and knowledge, or man has not fought enough for life and freedom in order to achieve sufficient knowledge. If “the eye is not free”, then consciousness is not free either, becoming a mere software of technology, as the body is its support. 3. [idiot - from the Greek idiotês - does not mean dumbhead or moron, but it evokes the particular, the singular. This meaning of the word still persists in the modern language when we speak of an idiom, of a particularity of the language. In reality, there are not two things that are identical, so that, when I say that the real is an idiot, I mean that the real is singular. I am talking about singularity. This thinking is truly very strong in the philosophy of Leibniz. Following Leibniz, there are not two blades of grass that are the same.] http:// www.teheran.ir/spip.php?article926. [Everything, everybody is thus idiot, since they exist only in-themselves, that is to say that they are incapable of appearing somewhere else from where they are: incapable first and foremost of reflection, of appearing in the double of the mirror] C. Rosset, Le réel – Traité de l’idiotie [The Real – A Treatise on Idiocy]. [Most often, the majority of superstitions and magical thinking result from this form of logical error] http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_ hoc. [translated by Alina Popa] 176

The unleashing of the code for Bezna 5 in Marienskirche, Stuttgart

Green-leaf violet, Here a sweet little child Chasing a little butterfly. One running, one flying Plague catches both and kills them! (Old Romanian Poem)

Editor, design: Alina Popa Ebook editor, design: Florin Flueras Associate editor: Irina Gheorghe Pest collection: Mihai Lukacs Drawings: Alina Popa (p. 31, 56, 73, 90), Arnold Schlachter (p. 153)