Seven Prophecies of the Future -- Part 7. Idol [Reza Negarestani; Jason Mohaghegh]

Welcome to the final episode of the Future Studies Program series, Seven Prophets of the Future. Before we welcome Jason Babak-Mohagic and Reza Negarastani, our guests of this episode, I'd like to make a few remarks as we approach the end of our Seven Prophets of the Future series. thanks to the Future Studies faculty for allowing us to enter a world of magic, in the etymological sense of the word, meaning of foreign things, the unknown, and that which transformed the world around us and opens new possible avenues to experience reality. And for doing this so

graciously from a place of enchantment and fascination, through storytelling and honest speculation. Along the seven episodes that have composed the series, we have explored the conceptual passwords of chimera, cypher, temple, rain, oracle, surface, and idol. Through these encounters, we were able to open a space for alternative narratives to emerge, narratives that don't follow the conventional format of chronological accounts of history, but rather seek to find the points where events meet and resonate with one another. As the art historian Diddy Huberman puts it, a historical discourse which is never born, but always recommences. It is in this manner that our guests have elegantly addressed the future, bringing groundbreaking

observations on futurity, without forgetting the legacy of those who have done it before themselves. Our oracles of the future have summoned all sorts of eclectic phenomena and correspondences, the unknown, the unseen, or simply the overlooked. Monsters, ghosts, artworks, and creatures that transcend human self-representation have made their appearance. We hope that this injection of enthusiasm and original thoughts has somehow quenched the thirst many of us in our contemporary world have for hearing stories that escape the ordinary experience of reality itself. I am Andrea Citrullo, and it has been a pleasure to guide you towards these chambers of enchantment. Tonight, I am joined by the Future Studies founder, philosopher Jason Babak Mohagic,

and by fellow Iranian philosopher Reza Negaristani. Their conceptual password, IDLE. So, welcome Reza and Jason to the grand finale, which marks the end of the Seven Prophets of the Future series. Both of you will be our oracles of futurity, leading us to the chamber that holds the figure of the idol. I believe tonight we have two teams, the monotheistic team and the idols team. So let's start with the monotheistic team with one player, you Reza. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Jason. So this is the title of my talk. If idols are real, then we should invent a god to smash them. It sounds particularly more Abrahamic and monotheistic

in its nature, right? But I assure you it is not. For those of you who have come from Middle East, Muslim cultures and societies, know that there is a story that every child knows at the elementary school or being exposed to. This is the story of Abraham, rebellion against idols. Also, what is usually called the paradox of idolatry, right? Or in the book of Isis called

the paradox of the human fingers. The paradox, the story is quite simple and usually you can watch it as a cartoon on Fridays. If we can go to the second page. So the story is this, that at night, Abram goes to the Grand Temple of King Nimrod, the Neobabylonian Empire. Probably these are all, you know, confusing different ages and different kings. this is the sort of version that I have seen and heard. So Abraham goes to the Grand Temple

where there are numerous idols, right, of different ranks, different priorities, different structure and different composers. And within the temple there is also the grand idol, right, which is probably Baal. So Abram has wielded an axe and he starts to smash the head of every idol in this temple except for one, the grand one, Baal himself. Then he puts the axe around the neck of Baal. He goes, exits the temple, goes to bed, sleeps as if nothing has

happened. So tomorrow morning, people, the priests come to the temple. They notice that this is like a complete chaos. Someone has sabotaged, broken all the idols except for one. But then they start to inquire and then some people say that, well, we have seen Abraham at this time of night has gone to a temple, so it must be him. They bring Abraham to the court, put him under pressure, interrogate him, and Abraham tells to them that, look, it cannot be me. If you notice, the person who is responsible is the person who wields the axe, namely Baal, the grand idol.

And then they say that, how can this be? I mean, are you out of your mind? How can a statue basically as much as other statues? So, well, look, if there are statues, then why are you actually worshipping them? If they are incapable of any sort of exerting any sort of power, even as lowly of human powers, then why are you worshipping them? And this is also, this is why it's also called the paradox of human fingers, because I see a, in a verse says that their land is full of idols. fingers have made these items from water and dirt, and they think that they also have created

them, right? That they have given them their lands and so forth. So there's a paradox of monotheism, so to speak, from which monotheism begins to basically kind of advance against the cult of devotional images. Now, I want to make this, and I know that Jason probably wouldn't like this idea, I would say that any sort of talk about idols as idols, in the original sense of the word idol, is already coming from a presupposed and established position that has been set either within the

ambit of monotheism, either within the ambit of enlightenment, early enlightenment, or within the ambit of kind of, you know, philosophy in a grand enlightening sense of Plato, right? So we know that for Plato there are idolons, namely appearances, and the idols, which has all the divine origin, and that is called the form. And the thing is that you have to shatter the appearances, the role of appearances, in order to get into the nature of forms or idos. And idos is good itself.

So that's one way to see that these appearances are idollans or idols, calling them idols in a kind of that negative sense that you're usually associated with them, or seeing them as many representations, is itself already assuming that there is a unity behind such representations. You're approaching them negatively precisely because you're already beginning with a approach that starts from a unity, unity of nature, unity of ideas or forms, or unity of the divine, right? So the same thing, so this is a Platonic story, you can

see it in monotheism as well, that monotheism, I'm not talking about a Brahmic monotheism, I'm actually, let's start with a much older form of Marathaisen, Arama Kat or Arama Heresy. Akhenaten's heresy for almost 20 years in Egypt to create an uprope in the traditionalist society of Egypt that he asks to all records of gods and lesser gods and all deities to be expunged. The only thing that is being reserved is Aten, the picture of Aten. Aten is a sun god, usually associated with Ra,

but doesn't have the anthropomorphic figuration of Ra. It's just a disk. It's just a disk of sun emanating rays from itself, right? And it's always in the high sky above and people looking at it in amazement and awe. Now, sometimes the most anthropomorphic variations of this disc is that the rays actually take the shape of hands, right? But that's as anthropomorphic as it gets, right? So that creates an uproar in Egyptian society, and obviously the coup against Akhenaten's

heresy was completely because of this, that this is like a complete heresy against that sort of proliferation of images upon which Egyptian politism thrived, right? So this unification, this unity, this picture of unity behind what Plato might have called the confusion of fluxes, the confusion of, you know, passing illusions and images, iconis, is precisely an enduring core of the monotheistic enlightenment. Francis Bacon, for example, you know, his

theory of idol, namely sort of what you might call to be blind spots that prevents us from seeing the true essence of nature in an enlightened scientific sense, right? So we see that it is an enduring thing. There is some sort of unity out there, right? Behind this mere flux of sensations and representations. A flux that by its very nature is paradoxical, because if we buy into this very idea of flux according to this sort of unity of nature,

unity of the one, unity of the forms or ideas, then obviously we are not talking about reality. We can't even actually talk about reality anymore. We will be just talking about ourselves projecting into reality, projecting our mere sensations, mere dogmas and opinions of such sensations to reality. Why I'm saying that dogmas, I'm here I'm actually saying dogmas in a negative sense even though it's not, it's a neutral word. Precisely because if there are, if we are merely living in a, in, in an, in the benighted universe of sensory fluxes and proliferation of images and

representations, then is it possible for any of us to communicate the same representation that we experience or we have of reality to another person, knowing that it would be the same representation or it would be completely futile, basically, project? Meaning that the idea of communicating in the deep sense of experience, of interpersonal experience, would be hamstrung and become almost impossible. So there is this sort of concerns that go into the origin of Greek philosophy,

into the origin of proto-enlightenment, and into basically the origin of monotheism. are quite, I would say that they are philosophically interesting for me, and so as theologically and anthropologically. Let's come back to monotheism. So if, as I said, the very fact that we are talking about idols seems that we have taken a certain sort of monotheist or unitary-like position already. We have already adopted that sort of position, that that's why we are actually talking about

idols, because people who are actually living with idols as so-called idolatrous people, don't see them as idols in the negative sense that we see. They might have ranking for them, lesser and smaller and larger, of lesser influence and more influence, deities and daemons, so on and so forth. But that would be about it. It wouldn't be any sort of fight against or a negative understanding of idols, sort of way that we think of idols as, you know, being

this sort of kind of obstacles or things that ought to, things that either fundamentally proliferate for the sake of proliferation or ought to be purged. sort of stuff, I would say that they're all coming from a kind of a background monotheistic or unitary mindset or position. Regardless, we need to... What I want to focus today is about the nature of monotheism at its core. I mentioned about this kind of philosophical

or proto-philosophical concerns that has gone to the core of monotheism, particularly Abrahamic monotheism. And I want to narrow down my focus to Abrahamic monotheism. That, I would said is my expertise here. I want to actually give a rather science fictional account of what monotheism is. Imagine people who have read the Strogowski brothers, it's hard to be a god, know probably what I mean by a science fictional account of one god. It's essentially

a story of a, of an extremely advanced earth civilization that has created simulations all over different planets, simulations of what history could be, of what history could be. And the story happens in a, in a planet where basically, um, uh, from the perspective of an Earth spy, extremely advanced Earth spy who is just like a watchman, just like without doing any interfering with this planet, just observed what is happening in this planet. So this planet, human civilization has started like a regular way, all good, great, magnificent.

Then medieval stuff, and he's actually really is living in the dark ages right now, right? kind of like medieval dark ages, a lot of superstition, a lot of religious fanaticism, and so on and so forth. And then suddenly, he's noticing that something odd is happening in this civilization, that this civilization is not going through the source of supposed historical progression in a Hegelian sense that we should all go through, meaning that from the dark medieval ages, they are rapidly, without skipping all the enlightenment and stuff, they are rapidly progressing toward a techno-fascist society. Enlightenment didn't happen, industrial age

didn't happen, none of this stuff happened. Simply from dark age to techno-fascism. So this is the guy who's looking like these ants or spillo-humans on a different planet. and he has been, he cannot interfere, Earth Directorate has absolutely put, you know, you know, disallowed any of his agents to interfere in the history of, so basically we can just see how they evolve, you can't interfere. But then he sees that there's too much of mistakes with people around him that he has to actually interfere as a god because he is a god technologically

from the historical perspective to these people right uh so that's the title it's hard to be a god this is this is the second kind of i would say that that's a kind of, I would say that a story that I'm really interested to recreate that for monotheism. So what monotheism looks to us if we were aliens inhabiting the planet Earth, right? And reporting back to our base about the historical progression of what things are happening, but not just what things are happening as everyone knows on the planet Earth, but what things are happening according to our own eyes.

Obviously, the sort of monotheism that we are talking about here has a very twisted beginning and moving toward ever twisted ends. It seems that monotheism did a great job at fighting the proliferation of images or appearances. That I think is great. Precisely because proliferation, what I want to say is a very controversial thesis, I would say. Precisely because I think that adoration or veneration of polytheism is even worse than

veneration of monotheism. Polytheism has all the, what you might call to be, negativities of religion, but under the banner of some sort of multitude. Multitude for who? for the rise of religion again in a different under the different guise. At the very least monotheism is honest about its ulterior motives. We know what monotheism is. So we say as monotheists no to the legion to the proliferation of idolatries or appearances. Can we go to the next

So, monotheism essentially comes with a strategic plan of how to deal with the, with the proliferation of images, namely the problem of religiosity, the problem of theos, or the pro-pro-proliferation of deities, the proliferation of gods, the proliferation of basically opportunities for these gods, right? Idolatry. It's extremely hard to fight idolatry as Moral Thaisama understands.

Killing too many birds with one stone just not works. Then politheism, you know, you have still have, you know, theism plus a little bit of a proliferation of these deities in a constrained way, right? You need to have a family, a family of resemblance, a web of idols, right, of different sources that are like ultimately responsible for a, that they have a hierarchy of idols. That's what politheism essentially works. But tribal idolatry, you can, everyone can have his or her own garage made idol, right? Deity or God. I can invent religion in my garage, simple as that, or in my tent.

But politism actually puts us a little bit of constraint on this, precisely because it installs a web of family resemblances among the idols. So that there are, there is a certain kind of hierarchizations among the idols. It's this kind of a systematization that goes into the evolution of religion. Now, I would say that killing two birds, now we have a little bit of idolatry in the old-fashioned tribal sense, proto-religion sense, and also the religious sense. Now, killing two birds with one stone sounds really great on paper, but as we know, in the earth usually doesn't work. So monotheism goes one step further. How about we just kill all of that shit, smash all the idols, stop the proliferation of images or idols by all and

any means necessary. And then that's monotheism. But I would say that from my science fictional point of view as an alien agent inhabiting the planet Earth, I would say that this is not actually an interesting reading of monotheism. Even it might be true, but probably not. Actually, everything that we have seen in modern rise of monotheism has actually given us evidences to believe that this is not an end to monotheism. That monotheism is, in fact, God's dead switch,

dead man's switch. Monotheism is God's dead man's switch. Essentially, it is the only way that religion can uproot itself by basically exposing God as something that is so detached, so outside of a space and time that there is no use for it. So we see that through the progression of idolatry, pure idolatry to polytheism, to monotheism, is a certain kind of that we see that we begin to move toward a certain kind of restriction

of anthropomorphization of deities or forces, natural forces, religious forces, or usually dark natural forces. So before it was like any sort of fluctuation in the fabric of reality or nature could have a name, right? As daemons, so to speak. And then we have that node, we have a family resemblance, namely polytheism, of certain kind of forces and the representations of them, that they work in unison. They always balance one another, right, in some sort of

titanic battle at the end of time. And that's, that is, that's, that's a reason that we can live in this world, right? Because if there were, there were in unison, we couldn't live. they always want to say that you are living in a world precisely because it is always at the brink of war that hasn't happened yet but might arrive from the future. Monotheism takes it one step further by completely annihilating every sort of human attribution or human characterization to the divine.

Divine is the very essence of a time, of a conception of time that has no edges, meaning that it's a time of futurity. It is no longer the time of past, because past is an edge, because we know the myth of the origin. The myth of origin is not really that important for monophagic. What is really important is to establish a god that holds over the future. And you can do that by simply turning god, the, the, or many gods into one god,

a one God that is so remote that its name is equivalent to the cipher of the future itself, right? Can we go to the next page? So, obviously, there is a lot of materials missing here before we come to this. rather curious slide. But coming back, yes, so, so, Maratha is, is essentially, from, from the science, sci-fi perspective, it's an engineering project to make a new abode

for a god that truly represents the future and precisely that everything that comes after us will be under the reign and the sovereignty of this god as well. You see, idols don't have that much power, I mean in the original Sumerian or Babylonians, don't have that much power over the future. They always have them, when you read about them, they actually exercise or make this flaunt their powers of the past, myth of the origin, Gilgamesh, and all of that sort of jazz. But to create a god that is so beastly, so voracious,

that wants to become the god, becomes the time itself, the edgeless time itself. That's, I think, is the bold move of monotheism. The thing is that monotheism hasn't taken its ultimate assumption, its ultimate engine to its final conclusions, right? Think about this. I'm going to save some time. I'm going to make a shortcut here. Say that We see in sort of radical source of monotheism, particularly Abraham monotheism, when they

have become radical, when actually monotheism shines through and reveals to us its undergirding mechanisms, we see that monotheism absolutely hates tradition. Monotheism is not about the past. Monotheism hates the past. So has its manifestations. Monotheism in its true radical essence is futuristic by its nature. Precisely because it does not want us to submit to a God that has come before and has ceased to exist, but a God that is so unexplorable as

the future. He wants us to submit to the future, which is God itself, you know, as open as the idea of future. And, you know, the sort of when we see, for example, in Islamic, in radical Islamic theology, we see that, for example, Allah is often defined by complete disconnection from attributes of temporal, spatial characteristics or qualities. It is essentially, not to go too Lovecraftian about this,

but it's essentially something out of space and time. That's the kernel of Islamic exotericism. them. And having that sort of, you know, initiation to Islam in that sense is preparation for the future, not for the past. It is not initiation to the past, it's preparation for the future. And that's that, and those people who believe in such a God are the people who are going to survive. And then we see that in the sort of, you know, propaganda that has been going around since the emergence of Salafism and Wahhabism, particularly Salafism. I mean,

I would say that the difference between people who might not know the exact difference, I would say that if we are going to make a reductive comparison here, the difference between Wahhabism and Salafism is the difference between Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Al-Qaeda is fundamentally traditionalist, even though it has a sort of desert-like monotheism, right? You know, the desert of God, the non-place of God, so on and so forth. But it does not, but it is still abided by certain kinds of traditions and imageries that seem to be idolatrous from the side of Salafism, namely ISIS, right? So whereas Wahhabism tries in Saudi Arabia to level, you know, the

basically the grave of Prophet Muhammad's daughter or other sorts of shrines by natural disasters, right? You know, for example, you know, there are these reports of, you know, Saudi Arabia rechannels water flow, underground water flow, throughout the city to a particular zones where basically it starts to erode these sorts of sites from within. And then we blame it on nature, right? There is no active enmity toward the image. It is, let's blame it on nature, nature. Right? But a true Mahathist, radical Mahathist, if it wants to take the core engine of Mahathism,

its hatred against idolatry so seriously on behalf of the god, which is the future itself, You want to actively destroy everything of these proliferation of images. And then we see that ISIS has characteristics of at once Marinetti's futurism, right? And by the way, you don't know, Marinetti was extremely into this sort of Islamic radicalism as part of his fascination with orientalism. So there is this image of Marinetti talking about the fascist futurist boys who chase after death and they are actually starting to share intimate stories about

the future under the lampshades of a mosque on an oriental rock and then they start to run from the the mosque and chant, uh, uh, Viva future and chasing after death like lions. Uh, so that, that sort of imagery is very, quite, um, similar to the sort of ISIS videos that ISIS used for propaganda. Uh, I, I, I'm sure that this has been, uh, used before, mentioned before by a number of people who are looking into the kind of art historical connections of ISIS and the avant-garde, right, that people have noticed that

al-Qaeda looks quite dated, right, their videos are just badly edited, like, you know, even if they have the money, but ISIS is just absolutely high-tech. They have a bullet, They have this kind of matrix, what's a bullet time stuff. They have great montage skills. Everything is about the speed, about technology and holy warfare against all idols. And then you are also getting these images of them basically swarming a museum a museum and it started to shattering the Assyrian statues, Akkadian statues and so on and so forth.

I mean this is why I mean probably most of you know that there is this thing that has been going on that is ISIS the new avant-garde, right? There are many essays written about this actually I would say that, well, I mean, majority of these essays actually draw on extremely, I would say, random connections between the avant-garde, artistic avant-garde, and Isis. But nevertheless, if we really look into the conceptual dimension of it, I would say it's not far-fetched.

You see, the whole idea of what is avant-garde really? First of all, the word avant-garde is a militaristic word. This is basically French word coming from a very eccentrically Roman and Ottoman word, Yenicherry, Yenicherry. You probably know this word in English, janicaries. Janicaries simply means the avant-garde. It means Cherike, Cherike, Mugaddam. It simply means a kind of guerrilla soldier who is at the front line of it all, right?

So there is, I mean, this has been completely brought into the open that avant-garde at the, at the, at the, at the, what you might call to be ideological side, the avant-garde believes that culture can be militarized. The culture has a militant role, right? And the same thing about ISIS. ISIS is precisely, and this is part of that radical sort of monotheistic, you know, fight, that the culture can be militarized and ISIS can do it the same way. But the thing is that,

unlike the artistic avant-garde, ISIS actually doesn't care about what you might call to be that whether this sort of images of them destroying this and that can create some sort of impression on young people or not. It probably does as a means of propaganda. That's why it shares such images widely. But it is literally, I I think that people who think that these are simply like bad youths, simply thinking that these are just a bunch of tired, uh, techno, uh, Muslims, youth, disenfranchised, uh, techno

Muslim with nihilistic tendencies, trying to destroy civilization using the means of civilization, technological means of civilizations, are quite wrong. No, this is actually from that alien bird's eye view. That's what Maraphaizam ultimately is. Maraphaizam is the creation of desert. And that desert has a name. It's a non-place. It's called future. I think that at this point, I will keep it to this enigmatic ending so that Jason can join and then we will talk. Yeah, now I think it is time to hear from you, Jason, the member of Team Idol, unless

you have been somehow persuaded by Reza's propositions. So how would you like to start your exploration on the Idol, Jason? Go ahead, please. I want to begin by saying that's a fascinating reflection, obviously, that sets up all kinds of trap doors and difficulties at the outset and also openings. But I wanted to actually begin with a poem that on many levels dodges, I think dodges the bullets of monotheism, the way that it's being defined. But just to speak to some of Reza's excellent points here, it's just an empirical sort of anthropological fact that idol cultures in the ancient world allowed for the trading, metamorphosis, abandonment and distortion of God types much more easily than monotheistic traditions do.

So you can switch your idols, you can bargain your idols, you can sell your idols, you can desert your idols far more easily than I think monotheistic orthodoxies allow. There's a rotational flexibility there, just like there's a greater versatility in the political structures of barbarian city-states than there are later in empires, in the sense that the barbarian king or queen is only the ruler as long as they're winning. but they can immediately be overthrown because they have no greater metaphorical legitimacy or symbolic structure other than their practical and instrumental effect in war. The day we go hungry is the day the barbarian queen is substituted for someone else. And I think idols follow that kind of resiliency as well. I loved Reza's point about the Abrahamic story, but I think it actually

vindicates team idol to a great extent because first of all the fact that the idols can be shattered by the axe meaning that they're in the realm of extreme vulnerability makes them far more interesting to me than untouchable and transcendent divinities who can't bleed who can't experience pain who can't be killed bringing them to the realm of body and touch is absolutely crucial to my mind, not only at the destructive level that then they can be eliminated, but remember Nietzsche's wonderful saying, I would only believe in a God who could dance. And I take that quite seriously as an invitation. Even if you look at Jacob wrestling the angel, literally wrestling the angel, it allows him to steal the blessing through touch, through immediacy,

sort of through physicality. And when your mother in the ancient Assyrian world or our great-grandmothers as a, you know, they went down to worship their river god, they weren't worshiping the transcendent bearded overlord of the river. They were worshiping the river itself. The river was the god sort of in that kind of idolatrous realm, which meant that our great-grandmothers could bathe in their god, could wash in their god could swim naked in their god which allows for all kinds of potential for becoming apotheosis a god whose residue can linger on your skin exudes god-like powers and bestows possibilities so i think that's also a very powerful notion and just to mention where abraham's

story falls apart not to do a little bit of deconstructive trickery here but you know the black stone in the cabin around which everyone circumambulates is presumably a piece of volcanic sort of rock that comes from the time of Abraham, falls to the earth, some meteoric shard that falls to the earth. You cannot pull off that amazing choreographic event of a whirlpool in unison, sort of entranced around that gravitational center with an invisible God. You need the supplemental force of the black stone to pull it off. That's where God even meets the idol, the monotheistic God in my vision. And lastly, I would just say as a response to some of Reza's great points,

that he's absolutely right, that if we remain purely in theological and philosophical chambers of reflection, then idolatry might indeed, like Reza mentioned, stumble into some of the traps of monotheistic metaphysics. It might get caught in the vice. But there is, for me, who studies sort of other alternative methods of expression, there's just a massive empirical difference in the literary and narrative potentials that come out of idolatry versus monotheism, the aesthetics that can manifest and the performative registers that come out of that. So dance, incantation, things of that nature that can manifest only under the shadow of the idol. So as an example of that, if I can transition real quick,

I know I want to respond to those points, but just to give a kind of tangible example, one of my favorite poems that I've read for several years by an ingenious Iraqi poet, Mahmoud al-Buray Khan, I'd love to share that just for a moment. And this is visible here. So, as I said, I wanted to begin a kind of mythic exploration of the idol through the prism of this single poem. It's titled Tale of the Assyrian Idol, and it holds several astounding messages, some subliminal, some flagrant, one of which being that it narrates an immense passage of time from the perspective of an old Assyrian idol's own consciousness. It's actually written in the sinister voice of the idol itself, which opens a dark level of tonality that we can never find in human expression.

And for me, tone and style are magnificent classifications that need to be mastered. So also its author, who I said the reclusive poet Mahmoud al-Buray Khan, was himself someone who rarely ever published his own poetic works. He preferred a life of obscurity. And so the few remaining pieces from this Iraqi literary genius come to us as smuggled documents that friends of his stole from his house and published against his will. So merely by reading the following lines, we're automatically in possession of a forbidden work. And this criminal trespass itself has much to do with the circulatory networks of piracy and trafficking that always accompanied the world of idols. Another reason why I like it. As such, I want to read the three opening verses from the tale of the Assyrian idol, where we find the grave in form after thousands of years, now placed in a display case in some modern museum.

So as you can see on the screen, it goes like this. In a glass room, in a museum that squats, in a lost city that crouches in a deserted land on a vast continent, I live, elevated, confronting the eyes of men and paralyzing. At silence's end, I shake them off, the events of time and the terror of the ninth century. Idol of Nineveh, its master, in an inscrutable moment, my being emerged to the echo of a chisel in the hands of a sculptor in the hall of stones and clay. In terror, tribes of the dead make me blood offerings. How many voices tremble with the nightmare in the cadence of the chant? I was called many names, scented with perfumes and essences, hung with rings. My eyes, two diamonds that pierce the night, come from minds whose secrets no man has discovered. Does time admit to this memory?

So from these first three verses alone, we start to understand the intricate nature and strange effects of the idol that differentiate it from archetypal sacred objects and symbols. First, the fact that it's a deserted artifact that comes from a lost city is an essential detail, because it reveals the idol is a plaything in the hands of impermanence, indeterminacy, and potential obsolescence. It is not guaranteed an eternal status. It is neither immemorial, since it was constructed one day in time, nor everlasting. It might not make it to witness the apocalyptic limit of the world. It can also be subjected to merciless abandonment. This god of the idol admits that it can fail. This god admits that it can die. Secondly, it speaks of its elevation, but not to some celestial register, only high enough that it can stare directly into the eyes of all followers.

The idol is therefore not the invisible god who looks down, but rather the one who casts a paralyzing gaze straight into the pupils of its human subjects. Not the all-seeing remote gaze of the witness, but the knife and dagger glare of the expectant. the overseer of high prices who sees right through you, who makes you want to tear out your own eyes from dread, and who demands unbearable tasks in its service. The idol is the manifested God in whose empty sockets we drown and tremble. They are the full awe of the abyss embodied in a miniature physiology for the ages. Thirdly, this is important to me, the idol speaks of silence. This is a key performative alignment. Unlike the traditional deities, monotheistic deities, who hang their authority on the logos, inscribing endless texts and demanding endless recitation and nightly prayer words, this rock or

metallic figure hangs back in the realms of the unspoken, the unsaid, and the untold. This silence is more gravely intimidating than any commandment or hellfire threat, for it's the signal of radical calmness, inevitability, and the omen. The idol does not need to speak, for the idol has already set in motion the deranged set of events that will lock one in its fatalistic grip. This is the sound of pure terror for me, what the poet calls the terror of the ninth century. Not the void of noise, but the hush of inescapable measures that whisper it's already done, it's already too late. In the second verse just quickly we're introduced to the paradoxical riddle that the idol's dominance, written here as the word master, emanates from its origination in an inscrutable moment. This is a

telling departure from those gods whose origin stories precede even the origin stories of the cosmos or earth. Instead the idol here confesses openly that they are an artificial item forged at the hands of some random craftsman. This is neither a hallowed nor sacrosanct beginning, rather it is a whimsical or artisanal emergence in the world of materiality, proportion, and appearances. No depth, only the contorted infinity of the surface found in the quote, halls of stone and clay. So if the idol is enigmatic, then it is not because it partakes of some game of hide-and-seek between heaven and world. It does not cloak itself in mysterious distances and withhold esoteric answers. Instead, the idol is the true secret, meaning that it is what remains an unstoppable

force of secrecy, disorienting, demented, unfathomable, even when existing in full transparency right in front of it. In fact, it is its awful presence, its immediacy in space, its instantaneity in time, which is the source of its mystification. So just to close, we open the third verse with a reiteration of the word terror, though on this occasion linked to the sacrificial rites of blood offerings made by tribes of the dead. Now we already recall that the idol's constructiveness, the fact that it's molded into being by some rogue sculptor, did not diminish its wrath or effective intensity, instead it somehow enhanced it. This is because there is perhaps nothing more disturbing than the idea that the human touch can reach beyond itself,

can summon the inhum, can fashion unanticipated things which then spill out of their own control and become lost causes or runaway events. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said, praised be the nightmare for it reminds us that we have the power to create hell. But beyond this, the fact that the idol belongs to a tribal populace is a critical facet, for it's therefore not a universal god type, but one of particularity, exclusivity, and territorial dominion. Weirdly enough, it is these partial gods who should be feared more than the all-encompassing ones, since they demand alternative currencies of devotion and sacrifice than their omnipotent counterparts. Hence, the blood offerings are not metaphorical gestures of loyalty. They are

evidence of an actual thirst, a survival instinct and vampiric desiring mechanism at work in the idol. The idol does not require formal spectacles of violence, like the ritual slaughtering of lambs. The idol needs to drink blood to stay alive. Thus the incantation of the tribal sorcerers, what Burekan calls the cadence of the chant, as the poet says, are not profound metaphysical truths, but rather the hunger pangs from the empty stomach and twisting entrails of the idol. And there's also a beautiful geopoetic suggestion in the fact that it's nomadic set. The fact that it's being moved from landscape to landscape, city to city, sand dune to oasis, affords it the versatility of, quote, being called by many names.

Like the blank domino or the wild card in poker, like the skeleton key that opens every room in the house, the idol can shapeshift in a single flicker of movement. It can wear multiple guises and disguises, suit multiple narratives, and inhabit divergent cosmologies. It can change allegiances and bring new talismanic gifts or curses to whomever stumbles across its eroded body in the desert and picks it up again. If it is forgotten in time for a while, then this is only so that it can make its eventual return. Only that which disappears can appear again. Would you like to respond to that, Reza? I have just like minimal comments. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you very much. One thing, a couple of things I would say that, for example, with regard to, I completely understand the exchange power at the time of idolatry for creation of a community.

But you see, even from the same empirical facts, you cannot simply create a fully, what you might call to be, proto-capitalist society from that sort of mirror exchanging the way that there is in tribal, idolatric, or even idolatric civilization. there is there's always needs to be a certain kind of monopolization. You can see it in Egypt that the Pharaoh of Egypt as a deity has a sort of monopolization in against all the idols right or as a representation of all the idols themselves

right has that monotheism takes it just takes what is already there to a different level You can't simply, unfortunately, this is whether we like it or not, in any sort of what you might call to be proto-capitalist society or capitalist society, you can't make an economy without something called a scarcity. And Martheism is great at creating fake scarcity. It's the greatest. Absolutely. The monopoly of God is overall, you know, it creates by its very existence a scarcity upon which economy it will start to thrive. I mean, to compare monotheistic,

I mean, this is Mark Webber's idea, the intrinsic link between monotheism and capitalism, right? Whereas the sort of kind of purely tribal idolatry, not more of a polytheistic one, but more tribal idolatry. It is what you might call to be what Nick Jabo has called, you know, the collectibles. It's a cult of shelling out, right? You know, the collectibles, absolutely they have, you know, idols, you basically play the rules of collectibles, meaning they have a certain kind of scarcity. So there is, there is obviously, you can't make an economy if every idol can be

proliferated. Everything can be proliferated. You need to have a set of kind of restriction for an exchange to have a sort of value. And for that, you need to have a semblance of natural or artificial scarcity. Now, one of these, as I mentioned, Reza, if I could interrupt, if I could interrupt you just a second, but there's a level of scale there. Yes, different scales. The prospects of running away from a divinity cult in the ancient world to join another city-state are far more fluid than medieval Christian Europe. But you see, but the thing is that capitalism, the industrial age, did not actually grow on those

escape from city-estates. It actually was erected under ruins of monotheism. That's its problem. Simple as that. It's not its problem. No, I would say that that sort of economy, so we can't be in civilization and not having its cake, right? I will say that if we are already, we are having a certain kind of retrospective from the ambit of monotheistic cult, from the ambit of civilization, looking back on what might have happened. Yes, things might have happened differently, and I hope that they have taken a different turn. But I would say that that sort of economy

that is usually sort of tribal or semi-politistic societies and civilizations could not actually become robust to create an engine of a certain kind of economy that starts to boot and strap civilization. So I think of this completely in a Marxian sense that look, capitalism was necessary, but now it has to end. So has monotheism.

But do you know, please, I was just before you proceed with that. There's an anthropologist of the 20th century, Pierre Clastres, who says very intriguingly that we always look at the Aztec city states, their fragmentary nature, their lack of unity as some type of primitive failing on their part, not realizing the brilliant political theory of sectarianism that was involved there, where they knew that the greatest nightmare, the greatest catastrophic possibility is the realization of empire and the will to universality so they used no but i completely disagree with that because i think that there is this source of sentiment um i know where you are coming from but i think that i would caution you for this sort of

sentiment precisely because this is a very sentiment that today's neoliberalians actually used, isn't it? The whole idea of Texas needs to be independent, that the worst thing that happened to us is because, you know, the union put its own, imposed its own will on us. But look, I think that this myth of independence can only be taken to be an, to be to an extent without blowing apart in a tragic sense. I would say that yes, myths of universalism, but what sort of myths of universalism? There are so many of them. I would say that universalism, but capitalism is

universalism. Capitalism is actually not universalism. In fact, anything that has come from capitalism has shown that people tend to make their own enclaves. And in fact, universalism at this point is the very enemy of capitalism as as understood. So I I don't I think that we need to flesh out what sort of universalism we are talking about right. Um uh whether it's integration or imposition of a unity by force right. Integration I am all for integration, universalism as a mode of integration. But unity by force obviously is going to backfire.

I mean, we don't even need to talk about it. We already know what has happened. But also I would say that this whole idea of secretarianism also completely is going to backfire. It has its own limits and the limits of it are already there. No libertarianism, post-capitalist society. I think that we already see that the enclaves are of people making independence. What happens, there are two sorts of independence. Independence as an emancipatory power, right? Or independence as me completely doing stuff without any sort of regard to what

is happening around me right if i have a regard for what around works around me then i then i neither live in a uh commune nor i live in a capitalist utopia you you as a as a former citizen of the great city of shiraz know that your greatest poet in history hafez would never have been able to attain his poetic genius without the carving out of an I don't want to call it an autonomous spatial territory that's too grandiose without the presence of the harabot without the tavern the caravan yes yes but you see but but that's but that's but that's precisely what office is not

office is never going to be simply like that he's going to going through all of these various locales, integrating them, and ultimately his poetry is fundamentally using universal concepts. It's for the human being as such. It would be extremely against Hafez's legacy to say that, look, there are two different things, and this is actually quite a very specific idea that the communists... I don't know how the prototype of the Marderend, which means the bum, the rogue, the vagabond, the nobody, is a triumph. But that Marderend is not an idolatrous one.

Look, it has nothing to do with idolatrous. I see that. You see, we, I think that. No, it's not a humanist archetype. It's not a humanist archetype. No, it's a humanist archetype in a different sense. Look, I would say that this is the whole point here. I think that this whole idea of monotheism versus idolatry debate is precisely because I think that people think of monotheism as the creation of sameness and identitarian sort of imposition on every will, so on and so forth. But you can see it, as I said, as a twisted lesson of, in a kind of Nietzschean sense or halage sense, that Maltheism, precisely by its virtue of its nature, is the great abode of heresies.

Heresies are far more interesting than idolatry, than polytheism. And Poffez is coming from the tradition of deep heresy of Maltheism. not idolatry it would be completely i would say that a betrayal of how where hofes is coming from to say that he has some sort of affinity with the idolatry tradition no he's a muslim but he's a muslim he's a heretical musk which makes him very dangerous person with a certain relation intimate relationship to objects like the wine glass and to figures who can turn into kind of counter divinities like the wine bearer. But you see, these are transmogrifications.

Transmogrifications are symbolically used throughout the Middle Ages. Fine. There is no heresy against them. But as I said, they are not latria, meaning that they are not devotions. he tries to make a very fine line when he says a salvi and according to the strictest orthodox things when you say a you shouldn't put anything after it but the name of god you see a you can you can do all of this as long as it is what symbolizes something a better affair bringing people to a new understanding of God.

So Hoffa is always like, for example, there is this whole story about he talking to Taymor, right? And Taymor is an extreme fanatic Muslim, Sunni Muslim. He's not even a Sunni. He's just like really out of this world fanatic. And he's trying to actually show and expose Hoffa as a heretic man. Not a heretic man, as an apostat, right? He can't do it. He just can't do it because every time that he's trying to say something, Afez goes toward the god, twisted back to the god and from god to the death of it, without Tehor knowing it.

I think this is my final kind of like twist to the story that I mentioned, that you need to have monotheism to make sure that God is going to die. Because nothing comes good without the death of God. The death of God is the beginning of the good. And monotheism is a very twisted maze toward that objective, and particularly Islamic heresy. In all its shapes, if we think about it not as these small threads here and now, but historically

as the alien who looks into these ants' doings. We see that, my God, they try to kill God in a different way. How cool is it? All right, well, we can continue to think about ways to sabotage. You know, I mean, the aftermath of the death of God, whether or not the Nietzschean overhuman is actually an idol form of some way. Yes, absolutely. No, I think Nietzsche actually doesn't... Not in the way that you will critique him, in the way that I would affirm. Yes. And it substitutes the vacancy of a metaphysical. But Nietzsche really didn't understand the nature of monotheism. Particularly, I mean, we can talk about Nietzsche's version of Zarathustra versus the actual Zarathustra or Zoroastrian religion.

I think Zoroastrian religion is far more exciting than what Nietzsche is actually talking about. So Rastarianism is at the very core of monotheism, self-sabotaging itself. Absolutely. One of the greatest feats of heresy and heist against the walls of gods. He anticipates that. That's why he entrusts the sabotage of monotheism to a character named. He suspects that Zarathustra is up to no good. He just doesn't understand how much he's not up to go to no good. That's cool. Jason, now, if you would like to elaborate on all of this by sharing in your representation or manifestation, aesthetic representation, then also go ahead.

So for a contemporary artistic image that imposes for me something like the heavy air of idolatry in all its wonderment and fear, I'd like to look to the elaborate installations of David Spriggs, who's refined his own stratochrome practice, wherein he synthesizes multiple painted layered transparencies and metal frameworks to bring about spellbinding boxes of cascading light shape and color. These rooms have all the mesmerizing sensibilities of a temple, and they command atmospheres resembling something like a trance. No doubt, when staring at these installations, it feels as if an entire world might hang in the balance. We're just not sure which world or whose world. This goes very much to Reza's idea of the alien. We're not certain to whom these idols might belong.

If these estranged others might crave our good fortune or harm, and if they might return while we're caught stealing glimpses of their antechamber. So let's imagine this hypothetical race for whom such idols, which are indecipherable to us, have palpable, urgent meaning. And what might we deduce about those foreigners for whom such radiant, glowing works were contrived? The key perhaps lies in studying the many spatial paradigms that form the full theater of operation here, the first of which being the altar. Indeed, as one walks in slow counterclockwise circles around the installations, one gradually realizes that there is an induction principle at work. It's nothing less than an initiation, for which the suspended clear glass strata announce an existence in the last throes of its own ephemerality. Still, altars are typically sites of supplication, where we pay tribute, yet also where we are allowed to make wishes.

But what might one wish for of these hanging etherealities? The second spatial paradigm in play is that of the capsule, for to tread into this installation room is to immediately feel encased, engulfed, or enveloped in some peculiar way. peculiar way. Moreover, the capsule gives rise to the sensation of a third spatial category here, that of those sensory deprivation tanks where subjects were made to rest horizontally in small pools of water and experience the total void of light-proof and sound-proof environments. But these isolation pods or flotation centers were known to have another instrumental effect, namely they incited vivid hallucinations of luminescence. So are these idle installations in fact the incandescent figments that arise from our being stranded in the black?

Are they the collective projection of insane neuropathological abstractions from within the heart of nothingness, the optical delusions of our oblivion? Is this the meaning of the capsule, a last flash of astonishment before annihilation sense? The fourth spatial paradigm we encounter is that of the tower, and here we begin speaking about the fact of the unmistakable immensity pervading such works. The idols here are forces of inundation. They daunt and overwhelm. They are literally breathtaking. Their monumentality dwarfs our slender torsos that circumambulate in sheer futility around the Colossus. Their disproportion haunts us with their elongated limbs, massive heads, or hurricane-like smoke. They thereby bring us into a titanic orbit where their blurred profiles are enough to dethrone us as the epicenters of even our own

perception. The installations are far more foreboding than shrines. They are the citadels of the usurpers, the abductors, the conquerors, who have taken our entire reality hostage, if even for a short while. The fifth spatial paradigm that I wanted to unlock here is that of the prism, which definitionally rests upon a certain protocol of refraction, acute angles, and translucence. But prisms also have telescopic and kaleidoscopic potentials. They create their idiosyncratic spectrum. To what extent then do these hovering idols filter the magnificence of a looking glass, but not one that increasingly clarifies, but rather one that rests us carefully into the ever more faded and apparitional logic of things? We should note the great paradox of

the fact that this master artist behind the curtains, he takes excruciating long periods of time to craft and delicately assemble these installations that themselves do not often last long. Their materials are brittle and easily corroded. This is the essence of the apparition, who also does not have long in our world, who lives on borrowed time and faces an hourglass countdown for risking even a second of exposure. And finally, we arrive at the sixth spatial paradigm, which is that of the mist. The mist is the kingdom of the silhouette and the intimation. Those partial glance run away beings who drift through our peripheral vision and evaporate. Note that such installations can house multiple kinds of beings, from secret society gatherings in the lower left installation titled Gold, to giants astride horses in the left installation

titled Regisol, meaning Sun King, to elemental disasters of the whirlwinds, clouds, and cyclones in the upper and middle right installations titled First Wave and Axis of Power. It does not matter whether it is a conspiracy of strangers, a gargantuan rider, or the natural phenomenon of a storm or a blood-red vortex. They all come into the mist and then dissolve into thin air. Their subsidence makes these idols something of a reverse Rorschach test. Never comprehension, only apprehension. Instead of interpreting a hazy image that then makes sense of an unconscious world of meaning, here we stare upon a fog of semblances that bring all watchers crashing through their own disintegration. Beautiful. Thank you, Jason. Maybe now you can complement it with the following example, that

is that of the emergent phenomenon, which is one that you have prepared, I believe. The emerging or futuristic phenomenon that I wanted to describe, I think Reza will find this intriguing as well, is that of a recently excavated subterranean spirit army in Xi'an, China, constructed by the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang over 2,000 years ago in 210 BC. It is a massive archaeological discovery that unearthed countless terracotta statues, which span over 600 underground pits and 50 square kilometers surrounding the tomb of a dead emperor who held the megalomaniacal belief that he would require protection from his enemies even in the aftermath. According to historical reports from the time period, the overall task

was executed by over 700,000 builders and took over 40 years to complete. But what are we to make of the underground spirited army that stands watch over this funerary city? How do we interpret this mausoleum of the ancient capital with its archers, horsemen, spear bearers, and chariots of bronze horses. The first lesson of this ghostly encampment is that the idols do not abide by any life and death binary. Rather, the emperor's decision to convene this legion signifies a morbid third existential condition, that of immortal mortality, better known to us as the undying or the living dead. This plunges us into the sphere of monstrosity, that which takes the death wish or death drive to an absurd outer edge, where violence cannot cease its cyclical recurrence

over and again. These idols are therefore only seemingly frozen in inanimate states, like those cats once buried alive among the pharaohs to guide them into the afterlife. Really, they lie in wait, with the ultra-animate impetus to stir with the killer's potential whenever the invaders come. Secondly, the spirit army confirms a worldview where vengeance is the prime law of all things. Here there will always be a pattern of intrusion, violation, and betrayal. We are in an exceptionally fragile and vulnerable terrain where each domain of being hides its own team of cutthroats, traitors, or assassins. Thus the spirit army exists as a preemptive strike against those who would draw first blood. They win a retroactive vengeance or punishment on behalf

of the half-sleeping emperor. They dispatch with utter precision and mercilessness those who would challenge the throne in any age to come, which in turn gives the idol the status of the imminent enemy and the imminent enemy. For all their nobility, for all their aesthetic elegance, we must not elide the fact that such a gigantic architectural complex is a testament to the most expansive paranoia that maybe the world has perhaps ever seen. Its sinuous vaults and serpentines, its trenches and treasuries are the labyrinth of a mad king who envisions downfall around every corner. It is even speculated that the emperor's own burial mound, which is insulated by rivers of mercury, might be full of lethal traps for those who traverse its threshold. This is the mindset

of Dume. I'm very interested in philosophies of Dume. In its modern sadistic framework, this leads to the killing fields, prison dungeons, and concentration camps of those utopian ideologies that ran grotesquely across the 20th century with the intent to impose a paranoiac tyranny of sameness. But in its ancient masochistic framework here, we see paranoia galvanize the rise of an empire of idols, the vitalist coming to life of an entire spirit necropolis beneath the dirt. Furthermore, scholars have observed that each warrior figure has its own unique physiological features, stances, and slightly varying facial expressions, no two idols are identical, leading to a hypothesis that they were perhaps fabricated based on actual living individuals from the time period. Hence, lunatic

distrust leads to an exalted resurrection principle, whereby the idol defenders stay forever poised in the state of war. This is the meaning of the guardian's posture, the one who holds vigil, who keeps watch over the resting soul of the leader, who remains suspended in wakefulness for millennia. Their apparent stillness is a choreography of militant pacing through the halls of this enclosure. They congregate, they unleash, and thereby maintain the fortress walls. And this brings us to the final implication of the spirit army for this business of the idol today. Namely, in what way do they redefine the paradigm of sacrificial force? In what ways are these spectral champions a typology of martyrdom unknown to us thus far? Again, we return to the premise of

the extreme death drive that they harbor in their glazed facades, namely that they are the ones who are willing to remain undead forever in order to perish gloriously for their emperor in a ring of victory and fallenness. Stated otherwise, they are stranded in a looping martyrological instant that permits no afterlife. They are the personification of the dangerous words of an avant-garde filmmaker who once instructed us to, quote, become immortal and then die. But how exactly does this example stand for a futural phenomenon? It is because of the bizarre outcome that has now befall. As the archaeologists expose more layers and gain international acclaim for their discovery. At this stage, right now, several of the life-size figurines, including their weapons and carriages, have been sent around the world to various museums in a kind of traveling show.

traveling show. Is this displacement from the sovereign's grave to the glass case world of the gallery and exhibition hall a disgrace to them? Do they languish and agonize once wrenched from their protective arena? Even more than this, and this is where the futuristic modality truly comes into play, there are projects being devised to recast these idol warriors in immersive virtual reality interfaces. 360 degree online tours and interactive programs that would manipulate their limbs and showcase them in rank and file procession. So now they are entering a holographic list. And what does it mean when the blade of a warrior idol is transported to the matrix of digital augmentation? Is this a sad defeat that they are? Is the cyber-replicated screen the ultimate battlefield in which they lose once and for all?

Or is this a discrete alliance with technology? A counter siege tactic that will afford them a new kind of violent telepresence. at long last a way to make them invincible. Thank you, Jason. Now, as we come towards the end of this certainly very rich conversation, I'd like to relay to both of you the questions from preceding oracles, Michael Marder and Laura Dribaldi, who in the previous episode acted as oracles themselves and revealed different textures of the concept of surface. So Reza, Laura says, in Cyclonopedia, you write that to desertify the earth is to make the earth ready for change in the name of divine monopoly, as opposed to terrestrial idols.

And her question is, would you say that the monotheistic God is inherently different from all terrestrial idols, or is just an idol whose material vessel is always hidden? Is the distinction between gods and idols becoming more blurred or more defined as we move towards the future. So, yes, if you could answer. Thank you. How to answer this question? I actually want to answer this question by way of Jason's exemplification of the army, of the Chinese buried ghost army.

This for me is a kind of allegory for the paranoia of idolatry versus that of monotheism. They have their own fears, their respective fears. My challenge to the idolatrous crowd and their paranoia, like, it's a pharaoh who actually buries himself, right? asked himself to be buried together with the architects who made the temple, right? Or the pyramid, right? The same thing kind of in this sort of a story, right?

We need to have watchful eyes. But my question to the idolaterals emperor would be that do you think the old guards have the Verwitton to save you in the future? No, of course not. The old guards are going to be weaponless, completely disproportionately vanquished by the future guards. A paranoia that does not have the risk of the future already counted in is not a good paranoia. It's a shit sort of paranoia. Monotheism is the ultimate paranoia. We always want the future guards.

We actually don't give a shit about traditionalists or conservative religious people who came before us and basically guarded us at that point or here and now. We want to make new children. These children are the children of the future. And this is the thing that I see that there is a certain sort of paranoia in Maltaism that cannot be surpassed by any sort of human paranoia in its healthy or even unhealthy sort of way. I would say that, yes, of course, Cyclonopedia is a work of fiction.

I don't believe, yes, of course, it has philosophical aspects to it, but so has, you know, old Islamic allegories about the world and the fate of the world. I generally see it as a world of fiction. and I wouldn't fret about its theoretical implications, so to speak. I want to say that, look, I absolutely do not want people to misjudge or misunderstand this as an insightful philosophy of work, because it is not. Nevertheless, every work of literature

needs to have some of these components. And with that caveat put out in the open, I say that yes, there is this sort of twist in Cyclonopedia that the world is getting ready finally for the true essence of monotheism, which is basically the death of God. And the death of God is like an assassination. It is not that you think that, oh, gods can be simply killed. No, who kills gods? I mean, who has ever killed a god?

Do we know anyone who has killed a god? No. Gods can be assassinated throughout history by a very subtle way, which Greeks used to called metis, conning intelligence. cunning is the only way to kill gods and monotheism absolutely I would say has its own cunning devices implanted to it whether voluntarily intentionally or not doesn't matter at this point to kill gods as I said it's always a sure shot to kill a bird with one giant boulder Right? And yes, and essentially, Cyclonopedia is a kind of like a, I was trying to think

about it as this sort of kind of religious Jew philosophy work in the vein of Duluth, in the vein of, you know, Islamic, what's that, you know, island, island stories like Hayyibnaniyakhsan and Eben Tophion's work. So he has all of this stuff and it was more like like a prologue to a different earth than we could have, where basically the earth begins with death of God. So first we have to devise a very strange twisted way, I mean if you have played Hitman,

you know, the way that Hitman kills his, the video game Hitman, he kills his targets, are quite twisted, like, you know, the moves that he makes, you think that, oh, you know, there is a coin over there, maybe I should touch it, but it has nothing to do with that, it just simply means that you have to make a move for you to notice something else, and then that movement also puts you in some sort of danger. I would say that Cyclopaedia is really a story about this. It's about a kind of twisted mechanisms that go into the monotheism to finally kill God for good. And from that, a new earth shall rise, right? That's obviously the very mythopoetic engine of all the old world sagas that are

old gods and new gods. But the thing is that we don't need gods at this point. I mean, that's Cyclonopédias, at least, thing. That it essentially, like what you might call to be an introduction, a very overwrought, overworked, confused introduction for how God to be killed, rendered dead. And from that, a new earth, a new geophilosophy can come. and we don't know what that geofilosophy might look like because as I said uh throughout this work it seems to me that everything that we do everything we speak is kind of tinged with that sort of

godly talks which we are infuriated by but we don't have any final resolution to. So if that is the case then uh devise the most intricate plan uh to finally assassinate God silently throughout the machination of nothing but human history. Thank you, Reza. Now, Jason, Michael Martyr has a question for you. And the question is,

have images displaced idols in the 21st century? Has the difference between the idol and the image been erased? Are images our new idols? And specifically, how do they fare in the night? I began, it's a great question. I began dancing at the borders of this question, my last section on the spirit army becoming holographic entities. But then we should start then with what Reza himself mentioned. The etymological root of idol itself in the ancient Greek is idolon, which means a double apparition ghost, but more acutely often referred to a spirit image of a living or dead person. Moreover, it's a shade or a phantasmic lookalike that in mythic stories

often makes appearances to warn of coming threats from the future. So the original concept of the Eidolon or idol as a harbinger of cataclysmic possibilities was always already fastened to the forces of virtuality and futurity. But the idols of the typology that we've been debating, which are more frequently so-called pagan statues from early civilizations, they do have a very stark phenomenological and existential difference from the rule of images that's overtaken us in our age of simulation. So to begin with, the idol was almost always a rare object, either supposedly one of a kind and therefore irreplaceable, or with very few replicas. And the reason for this is that they were treated as sensible incarnations rather than as symbols of faraway intangible overlords.

Their abilities supposedly surged through their cold iron or mineral forms, not even as a conduit or intermediary, but as the apotheosis itself, which could be shattered, burned, thieved, or lost. There's some great work by Zeynab Bahrani, the anthropologist, on how warring nations in the ancient world or cities used to steal idols from one another, and sort of the currency of that act of subversion. This is clearly not the case, though, for our contemporary image cultures, where semblances are transacted with the promise of infinite reproducibility. So secondly, the connection to one of my favorite philosophical topics that Michael Martyr asked, Knight, it's an excellent one, for it's well known that idol cults most often favored nocturnal backdrops for their worshiping rituals.

This is because of the idols aforementioned linked to the jurisdictions of secrecy. But our contemporary images offer us precisely a shield against darkness. Like the invention of electricity did when it first illuminated the cities of Europe, or even the Promethean gift of fire which supposedly saved our ancestors from the twilight hours, these glimmers of light on our screens represent the false promise of escaping the tension of the secretive. secretive. They offer the delusion of grandeur that we have overcome those chasms where our mind fails desperately to keep its balance. And lastly, even if we did take the etymological root of the idol as a phantom double for our criterion, we would notice that this made the Greek version of the Eidolon or idol a messenger from some extra reality, underworld, or parallel universe within the world.

They reminded us that these that there were elsewhere elsewheres even within the ruination of of our finitude, whereas our images today imprison us in pure banality and the bleak spectacle of the everyday. The former idol, even if it were a ghostly emissary, was once extraordinary. It was the agent through which unreal powers broke and flooded upon our world. It threatened insidiously to upset the scales of everything through whatever whims or impulses of a strange being. It did not slavishly uphold dominant orders, but instead altered the mood of whatever crossed its path. Still, I think there are ways to restore this type of image again. In fact, learning to resuscitate the visionary secrets of the idol, its techniques of chipping, fading, its dazzling evil eye, might be our best last chance against the reign of simulation.

An eye for an eye, an image for an image. And that actually would take me into just something I wanted to say in response to Reza's wonderful points about the paranoia within monotheism and the death of God. that if we are wading through Nietzsche's swampland wonderfully, you know, and paying tribute to his mastery in announcing the death of God, we also must remember that aphorism where he says he fears less by far the literal God and far more fears the shadow of God. The shadow of God being this prolonged after effect that can often cloak and disguise itself in nihilism. and this is an interesting thing for me because Nietzsche for all of his talk of the death of God is interested in force he's interested in intensity he's interested in ecstasy and power

which were the realms of divinities in their original sort of castings he's just not interested in belief instead he wants to evacuate belief from that but still retain the existential and affective mood of awe, which actually by definition is disbelief. You cannot believe what you are seeing, but in a vital sense of the term. That's where those images, we can talk for days about the philosophical registers and the implications, but when you stand in front of the spirit army of the ancient Chinese emperor without even a hint of knowledge of what it might actually represent historically or contextually, it is awe-inspiring. And that effect must be taken seriously in the way

that some philosophers of this 20th century whispered to us, no one paid attention, that the most important concept for philosophy that has gone unanswered for millennia is that of Mu. Kafka understood that. Some other geniuses understood that. But still it is an understudied and underrepresented category of analysis because it's tricky, it's evasive, it's volatile and nebulous, as Rezo was saying earlier. And so the moods that God's created once are something that are to be perhaps salvaged in the midst of all of this. And they may be the gateway to the weapons of the future that Rezo was talking about.

I don't think it's any joke that in a book that very few people ever read, when Jean Baudrillard at a time when they were dismissing him as becoming trite or trapped in his own sort of imprisoned cage of simulations with his theories, he tried to murmur to us that the antidote to an age of hollow simulations is seduction. He wrote a book on seduction, very few people read. I think that's my interest in the item, that when you set foot in that museum, thousands of years later, Reza and I, our ancestors may have been from Babylon, but we haven't been to Babylon necessarily. But when we step in that museum, there's a chill down the spine looking at that thing in front of you, which is not a creator, but the creative.

Remember that it's forged. That right there takes us in a whole different direction. But staring at that miniature force in front of you still has a moon attached to it. It constructs an atmospheric tension or pressure. And that's something that I think we need to harness if we're going to win, and if we are at war, like the spirit army. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you. I have one last comment with regard to Nietzsche. And that's what will be part of my anti-Nietzscheian stance. I would say that if Nietzsche so Nietzsche is talking about the shadow of God that might endure

after the death of God and that's even more dangerous as you said but how a Prussian guy knows whether God is dead or not to even talk about the shadow of God this is I would say Nietzsche in its greatest moments is also the greatest basically butler of the cult of God. The reason that I am saying that is that his line of reasoning is always the sort of line of reasoning that people use against unabashed and unhinged

Prometheanism. that ultimately what we are trying to do is to replace God by human. God and human would be a new God. I would say that people who say that just don't understand what is actually going on through this sort of mechanism of replacement. They still think like a slaves of goddamn old gods. So was Nietzsche. this could take hours so we'll we can yes i think we should this i intentionally put it there to fears and some something in you for a different debate no no this is this is good it's good to

open a wound so we can we can have a reason to to come back yes no no it's all it was magnificent and talk. It was really good. I think we covered a lot of grounds. I think we've got far and beyond this evening. The initial teams have well-disintegrated, fused, seduced, and certainly transcended pure taxonomies, going beyond all Manichian views of the idol. A wonderful final for the series. Thank you so much, Reza and Jason. Love you. Thank you both of you. I'm glad that I was invited. you