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Articles: a134
Date Published: 10/15/2003
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Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Openness and Germinal Death
Reza Negarestani
A shattered introduction.
From pre-Islamic Zoroastrian mages to Sade to Nietzsche, Bataille and Deleuze, the investigations
into openness have been always accompanied by at least five supplements: life, death, horror,
outside and intensity. Openness has been diagramed as both a tactical line and strategy
traversing these five supplements while crushing the dimensions between them. The desire for
openness has been considered the desire for life, death, horror, outside and intensity and this is
why it has been cautiously appropriated whether through desire itself or despotic rigidities.
However, it has been never totally blocked, for even in the case of monolithic despotism and
rigidity, we do not encounter closure but strictly economical openness which is the indispensable
part of any paranoiacally isolationist organization. On the other side of this panorama (economical
openness), the survivalist approaches (economic, political, social, etc.) to desire have been more
creative in appropriation / domestication of openness; the desire for openness has been
domesticated through complex economic networks through which openness is translated as
affordance; a survivalist horizon distributing or at least trying to distribute communication through
the networks, in which fluxes of desire are merely forming a complex web of transportation
systems or a hydraulic economy which is dynamic and flowing but empowering solidity and its
complex survivalist circulations by stirring and transporting them, or even assisting solidity to
assemble its own sphere of pseudo-fluxes where solid is softened, becomes extremely dynamic,
versatile and forming its free-play institutions as it moves (as in fluvial/alluvial processes). Through
affordance, openness is represented as the level of being open (to) not being opened (the plane of
epidemic and contagion: plagues, contaminations, possession, etc.). "I am open to you." means, I
have the capacity to bear your investment or 'I afford you' (this is not an intentional conservative
voice but what arises as the fundamental noise produced by the machinery of different levels of
organization and boundary, and finally organic survival); if you exceed this capacity I will be
cracked, lacerated and laid open.
The Zoroastrians were among the first people who discovered and experienced the lacerating
nature of openness and its contagious (or rather to say, the contaminative) space, thirsty to
lacerate dimensions, crushing borders, snuffing them out and unleashing its epidemics (as
epidemic is an avatar of openness) which confound the lineaments of openness as 'being open'.
Deleuze indirectly speaks about the dangers of desire for total openness. Erich Fromm's concern
is to argue the severe dangers of undomesticated or total openness, as openness traverses death,
life, outside and intensity simultaneously while bumping them into each other, opening the
virulently toxic expanses before the survival and bio-ethical horizons, spreading a satanic intensity
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of life (which Fromm calls necrophilia, a pervert side of life itself or more precisely, its desiring
space: philia) everywhere; as openness is the brutal and creative base-communication of life, a
confluence of non-unitary lines of philia (desire and attracting bonds) which is interdimensional; as
openness is imminent to life: giving rise to everything (even unlife) while anonymously coming
from the compositional depths of life.
... but what lurks in the abysmal thirst for openness that makes it so dreaded? What is the shape
(or specter) of the Thing unleashed by total openness? Where is it?
and such landscapes of epidemic, death, openness and desire dance under my skin:
To what extent can the openness of life be taken? Is such an openness possible? Is openness a
subject of bio-philosophy? Does the Deleuzian project of epidemic (epidemic desire, epidemic
becoming, becoming epidemic, etc.) which roots the understanding of philia (as a space of
multiplying bonds: love, desire, attraction, communication, etc.) on the plane of immanence really
engineer the lines of what Keith Ansell Pearson calls Germinal Life [1]? And finally where is death
in this epidemic openness? Subsequently, does necrophilia belong to Oedipus as "a race for
death" (Deleuze and Guattari)?
And the questions proliferate as an epidemic on the move:
Philia as epidemic.
The word 'death' has the same mix of referential richness and conceptual poverty as
the sign lifting a speed restriction. It would designate a concept only if this semiotic
transition were treated as the representation of absolute velocity, rather than an
incitement to free-flow. Dying is the departure from a traffic system, but this emigration
is not transcendentally governed by a pure destination. [2]
Life is the sexual plateau of all fetishes; death is only a perversion on this plateau. [3]
Erich Fromm in Die Seele des Menschen warns about a satanic intensity of life storming the
bio-ethical horizons of the human race; a Mistmare (an untraced and unreported plague) which is
cryptogenic (Incognitum Hactenus: anonymous-until-now) yet rising from the twisted nether of life
in which survival is partly a joke and partly an economical repression. It is necrophilia which
Fromm paranoiacally and artlessly opposes to biophilia, represents it as the ultimate fantasy of
masculinity boiling out from the docile greed for domination, ownership and monopolization
dedicated to Oedipality and the regime of doom and destruction in particular; consequently, he
mistakes necrophilia for necrocracy through his inflexible bio-morality which reduces all creative
communications to the interactions imprisoned within the logic of negativity and polar discourses.
Necrophilia is the expanse of base-participation and anonymous entities of power, "interphyletic
collisions" (Nick Land) [4] and border collapse through which death as a zero-becoming or the
absolute silence of intensity becomes problematic. Necrophilia is an event (in the Deleuzian sense
of this word) germinated through epidemic bonds or contamination (an imminent and inevitable
communication which pushes the entities toward an upheaval of proliferating and multiplying
becomings through each other) and not death. This betrayal (or profound disloyalty) of necrophilia
to death is what the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia experienced and discovered, and then, they
ciphered Vendidad (The Book of Law against Demons or Anti-Druj laws) with it: that necrophilia
and its systems of decay and germinal contamination cannot be coordinated with the other necrooriented horizons of death. Necrophilia is life feasting on death or a life-infested death, an
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unthinkable intensity of life (a dimensionality wreckage of events and entities) that as Fromm
remarks (but tries to repress and elude it) is unendurable, a satanic plateau which the Zoroastrians
call Druj-, it is the Mother of Abominations, of all contaminations (base-participations).
Necrophilia is not the necrocratic regime of Oedipus or Philosophy, one can only
(re)mold its history by economically communicating through its racialized boneyards (of
the Dead Philosophers?), it is a philia, a strategic wreckage of life smeared on death to
the point of wearing it out, messing it with its wasteful bonds, the bonds of philia, the
epidemic bonds. [5]
Necrophilia suggests a germination process including folding, composition, terminal softening,
proliferation, split, recomposition and eternal fluidification through the unground of philia, a
composition of philia, as philia is the engineering space of life, it is constituted of bonds and
alliances by and through which desiring machines rise and inter-communicate, and finally
engineer compositions of all forms (such as necro-philia). One might warn about the filiative and
tendentious nature of philia in the cosmogonic models as what suggested by Empedocles'
philosophy and the rest of unitary approaches; but considering philia on a non-transcendental
level, philia is neither possessing, nor possessable; it is only contagiously open because the very
bonds (of love, friendship, alliance, fondness, etc.) which make it philia, not as a capacity of
tendencies but a space of bonds which are pestilentially fond of (the very meaning philia)
everything, engineering alliances, transmuting every process and relationship into a perverse
love-making ( the common meaning of necrophilia is a distorted apparition of this process) and
finally, giving rise to inter-connective compositions, for compositions as Nick Land suggests are
unfocused complexities [6] which do not allow the tendencies to gain victory or conquer the
composition's complexity by the institutionalizing of economical relationships through composition
but affirm them as modes or transient instances of multiplicities imminent to the compos-ition. In
such a space (philia) nothing remains pure since tendencies which try to forge purities are all
contaminated and infected; they are inter-connected by each other. Philia, even concealed under
all appropriated features of Greek tradition, is a space where desiring machines unground
rigidities, storm borders and dimensions; and necrophilia is an event germinated through this
space, an instance of 'border collapse' and a perverse love (an anonymous plague of energy,
excess and multiplying bonds composed as a process of contagion) which does not fail to incite
becomings wherever it goes (contagion commotion). Meeting, communicating or touching the true
pestilential bonds of Empedocles' philia or the contagious plateau of interphylum or epidemic
openness [7], the resistance, any isolationist struggle, uncommunicative reaction or opposition to
remain unchanged (unmutated) becomes impossible (but appreciated as a strategy intensifying
the mess, the waste of the process and engineering the exorbitant). Through the expanse of
philia, everything should participate and participation has no end, nor beginning, nor horizon, nor
a certain objective of participation. Infested by the epidemic (contagious and wasteful) bonds of
philia, openness is triggered on all levels of its communicative lines but more on the plane of
"being opened" than "being open" or "being open to". This is an openness abolishing or messing
up all trajectories of economical communication, autarky and insularism: everything is terminally
and ruthlessly softened and opened; this is what happens for necro- in necrophilia. Philia is an
infection not in the term of invasion but unavoidable attraction (epidemic bonds: symbiosis,
base-communication, parasitism, contamination, alliance, etc.) Through this openness, philia
debases whatever attaches to it whether as a supplementary or articulative attachment (as in
necrophilia). Philia does not answer the quiddity-oriented questions or the interrogations around
genesis (oversimplifying philia as a rooted genesis element); it is the 'where' not as a question but
an unground; philia is the unground where events or entities undergo a descent without stoppage;
where everything is contagious, epidemic, compositional and under an immense ungrounding
process. Through philia space is experienced in its non-accommodating / non-dwelling openness,
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an openness free from affordance-based (J. J. Gibson) or economical appropriations.
Philia does not unite or totalize -- Empedocles as a philosopher of Survival Economy, the Greek
Genesis Project and cosmogonic regimes try to ascribe unification to philia, as if even thinking on
philia is a horror for survival economy, its denizens, cosmogonic institutions around genesis and
the anthropomorphic thought -- it mazes and storms by its epidemic openness, subverting
dimensions, scavenging them, composing and bumping them into each other, introducing
collapse to them. To this extent, brought to this plateau of base-communication (philia), necro (of
necrophilia) is all laid and stripped open, infested and messed up in the unheard-of
base-participations in life and the contagious bonds of philia. Through the interphyletic wreckages
of philia (necrophilia,...), transcendental and dissecting levels of analysis (whether holistic or
partitioning), if not appearing impossible, become extremely dangerous; extraction (e.g. extracting
necro as death or a mortification process from the interphyletic wreckage of necrophilia)
submerges in the fathomless depths of epidemic philia that is equal to being attracted and
infected, being drowned into this compositional abyss, contamination (being contaminated) or
being laid open by the bonds of philia. Contamination delays the extraction process or any
analysis on a transcendental level to no end. In necrophilia, the 'necro' strips open and takes an
anonymous life under the epidemic bonds of a contagious openness (philia) infecting through the
strategies of life. Attraction or more accurately, epidemic bond is the functioning of philia (or
epidemic openness) or as Deleuze and Guattari remarked "attraction is the functioning itself" [8]
but in such an openness (and its avatars such as necrophilia) attraction is a hunt in the strategic
ways (It knows nothing of lack.), where, always, the hunt is on. The sepulchral affirmation in
necrophilia is also a hunt for openness, an anti-survivalist approach to openness and
communication: being laid open. Necrophilia is the ultimate of such dimensionality wreckage
engineered by the multiplicities and proliferation of philia as a creative space and not a concept or
a horizon of nature; it is a hunt multiplying on the pestilential bonds of philia and through the
war-strategies of life; however, certain segments and instances of necrocracy and Oedipalizing
webs may enter in and try to appropriate this virulent openness but they are just trapped,
recomposed and softened to no end through the bonds of philia, they just strategically enrich the
battlefield, the dimensionality wreckage of mess engineering. Infested by philia, death is not
domesticated; it goes rabid.
Germinal Death or the Mistmare.
Such an epidemic plague infesting and totally anonymizing death is one of the main traces
investigated by the contemporary Russian necrorealist cinema known as Chernukha (blackness),
mainly founded by the directors such as Evgenii Iufit, the Aleynikov brothers, Boris Youkhananov,
Debil Kondratiev, et al. A radical movement started in Leningrad mainly with an inclination primarily
toward the underground counter-culture of the mid 80s in Russia. The desolated landscapes of
economic meltdown, lack of horror cinema or a science-fictional future in the collapsing Soviet
Union and the Post-Soviet era, intense strife between the necroeconomic terror of survival
economy and horror of life, collapse of thermoeconomical markets, and finally, cold-melt process
of the necrocratic institutions, all have composed a web of netting heterogeneities, unnatural,
unlocalizable and chronologically discontemporized to all politico-economic terrors in recent
decades or a dystopian future; in one word, rendering a chaotic geography so terminal that any
occidental / oriental discontaminating cultural, economic or social solution has been proved both
inapplicable and dangerous not for Russian anonymous labyrinths but for the Eastern and
Western countries themselves. Encountered with such an ample pestilential opportunity, the
Russian artists started to investigate how the necrocratic regimes rot and their power formations
are ungrounded within the shell of institutions, architectonic solids and political survivals but in fact
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exterior to them; how solidity is not wiped out and sucked into Zero but necrotized and softened to
no end, shatters on the virtual surfaces of Zero without being sucked by its vortices, making its
own economic grund, a (un)grund whose tectonic expansion is the Zero itself (p/0); and how
masculinity does not take the voyage of becoming-woman as its space of becoming but bites
itself, appearing as the extreme homophobic/erotic irony of the impossibility of any final
deliverance one can anticipate as the satisfying end of masculinity; however, considering and
charting all these not as the illustrations of life emptiness (a survivalist or absurdist approach) or
mortification as a collective response to social disorders and the problem of subjectivity (a
crisis-based reaction), but affirmation (acting as companion) of a non-survival-supporting life
whose tentacles crack death open merely as a collective perversion, a philia, which progressively
disterminalizes as the end of all becomings or the terminus ad quem of becomings; and is
transmuted to a collapsing expanse exhumed, deflowered and scavenged by life (non-survivalist
life: unlife), its netting, mazing and bonding philia: a space of becomings, so contagious and
epidemic, which as Nick Land puts it, is a "Pest" [9], a "meltdown plague" [10] (similar to
Chernobyl Chinese syndrome) which does not serve the fluxional faith of the flux (becoming as
fluvius) or pseudo-theological becoming (an unconventionally reductionist and characteristic,
Eigentümlichkeit, becoming that is pregnant of some kind of stealth negativity) which Catherine
Malabou suspects about Deleuzian becoming [11], but a terminal multiplicity in the form of
evaporation, a GAS-becoming where molecules do not play the role of constituting or designing
agents of flux-movements any longer; they become the pestilential ungrounding forces, the
surface-consuming plagues; whatever they do is ungrounding (exhumation: ex + humus: ground),
irreparable and undoable; each molecule becomes a miniature of a mazing earthquake. Such
evaporations (Gas-becomings) and ungrounding / anonymizing becomings do not depict a "pure
insertion into the cycle of metamorphoses" [12] that rummages through the stealth circulations of
pseudo-flux (where flow is appropriated by grund) to locate its temporary (transient) and
dynamically appropriated Utopias (the stages or expressions of metamorphing process); for
meta-morphosis expresses a movement which, temporarily and dynamically, is appropriated by the
ground it traverses to generate a fully dynamic and somehow unlocalizable formation; a
non-institutionalized movement but a messenger of grund, a movement forced to transport a
form-ation (morphosis), to express the ground dynamically, to disseminate the regulations of
ground like fluvial / alluvial processes, irrigation systems fertilizing the ground and hydraulic
architectures (as the State war-machines) which Wittfogel investigated in his Oriental Despotism: a
Comparative Study of Total Power (1963). In Chernukha, as through the anonymous and
undomesticated horizon of Russia with its vertiginous simplicity (or as Sergei Medvedev suggests
The North or The_Blank_Space [13]), death as a terminal expanse of coldness and a part of
desiring-machine is messed up through the pestilential and wasteful (exorbitant) bonds of
epidemic life (philia) which frantically composes new strategies of 'openness to everything' -- by
means of its ungrounding strategies, bonds of philia and affirmation -- not merely openness as the
plane of being open but rather being lacerated, cracked, butchered and laid open ... then, sewing
and scavenging what have been opened through the bonds of philia and the interphyletic
labyrinths of life through which becoming runs as a vermiculating, mazing machine or an engineer
of labyrinthine inter-dimensionalities. Once death is infected (and infested) by the true satanic
horror of life and its opening / affirming strategies or epidemic bonds of philia -- triggered by the
auto-collapse of all survival economies and necrocratic regimes -- opening and being opened
gruesomely is inexorable; the exhumed and scavenged death is sewn together as the lines of a
new becoming (anonymous-until-now) trapped in the interphyletic and pestilential bonds of philia
and life; it becomes a germinal death or a becoming(s), disloyal to Zero. To call it germinal death is
because it has a germinal intensity within itself; it has been infected and infested with a
germinality which can only be diagramed and perceived through the inter-dimensionality and the
fathomless epidemic of philia and its openness and not life alone since this germinality which
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death has been infected with is not the Deleuzian movement from an organized body to 'the body
without organs', the vortex of zero or death, for death itself has been laid open (infected,
contaminated and butchered) and disterminalized (brought to an ultimate openness) under the
constant and progressive ungrounding processes unleashed by the desiring machines or the
epidemic / plaguing agents of philia; this germinality is a total and dangerously epidemic
Openness, it is not movement but pure openness (in the sense of epidemic), it does not move
since it is an absolute ungrounding process of ground or a horizon which makes all lines of tactics
(movements) and at the same time, their domestication possible (movements, fluxes or tactical
lines can only run and flow in the presence of dimensions, surfaces and other attributes of grund
[14]), an openness which infects and attracts, merely radiating openness, its war against closure is
purely strategic and not tactical [15] which needs ground as its horizon. However, what makes this
germinality, germinal and not something else is that it is a space of becomings and
heterogeneities giving rise to the new things (modes of power, entities, etc.) like the germinality
that Deleuze diagrams; however the lines of these ungrounded becomings (of this ungrounded
germinality) do not envelope a becoming-death as their zero-intensity (extinguishable intensity) or
final silence [16] any longer, for, once again, death has been disterminalized, infested and cracked
open. Openness bites into death, chews and liquidates it by its enzymes.
Germinal death is death transmuted to a new becoming or rather a space of becomings through
which death surpasses itself through a brutal opening process; death itself is disterminalized by
transmuting to a becoming that is anonymous (and imperceptible) even to zero but not external to
it. Death actually happens but merely as a collective perversion (an infested practice with its own
anonymous and contaminated intensities) through the epidemic bonds and the interphyletic
labyrinths of philia. This is why Russian psychoanalyst Victor Mazin considers Chernukha and
necrorealism as the anonymous landscapes of "the mutual contamination of life and death" [17];
or as previously discussed, base-necrophilia. Where even death is infested, then, survival
economy (and the necessity of surviving for the organic body) as the base-ground of necrocracy
loses all its politico-economic conservatism, mutates into a virulent strategy augmenting the
collapse of any stratification process on its holy ground, acts as a camouflaged ungrounding
process: solidity becomes virulent and messy; institutions become deterritorializing machines (as
in the Post-Soviet space). This is where necrophilia (Chernukha) unleashes itself as a brutal
schizotrategy working at the heart of paranoia as an ungrounding force. Through germinal death,
the survivalist subject or the avatar of solidity does not try to survive but to soften itself
progressively, to become an avatar of the ultimate softness; however, it does not choose or follow
the liquidation that flux or conventional destratification processes use to mollify solidity; it installs
decay (what is supposed to be a characteristic process of the regime of doom and destruction and
the Oedipus race as Deleuze warns) as its softening machine, as a way of replacing surviving with
eternal decomposition and rotting processes not on the plane of paranoia but schizotrategy and
anti-solidity. Decomposition and decay stop because of the limits that death (or the great void)
draws; in germinal death, however, they progress and persist endlessly. Decay appears as a
strategic anti-rigidity process working through paranoia, using a brutal and fanatic destratification
which is utterly dangerous and somehow disloyal to both schizophrenia and paranoia; what it only
cares about is delirial softening.
To this extent, desire for germinal death is not geminated on the great silence or the cosmic tides
of entropy, but as Nick Land suggests, "Pest."
In a transcendental interrogation, if becoming-death is the zero-collapse of all becomings, then
what is that Becoming which infects death, demonically possesses it, pervades and infiltrates it,
and in a turbulent motion ungrounds death through the epidemic openness of life through which
everything is scavenged as an interphyletic wreckage or a maze of the affirming bonds? What is
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the becoming-infected death (germinal death) which loses its terminality, crosses itself as a
becoming and becomes anonymous even to Zero but not external to it, a death cracked open by
the affirming strategies of the satanic chemistry of life which allows the survival economies to be
grounded as part of mess engineering and its grand strategic design for universal ungrounding? Is
it Anonymous-until-Now (incognitum hactenus)? Or a lie or as the ancient Zoroastrians called it,
Druj-, the feminine blackening upheaval, a universal ungrounding force or the Mother of
Abominations -- Druj- means lie or strategy, the Mother of Abominations (Mistmare) or the
life-satan according to Vendidad or the Zoroastrian Anti-Druj Laws -- by whose ungrounding
forces, survival is rendered a catastrophic blindness through the dark chemistry of life?
Chernobog, Chernobyl, Chernukha.
Call it Chernukha cinema, contemporary Russia, the Mistmare (Mother of Abominations) or
germinal death; it ungrounds death to the point that it (death) cannot be charted on the logic and
the plane of the Outside; and the Outside as a horizon which renders the outlines of our thoughts,
politics and economies and finally horror loses its creative and significant existence. We come to
an expanse of juxtaposed death (Non esse apud se) or a dimensional wreckage (a terminal
intimacy as in demonic possession) in which death is extra-proximal, assuming a germinal process
of its own through life. Death itself becomes a germinal unlife. In such a non-judgmental
upheaval, death cannot serve the outside any longer or the other way around; horror leaves the
Outside or Baudrillardian Double as its fungal oceans and becomes a cryptogenic process which
rises everywhere that philia germinates. The Bataillean eye, the eye of the Outside, is turned
inside out; becomes an evaporative eye. The cult of the Eye must be the cult of philia, the Mother
of Abominations, Chernukha and the germinal death. Chernukha does not insinuate death as an
outsider or the death-outsider as the principle of its horror but frenziedly tries to explore the space
in which death is always beside one in a diabolic intimacy of zero-distance and multiplying
closeness or more accurately the level of possession (possessing and being possessed:
ungrounded), for possession (or demonic infestation) is always the closeness in the absence of
measures, scales and judgments (metron), a molecular closeness. This extra-proximal death
('death-beside ...') instead of the death-outsider has been disseminated as the imminent horror of
a life whose necrocratic regimes and survival economies are progressively ungrounded, a life
rabidly radiating its contagious lines, turning necrocracy to base-necrophilia, transmuting any
communication to a strategic affirmation leading to a gruesome and inevitable openness (not
'being open to' as the liberalist and absolutely economical approach to openness but being
lacerated, cracked and laid open).
The entities, the inter-dimensional entities of this germinal death have already swarmed our
popular culture, horror genre, video games, literature, the internet and everyday life, triggered the
rise of new cryptogenic (ungrounded) entities and networks of power, disloyal to any
grounded(ing) approach or procedure.
Chernukha is not noir; it is a creative blackness inviting blindness as its only way of experience. It
is beyond judgment.
Notes
--------------[1] Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze, London & New
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York: Routledge, 1999.
[2] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, London & New
York: Routledge, 1992, p. 174.
[3] Reza Negarestani, Pestis Solidus: On the Economy of Pseudo-flux, Online. http://www.coldme.net/text/pestis.pdf< /a>, 2002.
[4] Reza Negarestani, "Conversation with Nick Land" in Homo.stasis: conversations, unpublished.
[5] Reza Negarestani, Pestis Solidus: On the Economy of Pseudo-flux, Online. http://www.coldme.net/text/pestis.pdf< /a>, 2002.
[6] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, London & New
York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 160-183
[7] For more details on the Epidemic Openness (being laid open rather than being open),
Nietzsche and the strategy of affirmation see: Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal and Cata-, Online.
http://www.cold-me.net/text/meal.html and http://www.cold-me.net/text/cata.html, 2002.
[8] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M.
Seem, H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 330.
[9] Reza Negarestani, "Conversation with Nick Land" in Homo.stasis: conversations, unpublished.
[10] Ibid.
[11] See Catherine Malabou, "Who's Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?", in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, Oxford & Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pp. 114-138.
[12] Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1993, p. 210.
[13] Sergei Medvedev, "The_Blank_Space: Glenn Gould, Russia, Finland And The North",
CTheory, Online. http://www.ctheory.net/text_file? pick=128, 2000.
[14] 'f=p/a' suggests the linkage between tactical lines and ground, where 'f' is flux, 'p' is power
and 'a' is a representation of surface.
[15] This germinality is of the contaminative and contagious potentialities and not destructive
tendencies.
[16] On the death-enveloping machinery (part of desiring machine) of every intensity Deleuze and
Guattari remark:
They control the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in
every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming -- in
the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming
zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own
life the experience of death, and envelopes it. And it is doubtless the case that every
intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becomingdeath! Death, then, does actually happen.
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