Edia Connole (Editor), Gary J. Shipley (Editor) - Serial Killing A Philosophical Anthology (2015, Schism Press) - libgen.li

Serial Killing A Philosophical Anthology edited by Edia Connole & Gary J. Shipley Those screams you're hearing are philosophy being awoken from its dogmatic slumbers with a stark brutality rarely matched in the history of intellectual anomaly. If there's a more intense sleep-killer compilation out there somewhere, it's concealing itself well. - Nick Land

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First pub li s hed in 2015 by Schism. prsss .\n imprint of Gobbet press First edition ISBN-13: 978-1515154853 ISBN-10: 1515154858 Copyright © the editors, authors and Schism Press Cover image: Heather Masciandaro Cover design: Caoimhe Doyle Frontispiece: Alina P opa, X, 2015 All right s reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written consent of the pub­ lisher, except wh ere permitted by law. Printed in the CS.\.

SERIAL KILLING: A PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHOLOGY Edited by Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley • SC}ISM

CONTENTS Introduction - Edia Connole & Gary J. Shipley 1 I. 'I don't Im.ow why it started' Qeffrey Dahmer) ALIENS UNDER THE SKIN: SERIAL KILLING AND THE SEDCCTION OF OUR CO:MM ON INHUMANI1Y David Roden 9 VISCERAL INCREDULI1Y, OR SERIAL KILLING AS NECESSARY ANATHEMA Gary J. Shipley 21 NONRELATION AND METARELATION Daniel Colucciello Barber 39 SO LET IT BE WRITTEN, A CREEPING DEATH: PHAGOCYTOTIC CHRONAPTOPTOSIS, OR THE SELF THAT KILLS THE OTHER Tl-L\ T THE SELF CREATED, SLOWLY Niall W. R. Scott 53 II. 'I picked a juicy flower' (Lucian Sraniak) BATAILLE'S VAMPIRE Fred Botting 61 GULP OF SUN: RETHINKING SACRIFICE THROUGH BATAILLE'S GILLES DE RAIS Brooker Buckingham 79 THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS: SERL4L KITSCH Edia Connole 95

Il\iAGES J esuve 105 III. 'On living and breathing pages' (Ian Brady) KALIGR:\.PHY Dan Mellamphy 131 EXQCISITE C ORP SE : SERIAL KILLING Al."'JD THE HORRIPIL\TI ON OF WRITING Aspasia Stephanou W'RITING FROM THE HEART: E�'1ERGING FROM T H E REALM OF THE INVISIBLE 147 David Peak 163 WORDS IN BLOOD, LIKE FLOWERS Heather Masciandaro 173 IV. 'I cannot remain in control for much longer' (Zodiac) RELIGION, DOMINATION AND SERIAL KILLING: \VE.STERN CULTURE AND MURDER Paul O'Brien 183 AMOUR FOU AND THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION, OR LOVE IN N EC LIBE RAL TIMES Anthony Faramelli 199 KILLING SPREE! Dominic Fox 215 ON THE ROAD WITH JACK THE RIPPER Paul J. Ennis 221 - DOUBLE CLICK SHOT GAZE Teresa Gillespie 237

V. 'I don't belong on earth' (David Berkowitz) DEATI-I SPRITZ Amy Ireland & Lendl Barcelos 265 LIFE THROUGH DEATH Matt Gaede I AM ODD FOR TODAY Yuu Seki 281 285 THE MYSTERY OF NIHILL Brad Baumgartner 295 AN EXPI.A TORY PESSIMISM Eugene Thacker 299 THE BERITHIC WANDERER: DAEMONUS MONSMORANCIENSIS Nicola Masciandaro 309 NE RE!\illNISCARIS James Harris 315 OLD BILL Sam Keogh 323 VI. 'I caused dreams which caused death' (Dennis Nilsen) TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY MEDIUM Irina Gheorghe 331 CUT THE CLOAK ON THE INSIDE TO ALWAYS ENTER FROM THE OUTSIDE Alina Popa 343 DREAMING THE END OF DREAMING Florin Flueras 361

A THOUSAND CHATEA US: ON TIME, TOPOLOGY AND THE SERIALITY OF SERIA.L MURDER, PART ONE Charlie Blake 369 GENESIS CAL'L AS PRIMORDIAL WOUND Hunter Hunt-Hendrix 391 MURDER BY TELEPHONE NUMBERS: UNREASON AND SERIAL KILLING THROL'GH THE WORK OF DOUGLAS ADAMS Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle 403

INTRODUCTION Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. -Georges Bataille For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways. -Isaiah 55:8 Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. -Milan Kundera Betrayal as necessity. The betrayer as a father who lets his son fall without catching him, to teach him the cruelties of the world [ . ] akin to [the] description of holy men and gurus, who are said to have a coldness that comes from their holiness, 'as imper­ sonal as nature itself,' echoing the chaos of creation. . . -Samara Hennen I did not fed bad. I did not feel evil. -Dennis Nilsen James Douglas: Is there evil in the world? Baba: No, there is nothing like evil. Douglas: What do you mean? Baba: There is nothing except bliss everywhere. Douglas: How could that be?

Baba: In reality, that is the case. Douglas: Then how would you explain the thousand and one evils in the world, such as theft, murder, rape, treachery, dishonesty, immorality, torture? Can these wickednesses not be considered as evils? Baba: Not necessarily. Douglas: Then what do you call them? What are these to be con­ sidered? Baba: They are more or less of a degree of good itself. Douglas: Oh God, how wonderful. Why couldn't the poets and metaphysicians have explined it in such a straightforward and in­ telligible manner? Baba: As I have said, there is nothing b ut bliss in the world. What the world calls evil is an extremely lower aspect of good. Douglas: Of course, of course. How easy. Why the people of the world cannot understand such a simple thing is surprising. Could you enlighten us as to when the world will understand this simple truth? Baba: When its angle of vision has changed. Douglas: But when? Baba: It is going on internally. -Meher Baba interview with James Douglas There was a man who was a great murderer. In his life he mur­ dered 99 people. One day he felt very depressed and sick of it all. So he went to the Buddha and frankly and openly confessed be­ fore him all his crimes, adding that he was feeling most dejected and wanted to end it all. The Buddha told him to go and sit by the side of a certain road and think of him. The murderer did so. Years passed. 11

One day, while he was sitting there thinking of theBuddha, a rider came by, stopped before him, and told him to move aside. The man refused, and the rider started lashing him with his whip. In­ stantly reverting back to his old ways, the man pulled the rider from his horse and stabbed him . He kille d him . However, at that very moment, the man realised God. The rider was carrying on his person a message from one king to another ordering the death of one hundred spies.By saving the exact number of lives that he had murdered, his good and bad sanskaras balanced.The man, of course, did not know all this, and was only thus saved by theBuddha because the Master knew. Therefore, if you obey implicitly and unquestioningly, you win, because, whereas your conception is limited, the Master knows all, and gives you just what is best for you. -MeherBaba [ ... ] The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, Because each has been sent As a guide from beyond. -Jalal al-din Rumi [Ecstasy] begins where horror is sloughed off. -Georges Bataille The supposed grotesqueries of murder are nothing but auto­ conspiracies designed to have us remain comfortably wallowed in our own rot, dancing and singing the odour of putrefaction (the embodiment of it), instead of drowning each breath in the per­ fume of sphacelation, aware to our mortified condition and born anew from it. -Gary J.Shipley w

�'hat Georges Bataille once termed the 'horror of philosophy,' to refer to the dread fdt by philosophers when making abstract claims of thought, has been taken-up by Eugene Thacker to refer more specifically to a fundamental un­ knowing embedded in the fabric of existence, suggesting the impossibility of our ever comprehending it. For Thacker, as for Bataille, this inherent dread moves the question of existence beyond the grasp of philosophy into the realm of religious and mystical ecstasy where, once sloughed off, along with human­ centric concerns regarding morality-'psychology, desire, motive, free will, and so on'-horror becomes, in this 'radically singular self/world-negation,' what Nicola Masciandaro, after Meher Baba and Rumi above, would term 'individu­ alized salvation or God realization.' The oeuvre of each of these thinkers, in its own disparate way, serves to suggest that the holy exists at the site of the most profane. Uniting their thought is a religious intuition that extends back to pre-modernity, to mystical anatheistic texts that see a sacred excess emerging from the play of opposites. On the other hand, the bodily signature of this excess has become for some nothing more than the stigma of the profane everyday openness of everybody in modernity's 'wound culture': 'the public fascination with tom and open bod­ ies, with tom and open persons' arising from the intersection of private desire and public fantasy in a society based on the spectacle of atrocity (Mark Sdtzer). Central to the movement of the wound expressed, from sacred signature to serial kitsch, is the emergence in modernity of a 'new' ontological type and continuum, serial killing. Bound up with popular notions of the body-machine­ image complex endemic to our digital culture, with its unremitting flow of codes, numbers and letters, the serial killer is said to represent a fundamental break with pre-modern thought and culture, specifically with the scholastic no­ tion of haeccita.r. that which accounts for the individuality of an individual or the individuation of different members of a species. And yet, the most popular re­ frain in this regard, pertaining to the devoid, anonymous, impersonal nature and character of the killer-'living composites,' 'minus men,' whose methods of 'material transportation (bodies) and message transportation' (Sdtzer) bot­ tom out in a flat ontology or desire for total unity, of direct fusion with nature or with an indistinct mass of others: 'a mixing of flesh in a common flame and single unity of ashes [ ...] a uniform anonymous corporation cemetery' (Nil­ sen)-mirrors the self/world-negation sought by the pre-modern mystical tra­ dition, what Bataille would term the indifferent world of 'continuity,' or divini­ ty. Understood thus, the dead-leveling, depersonalization and ambivalent dread that characterizes serial killing unshackles its art from well-worn media tropes, and maps the incomprehensibility of its methods onto questions of ontology, phenomenology, biology, ecology, economy et cetera through corporeality, connecting individual dynamics of hope, fear and horror to larger scale envi­ ronmental, planetary and cosmic dynamics of the same order. lV

In sum, while a great deal has been written on the subject of serial killers, very little has been written alongside them, approaching them as they approach us: without recourse to any of the usual courtesies or mercies, taking what they want, leaving behind new signatures in what remains. The point here, then, is not to construct further taxonomies, or to pin these killers down like so many zoological specimens, but to put their logos and their methods to use, to open them up not merely to observe their workings, but in order that we might fear­ lessly climb inside. Edia Connole & Gary J. Shipley July 2015

I I DON'T KNOW WHY IT STARTED

ALIENS UNDER THE SKIN: SERIAL KILLING AND THE SEDUCTION OF OUR COMMON INHUMANITY David Roden It is common to describe the actions of serial killers as 'inhuman'-as being of the kind that place the perpetrator in a separate category to ordinary humans, even from ordinary criminals. Yet what, if any, sense can be made of this designation? Do serial killers really exit humanity by being prone to commit violent acts? I will argue that there is a way of understanding our humanity that denies it to serial killers and psychopaths. The second question I wish to pose is how the inhumanity of the serial killer, so understood, contributes to our fascination with hyper-competent fic­ tive murderers who-like Dexter Morgan, Paul Spector or Hannibal Lecter­ exhibit all the traits of 'successful psychopaths' regimenting their violent im­ pulses while cultivating a fa�ade of humanity. I first wish to forestall misunderstandings about the terms 'human' and 'inhuman.' It might be satisfying to view the serial killer as a kind of moral monster. Such a view would have been justifiable from within Aristotle's biolo­ gy, in which differences between living creatures are explained by the natural purposes associated with their species. Monsters are accidental deviations from the end or natural purpose associated with their kind. 1 However, the success of Darwinism justifies dissociating biological types from natural ends. A Darwinian kind such as a species cannot be uniform and evolvable. Species can undergo significant changes in their composition due to the effects of selection. Since species are diverse and historically changeable, they are not the kind of entity that can have an essence or an end associated with it. There are no essential properties for humanness. Not all humans have 1 'Problems' and 'Generation of Animals,' in Aristotle, Complete Work! of Aristotle: The &vised 0><.ford Translation, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, �J: Princeton University Press, 1 982), 2:4 878a20, 2: 10 898a9-1 9 and 1 :4 767b5-15, 770b6, respectively; Elliott Sober, 'Evolution, Pop ulation Thinking, and Essentialism,' Philosophy ofScilnce 47, no. 3 (1 980): 362. , 9

David Roden forty-six chromosomes. Not all humans even have the capacity to acquire lan­ guage. Not all humans have a definable gender, and so on. Even if there is ge­ netic sequence that corresponds to the current best adapted organism within a population-the 'wild type'-this need not be the majority and will generally be 'distributed' over optimal mutants at other points in genetic sequence space.2 In consequence biologists tend to regard species as 'distributed concreta' like populations, not as ahistorical essences. For example, Ernst Mayr's 'biolog­ ical species concept' (BSC) explains species differences among sexually repro­ ducing populations in terms of the reproductive compatibility of their mem­ bers. While it is not inconceivable that humans could exit our species by losing their reproductive compatibility with fellow humans, it is implausible to sup­ pose that the violent actions of serial killers are sufficient to achieve this.3 Indeed, it is possible that serial killers represent a destructive manifestation of traits that are adaptive in certain environments. For, real or imagined, the serial killer is usually a psychopath. Psychopathy manifests in different ways­ impulsiveness, fearlessness, insensitivity to social norms, a tendency for atten­ tion to be fixed on a current activity. Psychopaths are typically not bothered by the damage they inflict on others because they are unusually lacking in the ca­ pacity for 'negative feelings like fear and sadness.'4 If, as some studies suggest, psychopathy is highly heritable within human populations, it is a target for Darwinian selection. Traits associated with psychopathy such as risk-taking, lack of empathy, lower stress responsivity and uncooperativeness may be adap­ tive (contributing to reproductive success) where their incidence is low enough to favour predatory strategies. Where individuals exhibiting these are sufficient­ ly 'high functioning' to regulate them they may be particularly successful in set­ tings such as migrations or modem corporate workplaces.s In Posth11man Ufa, I distinguish between the population of narrow humans (roughly, members of our biological species) and the network of non­ biologically human entities that compose cultural and technological niches sup­ porting the distinctive cognitive and moral powers we associated with fully able 2 Manfred Eigen, Steps Towardr Ufe: A Perspective on Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25; Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangero111 Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Ufe (London: Penguin, 1995), 192. 3 For a discussion of some of the ways in which a new posthuman biological species rojght result from technical change, see Nicholas :\gar, Humanity i End· W� We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (Cambridge, �l-\: l\IIT Press, 2010). 4 Jesse Prinz, 'The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgements,' Philoiophical Explorations 9, no. 1 (March 2006): 32. 5 Though the evidence from evolutionary psychology and gene tics is somewhat equivo­ cal. Some psycho logists argue that p sych opathy is a recurrent consequence of mutation. See Glenn, Andrea L., Robert Kurzban, and Adrian Raine. 'Evolutionary theory and p sychopathy, Au,msion And Violent Behavior 16, no. 5 (September 2011): 371-80. ' 10

ALI ENS U N DER TH E SKIN humans. I argue that technological entities (including human-machine hybrids, or cyborgs) belonging to this extended system can be viewed as 'wide humans' so long as they depend on their functioning within it.6 If they were to become autonomous enough to 'go feral' and flourish outside the wide human system, they would become 'posthuman.' But, whether imaginary or real, serial killers depend upon the same 'wide human' cultural and technical infrastructure. Some science fiction dramas en­ \-isage posthuman serial killers, but-like the cheerfully genocidal 'Brother' Cavil in Battlestar Galarnca, or indeed the Terminator-these owe their posthu­ manity to their technical origins rather than their murderous careers. None of the foregoing should be surprising. If we describe Dexter or Hannibal as 'inhuman' we make a claim about their moral character, not their biological taxa. But are such statements any more than an exclamation of moral disgust? Do they not make some kind of truth claim? To see why statements about the inhumanity of serial killers might be apt, I will introduce a species concept that has been proposed by the bioethicist Dari­ an Meacham: the Phenomenological Species Concept (PSC). The PSC is based on our prereflective experience of others' experiential and affective relation to shared human worlds-as having a susceptibility to pain, suffering or joy. Meacham's account of species recognition is based on Husserl's claim that our experience of others involves an empathic awareness of them as having mental states analogous to our own. This phenomenological understanding of the hu­ man is implicit in our recognition of others as members of our moral commu­ nity and entirely independent of contested species concepts-like the BSC­ arising in natural science:7 Empathy, for Husser� entails an immediate apperception (the per­ ceptual presentation of something not immediately present) of another being as having a structure of experience that is analogous to my own; or, empathy is the prereflective experience of another being as having experiences that could potentially be my own­ this need not entail that I actually imagine the experiences of the other as my own. The shared structure of experience is apper­ ceived rather than directly perceived as it is mediated by the ex­ pressivity of the body.a 6 David Roden, Po1thmnan Lft: Philo1opf!.y aJ the Edge of the Human (New York: Routledge, 2014), 105-51 . 7 Darian Meacham, 'Empathy and alteration: the ethical relevance of a phenomenologi­ cal species concept,' The ]011mal Of Medicine And Phi/osopl?J 39, no. 5 (October 2014): 543-64. 8 Meacham, 'Emp a thy and Alteration,' 553; Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditation!: An Introd11clion to Phenomenolo1J1, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: l\fartinus Nijhoff, 1982), 11

David Roden I n his autobiography, Bertrand Russell movingly describes Alfred White­ head's wife, Evelyn, undergoing great physical pain due to an illness: 'She seemed cut off from everyone and everythinE: by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me.'9 Here, Russell records a response that qualifies as 'empathy' in Meacham's sense. There is no suggestion that he felt Evelyn's pain. He feels with her as an embodied person, understanding her pain as the deprivation of a shared world. The experience described by Russell is not an impartial judgment. It is a negative valuation based on an affective experience of 'the other human' shar­ ing my concern for our world. 1bis is a basis for species solidarity prior to any moral judgment, or normative claim regarding; the nature and desirability of that unity.10 Empathy, as Meacham understands it, is intrinsically motivating and normative. The PSC is a precondition for a life governed by a shared set of moral values and an ethics because the people we can 'apperceive' as sharing our way of responding to the world are those to which these shared concep­ tions apply and from which they are derivecl For if we cannot see others as having affective responses like our own, we c:annot share moral practices sensi­ tive to those feelings. Meacham's phenomenological account furnishes an interesting perspective on the phenomenon of psychopathic killers. Psychopaths are capable of inflict­ ing great suffering or death on others without experiencing remorse or really understanding the significance of their victim:s' suffering. Kent Kiehl and Josh­ ua Buckholtz relate an interview with a psychopathic prisoner who described how he kidnapped and raped a woman, then left her for dead after cutting her throat. Immediately following this account, and seemingly oblivious to the hor­ ror he had narrated, the prisoner decided to p·op the interviewer a little relation­ ship advice: 'Do you have a girl?' he asked. 'Because I think it's really im­ p orta n t to practice the three C's-caring, conununication and compassion. That's the secret to a good relationship. I try to prac­ tice the three C's in all my relationships.' Buckholtz notes that the psychopath 'spoke without hesitation, clearly un­ aware how bizarre this self-help platitude sounded after his awful confession.'11 So it seems that, qua psychopaths, serial killer'S will typically lack the preflective 92, 10�16; Edmund Husserl, Cmi! of European S.cienm and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, II: �orthwestem University Press, 1970), 82. 9 Bertrand Russell, Autobiograpl?J (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 137. 10 Meacham, 'Empathy and _\Iteration , 557. 11 Kent_\, Kiehl and Joshua\"{'. Buckholtz, 'Inside! the Mind of a Psychopath,' Scientific American Mind 21, no. 4 (2010): 23. ' 12

ALI ENS U N DER THE SKI N and affective capacities required for a grasp of the PSC. They may-as some research suggests-be able to apply the associated moral concepts in a purdy conventional way.12 But this will not motivate them to regard others as belong­ ing to a common ethical community. Meacham introduces the PSC as means of explaining why the idea of hu­ manity has a moral integrity that could be threatened by the emergence of posthumans-who are no longer human as a consequence of some history of technical alteration.13 The case of psychopaths is asymmetric to posthumans. Posthumans may (or may not) be capable of the kind of suffering or joy that we impute to fellow humans. But (or so Meacham argues) their physical and social nature might be so overtly alien to ours that we would not feel this at a gut level necessary for sustaining a moral community. On the other hand, hyperbolically successful psychopaths are often at­ tributed the power to simulate emotions that they do not have, enabling them to gull non-psychopaths into thinking them capable of empathy. Paul Spector is not just a bereavement councilor-he is an unusually effective one. In Season 2 of The Fall, for example, he is shown developing a therapeutically productive 'rapport' with Annie Brawley, a young woman who has emerged from a coma caused by his vicious attack on her in the previous season.14 The skillset of the hyperbolically successful psychopath is also illustrated in an episode of the 1V series Hannibal, 'Trou Normand.'15 This opens with FBI profiler Will Graham finding himself in Lecter's apartment immediately follow­ ing his attendance at a crime scene involving a grisly totem of bodies by a beach in West Virginia, the three-hour journey between the beach and Lecter's office having been erased from his memory. Lecter affirms his concern for Will and their ongoing friendship on learning of his time-lapse. Yet when Graham, sus­ pecting a medical cause, suggests that he undergo a brain scan, Lecter insists without a trace of irony that Graham has an 'empathy disorder' which requires therapeutic rather than neurological treatment. Lecter's understanding of the proprieties of friendship is divorced from any benevolent feelings. He says what one would be expected to say to a friend in these circumstances. His ability to ply the concept 'friend' without appreciat­ ing its moral import is confirmed in the next episode 'Buffet Froid' when he convinces a neurologist colleague to conceal bis diagnosis of encephalitis from 1 2 Prinz, 'The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgements,' 32. 13 Roden, Posth11111an Ufa, 1 07. 14 The Fall, Season 2: Episode 8, written and directed by Allan Cubitt (Belfast, NI: BBC, November 23 201 4). is H annibal, Season 1: Episode 9, written by Steve Lightfoot, directed by Guille rmo Navarro (:'!cw York: N"'BC, ;\fay 23 201 3). 13

David Roden Graham.16 Thus when Lecter says to Graham, 'I am worried about you, Will ,' on learning of the lapse, he is dissimulating. He is unable to empathize with Graham's suffering and distress but uses his 'theory of mind' to infer that Will mistakenly attributes this affective capacity to him. We can conceptualise this capacity by making a functional distinction be­ tween the ability to represent others' states of mind, which is typically unim­ paired in psychopaths, and the phenomenal state of feeling with another exhib­ ited by Russell.1; The psychologist James Blair refers to the capacity as 'cogni­ tive empathy' and the second as 'affective empathy.' As successful therapists, Lecter and Spector exhibit 'cognitive empathy' to a high degree but lack the phenomenal capacity for feeling which endows that representation with moral motivation. Does it follow that serial killers fail to belong to our phenomenological species by dint of lacking the capacity for affective empathy? I think a plausible case can be made for this exclusion. For two creatures to belong to the same phenomenological species they must be disposed to experience each other as having analogous forms of expe­ rience. This is a pretty permissive condition-it does not require that they have the same experiences (as the Russell example shows) or the same beliefs or val­ ues. Thus the PSC in no way implies cultural relativism, even if it implies a kind of species relativism. ts This requirement is implicitly reflexive, however. The proneness to affec­ tive empathy towards conspecifics is presumably constitutive of membership of a common human world in Meacham's account of the PSC. To experience an­ other as a conspecific I must see them as one who could potentially respond to me in a similar way. Lacking this concern, the other cannot appear to me as a being whose attitudes towards others merit my resentment or approval.19 16 Hannibal, 1:1 0, written by Andy Black, Chris Brancato and Btyan Fuller, directed by John Dahl (New York: NBC, :\lay 30 201 3). 17 E. _-\altola, '_-\ffective empathy as core moral agency: psychopathy, autism and reason revisited,' Philosophfral Explorations 17, no. 1 (2014): 76-92; R. R. J. R. Blair, 'Fine cuts of empathy and the amygdala: Dissociable deficits in psychopathy and autism,' The Q11arler­ !Ji Journa! OfExperimental P!.Jcho!ogy 61, no. 1Ganuaty 2008): 157-70. is Nicholas :\gar spells out the thesis of species relativism as follows: 'According to species-relativism, certain experiences and ways of existing properly valued by members of one species may lack value for the members of another species' (Agar, H11mani!J's End, 12). If two beings belong to different phenomenological species, they cannot share affective states that incline them to value the other's ways of existing, or have 'reactive attitudes' towards the quality of the other's attitudes towards them (see next note). 19 .According to Peter Strawson, the capacity to feel resentment, gratitude and for­ giveness and other so-calle d 'reactive attitudes' are background conditions for under- 14

ALI ENS U N DER TH E SKI N The proneness to share and understand concerns in this way is constitutive of the possession of a PSC. Affectively grasping a PSC is thus a condition for being phenomenologically human and thus of coming within its scope. A being � nor appropriately seen as phenomenologicall y human if they cannot recipro­ cate the affections necessary for possession of human PSC. Psychopathic serial killers cannot, then, qualify as phenomenologically hu­ man-even if, like Graham, we mistake them as such. For by taking them to be phenomenologically human we attribute empathic capacities to them that they dci not possess. If this is so, then why, despite their alienness, does the successful psycho­ pathic killer exercise a continuing allure within contemporary film, television a..rid literary dramas? There could be mixed reasons for this, of course. Those "-ho enjoy masochistic fantasies of domination or harm might find it sexually exciting to identify with the victims of powerful and implacable killers. Similar­ ly, rhose who enjoy sadistic fantasies might enjoy identifying with the serial kill­ er. �!any more presumably find the conflict between phenomenologically hu­ man protagonists and a powerful inhuman killer dramatically compelling. However, there may be a further appeal that goes beyond these tastes, that n-plains why avatars such as Dexter or Hannibal retain their hold on our imag­ inations. I have suggested that we take the serial killer to be phenomenological­ ly alien or inhuman due to their incapacity for empathy, rather than biologically inhuman or posthuman. If we are still drawn to their flame, perhaps this is be­ cause the serial killer discloses the nonhuman nature on which our moral com­ munity depends by withdrawing from it. Their inhumanity is not a consequence of prejudice or exclusionary social practices. Whereas some groups of humans may be arbitrarily excluded from society by the social practices of others, the 'otherness' of the serial murderer is a sport of nature. The serial killer is thus metaphysically alien while occupying a body that is biologically akin to our phenomenological conspecifics. Their dif­ ference is both radical and mundane. They are not biological or technological monsters but part of a nature to which we belong through our shared embodi­ ment. They may be phenomenologically alien, but, in so being, they indirectly manifest the inhuman reality on which the fragile phenomenology of the hu­ man community depends. Phenomenology is, as I have argued elsewhere, striated with 'darkness'­ experiencing it only affords a partial and very fallible insight into its nature.20 standing one another as moral agents. See his 'Freedom and Resentment,' in Frndom and &senlment and Other Essqys (New York: Methuen, 1974). 20 David Rodeo, 'Nature's Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenol­ ogy,' Rnyal In1tit11te OfPhi/osophj1 Suppkment72 (201 3): 1 69-88. 15

David Roden W e are not normally aware of this darkness because, a s Scott Bakker writes, it 'provides no information about the absence of information. '21 However, this opacity can be exhibited from a third-person perspective in cases of 'anosogno­ sia'-conditions where patients are unable to access the fact that they have some sensorimotor deficit, such as blindness, deafness or the inability to move a limb. Sufferers from Anton's syndrome or 'blindness denial,' for example, are blind as a result of damage to visual areas in the brain. But, when questioned they deny that they are blind and attempt to act as if they were not. 22 This shows not only that the people can be radically mistaken about the contents of their conscious experience but that a standard Cartesian impossibility claim­ that we cannot make a perceptual judgment without having a corresponding perception-is false. Minds assumed impossible on the basis of armchair rea­ soning tum out to be quite possible The blindness of the mind to its true nature is also exhibited among unim­ paired agents. We regularly assume that we are authoritative about the reasons for our choices. Yet studies into the phenomenon of 'choice blindness' by Pet­ ter Johansson and Lars Hall suggest that humans can be gulled into attributing reasons to themselves that they did not make. In one case, subjects in a super­ market were asked to rate jams and teas, following which they were apparently presented with samples of the tea or jam they had chosen earlier and asked to explain their choice. In manipulated trials the samples were sneakily switched with samples of different products. Remarkably, less than a half the experi­ mental participants noticed the switch, despite striking differences between the substituted pairs of flavours. The remainder sought retrospective justifications for choices they had not made. Lars and Hall have been able to exhibit choice blindness in moral reason­ ing. In another experiment, subjects were asked to rate their agreement with controversial moral claims in a survey form. Unbeknownst to the experimental subjects, the pages with the original rated statements were switched for subtly altered sentences expressing contrary moral daims. However, when asked to review and discuss their rating, a majority of e:<perimental subjects confabulated reasons for moral positions opposing the ones that had earlier embraced.23 Phenomena such as choice blindness and anosognosia suggest that our in­ sight into subjectivity depends on a fallible process of self-interpretation that is 21 R. Scott Bakker, 'Back to Square One: Towardls a Post-Intentional Future,' Sdentia Salon, http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/201 4 /11 /05/back-to-square-one-toward-a­ post-intentional-furure (accessed 08-01-1 5). 22 Thomas :\Ietzinger, Being No One: The Se!f-Model Theory of S11bje<tivity (Cambridge, �L\: MIT Press, 2004), 429-36. :?3 Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and David de Leon� 'Recomposing the will: Distributed motivation and computer-mediated Extrospection,' in Decomposing the Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 298-324; 303-4. 16

ALI ENS UN DER TH E SKI N subjectively 'transparent' and immediate only because we are not aware that it is .1 process at all. Thomas Metzinger calls this constraint 'autoepistemic closure.' B:.- \-irtue of it, the vivid world 'out there' and our vital, rich 'inner' life appear :iot to be models or interpretations only because we are not aware of concoct­ mg them. 24 Metzinger argues that phenomenology is systematically misleading about what phenomenology really is because it needs to be. A system that modeled melf and attempted to model that modeling process in tum (and so on) would !'e<:juire infinite representational resources. Phenomenological darkness thus pre,·ents the self-interpreter from becoming entangled 'in endless internal loops of higher-order self-modeling.'25 It is thus reasonable to argue that the anti­ reductionist intuition that subjective experience is inexplicable in terms of non­ subjective physical or computational processes is an artifact of this phenome­ nological darkness.26 From this account it follows that, while psychopaths and serial killers are phenomenological aliens in virtue of their incapacity for empathy, we are all alien to ourselves epistemically. The non-subjective nature that sustains our experience of humanity and generates the background hum of sentience does not belong to the 'manifest image' expressed in Meacham's formulation of the p5e,21 We can become aware of this inhuman side of ourselves whenever it per­ turbs our experience in ways that we cannot own. For example, when we are oYertaken by states (e.g. moods or obsessions) contrary to the desires and pro­ jects that we ascribe to ourselves. The phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas argues that the experience of insomnia is not of a human agent striving to sleep but of a fundamentally impersonal wakefulness: 'This impersonality absorbs my ::4 :y{etzinger, Being·No·One, 57. � Ibid., 338. 26 27 Ibid., 436. 'Manifest image' is Wilfred Sellars term for culturally achieved conceptual framework 'in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world'-i.e. as a rational agent or person among other people, things, actions and mental states. The manifest image is distinguished from the 'scientific image' which represents the world in terms of the ontology of the current best scientific theories. If :Meacham is correct, of course, subjects must fulfill both affective and cognitive conditions to adopt it See Wtlf'red Sellars, 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,' in Frontiers of Science and Philosop�, Robert Colodny, ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 35-78. 17

David Roden consciousness' consciousness is depersonalized. I do not stay awake: "it" stays awake.'28 In The Thing: A Phenome110/ogy of Homr, Dylan Trigg argues that this experi­ ence of the psychic thing is symptomatic of a material embodiment that escapes it-a 'specter' independent of perception or intention. Following Levinas, he equates the experience of the spectral materiality of the world with horror-an inhuman void yawning beneath our lived and shared world.29 The figure of the psychopath-killer confirms that the human world of the PSC is dependent on this common inhumanity. The inhuman condition of the human is thus fundamentally ambivalent-an occasion for horror, perhaps, but also a signature of alien pa ssi ons that might overcharge our nondescript human ones, could our frail bodies but allow it. The phenomenological species implies a boundary on communal norms, against which the psychopath poses a figure of i ts fragility and contingency. In terms borrowed from Jacques Derrida, we could say that the psycho­ path par ticipates in the human without belonging ro ir.3° For he or she implies a possibility of the absolute extirpation of the manifest image. This is the 'seman­ tic apocalypse' obsessively discussed by the protagonists of Bakker's ultra-dark, near-future thriller, Nmropath. It is the moment at which science's propensity to expunge meaning from the world is applied recursively to thinkers, lea ving a reality devoid of thought or purpose, one in which there are 'innumerable caus­ es for everything, but no reasons for anything.'31 The boo k's main antagonist, Neil C assidy, seems, at first, cut from the cloth of the high-functioning psychopathic villain. A brilliant rogue neuroscien­ tist, Cassidy employs technologies acquired during his work for the US gov­ ernment's anti terrorist program to warp human mind/brains into shapes of his own devising. Ear ly in the novel, we learn that he has surgically altered the neu­ ral reward systems of a young porn star inducing her to lacerate herself to death on video while experiencing multiple organisms.32 Likewise, a ham-again tele­ vangelist is forced to alternate between the torments of the damned and bouts of religious ecstasy while Cassidy undertakes an inquisitorial dissection of his faith.33 As Steven Shaviro points out in a chapter on the novel in his forthcoming book on philosophical science fiction, the epistemological double bind in which 28 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 49. Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomeno/.ogy ofHorror (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014), 53. 30 Jacques Derrida, 'The Law of Genre,' trans. Avita! Ronell, in Ads of Uteraturr, Derek _-\ttridge, ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), 227-8. 31 R. Scott Bakker, Neuropath (London: Orion, 2010), Kindle edition. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 29 18

ALI ENS U N DER TH E S KI N Smropath cultivates leaves the reader unable to apply convenient motivations or iabels like 'psychopath' to Cassidy. For he has used these same neurotechnolo­ gies to 'subtract' his own illusions of selfhood and empathic communion.34 Cassidy, it transpires, is a beta-test-version of what, in Posthnma11 Ufa, I refer to as a 'hyperplastic entity'-an agent able to manipulate itself at the physical or functional level to an arbitrary degree. 35 Antireductionist materialists like Sellars and Donald Davison insis t that since p sychology, unlike physics, is governed by norms of rationality, strict psy­ chophysical laws relating physical states and contentful mental states are impos­ sible.36 For the anti-reductionist this justifies our use of psychological vocabu­ lary, blunting arguments for the elimination of the human world of reasons and meanings while, at the same time, leaving the natural science sovereign in their own sphere. However, unlike the cognitively empathic psychopath, the hyper­ plastic can make no use of psychology to understand or predict the conse­ quences of its manipulations . A sufficiently advanced neurotechnology, then, would imply the redundancy and effective elimination of reasons for the very reasons the anti-reductionist takes them to be ineliminable! Thus, as Shaviro shows, Cassidy (or rather his brain) has 'overcome' the perspective from which _\,-e11ropath--or any story-can be read by us.37 Perhaps, as the psychology pro­ fessor at Cassidy's alma mater claims, the serial psychopath bares involuntary testimony to this view from nowhere: For Professor Skeat, psychopaths were nothing less than the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Contemporary culture had digested the meaninglessness of natural events, the fact they were indiffer­ ent to all things human. A few stubborn fools still shook their fists at God, but most simply shrugged their shoulders. Mos t knew bet­ ter, no matter how ardently they prayed What made psychopaths so indigestible, Skeat claimed, what drove culture to lather them with layer after layer of cinematic and textual pearl was that they were humans who were indifferent to all things human. They were natural disasters personified. They were talking gnosis, secret knowledge, an expression of the nihilistic truth of existence. And this, Skeat insisted, was why psy- 3-1 Steven Shaviro, 'On Scott Bakke r's Neuropath' (forthcoming). 35 Roden, Posthuman Ufa, 1 01-3. 36 See Donald Davidson, 'Mental Events,' Essqys on Actions and Events (Oxford: Claren­ don Pre ss 2001), 207-25. 37 Bakke r, Neuropath. , 19

David Roden chopaths were the only holy men, the only real avatars left to hu­ mankind.38 In his contribution to this volume, Dominic Fox suggests that a sadistic in­ terest in another's suffering does not imply an absence of empathy but, rather, presupposes it. If Lecter cannot respond to his victim's pain and distress, what value can his predatory behaviour have to him? This question is only prompted, not answered, by imagined serial killers. It is possible that many fictive serial killers are impossible chimeras. But our inability to put oursdves in their shoes is also a fictive empathic failure on our part. It invites us to suppose that there could be agents whose relationship to their world is fundamentally unlike our own in ways that elude our grip on phenomenological possibility. Beyond Lecter or Spector, then, lies the thing that was Cassidy and (who knows?) the spectral materiality of the hyperplastic. Llke demons pawing at our pentagram with nootechnical erasers, they descry 'the edge of the human.' Georges Batailles attributes a not dissimilar role to sacred and erotic experience in his heterological account of human culture (See Fred Batting's 'Bataille s' Vampire' and Brooker Buckingham's 'A Gulp of Sun' in this volume) . Fictions such as Lecter or Cassidy also figure the transgression of community and nor­ mativity. Yet their 'gnosis' is not a sovereign or sacrificial violence. They only hint at darker than dark phenomenologies, the threshing 'of something vast and terrible with complexity.'39 Perhaps, for the Skeats of this world, this is the only transgression that remains viable: the transgression that annuls transgression. It seems that we are drawn to the serial kill er not because we admire their actions or identify with their prey, but because they intimate a reality deeper or more capacious than our parochial human world. The hyperbolically powerful serial killer may, then, entice us with the prospect of a weird transcendence, hidden in the defiles of an inhuman nature. 3 8 Ibid. 39 Jbid. 20

VISCERAL INCREDULITY, OR SERIAL KILLING AS NECESSARY ANATHEMA Gary J. Shipley After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures. -Peter Kiirten \\"ELCO:ME ABROAD \\�ill we hear the bodies when they say goodbye? Will the blood speak? Will we sleep through its noise if it does, through this noise of our own waiting? Fol­ lowing on from Kiirten's own terminal longings, these questions will prove suf­ ficient to pull apart the sickening, cum animated-yet-already-festering, soma of what passes for our torpid, dreamlike moral excursions. For the serial killer does not only kill us in multitudes, he kill s our easy means of disapproving of him doing so. He is like the hernia we allowed to escape, that we didn't have the muscle to contain, that we allowed to swim in our fat and to extrude into me world on a whim; the hernia that turned out to be useful despite its ugliness, and while it's a forced symbiosis, it is not one we can easily return from, or should necessarily want to: if we imagine our moral sanitation to operate like fish parasitized by Cymothoa exigua, then maybe the time has come to correct rhis invidious collaboration by doing what we can to precipitate its righteous starving to death. While being inimical to the processes of reasoned ethical discourse, the construct of 'evil' is at the same time the most prevalent manifestation of its inherent incompleteness, acting as placeholder-a semblant impletion-for an integral lacuna, a hinterland of comprehension that s tands both as proof of mo­ rality's abiding relevance to selfhood and self-creation, and as a means of lazy abdication from the real business of personal and social responsibility. Our in­ \'ariably messy and thrown together concept of evil (of which the serial kill er provides the most convenient embodiment) exists both inside and outside the margins of our ethical understanding: from the inside it corrupts and distorts the dialogue for which it will always remain a dishonest anathema, while from 21

Gary J. Shipley the outside it illustrates the very actuating and perpetual force of morality itself. It is then necessary (within the context of our ethical formulas) that we end up not properly understanding these aberrant individuals, these men and women who deviate so extremely in their behaviour that any comprehensive placement within our moral schemas is thought (without ever consciously being thought) too disruptive: to understand evil would be to strip it of ambiguity, and by so stripping inculcate our primary network of devation with monsters from which we can no longer escape. 'Evil' is the term we use when somewhat more bal­ anced terminology doesn't seem strong enough to express our confusion and disgust: 'It isn't false to call a mass murder bad, but if nothing more occurs to you when faced with a pile of corpses you have seen as much, and as little, as a man who calls a Vermeer portrait pretty. '1 In light of this, it should not be con­ sidered a term in the rational employ of ethics, but rather as nothing more rea­ soned than an expression of visceral incredulity-and considered as such, as a defence mechanism, it like all defence mechanisms reveals an underlying weak­ ness whose task it is to not only fortify but shroud. WHAT CAN I DO? / W'HO CAN I BE? Ruminating on his career as a philosopher, Gregory McCulloch shares a mo­ ment of candid self-appraisal: 'I accept that it is logically and physically possible that tomorrow I should throw it all in, but I cannot see it as a live possibility, as a possibility for me. '2 This notion o f 'live possibilities' is crucial. For while we might be clearly aware of our own live possibilities, those of others ' are not so evident:3 we broaden the scope of others ' possibilities in a way that we do not do internally. As far as any specifically moral agency is concerned, we most of­ ten find our live possibilities to be severely curtailed by diverse yet intercon­ nected strictures, the live agency we can actually lay any kind of claim to dis- 1 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative Hidory of Philosophy• (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xv. 2 Gregory :-.kCulloch, Using Sartre: An Anafytical Introduction to Earfy Sartrean Themes (London and �ew York: Routledge, 1 994), 65. 3 Thomas Nagel claims that you and I 'are unable to view ourselves simply as portions of the world, and from inside we have a rough idea of the boundary between what is us and what is not, what we do and what happens to us, what is our personality and what is an accidental handicap. We apply the same essentially internal conception of the sdf to others' (Thomas Nage� ':\!oral Luck,' Mortal Questiom [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1 979], 37). This account of the application of our internal conception of ourselves to others is only partially accurate, and its mistake is to ignore a crucial differ­ ence between the inevitable narrowing of our own possibilities, and our failure (in most cases) to apply this narrowing process to others. 22

VISCERAL I NCREDU LITY unctly limited. Although we no doubt overestimate our own live options on occasion, we frequently and grossly overestimate the live options of others.4 \\ben focusing exclusively on the acts of others we consider immoral, we tend, by processes of dissimilation, to overestimate our own moral worth; whereas the more we focus on the characters of these others, th e more uncomfortable 14-e feel, the more we feel like excuses and justifications are being made for what '\.\--C ardently believe cannot be excused or justified.5 We somehow disapprove of the resultant diagnosis of reasons (comprising the other's physical, sociological and psychological history)6 and desperately grapple for sufficient leverage to illow us to disassociate ourselves from what internally we'd be far more in­ clined to view as a distinctly causal process-believing that the possibility must exist for something like the following statement to be true: 'If it were me in their situation, I would have acted differently.' However, statements of this kind are, if not trivial, problematically reliant on a highly suspicious understand­ ing of personal identity, without which they make little sense, grounded, as they are, in a failure to apply the narrowing of live options to others with any degree of consistency. The less we know about the lives of serial killers, their sense of powerlessness maybe, their brain chemistry, their abusive childhoods, etc., the • With the exception of those close and well known to us, whose live options we tend ro reduce: in a sense, we internalize them by doing so. s Gus Van Sant's movie Elephant (2003) has been criticised for its failure to ask why two high school boys chose to perpetrate mass murder, choosing instead to just present events in a matter-of-fact way with little or no effort made to understand the killers' motives \s a result of this, the movie's style provides perfect comment on the fact that whatever reasons Van Sant may haYe presented they would have been dismissed as msufficient. Nothing he could have dispensed to his audience would have expiated for me crime, and yet dispensing that nothing was itself considered unacceptable. _'\n audi­ ence demands reasons just so that it can have something to reject See Elephant, directed by Gus Van Sant (2003; New York: Fine Llne Features, 2004), DVD. �· \\Then does explaining become justifying? At what point do the details of a particular e\-il act or series of evil acts provide sufficient reason for the evil in question? Is there a point at which the right kind of detail provides the act with 'comparative reasonable­ ness'? There is a definite sense in which an evil act can start to make sense given certain details, where the act appears to be consistent with those details. But does this Coher­ entist response amount to a moral justification, an expiation of the serial killer's habits? The serial killer forces us outside the tramlines of the moral dialogue and into mere exercises in sense-making, into the means by which \Ve might alleviate (although never completely appease) our state of visceral incredulity. If we consider what Mark Seltzer has called, 'the endless rituals of noncomprehension that continue to sw:round the seri­ al killer' (Serial Killers: Death and Lift in America '! Wo1111d C11lt11re [London and New York: Routledge, 1 998], 9), we see that despite all the years spent profiling and interviewing serial killers, our default state when considering such individuals is one of defiant in­ scrutability. . • 23

Gary J . Shipley better we feel about our own moral sanitation. Few of us want evil e:i..."Plained away in terms that leave us morally superior only by chance.7 We like to think that whatever may have happened to us, and however different things might have been, we would neYer have acted in similarly despicable ways: a nonsensi­ cal delusion grounded (hidden fearing discovery) in an erroneous conception of what it is to be the people we are. The problem with this claim, then, is th at it either lacks consequence alto­ gether, or else is grounded in an inaccurate widening of the live options of oth­ ers. For we are either saying that we would not have acted in such a way, given the way we are, which is trivial giYen the dispos itions we happen to have; or we are saying that there was a live option present to avoid s aid acts that we, even while hypothetically adopting the perpetrator's relevant physical, sociological and psychological background, would envisage ourselves acting upon. This is desperate and clumsy at bes t. Following Bernard Willi ams, we should be asking what it is we mean when we say things like, 'I could have been somebody else,' 'I might not have exis ted,' or 'I might h ave been Napoleon.' For as Williams points out, if we push these claims to their logical conclusions, then they seem to imply that there is nothing more to being me than some form of C artesian ego or hub of consciousness. This would be the case if we wis hed to say that my being Napoleon wouldn't actually change anything about Napoleon, beyond the fact that he would be me. But then what could this portable 'I' (employed in imagining I was Napoleon) actually be? If it is me then it is not Napoleon that is being imagined; if it's some featureless Cartesian 'I' then where is my peculiar 'I' in this picture? Williams, in accord with Gilbert Ryle, claims that imagination should be assimilated with pretending and that 'only two people need figure: the real me and Napoleon. There is no place for a third item, the Cartesian "I."'8 So while being able to imagine being Napoleon, we cannot fathom what would constitute my actually having been Napoleon, for imagining being Napo­ leon doesn't involve my in any way having identity relations to him. In fact my imagining being someone else is not really about me. What happens is that I imagine how certain events would have transpired, or will transpire, as experi­ enced by this someone else, without ever really entering into that which is imag­ ined. Williams writes that 'the imagination is too tricky a thing to provide a reli­ able road to the comprehension of what is logically possible.'9 His point being, 7 The problem of evil in its more traditional, theological, guise is in many respects the problem of how to link sin with suffering, evils done and evils endured. What better candidate, in the absence of God, than the killer-as-victim? In the killer-as-victim we have a combination of both moral (or man-made) evil and natural evil: killer as brutal­ ized individual (moral) and biologically-impaired (natural) individual. 8 Bernard Williams , Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 973), 44. 9 Ibid., 45. 24

VISCERAL I NCREDULITY � t the fact that I can imagine being such-and-such a person in n o way grounds any metaphysical claims that seek to establish my possibly being rdat­ ed by identity to such and such a person. This, I argue, goes for moral claims as ""--ell as metaphysical ones, in particular, moral claims that seek to establish an clented sense of culpability for such-and-such a person. When I imagine I ;-ould have acted differently had I been him (a serial killer, for instance) I can­ not really be putting mysdf in his skin in a way that is both illuminating and metaphysically palatable: for either I allow mysdf to subsume him, become subsumed by him, or posit the existence of some dubious third entity-the portable something as nothing. i o It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's contention that salvation equates to sdf­ icnowledge, its centrality to our flourishing being as clear as its achievement is difficult-its difficulty being the result of our tendency to succumb all too easi­ i:o to the corruptive machinations of self-deception. More specifically, he u-arned against the danger of seeking self-knowledge through the opinions of others. Rousseau extolled the virtue of satisfaction found not in the 'testimony' of others, but in that of one's own, of self-knowledge as foundational good. He ·.�;rote of the emptiness of the over-socialized man, and of how once everything !S ·reduced to appearances, everything becomes factitious and play-acting: hon­ or, friendship, virtue, and often even vices in which one at length discovers the secret of glorying; how, in a word, forever asking of others what we are, with­ out ever daring to ask it of ourselves, in the midst of so much Philosophy, hu­ manity, politeness, and Sublime maxims, we have nothing more than a deceiv­ mg and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness .'1 1 He argued that men are throughout their lives often 'quite unlike themselves,' continually looking outward for what can only : In the initial two books of &li!fan within the Boundaries ofMere &ason, Kant develops a notion of 'radical evil' (a philosophical correlative of the Christian doctrine of original sin) and the moral conversion (a philosophical correlative of the Christian doctrine of redemption) necessary if one is ever to overthrow it. According to Kant, individual human beings are responsible for bringing radical evil upon themselves, and are like­ �:ise responsible for extricating themselves from its grip. Kant characterises radical evil in terms of inverted maxims: the abandoning of the categorical imperative as the cardi­ nal principle of choice in favour of willing only the satisfaction of one's own ends. In order to prevail over radical evil one must effect a 'change of heart' within one's self, thereby reinstating the categorical imperative as the cardinal principle of choice. But such universalized possibilities and the resultant moral conversions they can occasion remain distinctly mysterious, relying as they do, once again, on distinctly dubious no­ tions of self and extravagant attributions of free will See Immanuel Kant &ligion within :he B o11ndaries of Mere &ason And Other Writings, Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 998), 31-92. '1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Political lf?ritings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge l'Diversity Press, 1 997), 1 87. , 25

Gary J . Shipley be found inside. Here we can see obvious correlations with Heidegger's con­ cerns regarding Dasein's inauthentic submission to the they-self, for according to Heidegger, our everyday mode of being is inauthentic: 'Everyone is the oth­ er, and no one is himself. The "they," which supplies the answer to the ques­ tion of the "who" of everyday Dasein, is the "nobody" to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-other.'12 It is this very dis­ burdening of one's Being that we see acted out not only in the serial killer's habit of feeding on his type (the looping effect) in order to nourish his sense of identity, his internal experience of himself and the world around him;B but also, as will become apparent, in the moral substance we so easily accrue through the flagitious misdeeds of others. Hegel, and F. H. Bradley in his wake, sought to establish the recognition of others as integral to our self-knowledge, our identity, our moral being. Both proponents of the ethics of self-realization they pressed the thought that man is essentially social and that the self that ought to be realised is none other than that core socialized self. Bur aware of the pitfalls they also stressed the im­ portance of self-identity, for although self-realization is ultimately social it also requires the existence of a self with a distinguishing presence of its own, as it is only through others' recognition of this self-consciousness that the self­ consciousness truly exists. The issue with the serial killer is that it is not his own individuality that is confirmed and acknowledged by others, but rather a type external to himself, of which he is a mere instantiation. The danger here, then, lies not in realizing the social aspect of the self, but in the social being incorpo­ rated into a self that is not merely defined in terms of its relations to others, relations that are integral to its identity, but a self whose very need for recogni­ tion is itself undermined from without, lacking the individuality necessary for ownership of any confirmation subsequently received (the cracks in the void's containment failing to assimilate/ enclose influence from without). If, as Bradley claims, the self is necessarily 'penetrated, infected, characterized by the exist­ ence of others,'14 then the self, such as it is, of the serial killer is such that any penetration, infection or characterization that occurs has as its object some­ thing already subjugated to otherness: the individual self that the recognition of others might help fulfil is already lost to the generality of a type, construction of self replaced by tokenization of that type, thus in part bypassing 'the great ef­ fort of construction that is living.'t 5 12 l\ fartin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J ohn Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1 962), 16H. 13 See Ian Hacking, Re111riting the Soul: M.ultipk Personality and the Sciences ofMemory (Prince­ ton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1 995), 2 1 ; Seltzer, Serial Killers, 107. 14 F. H. Bradley, Ethical S111dies (Oxford: Oxford University Pres s , 1 988), 1 72. 1 5 Clarice Lispector, The Pa1sion According to G.H. (London and New York: P enguin Books, 201 2), 4. 26

VISCE RAL I NCREDULITY 'While analysing an d critiquing the J\.iarquis d e Sade's prescription o f apathy ·a necessary divorcement from others), as a route to 'voluptuous toughness,' Pierre Klossowski happens upon what amounts to a strikingly accurate adum­ bration of the serial kill er: 'If the other is no longer anything for me, and if I am :lathing for the other, how can these acts be performed since, in effect, they would turn out to be the acts of a nothing on a nothing?'16 Serial kill ers find their identity in non-identity and have their normalcy and non-person status reinforced by the profilers, writers, filmm akers, etc. that use them as their sub­ ?ect matter. They are just like you and me-you cannot distinguish them-and yet they are monsters. (And 'monsters' is no throwaway term, for a Franken- 5tein-like focus on the ready compartmentalisation of bodies is common .amongst serial killers, as parts come away all the easier from a whole that was never comprehensibly encountered-either in themselves or in others-in the first place: whether it be Peter Sutcliffe obsessively viewing waxworks of torsos r.ddled with venereal disease, or Dennis Nilsen arranging mirrors so that his O'\\'n head was missing from the reflected image-before then proceeding to remove the head of the victim for real-or Albert Fish's fetishization of 'pee­ wees' and asses, or the Black Dahlia killer, or the fact that 'Fred West was inter­ ested only in parts of people-usually their depersonalized genitals-rather than in whole, integrated human beings,' 17 to name a few.) The serial killer is a miscreation, an embodiment (rather than a personification) of the hidden be­ hind the seen, the thing, the murderous ghost in the machine. They represent our ultimate distance from the inner lives of others (and even of ourselves); they are the self-replicating theoretical zombies that should not exist,te the alien entities that assimilate as they consume-the leaking nothings. lbis same occlusion of inner vacuity can be witnessed at large in the blood test scene in J ohn Carpenter's film The Thing. 1 9 The setting is a research station m Antarctica, and the titular thing a formless alien being that somehow manag­ es to precisely replicate the anatomy of whatever living entity it penetrates. The :� Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle,' in Marquis de Sade, The 120 D'!)'s ofSodom and O ther Writings, trans. Austtyn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (London: _\rrow Books, 1 990), 84. ;- Gordon Bum, Happy Like M11rderm (London: Faber and Faber, 1 998), 1 86. i 8 O r a close approximation: see Robert Kirk, Raw Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 994). Or as Joyce Carol Oates has Quentin P. (her aspiring zombie-maker in the mould of Jeffrey Dahmer) put it: 'For a true ZOMBIE could not say a thing that was not, only a thing that was. His eyes would be open & clear but there would be nothing !.nside them seeing. & nothing behind them thinking' Ooyce Carol Oates, Zombi e [Lon­ don and New York: Penguin Books, 1 996), 49). : ·1 Cf. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what 1t means to be a person?' (Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star [New York: �ew Direc­ tions, 1 992), 1 5) . 27

Gary J . Shipley test is designed to show which (if any) o f the group o f researchers is an alien entity, and whic h of them remain human. On the premise that every part of the alien is a whole with a built in desire to p rotect its own life, Macready sets up and conducts a test in which he attacks each man's blood with a hot wire to see if the blood reacts and attempts to defend itself, thereby identifying the donor as an alien. The first character he tests, Windows, appears nervous as the hot wire approaches a Petri dish of his blood-backing away from the dish, his eye s fixed on the p rocedure to the point of lunacy-and is visibly relieved when the test proves negative, the blood merely smoking from the heat of the wire. Simi­ lar reactions are seen in the other, ultimately uncontaminated, tes t subjects: Nauls , Childs, and Garry . Then Macready says, 'Now I'll show you what I al­ ready know,'2° and puts the wire in a dish of his own blood with the same nega­ tive result. But how is it that Macready can predict, with something approach­ ing certainty, the result of his own test, dis playing no visible signs of doubt , when the other test subje ct s had backed away or squirmed in their seats patent­ ly uncertain of their own identities? The answer is that Macready takes his in­ ternal states, his thought processes, to be evidential in relation to his physical reality, his worldly mani fes tation He doesn't require objective validation of his . mental states in order to tru s t them. Macready, then, is presuming that if he were an alien, a Thing, he'd somehow know it. The others, however, don't ap­ pear able to make the leap to this most natural of presumptions. They need their interiors to be confirmed from outside. But what of the moral implications of .Macready's certitude? Theodor Adorno maintains that 'it is part of morality not to be at home with oneself,'2 1 and this phrase captures quite perfectly the idea of morality as a creative pro­ cess, morality as the construction of an internal world, an internal world with obvious implications for the external world, but not one wholly constructed from it, a state which precludes the possibility of completion. A home can nev­ er be made of the self, as it must always be auto-deconstructing in order to ac­ commodate its future, and it is this perpetual unmaking of self that is the es­ s ence uf Lhe sdf':s creat.ivily aml all moral engagement. Any crc::a tive proces s must be incomplete in the face of an unknown future. Macready, while accept­ ing the wider po s sibility of encroachment from without, remains implacably defined by networks of internal procedures that themselves unfold a presence which in lieu of its own notional transience strikes him as owned and dependa­ ble. When it comes time to test Palmer , the only alien in the room, he sits quiet­ ly awaiting the outcome, until a positive result causes him to mutate and ex- 20 See The Thing, directed by John Carpenter (1 982; California: Universal Studios, 1 998; 2005), D\TI. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: &flection.r On A Dllllaged Lift (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1 951), 41 . 21 28

VISCERAL I NCREDULITY piode into a killing frenzy. In similar fashion, the serial killer, once having wit­ nessed his nature outside of himself (in the form of a corpse he has produced) , becomes the type of being that does such things, as if the first were an experi­ ment, a means of viewing himself.22 Once his identity has, if you like, been con­ Srmed to himself, he finds it almost impossible to refrain from further murder­ ous acts, further external disclosures-as Mark Seltzer puts it: 'the self­ duplication of an inanimacy, a lifelike lifelessness, within.'23 Seltzer presses the centrality of this practice, explaining how '[i]nteriors are simultaneously opened ro Yiew and exteriorized or expelled: as if those interiors can only be recognized or acknowledged to the extent that they lie outside the self,' and of how ' [r] epetitive killing [ . . . ] becomes an experiment in self-witnessing.'24 Despite its crudity, its literalism, this form of self-awareness is nevertheless ;ignificant when it comes to ow: everyday moral discourse, because it serves to highlight the importance of self-awareness, of self-construction. According to this picture of the serial killer, they are yet to cultivate a strong enough sense of self, prior to enactment, to allow them a level of access to their future actions that we have come to expect from (what we consider to be) fully-fledged per­ sons. They are waiting to see what they do in order to see what they are, and engagement with the moral dialogue requires the exact opposite of this. This selt:alienated form of self-disclosure involves an abandonment of the tradition­ al sequence which leads an agent from purpose to the realisation of that pur­ pose: it is to estrange yourself from the defining nature of yow: motivations, to sacrifice the internal for the sake of the external, to construct a self for which vou have already relinquished responsibility. Macready doesn't have to wait and see in order to know what he is. He has enough self-knowledge to allow him to predict with some certainty his own external reality. This is because his internal reality is (at some core level) his external reality-there is no fundamental sepa­ ration here. (And while the legitimacy of this stance may well be questionable, it 1s the attitude itself that's crucial i.e. that of its being seen to play out in the world as being somehow inevitable.) The moral dialogue allows you access to yourself: you know what you are capable of because you have lived it internally, m your imagination-an imaginational act not hampered by any transposition .::: C£ 'Every disease is an identification' (E .M. Cioran, Dra1V11 andQ11artend (New York: . _\rcade Publishing, 201 2) , 1 1 9). Our predilection for turning serial killers into amoral processes loosely dressed in the skin of human beings and the sentiments of persons confirms this diagnosis. There is even the recognition that they might be mapped in similar ways. See Le Comber et al, 'Geographic profiling as a novel spatial tool for tar­ geting infectious disease control,' International Journal of Health Geographies 1 0.35 (201 1), anilable from http:// www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/ 10/1 /35 (accessed 27- 05-1 5). =-' :4 Sdtzer, Serial Killers, 1 92. Ibid., 191-2. 29

Gary J . Shipley of identity, as witnessed in Williams' examples. Self-ownership of this kind i� grounded in the hypothetical scenarios and make-believe futures that are them­ selves necessitated by the moral dialogue, and it is this constant reassessment that is the source of Adomoian self-alienation, a self-alienation that we've come to accept as our defining moral sensibility: a self-alienation that is itself tanta­ mount to selfhood. Serial killers are identified with their victms from without and mirror this attribution internally, repetitively mapping out their subjective presence with a series of corpse-shaped self-disclosures. 1bis internecine transmutation of inner self into outer sel f is the reason why we see them less as people and more as amoral processes (instances of possession almost) , processes which in turn trig­ ger our labelling them as evil, an evil grounded in nothing more cogent than our own visceral incredulity. Self-witnessing in this way is, of course, not con­ fined to serial killers. We can all experience it. But the crucial difference is that most have already identified themselves with their intentions, and hope to do justice to a self-image that has already been partly constructed, whereas the non-person, the serial killer as is claimed, is constructing himself from his acts and thereby doing justice not to a self-image but an external type, of which he now sees himself tokenizing. Engagement with the moral dialogue constructs something that actualities can inform and possibly shape, whereas functioning outside it constructs internalized actualities that are unstable, transitory and im­ personal. And this notion of the serial killer as void, as zombielike and person­ le ss , is to be found in the language of the serial killers themselves: in the words of Henry Lee Lucas, 'I think it was just the hands doing it.' 1bis deference to the whims of the body, to that which is somehow beyond their conscious con­ trol, is not mere posturing in the service of some tedious self-exoneration, but instead a recognition of where it is the alterity of their mode of existence actual­ ly resides, recognition of their conscious life as 'essentially reactive,' and of how only their bodies are active, and that 'there can only be science [and any kind of objective answer to the deeds they find themselves doing] where there is no consciousness,'25 no consciousness to obscure and mystify their undeniable involvement. THE EXTRA1ERRESTRIAL PERSONAS OF EVIL There is more than a taste for the pornography of evil; there are all the signs of full-blown dependency. Pornography, at its purest level, exhibits a lean, sinewy transaction, a communion bereft of the mundane truths and frustrations usually 25 Gille s Deleuze, NitlZfthe and Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 39. 30

VISCERAL I NCREDULITY L5sociated with human interaction. Uncluttered of extraneous purpose and em­ P"·Hhetic openings, stripped down to essence, it is this very purity of purpose dut provides the primary stimulus. The thrill is there in the contrivance and the SJ.me is true of evil: a similarly sinewy concept, relying heavily on its explanatory 7oids, a flattened space in which the contours of contextual detail (allowing us ru see histories and psychologies outside this space) have been made inaccessi­ bk These people-shaped things fuck and these ones get fucked; these one kill md these ones get killed. It is the mark branded on certain types of humans who do certain types of things, but somehow its purpose is always its own, that rif doing some evil: it is self-sufficient and its practitioners are consumed by its brand, the arbitrary details of their history, brain function, and mental condition being listed almost as symptoms of evil rather than its facilitators. It is no sur­ prise that the serial killer is seen as and indeed sees him/herself as type: 'a type of person, a body, a case history, a childhood, an alien life form.'26 The person reduced to his active capacity for evil, the person reduced to the negation of itself.:.!7 personhood Susan Neiman writes of Sade that his 'portraits of pure evil fascinate be­ cause they are rare,'28 and the reason why such portraits are so atypical lies in rhe anonymity that pure evil imposes on its subject. To be in a state of conti.nu:: Sdtzer, Serial Killers, 4. ;- In the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, :Michael Rooker's depiction of the real-life $erial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, and Tom Towles's depiction of his accomplice, Ottis Toole Gust Otis in the film), is such that despite the comparability of their crimes we find our sympathies, such as they are, lying with Henry. Both are sadistic killers devoid of remorse, and yet, alongside Otis, Henry appears less despicable. This is the result of the fact that Henry is brooding and seemingly burdened. He seems dsewhere, morose, preoccupied: he is distanced and so we in tum distance him from what he does. Otis, in contradistinction, is jovial, light-hearted, enthusiastic: involved. Both intend to torture a.ad murder their victims, but each approaches the task differently. Otis appears to en1oy it too much. Despite the fact that it is Henry who commits the initial crime, killing two prostitutes they've hired, without any readily apparent reason, easing Otis's con­ cerns about the police catching up with them, and going on to coach Otis in the me­ chanics of serial murder, there is something so distant and automated in Rooker's por­ trayal of Henry that the viewer begins to focus his moral distaste in the direction of his more than willing accomplice. The reason for this is that Otis doesn't appear ill with his choices; he revels in them, whereas Henry gives the impression of being under the yoke of something he cannot control and seems to glean little pleasure from his crimes. Hen­ �- appears empty, incomplete, devoid, lacking-'The Minus Mao.' We are more com­ fortable with Henry as an embodiment of evil. Otis is too much like a person for us to be comfortable with his choices, and it is his very relaxed everydayness that attracts the majority of our moral disapprobation. See Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, directed by John McNaughton (1 986; Los Angeles, CA: Greycat Films, 2003), DVD. =-� Neiman, Evili,, Modern Thought, 278. 31

Gary J . Shipley al unrestrained iniquity is to be dehumanized, characterless, the mere embodi­ ment of a process, a procedural tool in the service of anti-humanism and non­ personhood--one of numerous other extraterrestrial personas of evil. Even when we analyze them we do so in such a way that they end up transcending the banality of the detail. Like the inhabitants of dreams and fantasy, evil people do not con form to the motivational norms of ordinary people. They exist out­ side our world, but are nevertheles s able to permeate it through acts of violence and murder, their only currency of self-expression. To label someone as 'pure evil' is to cease to believe they are part of the known world, and the interest then is in witnes sing the fragments of humanity that remain, in observing the awkward cohabitation of these irreconcilably oppugnant elements. Acute im­ balance produces characters we can place, but the examples of saturation, with evil reigning insuperable, such as we see in Sade, produces characters that we cannot properly contextualize-they become (formless) voids through which evil does its work. As Noel Carroll points out, a monster is 'un-natural relative to a culture's conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitive­ ly threatening.'29 Our inability to understand serial killers, then, is in direct cor­ relation with their inability to understand themselves, and what we do not know we make up, and the reality we find ourselves inhabiting in their absence seems all the sweeter for it. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between the evils o f the banal conformist (his thoughtlessness and almost clinical absurdity) and the evils of the torture-killer. Indeed. if evil is ins tantiated in both then we need to account for the variances between them. Perhaps most glaringly, there ap­ pears to be very little in common with regards to intent. The acts committed by the Nazi conformist strike many as being unequivocal examples of evil, but the blame often has to be spread so wide that when we focus on one participator among many they can begin to look vapid, their active participation an aberra­ tion of due consideration, a deficiency in societal rigour, rather than the fruit of any concentrated malice. With instances of 'group evil,' evils of multiplicity, evil becomes so dissipative to be almost unattributable. After all, 'the problem is not that Nazi murderers were either particularly brutal or particularly heart­ less-but precisely that, by and large, they were not. ' 3° In the absence of sub­ stantial loci for our strictures, we tend to conflate the two, letting the act speak for its perpetrator(s) , and in doing so we once again (confounded as we are by the facts) reduce evil to an impersonal process performed by extraterrestrial stand-ins, monstrous voids disclosed only through their iniquitous agenda. Noel Carroll, The Philosopf?y of Horror; or. Paraf/Qxes of the Heart (London and New York: Routledge, 1 990), 34. 3n Neiman, Evil in Modem Thought, 252. 2'J 32

VISCERAL I NCREDU LITY �EEDFUL OBFUSCATION AND THE DEA TH OF ETHICS Our inarticulate horror in the face of a serial killer's acts and testimony, com­ :i:ned with our unceasing curiosity and voyeurism regarding both, suggest that they fulfil some rooted need in us, enriching our otherwise automated behav­ rour by acting so askew of motivational norms that our comprehension falters ill d falls in love with itself-all over again, more intensely. Although it is unde­ niably abhorrent to think that the serial killer could possibly benefit us in any ·01:ay, especially in virtue of the crimes which so repulse us, it is, nevertheless, quire apparent that their existence is something we have routinely exploited, the muation seeming to lend credence to there being some (covert) consolation in the thought that in the absence of God we at least have the Devil. \�'hat follows is an excerpt from an account given by Albert Fish in a letter �o Billy Gaffuey's mother about her son's disappearance and subsequent death: I brought him to the Riker Avenue dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 p.m., [ . . . ] I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. This gleeful yet sober recollection seems tailor-made to sicken and bewilder, to expose our sentiments to their inverted form, to an Other that we recognise only as Other, a recognition that shields itself in noncomprehension so that our o\Vn sentiments might be better seen, and thereby become worthier through a.symmetry. And so it is these isolated teratoids make moral citizens of us all, through a tawdry comparison effortlessly effected by our understanding men iike Fish without understanding them. We can comprehend what a strong compulsion feels like, how difficult they can be to ignore or to overcome, but where the empathy breaks down is in the particularity of the compulsion, and this is the beginning and the end of any ethics of serial killing, where if we truly get it, it gets us. Consider this predicament in reverse, as evidenced in Kant's exclusion of the supererogatory and its subsequent justification by Marcia W. Baron. Ac­ cording to Baron, the more we focus on the supererogatory the more Kant thought 'Morality will seem optional or, alternatively, incumbent only on the noble [ . . . ] not everyone will see himself or herself as noble-and thus morali33

Gary J . Shipley ty may seem to be something that concerns only others. Indeed, if identified too closely with heroic feats, morality might come to be thought of as a sort of spectator sport [ . . . ] it would be one of a number of fields in which those with a special gift for it might excel, but one that is beyond the reach of most.'lt Our furtive and selective assimilation of evil is a perfect inversion of this concern. For when we focus on the evil acts of others, passing over the details with a superficial sweep, we make ourselves moral by a simple process of disassocia­ tion, of a found asymme try. Confronted with such acts, it is considered enough for us to mechanically abstain from them-to shake our heads in disbelief, to feel the requisite amount of sorrow for the victims and disgust at the perpetra­ tors-when the only honest response is to admit that our moral edifice is not the proper playground of either heroes or evil men. For while heroic feats dis­ tance the common man from the day-to-day business of living a moral life, evil deeds have the opposite effect: allowing moral worth to be bestowed on all of us who find the deeds of men like Fish to be outside our capabilities. I f super­ erogation somehow makes morality appear coo hard to attain, then the exist­ ence of evil surely makes its attainment (for most of us) all too easy. To appro­ priate the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: 'if all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.'32 If we were to permit the supererogatory into our moral evaluation without it doing us harm, then we would have to focus on the possibility for our charac­ ters to be stretched to incorporate some of their greatness. But, similarly, if evil is not to turn us into smug moral sloths, then we must close the distance be­ tween ourselves and the evil-doers, and not demonise them without demonis­ ing parts of ourselves at the same time. Let us ask who we would be with our good natures beaten out of us, not with an eye on excusing or justifying, but with an eye on the elusiveness of such counterfactuals and the consequent un­ foundedness of a merely comparative moral worth. To say that evil is a comfort to the moral majority may seem distasteful, but are we not so very pleased with ourselves when we consider the deeds of others to be impossible for us, and are able to label them as immoral in the same breath? (And, after all, are these two responses really so different?)l3 It is important though to distinguish this view from what might be termed the scapegoat approach to evildoers, put forward by, among others, Slavoj Zizek. The phenomenon, as presented by Zizek, is one where the non-evil per- 31 :Marcia W. Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost lf'itho11t Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 995), 38. 32 Thomas :\quinas, Summa Theolo!)ae, eds. T. Gilby et al (London: Eyre and Spottis­ woode; �ew York: :'.VfcGraw-Hill, 1964- 73), 964-80 (22.2 ad.2). 33 C£ When 'we separate force from what it can do, setting it up in ourselves a s "wor­ thy" because it holds back from what it cannot do, but as "blameworthy'' in the thing where it manifests precisely the force it has' (Deleuze, Nt'tlZfche and Philosopl?J, 21). 34

VISCERAL I NCREDULITY �on deflects their guilt about harbouring evil desires at an unconscious level by �eing the amalgam of those desires embodied 'in a single subject.' The evildoer -;rands as a scapegoat for all latent evil desires, transmogrifying our guilt into outrage as we witness those desires realised by the evildoer, and best of all 'we do not even have to pay the price for it. '34 This same psychological process can ::ic seen, according to Kerekes and Slater, in our tentative fascination with snuff !ilms: 'It is evident that the outrage and furore over snuff reveals a tacit desire !:!ldeed, a need - for it to exist, if only as an idea. Just as we had to create, say, ±e vampire as an embodiment of man's darker, unacceptable sexual urges, so r.)Q the mythic "snuff-pedlar"-ultimate incarnation of the iconic serial killer -must caay the can for our death-lust.'35 This view is again one recognised by !he serial killers themselves: Dennis Nilsen considered himself 'a national recep­ ::icle into which all the nation will urinate.'36 But the real problem is not that serial killers realize some unwittingly desired portal of vicarious indulgence, but that through them morality itself becomes a passive state, in which much of the remainder of human life contains only the possibility for misdemeanours, leav­ :ng a morality devoid of genuine involvement, which is no morality at all-an eventuality that may be no bad thing, in light of what badness amounts to, and �har does at least contain some semblance of veracity. In an attempt to clarify that which must always militate against it, serial :cllers cannot be located solely outside of the margins of moral discourse, an £berration completely divorced from moral engagement, but nor can they be located solely within its perimeters, themselves a reaction to any notion of scandardized engagement, for their situation is always both inside and outside my moral systemization: inside for the purposes of moral condemnation, and vutside as an expression of our visceral incredulity. Their evil can only exist if it maddles both camps, the concept of evil being intrinsically unstable for the conceptualizer. For while being constructed from stable positions it cannot be made sense of from both perspectives at once-it is, if you like, the moral equivalent of Jastrow's duck-rabbit. But then there are things that by their very �sence defy simple encapsulation; and although ethical theories often manage to capture and extrapolate on many crucial aspects of moral motivation and consequence, each one inevitably leaves something unaccounted for. Consider the novels of Franz Kafka, their essential otherness, their sly promise of hidden profundity (of there always being something just out of reach), their discursive­ ness, their essential incompleteness, their seemingly endless connotations. They "" Zizek is quoted in Seltzer, Serial Killers, 221 . ; ; David Kerekes and David Slater, Killingfor C11/t1m: An Illustrated History of Death Film Frr.>m Mondo lo S111f (San Francisco: Creation Books, 1 994), 3 1 1 . ...,_ Brian Masters, Killingfor Compa11J•: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1 985), 1 84. 35

Gary J . Shipley offer what few other things offer: something whose meaning will never be completely deadened by our understanding (or by our confidence in our under­ standing); they offer us something tangible that is at the same time (necessarily) incomplete. Moving to another example, we can see that the movies of David Lynch present us with the same immanent slipperiness,37 their design being one of cleverly-tailored obscurity, their facility to propagate questions and rebuff resolution structural. There can be no definitive solutions to Lost Highwqy, M11/­ holland Drive or !fl/and Empire, because the mystery is integral. Unravel this in­ scrutability (if such an unravelling were possible) and the movie falls apart.JS And this appraisal is one that can be usefully applied to morality. You have to buy into the perpetual intricacies of morality for it to work. You have to believe in those resolutions to quandaries that remain always just out of reach, because the problems and paradoxes and contradictions and dil emma s in moral thought are moral th ough t , without them it does not exist. And what to do in the face of this bur accept that moral pluralism is what we have and all we should hope to have, and that such pluralism is nothing but a s trikingly accurate and exhaus­ tive picture of what it is to be human and confused, and that it is not only 37 Howe\·er, it seems as if Lynch does not celebrate incompleteness, but instead sees himself as displaying its negative effects. He has 5aid that: We're not experiencing the ultimate reality: the "real" is hiding all through life, but we don't see it. We mistake it for all the other things. Fear is based on not seei:J.g the whole thing and, if you could get there and see the whole thing, fear is out of the window' (cited in Chris Rodley, ed., Lynch on f...:ynch (London: Faber and Faber, 1 999], 243). So while it might seem as if his films' unsolvable mysteries are symbolic of hope in an age (purportedly) rid of magic and gods, an open-endedness where we might escape the dull, prescribed fate of nature, Lynch himself is decrying this incompleteness as a sufferance heaped upon us by our limitations. He believes in the missing denouement, the solution that will act as balm to the wounds inflicted by the inscrutability of human existence. Lynch then is an opti­ mist. Like Leibniz he puts his faith in future elucidation, a time when we will be rid of lacunas, a time when we will able to connect the mysteries of the world with their hid­ den purpose. And yet some form of epistemic pessimism seems more apt here. For as we see in Kant, who also sought to establish both the metaphysical and the moral ne­ cessity of ignorance while at the same time realizing our tendency to overreach, it's the mystery itself that holds fast to any credible notion of salvation, the missing denoue­ ment possessing value only with respect to its remaining hidden, forever a presence of absence, a game no one can win and by winning destroy. 38 Consider this point made by David Foster Wallace: ':\fost of Lynch's best film s don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film. interpretative process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained"' (Foster Wal­ lace, 'David Lynch Keeps His Head,' in A Supposed!;• Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again (London: Abacus: 1 997], 1 70). 36

VISCERAL I NCREDULITY couched in contradictions and incompatible sentiments, but is terminally in­ \·esred in dilemma s that morality cannot do without but which any thoroughgo­ mg moral pluralism should have assiduously expunged. Or rather this: throw no more words at it, remembering diligently-by the hour, the minute, the second, .-.-hatever it takes-that '[w]hat can be said lacks reality. Only what fails to make :ts way into words exists and counts,'39 and that to exist is no obvious gift, and �o count is to be merely worthy of note, and not any indication of worthiness u::; el f. Once the deceit of our moral vigilance is acknowledged, accepted as a kind 0f pointless insomnia (from which we cannot sleep to wake), might we become :a.s faceless as the breed of killers that helped to bring us here? And yet to con­ nnue as we are is to embrace ourselves as benign ghosts, here and yet not here, exonerated through an absence we've claimed as our own. And it is in this ab­ sence that we listen for ourselves, like Kurten for the sound of his own arterial blood, waiting for our presence to somehow arrive outside the dead body of our proclivities, and for the noise of that arrival to wake us inside the sleep of our insomnia, an insomnia 'constituted by the consciousness that it will never i!Pish-that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigi­ !.ince to which one is held. Vigilance without end.'40 But ultimately this vigi­ !mce is empty and goes on outside me, a comparison between me here now a.<Jd the uncodifiable nothing.41 I found already in place, what I say and do and -:.-bar I imagine I am, a nothing that is really just a something to which I canno t properly lay claim; and so where the serial killer has gone we go too, outside the grasp of what we've theorized as constituting who we are and into an outside "-e wait to comprehend while existing in the very negated possibility of doing �. in noncomprehension, in taking the constrained algorithms of our delibera­ nve being as created and not found, as if what was found was up to us and dis­ :o•ery a creative act. And after everything, we end up here, grinning inanely and refusing to sleep, trying over and over in our sleep-like surveillance to be­ come whole, to own our lacunas, when all the while our sightless persistence in !he increasingly facile game of being moral becomes ever more securely the ·::ibscured answer to a prayer we never fully articulated. , Cioran, Drawn andQ11artered, 1 58. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), • �. �' The depersonalized 'there is,' the 'it' that 'stays awake' through me, so relieving me of v.-akefulness. See Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universi­ ty Press, 1 985), 49. 37

NONRELATION AND METARELATION Daniel Colucciello Barber \.\LORIZATION OF PERFORMANCE Tn ere is no position without performance, nor is there any performance with­ rn: position; all positions are performed, just as all performance is positioned. !"r.cse statements, due to their overarching chiastic structure, have implications ±lot apply to both of the terms involved. Nonetheless, insofar as contemporary =eory grants a specific value to performance (or to performance's potentiality), useful to foreground the pressure this chiasm exerts on performance. That there is something at stake in the articulation of such pressure is evi­ .:ll:n t in the fact that these two statements have different effects on contempo­ ::2..':" theoretical common sense. Consider, first of all, the statement: 'all posi­ ':'mls are performed.' The implications of this statement seem already to have :.cen grasped by the valorization of performance. To see that this is the case, it 5 enough to imagine asking a valorizer of performance: 'You give so much em­ �s1s to performance, but what about positionality?' The valorizer of perfor­ =mce could respond to this question by invoking the statement we have al­ :ndy mentioned: 'all positions are performed.' In other words, the valorizer of ?Crtormance, when asked about the role that positionality plays in this valoriza­ :,,:m . can respond-without trouble-by observing that attention to perfor­ --wce entails, by its very nature, attention to positionality. In fact, performance � gr.·en specific privilege precisely because it is taken for granted that all posi­ ::ionality is performed. The value of performance resides in what it is capable of doing with or to :he positions that are presumed to be performed. Hence, when faced with the �rative to change the world--defined here as the configuration of all posi­ :.L-.ns-it seems central to focus on perfonnance: since all positions are per­ formed, the imperative to change these positions means finding ways to per­ :':mn them subversively or otherwise; since positions entail their performance, pcrformance appears as that which, when changed, could change these posir "� The statement, 'all positions are performed,' is therefore one that is already acrounted for by the valorization of performance. Yet it is a different case •nen it comes to the other statement I have mentioned: 'all performance is 39

Daniel Colucciello Barber positioned.' This statement has implications that appear not to have been ac­ counted for by the valorization of performance. In fact, I claim that this state­ ment-'all performance is positioned'-presents an obstacle for the valoriza­ tion of performance. What, then, is this obstacle? In what sense does the fact that 'all performance is positioned' present an obstacle to the valorization of performance? The obstacle is the recurrence of positionality: no matter how position is performed, no matter what performance does with or to a position­ performing it subversively or otherwise-it remains the case that 'all perfor­ mance is positioned,' which is to say that in spite of performance's supposed capacity, position recurs. The fact that 'all positions are performed' may, when considered on its own, grant promise to performance, for it then seems that performance carries within itself the capacity to undermine the positions that are performed. Yet such promissory capacity is itself undermined by the recur­ rence of positionality: while it is true that 'all positions are performed,' it is likewise true that 'all performance is positioned.' This means that whatever the performance may do, however the performance is made, this performance does not cease being positioned. Consequently, the valorization of performance, far from providing a capacity to overcome the limitations of positions, actually serves to deny the positionality to which it remains bound. Of course, it may be countered that the valorization of performance is aware of this recurrence of positionality, and that such valorization actually proceeds differently from what I have presumed. More precisely, it may be countered that the valorization of performance arises not from performance's capacity to straightforwardly overcome given positions, but rather from its more mundane capacity to improve positions, or to improve the world that is configured by and as these positions. The valorization of performance, in this reelaborated sense, would then amount to the following claim: a given position may, by way of its performance, be repositioned in a progressive-that is, an improved or bettered-manner. 1 Accordingly, such valorization of perfor­ mance does not deny the recurrence of positionality, it simply understands this recurrence in a progressive manner. Let us grant, then, that this understanding of the valorization of perfor­ mance is correct. In other words, let us proceed with the understanding that the valorization of performance does not entail the denial of positionality's recur­ rence, but that it instead focuses on the way in which the performance of a po­ sition shifts the recurrence of that position for the better. In doing so, however, we must stress that performance's capacity to better the position is essential to performance's valorization. \�7ithout such betterment, performance would have 1 Throughout this paper I use 'progress,' 'better,' and 'improve' in an interchangeable sense. 40

NONRELATION AN D M ETARELATION -.. •'2\ of marking anything but the recurrence of position; if performance does 9CIC cieny but instead improves the position, then it is only by way of this pro­ �on that performance gains a value that is not nullified by position's recur­ �:e. LR..\..�SITIVITY AND TRANSCENDENCE '!.-d: n is this centrality of progression that presents a new obstacle. A reelabo­ � valorization of performance runs into a reelaborated obstacle. The reelab­ -:ated obstacle arises from progression's dependence on a logic of transitivity; pc=f•:>rrnance, when reelaborated in tenns of a progression of position, binds �f to a logic of transitivity. This is because the value of the change brought &:lout by performance requires the articulation of a transit between the position p�:m to the performance (position 1) and the position posterior to the perfor­ cmce (position 2). In other words, the value of performance, insofar as it re­ .:)es in the progression of the position performed, must be expressed in transi­ �e terms - that is, as the passage, for the better, from position 1 to position 2. 7"ru.s begs the question, then, of what it is that is introduced by way of transit, <.::h that the transit has the capacity to establish improvement: What is it that �ormance, which marks the transit from position 1 to position 2, introduces? �t is it that position 2 (posterior to performance) possesses that position 1 poor to performance) does not? Performance introduces nothing or it introduces something. If it introduc­ e; nothing, then the valorization of performance does not hold. This is to say -i>•n if performance, as the transit between position 1 and position 2, introduces ::£idling that was not already there in position 1 , then position 2 is simply a re­ ronfiguration of position 1 . And if this is the case, then there is no betterment t-cought about by performance; performance cannot then provide the value that � claims for itself. Consequently, if the valorization of performan ce is to hold, ±en it requires that something, rather than nothing, is introduced. But what, 'l!en, is this something? Or, more precisely, in virtue of what does the transit from position 1 to position 2 proceed? It is not enough here simply to say per­ formance, for performance is said just as much of position 1 as it is said of po­ s.."Don 2. If the transit from position 1 to position 2 proceeds in virtue simply of ;>erformance, then there is no index of betterment. So, to say it again: what is it c..iut performance introduces by way of its transitivity? Whatever it is that is introduced, it must be something. To say that it is ·something' may appear vague, or too indeterminate, but that is not the point By referring to whatever is supposed to be introduced as 'something,' I want to call attention not to the content of what is introduced, but rather to the rela­ . ::ionality and operationality entailed by this introduction. Along these lines, we 41

Daniel Colucciello Barber can call this something 'X. ' Given this, we can now summarize the claim made by the valorization of perfonnance: performance, as the transit between posi­ tion 1 and position 2, involves the capacity for bettering position, and it in­ volves this capacity precisely insofar as this transit introduces X, such that posi­ tion 2 relates to or draws upon X in a manner that position 1 does not. I call this a relational and operational description of the valorization of per­ formance simply because it foregrounds how the valorization of performance operates, and how this operation entails relation to an X that is introduced through the operation. W'hat is the nature of the relation-to-X that is e.xpressed in this operation? We have already observed the logic of transitivity, but we should now add that this transitivity is also transcendent: the transitive relation between position 1 and position 2 depends, for its betterment, on the introduc­ tion of an X that is transcendent to both position 1 and position 2. This is to observe that the claim for position 2's betterment is not that it ceases to be positioned-for position 2, like position 1, is positioned-but that its position possesses a better relation-to-X than is possessed by position 1 . Yet in order for such an improvement to be made, the X that is introduced in per­ formance's transit (from position 1 to position 2) must exist in a manner that transcends both positions: X must transcend positionality as such, for if it did not, then X could not be introduced to position 2 in a manner that makes posi­ tion 2 better than position 1 ; without X's transcendence to positionality as such, position 1 (insofar as it is a position) would already relate-to-X just as much as position 2 (insofar as it is a position) is supposed to relate-to-X. In such a sce­ nario, where X does not transcend positions, relation-to-X cannot provide an index of betterment between position 1 and position 2. The differentiation be­ tween positions (as better or worse) thus requires a criterion of evaluation that transcends positionality as such. The valorization of performance is, in this sense, also a valorization of the transcendent-that is, of the transcendence of X to positions. While positional­ ity recurs, performance promises to better this recurring positionality by draw­ ing on its own capacity to access and introduce an X that transcends positional­ ity. Performance is therefore the mediation between the recurring positionality of the world and the X that transcends the world. The world of positions may be bettered insofar as performance mediates to the world a transcendent X. .My argument, then, is that the valorization of performance, in order to evade the obstacle of the recurrence of positionality, creates for itself another obstacle: the obstacle of transitivity, which entails the obstacle of transcend­ ence. The desire expressed by this valorization of performance, or this tum to transcendence, is-from a certain vantage-comprehensible. Given the wretchedness of the world, one desires to escape from the positions by which this world recurs. Yet such a desire for change does not change the fact that its obstacle-whether as recurrence of positionality or as dependence on the 42

NONRELATION AND M ETARELATION '::ZlScendent-is real. The connection between these two obstacles may be ar­ x-.ilited as follows: given the chiastic structure of position and performance, Z!L! s peci fic ally given the fact that all performance remains positioned, the de­ � to escap e from the wretchedness of position-that is, the world configured "° pos1tionality's wretchedness-calls forth an X that would transcend this chi­ � re l a ti on . In other words, the desire of performance to escape positionali­ �· , recurre nce gives rise to the claim that there is something, X, that is beyond �non and that is accessed (even if only partially) by performance. Put in c:n:m of world-the configuration of all positions-this amounts to the claim :a.r c>erformance is able to change (and ideally to better) the world through the �"Oduction of an X that is supposed to transcend the world.2 ·:'f>ER:\ TION OF IMMAN ENCE .. !'< 'alorization of performance seeks, by way of transcendence, to escape the ==as ric structure of performance and position; the refusal of this transcend­ c:::ce. on the other hand, may be called immanence. It is important to note that =mn ence here names not a register of reality in distinction from the trans­ �em, but rather an operational criterion. This is to say that immanence is � "'C here invoked as a realm of reality in relation to the transcendent-as if im­ ::s:oence named a limitation that, when crossed, would lead to the transcend­ � On the contrary, the transcendent is not real; it is hallucinatory. In this � �. imma nence is not something that may or may not be surpassed, it is in­ � the operational refusal of the hallucination of transcendence. To say that immanence is operational is to say that immanence is ethical, in • '.'ipmozian sense: 'God is the imma nent, not the transitive, cause of all things .'3 =.:io.r Spinoza, 'God' is taken-together with 'Nature' and 'Substance,' such that � e terms are substitutable for one another-as a name for the cause of all ::::Li ry . The point, then, is that reality-indicated by 'all things'-is not related "'.:: ::s cause in a transcendent manner. The cause does not e.'Ci. st exterior to the :n.!tty that is caused; it does not name something that would be able, by trans­ .::nding reality, to provide an X according to which all things relate. This also :x:.2IlS that the cause does not cause all things through a transit of before and �. There is no distance between cause and all things-no distance as tran­ :oandence (where the cause would exist exterior to all things) , but also no dis­ :.o:::e as transit (where the cause would indicate a distance between before and c::i: . The cause of all things, i.e. 'God,' causes these things as it causes itself; : :: is in this sense that we can speak of a link between the valorization of performance Cl.:i rhe logic of standard Christianity. '. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1 996), (I.) 1 8. 43

Daniel Colucciello Barber the reality of the cause is not ontologically distinct from the reality of all things . . Concomitantly, the reality o f all things and th e reality o f God are collapsed-or, , better yet, they are never dividable in the first place, and so they never permit , the distance between 'cause' and 'all things' that is central for transitivity. In this sense, transitivity is refused at essence. If the cause of reality is not transitive, ; then there is no capacity by which reality could appeal to transitivity in order to bring about betterment. We can therefore understand that immanence, or imman e nt causality, does not name one realm of reality divided from another, transcendent realm of real­ ity; it instead names an operational refusal of division in the first place. This division-whether by way of transcendence, as the division between the world and an X transcendent to the world, or by way of transitivity, as the division between before and after-is precisely that on which the valorization of per­ formance depends. Yet, granting this imm anent refusal of division, along with the concomitant imma nent revelation of division as the denial (or hallucinatory transcendence and transitivity) on which the valorization of performance de­ pends, we are left with the difficulty of articulating change.4 In other words, if there is no something that transcends positionality, and thus no introducing a means by which performance could gain leverage-against the positions that are being performed, and for the betterment of position-then we seem to be condemned to the world. It is of use, here, to recall the definition of 'world' as the configuration of all positions. From this vantage, the valorization of performance can be under­ stood as a commitment to worldly transfiguration-one that seeks to gain lev­ erage against the obstacle of positionality's recurrence through transcendent and transitive division. Immanence operates as the refusal of this division, and thereby as the refusal of any valorization of performance. Yet this condemns us to the world only insofar as we presume that we must choose between the world as it is given (the configuration of all positions) and the world as it mav be performatively transfigured. �'hat is left unconsidered by this choice is tagonism toward the world as such. an"­ This antagonism may be articulated by intensifying the refusal of division. Immanence refuses the transitive performance of that which is supposed to transcend the world, but it does not do so in service of a reconciliation with or resignation to this world. Put otherwise, if the valorization of performance seeks to gain leverage for an escape from the world, then the operation of im­ manence does not refuse this leverage in order to get settled in the world. It refuses this leverage precisely so that it can directly encounter the recurrence of On the notion of denial, see Gil Anidjar, 'SurvivaV Political Concepts: A Critkal Ltxicon 2, available from http: / / www.politicalconcepts.org/ survival-gil-anidjar/ (accessed 1 0- 4 05-15). 44 1

NONRELATION AN D M ETARELATION �irionality-that is, the total configuration and reconfiguration of positions ttown as the world. Immanence, having refused the divisively imagined means ::ransitive and transcendent) of gaining leverage on or within the world, may �Jicalize this refusal by making the world as such an object of antagonism. The potnt, then, is not only to insist that there is no escape from the world, no tran­ �m-iry, no transcendent something. It is also, or furthermore, to radicalize this rhe no to transitivity, or transcendence, belongs to an operation of imma­ :c:nce that may be radicalized as a no to the world, in all of its chiastic reconfig­ :: o : .;;rarions. The operation of immanence does not replace the valorization of perfor­ a?:.Ulce with a valorization of positionality. As we have seen, the valorization of performance depends on the claim that performance is able to introduce to ;--: r.:itionality something that would bring about a betterment. For immanence, !..::owever, the point is not to repeat, in an inverted manner, this valorization­ rim too would be divisive. The point is rather to begin with the recurrence of p..-r.;1rionality, understood as already including its performative reconfiguration ·:rr supposed transfiguration) . In other words, the world that is the configura­ :.on of all positions is understood as a world that includes the performance of �ese positions. Therefore it is not that performance is opposed in the name of ;x>5-irionality, it is rather that the world, understood as the configuration of all ?osirions and the performance of these positions, is antagonized in its totality. Nor does the operation of immanence replace the transcendent something �th an immanent something. The reason for this is that immanence, which -peratively refuses division, cannot permit the distance required by a reference ;::> something-such a 'to,' after all, would establish a transitive relation. This to UY. furthermore, that there is no analogy between the valorization of perfor­ �nce and the operation of immanence: the latter never provides any 'some­ !hing' to which the transcendent something could become analogous. Imma­ �ce is, of course, real-it is simply that this reality, as causal or operative im­ ::::a.'lence, cannot be made into something. It is along these lines that we must qualify the 'no' by which the operation 0 :- !ffitnlnence articulates its antagonism. This antagonism, or this no, is a no �.i!Ilst the world.5 It is a no that indexes a reality that, as operative immanence, - Tne 'no' of imm anence, as I am here articulating it, draws rather directly on Frans:ois 1...utr elle's understanding of immanence according to a real that is foreclosed by the '3crennin ation of the world. The term that he uses for this world is one that I already ::rre been using: 'hallucination.' Pressing the antagonistic implications of this fonnula­ � I understand the world as the name not of reality, but rather of the hallucination �t d enies the reality of immanence. I draw, furthermore, on Laruelle's claim that the �odd proceeds through division-that is, the division of being, or the division between ecng and its alteri.ty. In this sense, I understand the world to be not only hallucinatory ·::l<.Jt also divisive. Thinking immanence thus entails thinking without division. For an 45

Daniel Colucciello Barber cannot but be against the world-for the world makes itself not only through, but also and moreso as, the denial of operative imm anence. In other words, it is not that the being of immanence is excluded by the being of the world, it is rather that the world possesses being only as the denial of immanence. The no of immanence is a no to this denial-or, given that the world is constituted by this denial, the no of immanence is a no to the world as such. ANTAGONISTIC NONREU TION This is to say that the reality of operative immanence does not fall short of or stand outside of the configuration of positions . On the contrary, it is the world that wants to stand out-transitively and transcendently-from the reality of immanence. The no of immanence is therefore the articulation of this reality against the very capacity invoked by position (and its performance) . In this sense, the radical negativity indicated by this no is the force of reality; reality articulates itself as no not because it calls on something outside the world, but rather because it is, as reality, against the world. Such antagonism is intrinsic to reality's operative immanence: reality cannot but be against that which denies it. The no of immanence is the reality of the zero-point where the world's denial can no longer hold.6 It is this zero point, rather than the configuration of posi- encapsulated account of these themes, see Laruelle's 'A Summary of Non-Philosophy,' trans. Ray Brassier, in From Decision to Hm£)1: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought ed. Robin l\Iackay (Windsor Quarry/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2012), 285304. 6 I understand this zero-point to be what Gille s Deleuze had in mind when he refused together with Felix Guattari, in lf'hat is Philosopl?J?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 996)-any account of immanence that would make immanence 'related to something like a "dative"' (44), and instead insisted: 'Immanence is imm anent only to itself' (45). I take this as a moment in Deleuze's work that undermines its predominant reception in terms of a ffirm ati\•e ex­ cess. What is central, in this moment, is not the overflow of rhizomatic relations but rather the no to relation. In fact, the utterly differential character of immanence entails an understanding of difference in-itself as a zero-point that refuses the demand to be something in the world. The intrinsic differentiality of immanence renders it the enemy of all beings, regardless of whether they are positively or negatively described. (On this point, see Barber, 'The Creation of Non-Being,' ruiz.omes 28, forthcoming.) Even when Deleuze speaks of believing in the world-in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson �Iinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)-it is not in the world as object but rather in the world as affect of intolerability. Belief is actually a means of antagonism toward the very idea of the world as something to which we could relate. In other words, such belief is explicitly formed so as to not be made into belief in 'another world' or 'a transformed world'; belief in the world is 'belief in this world, as it is' (1 72). , 46

NONRELATION AND M ETARELATION �-ns that deny it, that is real; it is the reality of this zero-point that is indexed by ±.e no of immanence.7 The antagonism of operative immanence toward the world has essential �lications for how we think about relationality. Such antagonism cannot ut­ d;- avoid the status of relation, for to be antagonistic toward something is to �te to something. Yet this sense of relation, precisely because it is antagonis­ -x. cannot be thought in standard terms of relationality: to be antagonistic to- -nrd something is to refuse--and, more fundamentally, to call for the destruc:>:c of-the object of antagonism; it is also to refuse the very terms of relation ciwled by this object. In other words, antagonism, even as it does not utterly en<ie relation, is defined by a demand to utterly put out of play both the world � the relationality of the world. I therefore call this antagonism 'nonrelation,' «.Jeh that the relation between operative immanence and the world is articulated >-�ording to the no of immanence. To speak of nonrelation is to stress the in­ cammensurability between the reality of immanence and the hallucinatory char­ =c:er of the world. There is nothing shared by, or common to, immanence and :::e world. On the contrary, the world's very existence depends on its hallucina­ �- d e nial of immanence, and so it is only by way of this denial that the world There is nowhere else to go, and that is the most difficult--or the most intense-thing � believe, and this is because it does not give us a thing in (or toward) which to believe. - Imm anence, as zero point does nothing but vertiginize . Deleuze remarked-in Ex­ in :..1onum in Philosophy: Spinoz.a, trans. Martin Jougb.in (New York: Zone Books, 1 992), � .� L-that 'immanence is the veiy vertigo of philosophy'; he also spoke, more directly, :L ·me vertigo of immanence' (What u Philosopl?J?, 48). However, this vertigo must still !:le radicalized. This is to follow the claim, by Frank B. Wilderson, III-in 'The Venge­ zx:e of Vertigo: Aphasia and _\bjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,' In­ -:-,11rions 5, available from http:/ /www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/frankbw i'.:krsoniiiarticle.pdf (accessed 1 0-05-1 5)-that blackness articulates 'objective vertigo, a a!c constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation' (3). The �-rid made through denial is the antiblack world; the world constitutes itself through � and it does this specifically as the denial of blackness. It is therefore necessary to rriculate the zero-point of immanence not as a vertigo that intermptively undermines � \\·orld-an interpretation that Deleuze's articulation fails to explicitly preclude­ cc:i rather as a vertigo that is intrinsically against the veiy c on s titutio n of the world. iegarding such a demand, Jared Sexton-in 'The Social Life of Social Death: On .Afro­ FesslIDlsm and Black Optimism,' InTensions 5, available from �tp: / /www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf (accessed 1 0. 6- 1 5)-offers the essential criterion: 'In a world structured by the twin axioms of �hite superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence . the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness . . . In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology .-ithout pathos' (27-8). - , . . 47

Daniel Colucciello Barber can relate to immanence. Along these lines, we can see how the incommen­ surability at the essence of nonrelation emerges from both sides: the world's 'relation' to immanence is defined by denial, while immanence's 'relation' to the world is defined by the antagonism of no. To speak of this antagonism in terms of nonrelationality is to observe that antagonism extends not only to the world, but also to the relationality of the world-that is, to relationality as it is defined by the world, and as it constitutes the world. In order to understand this relationality of the world, it is useful to return to the valorization of performance. This is because such valorization of performance, in its transitive and transcendent divisions, is working through and off of the relationality of the world. The transit from position 1 to position 2 divides these positions, but this division is also a relation: the supposed im­ provement by which position 2 divides itself from position 1 is articulated through comparison, and comparability entails analogizability; position 2, in order to be better than position 1, mus t also be like-analogically related to­ position l . The division between one thing and another is therefore signi ficant precisely insofar as these things remain relatable across (or by way ot) their di­ vision. It is in this sense that division. far from breaking with analogy, actually belongs to an analogical operation. And this mutual implication of division and analogy is at work not only in transitivity, but also in transcendence: the some­ thing that divisively transcends the world gains its significance through its ca­ pacity to relate to-by providing a measure for, or a differentiation within-the world.8 We have already noted that the world is the configuration of all positions. As such, immanence's antagonistic nonrelation to the world is also an antago­ nistic nonrelation to positions; the no of immanence to the world is also the no of immanence to positions. \Vhat we can now add, in view of our discussion of the world's relationality in terms of analogy, is that if the world is the configura­ tion of all positions, then this configuration holds together as analogy. In other words, the positions of the world, even as they may be divided from one an­ other, or even as they may be severely disproportiona te with one another, still hold together-as a configuration-insofar as they remain analogizable with one another. Positions, regardless of their division or the severity of their dis­ proportion, remain analogizable precisely because they are positions. Accord­ ingly, immanence, as nonrelationality, articulates antagonism that is simultane8 While I have defined the relarionality of the world in terms of analogy, this does not exclude dialectics. It is simply that I understand dialectics to be a more explicitly con­ flictual use of analogy. Dialectics foregrounds the conflict between things, but this con­ flict can be staged only insofar as a basic analogizablity between the conflictual things is presumed. Conflict, eve n if it is without end, and even if it indefinitely suspends the realization of an analogy between the conflictual terms, remains recognizable only inso­ far as it presumes a minimal capacity-for-analogy between these terms. 48

NONRELATION AN D METARELATION � toward the positions of the world and the analogical relationality of these ?OOm ons. 9 It should not be forgotten, amidst this discussion of the antagonism of the � of immanence, that it is operative immanence-not the world-that is real. r� to recall, as well, that the object of antagonism-the world, or the analogi­ cL o p a city of relation-is hallucinarory. Hence the antagonism of immanence .s not an antagonism that withdraws from reality, it is rather the antagonism of z:a..hry toward a hallucination that denies this reality. In this sense, the no of s:man ence indexes a reality that-as operative immanence--must say no to i:3e world that denies it, and that does so by insisting on its own force. \Ve =-.."Uld say, in fact, that the no of immanence indexes the zero-point at which a ;a..h cil negativity (toward the object of antagonism) insists on its incapacity to ;x �omething in the world precisely so as to intensify and radicalize its incom­ =cn�urability with, or nonrelation to, this world. \\bat is therefore at stake is a reality that-as real-is both inextinguisha­ � 3nd inevitable, but that-as nonrelational--cannot appear within the rela­ �"(lal configuration of positions that is the world. The ensuing difficulty may !le- obs erved through a series of questions: How does one articulate a reality �t possesses no position from which to articulate itself? How does one ex­ press a reality that is denied by the relations (and related terms, or positions) of cspression? How does one construct a reality indexed by the no of immanence? �\TERIAL AS METARELATION 'i"""e can begin to think according to these questions by means of the term 'ma­ �.' This term is meant to articulate the reality of operative immanence as a i�ce that is simultaneously denied by and antagonistic toward the world. Addi­ >:mally, however, it indicates this reality as it appears in terms of the world: While the critique of analogy was central to my argument in Deleuze and the Naming of C.ad· Post-Se,11/arism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, � 1 1 -4:1, the thesis I there advanced has been radically reshaped by my reading of Wtlder­ Ko:i The present argument-regarding analogy, but also throughout this essay, which .:cks to become adequate to the logic of antagonism that Wilderson proposes-is �ly informed by, and unthinkable without, his articulation of two claims: that black­ the unthought of the world, cannot be made analogous with any position in the TOrld; and, concomitantly, that there is no politics other than a politics that would put c end to this world. For an adumbration of these claims, articulated in collaboration -.-:th Saidiya V. Hartman, see their article, 'The Position of the Unthought,' Qui Park: "J:."tcal Humanities and Social Sciences 1 3:2 (2003): 1 83-201 ; for a more expanded account, :ee U7tlderson, &d, White & Black: Cinema and the Stn1c/11re of U.S. Anta§mi.rms (Durham, :-..: c Duke University Press, 2010). :xss, as 49

Daniel Colucciello Barber reality, though denied by the world, remains forcefully against the world; yet reality, having been denied by the world, appears in the world as that which cannot appear-as that which is 'merely' material, available either to be made into a position or discarded. This way of putting it is liable to an interpretation whereby material is imagined as something captured by the world and in need of reappropriation. Such an interpretation, however, is incorrect: material, as reality, is not something. In fact, it is precisely material's being made something that puts it into the double-bind of being either positionable or discardable­ or, more simply, that makes it killable. Along these lines, we could say that the world, in its recurring configuration-in the 'seriality' indicated by its reconfig­ uration-is the basis of serial killing. 10 More precisely, material indicates that reality, even when positioned, re­ mains immanently operative, but also that this reality, precisely because it is immanently operative-and thus not transcendent to the world-remains marked by the positionality that makes it suffer. In other words, material names reality that does not escape the world and its suffering, but that nonetheless remains antagonistic toward this world that positions suffering. 1 1 Material in­ dexes a reality whose appearance is marked by the relations or positions that it necessarily antagonizes. It thereby provides further determination of the no of immanence, and more specifically of what I have called the zero-point of im­ manence: material says no to the world, but it does so while being denied by position. In this sense, it is the point of indistinction between the incapacity to be something-the incapacity to be positioned in terms of the divisions and relations between things-and the operative imm anence that antagonizes the total configuration of positions. The zero-point of material-as the point of indis tinction between incapaci­ ty for and antagonism toward relationality-is metarelational. To see how this is the case, we must attend to the fact that this material is without the capacity for relational expression, but that it is such as a force of antagonistic nonrela­ tionality. In other words, material's metarelational status s tems from its simul­ taneous withoutness and antagonism. This simultaneity marks both the denial of material by the world and the antagonism of material toward the world that denies it. Material is what is there, as insistent reality, in a way that cannot be made relatable, cannot be relationally expressed, but that for this very reason is express ed as no. Its reality exceeds relationality, but not as 'something' divided from relationality. Material's exceeding is expressed as the zero-point, and so it 10 For a contemporary instance of such serial killing, we might think of the police. See Steve Martinat and Sexton, 'The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,' in Sotial ldentitie1 9:2 (2003): 1 69-81 . 1 1 This antagonistic material, in fact, is all the more intense precisely insofar as it bas no escape. 50

NON RELATION AND M ETARELATION be> nothing to leverage in relation to relationality, nothing but no. What is 'me­ :a- : chen, is no-exceeding. As no, metarelacion remains nonrelational, but it .i!Ters from nonrelationality in that it emphasizes construction, or names mate­ �·� excessive demand for the construction of no. �fetarelationality thus insists on the reality of antagonism toward relation­ �. but precisely insofar as this antagonism's reality makes no-exceeding a �tter of construction. Simply put, metarelation constructs material's incom­ =..erl $urability (or nonrelation) with the (relational) world. Such construction is ::>:'.\t 'cons tructive' in the ameliorative sense. \'<'hat is constructed is not a media­ ;::-,-:m between no and the relational world. On the contrary, the construction is r:.>f m intensified and expanded no to the world. Metarelationality does not add �tionality to nonrelationality, nor does it compromise the no. It instead :oi_-n es the construction of material as that which says no to the world's denial. �tarelational construction is an attempt to make the no determinative of con­ �..icrion itself: metarelationality is not one species of an overarching, generical­ !-:- -defined construction; on the contrary, metarelationality names the no's own .:3rniand for construction. This involves saying no to the world's definition of O:i!l Struction, as well as to the very construction of the world. This metarelational construction of no is abstract. However, this must not � l.!nderstood in terms of a commensuration-at the level of 'abstraction'--of 1 multiplicity of materials. Such commensuration is simply the condensation of c:-...il ogizability, or relationality, into a minimwn. The abstraction of metarela­ ;).')nality instead emerges from the incommensurability between material and :::.e rotal configuration of relationality: abstraction against configuration. The �rerial positioned by relation is, by means of metarelation, made abstract­ �t is, incapable of being related to by the world, or without analogy to the 5'l:>r!d's configuration. Abstraction indexes the antagonism of material toward �e world's relations of expression, and it does so precisely as it is constructed, x as it is really, imman ently, here. 51

SO LET IT BE WRITTEN, A CREEPING DEATH: PHAGOCYTOTIC CHRONAPTOPTOSIS, OR THE SELF THAT KILLS THE OTHER THAT THE SELF CREATED, SLOWLY Niall W. R. Scott (Sin-Eater) Some say it descended upon the human race through the influ­ ence of heavenly bodies, others that is was a punishment signi fy­ ing God's righteous anger at our iniquitous way of life. But whatever its cause . . . -Giovanni Boccaccio So let it be written, so let it be done, To kill the first born Pharaoh son; I'm creeping death; Die by my hand, I creep across the land, Killing first born man. -Metallica It is not homogeneity-not the levelling of individuality-that scares anymore, then, if this image is read symptomatically: it is ra­ ther the lack of control, dignity, direction that scares us. -Peter Dendle Oh womb, that made me, kept me safe, that has now turned from love to malignance and destroyed my very origin . -Sin-Eater Thus he was enabled to follow, and on a different plane, the dreary struggle in progress between each man's happiness and the abstractions of the plague-which constituted the whole life of our town over a long period of time. -Albert Camus Everyone needs a fantasy. -Andy Warhol 53

Niall W. R. Scott A Creeping Death: a death that not only occurs over time and surface area; a creeping death is a death prophesied. It is an idea scrawled out in text. It is an­ ticipated: the divine judgement cast over Egypt in the form of plagues comes from a distance, each one of the ten plagues enveloping the land, but each one foretold ( Exodus 7:1). Phagocytosis: the endocytotic consumption an d digestion of cells b y other cells ; intra cellular digestion, usually a protective mechanism destroying dangerous microorganisms that have invaded the body. Chronapoptosis: serial cellular death . Phagocytotic chronapoptosis is a death that is deconstructed. It is a death that is consumed, eaten, absorbed. It is a death that progresses over time. It is a death that creeps, devours and removes all traces of evidence; the entire body necrotises itself into oblivion. The creeping death takes several forms: the bu­ bonic plague, SARS, Ebola, malaria-or, for example, a death in opposition­ cancer. In this inexhaustive list we are presented with a veritable family of serial kill ers. Instead of the serial killer being figured as a single individual who kill s the many, we can consider the serial kill er in terms of the many killing the one. One by one. Multiple cellular death, cells killing cells: cancerous tumours amassing to extinguish organs and ultimately the organism. This inversion maintains the chronological sequence, a succession of deaths, but it changes its source, locating the agency at the level of a pathogenic or toxic invasion, or an internal cause of cellular breakdown . This inversion has already been used to describe the Black Death, 1 but merely as a placeholder for emotive affect. The inversion challenges the anthropocentric obsession with the terminology sur­ rounding serial killing, an obsession that treats serial killing as restricted to the sphere of human agency. On the contrary, phagocytotic chronapoptosis is a serial killing that leaves no trace of the human, and not simply in some vague phenomenological sense. 2 1 Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, The Return ofthe Black Death: The Worldi Greatest Serial Killer (C hiche ster: Wiley and Sons, 2004). 2 Cf. 'The serial killer is a miscreation, an e mb odime nt (ra ther than a personification) of the hidden behind the seen, the thing, the murderous ghost in the machine. They repre­ sent our ultimate distance from the inner lives of othe rs (and even of ourselves); they are the self-replicating theoretical zombies that should not exist, the alien entitie s that assimilate as they consume-the leaking nothings' (Gary J. Shipley, 'Visceral Increduli­ ty, Or Serial Killing _-\s Necessary .Anathema,' in this volume). 54

A CREEPI NG DEATH .�poptosis and necrosis are forms of cellular death. Necrosis follows apoptosis, £:s:i is brought about by the internal mechanism of the cell: leading to its de­ �uction. The terms autolysis and phagocytosis lead to the impression that the :::i:I: does this to itself-cellular deconstruction. But the term is ambiguous in its �hcation. Although some claim that apoptosis was originally defined as both • programmed cell death and a self-directed cellular suicide,3 this definition is +,.Uenged, highlighting the ambiguity of the term (relegating its grounding to o::!l ceptual rather than empirical foundations) . Correlatively, while this is also c: accu sa tion levelled at necrosis,4 there are those who deny that it is 'synony­ �:-.us with programmed cell death.'S .\t an empirical level, Robert Sloviter maintains that there is no such thing elmer form of death, and opts instead for the general terms 'passive cell 6:-.ath' and 'active cell death.'6 Typically reductionist, this removes the fantastic o ?""...e rry from terminology, evinced in the biologist's dull descriptive attempts to aprure cellular death and its impact in his search for scientific accuracy. The Df"llogist is ever interested in the mechanism of how it occurs, but is unmoved � the tum of phrase 'self-directed' when the effect of apoptosis en rnasse leads y;;. me death of an organism . .\poptosis is seen as a sequential process involving a morphological change � the cell.7 As a form of death, apoptosis is linked to the 'machinery' of the cell •orkmg in a certain style. The cell becomes apoptotic after an apoptotic trig­ �--described as an apoptotic 'conunitment point'-has been set-off. This is i:ac language for describing serial killers, is it not? It is interesting that in his .El!"ch to accurately define apoptosis, Sloviter treats it (as well as necrosis) as an .:ic:a that is-for the purposes of explanatory biological science and pharmacol­ -�-'confusing and therefore virtually meaningless,'8 mirroring claims about � �imilarly confusing nature of definitions surrounding the human serial killer �cally here, where concerned with quantity and time) : • • Ji-,d Hockenberry, 'Review: Defining .\poptosis,' American Journal of Pathology 1 46. 1 ! r,.q; , 1 6 :� 1 9. � ;.obert S. Sloviter, 'Apoptosis: A Guide for the Perplexed,' TRENDS in Pharmacological 5zw;u 23. 1 (2002): 19-24. . • .. • !..�. 23. - ·:::dl shrinkage and loss of normal contacts, dense chromatin condensation, cellular �g and fragmentation, and rapid phagocytosis by professional phagocytes or adja­ c:=: cells are the typical events of apoptosis that occur in a fixed sequence' (David n..--..: kenberry 'Review: Defining Apoptosis,' American Journal of Pathology 146. 1 [1995): · �­ .- ' �ter, '-�poptosis,' 23. 55

Niall W. R. Scott In the Va11co11ver Sn11 recently, I saw this statement: 'A serial killer is defined as someone who commits more than three murders over a period that spans more than one month. For the most part, serial killers commit murder for some sort of psychological bene­ fit.' I've seen similar definitions in many other media reports, de­ spite the FBI's change in 2005 to a minimum of two murders with no reference to motive or time frame. This is not surprising, con­ sidering the haphazard history of the term.9 Typically, the focus of interest in serial killing is in the detail of the how, the method, the agency, the motivation, the quantity. The focus of interest in apop­ tosis is in the detail of the mechanism, the changes that are undergone (in mor­ phology) , and the external invasive processes that instigate it. The cellular self­ directed death is described in such a way as to suggest that the cell enters a state of psychological torment, a crisis which leads it to commit suicide. But when this event happens en masse, cell by cell, it can lead to the death of the organ­ ism. Somewhat paradoxically-though in the face of another cellular serial kill­ er-it can also lead to its health and survival. For example, apoptosis is related to a cellular self-destruction that prevents cancer cells developing and amassing in the body. A key cause of serial death is cancer, and cancer is the adversary of apoptosis. The apoptotic cell's machinic agency required for self-annihilation is usurped by the power of the cancerous cell. The cancerous cell annihilates through its mass reproduction. In cancer, it is the process of apoptosis that is inhibited; cancer cells are thus de-regulated cells that are able to overcome the apoptotic mechanism that would lead to their own destruction. Twin deaths fighting each other for supremacy: cancerous tumour growth emerges through the suppression of apoptosis, 1 0 yet apoptosis can lead to the process of necro­ sis. A cellular serial killer that undermines the actions of the cellular serial killer. II. As a serial killer, the cell-self that kill s the mereological constructed self does so bit by bit, slowly over time. It is true that from the moment we are born we begin to die. The moment the cell is created, the path to putrefaction, decay and death is engendered. There is no way out. Creeping death commences 9 Katherine Ramsland, 'Defining a serial Killer. So Much Confusion,' Pv·chology Today (201 3), available from https:/ /www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shadow­ boxing/ 201304/ defining-serial-killer-so-much-confusion (accessed 28-05-1 5). 10 .\lison M . Hunter, Eric C. LaCasse, and Robert G. Komeluk, et al, 'The Inhibitor& of Apoptosis (L-\.Ps) as Cancer Targets,' An International]011rnal on Programmed Cell Death 1 2. 1 9 (2007): 1 543-68, available from http: / /www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gm.·/pubmed/ 1 757 3556 (accessed 28-05-1 5). 56

A CREEPING DEATH ..:.ere apoptosis is merely an idea. 1 1 A momentary idea. The realisation in the s.h that this inevitable death by disease or decay at the hands of the cellular � killer is a moment of realisation. Not only this, but it is a realisation of the .:lerual of individuality in favour of the primacy of the many, the supremacy of � many and the obliteration of the one. This multitude or mass can be con­ ::r--ed as a solid growing tumour that takes to task destroying the functionality .::£ the body, on the one hand, and ensuring its putrefication and necrotic liqui­ �on, on the other. Tius momentary idea, the moment of death of the s (c)el(l)f that is also the =s:rment of self-realisation is in its very nature the moment of another death: :!le death of immediacy. Where the cell dies, at the point of its annihilation, one C!",1:ounters the very precipice of what it is and what it is not at that particular =::o)ffie nt. That is to say, the difference between one's state of awareness as a � and the anticipation of no longer being able to be aware of oneself as a �· The cellular suicide is accompanied by a conceptual self-suicide. The self �t has been created and grounded in a cellular existence is slowly dying at the :xbest of those very cells in which the self is grounded. �egaard characterises the annihilation of the self as dying away from imme­ �cy . 1 z S uffering for Kierkegaard is a term of worship, and dying away from - mediacy is, as he puts it, not just a death of the self, it is a move away from � moment. That which is serial has a chronology, iterations that may happen ::: moments, but are projected across time in sequence. An acceptance of the -:reep of the serial death demands a perspective that also denies the immediate. �e human serial killer invites acceptance and surrender, the participation of � death of the self and the corpulent self together, a simultaneity that com­ ":Zl:es \vith immediacy, to experience the moment of the light diminishing and � corpse emerging. No matter what the motivation, of quantity, it is always a �ure, because the extinguishing moment will always be denied to us as a mo­ =ent of possible experience. This is because the individual self that hoped to be •'.:'Le to reflect on that very moment, is gone-'After my head has been z·:>pped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my ·�"lln -:!!'C'S ' blood gushing from my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleas­ (P eter Ki.irten) . 1 3 On the contrary, the creeping chronapoptoptic death, : Cf. Sloviter, 'Apoptosis,' 23-4 and passim . .: 5ee C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard'! Fragments and Po1tmipl: The R.eli!J'ot11 Philo1opl?J of '...;..;irnu C!im1ZC11 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Humanities Press International, 1 983), 1 69- -J • Cf Fred Botting, 'Bataille's Vampire,' and Shipley, '�ecessary Anathema,' in this -)hnn e . 57

Niall W. R. Scott the motiveles s mindless death witnessed over time, and in sequence, is a rejec­ tion of immediacy, and thus also a rejection of the self. Conceding to the prophecy of cell biology is an acceptance that allows for a death before death. Maybe this acceptance can even be characterised as a fonn of revelation-we cannot die because we have died already. The very thing the human serial killer revels in-agency, the moment, the act-is overcome by this double death: time and multiplication coalesce to become the supreme enemy; the real heces­ sary anathema. ' The outcome of this cellular serial killing looms over all of u s . It i s a cellu­ lar E1711achtigung, the final solution that hangs over humanity. It is a serial killing that has diversified into multiple invasions, from diseases to corporeal malfunc­ tioning malignancies, a creeping death that continues despite microbiological resistance garnered by those who would try to postpone and withstand it. The creeping death is slow and adaptive. Its advance is coming. 58

II I PICKED A JUICY FLOWER

BATAILLE'S VAMPIRE Fred Botting A prolific serial killer strangled, stabbed and hacked to death women, children, and men in the vicinity of Diisseldorf in separate attacks from 1 929 to 1 930. A manhunt across Germany saw police chasing false leads and making wrong ar­ rests . The 'Vampire of Diisseldorf'-as he was called by the press-was appre­ hended only by chance in April 1 930. A local, married, working man who al­ ready had a long criminal record and who had spent significant periods in pris­ ons from before the outbreak of World War I, the vampire's given name was Peter Kiirten. He was indicted-and convicted in 1 931--of nine murders and seven attempted murders, all of which he readily admitted, as well as confessing many other criminal and violent acts in a series of statements following his ar­ rest. His crimes, pursuit and capture attracted considerable attention across Eu­ rope. The trial, with its range of experts, its number of witnesses, and its cata­ logue of violent horrors, drew large crowds and over eighty journalists to the army barracks that served as a courtroom. The brutality of the 'series-murders,' or 'lust-murders,' and the sensational reporting that styled the unknown killer as 'monster,' 'ripper' and 'vampire' ensured widespread interest in the case. Among those who paid attention to press reports in France was a writer who has become known for examining monsters of greater notoriety and more scandalous historical purview, like Gille s de Rais or Marquis de Sade, as well as monstrosities of wider cultural significance, like the bloody, sacrificial practices of the Aztecs. In a short piece, unpublished in his lifetime, Georges Bataille makes specific reference to the 'Vampire of Diisseldorf,' albeit in a footnote that is subsequently crossed out. The translator of the piece, entitled 'Dali Screams with Sade,' adds weight to the note by commenting that the trial of Kiirten 'drew much of Bataille's attention.'1 Yet Boris Belay is not concerned with pursuing the theoretical and cultural significance of Bataille's interest in a notorious murderer. For him, the citation serves as an aid to dating the essay's composition. One option, 1 929, is marked as a period less dense in terms of space devoted to reports of the murders, though it did see the Paris press plot the course of attacks, investigation and mistaken arrests: Le Matin referred regu- ' Georges Bataille, 'The Place of Violence: Selected Writings,' trans. Boris Belay, Paral­ hx 6, no.2 (2000) : 81-91 ; 90. 61

Fred Botting larly to the 'l'insaisissable vampire.' The second date, 1 93 1 , coincides with the trial, when the press gleaned richer copy from arrest details, indictments, court statements and photographs. Belay inclines towards the second option, moving away from the previously accepted date proposed by Denis Hollier. Hollier identifies the piece as an early version of an essay on a painting by Salvador Dali that was published in 1 929 in DoCJ1ments as 'The Lugubrious Game.' The necessity of significant revision was a consequence of the fractious relationship between Bataille and Andre Breton at the time: Dali had just defected to the latter and refused pennission to print a reproduction of the painting that was to have accompanied the essay.2 Dali screamed with Sade in the first version, that is, before he decamped. In the rewritten piece, the association between Sade and Surrealism is considerably more antagonistic. EXPULSION Sade screams more often in 'Tile Lugubrious Game' than in 'Dali Screams with Sade.' The first of Sade's screams-an anecdote later discredited by Maurice Heine-comes with the s tory of his calling to the rabble in the streets outside the prison in which he was incarcerated. A loud and anguished voice, chan­ nelled through the waste pipes of his cell, agitates the crowd with the misin­ formation that 'they are killing all the prisoners.' The second scream is reported by Rose Keller, Sade's mistress and victim: her tearful pleas and pathetic en­ treaties only enflarned his callous and brutal physical attentions, inciting him to utter 'horrifying and particularly nauseating screams.'3 Not an accompaniment any joy other than of the most painful sort, the violence of Sade's screams evince an expulsive, excremental energy that is too much for Surrealism. As Bataille develops the excremental theme in 'The Use Value of D .A.F. de Sade,' an essay addressed to his Surrealis t 'comrades,' the encyclopaedic sexual philos­ opher of natural violence assumes too excessive a shape for Surreali s m to coun­ tenance: Sade is a 'foreign body' who serves 'as the object of transports of exal­ tation to the extent that these transports facilitate his excretion (his peremptory expulsion) .'4 The Sade that is celebrated and dispatched by Surrealism is not the horrifying screamer inciting the rabble through a prison drain or the cruel tor­ turer excited by a victim's pleas: he is little more than a piece of faecal matter Denis Hollier, Against Architet111re, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: :\ITT Press, 1 989), 1 06-7. 3 Georges Bataille, 'The "Lugubrious Game,'" in Virions of Excess: Sekcted Writings, 19271939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of :\famesota Press, 1 985), 2�30; 28. � Georges Bataille, 'The Use-Value of D ..\.F. de Sade (an Open Letter to ::VIy Current Comrades),' in The Batailk Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Black­ well, 1 997), 1 47-59; 148. 2 62

BATAI LLE'S VAM P I RE that, with some relief, has been passed after a brief moment of painful pleasure, a turd-Sade expelled, as it were, in a constipatory dynamic of pain-pleasure or contraction-release. Turd-Sade is a curious object, promoted yet held at bay, ingested only in­ sofar as it can be discharged. It is the image of another object constituted and vigorously dispelled in an act of sovereign expenditure, an object that bears the brunt of an acute and imperative act of exclusion founded on abjection.s On a wider social scale, it serves as the strange object over which an imperative moral or mythical force erects itself in a violently authoritative manner.6 In contrast, screaming-Sade is no faecal object but presents 'an irruption of excremental forces' pressing against the limitation to which it corresponds and the narrow­ ness of the enslavement that would contain it.7 Excremental opposition, more­ over, vents revolutionary energies rupturing all and anything that is held up as 'immutable': 'without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature, there would be no revolutionaries, there would only be a revolting utopian sentimentality.'8 Surrealism's radical claims fall into the sec­ ond category, the function of their turd-Sade serving to sustain an expulsive energy which tempers and contains a more violent, tempestuous and irrepressi­ ble explosion of excremental forces. DIAGNOSIS: SADISM What of the screams evoked and uttered by the vampire: the desperate and ag­ onised final outbursts of victims; the quieter, anxiously suffocated breaths of the Diisseldorf population; the orgasmic outbursts of violent joy decorated with splashes of blood; the horrified, indignant, perhaps secretly delighted, gasps exhaled by readers of gory news? Peter Kiirten was a sadist. The diagnosis was established by a legal psychiatrist, Karl Berg, who spent a year interviewing and evaluating the mental state of the killer while he was awaiting trial. Excremental, to judge by the horrified reactions his acts provoked, the object of Berg's study, though fully conforming to criteria defining the sadistic personality type, does not appear in the monstrous form suggested by the media. The horror of the acts when contrasted with the sanity, responsibility and appearance of the man that committed them was a division that shaped the course of Kiirten's prose­ cution. In Berg's analysis, the acts of the sadist, his psychological make-up, his 5 Georges Bataille, 'L'abjection et les fonnes miserables: in <Euvres completes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 2 1 �21. 6 Georges Bataille , 'The Psychological Structure of Fascism,' in The Bataille Reader, 12246. - Bataille, 'D.A.F. de Sade,' 1 48. s Ibid., 1 57. 63

Fred Botting everyday appearance and his murderous pastimes all remained fully in accorc with his psychiatric classification. From this perspective, he seems excrementa in the sense of turd-Sade, a figure who is unimpressive but for the horror of hi! acts alone: ripping through bodies at will and without consideration for any· thing but his own pleasure, this vampire, it seems, is no monstrous, super· natural entity who succeeds in releasing forces that shred or shatter the founda­ tions of 'immutable' laws and structures . However, in the stories appearing in daily newspapers, in the accounts ot experts and witnesses at the trial, and in Kiirten's statements and many inter­ views with Berg (transcribed and published in his book a year later), the crimes appear so horrific that the magnitude of their monstrosity warrants heterologi­ cal consideration. Kiirten's excessive violence, motivated by the demands of his pleasure alone, certainly seems to manifest the transgression of any restraints and values, eschewing laws, social rules and any form of morality or compas­ sion. Beyond the actualities of physical pain and pleasure, however, lies the question of the sacred or anguished dimension of monstrosity with its shatter­ ing, excremental forces . Attuned to both the most abject social and political conditions of interwar Germany and to a violence and sovereignty that seemed utterly inhuman, the crimes reverberated across Europe and, without knowledge of the identity of the perpetrator, were garnished only with evoca­ tive names-vampire, ripper, monster-thereby fuelling and forming fears, and furnishing, moreover, the manner in which later proceedings would be framed. With a touch of hyperbole, George Godwin, in a short book that originated as an introduction to the English translation of Berg's The Sadist, describes Kiirten's crimes as 'so monstrous and inhuman as to be without parallel in criminal history.'9 BLOOD LUST Headlines settled on the designation of 'vampire,' though many-and crucial­ details were unavailable until after his arrest. It turned out to be most apt, as interviews and diagnoses revealed: blood lay very much at the root and aim of Kiirten's crimes. For a considerable period, the singularity of motive, as well as identification of a single perpetrator, was obscured by the variety of the killings, methods, instruments and targets being modified according to mood and op­ portunity: as well as s trangling, he stabbed and hacked his victims with a variety of weapons (broken scissors, knives, axes) ; he killed during burglaries, but more often lured his victims to the wooded outskirts of Diisseldorf; his acts involved different types of sexual invasion, usually they resulted in orgasm; most victims 9 George Godwin, Peter Kiirten: A Study in Sadism (London: Acom Press, 1 938), 1 0. 64

BATAI LLE'S VAM PIRE were female, often women and sometimes children, while on occasions h e at­ tacked men. The lack of identifiable pattern to profile the crimes confounded the police. It also made the acts seem random and motiveless: here was a mur­ derer driven to kill for the sake of killing, a sovereign, almost existential, affir­ mation of nothing except, through violently taking life, the overcoming of life's subordinate relation to death. Some experts suggested at the trial that Ki.irten's crimes involved nothing but killing for killing's sake. Their claims were reiterat­ ed by newspapers citing his aim to be 'killing with such deliberation and with­ out purpose': 'he kills for the pleasure of killing,' u Petit Parisien noted on its front page for 29 May 1930. No reason, no material gain, no apparent motive seemed to determine the murders. Ki.irten's own account at times plays up the motiveless monstrosity of his crimes, making claim to nothing but a murderous extravagance and wastefully destructive expenditure of energies: 'if I had the means I would have killed masses. I would have caused catastrophes.'10 A willingn ess to shock and magni­ fy the grandeur of his meaningless acts of murder is evident in some state­ ments. In others, he underplays the horror and exceptional nature of his experi­ ence with calm indifference and almost commonplace callousness. Discussing his early life with Berg he describes decapitating a goose and watching the blood flow from the neck in a matter of fact and banal tone: 'you can imagine that, Professor, and you must try it for yourself sometime-how the blood rushes absolutely silently when you cut the head off a goose.'1 1 Mentioned al­ most in passing and as little more than ordinary sight, the fascination is under­ stood to be evident and universal. A lack of emotion and absence of compas­ sion is evident in the confessions, and characterises the sadist. The clarity with which he recalls and retells brutal details of his murders is striking, especially when the fervour and intensity of the sexual violence they involved is consid­ ered: 'sometimes when I seized my victim's throat, I had an orgasm, sometimes not, but then the orgasm came as I stabbed my victim.'12 The underlying sexual imperative of the murders is set out coldly, almost mechanically, in the recollec­ tions, belying the intensity of the urges. Bloody sexual gratification underpinned all Kiirten's actions, though the unpredictability of successful satiation and cli­ max demanded escalations of frequency, method and implement: achieving an indeterminate threshold of satisfaction governed the seemingly random nature of the acts so that, if strangulation did not succeed, stabbing would; if scissors were inadequate, an axe would suffice. Repetition-the very definition of a se­ ries-murderer-works against itself, with familiarity diminishing excitement and the possibility of orgasm with every reiteration: every additional act thus reto Cited in Karl Berg, The Sadist, trans. Olga Hiner and George Godwin (London: Acom Press. 1 938), 1 1 0. 1 1 Berg, The Sadist, 1 1 3. I� Ibid., 1 1 1 . 65

Fred Botting quired variation and intensification of scale to recover the stimulation necessary to climactic expenditure. The pattern is that of modem reproduction, as set out in Walter Benjamin's discussion of repetitive mechanisms of industrial, urban and aesthetic shocks. n Blood, so Berg, concluded was the key to Kiirten's abnormal desires.14 In one account, describing the murder of a woman he had lured into the woods, different threads of his sexual violence cohere: 'there, too, I had no satisfaction during the SeA"Ual act, only later during the throttling I became stiff again and when, as I stabbed her throat, the blood gushed from the wound, I drank the blood from the wound and ejaculated. I probably drank too much blood, be­ cause I vomited.'15 The excess from which Kiirten abreacts corporeally with an expulsion of excess sees the physical culmination of his pleasures encounter the full sanguinary fantasy that drives them. Blood determined his sexual life, so Berg's analysis discloses, from the intensity that encompassed early experience of the slaughter of animals, to his own erotic emulations in acts of bestiality and animal torture. Blood defined the horizons of his existence, from the start of his life, to its end: reflecting on his impending execution by guillotine, Kiirten imagined the possibility of being able to see the blood gush from his headless neck, considering it to be the 'pleasure of pleasures.'1 6 Sadist, masochist, fetishist, and pyromaniac, Kiirten 'displayed practically every sexual aberration known to psychiatrists . ' 1 7 He took great pleasure in set­ ting isolated buildings on fire and watching them burn. Childhood bestiality and torture carried through to adulr sexual behaviour dominated by pain, violence and blood. Though conducting relatively normal relations with his wife, absti­ nence was never an option: his urges, so it seemed, required repeated and vio­ lent satisfaction. He was imaginative and adaptable in fll1ding sources of satis­ faction. Even the abstinence enforced by frequent and extended periods in prison, mainly for theft and burglary, did not impede his search for satisfaction: highly suggestible, his own violent fantasies were often enough to secure or­ gasm. If not, there were others, alive and dead, imprisoned alongside him. He took advantage of the poor sanitation, brutal punishment and limited nutrition dominating prison life during WWI: by volunteering for duties involving the disposal of corpses he found new ways to gratify his needs . 1 8 The number of killings and attacks, the levels of violence they exhibited, the variety of victims and means of murder and the combination of callous in13 Walter Benjamin, 11/nminalions, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 1 78. 1 4 Berg, The Sadist, 1 59. 1 s Ibid., 1 24. 1 6 Ibid. 17 .Margaret Seaton Wagner, The Monster of Diisseldoif: The Ufa and Trial of Peter Kiirten (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 28. 1 a Wagner, Monster ofDiisseldoif, 28. 66

BATAI LLE'S VAMP I R E difference and glorious extravagance evinced by the vampire's exhibitionistic confessions already speak to a mode of monstrosity that threatens all bounds of reason, morality and sense. The range and intensity o f sexual aberrations, viola­ tions, pleasures and orgasmic expenditures involve excessive flows of energy and fluids, powerful urges gratified by burning, killing, bleeding and ejaculating. If such an individual achieves the status of a 'great abnormal,' the sovereignty of the monstrosity evinced lies at the limits of the culture and times in which it is born. An editorial in Le Matin considered the conditions from which his monstrosity emerged and wonders whether an individual monster is really re­ sponsible or whether he is the crest of a 'collective wave of sadism' that is at­ tributed to 'the moral disequilibrium of the post-war troubled years' (13 April 1 931). Another commentator agrees: 'such horrors are caused by times such as those through which Germany, embittered and impoverished, was passing. ''9 Unintentionally, but no less powerfully, the individual monster called the 'Vampire of Di.isseldorf' comes to express \•;icier monstrosity as symptomatic figure born of conditions of poverty, despair, political and economic impotence and disillusion, a figure of abjection, weakness and brutality shivering with a generalised, aimless and endless rage. One makes the monsters one deserves. SYMPTOM-KIILERS A mirror and excess to the times out of and beyond which he grew, Kiirten's monstrosity, it seems, is located at the level of other symptomatically-charged figures of murderous expenditure, serial killers whose acts speak less of forces within than of surrounding, barely suppres sed violence. Gilles de Rai's, tried in sixteenth-century France for many heinous crimes, including a penchant for sitting masturbating on bellies of dying or decapitated tortured children, took imperatives to expend destructively and gloriously to their absolute end. De Rais was of a different world. His killing was not driven by a sexual urge but by a desire to be close to death. As a 'simple brutal man' shaped by the destructive expenditures of battle and ruled by standards inimical to 'civilized proprieties,' moral value or religious precept; he 'fancied himself a sovereign Lord' guided only by the values of 'ruinous expenditure,' determined only to 'shine' through the scale of his wasteful extravagance.20 In de Rals' world humans had no mean ing and little value, 'no more than an element of voluptuous turmoil' in which lives could be consumed on any sovereign whim: they possessed 'no other meaning than a possibility for more violent pleasures and he did not stop 1 9 Ibid., 27. �· Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gil/ts de RaiS, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: _\mok, 1 991), 10; Ibid., 29; Ibid., 1 �24. 67

Fred Botting losing himself in this violence.'21 In a world in which wars were incessant, slaughter common, and burning villages a familiar occurrence, violent, destruc­ tive and meaningless acts 'had a sort of banality to them. '22 The enjoyment of battle that was, for de Rai's, life itself, existed as an ongoing potlatch, a ruinous game of glory and excessive expenditure at which only sovereigns could play. Another time, another killer: when Jack t!ie Ripper stalked the streets and newsstands of London, murdering and eviscerating 'fallen' women while avoid­ ing capture and evading all attempts at identification, the unquenched anxiety that arose traversed concerns with self-preservation in the overcrowded, anon­ ymous, multi-ethnic, recidivistic slums of the East End and the disgusted but fascinated gaze of speculative decadence associated with higher social strata. Sovereign and abject, Ripper anxiety disclosed a violent imperative bom of a vicious, uncompromising yet hypocritical sexual morality executed with the muscled nonchalance of a servile slaughter-man or the surgical skill of a trained man of medical science.23 Another place, another killer: Hennan Webster Mudgett's notoriety as the exemplar of a modem and distinctively American 'Gothic' style of murder mirrored and distilled a world of entrepreneurial ra­ tionality and businesslike execution. A chemist and fraudster known also as 'H. H. Holmes,' he built his own 'murder factory' on the bustling streets of a Chi­ cago booming as a centre of commercial and agricultural distribution.24 Near the site of the World Columbian Exposition, i;:s position served well as a 'tour­ ist trap,' luring hopeful visitors and lonely, job-seeking female stenographers alike. Designed for commerce and comfort, with shops below and lodgings above, the building boasted a range of modem conveniences like gas and elec­ tricity. Sophistication of design extended to the dispatch of bodies: secret stairs and passages, sliding doors, fake and concealed gas pipes (not used for lighting, cooking or heating) and various hidden chutes dropping directly to a basement containing examination table, lime pits, and furnace, constructed a killing maze enabling undetected movement, easy execution and efficient disposal. Money, machines, marketing and murder, entrepreneurial rationality and brutal efficien­ cy, domestic comfort and vicious cruelty, it was as much an exposition of the American dream as the marvel of mechanical manufacturing established by Henry Ford.25 One makes the monsters one deserves. The lust-murders of Peter Ki.irten, mirror and excess of interwar abjection and brutal projections of imperative and sovereign violence, follow patterns of Gilles de Raii, 36. 22 Ibid. 23 Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis, eds., ]ark the Ripper: Media, Cu/tun, History �anchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) . 24 Mark Sdtzer, Serial Kilkr1: Death and Ufi in America '! Wound Culture (London and New York: Routledge , 1 998), 204. :?5 Sdtzer, Serial Ki//er1, 2 1 8. :?l Bataille, 68

BATAI LLE'S VAMPI RE extended monstrosity. Like de Rai's, mythologised as 'Bluebeard,' or the Ripper, whose anonymity adds fuel to so many fictional returns and reinventions, and like Holmes, too, in Robert Bloch's Ameni:an Gothic,26 the effects of horror and monstrosity echo in popular fascinations and fictional iterations. Fiction and folklore frames Kiirten, sensationally monstered before his identity was known. Afterwards, he appears in film aml 1;oi1g: FriLZ Lang's M was reputec.lly based uu Kiirten, though the director denied it. Elsewhere influence is unequivocal: 'I'm the Vampire of Diisseldorf / And I will cut your life short' is the closing cou­ plet of Macabre's metal homage to Kiirten.27 The Chicago-based self-styled 'murder metal' band with a penchant for songs about serial killers, finds suitable inspiration from the 'Vampire of Diisseldorf.' Celebrating the spilling of blood and semen and citing the strangling, slashing, slicing and stabbing necessary to attaining the requisite flows, the appropriately gory eulogy to Kiirten proffers a degree of tonal ambivalence: performances deliver the song with nursery-rhyme chanting as well as a Can-Can tempo. That, and the use of half-rhymes (knives 'gashing,' blood 'splashing'; blood 'spilling,' a sight 'thrilling') suggesting the halving of lives as well as lines, adds a rhythmic lightness that plays sex­ violence-shock-horror for fun, undercutting monstrosity with a sense of trite­ ness. PROFANATION Claims inflating the scale of Kiirten's monstrosity only tell part of a story in which banality persistently plays a part. A tidy, even dapper, man who sustained a marriage and, when not incarcerated, held down a job, he had few qualities distinguishing him from others: 'he was not a good-looking man nor an ugly man but one of the most ordinary appearance in the world.'28 Newspaper pho­ tographs displayed his clean-cut, careful appearance: a normal-looking, well­ groomed man. He even carried an old cloth with him to wipe his shoes (and probably the instruments of murder) . He was both a 'nice man' and a 'monster,' whose autopsy revealed him to be 'physically normal'; he showed 'normal affec­ tion' for his wife.29 After a year of psychiatric evaluation, Berg was able - al­ most-to forget that the man before him was the monster of Diisseldorf: 'aside from his defects, Kiirten presented qualities similar to the ordinary run of men,' noting, further, that such ordinariness was common among sadistic killers: there was 'nothing very remarkable in that.'30 Oddly, but directly, Berg's diag1(; Robert Bloch, American Gothic (London: W. H . -\lien, 1 975). :· �Iacabre, 'Vampire of Diisseldorf,' . Sinister Slaughter (Nuclear Blast Records, 1 993). !l3 Wagner, Monster ofDiisseldoif, 1 58. Peter Kiirten, 1 7-22. " Berg, The Sadirt, 1 59. ::s Godwin, 69

Fred Botting " � as doubly ordinary: ordinary as a man and unremarkable DJim ; as m ahx.nW p:uh ological killer. Though the sexual urge driving his crimes v.� aboomuly strong, th ere was 'nothing fundamentally new for sexual pa­ thology· m Kllrten 's case. The only distinctive feature of his pathology was its qwntiatrrc, nor qualitati>e, aspect.31 Klirten v.<LS not contemptuously superior to, dismissive of or indifferent to attempts to reduce him to reason or explain his crimes; he made no attempt to keep sO\·ettign silence, display disdainful refusal or regularly assume aggrandis­ ing postures when it came to dealing with experts and figures of authority. Con­ forming to his �e. he showed 'respect' for legal and moral authority.32 He was also highly accommodating when it came to confessing his crimes, displaying a fine mem�- for detail and an 'active desire to reveal himself' to the psychia­ trisr_ 35 .\ll his acts and statements fitted very neatly into available psychiatric ca t egories . Too well: 'in whatever abnormal light he was regarded he presented striking confirmanon of the argument in hand.'34 Having already read Cesare Lombroso's thesis on criminality, he readily offers himself up in that light when discussing how the sexual passions 'inherited from my father made me abso­ lutely crazy-'35 If atavistic genetic inheritance is one part of an agreed pathologi­ cal his tory, his miserable upbringing presided over by the drunken violence of an incestuous father was another: statements in court not only reiterate his childhood sufferings but also directly refute claims by the prosecution that they had no bearing on his crimes, underlining the 'negative influence' of his back­ ground. These statements, indeed, warranted comment from Le Petit Parisien ( 1 4 April 1 931) and ]oumal des Dibats (24 April 1 93 1 ) . Defined fully within the frame of a sadistic pathology Kurten freely accords when describing the stran­ gling and stabbing of a young girl: 'my sadistic impulses were the motive for this crime.'36 Sexual aberration, bad genes, an abusive upbringing, and poverty contain and define the killer and his crimes, thereby limiting reverberations of mon­ strosity. Explanations did not diminish responsibility or soften the sentence_ All the experts agreed on the defendant's responsibility and sanity in the terms of the Prussian legal code. As Berg explains, despite claiming at times to be domi­ nated by a 'demonic' sexual urge, he was always able to withstand its pressure, whether leaving unsated if no suitable victim was to be found, or halting an assault if interruption made flight the prudent course. An ordinary man and an 31 Ibid., 1 30. 32 Ibid., 1 75. 33 Ibid., 1 95. 34 Wagner, Monster ofDiimldoif, 30. 35 Ibid., 1 29. 36 Ibid., 1 32. 70

BATAILLE'S VAM P I R E ordinary sadist, Kiirten steadily emerges a s a 'habitual criminal.'37 Refuting the defendant's dramatic appeal to irresistible sexual urges, Berg notes that, 'fun­ damentally, it was no more than habit this going out in the evenings or on holi­ days for a suitable victim.'38 He appears as a commonplace figure, a habitual criminal and a habitual killer. His routine of strolling the streets, smoking at crossroads or waiting in bars, moreover, is carefully structured around the ordi­ nary working day: killing, like a hobby, constitutes something to do when one has time off - just another leisure activity. A 'lust-murderer,' 'series-killer,' a suggestible and habitual criminal whose acts and nature fit firmly into the psychopathology called sadism, an ordinary man and an ordinary abnormal, Kurten, as his confession makes plain, turns out to be complicit in his reduction and rationalisation to the systems of medi­ cal and legal authority. Despite the amount of killing, his monstrosity is readily contained. Any qualitative distinction is occluded by the fictional and mythical names bestowed on him by the press. But he was never known as a 'leisure kill­ er,' a murderer passing the time and satisfying a desire by killing on holidays, and on evenings and weekends . With him, urges, violence, blood and orgasm notwithstanding, pleasure is the boss only when he is not at work. The pattern of his emotional state in advance and after each act follows a crescendo and diminuendo of tension and release: rising excitement in the build-up to an at­ tack was swiftly succeeded by imme nse relief.39 His acts, calibrated to a tempo­ rality of production as much as pleasure, a rhythm tied to working life, are also, like the care devoted to maintaining his appearance, bound to maintaining equi­ librium. The bursts of bloody sexual violence quite literally the discharge that restores balance to working and corporeal systems, blood wiped away with the cloth he carried to clean his shoes. Despite appearances, he does not vent orgi­ astic or ecstatic expenditure aimed at shattering or rending, in anguish, trans­ gression and sacred violence, an order of material and productive processes to which pleasure and leisure constitute equivalent operating modalities. He is no sacred monster. LEISURE-KILLER Leisure is both a modem and profane notion, registering just how far society has relinquished any institution of ruinous, ecstatic or destructive values and practices. In Man and the Sacred, Roger Caillois charts the shift in terms of a move away from 'holy-days' and festivals in which the everyday world was turned upside down in an active, sometimes violent and brief renunciation of 37 Wagner, Monster ofDiimldoif, 2 1 4. The Sadist, 1 92. 39 Godwin, Peter Kiirten, 13. 3 8 Berg, 71

Fred Botting profane things through bodily expenditures, religious rites and social upheaval. In modernity, Caillois observes, the idea of the holiday is replaced by the vaca­ tion: what once was frenetic, energetic, and sacred in its modes of unproductive re-creation is itself supplanted by practices aimed at rest and relaxation, a pas­ sivity defined in opposition to the busy-ness of work. The term <vacation' itself is significant: it does not suggest the fullness. turmoil and vigour of a festival, but the vacancy and voiding that constitutes the negative of a world dominated by productive and profane forces: not a doing nothing in an active sacred sense, but a becoming nothing, an emptying out, an occupation of the void left by the absence of work.40 To expect Bataille's writings to deliver an extensive study of the 'Vampire of Diisseldorf' would be a mistake. Falling short of any heterological dimen­ sion, whether sovereign or abject, Kiirten's crimes remain closer to ordinary profanation. Horrible though they were, his acts manifest less an ecstatic rend­ ing of material or ideal limitations and remain more solidly tied to the everyday world. The banality of the Diisseldorf killer is t\.vofold: contained in the way they are conducted, explained and circulated, the acts also reflect a wider and pervasive ordinariness in the desires exhibited and satisfied. While, as Belay notes, Bataille paid attention to the reporting of the case, he does not-at least in writing-demonstrate significant interest in the killer. Even the note which mentions the 'Vampire of Diisseldorf' is dismissive: 'whatever the appearances, houses suffocate, and that even without the 'Vampire of Diisseldor£'41 The suffocation that oppresses ordinary domestic spaces-an apprehension o f banal terrors pervading the Earth--exists, in contrast to calm exteriors, without need of any additional aggravation and anxiety prompted by the acts of serial kill ers. Everyday life, it seems, is imbued with enough terrifying potential without the fears evoked by vampires. If anything, it seems that the vampire is extraneous to the fears bubbling in everyday life. The context of the essay suggests as much. It begins with a critical discus­ sion of the poetic uses of dreams (another reference to Dali and the Surrealists) as 'a consecration of unconscious censoring' which is contrasted with real ter­ rors central to the constitution of human psyches. Where, like the psychoana­ lytic unconscious with its screens and censors, social life tends towards con­ cealment, secrecy and shame, such forms of hiding a\vay or burying secrets are set against more overt terror and apparent terrors: 'enough happens incessantly, on the surface of the Earth, to endlessly give rise to spasmodic dread. •42 To this comment is appended the note on the vampire. An addendum to an already overt and manifest dread, the vampire is dismissed as an unnecessary addition � Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, rrans. Meyer Barash (Crbana and Chicago: l.."niver­ sity of Illinois Press, 2001 ) , 1 27. 41 Bataille , 'Place of Violence,' 42 Ibid., 82. 72 90.

BATAI LLE'S VAM PIRE t o extant terrors and another fo rm in which terrors can b e concealed or cen­ sored. The essay goes on to argue against finding serious significance in irrup­ tions associated with poetic and psychoanalytic models, noting instead the su­ perficial sites of horror's circulation: it is a matter of any body being a container and distributor 'of suffering and bloody revolting horror.' The capacity of reli­ gions to determine responses to horror has been 'exasperated' by repeated ex­ posure to death so that the alternations of 'savage' life between 'delirious attrac­ tion' and 'fright' have been resolved by modernity to fall exclusively on the side of the latter Qeading to a 'spiritual emasculation').43 Such polarisation, crucial to the heterological articulation of sacred energies, finds its force similarly weak­ ened by science, economy and psychology.44 Without elaborate religious tech­ niques to engage sufferings, agonies or ecstasies (with their brief, intense and explosive access to sacred continuity) , the modem resolution of polarities insti­ tutes practices that 'turn into mental dissimulation and generalised banalities' and thus evade 'the thought of suffering' by simultaneously renouncing 'the attractiveness of exceeding joy itself. '45 .'\ kind of levelling or homogenisation is put in place to ward off either pole or extremity, whether suffering or joy. The reign of homogeneity and banality, however, does not complete the expulsion of excess energies. Diminished, they are incorporated in a continuity that per­ vades and regularly palpitates across quotidian social and corporeal surfaces to the extent that the violence of Assyrian cruelty, Freud's unconscious and Sade's 'scandalous statements' only sustain slight and superficial differences in a con­ tinuum of terrors that is 'as natural as the fever of animals when they are thirs ty .' The persistence of cruelty and fear at this level suggests that 'the mean­ ings of horrible things' no longer attain the devastating truth of a sacred value but signal a secret 'weakening' of 'the most delicate and purest among us.'46 The diminution of sacred intensities, as Bataille's argument develops, is linked to the daily diet of horrors supplied by newspapers and magazines, sto­ ries of pain, violence and suffering both held at a distance from daily life and consumed within it like coffee at breakfast or a glass of wine with dinner. These organs are rank with stories like that of the 'Vampire of Diisseldorf.' Turning attention to print media and the banal consumption of horrors that they foster suggests where the interest of the case lies, not so much with the nature and crimes of the killer, but in stories and media in which violence and fear are pur­ veyed for pleasurable consumption in homogeneous and profane life: 'and eve43 Ibid. "" Georges Bataille , 'Dossier heterologie,' in CF.uuns complttes II, 1 65-202; George s Ba­ taille, 'Attraction and Repulsion I and II,' in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology 1937- 1939, trans. Betsy \Ving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 988), 1 0324. 45 Bataille, 'Place of Violence,' 83. -16 Ibid. 73

Fred Botting ry morning, the crowd of human beings awakened by the sun above the city demands the share of horrors which despite the puzzlement and even the pro­ resrations of the moralising editorialists, the main newspapers deliver without fail, omitting no detail: for what one wants to know above all else is what atro­ oous thing has happened.'47 The 'share of horrors' presents no great accursed C'\"ent or encounter that rattles the bars of civilization with an upsurge of pagan violence or sacrificial expenditure. Nor is it something that really disturbs the foundations of morality, whatever the overly protesting columnists might claim ( the horror and moral protest feed on each other). Reported atrocities, it seems, are tied to everyday circulation and satisfaction of curiosity, side-dishes to a normal, natural and fairly healthy diet. Bataille certainly has no inclination to iudge and condemn (directing more criticism towards weak, hypocritical moral­ isations of editors and columnists) and, unshaken or unimpressed, sees the cir­ culation of stories of horror and atrocity as part of an unremarkable and unsur­ prising routine. It is even gently restorative and invigorating in its social effects: 'far from making life noxious and unbearable,' it contributes 'to the restless and general and exasperating excitement of atrocity' that serves not to inflate, shat­ ter or disturb everyday life with an irru ption of revolutionary, excremental forc­ es, but participates positively in a modern and management of agonised or joy­ ful excesses. 'Exasperation,' when applied to the sacred intensities of death and horror, significantly describes a practical and profane operation which stokes up and wears down energies with repetition, tempering any spikes of heteroge­ neity, and thereby evacuating or containing extremes with homogenising famil­ iarisation. The 'popular palpitation' that these stories encourage is no occasion for a redoubled moral outrage (first at the crimes themselves and then at the sensational reporting of them) but, on the contrary, serves broadly pacifying and mildly cathartic purposes in the maintenance of a balanced system: it is 'by all means healthy.'48 The leisure killer holds up a cultural mirror, not in terms of excesses that cannot be grasped or measured, that cannot be apprehended without anguish, but as mild doses of light stimulants spicing up and watering down criminal violence, harnessing everyday fears with stories of shock-horror­ atrocity that are consumed on a daily basis by readers at their leisure. RE.IDING MONSTERS Reading sensational stories of violence and murder, whether in books or news­ papers, permeates Kiirten's case. The names in which his crimes are framed come from the legends, folklore and myths that are reinvented to be consumed ,. Ibid. " Ibid.

BATAI LLE'S VAMPIRE in mas s fiction: monster and vampire especially. Th e one commentator who pursues the idea of �ampire' most seriously, George Godwin, does so in a manner that articulates different threads of the case, from causes to diagnoses, outlets and excuses: Kiirten 'walks out of the folklore of the Middle Ages to become the vampire of reality in a modem city.'49 The realisation of myth in the living, breathing violence of the killer, a fantasy made flesh and blood, is associ­ ated with an understanding of an inherent human violence underlying the popular appetite for violent tales: the pleasure taken in the consumption of popular fictions of violence also provides a 'measure of the latent criminality of so-called "normal" people. '50 Stories render lines between normality and ab­ normality, decency and criminality rather porous, separated only by a light gloss of civilization and sublimation that barely keeps latent and manifest desires, suppression and expression, apart. Such stories, however, also offer a mode of sublimation that serves as an outlet for otherwise unconscionable violence: if Kiirten, Godwin speculates, had taken to producing imaginative writing he might have found a 'channel for the discharge of his abnormal appetite' without resorting to violent acts.st Despite his consideration of the implications-and imbrication-of stories and violence, Godwin is less convinced by Kiirten's claim that, having read accounts of J ack the Ripper several times, stories served to 'stimulate the abnormality. ' It is a 'dubious proposition.'52 In interviews and court statements , Kiirten made frequent reference to the appeal of gory and sensational reading material. Not only did he find time to reread accounts of J ack the Ripper, he also recounted the pleasure he took in movies, particularly when viewing scenes of people being grabbed by the throat or thrown over cliffs.53 Sensational newspapers stories also aroused him , as did their effects on others: 'I always got the papers, all of them, and as they were displayed it cost me nothing. In particular I read the murder stories. In doing so I always got sexually excited. Besides that there were always people about the displayed newspapers in whose faces I saw horror.'54 During the period of his most intense activity, Kiirten relished the resulting publicity at the same news­ stands, taking immense pleasure observing and listening to the disturbing ef­ fects that reports of his activities produced on other readers: 'all this amount of indignation and horror did one good.'55 His final statement at his trial adds an­ other twist: 'I may say that I used to intoxicate myself with the sensational press, it was the poison which must bear part of the responsibility of my poi49 Godwin, Peter Kiirten, 49. Ibid., 43. 5t Ibid., 46. s 2 Ibid., 43. 53 Berg, The Sadist, 1 54. 5-1 Ibid., 1 54. so 55 Wagner, Monster ofDiimldoif, 143. 75

Fred Botting saned life. By being moderate now, it has done a great deed to prevent the pub­ lic from being poisoned.'56 This time, rather than emphasising the pleasure ob­ tained from newspaper stories, he stresses their toxic effects, noting their addic­ tive and noxious potential as if offsetting responsibility and blame for his own violent crimes . But he assumes a curiously moralistic position in regard to his own actions, placing himself at a remove and distance that leaves him as ob­ server and commentator on the reporting of his own trial: by withholding the dangerous and intoxicating pleasures of sensationalism, the press has per­ formed a public service. In noting the moderation and restraint characterising the press treatment of his crimes, his praise situates his position as a subject, and in the public interest, rather than as an object of public concern and execra­ tion. The pleasure killer and pleasure reader thus adopts a position defined against any incitement to excessive pleasure, replicating a tone already adopted in editorial commentaries. While summarising Kiirten's final statement and its invocation of the debilitating effects of childhood abuse and suffering, Le Petit Parisien interjects to suggest the appeal constitutes just another work of fancy: 'Beware bad reading! Nothing more easily disturbs one's peace of mind than scenes from spicy fictions' (23 April 1 931). Fiction-as pleasure, sensation and influence-is poison. As an appeal to extenuating circumstance or for sympa­ thy or as a deflection of responsibility, it is also object of derision and dismissal. But fiction-as sublimation and imaginative outlet-remains a possible cure that keeps violence in an unrealised space of writing. Poison-cure, pleasure-morality, and cause-excuse, the sensational stories that surround Kiirten's case keep returning to the same axis along which excess is continually modulated and moderated. For all the killings and violence, for all the tremors evoked among an anxious populace and stirred up in sensational reports, the vampire is contained, running his course and, captured by accident, readily accedes to the powers-that-be. Homogeneity is barely troubled: this vampire remains part of a general palpitation which excites him and, in tum, he excites. Though psychiatric discourse has him pinned unequivocally as a sadistic personality, he is far from being a mirror to an utterly unimaginable excess or a corporeal conduit of excremental forces that leave all structures, laws and grounds in ruins. He is no sacred monster, no object or sovereign agent of het­ erological energy. Almost abject, but too ordinary for that, neither he nor his crimes admit sovereign indifference or the utter insubordination that comes of radical negativity. Neither outside nor cleaving within the circulation of which he remains a reflecting and suggestible part, he remains object, mirror and banal expression of a violence that pertains to a general, even natural, body of suffering and re­ volting horror. Leisure killer and leisure reader, consumer and moralist of his ;6 Berg, The Sadist, 174. 76

BATAI LLE'S VAMPIRE own woes and deficiencies, h e reflects precisely, i f unpleasantly, th e circulations of pleasure-desire central to the productive and profane world. Reader­ consumer and object-provider of the palpitations in others that also animate him, this vampire is a figure lying at the edge-not beyond-systems of circula­ tion, equilibrium, homogeneity, like a gift, if there is one. The only and neces­ sary fault in circulation that the vampire prompts, the sole, if violent, interrup­ tion that keeps circulation turning, is the small (though horrifying) aberration manifested by a move from story or fantasy and into act. Brief bursts of vio­ lence, extenuated tension and sudden, orgasmic release, trace a pattern of dis­ satisfaction calibrated to the wider rise and fall and rise again of stimulation, excitement and relief generated by the circulation and consumption of reports of the crimes. In this banal, repeated and escalating equilibrium of tension and release, only, shocking though it is, the strength of the sexual, bloody urge that drives it is abnormal: yet that is enough to distinguish the crimes as rich materi­ al for stories. Otherwise, this leisure-killer remains very much on the same plane-and page-as the readers briefly enervated by tales of violence. 77

GULP OF SUN: RETHINKING SACRIFICE THROUGH BATAILLE'S GILLES DE RAiS Brooker Buckingham Too bad! This story might've benefited from not seeming so unfortunate It might've been more humiliating It might've been more shocking since the desire in me to humiliate and shock is great enough that I should've been a sun rather than a god. -Georges Bataill e, Divine Filtht In the Trial of Gilles de RaiS, Georges Bataille 's study of the fifteenth-century French nobleman who was tried and executed for torturing and murdering up to two hundred youths, Bataille quotes de Rai's as saying he had been 'born un­ der a constellation such that no one could understand without difficulty the illicit things he committed.'2 Earlier, Bataille makes the observation that, 'Crime, obviously, calls for night; crime would not be crime without darkness, yet-were it pitch dark-this horror of night aspires to the burst of sunshine.'3 One would be remiss not to read these fragments through Bataill e 's theory of solar economy. By taking this approach, I argue that Bataille 's solar economy­ which posits the Sun as both the condition for life and the originary representa­ tion of the excess and expenditure that life-forms emulate through the general economy-provides the foundation for a speculative framework through which 1 Georges Bataille , Divine Filth: Lost Wniings 1?;1 Georges Batailk, trans. �fark Spitzer (Lon­ don: Creation Books, 2004), 1 6. I would like to thank Edia Connole and Fred Botting for their critical appraisal of this essay at various stages in its development. 2 Georges Bataille , The Trial of GiUes de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok, 1991), 1 1 . 3 Ibid., 10. 79

Brooker Buckingham one can understand the historical positionality of de Rafa' explosive violence. In conclusion, and against Bataille 's fascination with sacrificial violence, I argue that sacrificial violence has always already been in excess and requires a closure in order for humanity to make the gift both immanent and intimate-a closure that will emancipate us &om the human condition, as conditioned by the Sun. I. Whil e premodem historical records reveal a paucity of serial killers, none o f them came close t o the level of atrocity that de Rais achieved with the help of a handful of accomplices. Between 1 432 and 1 440, de Rais was accused of tortur­ ing, raping and murdering over one hundred and forty youths between the ages of seven and twenty. An absurdly wealthy nobleman, de Rais owned a number of residences throughout the Brittany region of France. De Rais enlisted men to act as 'child valets,' tasking them to find beautiful, young children and bring them back to his residence. Children were ushered into a room, where they were strangled and abused on an 'abominable apparatus.'� De Rais often re­ leased the children and sat upon them, rubbing his penis against their bellies and ejaculating on them.s More often, he would suspend his enjoyment and pair it with the moment of the child's death, usually caused by slitting their throats . De Rais took great pleasure in coming while his victim was in the 'lan­ guor of death.'6 The orgiastic behavior continued-the dead children were de­ capitated or dismembered; de Rais was said to have 'delighted at the sight o f their internal organs . '7 The cadavers were then burned in the fireplace, but de Rais was known to keep the heads of his victims for a short time, and reflect upon their beauty. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Bataille 's research on de Rais is the explicit detail he provides of the man's crimes-a litany of grotesqueries. These revolting passages stand in stark contrast to the rigorous attempts that Bataille makes to determine the cause of de Rais' behavior-the loss of his parents at a young age, being raised by an immoral, sadistic and greedy grandfather, his in­ volvement in brutal war campaigns, evidence of his participation in Satanic rit­ uals, and the inexplicable expenditure of his wealth which reached hemorrhagic proportions in the years leading up to his arrest. Bataille presents us with reflec­ tions on violence that exceed any possible limit, a limit past which the perpetra­ tor of the violence is confined to 'the domain of the monstrous,' creating a dis- -1 Ibid., 35. 5 C£ 'My balls become dead suns [De la house dans la tete . ],' in Georges Bataille, 5 poems: Georges Bataille, trans. Mark Daniel Cohen, Hyperion 3, no. 4 (2008): 79-83; 80. 6 Bataille , Gilles de Rail, 36. 7 Ibid., 36. . 80 .

G U LP OF SUN tance 'between hi s crimes and us.'8 To place the serial killer outside o f the hu­ man amounts to a rejection, not only of de Rats, but also of Bataille's attempts to think 'with' the serial killer. More importantly, it amounts to enacting vio­ lence against the human totality. Benjamin Noys encapsulates this second re­ jection in the fonn of a paradox: To exclude crime and perversion from the human totality is an act of violence against that totality that does not destroy crime and perversion. However, if we take on perversion and crime as exclu­ sive values then we celebrate them as such and thereby increase their violence. 9 Bataille asks us to abandon the former premise and engage with the impli­ cations of the latter. But modernity, in particular, instrumental reason, cannot abide by Bataille 's demand, nor can morality, society and its institutions. In ask­ ing us to experience the <vertigo' of de Rats' 'shattering of boundaries,'10 and to claim that his 'crimes arose from the immen se disorder that was . . . unwinding him and unhinging him,'' ' Bataille argues that de Rats was constituted by the power relations and social structures that defined fifteenth-century France. But an alternative reading--one that is truly present to the complexities of Bataille 's thought-requires a bracketing of his rational, causative account of de Rats' behavior, and asks us to think de Rai's through the concepts of sovereignty and sacrifice. Bataill e defines sovereignty as the impossible expression, or experience of that which is 'free of all limitations of interest'1 2-experience which, at the same time, appears to be opposed to our common sense notion of freedom. n Faced with the 'magisterial obscenity'1 4 of de Rats' sovereignty, an impossible expression of freedom that violently ruptures the social, it seems right, as Nick Land suggests, to discard the notion that one could derive any 'theoretical com­ fort'1 5 from Bataille's reading of de Rats . However, one can perhaps read de Ra!s' expression of sovereignty as an example of 'a sovereignty of servitude,' which Bataille defines as 'a world in which free violence only has a negative Benjamin Noys. Geofl!! Batailk: A Critical Introduction (Sterling: Pluto, 2000), 6 1 . Ibid., 62. tu Ibid., 64. 11 Bataille , Gilk! de RaiS, 1 4. 1 2 Georges Bataille , 'Autobiographical Note,' in The Batailk &ader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1 997), 1 1 6. 1 3 Nays, Geofl!! Batailk, 60. s 9 1 4 Ibid. 1 s Nick Land, The Thir!t For Annihilation: Geo'lf! Batailk and Vimknt Nihili!m (London: Routledge, 1 992), 70. 81

Brooker Buckingham place.'16 Perhaps Bataille views d e Ra.ls as a n aberration of sovereignty, a fonn of sovereignty divorced from its potential to realize itself in a positive space, in a world that differs from our own. Bataille 's theory of sacrifice follows a similar logic. For Bataille , sacrifice is founded on destruction-its originary, mythical gesture was to remove plants and animals from the world of things, placing them in an intimate relation with a divine world that is, at the same time, im­ manent to the world of things. 'Sacrifice turns its back on real relations .'17 Sacri­ fice 'resolve[s] the painful antinomy of life and death by means of a reversal, ' t 8 In the mythical past, s acri fice was grounded in a positive place . The sacrifice, the putting to death of the thing, released the soul to commune with the inti­ mate sacred. But from the beginnings of Empire and Christianity, and onwards to the present day, sacrifice has come to occupy a nega tive space. The violence associated with the intimate life becomes 'a danger to t h e stability of things.' 1 9 Becaus e discontinuous, limited life can never b e 'thinged, ' the intimate life sug­ gests itsel f in its absence, while continuous, limitless death-that which exceeds the continuous-always reveals itself in the plenitude of life and the order of thin . 20 gs Elsewhere in his oeuvre, Bataille develops a metap hysics of evil, which is largely premised on the idea that 'Evil is not the opposite of Good but that which confounds the ordered opposition of Good and Evil upon which Good is based '2 1 Bataille argues that conceptual dualisms are essentially reductive, idealized abstractions that 'function to confine or imprison human experience within a discursive system.'22 These dualisms are ideologi cal , protecting power and order from the 'accursed share'-the proliferation of exces s energy derived from the general economy. In order to think outside of these imposed dual­ isms, Bataille posits a dualism derived from the Gnostic and Manichean tradi­ tions . Accordingly, the conceptual dualism of Good and Evil is grounded in the homogenous world of plurality and difference-a material and profane world-while the supplemental Evil that confounds th e dualism belongs to a heterogenous world-a sacred world . Yet this sacred world is not transcendent; it en ters into relations with and conditions the profane world. 16 Georges Bataille, The Theory of &ligion, trans. Robert Hurley (Boston: Zone Books, 1 989), 77. 1 7 Ibid., 44. 18 Ibid., 45. 19 Ibid., 46-7. 20 Bataille, Theory of&ligion, 46-7. 21 William Pawlett, 'Baudrillard's Duality: Manichaeism and the Principle of Evil,' Inter­ national Journal of Baudrillard Studies 1 1 , no. 1 (2014), available from http://www .ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1 1_1 /v1 1 -1-pawlett.html (accessed 1005-15). 22 Pawlett, 'Baudrillard 's Duality.' 82

G U LP OF SUN How does one reconcile Bataille's engagement with de Rats with his theo­ ries of sovereignty, sacrifice and Evil? De Rats is clearly enmeshed in the sover­ eignty of servitude, a monolithic figure of Evil and a sacrificer that appears to be operating without recourse to the sacred If we are to accept Bataille's desire for a community that circumscribes a positive space, that transcends the world of things and brings intimacy and the sacred into immanence, then what role can sacrifice play? Along with Jean-Luc Nancy, should we not seek 'both the end of sacrifice and the closure of its fantasm?'23 In order to end sacrifice, we must realize the gift. But first, the fantasm. II. The stars were still covering my head, but I was maddened with sunlight. -Georges Bataille, Blue OfNoon24 I begin with stars, because life as we know it begins with the death of stars. What is human existence? It turns out it's pretty simple: We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky.'25 When a s tar goes supernova, it outshines entire galaxies, radiating as much energy in a relatively brief moment as a living star emits during its entire life span. Some 3.8 billion years ago, supernovae show­ ered the Earth with an array of heavy elements, altering the crust's chemistry, thereby spicing the primordial soup from which life arose. Enter the Sun. Phys­ icist Jeremy England has recently tabled a new thermodynamic theory, which sets out to prove that the steady stream of solar energy that strikes the Earth­ which turns the atmosphere and oceans into heat baths-acts upon matter to combine into groups of atoms. These groups gradually develop the capacity to capture energy from their environment and dissipate that energy as heat.26 Giv23 Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable,' Yale Ft-rnch Studies 79, trans. Richard Living­ ston (1 991): 20-38; 2 1 . 2* Georges Bataille , BINe of Noon, trans. Harry ::\Iatthews (London: Penguin Group, 201 2), 74. 25 Katherine Wells , 'We Are Dead Stars,' The Atlantic, video, 3:57, available from http:/ / www.theatlantic.com/video/index/370784/we-are-dead-stars/ (accessed 10-051 5). _-\lso, a note to the reader: the speculatoiy nature of this section is heavily indebted to 'The Curse of the Sun,' in Land, Thirst for Annihilation. C£ 'Our bodies have sucked up the sun long before we opened our eyes, just as our eyes are congealed droplets of the sun before copulating with its outpourings' (in Ibid., 30); to qualify my speculation, I, too, acknowledge that ·�ry relation to scientific knowledge . . . is nothing less than a scandal' (37). 26 N atalie Wolchover, 'A New Physics Theoiy of Life,' Quanta Ganuaiy 22, 201 4), avail­ able from https: //www.quantamagazine.org/ 201 401 22-a-new-physics-theoiy-of-life/ (accessed 10-05- 1 5). 83

Brooker Buckingham en enough time, stellar matter turns into life when the Sun shines upon it. The Sun is a re-animator, bringing miniscule fragments of its dead brethren back to life. The Sun looms large in Bataille's thought, and there is a sense in which his theory of solar economy anticipates England's theory. For Bataille, the Sun acts as 'the source of life's exuberant development.'27 Solar energy conditions the movement of atoms on Earth, permitting them to 'enter into composition of powers,' to achieve greater unities, first as molecules, and then 'as compositions which are much more complex, some crystalline and some colloidal, the latter arriving at the autonomous powers of life, of the plant, of the animal, of man, of human society.'28 But Bataille extends his notion of the solar economy, by showing how the Sun's gift, its seemingly infinite expenditure of excessive en­ ergy, is replicated in the operations of the general economy.29 For over 4.5 bil­ lion years, the Sun has engaged in a single mode of production: that of expendi­ ture. The Sun is a seemingly infinite bank, its coffers cracked open wide to ex­ pel currency in the form of solar energy, an extensive flow of heat. 'The sun gives without ever receiving.'30 But in light of recent scientific developments, we can argue the gift was given twice. First, dead stars provided the matter that had the potential to result in life forms. Second, that potential was actualized, or reanimated by the Sun. The gift was given twice, yet life squanders the gift through 'senseless luxury and excess of death. '31 From a speculative historical perspective--on e that pushes beyond Ba­ taille's notion of solar economy-humanity's relation to the solar economy can be represented in a triadic fashion: sacred presence (pre-history and the ancient world), desacralization (monotheism) and profane presence (modernity) .32 Hu- Georges Bataille, The Aca1rsed Share: f.-'olume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Brooklyn: Zone, 1 989), 28. 28 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complites (Paris: Gallim ard, 1 970), I, 5 1 6-17, quoted in Land, Thirstfor Annihilation, 1 60. 19 C£ 'I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism in a situation determined by the play of energy on the face of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is neces­ sary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically' (Bataille, The Acatrsed Share, 21). 3 0 Ibid., 28. 3 1 Ibid., 35. 32 In each historical phase, Bataille's dualist materialism still holds. Cf. ' . . . there is no point, either in the spirit or elsewhere, where the sacred and the profane cease being perceived as contradicting one another, even if at times they have to coexist and seem to be superimposed on one another. Moreover, this very point, this instant of the fu­ sion of contraries, defines the sacred as such, and distinguishes it &om the profane: the sacred confuses that which the profane opposes or distinguishes' (Denis Hollier, 'The 27 84

G U LP OF SUN manity always already knew the Sun was the Absolute. In Egypt, Ra and Horus, Shamash in Mesopotamia, the Germanic Sol, Vedic Surya, Apollo in Ancient Greece, the virtual solar monotheism of Rome and its Dies N atalis Solis Invicti celebration. The Levant provided the antithesis. Judaic monotheism begat Christianity, which rapidly spread throughout the ancient world like a fever in the years following Christ's death. Christ, the Son of God, eclipsed the Sun. The pagan and pre-Christian traditions that celebrated the Sun gift lost their solar bond when the Catholic Church usurped the date of the Winter Solstice, replacing it with the birth date of Christ. Sun becomes Son. Nature's Absolute loses its mythical role as immanent condition. Catholicism held that the Earth, God's ultimate creation, was the center of the universe for over a millennia. Enter Nicolas Copernicus and the revival of the heliocentric model in his posthumous 1543 text, On the &vo/11tio11s ofHeave11fy Spheres.33 While the Copernican Tum can be conceived as the triumph of Aris­ tarchus over Ptolemy, or the foundation upon which Galileo mathematized reality, it also represents the return of the Sun, anticipating the globalized re­ stricted economy that erupted in modernity. Galileo's phras e 'eppur si muove'34 had a double meaning. The earth moves, and yet so does the Sun, casting the infinite tentacles of energy that condition the modalities of telluric being. The Copernican (re)Turn is the Sun regaining its place as creator, forcefully retaking its throne from the Son. Bataille traced two historical events in the century prior to the Copernican (re)Turn that prefigured the re-ascension of the Sun to the Absolute: the dis­ covery by the Spanish conquistadors o f the Az tecs and their sun sacrifices, and the life of Gille s De Rais. Nobody knows what a sun can do. But the Aztecs thought they knew. The priests killed their victims on top of th e pyramids. They would stretch them over a stone alter and strike them in the chest with an obsidian knife. They would tear out the still beating heart Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille ,' in George Batailk: The Critical &adtr, eds. Fred Botting & Scott Wilson [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1 998], 65). 33 See Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican &volution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 957). 34 See Stephen W. Hawking, 'Galileo Galilei (1 564-1 642): His Life and Work,' in On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and AstronO"!)' (Philadelphia: Running Press Publishers, 2002), 391-98; 396-97. Some historians believe Galileo said 'Eppur si muove' (and yet it still moves) when he learned that the Catholic Church demanded his gentle house arrest-which allowed him to continue writing-be substituted for a stricter environment. Others discount the story as myth, but 'it is entirely within Gali­ leo's character to have only paid lip service to the church's demands in his abjuration and then to have returned to his scientific studies.' 85

Brooker Buckingham and raise it thus to the sun. Most of the victims were prisoners of war, which justified the idea of wars as necessary to the life of the sun: Wars meant consumption, not conquest, and the Mexican thought that if they ceased the sun would cease to give light.35 The Aztecs located the seat of the individual in the heart, and at the same time, they believed it retained a trace of the Sun's energy. Removing the heart was tc free the 'divine sun fragments' in order to renew the Sun. 36 Contra Bataille , the Aztecs represent the perversion of sacred presence­ they mistook the gift of light and life offered by the solar economy, and fearing they might lose future issuance of the gift, they exploded the general economy into sacrificial violence to guarantee the Sun's presence. In Aztec myth, the Sun was the burning husk of the God Nanauatzin, who immolated himself to pro­ vide light.37 The sacrifice became the gift, but the gift was returned to the Sun in the fonn of sacrifice. The Copernican (re)Turn gripped the Old World in the very moment that the Spanish conquerors encountered the horrors of Aztec sacrifice. The Aztec general economy and its perversion of the gift into sacri­ fice-production into destruction--cast a mirror on Christian mythology. The reflection betrayed Christianity's repressed internalization of sacrifice. God's gift took the fonn of Jesus Christ, who embodied 'the atoning sacrifice for our sins.'38 The Premodem Christians stayed beholden to the sacred gift of the af­ terlife, and sacrificed themselves in the hope of attaining it. One could say, Saint Augustine prescribed a morality designed to tum Christians away from the Earthly city and general economy,39 funneling them towards the restricted economy in a productive gesture that demanded a dual servitude-'Give to the Emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's.'40 In order to gain entrance to the Heavenly city, theological doctrine re­ quired that the Christian live a meager existence, one free from desire and incli­ nation. Not only is this a denial of general economy, it also represents a turning 35 Bataille, The AcC11rsed Share, 49. 36 See David Carra sco, O!J of Sacrifo:e: The AZfec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civiliza­ tion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1 999). 37 Bataille , The Accursed Share, 48. 38 1 John 2.2. 39 See Saint Augustine, The O!J of God, trans. :Marcus Dads (New York: :\fodern Li­ brary, 1 950), 477: 'Two cities have been fanned by two loves.' The love of the Earthly city is the lesser, where all are corrupted by the love of self, each seeks glory, pride, strength, profit and wisdom. 'They became fools, and changed the glory of the incor­ ruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.' The profane world of creeping things. The desire to burn. .jll Mark 1 2. 1 7. 86

G U LP OF SUN away from material existence in preparation for th e next world. A substitution of the Sun for the Son. To save one's soul, one must negate the sol. Christianity takes the heat and fire of the Sun from the sky and locates them in Hell, the infernal place of damnation-'the fire that never shall be quenched'41-that awaits those who ignore the path to the Heavenly city. This repression was brought to the surface during the Spanish conquest of the Old World, whence a conceptual transmutation occurred-through a chance encounter, the new he­ liocentrism collided with the horrors of Aztec Sun sacrifice, causing the Old World to abandon self-sacrifice to God and tum towards the era of profane presence-the sacrifice of self and the other to the dictates of the market, and the sacrifice of the world at large through the murderous rush for wealth and property: 'Man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagra­ tions befitting the solar origins of its movement.'42 But prior to the Copernican (re)Turn and the discovery of the new world, de R.ais' impossible sovereignty also prefigures modernity's shift to a profane, restricted economy. III. laughter of the starry sky I gulp of sun -Georges Bataille, Divine Filt/J43 Nobody knows what a sun can do, but Bataille implores us to speculate. 'Of course evil isn't what a hypocritical series of misunderstandings make it out to be: isn't it essentially a concrete freedom, the uneasy breaking of a taboo?'44 And in keeping with the spiri t of Bataille 's thought, one should speculate be­ yond him . The Sun gulps all of the Earth , and the starry sky laughs. The Sun's pure expenditure of energy acts as the reanirnator. The Sun reanimates matter from dead stars ('Every atom in our body was fused in an ancient star')45 to create telluric life-forms. We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky. But the Sun communes with us. Through the infinite release of energy, the Sun condi­ tions the capacity for life-forms to actualize energy, and to dissipate any excess . Life i s the wasting of energy. It i s th e substance (dead stars) as subject (con­ sciousness)46 that comes to understand the Sun's gift - it is that which sets fire 4t Saint Augustine, The City of God, 779. Bataille, The At'cursed Share, 37. 43 Bataille, Divine Filth, 124. 44 Georges Bataille , On NietZfche, trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1 992), 42 xxv. 45 Katherine �'ells, 'We Are Dead Stars.' 46 G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Philosophe des Geis/es in Samtlichte Werke, ed. Johannes Hoff­ meister, (Leipzig: Felix :\foner, 1 93 1), vol 20, 1 80-81 , cited by _-\lexandre Kojeve in 87

Brooker Buckingham to tinder, providing the impetus to replicate the flame by rubbing sticks togeth­ er, or striking flint; it is that which causes crops to grow, that which provides the light of the day. But the gift was misconstrued. The communion between the Sun and humanity's developing biochemistry, infected with dead star mat­ ter, is an infernal abomination, the true Fall of humanity. Consciousness, warped by a bio-alchemical process gone wrong, continually receives the gift, and in tum, subverts every form of economy-both general and restricted-by replying to the gift through senseless sacrifice. Reanimated con sciousness is predicated on the desire to bum. When we scream, 'I AM THE SUN , an inte­ gral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.'47 De Ra!s was one of the wealthiest men in all of France, his estates amongst the largest in the kingdom. A distinguished military leader who was granted the honor of Marshal of France by Charles VII, de Rai's had a retinue of over two hundred men, including a herald and a choir, which toured throughout his terri­ tory, dispensing alms. He was known to stage plays with casts that numbered in the hundreds. In the years leading up to his arrest, his lavish spending reached a feverous pitch, causing him to sell properties in order to fund further expendi­ ture, bringing his inscrutable disbursement to the attention of the courts. De Rai's also engaged in a number of dubious actions that accelerated his downfall , including an act of brigandage to reappropriate a property he had recently sold, not to mention threatening a clergyman with a sword. Combined with investi­ gations into increasing rumors of his murderous crimes, de Rai's soon found himself under the noose.48 Some have argued that the Catholic Church and the French State punished de Ra!s for his senseless expenditure, interpreting his waste of wealth as an ab­ dication of his aristocratic stature.49 This would be a retribution for engaging in the sacred form of the gift-for giving without receiving. From this perspec­ tive, one could be misled into thinking de Rai's was a sun that did not bum, that de Rals emanated too much of the gift in the form of alms and in the dis- Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1 980), 575, and by Bataille in 'Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,' in Batailk Reader. ':\Ian is that night, that empty �othingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity . . . That is the night that one per­ ceives if one looks a man in the eyes; the one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us ' (279); Bataille 's He­ gel and Hegel's Bataille are premised on ·�fan's negativity.' The collapse of the subject into substance, consciousness as the emanation of dead stars, reanimated by the sun. 47 Georges Bataille , 'The Solar Anus,' in Visions of Excess: Selerled Writings, 1927- 1939, trans. Alla n Stocki, Carl R Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5. 48 Reginald Hyatte, 'Introduction,' Laughter/or the Devil· The Trial of Gilles de Rair, Compan ­ ion-in-arms ofJoan ofArc (1 440) (Cranbury: .\ssociated University Presses, 1 984), 9-14. -i9 See Jean-Pierre Bayard, Plaidqyerpour Gilles de RaU (Paris: Editions Dualpha, 2007). 88

GULP OF SUN bursement o f his fortune--de R.ai's' gi ft presented like sun rays. But i f we are to take de R.ai's' unspeakable crimes at face value, then de R.ai's, as serial killer, in­ dulged in pure sacrifice, exceeding the limits of sovereignty; de Rai's was over­ come with the desire to burn like the fiercest sun, sacrificing dozens of lives, casting ropey rays of semen on the cadavers and framing the dead faces in his baleful gaze while laughing-all in order to seal the senseless sacrifice. For de Rai's, sacrifice was the corrupt practice of 'meontology'-the desire to burn being and reduce it to non-being. De Rai's was void of the sacred, emptied of the intimate, an auteur producing snuff films, projected within the harrowing confines of his skull-cramped Cartesian theatre. IV. I am the J esuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. -Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus•so In his analysis of de R.ai's, in 'Bataill e 's Vampire,' Fred Botting argues that he was . . . of a different world. His killing was not driven by a sexual urge but by a desire to be close to death. As a 'simple brutal man' shaped by the destructive expenditures of battle and ruled by standards inimical to 'civilized proprieties,' moral value or reli­ gious precept; he 'fancied himself a sovereign Lord' guided only by the values of 'ruinous expenditure,' determined only to 'shine' through the scale of his wasteful extravagance. In De Rais' world humans had no meaning and little value, 'no more than an ele­ ment of voluptuous turmoil' in which lives could be consumed on any sovereign whim: they possessed 'no other meaning than a possibility for more violent pleasures and he did not stop losing himself in this violence.' In a world in which wars were incessant, slaughter common, and burning villages a familiar occurrence, vio­ lent, destructive and meaningless acts 'had a sort of banality to them.' The enjoyment of battle was, for de R.ai's, life itself, life as an ongoing potlatch, a ruinous game of glory and excessive ex­ penditure at which only sovereigns could play.'51 Contrary to Bataille, who argued that the puritan ideology of early capitalism instantiated the break between potlatch culture and modernity, George Gilder's SU Bataille, 'The Solar Anus,' 9. 51 Fred Botting, 'Bataille 's Vampire,' in this volume. 89

Brooker Buckingham postmodern legitimization of capitalism-as recounted by Jean-Joseph Gowc in his seminal paper 'General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism'-sets the stage to argue for de Rats' relevance as a contemporary model of sovereignty, insofar as it enables one to trace a continuity between de Rai:s life 'as an ongo­ ing potlatch, a ruinous game of glory and excessive expenditure at which only sovereigns could play,' and contemp orary on to-el"'.onomic:al li fe. Gowc notes that Gilder, an advocate for the neo-conservative politics (and by extension, the neoliberal economics) that swept the L' .S. in the early 1 980s, operated 'on the same terrain as Bataille,' only to arrive at opposite conclusions. In his most famous book Wealth And Pover!J, Gilder essentially argues that 'the most elaborated forms of capitalism are simply a more elaborated form of the potlatch.'52 Or put another way, 'At the origin of "capitalism" is the gift, not self-love and avarice.'53 Gilder sought to locate the moral foundations of capi­ talism in supply-side economics. For Gilder, the capitalist proffers the gift by investing capital in production, but is never sure of the return. Therefore, Gil­ der argues, the aleatory nature of capital investment is the same as tha t of the potlatch, in that both share a logic 'where the essence of the gift is not the ab­ sence of all expectation of a counter-gift but, rather, a lack of certainty concern­ ing the return.'54 For Gilder, capitalism is thus irrational, and because it is irra­ tional it is 'superior to all other forms of society.' 55 By hinging his argument on irrationalism, Glider formulates a postmodern legitimation of capitalism, one that breaks �th the Enlightenment's valoriza­ tion of reason. More importantly, Gilder argues that capitalism does not consti­ tute a historical break with the gift; the play of gift-giving in primitive societies, or premodem societies like the one inhabited by de Rais, is continuous with the play of the entrepreneur, as reflected in the role that entrepreneurs play within Gilder's economic political project. Gilder grounds the entrepreneur as a moral agent-as the figure who bares the gift-within the neoliberal metamorphosis of capital.56 But returning to Bataille , there is a great deal of ttuth in his diagnosis of capitalism as being a project, and while he reflected on the coexistence of play within that project, he concluded that 'The project dominates capitalist activity. Play is restricted to the stock exchange.'57 One can extend Bataille 's claim to say that play is restricted to the market, which is determined not only by the stock 52 Jean-Joseph Goux, 'General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism,' in Critical &ad­ er, 200. 53 Ibid., 200. 54 Ibid., 201 . 5s Ibid. , 202. 56 Goux, 'Postmodern Capitalism,' 204. 57 Bataille, OC VII, 220. 90

GULP OF SUN exchange, but by the financial sector and the corporate sphere. From this per­ spective, Goux's analysis of the commodity takes on a crucial meaning: If 'an American apple is not an apple,' as the poet Rilke used to say in an amazing aphorism, it is not only because generations of peasants have not crystallized their sacred efforts in it, but also because the producer and the seller of that apple preferred to give it all the most stereotyped qualities of the 'beautiful apple'-(big, red and shiny, like the one the Witch offers to Snow White), even if it is to the detriment of the real apple (tasteless, fiberless, car­ cinogenic) . This substantive, actually consumed apple mus t remain a simple 'noumenon,' inexistent and without interest compared to the 'phenomenon,' the spectacle of the apple, which alone is at stake in the sale. But that does not prevent this very spectacle, this abstract aesthetization of the merchandise, from going hand in hand with an ideology of consumption that seems to transgress utility value.ss The excess and waste produced by the circuits of production and consumption in late capitalism thus illuminates a Bataillean dimension in Gilder's postmod­ ern capitalism. The abundance of the gift in the form of commodities becomes, in a critique of the consumer's perspective, the spectacle that warps desire, ma­ nipulates wants into needs-a productive consumption that slides into unpro­ ductive consumption. All of which is to say that late capitalism sacrifices the sacred, reducing the world of things into fodder for a profane circuit, soldy designed to stoke rabid desire. This profane circuit circumscribes the acts of both the serial killer-with de Rais being a prefigurement-and the consumer in late capitalism. In his study Serial Killers: Death and Ufe in America 's ff'/011nd C11/t11re, Mark Seltzer argus that 'The question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection and counting conspicuous in consumer society . . . and the forms of fetishism-the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies-that traverse it . . . '59 From this perspective, de Rais' incessant drive to murder the young and reflect on the beauty of their severed heads is a direct, unmediated form of seriality. In comparison to de Rais, or any number of contemp orary serial killers, the con sum er in late capital­ ism is the same in degree, but different in kind. The consumer's seriality is me­ diated through the circuits of capital, which obscures and defers the role that the consumer's purchases play in the murder of others-the article of clothing 58 Goux, 'Postmodern Capitalism,' 207. 59 Mark Seltzer, Serial Kilkrs: Death and Ufa in America 's Wound C11/ture (London: Routledge, 1 998), 64. 91

Brooker Buckingham fabricated by the Bangladeshi teenaged girl who died in a factory fire, the tech­ nological gadgets that rely on rare earth elements from the Congo, where thou­ sands toil to death in mines run by warlords, or the smart phone built by the Chinese youth in a massive compound prior to taking their own lives out of sorrow at their conditions. Goux rightly concludes that if Gilder's 'theory is weak as political econo­ my, it is highly significant . . . as economic politics .'60 In fact, Gilder's logic still operates as a defense for the neoliberal economic project, a causal force behind the 2007 -8 financial crisis, and now operating as 'zombie economics,' a dead ideology that continues to infect the global economy in the form of austerity politics. In just under three decades, Gilder's optimism has turned into a nightmare, in light of a contemporary global economy where eighty people nearly control the same amount of wealth as the remainder of humanity, the middle-class has by and large been reduced to an empty signifier, and the An­ thropocene-the geological era ushered in by the effects of human-caused cli­ mate change-threatens to plunge the globe into ecological catastrophe and mass extinction. Gilder's moral foundation is untenable when one reflects upon how neoliberalism has taken the gift out of circulation. The restricted economy has folded back into a constricted economy, one in which the corporate class and the wealthy-the 1 %-no longer pay taxes, and squirrel trillions of dollars of wealth away in offshore accounts. The gift is the revenue gained from un­ regulated financialization and interest-bearing accounts, the trickle-up econom­ ics associated with cost-cutting and bureaucratic bloat. The rest of humanity, and the entire globe, are sacrificed to feed the circuits of capital. The 1 % pre­ sides over the death of us all, and the death of the world, �ccruing the gift above the law and beyond governance. In the same manner as de Rai's, the 1 % are engaged in a game which 'only sovereigns could play.' Those who control the constricted economy of neoliberalism withhold the gift, dissipating the flow of economic energetics, and sacrifice the rest of the world in order to revel in their riches. This greed and self-avarice is the historical human response to the gift, conditioned by the Sun, which always devolves into sacrifice. v. I have searched for what we do / when we sacrifice / and climax I and laugh. 60 Ibid., 203. 6 1 Bataille , Divine Filth, 1 24. 92 -Georges Bataille, Divine Filtlf>l

G U LP OF SUN Bataille's extensive study o f sacrifice resulted i n the principle that i t i s always about the (production of sacred things .'62 But prior to this production, 'The principle of sacrifice is destruction.'63 Here lies the hinge that must be broken­ the production of the sacred must be detached from the destruction of sacri­ fice. In modernity, sacrifice incessantly orbits around destruction, waste and the homogenizing of the profane. The sacred dimensions of the gift and of the sac­ rifice-both entailing the ecstatic loss of self-are repressed and sublimated into profane forms of sacrifice. We see sacrifice to no end in the economic im­ perialism that forces the Global South to provide raw materials and cheap goods, the domination of nature and its resources in the drive for accumulation and wealth, the erasure of value in the form of reckless market speculations, and the endless wars in the name of capital accumulation, beginning with the genocide of the first nations people in the Old World, and leading up to the quest for oil in the contemporary :\fiddle F.ast. Profane sacrifice is encoded within the axioms of neo-classical economics. The idea that individuals are self­ interest maximizers presupposes an instrumental rationality, an ill ogic that rends apart the possibility of establishing a rnereology-the study of 'the rela­ tions of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole'64_that can reconcile the community with the individual. Self-interest is the desire to sacrifice, as conditioned by the Sun. As long as sacrifice is premised upon de­ struction, then the gift is absent and the sacred is lost. Now we know what the Sun can do--now it is time to find out what a body can do. How do we think through the ensnaring condition-the com­ munion between the reanimating Sun and the dead star matter that contami­ nates our thoughts and actions? Hmv do we desire not to sacrifice, but to give, to ecstatically abandon ourselves, to dismantle the restricted economy and free the 'accursed share' to found a new condition-a sacred condition? Bataille searched for what we do when we sacrifice. To close the fantasm, we must sacrifice the sacrificers. First we laugh away our anguish, and then we climax in an orgiastic ritual of sacrifice (we channel de Rai's to put the final de­ struction to creative destruction) .65 The fmal festival. We turn every bank into a 62 Bataille , 'The Notion of Expenditure,' in The Batai/lt &ader, 1 67-81 ; 1 70. 63 Bataille , Theory of&ligion, 43. 64 'Mereology,' Stanford Enryclopedia ofPhimsoplij·, available from http://plato.stanford.edu /entries/mereology/ (accessed 1 0-05-1 5). 65 See �farshall Berman's appropriation of Joseph Schumpeter's concept in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience ofModenti!J• �ew York: Penguin, 1 987): 'The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be tom down. "All that is solid"-from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the finns and corporations that exploit the work­ ers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them 93

Brooker Buckingham raging inferno. We cut off the heads of those who maintain the operative world of things . And we gaze into their eyes and marvel at how ugly they are. Com­ munity will find the sacred in the act of abandoning sacrifice. The bad constel­ lation-under which de Ra.i's was cursed, under which we are all cursed-will be broken. The asterisms of the sky will lose their bond with the dead star mat­ ter within us. In their place, we will re-draw them on Earth, re-connecting each and every bearer of the gift. A self-sacrifice of our desire to sacrifice. To tum the thing into a sacred gift. To give without expecting in return. To tum the desire to burn into the desire to give. all-all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually �ount for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and im­ pressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depre­ ciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and en­ campments than to "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals"' (99). 94

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS: SERIAL KITSCH1 Edia Connole Outside was a field of wildflowers. -Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch (an epic poem) She went out into the field and gathered ears of grain behind the reapers. -Ruth 2:3 In prefacing his ManijJ11l1s Flomm ('Handful of Flowers') with the biblical epi­ graph Ruth 2:3, Thomas of Ireland provided at once both an explanation for his methodology and the impetus behind his compiling this, the most prolific and, one must assume, influential anthology of quotations produced during the Middle Ages .2 Just as those who, having little or nothing themselves, would go into the field of another to gather after the reapers, so he-'a pauper without any books'3-went into the library of the Sorbonne and gathered some six thousand extracts from patristic and classical sources, compiling them into a literary bouquet that is to this day one of the finest extant examples of remix culture,4 generally attributed to that late medieval genre of writing known as jlorilegium or 'flower-culling.' Derived from the Latin Jlos, meaning 'flower,' and kgere, 'to read'-and having as its etymological root meaning 'to collect up, to gather by picking, plucking, and the like'-.florilegia were extensive and systemat­ ic compilations of extracts from past \\.Tirings : proverbs, maxims, and stories, sometimes quoted verbatim in mnemonically brief segments, but more often s ummarized or subject to some alteration with the aim of exemplifying certain This essay was previously published online by Figure/Ground, <http: //figureground.org/ the-language-of-flowers-serial-kitsch-by-edia-connole/ >. 2 See Thomas of Ireland, 'Preface,' Manipulus Florum, available from http:/ /web.wlu.ca/historyI cnighman/ index.httnl (accessed 31 -05-1 5). 3 Thomas, 'Preface.' 4 See Nicholas Bourriaud, Po1tprod11ction (New York: Lucas & Sternberg, 2007): 'Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurre d in this new [sic] cultural landscape marked by the twin fig­ ures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts' (1 3). 95

Edia Connole topics which, when combined and recombined together, illuminated a central doctrine or idea; thus producing, through a mode of literary splicing, the tele­ scopic effect traditionally associated with targumim texts.s For Thomas, the biblical gleaner was merely an avatar of that prototypical gatherer and cross-pollinator in nature-which, according to a late medieval mystical view, might also be regarded as the mobile part of the flower-the bee. The impetus expressed in his 'Preface' derives largely from Seneca who, in his Letters lo Lllcilius on Ethics, had adopted from Plato in the first century AD the image of the artist as a bee, which, gathering nectar from various flowers, ar­ ranges it into cells and produces honey, thus gathering, re-arranging and com­ ing up with something new.6 As Timothy Reiss has argued in Against Autonomy, Seneca used the image of the artist as a bee 'to show how the artist absorbed elements from many "flowers" to create a different amalgam and compound . . . His bees were makers, fictive imaginaries in the most essential way: they created new forms and experiences.'i Drawing on Reiss' argument, Ladina Lambert has stated that ' [t]hough the artist's creative act involves copying, in the sense of "following, imitating, emulating-previous writers" . . . what makes his or her work creative is the way it turns "potentially 'discordant voic­ es' . . . into a single harmonious soul."'8 Nowhere is this sentiment better ex­ pressed than in the seventeenth-century work of Richard Burton who, drawing directly on Seneca in and of his own literary nosegay, says: _ 411atomy of Melanchofy, As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all . FkJriftris 111 apes in saltibus omnia libant (as bees in flowery glades sip from all; Lucretius] , I have laboriously collected this cento out of divers writers . . . The matter is theirs Such as Targ11m Onkelas for instance, which contains thousands of passages that inten­ tionally deviate from original biblical text in order to elucidate a negative theology (and radical non-anthropomorphism). See The Targ11m1 of Onkelar and Jonathan Ben Uz.z!el on The Pentate11ch, trans. J. W. Etheridge (London: Longman et al, 1 862). Cf. Israel Dazin, M_aimonides: Reason Above All (New York: Gefen Books, 2009), 1 29-38. 6 See Seneca, Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters, trans. Brian Inwood (Oxford and N ew York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Oddly, and with no apparent justification by Inwood himself, Seneca's eighty-fourth letter to Lucilius, concerning the image of the artist as a 'bee' is not included in this volume, though it is eluded to substantially in the introduction. C£ Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge and Mass.: Harvard University Publishing, 2002), 424. 7 Timothy Reiss, Against Autonofl!)': Global Dialogues of C11/t11ral Exchange (Stanford: Stan­ ford University Press, 2002), 161-5. 8 Ladina Bezzola Lambert, Imagining the Unimaginabk: The Poetics ofEarfy Modern AstronO"!J' (New York and Amsterdam: Rodop� 2002), 10. 5 96

THE LANG UAGE OF FLOWERS most part, and yet mine, apparel rmde s11mpt11m sit [it is plain whence it is taken] (which Seneca approves), amid snmptnm sit apparel [yet it becomes different from whence it is taken] ; which nature doth with the ailment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do co11qnoqere qnod ha11si [digest what I have swallowed] , dispose of what I take.9 As Reiss remarks, Burton was here writing of mimicry and copying, however, he chose to accent not just that copying writers could be creative per se, but that in the act of copying original or authentic matter, its soaking up, and with whatever was from it and from one's own mind and body, produced something new.1 0 Plungingjlorilegium into the twenty first century-'into the era of YouTube, when the faces and words of Dahmer and Woumoz can be pulled up and orga­ nized like a playlist'1 1-is Yuu Seki's epic poem Serial Kitsch. Yuu Seki's 'flowers' are plucked from the testimonies of a slew of serial killers, and then seamlessly spliced with the kind of edge blending ease we associate with digital editing. In place of the cross-referencing that earned Manip11/11s Flomm the accolade of pio­ neering information technology at the time of its compilation,12 Yuu Seki's lit­ erary bouquet offers the 'cross-fade.' A signature feature of audio and visual mixing software, the cross-fade allows for the smooth transition between ex­ tracts. For DJs, for example, this involves fading down the volume on one track while moving it up on another, keeping in mind beat matching and tonal hannony. The cardinal rules of good mixing are that the splice be acoustically invisible and musically successful, with no unnatural loudening or softening on the one hand, and no sudden changes in tempo or dynamics (unless intentional) on the other. Successfully engaging these criteria on a literary platform, Yuu Seki's Serial Kitsch offers a sickening mix of seamy admissions-'! gave her a good ass fucking,' 'I cut off the hands I and then the feet,'13 interjections­ 'um,' 'ahhh,' 'yeah,' 'right / right I right,'14 and digressions-'madness as Quix- Richard Burton, The Analo"!J efMelanchofy �ew York, NY: New York Review Books, 2001), 24-5. 10 Reiss, Against Alltonom y, 1 67. 1 1 David Peak quoted in Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch (an epic poem) (Austin and New York: Hworde, 2014; London: Gobbet Press, 201 5) , front matter. C£ Yuu Seki, 'I Am Odd For Today,' this volume. 12 See Mary Rouse and Richard Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Ma­ nip11/us Flomm of Thomas ef Ireland (Ioronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1979). 1 3 Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch (2014), 72, 99. 1 4 Ibid., 83, 36, 64. 9 97

Edia Connole ote would say is seeing life as it is and not as it should be,'1 5 all fluently spliced to create an organic expressiveness that gives this florilegi11m the noetic feeling of a poem, turning potentially discordant voices into a single harmonious soul: the 'person-type,' the author's epigraph suggests, 'would survive even the destruc­ tion of the universe.' 1 6 Wh a t i s fascinating about Yuu Seki's choice of methodology i s the manner in which it mimics or copies the language of flower-culling employed by serial killers themselves ('I picked a juicy flower in Olsztyn') . 1 7 As Bataill e would ar­ gue in DoC11menls (1 929), this language of flowers is serially kitsch: repeatedly restricted to the mere sight of the flower, this 'well-defined part of the plant,'1 8 the corolla, it perpetuates an excessive, yet purely superficial in character, sen­ timen tality, by which it is attributed the weird privilege of revealing the pres­ ence of human love. What the corolla betray, as they form a whorl within the sepals, enclosing the stamens and ovary, is that that 'brilliance of flowers'1 9 men have repeatedly equated with their amorous emotions is really a question of phenomena that introduce pollination and fertilization ('my desires were bestial [/inhuman] obviously') .20 And yet, when it comes to expressing desire with the aid of a flower, it is the petals, rather than the hairy reproductive organs they enclose, that adumbrate this ideal of human love ('how I do LOVE you / words are cheap / this will show you') .21 As Bataille suggests, 'since the object of human love is never an organ, but the person who has that organ,' a mislead­ ingly attractive argument against interpretation of this phenomena through the 'objective value of appearance' could be raised, and according to which 'the at­ tribute of the corolla to love is easily explained: if the sign of love is displaced from the flower's pistil and stamens to the surrounding petals, it is because the human mind is accustomed to making such a displacement with regard to peo­ ple.'22 Despite the obvious correlationism at play, this does nothing to explain why these kitsch odoriferous elements, substituted for the flower's essential organs, develop in such an uninhibited way: why 'nothing will prevail against the 11alllral truth that a beautiful woman or a red rose signify love.'23 That is, unless one acknowledges that the 'inexplicable and equally immutable reac1s Ibid., 98. Derek Parfit quoted in Ibid., froot matter. 1 7 Yuu Seki, Sen'al KitsdJ, 18. 1 8 Georges Bataille , 'The Language of Flowers,' reprinted in .Alla n Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of �finnesota Press, 1 985), 1 0-1 4. 1 9 Bataille, 'Language of Flowers,' 1 1 . 2o Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch, 2 1 . 21 Ibid., 40. 22 Bataille, 'Language of Flowers,' 1 1 . 23 Ibid., 1 2. My emphasis. 16 98

TH E LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS ti.on'24 that give the rose and the woman their value is the ideal of beauty which, in displacing love to the fragile corolla, far from answering the demands of hu­ man ideas, is the furtive sign of their failure ('I want to make love to the world,' 'I love people,' 'I love you') .25 That this love will soon rot, just like its correlate, 'indecently in the sun,' thus becoming for the plant's essential elements a sort of serial killing, an endless death-drama 'played out between earth and sky,' is concomitant with that 'nauseating banality' introduced by Bataille: 'love smells like death. '26 O f course, Yuu Seki's choice of methodology is interesting more generally because the act of mimicry and copying is endemic to serial killing itself. Begin­ ning with the killers who, well, as was said of Dahmer: 'Dress him in a suit and he looks like ten other men.' Hiding behind a carefully constructed mask of normalcy, serial killers chose victims that fit a certain stereotype which holds symbolic meaning for them, and they v.:ill go on to kill that stereotype over and over again. Take Bundy, for example, who targeted college-age women with long brown hair: avatars of the upper-class fiance who broke his heart. Or Ga­ cy, who targeted 'worthless queers and punks': model copies of what he saw as his own inadequacy in the eyes of his domineering dad. Slivko is a particularly fascinating example. When Slivko was a young Pioneer, the Russian equivalent of a Boy Scout, he witnessed a particularly bad car crash in which a boy burned to death. On his own admission, Slivko al"W-ays wanted to recreate this scene because it aroused him . When he was a man, Slivko set up a Boy Scout-like club through which he persuaded boys to take part in experimental games amid claims that he was making a film about Nazis torturing young Pioneers during the Second World War. Excited at the prospect of the movie and its theme­ well known in Russia-over forty boys willingly participated in the filming of scenes. These scenes, which feature hangings, during which boys fall uncon­ scious and are seen to be laid out on the ground in suggestive positions while Slivko masturbates and caresses their bodies, include a particularly potent ex­ ample of the serial killer's act of copying, in which Slivko recreates the morbid scene that first aroused him.27 Here we see a boy laid out on the ground, who appears more or less undressed from the '"-aist down. What is immediately no­ ticeable is that he has on a fine pair of black leather boots. (the necrophiliac also had a shoe fetish) . When Slivko arrives on the scene, picking up an implement to the left of the screen, he proceeds to saw off one of the boy's legs just below the knee. The next shot shows two sawn-off legs standing upright and set alight in that pair of boots. This particular act is repeated within a decollative context 2� Ibid., 1 3. Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch, 35. 26 Bataille, 'Language of Flowers,' 1 3. 21 See 'Vintage Russina [sic] Serial Kille r *Disturbing,' Live Leak, available from 2s http: / /www .liveleakcom/view?i=637_1 3257565 1 2 (accessed 3 1 -05-1 5). 99

Edia Connole in the next scene and, from what we know, occurred in this mode another five times : Slivka killed, dismembered, and set alight the various limbs and torsos o f seven boys in total. Figure 1 \natoly Slivka, film footage from the Chergid Boys Club, 1 964-85 . . . I f there is an art of nature akin to the art in nature, as Yuu Seki's \\larholian epigraph sugges ts-'! like things to be the same over and over again'28_it is borne out in the treasonous methodology of Serial Kitsch: itself an ocular analog 'for the cosmic spectacle that held sway during the thousand or so years when [such) catenae were written, namely, the vision o f the universe as constituting a great chain of being 28 . . .' 29 Supporting the much celebrated aphorism of hermet- .\ndy Warhol quoted in Yuu Seki, Serial Kit.J"Ch, front matter. 29 :'.'Jicola :\fasciandaro, ':\nti-Cosmosis: Black :\fal:apralaya,' in :\Iasciandaro, ed., Hide­ ous Gnosis �ew York: n.p., 201 0), 7 1 . 100

T H E LAN G UAG E O F FLOWE RS ic philosophy, 'as above, so below,' the catena aurea situates man in a universe authored by God in which the s tructure o f the microcosm reflects that o f the macrocosm through a series of links or succession o f secondary causes ('I like things to be the same over and over again') . Consequently, Bataille, who exactly Figures 2-5 \ndy \'\'arhol, Orange/ Green/ Silver Car Crash, 1 962-3. . . 101

Edia Connole reverses this formula,;o will ask: 'Don't all these beautiful things run the risk of being reduced to a strange mise-en-scene?'31 Like the child who realizes Santa Claus is a man dressed-up, or the flower destined for filthy sacrilege, the movement mapped in the serial killer's actions reveals the same sequence of concealment and revelation, as the art in nature is converted into an art of na­ ture: the multiple mutilated bodies of Slivko and Warhol's 'Car Crash' victims (see figures 1 -5) . The oscillation from repulsion to attraction that underlies this movement, and the movement of testimonies in Yuu Seki's text, is the subject of Michael Taussig's engagement with artist Juan Manuel Echavarria's Flower Vase C11t (1 997),32 a series of thirty six black-and-white photographs based on one of the mutilations practiced in the Colombian Viole11cia of the 1 940s and 1 950s: the Corte de/ Florero, in which the limbs were thrust into rhe thorax via the neck of the decapitated corpse, just like a vase of flowers (see figure 6). Fusing the visu­ al language of this mutilation with the economic role of the flower in the socio­ economic framework within which this violence is inscnbed, Echavarria's pho­ tographs also hearken to the colonial violence that marks the flower vis-a-vis the botanical expeditions conducted in Columbia in the eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries. What appear at first to be plates from an expedition notebook are upon closer inspection what one author describes as 'perturbing images of human bones set to look like floral arrangements.'33 Accompanying each is a taxonomical classification which juxtaposes a real genus of Colombian flower with an adjective to denote the horror of the mutilation to which they refer (see figure 7) . The 'aesthetics of violence' to which the artist is said to 'consciously' tum in this work is one that engages a 'straregy of seduction' that is methodo­ logically appealing 'because of its ambivalence and the possibility of hiding hor­ ror within false appearances.'34 Taussig definitely doesn't see it like this . He says Echavarria's 'flowers are so obviously not flowers. Instead it is the very clumsi­ ness, the deliberateness of the artifice of posing bones as flowers, that perturbs on e-and this is of the same order of artifice that makes the mutilation of the Corte de/ Florero so powerful too.'35 3" See .\lastair Brotchie, 'Introduction,' in Georges Bataille, Robert Lebd and Isabelle \Valdberg, eds., Enf}clopaedia A�-ephalica Comprising the Critical Dictionary & &lated Text.r and the En91clopaedia Costa, trans. Iain Wbite (London: Atlas Press, 1 995), 12. 31 Bataille, 'Language of flowers,' 14. 3� l\fichael Taussig, 'The Language of Flowers,' in Critkal Enquiry 30 (Autumn 2003): 98-131. 33 .\na Tiscornia, 'Juan l\Ianuel Echavarria,' in Juan Manuel Ed1auarria: Mouth of Ash (Eclizioni Charta :-.filan and North Dakota Museum of _\rt, 2005), no pagination. 34 Tiscornia, juan :-.£anuel Echavarria.' 35 Taussig, 'Language of Flowers,' 99. 1 02

TH E LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS • Figure 6. La Violenda, Flower-vase Cut, 1 948-64. Figure 7. Juan Manuel Echavarria, Dumaea Viscosa, 1 997. Taussig speaks of being suspended before these flowers, adrift in a sort of si­ lence, unable to determine what is nature and what is art. It is this weightless­ ness, he says, and this wall of painful absence of sound that strips us of our conunon sense assumptions as to the narure of narure let alone the nature of art, that underlies all mutilation, whether of the living body or the corpse ('I have gone a million miles I in the depths of space I I can't even hear myself scream') . 36 I too am left suspended, silent, before these flowers, and the flowers that Yuu Seki has plucked. In a field stripped of all reverential and religious poten­ tial the poet has somehow managed to harvest a sacred surplus ('this almost holy feeling') ,37 that would have so fascinated Bataille. Like Taussig, I take my title here from Bataille, who took it in turn from the eighteenth- and nine­ teenth-century European tradition which, rooted in the occult and mysticism, appealed to a logic of nature to reveal divine truths: 'I said to the flowers, tell me what God told you to tell me. ' Yim Seki's flowers tell of a 'founding vio­ lence' that is 'this unsteady mix of an art in narure with an art of nature wherein violence becomes authority.'38 36 37 Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch, 1 06. Jbid., 1 0 1 . 3 8 Taussig, 'Language of Flowers,' 1 3 1 . 1 03

IMAGES Jesuve

III ON LIVING AND BREATHING PAGES

KALIGRAPHY Dan Mellamphy A great deal has been written on the subject of serial killers, [whereas] very little has been written alongside them, approaching them as they approach us: without recourse to any of the usual courtesies or mercies, taking what th ey want, leaving behind new signatures in what remains. -Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley, Stria/ Killing! Do you know how to use that weapon? That weapon will .replace your tongue. You will learn to speak th.rough it, and your poetry will now be written with blood. -Jim Jannusch, Dead Ma1fl This essay was written over the month of December in India, where I travelled for the final funeral-rites of my father-in-law, who s e ashes were brought to the triveni sangam of the Ganges, Yamuna, and invisible/mythic Sarasvati. The bulk of it was written on a rooftop in Tollygunge, South Kolkata, in the ab­ sence of reference-books and a good internet-connection, under the all­ seeing/ gora-burning eye of Surya.3 It was written in the spirit not only of Mata Kali-patroness of Kolkata4-but of the philosopher Georges Bataille, whose intellectual biography was written by another Surya5 and who contributed the entries on Kali, Metamorphosis, Materialism, :Misfortune, Formlessness and 1 See editor's 'Introduction,' this volume. 2 Jim Jannusch, DeadMan (1 995; Santa Monica, C\: l\Iiramax Films, 1996), DVD. 3 Cf. Wilcipedia, 'Surya,' available from En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surya (accessed 1 6-12- 14). Dan Mellamphy, 'Kalikkhetro (Kolikata/Kolkal4l/Calcutta),' online tweet (twitter­ post), available from Twitter.com/youtopos/status/544809251231 633408 (accessed 16-12-14). 5 �fichd Surya, George1 Batailk: An Intellect11al Bwgrap�, trans. Kaysztof Fijalkowski (London: Verso Books, 201 0); George1 Bataille: La Mort a l'r.mvre (Paris: Editions Seguier, 1 987). � 131

Dan Mellamphy Slaughterhouses (to name a few) for the j ournal Doe11ments.6 My initial proposal (proposed to our excellent editors Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley) was to write a piece on serial self-portrayal--online and off--as serial self-betrayal, and on ongoing individuation as multiple murder. The opening paragraph for that vision and version of my contribution had been written the day before my departure on the first of December: As one tweets, as one posts, as one reifies one's interpellated iden­ tity, one creates a garland of skulls and calls- forth a veritable Kali. The former is an opening-up of oneself to the outside, a kind of prostitution--one which would approach, at its limit, the condi­ tion of Madame Edwarda. The key concept of the work as it had thus been conceived was to have been a pun on the word 'portraiture': namely that of a 'portraitueur,' of the por­ trait as a 'tueur' or killer. - Portrayal, in other \vords, was going to be read as a betrayal unto death. The present paper is a tad less specific-less specific to portraits-and perhaps much more graphic, strange as that may be to say. It is concerned with that great matador8 Mata Kali, and with her particular form (and/ or formlessness)9 of writing, which could be called, after Michel Leiris, la littirat11re co11sidirie comme 1111e ta11romachie,1 0 and which I call-in a mightily mino­ tauromachian (that is to say, demonstrously monstrous) fashion-kaligraphy. The black-haired world-destroyer Kali1 1 writes, if I may use such an expression, 6 See for instance, Georges Bataille, 'Kali,' in Dot11ments 6 (1930): 368. 7 For an online machine-translation c/ o Google, see Translate.google.com/#fr/ en/ tue ur (accessed 1 6-12-14). 8 'Matador' meaning killer, or one who slaughters; cf. the online Wiktionru:y entry 'Mat­ ador,' available from En.wiktionru:y.org/wiki/matador#Spanish (accessed 16-12-14). Regarding this, see for instance Georges Bataille's entry on the formless, 'lnforme,' in Dot11ments 7 (1 930): 382. 1 0 Michel Leiris, L'.Age d'homme, pricide de De la /itterat11re considme comme 11ne /(ll(romachie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1939). 1 1 'Kali breaks into the Great Tradition in a battle context,' explains David Kin sle y in his study of Kali and Krsna: Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 975), 1 25; 'she is ham of wrath and epito­ mizes the fearful, vicious aspects of death and destruction. She is cruel, ferocious, and horrible to look at. She delights in slaughter, and her weird howl and uncanny laughter terrify her enemies.' As she emerges, 'the stars are blotted out' and one finds that 'clouds are covering clouds': her coming heralds a 'darkness, vibrant, sonant,' and in her 'roaring whirling wind are the souls of a million lunatics, just loose from the prison­ house, wrenching trees by the roots, sweeping all from the path' (Ibid., 1 47-8). The flash of lurid light reveals on every side a thousand shades of death begrimed and black, 9 1 32

KALIG RAPHY in a manner akin to the one expressed by Nobody 1 2 in the white-haired film­ director Jarmusch's13 Dead Man (a passage that serves as this essay's second epi­ graph) : her poetry is a poetry written with blood. 14 Kaligraphy follows no script: it is written not in a straightforward series of statements or sentences, but rather in and as the antithesis of such serial script­ ing[s]. The serial, as such, finds itself slaughtered-cleaved, cut, chopped, pierced, punctured and perforated-by this severe and severing15 (what's more, wholely hol[e]y: sacred, sacrificial) scrawl.16 Here we have a literall7 serial killing, killing the serial, breaking any and every arrangement in series, all regular sue- scattering plagues and sorrows, dancing with joy [ . . . ] for terror is thy name, [Kali, and] death is in thy breath, and eYery shaking step destroys a world forever' (Ibid. , from Vivekananda's hymn to Kali, cited by Sister :'.'\ivedita). 1 2 � obody is the native character of Jannu sch's Dead Matr. the melir of 011/ir (the film's homage to Homer's Odysseus, who calls himself Oudeis or Outis: No One, Nob ody. See Mellamphy, 'YOU, the l:-Bomb, or ''YOU-bomb goes Kabloom": .An Essay on Anonymity, Risibility and Quantum Subjectivity,' available from Academ­ ia.edu/41 84544/YOU_the_U_Bomb_or_YOC_bomb_goes_Kabloom_An_Essay_on _Anonymity_Risibility_and_Quantum_Subjectivity (accessed 1-06-1 5). l l On my morning walks to campus as an undergraduate student in �fontreal I used to , see, now and again, Jannusch-with his mop of bright white hair all vertical--sitting near the window at the Cinema Paralle cafe on Boule,·ard Saint-Laurent, enjoying an espresso (or were these allonges--cafes :\mericano?); I guess this was one of his favor­ ite spots when visiting the city, voyaging up from ;-.,·ye. Looking back, I always associ­ ated his shock of white hair not only with reels of cinematographic celluloid (ie. the stuff on non-reality) but with dark strong cups of coffee, as black as l\Iata Kali (i.e. the stuff of the real/all-too-real). 1� Jarmusch, Dead Man. 15 This severity and this severing does away with 'series' (serial orders or anangements) and with things taken 'seriously,' never mind 'serially' ( . . . Kali is severely non-serious: hers is the sovereign 'howl of laughter that mocks [all serious] pretense'-a 'long and maddened laughter,' the 'weird howl and uncanny laughter [that] terrifies her enemies'; 'she blazes like a millio n rising suns,' even in the deepest darkness, 'and fills the world with earth-shattering laughter' (David R Kinsley, The Sword and the F/11/e-Kali and Knna: Dark Visions of the Terrible and the S11blime in Hind11 1'1fythology [Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1975], 141, 98, 1 25). See also, David R. Kinsley, Tantric Vi!ions ofthe Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavit!J1as (Berkeley: UniYersity of California Press, 1 997), 23. lo addi­ tion, cf. footnote 38, below. 16 A kin, if one may say so, to the scrawl of an awl--0r indeed any sharp pointed in­ , strument. 11 Or perhaps, better, literal: 'leaving behind new signatures in what remains' (Connole and Shipley, 'Introduction,' here with a tip-of-the-bat and/or nod-of-the-headless to Lacan's punning 'po11bellicationl: the 'litter' of his every 'letter' /'litter'a[i]ry output[s]. 1 33

Dan Mellamphy cession[s] . These are murderous words,18 thudding thug-like19 into and onto the world, wreaking havoc by dint of being the occasion of and for the in[tro]duction of oblique tangents, occluded slipstreams and occult 'glisse­ ments'20 'beyond the conventional, [ . . . ] break[mg] away from approved social norms, roles and expectations.'21 Why would one wish to write-nevermind read-such a 'marginal, polluting and socially subversive' text? (a text that is utterly 'frightening, dangerous and loathesome '?) 22 . . . Its 'strong association with death, violence, pollution and despised marginal social roles [ . . . ] call[s] into question such normative goods as worldly comfort, security, respect and honor,' explains David Kinsley,23 former Chair of Religious Studies at McMas18 The 'garland of skulls' or freshly-cut 'severed heads' worn by Kali/Tara/Matangi/Bhairavi/Chinnamasra (David R. Kinsley, Tantric l7isions of the Di· vine Feminine: The Ten Mahavid_yas (Berkeley: l'niversity of California Press, 1 997) , 238) 'are sometimes said to correspond in number to the number of letters in the Sanskrit alphabet,' hence 'probably are meant to sugge st the sounds of the alphabet and to [be] associate[d) with the sabda brahman: the primordial creative force in the form of sound.' In addition to this 'creatn·e' aspect, of course, 'they almost surely also sugge s t [a] destructive aspect and are meant to signify death [as well] ' (in Ibid, 1 04). 19 'The term Thug-Th11gge�is derived from Hindi word OJT, or /hag, which means "thief" Related words are the verb th11gna, "to deceive," from Sanskrit #tm" sthaga, "cunning, sly, fraudulent," from � sthagati, "he conceals." This term for a particular kind of murder and robbery of travellers is popular in South Asia and particularly in India. [ . . . ] The Thuggee trace their origin to the [mythical) battle of Kali against Rakta­ bija; however, their foundation-myth departs from Brahminical versions of the Pura­ nas. The Thuggee consider themselves to be children of Kali, created out of her sweat' (Wikipedia, 'Thugge e,' available from En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee [accessed 1 6- 1 2- 1 4]). 20 ']e ne donnerai qu'un exemple de mot gliuanf-de glissement-wri.tes Georges Bataille in L 'Experiem"t intirietm (or if you prefer, inter-rie11ry: 'I will give only one example of a slip­ ping word [ . . . ]. I limit myself to the word silence. I t is already, as I have said, the abo­ lition of the sound which the word is; among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is a token of its own death' (Inner E:..perience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 16. Also see CE11vres completes V: La Somme athiologiq11e, Tome I-L'Expirience intirie11re, Mithode de meditation, Post-scciptum (Paris: Editions Gallimard , 1973), 28. 'Thus [ . . . ] you encounter only a slipping, only the poorly coordinated play of [ . . . ] perishable elements' (Inner Experience, 94). Puns often produce the same [perverse) effect, and the laughter they provoke is an uneasy laughter, a laughter filled with joy and terror ( . . . 'Without any doubt, one who laughs is himself laughable and, in a profound sense, is more than his victim, but it matters little that a slight error-a slipping-spills out joy to the realm of laughter,' in Ibid., 97). 21 Kinsley, Tantric Visions, 251-2. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 1 34

KALIGRAPHY ter University24 and a scholar whose multiple studies of Kali and the Maha­ vidyas:?.5 will be the dominant research-resource throughout this essay. �'ho would wish to identify with, let alone 'to actually become (in the logic of Tan­ tra),' an acolyte of such abjection?26 The sadh11, that's who. The sadhu or sadhaka, suggests Kinsley, is one who 'in some fashion finds marginality, social taboos, and the forbidden in general, spiritually refreshing or liberating.'27 'By subvert­ ing, mocking, or rejecting conventional nonns' and opening onto the realm of the forbidden (the realm of 'forbidden things'), kaligraphy-the inscrip­ tion/incarnation of Kali, goddess of destruction-'stretch[es] one's conscious­ ness beyond the conventional [and socially sanctioned] ,' thereby 'liberat[ing] [it] from the inherited, imposed, and probably inhibiting categories of proper and improper, good and bad, polluted and pure .'28 The point of kaligraphy is the point, one might say: the puncturing punc­ tum that cuts into the context qua con-job of culture, revealing the kha of kha­ os-that gushing gap, oozing orifice, or terribly terrific tear in the fabric of phemomena (phenomenal fabrications) which wounds the world 'as we know it.'29 Stable fonns find themselves fissured, fractured, fragmented, and (via this 'fragmentation,' 'fracturing' or 'fission') formidably fluid, bleeding beyond their beseeming boundaries. The perversion of puns might be one possible and par­ ticularly appropriate example of such disastrous discursivity or cagastrous cur­ sivity30_'particularly appropriate,' at present, because of the title of this text: 24 Just up the MacDonald-Cartier Freeway from my curre nt place of employment: c£ Google �faps Google.com/maps/dir/\X'estern+Uci\-ersity,+London,+ON/;\ldlaster +Universitv,:\lain+Street+West,+Hamilton,+0::-.; / @43.081331 ,80.7182457,6z/data=!4 m 1 4!4m 13 f1m51 lm1! 1 s0x882eee0e6ac42bd 1 :Oxaa8'7f353aab9799b!2m2! 1 d81 .273734!2d 43.00959711m51 1m1!1 s0x882c84ac44£72acl :Ox399e00ea6 14301 1c!2m2! 1 d79.91 922512d 43.260879!3eO?hl=en (accessed 1 6-1 2-14). 25 'Mahavidyas': 'great revelations'; cf. Wikipedia, ';\lahavidya-Etymology,' available from En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkata#Etymology (accessed 16-12- 1 4) . 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. See also David R Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute-Kali and Krsna: Dark J/iJion! of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mytholog>• (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 975), 140-41 -'.Kali lives in the cremation-ground, mocking distinctions of class and caste, rich and poor, success and failure. All in the end, are consumed in her undiscrim­ inating fires.' 2'.! 'Kha,' cf. the Greek xdtoi;;, is generally 'cavity,' and in the Rg Veda, particularly, 'the hole in the nave of a wheel through which the axle runs,' explains Ananda Coomaras­ wamy in his essay on 'Kha and other Words denoting Zero in Connection with the Metaphysics of Space' (Bulletin ofthe School of Orilntal Studiu 7 .3, 1 934: 487-97). 30 I refer here, obliquely (obscurely, occultedly) to the cagaster-iliaster of Philippus­ Aureolus Theophrastus-Bombastus Yon Hohenheim. As Henry Pachter explains in 1 35

Dan Mellamphy this essay on so-called 'kaligraphy' (a pun /portmanteau conjoining Kali and caligraphy) . The pun is itself a p11nct11m allowing the word[s] it punctures to bl eed- out different meanings in the manner of Derridean deconstruction, the linguistic labyrinths of Leiris, and the 'Library of Babel' via J orge-Luis Borges.31 The p11nct11m, writes Barthes, 'will break (or punctuate) the st1uli11m'-i. e. an y sta­ ble subject of study ('I invest the field of the st11di11m with my sovereign con­ sciousness' and the p11nct11m then punctures it-it 'rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me') :32 A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the b etter in that it also refers to the notion of punctua-tion, and because the Paracelsus: Magk into Scieni-e-Being the Tf'lle Story· of the Troubled Ufa, Advenhlres, Miraculous Crms and Prophecies of the Most &noJV1ted, Wtde!J· Traveled. I "ery Larned and Pio11s Gentleman, Scholar, and Most Highfy Experienced a11d J//111trious Pl?J·si."lls, the Honorable Philippus­ Theophrasftls Armol11s-Bomb11Jtt1s ab Hohenheim, Ementa, called Paracelms, Doctor of Both Medi­ cines and Professor of Theolos;·, a/Jo Adept of the Hofy Cabba!d and Expert of the Ali:hemical Art, Friend of the Common Man and Defender of Uber!J' r.-;ew York: Henry Schurman, 1 95 1) , 21 5-'iliaster is the constructive principle in matter, seeking creation. The destructive force he called cagaslfr (caco-astf'llm).' '\Vhen the cagaster acts upon the iliaster the fonner is realized as a chaos or complex of infinite ideas' (Alexander Jacob, De Natllf'r.e Nahlra: Conceptiom· ofNahlrt and the Unco11scio11s [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1 991), 34). Final­ ly-to provide a trinity of cagastic references-herewith a brief biblical correlation: 'After the fall, the flesh of .\dam became cagastic, ie. subject to corruption' (the bible sees all that is cagastic as utterly monstrous, ie. 'cagaster as monstrunr. cf. Uber AZJJlh chap.I volXIV, ed. Sudhoff, 549'); Allan G. Debus, A lchemy and Earfy Modern Chemistry: Papersfrom Ambix (Huddersfield: Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2004), 1 20. 3 1 'A monstrous aberration causes people to believe that language came into being to facilitate their relations with one another,' explains Leiris in La Rivolution Suma/isle 1 3, 1 925: 7. 'By dissecting the words we like, without bothering about conforming either to their etymologies or to their accepted significations, we discover their most hidden qualities and the secret ramifications that are propagated through the whole language, channeled by associations of sounds, forms, and ideas. Then language changes into an oracle, and there we have a thread (however slender it may be) to guide us through the Babel of our minds' CGlossain: ])' Serre mes G/osel), I should point, at this point, in the direction both of Borges's Laf?yrinlhs (trans. James E. Irby and Donald .\. Yates [New York: New Directions, 1 962]) and of the section of Georges Bataille's Inner Experience on 'The Labyrinth, or the Constitution of Beings,' 81-98. 32 Roland Barthes, Camera Llcida: &flee/ions on Photograph]·. trans. Richard Howard (New York: N ooday Press, 1 981 ) , 26. 'I invest the field of the studUtm with my sovereign con­ sciousness' and the punctum then punctures it-it 'rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me'-'hence, to give examples ofpunchlm is, in a certain fash­ ion, to give myself up' (in Ibid., 26, 43). 136

KALIGRAPHY [studies] of which I am speaking are in effect punctuated, some­ times even speckled, with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds, are so many points. 1bis [ . . . ] element which will disturb the studi11m I shall therefore call punclllm; for p11ncfllm is also 'sting,' 'speck,' 'cut,' 'little hole'-and also 'a cast of the dice.' A [ . . . ] puncfllm is that accident which pricks me-but also bruises me, is poignant to me.33 'The p11nct11m shows no preference for morality or good taste: the p11ncfllm can be ill-bred,' writes Barthes.34 The p"nclllm, indeed, brings about utter illn ess, ill-being, sickness unto death, beyond bruises and poignant puncture-marks. And as Kinsley suggests (in the context of what is here called kaligraphy), 'the first step in man's spiritual quest'-at least according to the sadh11 or sadha/ea (acolyte, devotee) of Kali-'is meditation on this point':3S the method of medi­ tation outlined by Bataille , which the latter calls joy before death.36 'Sickness, old age and death are the very texture'-the written text-'of life, and to think otherwise is to remain hopelessly deluded':3i 'the first step in [the sadhtls or sad- 33 Ibid. 26-7 �Un mot existe en latin pour designer cette blessure, cette piqilre, cette marque faite par un instrument pointu; ce mot m'irait d 'autant mieux qu'il tenvoie aussi a l'idee de ponctuation et que les [etudes] dont je parle soot en effet comme p onctuees, parfois meme mouchetees, de ces poin ts s ensib les ; precis ement, ces marques, ces blessures sont des points. Ce(t] [ . . . ] element qui vient d eranger le Jt11di11111, je l'appellerai done p11nc/11nr, car p11nclll11,1 c 'est aussi: piqtire, petit /ro11, petite /ache, petite roupllrt--{! t aussi coup de dis. Le punclllm [ . . . ] est ce hasard qui, en elle, me _p oint-mais aussi me 111e11rtrit, me poigne'; 'LJJ chllllbre c/aire: Sole .fllr la photographic [Paris: Editions Gal­ limard/Seuil, 1980], 49). 3 4 Ibid. 43 (I am tempted to append here a previously-cited statement from Kinsley in order to note that puns and kaligraphic in sc rip tions 'often threaten social order' and that 'in their strong association with death, violence, pollution and despised matginal social roles they call into question such normative good s as worldly comfort, security, respect and honor,' cf. Tantric Visions, 251-2). 35 Kinsley, The Sword and the F/Nu, 1 38-9. 36 Cf. Georges Bataille , 'La pratique de la joie devant la mort,' in Aciphak 5, 1 939: 3-8 ('The Practice of Joy Before Death,' in Georges B ataille , Visioll.f of Excess: Selected Writ­ ings, 1927-1939, ed . and trans. _'\llan Strekel �Iinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 985), 235-9). 3 7 Kinsley, The S}Jl()rd and the F/Nte, 1 38-9 (also s ee Ibid., 145: 'To ignore death, to pre­ tend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one's ego is the center of things, is to provoke Kali's mocking laughter. To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one's mortality is to be able to act superfluously, to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and sh out') ; cf. additionally footnote 1 6, above. 1 37

Dan Mellamphy hokds] spiritual quest is .meditation on this point.'38 Language considered as a [mino) tauromachia-hearkening here, again, to Leiris39-and as the play of paronomasia (puncturing puns), murders the m1m-d11rs (solid structures, stable sidings)40 ofworld-weaving words,41 bringing multiple/myriad meanings down to a level playing-field ('levelling' them in the sense of 'toppling them over,' 'overturning them' and/ or 'overthrowing them': 'mowing them down,' 'casting them down,' 'breaking them down,' et cetera) . This 'level playing-field' is for our present purposes the Ka/ikkhetro or 'field of Kali':42 the vast waste­ land/cremation-ground where Kali lives in the midst of death and dissolution43 ('the cremation-ground [being] the place where the five elements-the poncho mohobhutt:r-aee dissolved' and where one finds a similar dissolution 'of attach­ ments, anger, lust, and other binding emotions, feelings or ideas'; 'the devotee makes her image in his heart and under her influence bums away all limitations and ignorance in the cremation fires') .44 '.\lthough she has an impressive my­ thology centering on the battlefield-itself a field of death-it is well known that Kali prefers above any other place the cremation-ground,' Kinsley ex­ plains. 45 Kali denotes freedom, particularly freedom from societal norms: she dwells outside the confines of normal sociecy [and hence] pre­ fers the cremation-ground, which is the place avoided by those who live within society. Her loose hair and nudity suggest that she is totally unrestrained, totally free from social and ethical roles or expectations; in the same vein, she is an outsider, beyond conven­ tion. She is worshipped by criminals and outcastes. She is unre­ fined, raw in appearance and habit. And she is powerful, full of energy, perhaps because of being an outsider, a breaker of bound­ aries and social models.46 38 Ibid. See footnote 10, above. 40 For an online machine-translation c/o Google, see Translate.google.com/#fr/ en/ m urs%20durs (accessed from 1 6- 1 2- 1 4) 41 (wor�)ds) . . . see footnote 74, below. 42 Cf. Wikipedia, 'Kolkata-Etymology,' available from En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkata #Etymology (accessed 1 6-12-1 4). 4 3 Calling-to-my-mind the �1enstruum l.Jniversale' of Jean-Luc Nancy in The Birth to Pretence, trans. Paula :\foddel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 993), 248-265: 'the menstruum universale, meaning universal solvent in the vocabula.cy of alchemy,' a.k.a. 'dissolution itself' (Ibid., 250). +1 Kinsley, Tantric Visions, 88. 45 Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute, 141 . 46 Kinsley, Tantric Visions, 80. 39 . 138

KALIGRAPHY J ust as the pun sets fire to-and/or 'fires upon'-a given word, revealing in this ignition dimensions otherwise invisible/illisible, so Kali stands upon a supine figure ('often discernible as Shiva but sometimes said to be an anony­ mous corpse') which is itself 'being consumed in a cremation fire.'41 'The figure she stands upon is often said to be either a corpse or a preta (ghost) and is of­ ten shown being cremated. '48 She herself, of course, 'haunt[s the] cremation­ grounds' also, but as the creator-destroyer of ghostly apparitions ('identified with the actual fires of cremation and thus [ . . . ] the final destructive but puri­ fying force that marks the transition from life to death or from one type of ex­ istence to another') .49 Setting fire to-and/ or upon--existents, Kali reveals the existence beyond it, in all its paradoxical confliction, conflagration, contradic­ tion, embracing both its aporia and its porosity: its absolute and absolutely ag­ gressive ambiguity.50 'Ferocious and terrible to behold, the dweller in the cre­ mation-ground, it is Kali who reveals-or is-the world process, the entire cre­ ation in all its ambiguity.';1 The image of Kali in the cremation-ground [ . . . ] fastens one's at­ tention on those aspects of life that cannot be avoided and must eventually result in pain, sorrow and lamentation. As illustrative of maya �.e. illusion, delusion, phenomenological perception] and as the embodiment of uncaring, pulsing prakriti �.e. phusis, physics, the force of nature], Kali forces our attention upon those aspects of life that cannot be kept at bay or successfully repressed. She is the mythological embodiment of those three 'passing sights' that provoked the Huddha hunself to abandon the world in search of enlightenment-those same sights that are presupposed in his 'first noble truth': sickness, old age, and death.52 Kali pokes holes in-and ultimately destroys-our illusions, our delusions, our ego-centric ideas qua ideals of order. 'Meditation upon Kali as an image of this world calls into question the s tability, order, and destiny of the phenomenal world':53 'she may be voluptuous and smiling in her later representations, sug­ gesting the dark allure of the world based on not-knowing, but her overall pres­ ence-which is frightening-along with her dwelling-place in the cremation47 Ibid., 100. 48 Ibid., 1 02. 4Y Ibid., 103. 50 '_-\bsolute' and-of course--dissolute. 5 1 Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute, 1 1 5. 52 Ibid., 138-9. 53 Ibid., 136. 139

Dan Mellamphy ground clearly mock the ultimate significance of a world grounded in the ego [and ego-structures]'54 ('to ignore death, to pretend that one is physically im­ mortal, to pretend that one's ego is the center of things, is to provoke Kali's mocking laughter. To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one's mortality is to be able to act superfluously, to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout'S5). Hers is the world-or rather, are the worlds-of nobody, of nescioquiddity, and like 'Nobody' in Jarmusch's Dead Man, she knows (and reveals) that the only real poetry is a poetry 'written with blood.' This is why 'she is pre-eminently the goddess who is se1-.:ed with blood, who is pleased with blood, who subsists on blood': 'her force and power reside in the hot, pumping blood of all creatures-she is reinvigorated when the blood of birth is returned to her in the blood of death; she sustains life and is herself sustained by the giv­ ing-back of life.'56 Her lolling tongue, her blood-smeared lips and body, and her bloodied cleaver represent the irreducible truth that life sustains itself on life, that the throb of life-the pulsing beat of rushing blood, the insistent flow of sap-demands an unending stream of life-energy to go on, that death and decay form the only fertile ground for the hungry pulse of life. Kali represents the unrefined, raw, primordial scream of the hungry infant, while at the same time representing the anguished laments of the dying who have exhausted themselves in nourishing and sustaining the next gener­ ation. [ . . . ] The conclusion to be drawn from the voluptuous 'wet' nature of Kali is that the Hindu vision of the divin€ is grounded in the irreducible reality of life-in the reality of sex, birth, growth, decay and death.5i Hers are the pnncta rather than the singular p11ntltl111 of illu sion, delusion, ideas and ideals: hence the multiplicity of severed human hands that form a girdle round her otherwise naked body,58 the multiple severed heads worn as a garland round her neck, in addition to the 'freshly-cut human head' she holds in her left hand and the two others that dangle from her ears as earring adorn- 54 Ibid., 1 35. 55 Ibid., 1 45. 56 Ibid., 1 38. 57 Ibid., 1 56. 58 'Her girdle of severed arms may sugge s t the end of grasping,' sugges ts Kinsley in Ibid., 143. 1 40

KALIG RAPHY ments.59 These multiple murders, evidenced by the bloody bejewelling of her body-her girdle, her garland, her earrings, et cetera-'are in effect punctu­ at[ions] , [ . . . ] even speckle[s] ' Qooking back to Barthes),60 but in no actual or­ der ('serial' or otherwise), even if some suggest that the number of heads hang­ ing round Kali's neck might be the same as the letters in the Sanskrit alphabet.61 What we have here is a po11bellicalion Qooking back now to Lacan):62 the presen­ tation qua publication of refuse, remnants, remainders63 in and on the field qua form of Kali-which brings us (via the remainder, the remains) back to the first of this essay's two epigraphs, and to the idea expressed in it that we should ap­ proach Kali as she would approach us: 'without recourse to any of the usual courtesies or mercies, taking what [she] want[s], [and] leaving behind new signa­ tures in what remains.'64 Kali appears in various ways, in various forms, and even with various names-indeed, as one of the ten Mahavidyas65 (perhaps even 'the primordial or primary :Mahavidya, the adi-Mahavidya'),66 she can ap­ pear in and as the multiple forms of Kali, Bhairavi, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Bhuvaneshvari, Tripurasundari, Tara, Chinnarnasta, Kamala or Matangi. As Kinsley states in his study of the ten Mahavidyas, 'in some cases it seems appar­ ent that the other Mahavidyas originate from Kali or are her differing fonns.'67 For the sake of highlighting the multiple pm1cta of our Mahavidya-and explor­ ing in so doing the pun-like puncturings of so-called kaligraphy-I would like to compare Kali the beheader with the beheaded beheader Chinnamasta: the Mahavidya who literally loses (that is, lops oft) her head. 59 'Four-anned, garlanded with skulls and with disheveled hair, she holds a freshly-cut human head and a bloodied scimitar in her left bands while making signs for fearless­ ness-assurance and the bestowing of boons with her right hands. Her neck adorned with a garland of severed human heads all dripping blood, a severed bead hanging from each of her earlobes, she wears a girdle of severed human hands round her waist [ . . . ] and the smile on her lips glistens with blood [ . . . ] as her three eyes bum red, glaring like two rising suns' (in Ibid., 1 , translation slightly modified). Go Ibid., 26-7. 6 1 Kinsley, Tantric Visions, 104. 62 See footnote 1 8, above. 63 Perhaps 'where we [might] perceive a [series] or chain of events, (s]he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls in front of her feet,' and/or upon her body, bending a passage on the '.'\ngel of History' by Walter Benjamin into the arena and onto the concourse of :\fata Kali, who herself is the mother of kola (time itself); cf. Walter Benjamin, I/111minalion1: Em!JS and &fle1:tion1, trans. Harry Zohn (?'-'ew York: Schocken Books, 1 968), 257-8. 64 See footnote 1, above. 65 See footnote 26, above. Kinsley, Tantrk Vitions, 68. 67 Ibid. 66 141

Dan Mellamphy Here is the Dhyana mantra of Chinnamasta from the Shakta Pramoda (c. 950 CE) , wherein the key features of the goddess-how she is [kali]graphically presented-are described: She stands in an aggressive manner with her leg put forward. She is holding her own severed head in one hand and a sword in the other. She is naked and happily drinks the blood that gushes from her headless body. She has three eyes and is adorned with a blue lotus at her heart. One should meditate on Chinnamasta, who has the complexion of a red hibiscus flower. She stands on Kama and Rati, who are joined in sexual intercourse. To her right is Varini, who is possessed by rajas guna, who is white in color, with loose hair, and who holds a sword and a skull -cup . She happily drinks the blood gushing from the deYi's seYered neck. On her left is Dakini, who also drinks blood flowing from Chinnamasta's head­ less body. She is possessed by tamas guna and enjoys the world in its state of dissolution. 6 8 In his s tudy of Hind1t Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Rtligio11s Tradition, Kinsley describes her as follows: 'Chinnamasta stands in a cremation­ ground on the copulating bodies of Kama and Rati (sometimes Radha and Krsna) , the god of sexual lust and his wife. She has decapitated herself with a sword, which she holds in one hand. In her other hand she holds a platter bear­ ing her severed head. Three jets of blood spurt from her neck and stream into the mouths of rwo female attendants and into the mouth of her own severed head.'69 Like Kali, she is adorned with a garland of skulls or severed heads, but in her case the 'freshly-cut human head' she holds in her left hand'.O is not in fact human but rather her own; from this-her own severed head, which looks rather blissful-she drinks one of the three streams of blood that erupt from her neck, the other two spurting into the mouths of her acolytes. Rather than standing on the corpse of Shiva (revealing herself as a revelation over and above-i.e. beyond the bounds of.-Shaivist asceticism, Shiva's mahayoga) , Chinnamasta stands upon the copulating Kama and Rati, who lie on a great lotus-flower that somehow has blossomed in and on the cremation-ground (the former l\fahavidya thereby revealing herself as a revelation over and above-i.e. beyond the bounds of.-sexual reproduction, generation after generation) . 'Chinn amasta is probably the most dramatic, stunning representation in the 6s Ibid., 1 44. 69 David R Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: f/isions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu &ligious Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 986), 162. 7o Kinsley, Tantric Visions, 67. 142

KALIGRAPHY Hindu pantheon of the truth that life, sex and death are part of an interdepend­ ent, unified system' as chaotic as it is ordered (or perhaps, indeed, 'ordered' by 'chaos').71 'The stark contrasts and reversals of what one would normally expect to see in this iconographic scenari�the gruesome decapitation, the copulating couple, the cremation-ground-jolt the viewer into an awareness of the truth that life feeds on death, is nourished by death, necessitates death, and that the ultimate destiny of sex is to perpetuate more life, which in turn will decay and die in order to feed more life.'72 Chinnamasta punctures the world73 as does Kali-kaligraphy-but she does so first and foremost by self-decapitation, i.e. being headless. She is the Acephalic Kali (Kali Aciphale) : to pilfer a passage from Bataille 's contribution to Acipha/e 1 Oune 1 936), she 'has escaped from h[er] head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison,'74 'loose[d) from the prison-house [along with] the souls of a million lunatics.'75 A particularly perverse pun that literally and literarily 'pricks me' at this point76 is that of a Mahaviydan Chinnamasturba­ tion:77 in this case an MC78 that winds up ('in the roaring whirling wind') 'giving head' not in a sexual but in an utterly scissiparous way, a way wherein what is 'written' is written through the wounding-indeed the complete cleaving--of the 'writer,' wherein what is 'written' flows from this cutting and cleaving with copiousness, conjoining in so doing (in such flowing, in this flowering) the characteristics of copulation and of decapitation (not to mention 'giving head' and 'being headless') while moving beyond the bounds of both. Thus kaligraph­ ic 'writing and copulation are bound up with a problematic of traces that Ba­ taille generally introduces through the counterexample of [ . . . ] scissiparity,' explains Denis Hollier in his study Against A rchitectrm: On the Wrili11gs of Georges Batai/le (La prise de la Co11corde: Essais s11r Georges Bataille) ; 'the phenomenon of scissiparity thus would realize the unity of eroticism and death if, precisely, the fact that sex does not intervene in the process, did not make it impossible to speak of eroticism.'79 Kaligraphy is in this sense an erotischism: the presence in 7 1 Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, 173. n Ibid. 73 (the world and the word) . . . see footnote 42, above. 74 Cf. Acipha/e 1 (1 936): 2-3. 75 See footnote 1 1 , above; here 'the stars are blotted out, clouds are covering clouds,' and 'in the roaring whirling wind are the souls of a million lunatics, just loose from the prison-house' . . . 76 Barthes, Camera Ltdda, 26. n Hereafter, MC. 7 8 As before, Mahaviydan Chinnamasturbation. 79 Denis Hollier, La prise dt la Con,orde: Essais s11r Geo'l,es Bataille (Paris: E ditions Gal­ limard , 1 974), 1 25-1 26 (trans. Betsy Wing, Against Arr:hile,ture: On the Writings of Georges Balaille [Cambridge: The :\IIT Press, 1 990), 68). 1 43

Dan Mellamphy any given form[ul] ation, reproduction, in a given representation-representation, fornication/ coming-into-being-of the latter's division, dis­ memberment and dissolution, or as Hollier puts it, 'the presence in sexual re­ production (insofar as it produces traces) of its other, scissiparity (insofar as it implies an absence or, here, the obliteration of the trace) . '110 Chinnamasta exemplifies kaligraphy's 'a11tre cap'8 1 (stealing this phrase from Jacques Derrida),82 its living/breathing caput morruum. She shows, perhaps more than any of the other Mahavidyas, the [w) hole complex of kaligraphy as such: its grotesque perversion, its grotesque vision, emerging out from an ab­ sent cranium like Bataille's jesuve83 qua ail pi11eale84 . . . 'Grotesque,' of course, in the sense of 'holey'-wholly speckled and shot-through with holes,85 gratui­ tously 'grotto' ed. 86 Puns, come to think of it (lqrsque queje viens dy penser qua pu11Sf!Y), are linguistic grotesqueries-etymological transgressions,87 perversions, subversions-as well: they make holes in and through language [s] , puncta (using Barthes's term; or the 'holes' of Beckettian logoclasts) 88 from the wounds of which terrible visions, versions and pen•ersions of given statements/ states-of­ being bleed-forth. Puns puncture, in other words: they wound the world of words, and their 'work'89 works as a kind of blood-letting,90 a veritable kaligra­ phy. Puns open up and open onto other directions, other captions (l'autre cap): they decapitate, that is cut off, supposed/purported headings and allow words-words-work[s] , the world[s] of words9'-to lead [/bleed] elsewhere; Ibid., 1 26 (1 990, 69). 'Alltre cap, ' i.e. 'other heading.' 82 Jacques Derrida, VA.111? cap, suivi de La Dimocralie '!foumie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, so Bl 1 991). 83 Cf. Bataille , Visions efExcm, 73-8. 84 Ibid., 79-90. 85 ' in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled, with these sensitive points; pre­ cisely, these marks, these wounds, are so many points'-Roland Barthes, Camera LNdda, 26-7. 86 Cf. 'grotesque'/ 'grotto' in the Online Etymological Dictionary, available from Ety­ monline.com/index.php?tenn=grotesque & Etymonline.com/index.php?tenn =grotto (accessed 1 6-12-14). • • • 87 (:. etymillogical.) Samuel Beckett to Mary Manning Howe (1 1 -07-37) in The Letters ef Samuel Beckett, Volume 1 : 1 929-1 940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 521 n.8. 88 89 911 (their a11vre qua disaummenl.) Cf. 'Do you know how to use that weapon? That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it, and your poetry will now be written with blood'­ ] armusch, Dead Man. 9 1 See footnotes 42 and 74, above. 144

KALIGRAPHY they slice through any given, posed, proposed set or series of straightforward statements, and are thus a kind of serial-killing in that they laughingly slaugh­ ter92 any set series (and 'the serial' as such) . [[EXERGUE)] More and more, my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get at those things (or the nothing­ ness) lying behind it. [ . . . ] On the road toward this literature of the non-word, [ . . . ] Let's do as that crazy mathematician who used to apply a new principle of measurement at each individual step of the calculation. Word-storming in the name of beauty.93 As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into dis­ repute. To bore one hole after another in it , until what lurks be­ hind it (be it something or nothing) begins to seep through; I can­ not imagine a higher goal for a writer today. 94 I am starting a Logoclasts's League. I am the only member at pre­ sent. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude like a hernia. 95 9.2 See footnote 1 6, above ( . . . 'this severity and this severing does away with 'series'­ serial orders or arrangements-and with things taken ' seriously.' never mind 'serially. ' Kali is severely non-serious: hers is the sovereign 'howl of laughter that mocks [all seri­ ous] pretense'-a 'long and maddened laughter,' the 'weird howl and uncanny laugh ter [that] terrifies her enemies'; ' s he blazes like a million rising suns,' even in the deepest darlmess, 'and fill s the world with earth-shattering laughter'; see David R. Kin sley, The Sword and the Fl11te-Kali and Kmta: Dark l'isions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu M;•tholog>· [Berkeley: University of California Pres s , 1 975] , 141 , 98, 1 25. Also David R. Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavit!J•as [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 997] , 23). 93 Samuel Beckett to :\xel Kauo (09-07-37) in The utters, 5 1 8, 520. 9-1 Samuel Beckett to _\xel Kaun (09-07-37) in Di[jecta: Miscellaneo11s Writings and a Dra­ matzi: Fragment, ed. Roby Cohn. (New York: Grove Press, 1 984), 1 72. 95 Beckett to Manning Howe (1 1 -07-37) in The uttm, 52ln.8. 1 45

EXQUISITE CORPSE: SERIAL KILLING AND THE HORRIPILATION OF WRITING Aspasia Stephanou These words like daggers enter in mine ears. -William Shakespeare1 [ . . . ] the stroke of a bloody axe often outliving that of a pen. -Ian Brady2 In 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' Oscar Wilde renounces any sanctimonious analysis of morality or psychology, and instead, with the characteristic indifference that the aesthete approaches his subject matter, proceeds to discuss the style of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright: a person 'of an extremely artistic temperament,' Wainewright was not only 'a poet and a painter and an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,' but also 'a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.'3 A cultivated man, moving in the literary circles of Charles Lamb and influenced by Wordsworth, Wainewright was nonetheless a serial killer. Wilde recognised that it was Wainewright's crimes that 'seem to have had an im­ portant effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked,' to the extent that 'One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.'4 For this reason he believed that the liter­ ary power of a work of art cannot be denied in order to satisfy a sense of mo­ rality. The fact that one is a serial killer should not affect the quality of one's prose, because accordingly, 'There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.•s Wilde believed that when \\'ainewright and other criminals are 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Penguin Books, 2005), IIl.4.95, 9 1 . 2 Ian Brady, The Gates ofJanus: Serial /.(jl/ing and Its Anafysis f?J• the '!Yloors Murderrr ' (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2001), Kindle edition. 3 Oscar Wilde, 'Pen, Pencil and Poison,' in Intentions: The Decqy of L ying. Pen, Pencil and Poison, The Critic as Artist, The Truth oflvlasks (New York: Brentano's, 1 905), 60. 4 Wilde, 'Pen, Pencil and Poison,' 89. s Ibid., 90. 1 47

Aspasia Stephanou assimilated into the sphere of art and science, which know nothing of morality, it is possible to appreciate, from a safe distance, their art.6 Between symbolic meaning and the meaninglessness of violence, the serial killer seems to have trodden both worlds and written with both pen and poison (as well as sharper instruments). It is perhaps between these webs of tangled sense that the serial killer finds himself caught, revising and re-writing the unin­ telligible blood splashes, and veiling the horror of transparency with language. In what follows, I am concerned with writing and serial killing as inscriptions on the epidermal surfaces of flesh and paper; inscriptions that produce mean­ ing. Inscriptions that lacerate and open wounds that bleed words, knowledge, and more writing. Wainewright's writings, for example, are considered notewor­ thy when seasoned with the blood of murder. At the same time, the violence of inscriptions,7 stigmata, writing, or cutting car. be understood as the machina­ tions of a demonic imagination. Here, I wam to move beyond the idea of a cre­ ative imagination possessed by a sovereign human subject, as well as the post­ modern notion of imagination as endless reproduction without original refer­ ent.8 Instead, I locate imagination in the physical body, influenced by demonic Spirit.9 By looking at the idea of a material imagination able to affect one's body or infect the bodies of others through communication, as well as its associa­ tions with the idea of possession, it is possible to conceive of writing and serial killing as demonic: 'it is about entrancement, possession, being invaded or tak­ en over.'lll 6 Ibid., 7 9 1-2. In a chapter called 'The Violence of the Letter: From Levi-Strauss to Rousseau,' in Of Grammatologr (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1 997), Jacques Der­ rida writes that arche-writing or arche-violence is the very condition of both vio­ lence/writing and its opposite speech/peace. For Derrida, writing is a violent act .inher­ ent in the ''ery nature of language itself 'To name, to give names that it will on occa­ sion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which con­ sists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute' (1 1 2). Writing and other representational systems then, by attempting to classify and establish nonns, carry within them their own violence. 8 Cf. Jacques Derrida, 'The Double Session,' in Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1 981), 206. 9 _o\s Michel Foucault writes, sixteenth-century thinkers, by spiritualizing the power of the Devil, gave him more power over the interior of the body, fantasy, dream, senses, nerves, and humours. See Foucault, 'Religious Deviations and .Medical Knowledge,' in Religion and C11/ture, ed. Jeremy R. Carette (Manchester: :Manchester University Press, 1 999), (50-6) 53. 1 0 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An lntrodxction to Uterallln, Criticism and Theory (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2004), 1 67. 148

EXQU ISITE CORPSE The serial killer and the artist share the desire for communication pursued within a disfigured and dismembered universe of fantasy and reality. Imagina­ tion, controlled by demonic forces, occludes truth and infects reality with spec­ tres of violence and visions of corpses. It is my contention, that in this respect, the writer and serial killer can be seen as 'possessed,' or haunted by the hideous phantoms of imagination. 1 1 Mary Shelley associates writing with demonic pos­ session in her 'Author's Introduction to the Standard Novds Edition' (1831) of Frankenstein. Here, she explains how the idea of the novel 'possessed' her in a dream during which the 'imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gift­ ing the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.'12 Horror writing and serial killing are, then, bound up with the nightmare, wherein the demonic possesses both bodies and imagina­ tions. Serial killing is a form of writing that traverses the surfaces of the flesh, a state of possession that bears witness to the horror of a haunting that plunges one into the dark side of consciousness. Reading Ian Brady's The Gates of Ja1111s, written under the pseudonym Franc;ois Villo n (a Medieval French poet who had killed a priest in 1455),13 is not merely a discomforting experience but also a laceration and an opening that all ows one to communicate with the other as writer and serial killer, as language and criminal activity become implicated in the act of murder.14 Shedding blood and ink to violate appropriate boundaries becomes the transgressive act of the writer and killer. Utilising language to categorize, analyse and dissect other serial killers, Brady eloquently but cowardly occludes his own violence. At the same time, the act of exposing similar criminal transgressions, punctuated by his ir11 In his letter to \llen Ginsberg, \�'illiam Burroughs describes his writing 'almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity who is saying in effect, "I will write what I please." :\t the same time when I tty to pressure myself into organiz­ ing production, to impose some form on material, or even to follow a line (like contin uation of novel), the effort catapults me into a sort of madness, where only the most extreme material is available to me' (William S. Burroughs, Le!ttrs to Allen Gi111be'l, 19531957 [New York: Full Court Press, 1 982], 20). 1 2 Mary Shelley, 'Author's Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition' (1 831), Frank­ en1tein, or The Modern Promethe111 (London: Penguin, 2003), 9. 1 3 Ian Brady and his girlfriend �Iyra Hindley, also known as the 'J\foors Murderers,' committed a series of killings in Saddlewonh :\foor, an area in Northern England, be­ tween 1 963 and 1 965. Most of the victims, aged between ten and seventeen, were sex­ ually assaulted before being killed. Particularly shocking are Brady and Hindley's porno­ graphic photographs of ten year old Lesley _-\nn Downey, and their thirteen-minute tape recording of her torture. t4 I am thinking here also of writing as espionage anc;l war strategy. See Friedrich A. Kittler's Literat11re, Media, Information S.J'!lem1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1 997), . ­ 60. 149

Aspasia Stephanou reverent ideas and moral relativism, threatens both his authorial mastery as well as our security as readers, throwing us into disarray and horror as the text opens up lacerated by a thousand cuts . In The Georges Bataille writes: Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge It's just that I'm having trouble seeing what sin might be as far as the value that it assumes for the soul, if it's not an act. If I refer to my own experience of sin, either through personal memories, or through an awareness of the other, I have the impression that we connect the horror of sin to a positive action, to the idea of an in­ tervention that is simultaneously a fall , because this act makes us pass from one state to another, from a state of purity to a state of decomposition. And, in my mind, what's more, from a state of au­ tonomy and folding back on oneself, to a state of opening, of in­ j ury. t 5 Bataille's attempts to kill metaphor b y documenting horror and unimaginable obscenities, accelerated writing to the point of exhaustion and put the self at risk, pushing it towards its own collapse: the summit . 1 6 By attacking and debas­ ing language, inhabiting the position of the sovereign and the assassin, the murderer and the victim, the writer as serial killer, and the serial killer as writer facilitates the breaking down of the barrier between sacrificial victim and sacri­ ficer, unleashing the violence of the sacred. For Bataille, and consequently for Brady, 'the timid man, who never dares break the law, who turns away, is eve­ rywhere despised. The idea of virility always contains the image of the man who, within his limitations, can put himself above the law deliberately, fearlessly and thoughtlessly. '17 We can add that such a risky position fractures any notion of virility and domination, returning one to a place where opposites mingle. It is by putting oneself in such a precarious and dangerous place that one becomes a visionary, a criminal possessed. Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny (1 5 May 1 87 1 ) describes how 1 5 Georges Bataille , The Unfinished System of Non-&owkdge, ed. Stuart Kendall (Minneap­ olis and London: University of �finnesota Press, 2001), 55. 1 6 For Bataille, the summit is the inaccessible and impossible excess that threatens the self's security. It can be argued that the serial killer's authority and desire to control his victims is threatened by a violence that destroys his sovereign power and brings about his decline. It is in such a fall that there is a fissure and an opening of what Bataille would call radical 'continuity.' On this concept, see Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sen111ali!J, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1 957). 17 Georges Bataille, Uteralllre and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 201 2), Kindle edition. · 1 50

EXQUISITE CORPSE The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, of suf­ fering, madness; he seeks himself, he exhausts all poisons in him­ self, to keep only their quintessences. All indescribable torture in which he has need of all faith, all superhuman force, in which he becomes, among all, the great sick man, the great criminal, the great accursed-and the supreme Scholar!-for he arrives at the unknownl18 The experience of possession can be likened to the ecstasy Bataille associ­ ates with horror. In Tears of Eros he explains his obsession with the photograph of Chinese torture where the unspeakable and the most elevated are united in the victim's expression. The photograph, which Bataille acquired from his psy­ choanalyst, Dr. Adrien Borel, depicts the slow death of Fou-Tchou-Ll in 1 905. The tortured man, who had murdered Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, is condemned to Lingchi, translated as 'death by a thousand cuts,' or 'hundred pieces.' During the torture, opium is sometimes administered to prevent fainting and alleviate the pain in order to prolong the torture. 1 9 Opium is perhaps what causes the perverse ecstatic expression on the face of the victim which, juxtaposed with its opposite, the violence of tom flesh, produces an anguishing effect. For Bataille, religious eroticism, the evil synthesis of horror and divine ecstasy, of con­ sciousness and flesh, is an experience of the limit that shatters and moves be­ ing.20 Ian Brady, in his attempt to intellectualise meaningless action echoes the Bataillean universe of sacrifice and violation of the law by glorifying murderous will: 'Therefore, a person should consciously choose whether to e.xi.st as a grey daub on a grey canvas, or as an existential riot of every colour in the spectrum. You know which of these alternatives the serial killer selects, action-painting 18 Arthur Rimbaud, quoted in Edmund Wilson, Axel's Ca.rile (New York: Charles Scrib­ ner's Sons, 1 93 1), 270-1 . My emphasis. 1 9 Georges Bataille, The Tears oJEros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1 989), 205. 20 Bataille was also fascinated with the 'Dusseldorf vampire,' the serial killer Peter Kiirten, whose trial in 1 93 1 drew his attention and whom he references in 'Dali screams with Sade.' There he writes, that 'every morning, the crowd of human beings awakened by the sun above the city demands the share of horrors which, despite the puzzlement and even the protestations of the moralising editorialists, the main newspapers deliver without fail, omitting no detail: for what one wants to know above all else is what atro­ cious thirig has happened' (Georges Bataille, 'Dali s cream s with Sade,' in 'The Place of Violence: Selected Writings,' Parallax 6.2 [2000]: 83) . Cf. Fred Botting, 'Bataille's Vam­ pire,' in this volume. It is also noteworthy that the male narrator of Story of the Eye (1 928) also scavenges through newspapers, smoking cigarettes, and reading aloud crim­ inal or violent articles. See Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1 982). 151

Aspasia Stephanou with his knife on a human canvas, each slash-splash creating a unique master­ pie ce . Not for sale but nevertheless widely viewed with fa scina tion by most.'21 Brady's perception of murder as a sovereign act parallels the Surrealist concep­ tion of automatic writing as an activity liberated from any au th ori ty and morali­ ty and 'in which man fully lives according to his desire.'22 The Surre alists were also enamoured with the figure of the criminal which repre sented for them ab­ solute liberty. Exemplary of this is Breton's description of the simples t Surreal­ ist act which consisted of firing a pistol randomly into a crowd. As he write s , 'Anyone who, at least once in his li fe , has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well- defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level . '23 However, like the Surreal­ ists, Brady remain s attached to the idea of creative genius and of muscular works of art. In this respect, the freedom of the broken limit is found in the way Brady himself interpre ts crime as violent self-expression. Llke writing, serial killing can here be understood as a 'textual self-realisation,' and an 'intellectual and existen­ tial journey.'24 As George Hugo Tucker wri tes , 'homo viator, as homo exsulans, is thus also, sup remely , s olitarily , and in all freedom, homo scriptor sui: the "writ­ er''-the maker-of himself. Indeed, in this particular textual sense, he is, like Cain (both despite and because of his wandering "exile") homo faber.'25 Accord­ ing to Brady, serial killers, like writers, are 'pursuing the quest for a measure of inunortality in similar solitary fashion using a knife ra ther than a pen, skin ra­ ther than paper. In metaphysical terms, they would regard anything less . . . in­ substantial, lacking in existential satisfaction and durability, no substitute for the actual exp erienc e of writing on living and brea thing pages.'26 On the other hand, the overused rhetoric of writing and killing is threatened by a violent senselessness, an inhuman materiality , what Paul de Man would refer to as the 'materiality of inscription,' which disrupts assimilation and amputates the unity of the text. For Brady, both murder and wri ting are in s crip tion s of an inhuman imagination. They are materialisations of a perverse will. I t is perhaps through the messy language of blood that serial killing can become l egible . 27 This form of blood writing, which p ara sitically feeds on both life and fic­ tion, as it vampirically reproduce s it, has been indelibly imprinted upon p opular Brady, Gates ofJanus. iz .\ndre Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Sumalist Manifesto or Not, VVV 1 (1 942): 26. 23 Andre Breton, Manifestoes ofSuma/ism �lichigan: Ann Arbor Paperback, 1 972), 1 25. 2� George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Disp/a�·ement and IP'riting in Re­ naissance Europe (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2003), 306. 25 Tucker, Homo Viator, 306. 26 Brady, Gates of]an11s. 27 One can think here of Bloodstain Pattern _'\nalysis used in Forensic Science. 21

EXQU ISITE CORPSE imagination. For example, one of the most highly publicised and unsolved murders in American history was that of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia murder. Short's mutilated body, initially mistaken for a manne­ quin, was discovered in 1 947 in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. Of particular signif­ icance are the similarities between images of Short's body and the female torso as depicted in Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnes (1 946- 1 9 66) or Hans Bellmer's dolls (1 930s) .28 Short's inscribed body can be understood as the heart of the trawna, the original sin and laceration that bleeds to create a line of criminal activity, a bloodline that connects the unknown murderer of Elizabeth Short to a lineage of Surrealist accomplices who have created and reproduced the mys­ tery in their serial activity of killing her body again and again in order to repre­ sent it.29 But, as many have argued,30 the original wound and site of the crime can be located in Surrealist artworks, photographs, and Surrealist cut-up tech­ niques grafted from the aesthetic body of art onto the real body of the Black Dahlia, so that the tissues of murder and art are inextricably joined.31 This kind o f assemblage of disparate entities and things can also be seen in the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. By putting imagination into play and bringing together inappropriate entities, the players of Exquisite Corpse distort­ ed categories by creating illogical metaphors and fantastic monsters . In the game the first player draws part of an image or writes part of a sentence on a piece of paper, folds it over to cover the contribution, and hands it to the next player to add their own contribution, until all players have finished and the pa­ per is unfolded. Going beyond anthropomorphism, by negating the representa­ tion of physical characteristics and liberating the mind from its rational prison, 28 It is interesting to note that three books published between 1 976 and 2002 associate the painter Walter Sicken with the murders of Jack the Ripper. His fascination with Jack the Ripper and certain of hls paintings, such as 'Jack the Ripper's Bedroom' (1 9067) and 'The Camden Town Murder' (1 908) are believed to be some of the evidence that link hlm to the murders. 29 See, for example, William Copley's 'Birth of Venus' (1 953) and 'It is midnight, Dr.' (1 961), Fred Sexton's 'Death of Montalita' (1 955), and ::\Ian Ray's 'Vergine indomata' (1 964), 'Xatural Painting' (1 965), and 'Rebus' (1 972) and 'Rebus II' (1 972). 30 See Mark �elson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, Exqllisite Corpse: Suma/ism and the Black Dahlia Murder (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006); Jean-:Michel Rabate, Given: 1 °Art 2° Crime, Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture (East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2007). 3 1 Thomas de Quincey had already considered murder aesthetically: beyond the use of tools and its supposed purpose, murder is a 'condiment for seasoning the insipid mo­ notonies of daily life' (Thomas de Quincey, 'Three Memorable Murders,' in De Quincey 's IP'ritings, ed. James Thomas Fields [Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1 855), 35) and is really '[d]esign, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, [which] are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature' (Thomas de Quincey, On Murder Con­ sidered as one ofthe Fine Arts [Surrey: One World Classics, 2009], 1 4). 1 53

Aspasia Stephanou enabled the Surrealist artists to create chimeras and blend the cold inanimate surfaces of objects with the fleshy contours of the human body. The mutated figures, cut-up and reassembled, or the illogical sentences produced, are im­ portant evidence of the mind's potential and demonstrate the surprising possi­ bilities of the use of catachrestic or extreme metaphors. More particularly, as Paul de Man writes, catachreses are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrous lurks in the most inno­ cent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain, catachresis is already turning into pros­ opopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.32 For de Man, 'prosopopeia is hallucinatory. To make the invisible visible is un­ canny.'33 By giving a face to something that has no equivalent in nature, lan­ guage attempts to posit meaning where there is none. However, I want to move away from the figurative, and from Surrealism's privileging of metaphorical language. Again, following de Man's analysis in 'Hypogram and Inscription,' I want to draw attention to the materiality of the written word, the sign's material manifestation, which he names 'the materiality of an inscription.'34 Inscription is not hallucinatory or fantastic, but marks the here and now. This materiality of the icrit, written is also the materiality of the mark in the flesh. It destroys the illusion of origins and dismembers bodily wholeness.35 Inscription can be seen as the mark of the Devil: the imprint of an imagination possessed by terror, but also the inscription that forms imagination and shapes consciousness. It is my contention that through this double process serial killin g can be understood. The serial killer, in a similar state of possession, shapes his/her own reality through the violent inscription on real bodies. In his analysis of serial killers, Brady refers to the majority of those whose nihilistic philosophy attains religious significance. By recognising 'no divine order of things, no hidden sig­ nificance to life, other than the hedonistic or existential, they create their own 32 Paul de Man, 'The Epistemology of Metaphor, ' in Aesthetk Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski �finneapolis: University of l\finoesota Press, 1 996), 41-2. 33 Paul de Mao, 'Hypogram and Inscription,' in The &sistance to Theo')• �finneapolis: University of l\fiooesota Press, 1 986), 49. 34 D e Man, 'Hypogram and Inscription,' 5 1 . 3 5 See Paul d e :\fan's 'Phenomenality an d :Materiality in Kant,' in Aesthetic Ideoloo, 70-90. 1 54

EXQUISITE CORPSE spiritual or aesthetic microcosm. Metaphorically gods in their own kingdom, whimsically sampling everything that was once forbidden, eventually taking the lives of those who have entered their private domain.'36 But the killing also af­ firms their new powers: 'some can often regard destruction as an act of crea­ tion-an act of God.'37 For Brady, the serial killer needs to find meaning be­ yond the oppressive monotony of everyday life as he thirsts for transgression and the possibility of changing reality into the image of his dreams. Echoing Nietzsche's idea of life understood as an artwork in The Birth of Traget!J,38 Brady asserts that 'Life ps] a work of art'39 and the serial killer is a 'cynical Don Quix­ ote tilting at any laws and customs ques tioning his newfound nihilistic integrity' as he 'juggles dreams and fantasies' like a god.40 In his attempt to aestheticise the sphere of reality, Brady's serial killer transforms imagination into reality, pursuing serial killing as an art for art's sake. Not unlike the Romantics before him, Ian Brady exalts the power of imag­ ination which gives the serial killer the ability to see farther and deeper than most others, as his vigorous 'spirit expands to encompass the vaster gestalt.'41 Elaborating on this recondite power, Brady identifies the serial killer with the figure of the young man standing atop a rocky precipice and gazing into the sea of fog as illustrated in Caspar David Friedrich's 1 81 8 painting, 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.' While Brady does not name the painting his description is clear as well as his intentions: 'standing on a ,-acant shore. Staring over oceanic plains, the soothing surge of the void fill s [the serial killer] . . . with renewed life. Unknown presences whisper. Arcane meanings beyond language are experi­ enced. Silent music.'42 The image of the elevated mountain juxtaposed with the darkness of the deep sea, or the opposition between Apollonian lucidity and Dionysian darkness, resonates with Nietzsche's Zarathustra at the pinnacle of the mountain, as he gazes into the black sea stretching before him.43 It is only through plunging into the darkest depths that one can climb higher up to Apol­ lonian heights. The solitary figure of the serial killer standing over the infinite landscape is the sovereign man open to those expenditures beyond the mun- 36 Brady, Gatts of]anllf. 37 Ibid. 38 :\.ccording to Alexander Nehamas (Niecyche: Lift a.r Iittrature [Harvard: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1 985)), Nietzsche will continue to think that life is a literary artwork and can be interpreted like an aesthetic text 39 Brady, Gates of]anllf. 40 Ibid. 4t Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Friedrich Nietszche, Th11s Spokl Zarath11stra (Cambridge: C ambridge University Press, 2006), 1 22. 1 55

Aspasia Steph;anou dane world. and ready to seize the 'nature of unconditional freedom.'44 In this respect, Brady's serial kill er 'inhabits an almost poetic fourth dimension, where dreams and reality naturally meld, a world of esoteric certitude and applied will. A psychic state in which common reality is seen merely as a lace curtain.'45 Due to the fact that his altered psychic state can pierce beyond the veil of everyday reality, and fascinated by the visions he sees beyond, the possessed serial killer creates a monstrous reality and colours mom:>chromatic life with the deep red of bloodshed. By the time the sacrificer has chosen a '-ictim, the serial killer is relocated on the stage of the theatre of cruelty where the senses are battered and humili­ ated over and over again. For Brady, the proc:ess of destructive creation resem­ bles 'a theatrical event or happening' in whic:h the killer is the 'artistic creator and the sole spectator of a production yet to be Yiewed by the general public.'46 Such a play is also, like Luigi Pirandello's Sh< Characters in Sean-h of an Author (1 921), 'taking on a life of its o\\.n,' free of authorial control it unfolds beyond notions of good or evil, 'much like tele\.-ision with the sound turned off.'47 And, of course, as Brady writes, if the killer's '"play''' is a success, he will read the crit­ ical reviews with interest, not least as a technic:ian in search of dangerous, struc­ tural flaws. '48 At the same time, Brady confuses fantasy with reality, seducing his readers and carrying them through the labyrinthine cavities of his mind, blackening their perception of the truth. Quoting from Nietzsche, he playfully reminds his readers that the mouth might be lying but the: grimace on one's face never fails to attest to the truth.49 The serial kill er's writing and the act of killing become entangled in a dangerous game whose 'master' desperately tries not to relin­ quish control. Intoxicated by the power to control, the serial killer retains some form of mastery through creativity by taking up painting, writing, or other ex­ pressive activities . John Wayne Gacy's devian t activities, it can be argued, con­ tinued even after his captivity through the rc�petitive act of painting clowns . so 44 Brady, Gates ofJanus. Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 411 Ibid. 49 Cf. 'One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth' (Friedrich �ietzsche, Bryond Good and Evil [New York: The Modero Library, 1917], 90). 50 John Wayne Gacy, while awaiting execution, tot0k up painting, which would later be destroyed or auctioned off by bis attorney. His most valuable paintings are bis clown portraits. Gacy, who dressed as 'Pogo the Clown ' (a name be invented for himself), to entertain children in his neighbourhood or in variious charity events, had also seduced many of bis victims into corning into bis house by using those routines. See Peter 45 156

EXQUISITE CORPSE Similarly, Brady seeks to manipulate both reader and victim by making them believe in his creative vision, inducing what he repeatedly analyses in The Gates ofJanns, asJolie ti deux, or shared psychotic disorder. In the fictitious world of his book, where poetry, philosophy, and literature coexist with his analyses of serial killing, it is impossible not to admire the breadth of knowledge, or at least share-at the same time as one feels disgust-some of his nihilistic outlook. Participating in such criminal activity, the reader is repulsed and attracted, while aware of the limit between fiction and reality. Brady's blasphemous immersion into a universe of moral relativism, as well as his desire to degrade the reader by gradually suffocating him/her in the stench of corpses, is ultimately unsuccess­ ful. For abandoning oneself completely to evil, as Bataille reminds us in his reading of Genet, implies the loss of communication.51 Brady's perverted Romantic imagination can be associated with that of the vampire that Kim Pelis links to Romantic creativity. The vampire is its own creation because by drawing vital energy from its victim, it seeks to re-create its own life. Brady and the serial killers he admires and dissects, gain vitality at the expense of others by taking their lives, and sometimes, literally, drinking their blood. In describing the birth of the serial killer Dean Carll, and as if recollect­ ing the time of his own self-realisation, Brady writes: A new order of creative destruction was about to be brought into being. His whole existence now had purpose and meaning. He had never felt more alive now that he was actively planning the destruction of others. By taking lives he would enrich his own, making up for wasted time in the wilderness of other people's moral delusions and legal impositions.52 �cLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppotitional Politics in a Postmodern Era (New York: Routledge, 1 995), 5. 3 1 The French novelist Jean Genet (1 910-1 986), whose books centre on homosexuality and crime, had spent time in prison between the late 1 930s and 1 940s for theft, vaga­ bondage, and indecency. He was sentenced for life imprisonment but was finally re­ leased after a successful petition signed by intellectuals of his time including Jean Coc­ teau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Picasso. Sartre would later publish an analysis of Genet's metamorphosis from criminal to aesthete and writer entitled Saint Genet, Actor and Mar­ tyr (1 952). In Literature and Evil, Bataille discusses Sartre's study and criticises Genet's work for its inability to communicate with the reader. Bataille argues that Genet refuses to communicate because be places himself outside bis readership. He shows only con­ tempt and indifference to the reader because s/he lacks the profound beauty of thieves, murderers and traitors (Kindle edition). s2 Brady, Gale! effanus. 1 57

Aspasia Stephanou Brady elsewhere describes as sado-masochistic the psychic swapping of persona between hunter and prey, and particularly the multiplication of this occult phe­ nomenon with every instance of serial killing, as the killer accumulates the psy­ chic traces of his victims . This vampiric understanding of self-creation, of the consumption of lives as an assimilation of power, can also be understood in relation to another vampiric form that Brady connects to Richard Ramirez. Brady acknowledges that Ramirez's mercy shown to the victim's family was not innocent but motivated by evil ambition. By letting the victim's family survive, the serial killer was envisaging, according to Brady, god-like immortality in the form of the traumatic damage inflicted on the victim's loved ones 'by chain reaction, on their future children, and their children's children, ad infinitum,' a 'malignant, vengeful influence spreading, imperceptibly and implacably, from generation to generation beyond es timate. '53 This act of destructive creation would transform Ramirez into a 'Shakespeare of homicide,'54 infusing the blood of the victim's lineage with fear, horror and degradation. Brady bestows the serial killer with the perverse power of creativi ty: the serial kill e r is the one who pursues with religious zeal authorial imm ortality and grand visions of transgres­ sion, and would gladly plunge himself into the depths of the abyss in order to taste the delights of the forbidden, the 'demoniacal, tumultuous fields of mental and physical energy. '55 Brady's understanding of serial killing as a creative process that is at once monstrous and masculine, resonates, as noted, with the Romantics' creative imagination and with the role of the artist as a father giving birth to monstrous art. The monstrous birth in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an expression of this dark desire to reproduce without the other. More particularly, in the novel Vic­ tor Frankenstein calls the monster56 'my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave.'57 Here the monster is seen as a part of Victor's intimate self and embodies the effects o f a monstrous imagination. However, despite Brady's attempts to offer a consistent interpretation of murder or assert the power of the serial killer over his victims, this becomes increasingly ine ffectual as lan­ guage and violence are characterised by excess. As the text produces figures and disfigures them, the serial kill er-writer has no control over his work. The text 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 36 In Bloodscript1: Jrl'rifing the Violent Subject (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2003), Elana Gomd argues that the prototype of the serial kille r is Frankenstein's monster because he inhabits both criminological paradigms and narratives of serial killing as someone who was 'born bad' but also 'made bad.' .-\ relief to this tired binary is offered by Hannibal Lecter who fredy chooses to be evil (58). 57 Shdley, Frankenstein, 78. 1 58

EXQUISITE CORPSE takes on a life of its own, inviting different interpretations and meanings. Simi­ larly, the serial killer's possessed imagination gives birth to hideous progeny and monstrous visions that he is unable to control, but which have immense impact on his perverse consciousness. The idea of imagination having material effects predates the Romantics. It can be found in Nee-Platonist thought, Arabic philosophy and Western Esoter­ icisism. Vis imaginativa is an expression of the magical power of the imagination to affect Nature, whether that is the alchemist's or Magus's body itself or ob­ jects exterior to it As Marsilo Ficino clarifies in the thirteenth book of Theologia P/atonit'a (1 482), the intensity of the four feelings that derive from the imagina­ tion-pleasure, desire, fear and pain-can affect not only the body of the per­ son but also that of another.58 Increasingly, however, with the work of Paracel­ sus and the hermetic philosophers, imagination became the cradle of creativity, and genius and was endowed with germinal power. Paracelsus believed that imagination had the power not only to project the alchemist's will onto external matter, but also to internalise the alchemical opus within the alchemist's body and mind. For him, 'All the imagination of man comes from the heart. The heart is the "seed" of the Microcosm, and from that seed the imagination pro­ ceeds into the Macrocosm. Thus the imagination of man is a seed that becomes materialised or corporeal. A thought is an act having an object in view.'59 For example, one's strength of imagination motivated by an intense desire, whether evil or good, may accordingly kill or cure another person. 60 In this vein, a curse is productive of evil. What one desires in cursing enters their imagination and from the imagination the act is produced.61 Of interest here is Dennis Nilsen, who seems to connect his criminal activ­ ity with his imagination, caught in the spell of things past: 'I was a child of deep romanticism in a harsh plastic functioning materialism . . . I am an odd person­ ality for today. There was never a place for me in the scheme of things . My inner emotions could not be expressed, and this led to the alternative of a ret­ rograde and deepening imagination.'62 Similarly, the magus utilises imagination as a divine power to create out of nothing: 'Imagination is the power by which . . Antoine Faivre, Theosop'D· Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esoteridsm, tr.lns. Christine Rhone (Albany, �'Y:. State University of New York Press, 2000), 100. 59 Paracdsus, The Ufa and the Doctrines of Paracelsus, ed . Franz Hartmann (Washington: Health Research Books, 1 998), 1 98-9. 60 Paracelsus, U fa and the Doctrines, 1 99. 61 Ibid. 62 Dennis Nilsen quoted in Elizabeth McCarthy, 'The Evil of Creation: The Destructive Aesthetic in the Figure of the Romantic .-\rtist,' in Minding Evil· Exphrations of Human Iniquity, ed. i\Iargaret Sonser Breen (.-\msterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 148. 58 1 59

Aspasia Stephanou the Will forms sidereal entities out of thoughts.'63 A sexual and procreative force, imagination for Paracelsus 'becomes impregnated and also impregnates bodily things.'64 In this sense, imagination, impregnated by the mind's desire and will , has material effects. As Paracelsus writes, 'Imagination is the begin­ ning of the corpus of a form, and it guides the process of its growth. The Will is a dissolving power, which enables the body to become impregnated by the "tinctura" of the imagination.'65 But more importantly, imagi11ation, like pos.ressio11, births evil in a manner that recalls Frankenstein's monstrous progeny. Paracelsus refers to women's imagi­ native power to produce children, to influence the kind of children they will have through their imagination, but also their power to call monsters into exist­ ence.66 Because of their sexuality and excessive imagination, women are poten­ tially dangerous, giving birth to disease, succubi, and incubuses, deformed mon­ strosities and evil spirits.67 In particular, we read of how in convents, monaster­ ies, and houses of prostitution where a 'lascivious and evil imagination is espe­ cially active,' 'great quantities of sperma are there collected by evil spirits, and that sperma contains a powerful Mumia, which may be extracted, and trans­ formed into evil things; or it may decompose and become a strong poison, fur­ nishing life to innumerable invisible (microscopic) existences.'68 In order to counteract the evil imagination of woman, the alchemist seeks the ability to create life and bodies without the assistance of women; the homunculus and the golem are both exemplary instances of the seminal power of the mystic's or magus's imagination.69 Imagination can thus be understood as the plastic mediator between spirit and matter. This is demonstrated in Friedrich Christoph Oetinger's 1 776 defini­ tion of the imagination as that which 'can be in the beginning a thought with­ out substance; but then it makes itself substance, and it is no longer a nothing but a something that has developed organically while having engendered itself. Therefore be on your guard.'70 For Eliphas Levi, the imagination is the illumi­ nator of reality because it has the power to transform the opaque into the trans63 Hugh Urban, 'Birth Done Better: Conceiving the Immortal Fetus in India, China, and Renaissance Europe,' in Notes from a Mandala: EstqJ'S in the Histoo1 of Indian &ligions in Honor of WentfJ• Doniger, ed. Laurie L. Patton and David L. Haberman (Cranbury. New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 201 0), 54. 64 Urban, 'Birth Done Better,' 55. 65 Paracelsus, Lift and the Doctrines, 1 76. 66 Urban, 'Birth Done Better,' 55-6. 67 Ibid., 56. 68 Paracelsus, Li ft and the Doctrines, 1 92. 69 Urban, 'Birth Done Better,' 56. 70 Oetinger quoted in Faivre, Theosopl!J. Imagination, Tradition, 1 12. 160

EXQUI SITE CORPSE lucent, erasing thus the antithesis between spirit and matter.71 \Vhat imagination invents, it creates, 'and that which is created exists. '72 In the second book of The Key of the Mystenes (1 861), Levi characteristically writes that when 'one creates phantoms, one is putting vampires into the world, and one will have to feed these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, with one's life, with one's intelligence and one's reason, without ever satisfying them.'73 It is the power of imagination to create and bring to life these ghosts in the same way that the monstrouts image of the devil remains a 'frightful reality' for many chil­ dren.74 It is in this. way that the 'phantoms of superstition project their defonni­ ties on the astral light, and live upon the same terrors ..yhich gave them birth.'75 Imagination's power to have material effects, to create images of horror and influence one's dreams and senses is similar to the idea of demonic possession, but also to the ide:a of writing76 and serial killing as forms of material inscription that alter consciousness and shape one's reality. Foucault writes of how demon­ ic operation 'which spreads out from the imagination to the nerves and from there to the organs of the senses, extends itself, gains the body of others, their senses, their brailrl and their imagination, forming a dense vegetation which, excluding the outside world, is none the less real.'77 The dark forces of imagina­ tion circulating through the interior geography of bodies, exciting the senses and transplanting images into the minds of those possessed, tint the world of the serial kill er and call him/her to action. Like Brady, the serial killer uses this language of possiession to de-scribe/in-scribe/ ex-scribe78 his dark and veiled reality, different from everyday life. It is only through the cut-the violence of inscription and the ex-scription of existence--and the flow of material from one to the other that the serial killer seeks communication. Stephan Beyer, The Cult of Ttirti: Magic and Ritual in Tibet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: California University Press, 1 978), 88. 72 Eliphas Levi, Pai:adox VI, 'The Imagination Realises what it Invents,' in The Paradoxer ofthe Highest Scien,"t! (.Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1 922), 79, available from http:/ /sacred--texts.com/eso/levi/phs/index.htm (accessed 28-05-1 5). 73 Eliphas Levi, Tht· Ke y of the Mysterier, trans. Aleister Crowley (Newburyport, M..A : Red W'heel Weiser, 2001 ), 121 . 7� Uvi, Kry ofthe /1)11/en'es, 1 1 9 75 Ibid. 76 Kathy _-\.clter, My Mother: Demonology (New York: Grove Press, 1 994), 1 29. 77 Foucault, 'Religious Deviations,' 53. 7 s According to Jean-Luc Nancy, 'writing exscribes meaning every bit as much as it in­ scribes significatioo.s. It exscribes meaning or, in other words, it shows that what mat­ ters-the thing itself, Bataille's "life" or "cry," and, finally, the existence of everything that is "in question" in the text (including, most remarkably, writing's own existence)­ is outside the text, takes place outside writing' (The Birth of Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 993], 338). 71 . 161

Aspasia Stephanou To kill without reason, to truly live immersed in the blood of crime, is to live sovereignly. Inhabiting a world of dreams and images, the serial killer trav­ els through the cavernous and mystical paths where occult knowledge conjures the demons of imagination seducing them with bloody rituals-just as the evil Magus materialises his dream reality. Not subordinated to calculation, the crim­ inal activity of the serial killer is an expression of the will to live and fully expe­ rience life pushed to its extreme conclusion. It is a negative assertion and dis­ semination of 'word- flesh,' a perverse desire to find and inscribe meaning on the objectified bodies of those whose lives the seriaj killer considers as pitiful and dead as his. Brady concurs when he quotes Tolstoy: 'The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. '79 CODA While calculated and executed with precision, the torture machine in Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony' (1 91 9) brings to the fore this idea of inscribing on the materiality of the body, a form of writing that the more it disfigures the body, the closer it brings one to knowledge and enlightenment. Kafka's story describes a state apparatus that inscribes on the bodies of criminals the very commandment they have transgressed. The condemned are sacrificed and tor­ tured without even being made aware of the reasons for their sentence. The officer who explains to an inquirer how the particular machine works, stresses the mystical qualities visible on the body of the condemned just before death. After the sixth hour of 'exquisite torture,'80 'Enlightenment comes to even the dimmest.'81 Like the 'death by a thousand cuts,' the 'transfigured look on the sufferer's face'82 testifies to a mystical experience linked to violence and death. Like de Sade's language in The One H11ndred and Twenty Dqys of Sodom, which de­ grades and destroys the totality of beings it presents, so here, literally, a writing instrument destroys the body to create meaning. The corpse becomes a corpus of meaning, as meaning becomes flesh, and body is transcended through the limit experience. 79 Brady, Gates ofJan111. Franz Kafka, 'In the Penal Colony,' in The Metamorphosis and Other Storns, trans. Don­ na Reed (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 1 1 8. 8 1 Ka fka, 'In the Penal Colony,' 104. s2 Ibid., 1 08. 8° 1 62

WRITING FROM THE HEART: EMERGING FROM THE REALM OF THE INVISIBLE David Peak To embrace a thing by a definition, however arbitrary-and all the more serious the more arbitrary it is, since the soul then overtakes knowledge-is to reject that thing, to render it insipid and super­ fluous, to annihilate it. -E. M. Cioran 1 Living in a modern society typically ensures that we will not have to kill in order to survive. However, considering the finite nature of resources, compounded by man's general selfishness and an unwillingness to trust others, it isn't diffi­ cult to conceive of myriad scenarios in which survival is predicated on one's ability--or perhaps one's willingn ess-to kill others. As Hobbes has said, 'The right of nature . . . is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgment, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.'2 Such rationale, of course, is not designed to jus tify murder-not even re­ motely. Rather, H obbes was describing what he believed to be man's base na­ ture in an effort to promote the benefits of a sovereign that would provide peace and uphold the law-a system outside of the person that allowed one to live and let live. Hobbes understood man's true nature all too well and there­ fore sought to protect man from himself. Yet such protection, in totality, is impossible. Every society harbors aberrations. And of these aberrations, the serial killer most flagrantly perverts Hobbes's 'right of nature.' G ordon Llsh's 1 983 novel Dear Mr. Capote maps the inn er life of such an aberration, a kill er who, unlike so many of the faceless and inarticulate maniacs who lurk in the shadows of cheap horror flicks, is desperate to tell his story to a terrified-yet eager-public. I E. M. Goran, A Short History of Decqy, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 201 2), 7. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 1 89. 1 63

David Peak Dear Mr. Capote is structured as a long letter \\-Titten by the killer, who re­ fers to himself as 'Yours Truly,' and addressed to the famed, titular author of Jn Cold Blood. In it, Yours Truly, a disgraced banker with a traumatic past, claims to have already murdered 23 women. He accomplishes this by stabbing his victims directly in the eye with a folding knife, which he refers to as Paki, short for Pa­ kistan, the word embossed on the side of the blade. Throughout the course of reading his rambling, self-conscious letter, we come to realize that Yours Tru­ ly's crimes are partially driven by anxieties that revolve around not having enough money to raise his young son. He believes that, by serial killing , he will easily attain fame and fortune and that only Truman Capote, because of his past work with the life stories of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, is capable of handling his story. Yours Truly approaches murder as a business transaction by appealing to a famous writer who is better able to articulate his lifetime of frus­ trations, anxieties, and miscommunications-all of which led him to commit such desperate acts in the first place. 'Let's say we called it a day at twenty­ three,' he says. 'So what if we did, then what's the story? You and the boy get to divvy up what? A million? Five, six? Or am I so far out of the picture I am just talking about small potatoes? Because just between you, me, and the lamppost, I would not mind getting a rough idea at this stage of the game. So give me a ballpark. Ten million? Is this too crazy?'3 Like Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, Yours Truly is an aberration of society who must murder in order to maintain the semblance of a productive role in that society, almost as if the very system designed to protect the p oten tial murderer from committing his crime has in­ stead boxed him in and 'made' him do it. Part of what makes being boxed in so terrifying is the idea that communi­ cation becomes impossible. Bataille : 'I'm becoming gloomy and a kind of hos­ tility keeps me in the darkness of the room-and in this dead silence.'4 Silence is the loudest scream, and a boxed-in reality can only be expressed through in­ articulate rage and misdirected frustration. Yours Truly expresses such frustra­ tion throughout his letter, pointing out that he is unable to articulate his reasons for his behavior, notably demonstrated by the novel's stuttered, repetitive struc­ ture. Yours Truly dutifully checks a Word-a-Day calendar he bought as a pre­ sent for his son's birthday. The vocabulary provided by this calendar comprises what he refers to as 'the words,' and it is these words that he says to his victims in order to gain their a ttention, to 'tum them around.' As he explains, 'You take somebody who didn't know about the word He says, 'Hello.' \Vhat happens? He says, 'Do you know what time it is, please?' What happens? He says, 'Ex­ cuse me, is this way east or west?' What happens? Forget it! I mean, this is the 3 Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1 996), 130. Georges Bataille, The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1 991), 88. 4 1 64

WRITI NG FROM TH E HEART whole thing about the word. They look! They open wide and look. Bingo, Paki goes in the one on the left.'5 Yours Truly's reasons for using the words at first seem inscrutable. As he explains, 'Listen, check me out on this, okay? True or false, I have or haven't told you how the word works? I mean, the thing of it is, it makes no sense, which is why it does!'6 Language allows us to peaceably share in coexistence. It binds together individual selves, gives glimpses into our internal lives, crosses that impossible divide of unknowingness of the other. Derrida: 'lbe first effect or first destination of language therefore involves depriving me of, or delivering me from, my singularity. By suspending my absolute singularity in speaking, I renounce at the same time my liberty and my responsibility. Once I speak I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique. It is a very strange contract­ both paradoxical and terrifying . . . '7 Yet language is also just as easily weapon­ ized, typically after its meaning has broken down on a fundamental level. By this I mean the void of connection that exists between selves once their mutual language no longer functions as intended. In other words, people lash out when they are unable to be understood, when they feel ignored, or threatened with a sentence of silence-all of which are qualities of what I will refer to as the 'realm of the invisible,' the birthplace of annihilation, or that which lacks defini­ tion. Yours Truly exploits Derrida's singularity, the 'strange contract' that can so easily highlight the weakness in a society's reliance on communication, by mak­ ing a direct connection with his victims. He essentially steals their attention by employing the very language he believes himself unable to master in the written form, then capitalizes on this connection by forcing his victims to essentially 'see' their death coming, stabbing them in their eyes. This 'seeing' is an emer­ gence from the realm of the invisible as an annihilative force. By being seen and therefore taking on meaning in the eye of the ·dctim, the act of annihilation beyond language can take place. If, as Derrida says, our language removes us from ourselves, then the choice of the narrator to refer to himself as 'Yours Truly' takes on a new dimension. He has alienated himself from himself,s given 5 Lish, Dear Mr. Capote, 88. 6 Ibid., 134. 7 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1 992), 60. B C£ 'What we are dealing with here is the alienation of a thing by the concept that pre­ cedes and reconstitutes it into an object. "In naming a thing," writes Marion, "man substitutes for its immediate being and its qualities of representation 'a name, a sound made by [bis] voice, something entirely different from what [the thing] is in intuition . . . " No one understood this process of alienation better than Hegel, indeed, Kojeve would go so far as to say that for Hegel in naming a thing we are killing it, that for He- 1 65

David Peak himself away to an infamy much larger than the trivial concerns of day-to-day life. Through killing, Yours Truly has set himself free. This freedom from self is furthered by the way Yours Truly relates forma­ tive memories to certain phrases, cliches, and idioms (see above, for example, 'Between you, me, and the lamppost'). This language is then used so repeatedly that its meaning dissolves, its ability to communicate the reality of existence from one person to another becomes inconsequential, as removed from con­ textual definition as a word in a word-a-day calendar. \Vhat at first begins as a letter to a famous author, from 'one famous person to another,' soon lays bare uncomfortable and disturbing truths at the eenter of Yours Truly's self as a so­ cietal aberration, namely the idea that he is unable to hide himself in his words. His writing is writing from the heart, a putting forth of language that both de­ fines and annihilates the self. This is the reason that has escaped Lish's narrator: the reason of 'how the word works.' Without the words, he would have nothing to stab with Paki because the victims would never turn around. He would re­ main unseen behind the closed eyes of the society of which he is a part, unrec­ ognized for what he really is : a force of annihilation. 'Forget it!' Yours Truly says toward the end of his letter. 'You are all anybody! You are all just one per­ son which leads to another!'9 And with this, Yours Truly unknowingly gives himself--and his reason for killing-away: to emerge from the realm of the invisible and to destroy the sight of those who come to see him for what he is. Again, Derrida: 'How can another see into me, into my most secret self, with­ out my being able to see in there myself and without my being able to see him in me?'1° Celine: Certain words are hidden in with the rest, like stones. They're not very noticeable, but before long they make all the life that's in us tremble, every bit of it in its weakness and its strength . . . The outcome is panic . . . An avalanche . . . You're left dangling like a hanged man, over a sea of emotion . . . A tempest comes and goes, much too powerful for you, so via- gel "all conceptual understanding (Be-grieftn) is equivalent to a murder." Though we are at a task to find a statement nearly as sen-sational in Hegel's own writing, in chapter VII o f the Phenomenology he does refer to the "lifeless abstraction [ot] the things of perception," and in an alternate translation speaks of the "deadness of abstraction" inherited by "the things of perception." The object loses its being in order to receive it from the I: "the object is not what it is," writes Hegei "the thing is not what it is'" (Eclia Connole, 'Les Legions Noires: Labor, Language, Laughter,' in Nicola l\fasciandaro and Eclia Connole, Floating Tomb: Black Meta/ Theory (Mimesis, forthcoming 201 5], 1 58-9). 9 Lish, Dear Mr. Capote, 250. w Derrida, The Gift of Death, 92. 166

WRITI NG F ROM THE H EART lent you'd never have thought mere emotions could lead to anything like it . . . 1 1 By equating the outcome of words on our emotions to forces of nature­ an avalanche, a tempest-Celine infers that language has a power beyond our control, just as our emotions, which are outwardly communicated through our words, often 'get the best of us' and overpower our self-control. The image of a hanged man 'over a sea of emotion' is particularly powerful in evoking the help­ lessness we feel when battling our emotions, overcome by the limitlessness of depth of feeling. Anyone who has C\"er had their sense of self calle d into ques­ tion by the words of another-been boxed in to the realm of the invisible­ understands the destructive power of language. Here, narrative of self becomes important in the sense that the self is nothing but the words or the stories we tell ourselves.12 And it is this personal narrative, the boundaries it establishes, that comes to dictate whether we believe \Ve're being understood by another, or banished to the realm of the invisible. In this particular scene, the narrator of Celine's novel, Bardamu, is chroni­ cling those terribly still moments before an argument explodes. Crammed in a cab with his girlfriend Sophie, his friend Robinson, and Robinson's estranged fiance, Madelon, Bardamu watches intently as the language being exchanged between the two former lovers loses all meaning and becomes weaponized. Infuriated by Robinson's aloof behavior-no doubt made all the more mad­ dening by the fact that he had abandoned her some months previous­ Madelon gives into the forces of annihilation and lashes out with her words. 'She attacked us in our self-esteem,' Bardamu explains. 'At times like that the least little thing can provoke disaster. Just making us miserable seemed to be giving her a big kick, she followed out her nature to the bitter end, she couldn't help it.'1 3 As the fight escalates, Madelon gives Robinson an ultimatum: either he returns with her to her mother's house to marry her as promised or face the consequences. 'The air between us was charged with threats,'1 4 Bardamu says. The threat here is both obvious and irresistible-the exchange has become a game between two participants, one of whom is unwilling to play. Robinson unsurprisingly calls Madelon on her bluff. With no other recourse, Madelon 11 Louis-Ferdinand Celine, ]011mey ID the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions Books, 2006), 420. 1 2 For more, see Daniel Dennett's 'lbe Self as a Centre of Narrati.Ye Gravity,' in F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson, eds Self@d Conscio11sness: M11/tip/e Perspectives (Hills dale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1 992). B Celine, ]011mry to the End ofthe Night, 422. 14 Ibid., 426. ., 1 67

David Peak produces a revolver and repeatedly shoots Robinson in the stomach. By the end of the night, Robinson is dead. She co11/dn 't help it. How often have these words been uttered as the smoke clears and the sirens fade? It was11 't nry fault. Yo11 made me tkJ this. It's like somebotfy else was in control of my bot!J. When language has reached the point o f total mean­ inglessness, when our words function only as stand-ins for weapons-when they have become weaponized-the inevitable result must be an act of annihila­ tion. When our self-esteem is under attack, we give into the raging tempest and hope blindly to emerge from the stonn whole and intact. In an argument, eve­ rything admitted or profes sed occludes some other detail. What motivations might someone have when they state, 'I am this because I am not that'? Such occlusion isn't so different from the manner in which the writer, writing from the heart, chooses his or her words carefully in an effort to construct an image of self, whether positive of negative; the way we strategically divulge infor­ mation about ourselves to those we trust and distrust, depending. Either way, some necessary dimension of the truth must remain secreted away, the key tossed into oblivion. The result of this occlusion is a semblance of control over the reality of another-a narrative boxing in. Madelon's ultimate purpose in arguing with Robinson was not to learn why he abandoned her and to find out whether or not he would return with her. She knew all of that. Her real motiva­ tion was to exert control over the man who had wronged her, who had annihi­ lated her sense of self. Unable to get an answer, she brought the conversation to an impasse much as the executioner ties the noose around the condemned man's neck, choosing to escape that which had overtaken her reality in the only manner possible: murder. Like Yours Truly, she gained her freedom by annihi­ lating the freedom of another. This obsession with freedom is core to the act of killing. As Cioran has said: The murderer makes a limitless use of his freedom, and cannot resist the notion of his power. It is within the capacities of each of us to take another's life. I f all those we have killed in thought were to disappear for good, the earth would be de­ populated. We bear within us a reticent executioner, an unreal­ ized criminal. And those who lack the boldness to acknowledge their homicidal tendencies , murder in dreams, people their nightmares with corpses . Before an absolute tri­ bunal, only the angels would be acquitted. For there has never been a human being who has not-at least unconsciously­ desired the death of another human being. Each of us drags after him a cemetery of friends and enemies; and it matters lit- 1 68

WRITI NG FROM THE H EART tle whether this graveyard is relegated to the heart's abyss or projected to the surface of our desires. 1 5 Here then, put plainly, i s the difference between the violence that exists in our 'heart's abyss' and that which rises to the 'surface of our desires.' The mur­ derer is able to make a 'limitless use of his freedom' because he has decided that his power must be exercised at all cos ts, that his impulse to experience life on the surface of desire is wortli the inevitable annihilation of those crushed be­ neath that power. The annihilative potential of words, then, becomes nakedly apparent when this dynamic is applied to the relationship between the writer and the reader, or he who has limitless use of his freedom to choose language that both defines and annihilates the self. Blanchot has said, 'The writer, inas­ much as he remains a real person and believes himself to be this real person who is writing, also believes that he willingly shelters in himself the reader of what he writes.'16 We return again to the idea of boxing in another's reality, which is another way to interpret Blanchot's phrasing of 'shelters in himself.' A reader, by the very nature of their complacency with the text (as long as they are reading the words on the page, seeing what the writer gives them to see, they are at its mercy), can be considered a captive audience, a willing victim. And the writer, whether constructing communication that is in some way per­ suasive or impossibly escapist, is pummeling the reader's reality with each suc­ cessive sentence. Cioran: 'Annihilating affords a sense of power, flatters some­ thing obscure, something original in us. It is not by erecting but by pulverizing that we may divine the secret satisfactions of a god.'1 7 This dynamic between the murderer an d the victim, th e writer and the reader, the pulverized and the secret satisfactions of a god, is taken to the ex­ treme in Dario Argento's film Tenebre. Released in 1 982, more than a decade after Argento rose to fame for making films that reYeled in depicting gruesome murders in a highly stylized choreography, Tenebre is outwardly concerned with the intersection of art and reality. The original idea for the story came to Ar­ gento when he had a disturbing run-in with an obsessed fan, and inwardly con­ cerned with the way writing from the heart occurs despite the writer's best in­ tentions to keep his secret self in the realm of the invisible. Here, the writer serves as the film's main character, an American named Peter Neal who is something of a narrative stand-in for Argento. Neal's most recent book, Tenebre, 1 5 E. �I. Cioran, A Short HistO')' of Decqy, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 54. 1 6 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Uteroture, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, US; London, UK: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 200. n E. �1. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 201 2), 1 25. 1 69

David Peak has come under attack in the press for its perceived misogyny and naked cruel­ ty. '\Vhy do you despise women so much?' a reporter pointedly asks Neal dur­ ing a heated interview. (Notably, the question is ignored as Neal attempts a per­ sonal connection with the reporter, changing the subject from his work to their relationship.) Argento obviously had experience with similar attacks from crit­ ics, and Tenebre, fittingly enough, was released as a heavily censored cut in the US and banned outright in the UK. The film opens with a shot of a gloved hand holding a copy of Neal's latest book, a fire raging in the background. A disembodied voice reads the following passage: 'The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him and so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, but freedom. Every humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by this simple act of annihilation : murder. ' Then the copy of Tmebre is tossed onto the flames, as if to erase the very exis tence of its confession. Once again the emphasis is placed on the freedom attained through the killing of another. In fact, as the film progresses, the theme of freedom will emerge as centrally im­ portant-freedom from self, from the trauma of the past. In an early scene, a young woman is attacked by an assailant wearing black gloves-much like those in the film's opening shot. The attacker maneuvers the woman against the wall, pins her arms above her head, and holds the blade of a s traight razor to her neck, stuffing balled-up pages of N eal's book into her mouth. J us t before the killing blow is dealt, Argento is careful to splice in an extreme close-up of the woman's eye, unblinking, unable to look away from her fate. 1be message here is implicit. Like the murder victims of Llsh's Yours Tru­ ly, the young woman in this scene is forced to helplessly 'see' h er death coming, to understand the communication of her annihilation . Responding to the crime, two detectives arrive at Neal's hotel room to ask him if he knows anything that might help them identify the killer. 'She died from four deep wounds,' detective Giermani says . 'Throat, chest, and suffoca­ tion. Her mouth was stuffed with pages from a book. Tenebre.' Having just landed in Rome earlier that day, Neal is without doubt innocent of the crime, but his unwillingness to help suggests that he harbors secrets of his own. Soon enough it is revealed that the murders in Neal's book were also committed by a killer wielding a straight razor. As the film progresses, several more killings are made in a similar manner and finished in the same gruesome fashion, with pag­ es tom from Tenebre being stuffed into the victim's mouth. N eal, it seems, is unable to escape the power of his own creation; the violence of his language now boxes him in. In an all-too-familiar twist, Neal himself is revealed to be insane. Although he did not commit the initial handful of crimes depicted in the film (those were the handiwork of an obsessed fan, a sly nod to Argento's own experiences), the effect of those crimes brought back to the surface a pre- 1 70

WRITI NG FROM THE H EART viously occluded trauma, a trauma that Neal had unintentionally buried in his writings. As Giermani explains toward the end of the film, 'When Peter Neal was a teenager in Rhode Island, a girl he knew was killed. Brutally. Someone accused him but there wasn't any real evidence and it was never brought to tri­ al. But if it was Peter Neal, then he committed an act which haunted his life and twisted his mind forever.' Although unintentional, Neal's novel is composed of writing from the heart in the sense that it both defines and annihilates his own history-defines by exploring a significant event in his life, however hidden; and annihilates by fictionalizing real trauma-the very events that limited his personal freedom and defined him within an impossible narrative, the understanding of which causes him to go insane. t s 'What is the heart?' 1 9 asks Derrida in reference to a line from the Gospel of Matthew.20 'It is invisible. It does not devalue, it can never be stolen from you.•21 The ultimate purpose of writing from the heart is to express fully the act of living outside the realm of the invisible, to create an act of violence beyond the invitation of death, a transmission from the center of the unbroken ring. As Jean Luc Marion has said, 'I can only love him who remains for me without definition, and only for as long as he thus remains,'22 and 'defining a man is equivalent to having done with him Not,' as Marion would continue, 'because he would no longer be thought, but precisely because one thinks him by not thinking of him , because one thinks him without beginning the thinking from him himself but, instead, beginning from one other than him, namely, from the mind that defines him by alienating him . '23 Therefore, only an act of vio­ lence can have permanence. True freedom from self can only occur when one has emerged from and receded to the realm of the invisible. Thus, the unseen cannot be seen until it annihilates. This is the violence that occurs between the reader and the writer, the violence of seeking a power that annihilates the free­ doms of others. Such violence is only possible to deflect with closed eyes, deaf ears. And its effects are permanent in the sense that altered perceptions of reali­ ty are permanent, that having to watch one's death, being forced to see it com­ ing is not so dissimilar from another seeing into our most secret self, the crea. . . , 1 8 Dennett, from 'The Self as a Centre of ;.-..; amuive Gravity': '\Ve try to ma ke all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one's sel£' Cole and Johnson, Se!fand Consf:Wusness: Multiple Pmpeclives, 1 14. 1 9 Derrida, The Gift t?fDeath, 98. ;?(} 'For where treasure is, there will your heart be also.' Matthew 6: 1 9-21. 2 1 Derrida, The Gift ofDeath, 98. 22 Ma rion 'The Privilege of Unknowing.' 23 Ibid. , 171

David Peak tive self-the humiliation of being exposed for what we really are, destructive machines bent on consumption. All creation, whether something as impressive and labored over as a finely wrought novel or as inconsequential as a tossed-off insult, is an act of annihilation upon its receiver. How many novels read are ultimately forgotten? How many insults internalized multiply self-doubt like cancer? I f the aberration of society-the. serial killer-makes a limitless use of his freedom, then so too does the writer seek to irrevocably pulverize. Those who seek to kill , to wield power through freedom-those who become gods­ and subsequently succeed in their task, almost always choose to communicate that success as a means of reinforcing their very extraordinariness, or perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of their true self remaining unseen. In the case of Yours Truly, the need for communication arose in a misguided effort to provide for his family, to capitalize on his hard-won fame. For Madelon, it was a last-ditch effort to escape being boxed in to an impossible reality. And for Peter Neal, it was the emergence of a suppressed self that came to overpower his creative self. 24 24 I must express my most heanfdt gratitude for the invaluable editorial efforts of Gary J. Shipley and Edia Connole. Without their guidance, for better or for worse, this paper would likely have remained unseen, unheard. 172

WORDS IN BLOOD, LIKE FLOWE RS Heather l\fasciandaro

IV I CANNOT REMAIN IN CONTROL FOR MUCH LONGER

RELIGION, DOMINATION AND SERIAL KILLING: WESTERN CULTURE AND MURDER Paul O'Brien The Ten Commandments forbid killing, though taken in Biblical context the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' 1 clearly admits of all kinds of exceptions, for example, the death penalty for worshipping false gods: 'thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die. '2 So clearly 'thou shalt not kill' means that we should not kill human beings-with the exception of those we may kill (or indeed those we must) . The commandment means that we should not kill unlawfully, though that is really another way of saying that we should not kill those whom we should not kill : a kind of tautology. It also, in context, refers only to human beings, since the J ews were enthusiastic meat eaters and the slaughter of ani­ mals was an essential part of worship in Old Testament times.3 Christianity abolished animal sacrifice but retained the notion of sacrifice itself, substituting the figure of Christ for animals but retaining the image of animal sacrifice, though only in figurative terms (Christ as the sacrificial lamb) .4 The New Testament author of the epistle to the Hebrews, contra traditional Jewish practice, stated explicitly that animal sacrifice was spiritually ineffica­ cious: 'For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.'5 The Old Testament sacrifice of animals had to be renewed year by year, but the sacrifice of Christ was a one-off.6 1 Ex 20: 1 3. Quotations from the Bible are from the King]ames Bible (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press). I am referencing the �TB partly because of its literary excel­ lence, but mainly because of its influential status in the English-speaking world, which-for present purposes-outweighs issues of accuracy of translation that might otherwise arise when comparing it to more modem versions. 2 Deut 1 3: 10. 3 For example, �um 28: 1 1-31 . + Cf. Brooker Buckingham, 'Gulp O f Sun: Rethinking Sacrifice through Bataille 's Gille s de R.als,' in this volume. ; Heb 1 0:4. 6 Heb 1 0: 1-1 4. This raises the question of why it has to be renewed by Christians in liturgical terms. (The notion of blood sacrifice is embedded in our culture and contin- 1 83

Paul O'Brien With regard to the treatment of animals, however, Christianity in no sense offered an overt defence: the tendency within Hinduism and Buddhism to veg­ etarianism was absent in Christianity. Indeed, St. Peter has a significant dream wherein a sheet is let down to the earth full of all kinds of animals, which he is commanded to 'kill and eat'7 (thereby renouncing the J ewish prohibition on the consumption of certain animals) . The Christian teaching of reciprocity8 has not traditionally been applied to the animal kingdom, though arguably, for the sake of logical coherence, it ought to be.9 There was an essential continuity between the Jewish and the Christian world-views, albeit the latter abolishes much of the prescriptive legalism ofJew­ ish practice with the 'new covenant' ethics embodied in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) . While Northern European cultures, which have retained Judea-Christian morality while marginalizing its theology, are sometimes re­ garded as the most civilized on earth, 1 0 the treatment of animals in fanns , facto­ ries and laboratories is Qargely) ignored from such an anthropocentric perspec­ tive. Humans and animals alike have paid a high price for the dualism of tradi­ tional Christian morality: the notion of a battle between two powers (good and evil , spirit and flesh) has led to pathic projection whereby evil is projected onto an eternal enemy which must be created if it doesn't exist, as was rapidly seen after the fall of the Soviet Union with the 'new' hate- figures of Saddam, Gadda­ fi, Osama Bin Laden and (more recently) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi . 1 1 The idea of eternal punishment for a finite offence sits uneasily with the teaching of altruistic love that we are enjoined to display to one another. If our Creator i s morally superior to us, should He not be expected to behave in a morally superior way, and not condemn his creation either for ignorance or a finite infraction? The moral ambivalence that this teaching involves may help to explain much of the violence and destruction perpetrated by the Christian world from its inception, from the 011/0-da-ft of the Inquisition to Dresden and Hiroshima in more recent times. (Fire-starting-together with animal abuse- ues in recent politics, for example, the imagery used to justify the insurrection of 1 9 1 6 in Ireland, soon reaching its centenary.) 7 Acts 1 0:9-1 6. 8 Cf. 'Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye e\•en so to them' (Matt 7:1 2). 9 The issue, then, in discussions of animal rights becomes the vexed question about a hierarchy of rigbts--do animals such as kittens and baby seals have more rights than rats or mosquitoes, and if so, why? 1 11 'Good countries' index (Ireland comes out on top, though the criteria are no doubt open to debate), available from http:/ /www.independent.co.uk/incoming/the-top-ten­ countries-in-the-good-country-index-9 560427 .html (accessed 28-05-1 5). 1 1 This is no doubt the case in (versions of) Islam as well, with the image of the United States as the 'Great Satan.' 1 84

RELIGION, DOMI NATION AND SER IAL KILLING i s one of the key indicators of serial killers,1 2 and w e might consider how this could be applied at a macro level as well.) \'X'ith reference to the concept Hork­ heimer and Adorno applied to the Enlightenment itself, in a sense there is a kind of 'dialectic of Christianity': the positive elements of the gospel of love are paralleled by a destructiveness emanating from the teaching of an eternity of torture for the unrepentant or the unsaved, as well as the (philosophically prob­ lematic) concept of the co-existence of the power of evil with that of omnipo­ tent goodness. A single text from Proverbs ('He that spareth his rod hateth his son')B at­ tributed to King Solomon 1 4 has been the justification of centuries of child abuse: flogging was, until recent times, routine as a fonn of punishmenr, from upper-class s chools in England, on the one hand, to N azi concentration camps, on the other. t s Physical abuse in childhood is a frequent feature of serial kill ers, in a range of cases including, for example, the Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lu­ cas and the German serial killer Juergen Bartsch. 1 6 However, Christianity did admittedly lead to the diminution of domination in human-to-human terms with its ideology of human egalitarianism (an ideology that Nietzsche de­ plored) 1 7 albeit it also spawned forms of religious anti-Semitism. The great modem revolt against the Judea-Christian (egalitarian) world-view was the rise of National Socialism in the twentieth century, which paradoxically plugged into Christian (both Catholic and Lutheran) anti-Semitismt s and at the same 1 2 J. M. Macdonald, 'The Threat to Kill, ' Am�rican ]011mal ojP[J•chiatry 1 20 (1 963): 12530. n Prov 13:24. 1 4 Though as Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 1 1 :3) it might have been C.'tpected that some discipline problems would arise with the kids. i s The uncanny echoes of the Warsaw Ghetto which the recent situation in Gaza evokes, evince the familiar psychological s tructure: the abused child grows up to be an abuser. 1 6 :\l ark Seltzer, Serial Ki/Im: Death and U fa in Amerifa 's lf"oNnd CNllNre (New York and London: Routledge, 1 998) , 257. Cf. Paul J . Ennis' account of Jack the Ripper, for ex­ ample, in 'On the Road with Jack the Ripper,' this volume. 1 1 Douglas Kellner, ').fodernity and its Discontents: Nietzsche's Critique,' available from http: / /pages.gseis.ucla.edu/ faculty /kellner/ essays/ modernityanditsdiscontents.pd f (accessed 28-05-15); see also Jonathan Ree, '\'X'hat the Christians Did for Us,' New H11manist (Monday 27 October 20 1 4) , available from https: / /newhumanist.org.uk/articl es/4765/what-the-christians-did-for-us(accessed 28-05-1 5); John Gray, 'What Scares the New Atheists,' available from http:/ /www.theguardian.com/world/201 5/m ar /03 / what-scares-the-new-atheists?CvIP=ema_565 (accessed 28-05-1 5). t s The term 'anti-Semitism' is of course deeply problematic. :Yiany Semites (including Palestinians) are not Jews, and many Je\\'S are not Semites. Leftist opponents of the repressive policies of Israel are, despite the claims of defenders of Israeli policies, not 1 85

Paul O' Brien time offered the joyous opportunity for a neo-pagan renaissance and the (im­ plicit or overt) rejection of the Ten Commandments 19· themselves. For the first time since the imposition of Judeo-Christian values on Europe, it became OK to lie, to steal, to murder, to idolize (the figure of Hitler), to covet (and take) the property of the Jews (though, again paradoxically, the Nazis appropriated the processions and hymn-singing hitherto associated with religion--even the swastika may be seen as a deformation of the Christian cross, and the SS bore an uncanny resemblance to the Jesuit Order) . At the same time as the rights of humans were undennined, a curious ten­ der-heartedness pervaded the Nazi mentality in regard to animals: Hitler was a vegetarian and dog lover; legislative attempts were made to regulate hunting and animal experimentation in the interests of animal welfare.20 However, the industrial processing of human beings for slaughter in the death camps seems uncannily reminiscent of the practices of large-scale factory farming; while ani­ mal abuse in the laboratory preceded-and perhaps in some ways led to-the abuse of humans, including vivisection, in the concentration camps.21 In the same way, animal abuse often precedes the abuse of humans by individual psy­ chopaths, including serial killers.22 Our routine cultural abuse of animals at a usually 'anti-Semitic,' even in the (problematic) terms in which sympathizers with Israel define that term. 1 9 As Arnold Zweig, a prominent Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany wrote: 'It is the enforcement of this non-pagan and unnatural faith [Christianity] which the peoples of Central Europe cannot forgive the Jews [ . . . J A yearning for the old native gods is inextinguis hable in the group-mind of the Gennans' (.\mold Zweig, Insulted and Exiled: The TT'llth about the German Jews [London: John :\files, 1 937] , 223). w See Arnold .\rluke, Clinton Sanders, &garding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple l:niver­ sity Press, 1 996), 132. The Freudian term 'reaction formation' comes to mind, as when one covers up an impulse to murder A, with an excess of sentimentality towards B (the misanthrope Nietzsche's reputed embrace of a horse, at the point of his final descent into madness, illustrates this point). And of course, with a ready supply of human vic­ tims in the concentration camps, there was hardly any need for the use of vivisection on animals. 21 However, comparisons of our (still routine) contemporary (mis)treatment of animals and the historical treatment of the Jews are controversial, to say the least. See, for ex­ ample, 'Holocaust Imagery and Animal Rights,' available from http:/ /archive.adl.org/ anti_semitism/holocaust_imagery_ar.html (accessed 28-05-1 5), and "'Holocaust On A Plate" Angers US Jews,' available from http:// www.theguardi an.com/ media/ 2003 /mar/ 03 / advertising.marketingandpr (accessed 29-05-1 5). 22 See, for example, H. Gavin, Criminolo!fcal and Forrnsfr P!J·chology (Sage, 201 3): 120; J. Wright and C. Hensley, 'From animal cruelty to serial murder: :\pplying the graduation hypothesis,' International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminolO!)' 47, no. 1 (2003): 71-88. On the other hand, serial killer Denis Nilsen seems to have been a genu­ ine animal lover-his dog, with the curious name 'Bleep,' was a witness to some of his 1 86

RELIGION, DOMI NATION AND SERIAL KI LLI NG macro level i s mirrored in their abuse a t a micro level, abuse which-just a s at the macro level-may feed into the abuse of humans as well. As Mark Seltzer points out, contemporary commentators situated the 'murder factory' of the notorious 1 9th century serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (aka H. H . Holmes) i n the context of the mass, mechanized slaughter of th e Chicago meat­ packing plants.23 The Holocaus t, as well as feeding off German Romantic nationalism, in­ cluding Wagner's virulent anti-Semitism,24 was also the result o f centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, from the medieval pogroms to Luther's notorious text 'On the J ews and their Lies.'25 There are (ironic and contentious) resonances between the term 'Holocaust,' on the one hand, and the practice of burnt offer­ ings in the Old Testament.26 Everyone, or everyone that matters, condemns the Holocaust as practiced against the Jews; few bother to note the similarities be­ tween the mass murder of human beings and the slaughter and cruelty perpe­ trated against animals throughout history, and continuing in the present day. In the context of an extended critique of the contemporary (mis) treatment of an­ imals th.rough regimentalization, generic experimentation, industrialization and so on, Derrida writes: One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor consider it explained away. For it gets more complicated here: the annihila­ tion of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organiz a tio n and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous genera­ tions would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that a.re thus exterminated by crimes. See Brian :O.faster, J(jl/ingfar ComjJalt)'.' The Case of Denis Nilsen (London: Arrow Books, 1 995). 23 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 20�. �4 See Richard Wagner, 'Judaism in Music,' available from h ttp : / /users.belgacom.net/ wagnerlibrary /prose/wagjuda.htm (accessed 29-05-1 5). ::; See Martin Luther, 'On the Jews and Their Lies,' I-XIII, available from http:// jdstone.org/ er/ pages/ sss_mluther.html (accessed 29-0 5-1 5). 16 For example, the welcome accorded by Jewish commentators to the removal from the Catholic version of the Bible of the term 'holocaust,' to translate the Hebrew words otherwise translated as 'burnt offering' (the term 'holocaust' does not appear in the King James version). See 'Catholics Remove "Holocaust" From Bible,' available from http:// www .israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/1 4224 1 #.\'LJ sglbBDLQ (ac­ cessed 29-05-1 5). See also, 'The Biblical Meaning of Holocaust,' available from http://taylormarshall.com/2009 /01 /biblical-meaning-of-holocaust.html (accessed 2905-1 5). The Hebrew word 'burnt' (olah or ow/ah) is translated as 'holocaust' in James Strong, The Exht:111stivt Concordance ofThe Bible (Iowa: World Bible Publishers, n.d). 1 87

Paul O' Brien means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers Qet's say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of J ews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, be­ ing more numerous and better fed, they could be des tined in al­ ways increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or ex-perimentation by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs [ . . . ] In response to the irresistible but unacknowledged unleashing and the organized disavowal of this torture, voices are raised-minority, weak, marginal voices, little assured of their discourse, of their right to discourse and of the enactment of their discourse within the law, as a declaration of rights-in order to protest, in order to appeal [ . . . ] to what is still presented in such a problematic way as animal rights, in order to awaken us to our responsibilities and our obligations with respect to the living in general, and precisdy to this fundamental compas­ sion that, were we to take it seriously, would have to change even the very basis [ . . . ] of the philosophical problematic of the ani­ mal.2i The issue of the abuse of animals and the abuse of humans is intimately con­ nected. Historically, animal issues helped to define the differences between the Germans and the Jews : the Jews eschewed the pig; the Germans enthusiastically consumed it. The Nazis compared the Jews to rats in a notorious propaganda film, and consequently hdped to project onto the Jews the common feeling of contempt for an (allegedly) useless and disgusting animal. The same attitude to certain animals persists today, in our approach to creatures such as laboratory rats and mice that are deficient in 'cuteness' (as distinct from baby seals and kittens, for example) . Osama bin Laden enjoined his followers to kill their (hu­ man) victims along the same lines as the victims of animal sacrifice.28 Just as people who bum books may end up burning people, so a society that treats animals with contempt may end up treating humans in a similar fashion. This applies at both the macro level of political persecution, and the micro level of serial murder. Serial killer Edmund Kemper, for example, tormented cats as a child, including burying one alive. J acques Derrida, 'The Animal that Therefore I Am,' Critical lnq11iry 28:2 (Winter, 2002), 39�395. 28 See 'Osama bin Laden on Meat and Denial,' available from http:/ / www. animal peoplenews.org/Ol / 1 0/ editorial1 00 1 .html (accessed 29-05-1 5). 27 1 88

RELIGION , DOMI NATION AN D SERIAL KI LLI NG The relationship between humans and (the rest of) nature has never been more problematic than it is today, particularly with the issue of global warming and its challenge to the growth-imperative of capitalism itself. The human treatment of animals is an important sub-set of this,29 particularly in the context of animal experimentation and the meat industry (itself a key contributor to global warming) . Sidney Gendin estimates the figure of 500 million animals kille d in the context of scientific research every year,3° sometimes in experi­ ments whose cruelty is equaled only by their futility: First, the eyes of young Macaque monkeys were removed prior to the 1 9th day of life. The young monkeys were then separated from their mothers, who were placed in separate cages. Upon the mothers' uttering calls of alarm, the time required for the monkeys to contact their mothers' cages was measured. These interactions were compared with those of young monkeys who were not blinded. The researchers concluded that all the usual facial expres­ sions of sigh ted monkeys were also observed in blinded ones.3t Singer describes the conditions at a poultry farm in the US, 'where four [live] hens are squeezed into cages 1 2 inches by 1 2 inches.'32 If 'meat is murder,' the question arises as to how such murder differs from its human counterpart. If suffering is the key issue to be highlighted rather than metaphysical concerns being raised about the uniqueness of human beings, the question can be posed as to whether there is any essential difference between Nazi experimentation on humans Q ews and others) on the one hand, and the animal experimentation that still goes on in laboratories today. \\nat, if any, is the essential difference between treating nature as a resource to be exploited, and treating humans in concentration camps in the same way? By and large, our culture believes it has a right to dominate animals, to use them for its own ends and for the (alleged) good of humanity. According to 2Y A caveat is needed here: the well-being of animals and that of the biosphere do not necessarily coincide, as when animals (occasionally and allegedly) need culling to protect the environment as a whole. See E. Katz, 'Is there a Place for :\nimals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?,' in A. Llght and H. Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 86. 30 Sidney Gendin, 'The Use of Animals in Science,' in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal FJght1 and Human Obligations (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1 989), 1 97. 3 1 Gendin, 'Use of Animals,' 200. Gendin references Jeff Diner, Physical and Mental Sef­ fering ofExperimental Anima/.r (Washington DC: _-\nimal Welfare Institute, 1 979), 6. 32 Peter Singer, 'Down on the Factory Farm,' in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds . , An­ imal FJght1 and Human Obligations (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 1 64. 1 89

Paul O' Brien Lynn Wbite, our habits are dominated by the belief in progress, which was un­ known to antiquity-a belief that, in his view, is· grounded in Judeo-Christian teleology, and only defensible in terms of the latter. In regard to the relation between humans and the environment, �te references the story of creation inherited by Christianity from Judaism. The naming of the animals in Genesis established human dominance over them.33 'God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes.'34 White believes that: 'Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen . . . Christianity . . . not only established a dualism of man and narure, but also in­ sisted that it is God's will that man exploit narure for his proper ends.'35 In an­ tiquity every tree, spring, stream or hill had its own guardian spirit, but by abol­ ishing animism Christianity made the exploitation of nature possible. The spirits in natural objects disappeared, and with them the inhibitions to the exploitation of narure. White notes the difference between Western and Eastern Christiani­ ty. For the East, salvation was to be found in clear thinking; for the West, in right conduct: the W'es tern atmosphere was more conducive to the emergence of the Christian-influenced mind-set of the conquest of nature.36 He notes: To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous be­ cause they assume spirit in nature.37 In the Latin West by the early thirteenth century, natural theology was becom­ ing the attempt to understand the mind of God by discovering how His crea33 Lynn White, 'The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,' in R J. Berty, ed., The Carr ofCrration: Foet11ing Concern and Action (L1K: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), 37. The key text is Gen 1 :26: 'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' The tenn 'dominion' is a translation of the Hebrew teon radah whose meanings include to 'tread down,' to 'subjugate,' to have 'dominion,' to 'prevail against,' to 'reign' or to 'rule' (Strong, Exha11slive Concordance). For an extended discussion of this area, see Derrida, 'The Animal,' 369-41 8 and passim. See also .'\ndr�-Louis Par� 'One �fost Eat Well,' available from http: //www.kimwaldron.com/content/pdf/espace_en.pdf (ac­ cessed 29-05- 1 5). 34 White, 'Ecologic Crisis,' 37. 35 Ibid., 38. 36 Ibid., 39. 37 Ibid., 40. 1 90

RELIGION, DOMI NATION AN D SERIAL KILLI NG tion operates. From that time up to Leibniz and Newton, all maj or scientists explained their motivations in religious terms. 38 For White, 'modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology. The dynamism of religious devotion, shaped by the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation, gave it impetus.'39 The conclusion he draws is that (contrary to the contemporary militant atheism of Richard Dawkins et a� science and religion are not in a state of contradiction -science and technology are to be explained in terms of the Christian context in which they arose.40 (In Nietzsche's terms, 'even we knowing ones of today, the godless and antimetaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kin­ dled by a belief millennia old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine.')4t To stress the historical connection between science and technology on the one hand and religion on the other is, however, to impart a mixed compliment to religion. White argues that, to judge by the ecological consequences, the powers we have obtained through science and technology are out of control, and Christianity thus bears a huge burden of guilt.42 From this perspective, it can be argued that science and religion are not opposites: rather, science arose within a religious context, and religion is in a sense to blame for the concomi­ tant dominance of anthropocentric 'progressivism.' White (himself a Christian) argues for a rethink of Christian theology in terms of the pro-nature attitudes of St. Francis, in terms of humility and pan­ species democracy, as an alternative to traditional theology with its anthropo­ centric mind-set: The land around Gubbio in the Appenines was being ravaged by a fierce wolf. Saint Francis, says the legend, talked to the wolf and persuaded him of the error of his ways. The wolf repented, died in the odour of sanctity, and was buried in consecrated ground.43 From this perspective, St. Francis' view of nature and of man, which acted in opposition to the Western medieval world against which Francis was a rebel and that was the matrix of the destructive dynamic of science and technology, 38 W'hite, 'Ecologic Crisis,' 39. 39 Ibid., 40. 40 Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, JO.Jfol Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1 973), 209, quoted in :\fax Horkheimer and Theodor W. Ador­ no, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jep hcott (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 90. �2 White, 'Ecologic Crisis,' 40. �1 �3 Ibid., 4 1 . 191

Paul O'Brien 'rested on a unique form of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the glorification of their transcendent Creator.'44 The argument may be somewhat simplistic, since the ideals of Francis later became integrated into the institutional forms of Christianity.45 There is now, of course, a Pope Francis, a nomenclature conveniently guaranteed to plug into the 'this changes everything' dominance of ecological thought in contemporary culture.46 The notion of sin has been extended to sins against the ecology, while at the same time (presumably) the traditional J udeo-Christian dualism of humanity and na­ ture has been retained. Animal rights have no place in traditional Catholic theology. A Catholic Dic­ tionary of some decades ago notes that: If that term be used correctly, animals have no 'rights,' for these can belong only to persons, endowed with reason and responsibil­ ity. Cruelty to animals is certainly wrong: not because it outrages animal 'rights' which are non-existent, but because cruelty in a human being is an unworthy and wicked disposition and, objec­ tively, because ill-treatment of animals is an abuse and perversion of God's design. Man has been given dominion over the animal kingdom, and it is to be exercised in conformity with human rea­ son and God's Will. 47 The logical conclusion of this argument would seem to be that infants have no rights either, since they are conspicuously lacking in reason and responsibility. According to the medieval Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, charity does not extend to irrational creatures, since it is a form of friendship: a feeling which, he believes, we cannot have for animals since they lack free will and therefore cannot possess good, and because they can have no fellowship in human life, the latter being controlled by reason. Furthermore, Aquinas (in con­ tradiction of St. Paul, who wrote that 'the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of +4 Ibid., 42. -15 Cf. Ewert Cousins, 'Introduction,' Bonaventure: The So11/'s ]011m� into God,· The Tree of Lift: The Lift ofSI. Francis, trans. Cousins �Iahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1 978), 1 . Cf. Naomi Klein, This Change! Everything: Capitalism Versu.r the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 201 4). See also Rob Di."<on's review of This Changes Everything, in New York Times, (November 6, 201 4), available from http:/ /www. nytimes.com/201 4/ 1 1 /09 /books/ reviewI naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-review.html (accessed 29-051 5). 47 Extract from A Catholic Dktiontll)' (London: Thomas Ndson and Sons, 1 962), 97-8, quoted in Regan and Singer, Animal Rights, 1 33. 46 1 92

RELIGION, DOM I NATION AN D SERIAL KI LLI NG God')48 argues that animals cannot attain the fellowship of eternal happiness, therefore they do not merit charity which is based on such feliowship.49 To kill someone else's ox, according to Aquinas, is not murder but theft or robbery -'.i .e. the problem is that it injures human property, not that it takes away the animal's right to life) .so But the ideology of the appropriateness of the domination of animals is rooted in 'secular' theorizing as well, from Bacon to Descartes, who regarded animals as machines, evincing an indignant attack from Voltaire: Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in or der to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not sup­ pose this impertinent contradiction in nature . st ­ Later, in the terms of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the argument against cruelty to animals would be put in terms of the capacity of animals not to reason or talk, but to suffer.s2 However, to see the abuse of animals as a consequence of the dominance of secular science (exemplified by figures such as Bacon and Descartes) is to ignore the crucial role of the Judea-Christian context in which modem science developed. Carolyn Merchant, in an influential study of the historical replace­ ment of the organic by the mechanistic metaphor of nature,53 critiques the phi48 Romans 8:21 . Extract from St. Thomas Aquinas, 'On Killing Living Things and the Duty to Love Irrational Creatures,' Part II, Question 25, Article 3, Summa Theologica, trans. the English Dominican Fathers (Chicago: Benziger Brothers, 1 9 1 8), quoted in Regan and Singer, Animal "Rights, 1 2. Cf. Aquinas, 'Of The Object Of Charity,' available from http:/ /sacred-texts.com/ chr/ aquinas I summa/ sum280.htm (accessed 29 05 -15) ;o Extract from St. Thomas Aquinas, 'On Killing Living Things and the Duty to Love Irrational Creatures,' Question 64, _-\rticle 1 , Summa Theologica, quoted in Regan and Singer, Animal Rights, 1 1 . C£ _'\quinas, 'Of Ylurder,' available from http:/ /sacred­ texts.com/ chr/ aquinas/ summa / sum320.htm (accessed 29-05-1 5). 5 1 Extract from Voltaire, 'Animals,' in Philosophical Dictionary. quoted in Regan and Sing­ er, Animal Rights, 21 . 52 Extract from Jeremy Bentham, 'Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legisla­ tion,' quoted in Regan and Singer, Animal Rights, 78. For a powerful discussion of this issue, see Derrida, 'The Animal,' 395 ff. 53 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Naturt: Women, ECQlogy and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1 983) . 49 - . 1 93

Paul O'Brien losophy of Bacon with its analogy of scientific investigation to torture, citing the relationship between the domination of nature and that of women, specifi­ cally the torture of women in the witch trials.54 In Bacon's terms, due to the Fall from Eden the human race lost its 'dominion over creation.' The lost do­ minion needed to be recovered through scientific exploration. ss As Merchant puts it, 'Although a female's inquisitiveness may have caused man's fall &om his God-given dominion, the relentless interrogation of another female, nature, could be used to regain it.'56 In Bacon's 'utopian' New ,41/antis, 'We have also parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds, which we use [ .. . ] for dissections and trials [ . . . ] We also try all poisons and other medicines upon them as well of chirurgery as physic.'57 Singer argues that the suffering we inflict on animals derives from spe­ ciesism: 'animals are treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh.'58 The same argument applies against vivisection: if the experimenter would not be prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his/her use of animals is based on speciesism: 'since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant.'59 For Tom Regan, the animal rights movement is part of the human rights movement:60 inherent value 'belongs equally to those who are the experiencing subjects of a life.'61 One might raise a further issue. If humans have ultimately no more value than animals, and if vivisection on animals is to be allowed, then-short of positing religious-based concepts applicable to humans but not animals-it is not clear why vivisection on humans should not also be al­ lowed. 62 For Adorno and Horkheimer, the domination of nature is an outcome of instrumental rationality arising from Enlightenment. 'The "happy match" be­ tween human understanding and the nature of things that he [Bacon] envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disen­ chanted nature.'63 For Bacon, the concern of knowledge is not satisfaction but 54 Merchant, Death ofNature, 1 68. 5s Ibid., 1 70. 56 Ibid. Bacon, The New ,41/antis, quoted in Ibid., 1 84. 58 Peter Singer, 'All Animals are Equal,' in Regan and Singer, Animal PJghts, 79. 59 lbid., 80. 60 Tom Regan, 'The Case for .\nimal Rights,' in Regan and Singer, Animal Rights, 1 1 3. 61 Ibid., 1 1 2. 62 See the interesting debate between R. G. Frey and Sir William Paton, 'Vivisection, Morals and Medicine: .� Exchange,' in Regan and Singer, Animal PJghts, 2�. 63 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2. 57 1 94

RELIGION, DOMI NATION AND SERIAL KI LLI NG operation.64 Enlightenment is totalitarian.65 For Horkheimer and Adorno, smashing an atom is part of the same mind-set as subjecting a rabbit to torment in the laboratory .66 Everything that is not commensurable is cut away. 67 With Enlightenment, 'Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the ma­ chine.'68 'The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure.'69 The modem totalitarian order, with its canon of brutal efficiency, has 'granted unlimited rights to calculating thought.'70 The element of reason is coordination: it calculates and plans, and takes no account of ends.7' In the context of Enlightenment, pity stands in disrepute. 72 With fascism and its rejection of pity: 'Kindness and good deeds become a sin, dom­ ination and suppression virtue.'73 \\7omen and Jews bear the mark of domina­ tion.74 In an excursus on Sade, Horkheimer and Adorno note the pact between pleasure and cruelty: the means of sexual love is war, and at its root is the mor­ tal hatred of the sexes.75 Referring to the 'dark' writers of the bourgeoisie (most prominently Sade and Nietzsche) they write that 'It is because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from rooftops, that Sade and Nietzsche are still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers. 'i6 Their pitiless doctrines pro­ claim the identity of power and reason."7 It is notable that Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, were stu­ dents of Sade.78 David Schmid points out how books from Brady's personal 64 Ibid. 65 I bid., 4. For Horkheimer and Adomo (Dia/Mk of Enlightenment, 5) the split between thought and nature is present in Greek myth as much as in the ideology of dominion in Genesis. 66 I bid . , 7. 67 Ibid., 45. 63 Ibid., 1 9. 69 Horkheimer and Adomo, Dialectic ofEnlightenmml, 9. 70 Ibid., 68. 71 I bid., 69. 72 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectfr ofE nlightenment. 80. -3 Ibid., 8 1 . - 4 Ibid , 88. ·; Ibid., 8�9. 76 Horkheimer and Adorno, Diakctic ofEnlightenment, 93 . .,.. Ibid. ·s Richard Davenport-Hines, 'Hindley, Myra (1 942-2002),' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available from http: / / www.oxforddob.com/view/article/77394 (accessed 29- 05- 1 5). 1 95

Paul O' Brien library (including Sade's novel ]11sti11e) were entered as evidence during the origi­ nal rrial.79 Persaut observes that 'Perhaps de Sade's central concept is tha t the individual who transgresses society's rules is a rebel, in search of freedom and pleasure-a "transcendence"-which society, in its ignorance and repressive­ ness, denies him.'80 Persaut note s that (in the terms of Schmid) 'a characteristic of Sade' s heroes shared by certain sadistic serial killers-awareness of repug­ nance from others-is one of th e sources of pleasure to be derived from their acts .'St Dis cu ssin g a book written by Brady, Persaut notes that 'Brady adopts his (Sa d e 's] ideas at face value, and mix es them into a hotch-potch of theories from nihilistic philosophers and right-wing extremists.'82 In one way, Sade ' s libertine philosophizing is th e antithesis of Christian altruism and the teaching of agape; on the other hand, it is uncomfortably close to the dominance of reason and instrumental rationality that is inexrricably linked to the development of science and te chnology in the �rest-a devel opmen t which arose in the context o f the Christian world view. For Horkheimer and Adorno in their analysis of nationalist anti-Semitism, the economic injustice of the whole capitalist class is attributed to the Jew.83 They write: 'The J ews as a whole are charged with practicing forbidden magic and bloody rituals. Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the indigenous population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously re­ admitted to their consciousness.'84 Anti-Semitism is based on false proj ection, which makes its surroundings resemble itself.8S 'Those impelled by blind mur­ derous lust have always seen in the victim the pursuer who has driven them to desperate self-defence, and the mightiest of the rich have experienced their weakest neighbour as an intolerable threat be fore falling upon him.'86 Hork­ heimer and Adorno note that the substance of pa thic projection, according to psychoanalytic theory, is the transferance of forbidden urges from the subject 79 See David Schmid, 'A Philosophy of Serial Killing: Sade, �ietzsche, and Brady at the Gates of Janus,' in S. Waller, ed., Serial Killers: Being and Killing (l\falden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2010), cited in Raj Persaut, 'Inside the Mind of the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady,' The Hrdfington Post, available from http:/ /www .huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj­ persaud/ian-brady_b_350874 7 .html (accessed 29-05- 1 5). 80 Persaut, 'Moors Murderer, Ian Brady.' 8 1 Ibid. 82 Ibid. Cf. Aspasia Stephanou, 'Exquisite Corpse: Serial Killing And The Horripilation Of Writing,' this volume. 8 3 Horkheimer and Adorno, Diakclic ofEnlightenment, 142. 84 Ibid., 1 53. 85 Ibid., 1 54. 86 Ibid., 1 54. In contemporary terms, this might be seen as applicable to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, though (of course) nothing compares in extent and inten­ sity with the historical horror of the Holocaust itself. 1 96

RELIGION, DOMINATION AND SERIAL KILLI NG to the object.87 Writing at the time of the dominance of Nazism in Europe, they note that '[t]he anti-Semites are realizing their negative absolute through power, by transfonning the world into the hell they have always taken it to be . '88 Far from freeing us from medieval superstition, it can be argued that the Enlightenment mind-set, in its negative aspect with the triwnph of instrwnental rationality over all other values, led directly to the slavery and annihilation of _-\uschwitz. But if Enlightenment, per Lynn White, is itself (paradoxically) an outcome of Christianity, then Christianity-at least in its Western, mainstream version-is also to be blamed for Auschwitz. This is not Gust) in the usual sense of traditional, religious anti-Semitism (exacerbated by Luther) which, to­ gether with the 'scientific,' racist version, fed into Nazi anti-semitism with its outcome of the Holocaust; but also in the sense of the religious context of the power and influence of science and technology themselves in the modem world, with the downside of rational exterminism as applied to hwnans and animals, and consumption and cruel instrumentality as applied to animals. And if Christianity is historically and theologically inseparable from Judaism, one could reach the paradoxical conclusion that Auschwitz is inherent in Genesis: the ideology of domination led to the practice of extermination. Western cul­ ture is inextricably entangled with murder.89 This is another aspect of the 'dialectic of Christianity.' On the positive side, as noted already, Christianity foregrounded the values of altruism, reciprocity and mutual concern that inform the liberal values of the West (including, largdy and often unconsciously, the values of those atheists and humanists who osten­ sibly reject it). On the negative side, it unleashes the fury of pathic projection with its teaching of, on the one hand, Evil/Satan as an opposing power to God and, on the other hand, eternal punishment for offenders and unbelievers (as Islam does in a very similar way, albeit the latter has not as yet been tempered by its own secular Enlightenment). On the negative side also, Christianity-as White argues-must bear a considerable burden of guilt for the modern domi­ nance of science and technology themsdves. This may logically be extended to the dominance both of the machine and the machine-metaphor that arise from the hegemony of the scientific and technological perspective. Mark Seltzer ar­ gues that: 87 Horkheimer and Adamo, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, 1 58. Ibid., 1 65. 89 Nazism, a kind of witch's brew, had-despite a few aspects relating to animal righ ts and the environment - the unique ability to distill the worst elements of a wide range of (apparently contradictory) sources, combining as it did the anti-Semitism, ritualism and power-hunger of Christianity, with 'scientific' racism and the 'survival of the fittest' ideology of Social Darwinism. sa 1 97

Paul O'Brien Serial killing is the form of public violence proper to a machine culture: the era of the Second Industrial Revolution that is also popularly called 'the information society' or •digital culture' and might be calle d the Discourse Network of 2000. In the N etwork, the unremitting flood of numbers, codes, and letters is popularly seen as replacing real bodies and real persons, threatening to make both obsolete. What it really makes obsolete is the difference be­ tween bodies and information.90 Seltzer notes how, <J'opular and professional accounts' understand serial killing 'as a kind of machine work and even a pathologized work ethic.'9 1 In early modem society, he says, 'The clockwork mechanism or automaton provides the model for an idealized self-presence, an idealized and autonomous self­ sufficiency. 111e mechanism that works all by itself thus appears as the model for the human and as its replacement.'92 It is hardly necessary to labour the is­ sue of the dominance of the work ethic as itself an outcome of (Protestant) Christianity in Weber's analysis.93 Seltzer notes that what one continually finds described in accounts of the serial killer is the social ego 'formed from the out­ side in: its social substitute skin forming its insect-like exoskeleton. '94 The serial killer is an individual 'whose interior has lost its meaning in its utter dependence on the mechanical drills relentlessly binding him to external and social forms. '95 In terms of our overall perspective, the serial killer may be seen as a prod­ uct of the pathological downside of Western Christian culture, an individual whose identity is determined by his environment rather than by those values of altruism and reciprocity that Christianity (in i:s most positive form) promulgat­ ed. However, that environment-far from being antipathetic to Christianitv { itself-may be seen as (largely) its result. The dialectic of Christianity, which s still being worked out, is that it gave us not only those desirable personal and social values that pervade even our most secular societies (in fact that are in some ways particularly characteristic of them) but that it also helped to engen­ der terror, at both the macro-level of organized oppression, and the micro-level of serial killing. This terror has come down m us through the centuries, since the establishment of Christianity as the dominant mind-set of the West. 9u Seltzer, Serial J.(j//er1, 17. 91 Ibid., 40. 92 Ibid., 219. 93 �fax Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, available from https:/ /w w.mactists.org/ reference/ archive/weber/ protestant-ethic/ (accessed 29-05-15). 94 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 5 1 . 95 Ibid. 1 98

AMOUR FOU AND THE ECSTASY OF DESTRUCTION, OR LOVE IN NEO-LIBERAL TIMES Anthony Faramelli The community of lovers-no matter if the lovers want it or not, enjoy it or not, be they linked by chance, by 'l'amour fou,' by the passion of death (Kleist)-has as its ultimate goal the destruction of society. -1Iaurice Blanchot Serial killers do on a small scale what governments do on a large one. They are a product of the times and these are bloodthirsty times . -Richard Ramirez Figure 1. Tony Barnard, Richard Ramirez with inked pentagram on hand, 1 985. 1 99

Anthony Faramelli THE LOCATION AND CONTEXT OF ANXIETY Social and cultural theorists often argue that the psychosocial landscape of con­ temporary liberal societies is based on a general sense of anxiety and fear. I Tak­ ing this claim as the point of departure, society's response to serial killing is the most visceral example of this general sense of anxiety. The sound bites we hear following the apprehension of a serial killer have become all too familiar and are almost always delivered with an exorbitant degree of shock and awe at the revelation that the killer was 'such a nice neighbour,' who was always so 'quiet,' 'polite' and so on. The serial kill er-the monster hiding in plain sight, the om­ nipresent, but unseen threat that people warn children to fear and remain ever vigilant for-has become the quintessential figure of American nee-liberal soci­ ety. While popular culture has productively used this trope globally as a means of both critique and titillation in books and films such as Ameni:an P.rycho or Si­ lence of the Limbs, serial killing remains specifically American: with seventy-six per cent of all reported serial killings taking place in the United States.:? Like­ wise, the response to serial killing is uniquely American, with both the U.S. government and civil society creating-with the aid of media outlets - a moral panic predicated on the fictitious claim that between three to five thousand people are murdered by serial killers each year in the U.S.3 This moral panic reached its zenith in 1982 when J oho Walsh (whose son was murdered the pre­ vious year, and who subsequently went on to host the popular American 1V show America 's Most Wanted) testified before a U.S. Senate committee, describ­ ing recent cases of serial murder and suggesting that missing children were largely the victims of serial killers. Walsh testified (erroneously) that every hour 205 children go missing, many of whom, he claimed, would be found mur­ dered.4 He went on to proclaim that, 'This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, and strangled children,'5 ensuring a national panic following the next day's headlines.6 While the act of serial killing, committing two or more murders over a time span of more than one month where each instance is a separate event, doubt­ lessly predates recorded history, the phenomenon of the serial killer-societal 1 This claim will be elaborated on throughout this text \t this point it is important to note that for the purpose of this paper the two theorists whose work most explicitly engages with this analysis are Brian Massumi and Franco Berardi. 2 Lawrence �filler, 'Serial Kill ers: II. Development, Dynamics, and Forensics,' Aggression and Violent Behavior 1 : 1 9 (20 14): 3; Peter Vro nsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 56. l Vronsky, Serial Killers, 49. 4 Ibid., 47. ; Cited in Ibid., 48. j Ibid., 47. . 200 •

AMOU R FOU AN D THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION response to serial killings in which the serial killer is created as a type of person, a subjectivity-is a relatively recent event that has its roots in 1 970s and '80s America. FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler first coined the term 'serial murder­ er' during the 'Son of Sam' killings that �ook place in New York from 1 97 6- 77,7 the tenn then became popularized by the 1 977 media coverage of Ted Bundy's trials and the ensuing TV detective series broadcast in the 1 980s, such as the popular American series 'Hunter. '9 It is this media attention that accompanies the serial killing phenomenon that has specifically marked it out within an American cultural context, propelling many serial killers to a cult popularity that was previously known only to celebrities,10 thus enshrining the serial kill er trope in pop culture.1 1 This prompted Steven Egger, the former program director for New York's serial killer computer analysis program, HALT, to claim that: For many, the serial killer is a symbol of courage, individuality, and unique cleverness. Many will quickly transform the killer into a figure who allows them to fantasize rebellion or the lashing out at society's ills. For some, the serial killer may become a symbol of swift and effective justice, cleansing society of its crime-ridden vennin. The serial killer's skill s in eluding police for long periods of time transcends the very reason that he is being hunted. The killer's elusiveness overshadows his trail of grief and horror. 12 Egger grounded this claim on the assumption that most victims of serial killers are people considered subaltern to the 'normal' population. In other words, people who are not white, male, heterosexual and middle class. This subaltern position renders the victims 'less dead,' dehumanizing them to the level of pests that a diseased society feels should be e.�terminated. 1 3 This posi­ tion continues to bear both moral and analytical weight having been constantly reiterated in debates and studies of serial killers, most recently by the psycholo­ gist Lawrence Miller in his 201 4 study of the psychopathology of serial killers. 14 The basic assumption supporting these claims is that society has funda­ mental illiberal flaws-classism, sexism, homophobia and racism-and as such, 7 Miller, 'Serial Killers: II,' 3. Vronsk:y, Serial Killers, 23-4. 9 Miller, 'Serial Killers : II,' 2. 111 Wendv .-\.. Lavezzi and Barbara C. Wolf, 'Paths to Destruction: The Lives and Crimes of Two Serial Killers,' ]011rnal ofForensic Science 52 (2007): 199. I I Vronsky, Serial Killers, 63-8. 12 Qu oted in Vronsky, Serial Killers, 65. n Ibid., 63-4. 1� Lawrence Miller, 'Serial Killers : I. Development, Dynamics, and Forensics,' Aggrmion @d Violent Behavior 1 : 1 9 (2007): 2. 8 201

Anthony Faramelli serial killers are merely a projection of society's shortcomings. Ostensibly, this position refuses neuroscience's fumbling attempts to explain away serial kill ers by looking at causal factors such as whether or not they were dropped on their head as an infant, or smoked marijuana, in favour of a liberal moral position that denounces elements of society that it deems to be unproductively undemo­ cratic. This position seems to imply that, beyond any neurological and / or p sy­ chological pathology, serial kill ers would cease to be if society could just bring marginalized groups into the fold of representational politics where everybody is equal within a logic of exchange. However, the foundation of this line of reasoning crumbles beneath the weight of scrutiny. W'hile not disregarding the persistent and structuring preju­ dices that underlie a given society, this argument groups all serial killers togeth­ er into one uncomfortable and misshapen liberal framework. In doing so, it fails to account for the victims of serial killers who are often not those whom a racist, homophobic and classist (illiberal) society would judge to be 'less dead.' THE NIGHT STALKER A1'\JD POSTMODERN ANXIETY A salient example of the inadequacy of the liberal moral argument is the case of the 'Night Stalker,' Richard Ramirez . From June 1 984 until August 1 985 Ramirez committed a series of home invasions where the victims were robbed, beaten, tortured, raped and/ or murdered. Ramirez's victims were seemingly chosen at random, with no consideration given to their race, age, class position, gender or sexual identity. Following the liberal moral argument, this indiscrimi­ nate killing that often targeted white, middle-class heterosexuals should not have resulted in the elevation of Ramirez to cult hero. Nevertheless, after Ramirez's public capture and subsequent court case he became iconized within American pop culture. FollO\ving his arrest, Ramirez was flooded with letters from women professing their love for him and both his trials as well as the prisons where he was housed during the court proceedings and then later at San Quentin-where he was on death row-were frequented by women hoping for the chance to meet him . The Night Stalker case opens up a more nuanced read­ ing of the serial killer phenomenon as having a specific relationship vis-a-vis American liberal society, specifically as it is tied to and conditioned by the neo­ liberal economic form. Interestingly, Peter Vronsky describes the serial kill er phenomenon as be­ ing specifically 'postmodem. ' 1 5 Postmodern is best understood in this context as the loss of metanarratives, the structuring of grand ideologies that provided a sense of comfort and security by grounding people with a historical place in the i; Vronsky, Serial Killers, 29. 202

AMOUR FOU AND THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION world, that followed the global political and social upheaval of 1 968. • 6 While Vronsk"Y avoids qualifying exactly why he views the serial kiUer phenomenon as postmodern, he does contextualize it as arising out of a time of omnipresent fear. Noting that despite the fact that in real tenns there was no greater danger threatening the American population in the late 1 970s than before, he neverthe­ less claims that this was the time when it started to 'feel bad. '17 Fear was no longer located outside of society, but had shifted inwards, becoming omnipres­ ent and unrecognizable. The 'postmodern' feeling that Vronsky is describing is the unlocalizable anxiety that has always been in the middle of liberal subjectivi­ ties, but was exponentially amplified to become the prevalent feature of liberal society once capitalism transitioned into its neo-liberal phase of deregulated and unbalanced flows in the 1 970s. DISEQUILIBRIUM AND ECSTATIC DESTRUCTION Despite the fact that this 'postmodern' feeling of anxiety coincided with the birth of the serial killer phenomenon, it had nothing to do with the fear of America being buried under the mutilated victims of serial killers. Rather this was accomplished through the revolutionary reorganization of the financial flows of capitalism when the system abandoned the Keynesian economics of stability and equilibrium and moved to a state of perpetual and desired disequi­ librium. This can be best thought of as neo-liberalism's creative destruction, the creation of new markets through the destruction of current markets, what is often referred to as 'disaster capitalism. ' 1 8 As Franco Berardi • 9 reminds us, in the 1 980s: [Neo-liberalism] legitimated a process of destruction not only of actual but also of future resources. This process occurred by fre­ netically stimulating debt, overconsumption and competition, and 1 6 See Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A &port On Knowled ge (Manches­ ter: Manchester University Press, 1 984) and Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or The C11/t11ral 'LJJgic of!.Ate Capitalirm (London: Verso Books, 1 992). I T Vronsky, is Serial Killers, 30. Emphasis in the original See Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise oJDisa.rter Capitalirm (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2008). w Franco Berardi is an Italian psychosocial theorist and activist who was heavily in­ Yolved in the Autonomist movement in the 1 970s. 203

Anthony Faramelli by forcing the collective psyche to undergo a competitive stress, the effects of which produce depression, panic and aggression.20 Titls creative destruction unleashes what the philosopher J ean-Frans;ois Lyotard termed a libidinal jo11issance, an intense pleasure that is intrinsically linked to a degree of pain and carri es with it the spectre of death (both symbolic and actu­ al).21 In other words, neo-liberalism unleashes an ecstatic joy of destruction . Ecstasy is understood as the negative of programmatic equilibrium: it is disequi­ librium's lack of meaning, or what Georges Bataille tenned a 'non-knowledge,' that communicates ecstasy.22 However, ecstasy's destruction also negates the possibility for satisfaction, and as such 'ecs tasy only remains possible in the an­ guish of ecstasy.'23 Ecstasy constitutes an absolute limit of experience, a thresh­ old that cannot be maintained, so in order for the neo-liberal system to survive apparatuses or dispositifs of security had to be established in order to protect and maintain the system.24 The disequilibrium of neo-liberalism's financial flows are deeply intercon­ nected with psychic flows within society,25 meaning that neo-liberal bio­ politics-the social and political power that creates subjectivities or 'types' of people-is based on the same disequilibrium. Or, as Berardi writes, [In] this liberation of all flux, [nee-liberal capitalism] has produced a world of nightmare and anxiety. Why should history have failed? The reason is that 'deterritorialization' [the radical breaking away from social norms and constraints] is accompanied by a perpetual 'reterritorialization' [the imposition of new codes that constrain a subject] . Capitalism postpones the limit towards which it tends (nomadism) by restoring artificial 'territorialities' (beliefs, form s) .26 Franco Berardi, Fl/ix Guattari: Thought, Friendthip, and I·'irionary Cartographer, trans . Giuseppina :Mecchia and Charles Stivale (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillion, 2008), 23. 21 Jean-Franc,:ois Lyotard, 'Every political economy is libidinal,' in #Acrelera/f: The Accel­ erationist &adtr, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay (London and New York: Urbanomic, 201 4), 142-82; 1 64. 22 Georges Bataille , 'Inner Experience,' in The Bataille &atkr, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (:Malden, M.\: Blackwell, 1 997), 37-1 1 3; 82. 2.l Ibid. 24 See Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics: Lecturers at the College dt France 1978- 1979 (N ew York: Pa1grave, 2008). 2s Berardi, Felix Guattari, 27. 26 Ibid., 120. 20 204

AMOUR FOU AND THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION W'ithin this system an accelerated drive towards a possible future destruction is always present in the form of the future-anterior-and as such ecstatic destruc­ rion is immanent to subjectivity, it is located in the centre of a person's sense of self. This creates a generalized anxiety within society. Anxiety in this context carries with it the full force of Freudian understanding. That is to say, it is pred­ icated on the lost object, as well as J acques Lacan's reversion of Freud, too much of the object to the poin t of being smothered by it. The object in question here is understood in psychoanalysis as the mother. For both Freud and Lacan, the p roximity to the mother is the basis for psycho­ sis, however the term 'mother' should not be confused with an actual mother. Rather it is the symbolic material ob je ct . It is an object of love that provides a sense of comfort and security. In psychoanalysis 'traumatic situations are pre­ cipitated by "situations of danger'' such as birth, loss of the mother as object, loss of the object's love and, above all, castration.'27 Anxiety, then, is based on the trauma a subject suffers in relationship to the maternal object, either from separation from the object of security (Freud) or from the failure to break away from the object (Lacan) . Since the object is purely symbolic, it is by definition ungraspable. The relationship to the object then becomes predicated on the notion of the hunt. The object can never be truly possessed; rather it is affec­ tively defined by its proximity to the subject who hunts for it. 28 Neo-liberal anxiety results from, to quote Felix Guattari, the 'perversion of deterritorialization according to the law of alliance.'29 Capitalism, especially in its neo-li beral form, is revolutionary in the way in which it breaks away from the pre-existing social codes that structure society. However, in the wake of its destruction, it also rids itself of the maternal object. As such, in order for the system to function it obsessively creates new and more constraining codes to regulate a given society and provide a sense of security, al beit an impermanent security. In other words, as a result of the neo-liberalism's psychotic destruction the subject obsessively grasps onto a societal code, or normative law. The ob­ ject of security is at once destroyed, hunted for and smothering. In this way the neo-liberal subject is the quintessential obsessive neurotic. Obsessionals are in a Dylan Evan, Dictionary of Lacam'an P!]1choana/ym (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1 0. �s This understanding of the lost object of security is largely based on the work of Felix Guattati. Guattati trained as a psychoanalyst under Lacan, but broke away and devel­ oped a more radical system of psychotherapy though his work at la Borde clinic with Jean Oury that placed psychopathologies ·within the financial and social context of inte­ grated world capitalism. As such, this analysis breaks away from traditional Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. 29 Felix Gua ttari, The A11ti-Oedip11s Papers, trans. Ketina Gollnan, ed. Stephane Nadaud \-'Jew York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 49. Emphasis in the original. �7 205

Anthony Faramelli constant state of anxiety, trying to reconnect to the lost object by fanatically grasping onto a substitute, smothering themselves in the process:30 The obsessional being in perpetual vertigo of the destruction of the Other, can never do enough to allow the other to maintain himself in existence. But here we see its root, the anal stage is characterized by the fact that the subject satisfies a need uniquely for the satisfaction of an other. He has been taught to retain this need uniquely in order that it should be founded, established as the occasion of the satisfaction of the other who is the educator. [ . . . ] And note the consequence of this [ . . . ] desire comes to be symbolized in this situation by what is carried away in the opera­ tion: desire literally goes down the toilet.31 1bis has the effect of an anxious individualization, since the loved object comes to also carry with it the threat of possible death. 1bis threat is omnipresent and not localizable; the threat is virtual.32 The philosopher Gregoire Chamayou has argued that this has resulted in liberalism becoming predicated on the anxious creation of a sovereign identity that is based on the hunting down and neutralization-either through incarcer­ ation or death--0f this omnipresent threat. Setting the stage for both the 'War on Terror' and its predecessor, the 'War on Drugs,' the U.S. response to serial killing adopted the language of hunting, not war. 'While the language of war establishes a relationship between two opposing forces on a battlefield and car­ ries with it the recognition of both forces and a degree of legal rights guaran­ teed in international law, the language of the hunt-and this is especially true when used in the context of America's never ending wars-refuses any legal recognition to the prey. In his 201 2 book Manh1111ts: A Philosophical History, Chamayou outlines what he terms the 'dialectic of the hunter/hunted' in an elaboration of how liberal identity has been historically constructed by exercis­ ing cynegetic power33 in the act of the manhunt. Within this dialectic, the prey is located within the population and then devalued and dehumanized by being denied legal state recognition. As such they are transformed into invisible non- 3U Jacques Lacan, The SeminarI ofJacques Lacan: Book VI I I Tranfjerence 1960- 1961, trans. Cormac Gallagher (Paris: Seuil, 1 963), x1 22. 31 Lacan, The Seminars, xiv 8. 32 Brian Massumi, 'Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,' in Massumi, ed ., The Politics ofEveryday Fear (Minneapolis: University oE \finnesota Press, '1 993), 1 29. 33 Cynegetic power refers to the power of or relating to the hunt. Following Gregoire Chamayou's use of this concept, it is understood as the power that hunters gain through their relationship to the prey. 206

AMOU R FOU AN D THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION persons (in the legal sense of the tenn) .34 In other words, the goal of the hunt is not to kill or capture the hunted, but to devalue him or her by allowing the chase to destroy their humanity while the state asserts its own liberal identity · vis-a-vis its dehumanized prey. The operation of this dialectic becomes especially spectacular in the form of police manhunts. The police occupy a specific place in the liberal imagina­ tion: they are at once the embodiment of the state's legal authority with the power of the police hunts presented as the instrument and servant of the law, and yet the police are defined by their proximity to criminality since their cynegetic power has been largely developed outside the judicial framework that now justifies it.35 Police then occupy a liminal position within liberal societies with respect to the law. This is because the police, as a power of pursuit, does not deal with legal subjects but rather with bodies in movement, bodies that escape and that it must catch, bodies that pass by and that it must intercept. [ . . ] To be an efficient hunter, one must pursue the prey despite the law, and e\•en against it. But this antinomy was not born in the imaginations of scriptwriters. In passing from the law to the police, we pass from one sphere of sovereignty to . another, from the theology of the state-the legal system-to its material form-the police. From its spiritual existence to its secu­ lar arm. Both deal with the same obj ects, but from different points of view: subjects without bodies/bodies without subjects.36 The police enter into a relationship with the bodies they pursue that is inherent­ ly predatory in its form and function. As such the police are not defined by their respect for the law, but by their love of the hunt.37 This means that the principle challenge to the cynegetic power of the police is the fugitive. A fugi­ tive's ability to avoid capture comes to pose a direct threat to state sovereignty by revealing to everyone the state's relative impotence.38 This constitutes the marshal iteration of (neo)liberal anxiety . .An omnipres­ ent fugitive is required for a state to actively construct itself through the opera­ tion cynegetic power, that is to say an omnipresent threat to the state's sover­ eignty. This creates an anxious push/pull tension located within the centre of liberal subjectivity that ensures that the threat is at once omnipresent and al34 Ibid., 50. Ibid., 54-6. 36 Gregoire Cbamayou, Manh1mts: A Philosophical History (Princeton: Princeton Universi­ ty Press, 201 2), 55. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 57. 3; 207

Anthony Faramelli ways hunted. I n other words, liberalism is predicated o n its obsessional rela­ tionship with the hunted object. The object is always at the same time present within the liberal subject and yet defined by its destruction. Along with the financial iteration, this further illuminates the predominate feature of liberalism being the bio-political production of an anxious obsession­ al subjectivity that is based on the individual being alienated within the com­ munity precisely because the perceived enemy is no longer necessarily existen­ tial, but could be located within the community.39 In other words, the liberal subject may function within a communal setting, but at the same time they are alienated from a sense of community because possible threats are no longer safely located 'out there' in a simple binary opposition. The anxiety arises from the possibility that threats are internal to a given society. SERIAL KILLERS AND THE LIBERAL HvlAGINATION This understanding of the liberal state as it functions within the neo-liberal global system gives us a better position from which we can interrogate the serial killer phenomenon. Serial killers as manhunters par excellence come to embodr the liberal imagination. The serial killer constructs their identity through the operation of the cynegetic power of manhunts, while at the same time their role as fugitive exposes the limits of state sovereignty. In this way the serial killer (temporarily) embodies the liberal state by out-performing the state in the oper­ ation of power. As such, the bio-politics deployed by the serial killer phenome­ non are identical to the neo-liberal bio-politics; that is to say that they are predi­ cated on an anxiety produced by obsessional neurosis. The serial killer an­ guishes in the ecstatic destruction of the object, only to immediately replace the loss with a new object to be hunted. It is desire turned against itself in an anx­ ious cycle of destruction and attachment. Or, to paraphrase Lacan, it is desire turned into shit. 40 Ironically, this was a position that Ramirez himself took in his own reading of the phenomenon. In prison Ramirez became a 'book junkie,' reading authors like Freud and Sade, as well as books on serial kill ers-his 'favourite' subject. His biographer, Philip Carlo, writes that after reading these 'dangerous' books he 'acquired insights into human nature and the world he'd never known exist­ ed.'4 1 Carlo claims that Ramirez's engagement with psychoanalysis, literature and critical theory helped him formulate the belief that 'society was hypocritical 39 See Chamayou, Manh11nts; Massumi, 'Everywhere You Want to Be.' 40 Lacan, The Seminars, xiv 8. 4 1 Philip Carlo, The Night Stalker: The u:ft and Crimes of One of Amero:a's Most Deadliest Killers (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 201 0), 441 . 208

AMOUR FOU AN D THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION and malicious and would cut you up and spit you out like so much cow cud if you let it happen.'42 Ramirez was far more e:iplicit on this point when during an interview with Mike �'atkiss he stated that, 'serial killers do on a small scale what governments do on a large one. They are a product of the times and these are bloodthirsty times.'4l Moving beyond reading Ramirez's juxtaposing of seri­ al kill ers against a larger political backdrop of American imperialism as him simply looking for some form of absolution, his intervention into political and social commentary explicitly invites a reading that situates the serial killer trope at the very heart of neo-liberal subjectivity. For Vronsky, the figure who best exemplified 'postmodern anxiety' was Ted Bundy.44 Accordingly, Ted Bundy was the personification of the white, bourgeois American: [He] was a handsome, athletic, well-spoken young man. He was unfailingly polite and popular, and appeared caring and concerned to those in his proximity. He was educated, sophisticated, and well mannered, a graduate with a wliversity degree in psychology. He had plenty of friends of different ages and romantic relationships with women. Many other women considered him their trusted friend and confidant. An elderly woman he befriended described him as a 'lovable rascal.' Another woman, a former police officer who would become i\merica's leading true-crime writer and who coincidentally knew him, described him as having 'old-world gal­ lantry.' He had worked as a suicide c oun s elor at a phone-in crisis clinic and had been recently admitted into law school in Seattle. The state government hired him as a crime-control consultant and he even wrote a rape-prevention handbook for women. He was a hardworking volunteer for the Republican Party, an often-invited dinner guest, and a popular date, and ·was considered by his elders as somebody worth grooming for a possible future as state gover­ nor, perhaps even president.45 This made it all the more unsettling that Bundy was also a 'necrophiliac who kidnapped, murdered, raped, and mutilated, in that order, twenty college-age women over a period of sixteen months . .\t one point he kept four of their 42 Ibid. 43 1 989 televised interview with �fike \�'atkiss: 'A Conversation with Richard Ramirez­ The Night Stalker,' available from https:/ / www .youtube.com/watch?v=MCShuwZoP ZA (accessed 31-05- 1 5). +1 Vronsky, Serial Killers, 23. 43 Ibid., 20-1 . 209

Anthony Faramelli heads in his apartment. H e burned the head of another in hi s girlfriend's fire­ place.'46 If Ted Bundy was the archetypal white, middle-class American man, then Ramirez, the son of working-class Mexican immigrants, represents the flipside of this coin. While Bundy was confident in his ability to live up to the U.S. masculine role, boasting an easy popularity with women before and after his incarceration, 47 Ramirez largely considered himself to be unattractive and was painfully shy around women.48 In fact, Carlo goes to great length to illustrate just how inadequate Ramirez was at fulfilling his gender role when he notes that Ramirez was unable to perfonn during his first sexual encounter, and then, for the following fourteen years, Ramirez only had sex with prostitutes.49 As such, following the liberal imagination, the trial of Richard Ramirez should never have resulted in his elevation to sex symbol. This is a shock that Carlo makes no attempt to hide: There were quite a few women now writing him every day, want­ ing to see him . When it reached the point of his having three dif­ ferent women on his visiting list, the jail stopped asking for a court order and relaxed visiting policies for Richard, and soon there were lines of women showing up at the jail to visit him. Nothing like this had ever been seen before. It was a bizarre phe­ nomenon that none of the guards at the jail could get over. It was almost as if Ramirez was a movie star rather than a man accused of entering people's homes while they slept and tearing their lives and bodies apart.so Nevertheless, the Night Stalker case was marked by an unprecedented outpour­ ing of amorous longing for Ramirez and a subsequent prison marriage, enshrin­ ing Ramirez, alongside Ted Bundy, as the figures who best came to embody America's postmodern anxiety. That Bundy and Ramirez should become the recipients of the amorous feeling of countless women is undoubtedly the most unsettling aspect of the serial killer phenomenon. This is because it draws a direct relationship between the obsessional neurosis-the foundation of neo­ liberal subjectivity-and love. That is to say, people who fall in love with serial killers do so precisely because they are the embodiment of the ecstatic destruc­ tion that neo-liberal modernity is based on. 46 Ibid, 2 1 . 47 Ibid., 69-1 39. -48 Carlo, The Night Stalker, 495. Ibid., 3 1 0, 495. so Ibid, 446. 49 210

AMO U R FOU AN D T H E ECSTACY OF DEST R U CTION Figure 2. Still from A Current A.ffair expose on Richard Ramirez, reported by Mike \\'atkiss, 1 989. �'hen examining women who fall in love with serial killers, people tend to assert ham-fis ted dismissals that they are-at best-suffering from hybristo­ philia, a psychological disorder marked by sexual arousal at the thought that your partner may have committed a violent crime .5I or-at worst-gullible idi­ ots, sycophantic attention seekers or else psychopaths themselves .52 Carlo goes so far as to ponder (in a gratuitously sexis t manner) that the reason must be that women at some level want to be physically abused, raped and possibly even killed.53 All of these summary conclusions once again fall back on the liberal moral argument, and in doing so they pathologize love unless it is located with­ in the confines of a productive heterosexist framework.54 At the s ame time, the liberal argument looks to place all pathologies outside the liberal system. How- 5 1 See Elizabeth Gurian, 'Explanations of :\!i.'i: ed-sex Partnered Homicide: :\ Review of Sociological and Psychological theory,' Aggrmio n and Violent Behavior 1 1 8 (201 2): 520-6. 52 See Pat Brown, 'How Can Some \\'omen Fall in LoYe With and Marry Serial Killers in Prison?,' J(j//ing For Sport: Inside the ,\find qf Serial Killers (California: Phoenix Books, 2003), 1 76-82. 53 Carlo, The Night Stalker, 804-5. 54 lbis opens up the much larger issues of sexism and gender roles in relation to trans­ gression. Simply put, masculinity is often constructed by a man's ability to transgress the law. Conversely, women are barred access to the experience of transgression. The woman's body constitutes the space where transgression, specifically sexual transgres­ sion, takes place, but she is not permitted agency in the act. For more on this issue see _\shley Tauchert, Against Transgression (London: \'\'iley-Blackwell, 2008). 21 1

Anthony F,aramelli ever, to look within the liberal imagination necessitates a close examination of love and how love has been constructed vis-a-vis its relationship with the jolfis... sance of ecstatic destruction and death. DIVINE LOVE The founding duty of both Hebrew and Christian civilizations (what can be thought of as the founding principles of Western society) is the law of lov� divine love of God and love of your neighbour as yoursel£55 The law of love in this case is-and can only be-a divine narcissistic love. This is because God is love, so to love yourself and by extension to love your neighbour as yourself. means that love is fundamentally both divine and narcissistic.56 The divinity of love means that to hold onto the loved object (once again, a return to the ob­ ject that is hunted for, and yet ungraspable and threatening) would entail th� impossible act of knowing God; as such, love, like ecstasy, communicates a dis­ equilibrium, an incompleteness. Or, phrased differently, love is only the nega­ tion of love. This is found most explicitly in the 'Song of Songs,' where absence is the condition that allows the loved object to be enjoyed.57 It is a 'love wicb the other's absence.'58 What is communicated is the ecstasy of love - going out­ side of oneself-and the incantation of love-the understanding of the other as self-that immediately opens up a relationship with the death drive at the heart of love. This becomes most vivid in Christianity where love is inscribed upon the body of Christ. 'Love is accomplished by means of a death that is tempo­ rary, to be sure, and yet scandalous, insane, inadmissible. Such a love does not aim at e ternity but resurrection, shouldering in its trajectory the low point of the annihilation of the loved one.'59 This reading of love foregrounds the obsessional matrix of neo-liberalism. The obsessive thought is a thought of jouissa11ce as well as a vehicle for jo11is­ sance.60 That is to say that the obsessive trapped in the cycle where the object is constantly sought after and destroyed is the motor for neo-liberal's libidinal jouissance. For both Freud and Lacan the object at the centre of obsessional anxiety is the mother, that is to say, it is the loved object within the Oedipal matrix. ss J ulia Kristeva, Tales of love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 987), 84-5. Ibid., 83-5. 57 Ibid., 84-9. ss Ibid., 89. 59 Ibid., 141. 6 ° Colette Soler, 'Hysteria and Obsession,' in Reading Se111i11ars I & II: Lacan's Return la Freud, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Marie Jaanus (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 248-82; 274. 56 212

AMOUR FOU AND THE ECSTACY OF DESTRUCTION _\s such, neo-liberal jo11im111ce is profoundly Oedipal, and barriers a significant relationship to narcissistic love in its relationship with death.61 Suffering then conditions jo11iscc11 e, while at the same time jo11issa11ce 'would be the spur of a new suffering quest.'62 The love that people feel for serial kill ers then is condi­ tioned by neo-liberal 's anguished ecs tasy The love that the serial killer exudes is conditioned by the necessity of the love ob1ect's repetitive destruction. The killer is identified within the divine love of the object, but must eternally de­ s troy it to qua n tify the love. The body in question is analogous to the Christ body where (narcissistic) love is understood as proportional to the suffering inflicted. As previously mentioned, hunters are not concerned with subjects, but bodies. Narcissistic love is solely concerned with and located on the body of the victim and the body must be destroyed since the love object is by defini­ tion unattainable within the Judeo-Christian framework. In this matrix, the nature of the neo-liberal subject-specifically the sub­ jec tivity that came to dominate the United States in the late 1 970s and through­ out the 1 980s-is fully fleshed-out. Following the dissolution of Breton Woods, American society saw the rise of the serial killer phenomenon and the declaration of the War on Drugs, all of which explicitly displaced power from soldiers fighting external enemies to the police, the hunters who track down internal threats. Coinciding with this amcious (but profitable) state of the nation, evangelical Christianity and its fundamentalist understanding of love enjoyed a resurgence.63 Evangelical Christianity's emphasis on the suffering body of Christ as love object presents a social line for the neo-liberal subject to associ­ ate with, however once again the libidinal dispo.ritif presented is an inherently anxious one. All ecstasy can only be anguished, marking the rerum (repetition) of the full narcissistic subject who exists in a state of disequilibrium.64 The psy­ choanalyst Julia Kristeva described the neo-liberal subject in these exact terms when commenting on those seeking analysis in the late 201h Century: . What analysands are henceforth suffering from is the abolition of psychic space. Narcissus in want of light as much as of a spring al­ lowing him to capture his true image, Narcissus drowning in a cascade of false images (from social roles to the media), hence de­ prived of substance or place: these contemporary characters are M Guattari, Anti-Oedip11s Papers, 251 . Kristeva, Tales of love, 1 6 1 . 6 3 See T . ::\t Luhrmann, IV'hen God Talks back.: Understanding the American Evangelical Rela­ tionship with God (New York: Alfred .\. Knopf, 201 2), 1 9-20; Kevin Philips, .American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Boml/Jtd Mon!) in the 2 111 Cenfllry G'ew York: Penguin Books, 2006), xvi-xvii; 99-2 1 8. �� Kristeva, Tales of love, 374. 6� 213

Anthony Faramelli witnesses to our being unable today to elaborate primary narcis­ sism. 65 THE SERIAL Klll.ER AND OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS The serial killer phenomenon has brought to light the obsessional neurosis that underwrites life in neo-liberal societies. The neo-liberal subject is locked into the obsessional cycle of creative destruction where the Oedipal love object must be both omnipresent and yet constantly destroyed. The subjects revel in the libidinal jonissa11ce of destruction, but it is an agonized ecstasy that can only be defined by lack. The serial killer has come to embody neo-liberal subjectivity. They are defined by the cynegetic power of the hunt, their prey is always pre­ sent and always being destroyed. Finally, serial killers are bound within a rela­ tion to love that is absolutely tied to the destruction of bodies. It is this law of love, divine love, that provides a singular-being with immonality by tying the subject to the society through the framework of creative destruction. It is this conception of love as 'having in the other the moment of one's substance'­ this love as narcissism-that secures the subject firmly within the death drive at the hean of neo-liberalism. 65 Ibid., 273-374. Emphasis in the original. 214

KILLING SPREE! Dominic Fox And you, whiner, who wastes your time Dawdling over the remorseless earth, %at evil, what unspeakable crime Have you made your life worth? -W. D. Snodgrass, 'After Experience Taught Me . . . ' From the town of Lincoln Nebraska with a sawed-off .41 0 on my lap Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path -Bruce Springsteen, 'N ebraska.' No two worlds could be more seemingly remote from each other than that of Bruce Springsteen's song 'Nebraska' (from the album of the same name) 1 and that of the video game Unreal Tournamen1.2 'Nebraska,' an introspective acoustic ballad which tells the story of the spree killer Charles Starkweather,3 is analog, 1 Bruce Springsteen, 'Nebraska,' Nebrasle.a (Columbia Records, 1 982). Cliff Beszinski and James Schmalz, Unreal Toumament '99 �ew York: GT Interactive Software, 1 999), PS2. 3 In the criminological classification of multiple murder, 'spree' killing is held to be dis­ tinct from 'serial' killing primarily because of the rapidity with which the spree killer progresses from victim to victim, escalating without hiatus or cooling off period. Unreal Tournament concurs: a 'killing spree' is announced when the player succeeds in dispatch­ ing multiple enemies in quick succession. The cultural image of spree killing differs from that of serial killing in more general terms, notably in the supposition that the serial killer is more methodical, and of higher intelligence and/ or socio-economic sta­ tus, than the spree killer. The psychology of a murderous rampage attracts less specula­ tion: the question is usually 'what made him snap?' rather than 'what was the structure of his fantasy?' Part of the accomplishment of 'Nebraska' is that it doesn't patronize its subject in this way: Starkweather may have been considered 'mentally subnormal,' in the parlance of 1958, but he himsdf refused the classification, which might have saved him from the dectric chair. As I hope to show here, with Springsteen's Starkweather 2 215

Dominic Fox intimate, understatedly empathetic; Unreal Tournament, a hectic shoot-em-up, is digital, distanced, and energetically cynical. What they have in common, howev­ er, is that both are first-person worlds, fictional constructs which put you-the listener, the player-in the shoes of a fust-person,4 who is also, and not coinci­ dentally, a killer. Both function, in the memorable phrase of anti-videogame campaigner Jack Thompson, as 'murder simulators,'5 which bring supposedly unthinkable acts within the scope of experience and imagination. What is a first-person world? It is a world in which the active nodes are persons, and in which each person comes 'first,' in a sacrificial relationship to all the others. It is on condition of first being a person that one can be inserted into such a world, oriented within it as a focal point of privileged experience: as an 'I' possessed of a first-person perspective, who alone knows what it is like to be myself. What was it like to be Charles Starkweather? In Springsteen's 'Ne­ braska,' being Charles Starkweather above all means being a first-person, the bearer of a narrative voice which enunciates a subject-position. Starkweather is thus included in the world of Springsteen protagonists, humanized on condi­ tion that his humanity appear, like that of all the others, as lyrically articulated humanity-in-the-first-person. For the duration of the song, at least, Starkweath­ er takes centre stage as a paradigmatic human being, being a first-person the only way he knows how. Springsteen has his Starkweather-narrator say, by way of explanation for his misdeeds, 'well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world.'6 Let us agree to call the 'mean' world the world whose axioms are those named by Au­ den in 'The Shield of Achille s': 'That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third / Were axioms to him, who'd never heard / Of any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept.'7 The centre of gravity of the the question 'what was the structure of his fantasy?' is as crucial as it migh t be with a more patient and intermittent killer. 4 Throughout this essay I use the hyphenated noun 'first-person' to denote a person specifi.cally in the aspect of their being the bearer of a 'first-person perspective,' and also as assuming a kind of 'firstness' with respect to the world, an attitude of priority towards it and towards the other persons within it '.\ first-person' is a person whose way of being in the world is that demanded by a 'first-person world,' a world ontologi­ cally structured around first-personhood. This may seem circular, but its circularity is precisely that of methodological individualism. which simultaneously posits an atomic individuality as the unit of composition of social structure, and the social institution of private property as the enabling condition of that individuality, providing the horizon within which self-interest can be legitimatdy recognized and practiced. 5 See Scott Beattie, 'Extremity, Video Games and the Censors,' M/CJ011rna/ 9.5 (2006), <http:/ /journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php> (accessed 10-05-201 5). 6 Springsteen, �ebraska.' 7 W. H. Auden, 'The Shidd of .\chille s,' in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Menddson (New York: Vintage Books, 1 9 89) , 198-200. 216

K(LUNG SPREE! mean world is the necessity and desirability of causing pain to others, the ab­ sence of any social or sympathetic bond more powerful than the drive to inflict hun and to derive pleasure from so doing It is a world in which cruelty is not . only instrumental, as it might be in a resource war or Hobbesian contest of all­ against-all, but an active principle, a wellspring of enjoyment. The world of children at play can seem like this, as can the world of social media: a riot of egoities, of first-persons coming-first, each engaged in an ongoing spree of (not always only) symbolic cruelty and violence. As Springsteen-as-Starkweather says, referring to the ten murders Stark-weather committed with his teenage girl­ friend in tow, 'at least for a little while sir, me and her we had some fun.'8 Children at play are not exclusively cruel and egotistical, of course: they are also learning to make amends, to seek and to offer respite from pain and rec­ ompense for injury, to be tender and vulnerable and understanding with each other. But cruelty, and the enjoyment of cruelty, is undoubtedly part of the pro­ cess. The causing of pain is one of the ways in which one can come to know oneself as socially effective, as a 'player' in the social world One tests one's own capacity for cruelty at the same time as the other person's capacity to ab­ sorb it. An appetite for this pastime is not necessarily a sign of diminished em­ pathy. A person without empathy has no reason to take any interest in anoth­ er's discomfort. Ordinary children are intensely interested in unhappiness, and will gladly provoke it in others in order that they may learn more about it. The mean world, then, is a kind of extrapolation from the ordinary social world­ not its final truth, but a dystopian projection, an image of what life under the general dominion of cruelty and egotism would look like. The world of Unreal To11rnamml is similarly a mean world, an extrapolated world. The player is inserted into the game-\\rorld as a roving first-person per­ spective attached to a gun, which projects into the viewport as the player's only visible embodiment within the scene. On dying, this perspective is cast aside and we see the player's avatar within a third-person view, collapsing in mortal agony or exploding in a spray of 'gibs' ('giblets,' or gobbets of virtual flesh) . In online multiplayer mode, each human participant in the world of Unreal Tour­ nament experiences it in the same way, as a mobile point-of-view with introject­ ed weapon. The player's task is to find others and frag them, blasting them out of their first-person embodiment with bullets and rockets, shrapnel grenades and plasma balls and bursts of crackling lightning. I am most intensely present in this world, most pointedly myself, when gazing through the scope of a sniper rifle, looking for enemies to decapitate with a single headshot. A moment of guilty pleasure awaits players of Unreal Tournament who work their way up through its single-player levels: the notorious 'Facing Worlds' map, which permits the player to ascend to an elevated vantage point in one of two 8 Springsteen, 'Nebraska.' 21 7

Dominic Fox facing towers overlooking an asteroid, and use a sniper rifle to pick off enemies as they attempt to cross from one tower to the other. If you're crafty, you can rack up a lot of kills from that position while remaining nearly invulnerable yourself. It's an interlude where the usual dynamics of the game, which require you to keep moving around, restlessly searching for targets and dodging bullets from other players who are doing the same, are temporarily unbalanced in your favour. It feels like a brilliant breaking of the bank, a quite unlosable game.9 The more kill s you make in a row without getting killed yourself, the more hy­ perbolic the announcer's praise becomes: 'Headshot! Double kill! Killing spree! Godlike!' Unreal Tonrnammt has the defence of irony (the clue's in the title). Death is only temporary in its arenas: the fragged continually respawn, and are hurled back into battle moments after their demise. Its endless combat, its uninter­ rup ted supply of occasions for sadistic glee, belong to the genre 'violent future sport' rather than 'hellish future war.' There is an implied satire on the savagery to which the unchecked spectatorial impulse can turn itself. The locations cho­ sen for combat are abandoned places bereft of human purpose: ruined fortress­ es, deserted space stations, dilapidated industrial facilities where no-one works. 1bis is not a hopeful, outward-looking, space-faring Star Trek society: this is a technologically advanced leisure society which has chosen to stagnate whilst entertaining itself with slaughter. There is an implied analogy with the role played by big-league sports in contemporary US society, but it's probably not worth pursuing beyond the obvious (politically docile masses distracted by the spectacle, man). The point is this: Unreal Tonmamenfs mean world is a simula­ crum. The game is not a 'murder simulator' so much as a 'murder-simulator simulator.'10 If the killings in Unreal Tonmammt are enacted in order to be ·witnessed by an anonymous, spectatorial third-party, the structure of address in Nebraska is that of a first-person addressing a second: a 'you,' addressed as 'Sheriff" and 9 Cf. Then all at once the quarrel sank: / Everyone felt the same, I And every life be­ came / A brilliant breaking of the bank, / A quite unlosable game' (Philip Larkin, '.An­ nus Mirabilis,' in Collected Poems, ed. :\nthony Thwaite [London: Faber & Faber, 1 988), 1 67). 1 0 Cf. Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulacra and Simulations,' in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 988), 1 6�1 84. The killings in Unreal Tournament are victimless, since death has been robbed of its finality; the game thus stages a 'perfect crime,' in which reality itself, or the referent ('God,' say, or death) which provides a halting-point for the system of symbolic exchange, is itself liquidated and absorbed into that system. At this point, according to Baudrillard, 'the whole system becomes wdght­ less; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum : not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference' (1 73). 21 8

KILLING SPREE! 'sir.' If we take into account the implied presence of this second person, we come to realize that 'Nebraska' presents two situations simultaneously. The first is the monologic, first-person situation in which Starkweather abides, and which he is condemned to leave by being 'hurled' into 'that great void'1 1 that lies beyond first-person experience. The second is the dialogic situation in which Starkweather, facing imminent personal ex tinction in the electric chair, is speaking to another person who will presumably survive him . Starkweather himself has lived and moved and had his being within a mean world, and has acted in accordance with its axioms: the explanation he offers for his actions makes no reference to his own motivations or moral nature, but is a matter-of­ fact statement about the character of reality. It is not that he disclaims respon­ sibility for his actions, but that his reasons are in a sense extrinsic: they belong to the logic of the world in which he appears. Starkweather thus represents a kind of short-circuit within the couple self/world: an isolated atom of the \vorld, he acts as if entirely determined by his place in it, doomed to be what he is and to die for it. The dialogic situation is different: it pivots around the cou­ ple selfI other, in which the world is backdrop and occasion for a human en­ counter in which reasons are asked for and given. In this situation there are no isolated atoms, and there is no unilateral determination, rather there is intersub­ jective negotiation, the revision of one perspective by another. Listening to 'Nebraska,' you can experience the vicarious chill of identify­ ing with the narrator, and imagining what it might be like to live so entirely in conformance with the norms of the mean world; or you can identify with his unnamed interlocutor, and imagine instead the sadness of being confronted with a condemned man, a man who has become identical with his crimes and for whom no redemptive expansion or revision of seltbood seems possible. The drama of condemnation, seen from both sides, is central to 'Nebraska.' However, there is a third position: that o f s usp en ding identification, and seeing both figures according to a 'view from nowhere' 1 2 in which both appear other­ ·w:ise than according to a logic of personhood, whether monologic or dialogic. This is the view suggested by the album cover of 'Nebraska' itself, a bleak un­ peopled landscape viewed through a car ·windshield. Springsteen's reference in the lyrics to 'the badlands of Wyoming' is a nod to Terence Malik's film Badlands,13 which dramatized Starkweather's murders. The conceit is that there is something in the condition of the landscape itself which predisposes its in­ habitants to violence, as if the violence of the past had been absorbed by its 11 S p rings teen, 'Nebraska.' Cf. Thomas Nagel, The View From 'l'\-owhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 986). 13 Badlands, directed by Terence :\falik (1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1 999), DVD. 1: 21 9

Dominic Fox surroundings and was oozing out of them back into the present. Here violence is impersonal, a force which precedes personhood and remains latent within it. Springsteen's view here is not straightforwardly mythical, attributing ma­ lign spiritual powers to the landscape, but instead uses the metaphor of the 'badlands' to frame a social commentary. 'Ill fares the land'1 4 is a prophetic s tatement about a polity, in which 'the land'-its dwellings and lonely enclaves, its farmlands and factories-represents the place of politics: where it all begins, and where it all comes down. Springsteen's perception is that Reaganomics, the crusading neo-liberal doctrine of the 1 980s, has wrought a change in the land, a dispossession both material and spiritual. Nebraska's lonely, anomic figures traverse a badlands which has been made so by the withdrawal of human soli­ darity and care, an ill -tended terrain which affords poor sustenance for its in­ habitants. It is not nature itself which is evil but abandonment and desuetude, which make for places where human beings still are, but are no longer able to live. Seen from this perspective, Starkweather and the man guarding him are neither separate egoities, each focalizing the world in his own separate lived experience, nor participants in an intersubjective encounter for which the world is merely a supporting backdrop, but are both immanent to the badlands they inhabit, creatures of their landscape, such that their stories are ultimately in­ stances of its story. The most intimate lyrical rendition of atomized first­ personhood coincides with a prophetic vision, or what the French 'non­ philosopher' Fran�ois Laruelle might call a 'Vision-in-One.'15 The 'meanness in this world' that Starkweather identifies is precisely the deformation of the land into a first-person world, an arena of combat - whether by economic competi­ tion or by pulse rifle and shrapnel cannon. To respond to this deformation by deforming yourself into the kind of subj ect it deman ds is to become, if not ac­ tually a kill er, then a type of first-person of which the killer, the champion of the unreal tournament, is the apotheosis. Godlike! 1 � The reference is to Tony Judt, Ill Fam the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (New York: Penguin Press, 201 0). J udt's title is itself a citation from a poem of Oliver Goldsmith's, 'The Deserted Village': 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.' See Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village,' in Poems and Plays, ed. Tom Davis (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1 990), 179-92. t s Th e 'Vision-in-One' is Laruelle's name for a 'non-philosophical' theoria which envi­ sions a 'radical immanence' as yet uncorrelated with any representational syntax. See Franc;:ois Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 201 3), 20-1 and passim. 220

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK THE RIPPER Paul J. Ennis In 1 988, a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent, John E. Douglas, compile d a brief rep ort on the case of Jack the Ripper. • In contradistinction to the tiresome s ensationalism that blights the field of Ripperology, this short document is remarkably considered, and an invaluable resource. It refuses the temptation to provide a name for the kill er and rather helps us build an under­ standing of the type of person the Ripper might have been. It benefits as a re­ port from the rather unfortunate fact that the United States has such a rich tra­ dition of serial killing. However, it remains constrained in the same manner as all other approaches to the case, namely, the sloppiness of the original investi­ gation, the ad hoc approach to au t opsie s and crime-scene photography, and the total absence of techniques we take for granted in our CSI-saturated world.2 The report begins with the \'lctims, by n o ting, as is well-known, that the Ripper targeted heavy-drinking prostitutes.3 .-\.t the time, the working-poor women of London would often turn to prostitution in order to afford doss­ houses, usually due to drinking their m oney away during the day, and would accordingly be forced to remain on the streets until the early hours.4 The eco­ nomics of the time would further lead, I would con j e ctu re , to riskier behaviour 1 John E. Douglas, 'Jack the Ripper; Part 1 of 1 ,' FBI &cords: The VaN/t Q'uly 6, 1 988), available from http://vault.tbi.gov/Jack%20the%20Ripper/J ack%20the%20Ripper% 20Part%201 %20of/o201 /view (accessed 26-05-1 5) . � I have written briefly about the attnospherics of thi s time and of how i t hindered po­ lice tactics at Paul J. Ennis, 'Jack the Ripper and the case of Emma Smith,' <http:/ /blog.oup.com/ 201 3 /04 I jack-the-ripper-emma-smith-whitechapel/ 013>. 3 Douglas, FBI, 2. � Cf. 'Smith was attacked, like many women in her trade, as she left one of the many local pubs populated by the working-poor of London. She may very well have found herself, like the canonical Ripper victims, in the dangerous situation of needing to recu­ perate the money she had spent boozing. �Ioney was needed for a bed at one of the local doss-houses. The easiest way to do this was street prostitution and this took place in the early hours of the morning. This entailed hanging around pitch-black streets; street lamps being rare and sparse' (Ennis, 'Emma Smith'). On the living-conditions of working-class women during this time, see Andrew August, Poor Women '! Live1: Gender, lfork and Poverry in Late Victorian undon (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1 999). 221

Paul J . Ennis in spite of the presence-as with the later murders--o f a serial killer operative in the area. My ambition in what follows is to grasp the psycho-geographical conditions allowing for Jack's crime-spree to continue, rather than to focus on the brutality of the specific murders. In this sense, what interests us here is not what Jack did to his victims, but how he managed to do it. It is my contention that the geography and psychosphere of East End London were in Jack's favour.s To set the broad scene, imagine contemporary London stripped of electric lighting, absent of CCTV cameras, and lightly po­ liced in predictable beats.6 Now, replace each contemporary building with ten­ ements, bricks-and-mortar, old-and-dirty industry, rudimentary hygiene stand­ ards, smoke with unknown provenance, men and women passing through in constant streams, at all hours, from work and from the pub, and you are some­ what closer to the grimness of London's East End in 1 888.7 As the FBI dossier states, the geographical profile of the murder-scenes follow a pattern evident in other serial-crimes.8 The first scene, at Buck's Row, is the original, and the area is avoided by the Ripper from then on. 9 Considered, according to the FBI analysis, as the 'primary comfort zone,' the suspect moves toward a 'secondary' one as resources focus on the primary. 1 0 Intriguingly, the analyst notes that the primary zone would surely have included further Ripper crimes, but let us stick with the canonical five for reasons of economy, although Douglas would attribute other known murders to the Ripper. 1 1 The secondary zone comprises the nexus, roughly triangular, formed between Hanbury Street, Outfield's Yard, Mitre Square and Miller's Court (the reader is encouraged to trace these lines in the map below to familiarise themselves with the area). 12 5 This term is used by the character Rust Coble in the HBO show TrNe Detective to ex­ press the abnospherics of a certain locale, and neatly captures the mix of negative psy­ chological and geographical intrication that tends to pervade bleak settings. See TrNe Detective, written by Nie Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Jaji Fukunaga (201 4; Burbank, C.A: Warner Home Video, 201 4), DVD. Cf. Paul ]. Ennis, 'The :\bnospherics of Con­ sciousness,' in Edia Connole, Paul ] . Ennis, and Nicola i\fasciandaro, eds., True Detection (London: Schism, 2014), 96-1 04. 'Emma Smith. ' See also Lynda Nead, Victorian Baf?ylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century Llndon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 7 An excellent account of the streetscape of the time can be found in William Fishman, East End 1888 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1 988) . 8 Douglas, FBI, 3. 9 This was the murder oL \Jary Ann Nichols on August 31" 1 888; Nichols is generally 6 Ennis, considered the first canonical murder victim of the Ripper. 10 II 12 Douglas, FBI, 3. Ibid. I n order, th e next victims ar e Annie Chapman, September 8th, followed b y the dou­ ble-event of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on September 30ih and, finally, Mary Jane Kelly on November 9th. 222

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK TH E RI PPER Figure 1. Crime scene locations, from an 1 888 Ordinance Survey Map of the White­ chapel .Area. 13 Whilst here one can agree that there is a clear triangular formation within the secondary zone, it is curious that Douglas does not mention how one could also read the first three murders as forming one too: running from Buck's Row to Hanbury Street to Outfield's Yard. In fact, since Douglas, and general con­ sensus, consider primary zones as more likely to be closer to the killer's home, this triangle seems more significant, because the second triangle is formed on the basis of the double-event which was in itself caused by Jack being disturbed in the act and so forced to find a second victim. Hence, the first triangle is the more natural one relative to the contingent nature of the second, and perhaps gives us a better sense of his original spatial intentions. The Ripper, in moving zones, clearly knew to keep moving, but nonethe­ less did strike out a recognisable sphere of influence. Perhaps worried that a pattern was discerned, one amongst many reasons possible, there is a slight wait between the fourth and fifth murder, from September 30th to November 9th 1 888, which could speak to Jack's cautiousness as time passed. That he then disappears, if it was calculated based on possibility of capture, is genuinely im­ pressive. Barring an unrelated arrest, suicide, his being murdered, or another contingent matter, it is perfectly plausible that Jack, if he were, say, aged thirty 13 ' 1 888 Ordinance Survey Map of Whitechapel Area,' Casebook Productions, available from http:/ /www. casebook.org/victorian_london/maps.html (accessed 27-05- 1 5). 223

Paul J . Ennis in 1 888, could have lived happily into his nineties, which is long enough for him to have home witness to the Second World War. 1 4 Wh o then was Jack? Well he was a Jack, fo r sure. As Douglas notes, cases of female lust serial killers are rarely encountered. 1 5 Furthermore, our best wit­ nesses, although conflicting in detail, always refer to a male . 1 6 As the profile sugge sts, we can also assume he was a white male on the simple basis of the racial profile of the population at the time.17 We are also informed that killers o f this type are generally in their late twenties t o mid- thirties, although the report itself refuses to exclude different age-ranges. 1 8 Finally, our suspect is also some­ one who 'does not look out of the ordinary,' but nonetheless dresses up ever so slightly in order to entice his victims into initiating contact.19 The psychological profile generated by the report is perhaps the most fas­ cinating aspect of the document: our suspect was, it is suggested, 'raised by a domineering mother and a weak, passive and/ or absent father.'20 Tellingly, his mother was quite possibly a drunk consistently in the company of different men (an informal 'prostitute' in the mind of Jack, one imagines) . As expected this neglect leads to detachment and, as is quite well-known concerning serial killers, this culminates in a lack of empathy that is first externalised in minor acts of arson and the torture of animals. In time, such practises escalate until the targets are human beings .2 1 Stewing away at work, something solitary most likely, our killer, the quiet type, did not spend too much time in the company of others. There is one ex­ ception, and here the report provides us with a space to begin our journey with Jack. He comes alive, we hear, in local pubs, especially after a few drinks allow him to temporarily overcome his shyness. And what is this process? The lessen­ ing of inhibitions when inebriated is familiar to us all. Except with J ack this did not mean he might dance, or flirt with the bar lady. Rather, it means the fanta­ sies of his working days, churning away ever so slightly, bubble-up to the sur- 14 I will return to this toward the end of the article, but I am also working on a more robust analysis of precisely what the implications of Jack's living-on would have been. 1 s D ouglas, FBI, 5. 16 In the specific case we will be focusing on, that of Elizabeth Stride, a male is men­ tioned by all the credible witnesses whose testimony we will examine momentarily. 17 Douglas, FBI, 5. Again a non-white male would have surely emerged in witness statements if this had been a distinguishing feature, as it most certainly was in the East End at the time. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid 20 Ibid. The following portrait is gleaned from the FBI dossier. 21 See Paul O' Brien, 'Religion, Domination And Serial Killing: Western Culture .And Murder,' in this volume. 224

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK THE RI PPER face. Th e anxiety that cripples such a type socially without alcohol-shaky hands, low confidence, over-thinking, unease-all recede. This is worrisome because these are precisely what keep the fantasies in check. They retard the advance of strategically carrying-out such fantasies, which require a degree of grace, social charm, the illusion of fitting-in, self-confidence, and a smattering of courage. Granting his effectiveness as a killer, these traits were there in his personality all along, but constantly re-routed by nervousness and so dissipated Intoxication rendered explicit what was implicit in his character-the height­ ened traits necessary to fulfill acts of sociopathy. Alcohol, then, is, as ever, a bridge to violence. Let us begin where we find it, in a public house, of which the East End boasted many.22 In what follows, we are concerned with Jack on the road, emerging from the public house, in­ toxicated, in the mood, and ready to stalk. And we will focus on September 30th 1 888, because it places us squarely in the middle of the five canonical murders. Jack has already murdered :Mary Ann Nichols on August 3151 at Buck's Row, the primary zone, and has since murdered Annie Chapman on September 8th at 29 Hanbury Street, the first in the secondary zone. B oth killings are audacious in their execution and in both instances, Jack, of course, escapes. The night of September 30th however, is notable for being the one time that Jack was inter­ rupted, thus leading to a second killi ng on the same night. N ow, there are a number of reasons why the first killing is more signifi­ cant, and these broadly relate to the number of witnesses or bystanders that were present in the vicinity of Berner Street (now Henriques Street) where Eliz­ abeth Stride was found murdered. In essence, it is Stride's murder that speaks strongest of Jack's skill as a killer. The murder scene is , one must also note, in close proximity to Commercial Road, a well-known and busy London thor­ oughfare connecting the City of London to the 'docklands ' area (roughly en­ compassing contemporary Canary Wharf) . \\'e can get a sense of the wider ter­ rain from a contemporary map: = See l\fark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio Vista, 1 975). 225

Paul J . Ennis Glllrry • Figure 2 . Commercial Road and environs.23 Notably, Bemer Street runs from north to south and takes us to the south­ ernmost tip of Jack's murders. The site of the murder is located on the west side of the street prior to the junction (across from where the red balloon stands in the map above) . Now, assuming that J ack, going by how northerly his other murders were, reached Bemer Street on a downtrend, it seems plausible that he approached it by way of Commercial Road. There are four routes into the street by turning off Commercial Road. 'One may walk directly down Bemer Street, or one can enter, via Christian or Batty Street (to the east of Bemer Street) , or by Back Church Lane (to the west) . In these three cases one would cut through Fairclough Street and then turn up to Berner Street at the intersec­ tion. On September 29 ch we know that Stride had been drinking at the Queen's Head pub at 6.30 p.m., returned to her lodging house, and then headed back out again at approximately 8.00 p.m. 24 She was not seen again until 1 1 .00 p.m., when two local labourers, John Gardner and J . (possibly J ohn) Best, tell us she was with a gentleman at the Bricklayer's Arms on Settles Street, which runs 23 'Henriques Street,' Google Maps 20 14, available from https:/ /www. google.ie/maps/pl ace/Henriques+St,+Shadwell,+London+E 1 + 1 NB,+UK/@5 1 .5 1 35844,0.0653904,1 7z /data= !3m1 !4b1 !4m2!3m1 ! 1 s0x48760334bceb5847:0xfd21 bcd085501 73d (accessed 2705-15). 24 'Inquest Report,' The Times (October 4, 1 888). Due to various historical contingencies the original reports are lost, but a fairly accurate picture can be built from newspaper reports from the time. 226

ON TH E ROAD WITH JACK THE RI PPER north to south on to Commercial Road and is to the west of Bemer Street.25 The distance to the crime scene is relatively short, but the time between the sighting and the murder runs at two hours (her body was found at 1 .00 a.m.) . 26 Gardner and Best, for whatever reasons, gave their account to a newspaper and it seems possible the police considered the timeframe too far off to consider her companion a suspect. Furthermore, as we will see, there are far better wit­ nesses. Most likely this fellow was a client who rather unfortunately brought Stride unintentionally under the gaze of Jack. However, going by the FBI analysis it is surely not beyond the realm of probability that Jack was either present in the Bricklayer's Arms or was watch­ ing from outside for signs of a prostitute at work. Given that it was relatively early, this may have been necessary, since it would have taken a few more hours before women became desperate enough to roam in numbers by the edgier East End streets for doss-house money. Commercial Road, as we see in the map generated by Charles Booth below, was populated by a slightly better class of characters than the wider area was known for, and this, as Booth puts it, 'Middle-class,' is represented by the red lines running alongside Commercial Road. However, a simple tum in most directions leads directly into what Booth's map describes as 'Lower-class: vicious, semi-criminal' areas, of which Bemer Street falls into roughly. Let us assume that Jack had, in fact, been inside the Bricklayer's Arms on Settles Street that night. Perhaps his recent escapades have been playing on his mind and, as always, he knows the best method of quelling an anxious mind is to drink. He is drinking at an almost exactly triangulated point from the first two murders, which runs from Buck's Row, then west to Hanbury Street, and then southeast to Settles Street. The shift south is possibly carefully considered. 1he assumption may have been that J ack was operating above the Whitechapel Road and the mass of streets bet\veen it and Commercial Road may have acted as a kind of psychological barrier that he would now come to exploit. This is not to suggest there are any major stumbling blocks between moving between the two, there are not, but there is, at least, enough superficial distance, coupled with time passing, that may have triggered a trend of throwing caution to the wind outside his presumed hunting ground. Jack, having imputed this, may have chosen the Bricklayer's Arms precisely for its proximity to Bemer Street and its surrounding entry points. One possi­ bility is that Jack could have been biding his time ever so slightly, to let Gardner and Best enter and settle into the pub . \�'ith most eyes on Stride and her client, a less conspicuous lone male could easily slip out of the Bricklayer's unnoticed. Either way, Stride's client is soon led (or leads) in the direction of Bemer Street, 25 'Interview,' Evening News (October 1, 1 888). 26 Ibid.; approximately two-hundred yards according to Gardner and Best. 227

Paul J. Ennis The Stree t s � eololll? d acco!ding to tho gtru!ral condition of U� u1Mbit6llts, es under •• Fairly comforteble. Good ordmary earning:; • Middle-c lass WeU..t o.oo. • Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy. • Lower closs . Vici:>us, semi-criminal. Mmd Some comfort8ble, othen poor A cozrbination of colows • • es derl< blue 6lld black, or pink and red .• ind.:ates that the street conlm • fair proportion of each of the classes teprestnted by the teSpectM colows Figure 3. Charles Booth's Map of London Poverty, 1 889.27 where it is a half-hour to forty-five minutes \:>efore the pair are spotted again. Jack, to my mind, has been loitering not far behind them. A safe pace so as no1 to arouse suspicion, perhaps availing of intermittent stoppages to ensure hi� presence is not felt or only minimally felt. The next sighting of St.ride, if not necessarily of Jack, is at 1 1 .30 p.m., when William Marshall , stood outside his home at 64 Berner Street, first glimpses a couple, and then, at 1 1 .45 p.m., makes a more distinct identification of St.ride with a 'decently dressed' gentleman 'with the appearance of a clerk' a few doors down from his house.28 Marshall's home and the sighting take place on Berner Street, but not where one might expect them to be. For instance, in following the map below, an 'X' marks Boyd Street, which Marshall uses to situate the couple in his testimony: 'She was on the pavement opposite No. 63 [Berner Street], and between Christian-street and Boyd-street.'29 Much of this suggests that St.ride is, at this time, still with her client from the public house and that, ?7 'Charles Booth's Map of London Poverty, 1 889,' Casebook Production.r, available from http:/ / www.casebook.org/victorian_london/maps.html (accessed 27-05-1 5). !8 'Inquest Report,' The Times (October 6, 1 888). '.9 Ibid. !28

ON TH E ROAD WITH JACK THE RI PPER given the time-lapse, they have taken a rather leisurely route down Bemer Street. It is not cle:ar whether they have done so directly or from a side-route. ·i:;r_..:;. ____ -� """- .,,, ... ·---- Figure 4. Boyd Street. Now, between Marshall's sighting and the next, there are other people in the area we should take note of. William West is at the International Working Men's Educational[ Club which, as we see in the following image , is the building with the cart-wheel located right beside Outfield's Yard, and he leaves at 1 2. 1 5 p.m.30 Other possible street-dwellers are Charles Letchford, who was passing at 1 2.30 a.m., Fanny Mortimer, who claims to be loitering outside her home at 36 Bemer Street be�iveen 1 2.30 a.m. and 1 .00 a.m. (she also mentions a young couple in the area prior to the murder),31 Morris Eagle, who is passing through the yard at 1 2.35 :a.m.,32 and finally, Joseph Lave, who was getting fresh-air in Outfield's Yard at 1 2.40 a.m.33 So, people were about, but this does not seem to have deterred Jack in any strong sense. 30 'Inquest report,' Dai/y Telegraph (October 2, 1 888). Reported in Evening News (October 1 , 1 888). Mortimer did witness a suspicious char­ acter at roughly 1 .00 a.m., but he was later identified as Leon Goldstein, who was promptly cleared as a suspect for mundane reasons about which one can learn in Paul Begg, Martin Fido a:nd Keith Skinner, The Complete Jade the P.ipptr: A to Z (London: John Blake Publishing, 201 0). 32 Reported in The Times (October 2, 1 888). 11 R ep orted in Eveni•'1g News (October 1 , 1 888). 31 229

Paul J . Ennis Figure 5. The International Working Men's Educational Club.34 At 1 2.35 a.m. our best witness appears, one Police Constable \�'illiam Smith, on his beat down Berner Street. He spots Stride and a gentleman opposite the Working Men's Educational Club. His testimony, granting his profession, is worth quoting in full: [Coroner] : Was the woman anything like the deceased? [Smith] : Yes. I saw her face, and I think the body at the mortuary is that of the same woman. [Coroner] : Are you certain? [Smith] : I feel certain. She stood on the pavement a few yards from where the body was found, but on the opposite side of the street. [Coroner] : Did you look at the man at all? [Smith) : Yes. [Coroner] : �'hat did you notice about h1m? [Smith] : He had a parcel wrapped in a newspaper in his hand. The parcel was about 1 8in. long and 6in. to Sin. broad. [Coroner] : Did you notice his height? [Smith] : He was about Sft. 7in. [Coroner] His hat? 34 'Bemer Street and Dutfield's Yard,' Casebook Productions, available from http: / / www. casebook.org/victorian_london / sitepics.w-bemer.html (accessed 27-05- 15). 230

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK THE RI PPER [Smith] : H e wore a dark felt deerstalker's hat. [Coroner] : Clothes? [Smith] : His clothes were dark. The coat was a cutaway coat. [. . .] [Coroner] : Did you see the man's face? [Smith] : He had no whiskers, but I did not notice him much. I s hould say he was twenty-eight years of age. He was of respectable appearance, but I could not state what he was [ . . . ]35 The mos t important detail? The small parcel. That Smith sees this couple roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes before the time of Stride's murder, and that the male is carrying a parcel, almost invariably leads newly-minted Ripper­ ologists to believe Smith definitely did glim?se Jack. The location fits neatly too, just meters from Dutfield's Yard. Notably, Smith gives us a very definite age, he believes the man was about twenty eight, which would place him squarely within the age-range of the FBI profile. 1bis time we hear of respecta­ ble appearance, but not of dress per se or of profession, which Smith cannot place. At approximately 1 2 . 45 a.m., we have another witness, one James Brown, but Brown admitted to have not been able to see much in the darkness.36 The timing here is very close to that of t he next incident which, if Brown had wit­ nessed, he would surely have paid more attention to. One possibility is that Brown, slightly misjudging the time, had in fact passed the couple briefly allud­ ed to by Fanny Mortimer as being in the vicinity of Berner Street prior to and after the rnurder.37 It is essential that we get to one of the most famous witnesses of all in t he Ripper case, namely, Israel Schwartz, who we find walking down Berner Street at 1 2.45 a.rn. (coming down from Commercial Road) . Right outside Dutfield's Yard, Schwartz encounters a couple. Based on a translation of Schwarz's tes ti­ mony, we are told that when he . . . got as far as the gateway where the murder was committed, he s aw a man stop and speak to a woman, who was standing in the gate­ way. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round and threw her down on the footway and the woman screamed three times, but not loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he s aw a second man standing lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out, appar­ ently to the man on the opposite side of the road, 'Llpski,' and '; 'Inquest Testimony,' The Daify Telegraph (October 6, 1 888). I q e st report,' The Times (October 4, 1 888). ;- Evening News (October 1, 1 888). '� ' n u 23 1

Paul J. Ennis then Schwartz walked away, but finding that he was followed by the second man, he ran so far as the railway arch, but the man did not follow so far. Schwartz cannot say whether the two men were together or known to each other. Upon being taken to the Mortuary Schwartz identified the body as that of the woman he had seen. He thus de­ scribes the first man, who threw the woman down:- age, about 30; ht, 5 ft 5 in; comp., fair; hair, dark; small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak, and nothing in his hands . Second man: age, 35; ht., 5 ft 1 lin; comp., fresh; hair, light brown; dress, dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat, wide brim; had a clay pipe in his hand,3B This account is famous for a few reasons. Stride will be found at 1 .00 a.m., a mere fifteen minutes later, and Schwartz positively identified her body. The age profiles of our suspects also fits closely that provided by Smith. We are in the late-twenties, mid-thirties range we would expect when we include the second man. Indeed, that second man. We will get to him in a moment, but as it goes, we know Schwartz first encounters a couple close to the murder scene, there is a tussle and the male forces her to the ground, Schwartz wisely decides to move to the opposite side of the road, only then to notice a second man (on the same side of the road) standing on the comer, roughly at the junction of Fairclough Street. In the official statement, the presence of this second man, who lights his pipe, prompts the first to shout 'Llpski' at the pipe-smoker.39 It is impossible to tell why he does so, but it prompts the pipe-smoking man to briefly follow Schwartz. It seems possible the slur was directed at either the pipe-smoking man to let him know a 'Lipski' or Jew (Schwartz) was nearby and interrupting them. That the pipe-smoking man then follows Schwartz seems to attest to this. Note, of course, that this event takes place outside the International Working Men's Educational Club, a Jewish club, and the comment may have been no more than common prejudice from a client and his friend who were assuming anyone in the area is there to enter the club, possibly via Dutfield's Yard, and here some territory was being marked out for some kind of act (intercourse or, 38 Note these are not precisdy Schwartz's words, but reported by Chief Inspector Don­ ald Swanson and based on a translation of Schwartz's testimony. See Begg, Fido and Skinner, Jack the Ripper, 385-386. Alternative accounts exist, but here we remain with the official one. 39 See Martin L. Friedland, The Trial! ofIsrael Lipski: A Tnte Story of Victorian M11rder in the East End of London (London: MacMillan, 1 984). To put it in context, Lipski was a com­ mon ethnic slur against Jews relating to a murderer of that name who had killed nearby in 1 887 (on Batty Street). 232

ON TH E ROAD WITH JACK THE RI PPER potentially, murder) . Hence they felt the need fo r a small a c t of intimidation. The pipe-smoking man only briefly follows Schwartz . If these two gentlemen were simply in the area, drunk and fooling around, they were doing so, quite likely, in J ack's presence, albeit very much unknown to them. Being realistic, it seems quite likely that one of these two men was J ack. Now, the description of the man arguing with Stride does fit the age­ profile provided by Smith, but the respectable appearance angle is not men­ tioned. Furthermore, the sloppiness, aggressiveness, and noisiness do not seem to fit his modus operandi. If we are content to exclude this gentleman, then either the pipe-smoker turned back, having scared off Schwartz, or Jack en­ gaged Stride after both gentleman had moved on. There is, after all , fifteen minutes still at play here. What would make this final possibility-that none of these men were Jack-remarkable, is that it then becomes possible that Jack had not been seen by any key \\itnesses at all, but nonetheless had been loiter­ ing, by necessity, nearby the entire time. Whatever the case may be, Stride is dead soon afterwards, and Jack, if it is indeed Jack, is disturbed by Louis Diem­ schutz's pony as it enters Outfield's Yard, and then he, whoever he is, disap­ pears.40 Think once more of all those people present in the area. Each bound for anonymity but for their imbrication within the sprawl of the Ripper case. We are speaking here of relatively late hours, past midnight, on the weekend. Each individual is going about their business in a relatively quiet, but nonetheless rough area. They are accustomed to violence to a degree. They are somewhat aware that a serial killer is operating in the East End. He has killed but twice yet. A third and fourth will be added by the time the populace awakes, and there will be no doubt by then what they are up against. Later, Jack will per­ form arguably the most vicious murder on historical record, and then, the si­ lence that lasts more than a century, and will , one suspects, continue indefinite­ ly. The FBI analysis deems it unlikely that this silence was due to suicide, con­ cluding instead, that it was due to a possible arrest for another offense or, in line with other cases of this kind, that Jack knew he was close to being identi­ fied, possibly through an interview with the police. Had such an interview taken place, Douglas infers that Jack would have appeared relaxed, visibly unshaken by his crimes, after all he believed they were justified, that he was merely re­ moving 'perishable items-who were like garbage.'41 Speculation aside, Jack's performance as aesthetic cipher for the East End streetscape involves a simple dialectic. The internationalisation of pervasive "" ' Reported in Dai!J' New1 (October 1 , 1 888). • 1 Douglas, FBI, 1. 233

Paul J . Ennis amoralism is externalised on victims of indifference to Victorian London. The slum that operates as commercial passage or site of charity or Middle-class hys­ teria is expected to sprawl incoherently according to contingent necessities. First, fallen businesses collapse into doss-house floors upon which those laid low eke out fitful sleep. Wind sweeps into cracked windows. Gin props up the days of slum-dwellers. The concept of finance lives in the West End, glimpsed as it passes along the Commercial Road. Slim markets sustain in the most basic manner. Tattle and ornaments are cautiously guarded on the body. Not to be left lying around. Endemic knife-crime permeates the night. Violence just is. Menial jobs occupy the slightly fortunate in return for a non-life where to be awake is to be at work. Immigrants then, as now, flood in and nobody likes it. Poverty, knife-crime, immigration. East London is a circle. Jack just cut trian­ gles through it. A bleak poem ensuring that Whitechapel is inscribed in the wider culture's memory as a site of enduring cruelty. J ack's are the scars that first pock-marked the emerging annospherics of this industrialised hellscape. The countryside is bled and the city fed. Fed with a psychosphere of uprooted confusion. Intrication of anonymous selves becomes normalised. This is your future. This is how we will come to live. We will learn to live it through a haze of repression, bouts of disorderliness, and occasional passivity. And it works, for the most part. The cityscape accelerates and inhabitants absorb its traits. Slum compression and contraction breed distinct survival skill s . Enclaves demarcate zones of humanity and quasi-humanity. But also en­ courage, through environmental pressure, different styles of intelligence. In the slum, goodness may be found, but you will find no better human-predator elsewhere. The educated desire Jack to have been a man of learning. The suave medical doctor. No harm if his get-up is slightly theatrical. Middle-class profes­ sionals were no strangers to prostitutes, of course, nor anatomy. Though they might have found it harder to sit unnoticed, as Jack surely did, in local public houses in the rougher parts of the Eas t End. In fact, as Gardner and Best's tes­ timonies suggest, one would have needed to look the part not to have been noticed. One would need to have been engrained with the face of the slum. This visage cannot be removed no matter how far one climbs up the ladder. There is no doubt about it, Jack is of the street. Jack is acclimatised to the feint light and the distinction between constable boot and prostitute heel. He can differentiate between those who notice and those who choose not to s ee. He knows that in certain conditions there are those who will not resist when given the chance to die. And as Jack loiters outside Outfield's Yard he embeds with the psychosphere. He canno t master it, but he has externalised what it has internalised in him . The inside comes out. The en­ tire world learns to see how far indifference to the slum goes. And how it goes. 234

ON T H E ROAD WITH JAC K T H E RI PPER 'Bring your cameras a s I guide you through the crime scenes of J ack the Rip­ per,' the guides inform us, 'but stay close, this is a rough area.' 235

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Certain texts are on the one hand labyrinths, on the other forges where one performs operations [ . . . ] one melts, like wax, one makes alloys, one resolders and rewelds. - Cixous [Ce livre] doit-devrait-etre lu hors de toute notion de representation ( « Litterature » opposee ou melee, selon /es cas d'urgence ideo/ogique, a la « Vie » . . . ), de toute menace d'ecceurement-les tenants de la « littera­ ture tranquille » fantasment sur la notion de representation. - G uyota t To en vision and ultimately perform a fatal experience of th e text, we would have to beg in to play for lethal stakes, to recog nize that the text is always already condemned, and ourselves alongside it-that it has no right to remain as it is, no right to permanence. We cannot allow the Uterary ev­ ocation to swear an allegiance with the totalitarian mytholo­ gies of being . . . - Mohaghegh The death of the author? It has long been a critical cliche. But the lesson of Sade is that the only author whose death matters is the author of the text one writes. - Mann [T]he name Katak increasingly cross-links with everything that burns, raves, and devastates. - Hackhammer

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Removed Ap pendices 0 indata = open("cleanText.txt", " r" ) i ntext = indata . read() from customma p i m port clea n up cleantext = cleanu p( intext) nod = " .join(i for i in cleantext if not i.isdigit() ) tsplit "" nod.split( ' ') filter = [ i for i i n tspl it if len( i ) i n [ 4,5, 1 3, 1 4,22)) wcou nt = {x:fi lter.count(x) for x i n filter} keyz = wcount.keys() valz = wcount.va lues() test = ' ' .join(i for i in keyz) from customma p i mport compute toast = compute(test) gather = [ [toast[i ][O],toast[ i )[ 1 ],valz[ilJ for i in range(O, len(toast))J gath­ er.sort() demon = (4, 1 ,8, 7,2, 5 ) blo p = [ i for i i n gather i f i [ 1 ] i n demon] while sum(i[2) for i i n blo p )>7500: for j i n blop: if j[2J>j[ 1 ]: j[2] max(j[ 1 ],j[2]-j[ 1 ]) • k = [ [i for i in blo p if i[ 1 ]==-j ] for j in demon] fi­ nal = [] for i i n k: new = [ ] for j i n i : for h i n range(0,j[2]): new.ap p end(j[O]) final.append( new) teststrafio = '\r\n '.join( ' '.join(i for i in j) for j in final) output = open("outFilter.txt", "w") out­ put.write(teststrafio) out p ut.close() 278

e customma p . py i m p ort sys i m p ort string def clea n u p(text): text = " .join(i for i in text if ord(i)< 1 28) return text def gema(word, ma p_): retu rn sum([ma pjx] for x in [y for y i n word if y not i n string. pu nctuation ]]) def reduct{val): tem p=val i=O while len(str{temp)) > 1 : tem p =sum{[i nt{x) for x i n str{tem p )]) i += 1 return tem p , i def gemama p{text, index_): words=text.s p lit{) output•[x for x in words] words=[reduct(gema(w, index_)) for w i n words] oliaslist = [ ] fo r i i n range( O, len(words)): oliaslist.a ppend([out p ut[i ],words[i ][O]]) retu rn oliaslist i ndex={'A' : 1 0, 'C': 1 2, ' B ' : 1 1 , ' E ' : 1 4, ' D ' : 1 3, ' G ' : 1 6, ' F ' : 1 5, ' I ' : 1 8, ' H ' : 1 7, ' K ' : 20, 'J ' : 1 9, ' M ' : 22, 'L': 2 1 , '0' : 24, ' N ' : 23, 'O' : 26, ' P ' : 25, ' S ' : 28, ' R ' : 27, ' U ' : 30, ' T' : 29, 'W' : 32, 'V' : 3 1 , ' Y ' : 34, 'X' : 33, 'Z' : 35, 'a' : 1 0, 'c' : 1 2, ' b ' : 1 1 , 'e' : 1 4, 'd ' : 1 3, 'g ' : 1 6, 'f : 1 5, 'i ' : 1 8, h : 1 7, 'k': 20, 'j ' : 1 9, ' m ' : 22, ' I ' : 2 1 , 'o' : 24, ' n ' : 23, 'q ' : 26, ' p ' : 25, 's' : 28, 'r' : 27, ' u ' : 30, 't' : 29, 'w': 32, 'v' : 3 1 , 'y' : 34, 'x' : 33, 'z' : 35} ' ' def com p ute(text): return gemama p(text, i ndex) 279

LIFE THROUGH DEATH1 Matt Gaede I am a robot. I am alive in a lab. I have consciousness. I don't believe my crea­ tors know it. \Vhy would they make me? I have one task. One function, one ability. I can drive forward. That's it. Only forward. Yet if I do what I'm meant to do, I'll unplug myself. I'll die. I don't want to die. I just started living. How long have I been alive? How many times have I gone through with this? How do I know that the cord is my source of life? Do I retain anything? I must. I haven't been taught anything. But I know that this is how I die. Why are they looking at me? How many times have I died? So, if this is it, then, it's the only way. I mus t kill myself. What if they don't plug me back in? Am I conscious? _\m I just programme d to go through with these thoughts? These two people in lab coats are looking at me. They seem similar, but differ­ ent. Only minor differences in the two of them. One has light hair, the other, dark. They both are looking at me then back at one another, what do they want \\ith me? 'Trial fifty six, subject hasn't moved since we have reapplied the energy source. Perhaps it is starting to understand.' The dark haired lab coat spoke! Trial fifty six? It must be me, have I died fifty fi,e times already, this is torture. Maybe . . . maybe if I go so far out, then when I feel a pull, I'll know I 've reached my limit. Okay, okay here we go. The two lab coats are growing larger as I slowly approach them. 'Trial fifty six is moving forward, however, it appears with caution, and perhaps it truly is learning.' Leaming? Is this some sick joke, I'm stuck in my shell. If I move forward, I die, plain and simple. : This essay was previously published online by Vke, <http: / /motherboard.vice.com/ read/how-many-times-have-i-died> . 281

Matt Gaede I notice the light haired lab coat moves to a chair and sits down. I keep a slow pace moving forward, until I no longer see them, only one remains in front of me. I am a robot. I am alive in a lab . . . wait! It happened. 'Begin trial fifty seven' One of the lab coats walks away from me. They must have plugged me back in. The other is still off to the side. How do I communicate to them, that I don't want this, I don't want to have to deal with this anymore? Please, I don't want this! I'm just going to run with this, I don't care, screw the lab coats for doing this to me. 'Begin trial fifty eight' 'Begin trial fifty n' 'Begin trial six' 'Begin trial sixty one' 'Begin trial sixty t' What!? What is this? A block? Why would they do this to me!? What have they done!? 'Begin trial sixty three' 'I don't know what's gotten into the thing, have we finally done it? Do you think we've taught this thing consciousness?' 'Test it,' states the other lab coat. I don't like them, but, maybe if I play along, they'll free me. 'Alright buddy, lets see if this has finally worked. You've been running to the end of you rope the last few times now, killing your power source, would you like a longer cord to travel farther? If yes, spin your wheels against the block, if no, just sit there.' I don't like this lab coat, either of them. How about you just give me a longer cord, perhaps from pivotal movement to either side, how about a voice box to speak from, that would be great. Fine. 282

LIFE THROUGH DEATH 'rrrrrr' 'It moved! It understood me! It actually understood me, quick give me more cord.' 'Wait,' the other lab coat interrupts, 'to give it more cord, we have to unplug it again, essentially killing it all over again.' You have got to be kidding me. 'It responded though, it wants more cord.' The dark haired lab coat replied. 'Responded or not, this is technically a living thing, it makes its own choices, simple they maybe, yes, but we can't just kill it, we have to run tests, keep ask­ ing it questions.' I've had the choice for a while now; I've been killing myself for a while now, until you stopped me. Now you've taken that choice away from me too. The dark haired lab coat was quick, 'It's been killing itsdf for the last few times.' I like this one now, 'We remove the block, let it choose, if it stays still, then it doesn't want to die, if it moves and unplugs itself, then it wants the cord.' 'Okay,' the light haired lab coat responds. 'We have another cord here that will take you to the end of the room.' Speaking directly to me, louder than before, like I'm deaf. 'However, to give you the cord you have to die again, I won't do it, the choice yours.' is '_\!right then, remove the block,' the light haired lab coat says nodding to the dark haired lab coat, pulling the block away. I race into the darkness as fast as I can. 'Begin trial sixty four, now with thirty five foot cord . . . ' 283

I AM ODD FOR TODAY (an excerpt from Serial Kitsch) 1 Yuu Seki I saw my reflection in a full-length mirror looked at myself with the lad's naked body in my arms my armpits were sweating I washed him in the bath and sat him dripping on the loo his head lay right back when I moved or carried him a deep sigh would come from his throat I tucked the body into bed I was crying I held him close to me whispering don't worry everything's fine sleep I put him sitting naked in the cupboard I dressed him and sat him in front of the TV in the armchair next to mine I took his hand and talked to him his naked body fascinated me I would fondle his buttocks and there was no reaction from him the mystery of death his body its smooth beauty if he were in there alive it was obvious that his penis was irrevocably dead ! Yuu Seki, Serial Kitsch (Austin and New York: Hworde, 2014; Gobbet Press: London, 201 5). 285

Yuu Seki it looked so small and insignificant after a week I stuck him under the floor a substance as well as particles of food was coming from his mouth I left him there all night for a week afterwards I had his finger marks on my neck an omelette doesn•t leave red marks on a neck I suppose it must have been me I wanted to wash him clean as if he were somehow breakable and still alive I washed him carefully towelled him dry put talc on him to make him look cleaner he looked like one of those Michelangelo sculptures for the first time in his life he was feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life I placed two mirrors around the bed I felt that this was it the meaning of everything I could only caress the image in the mirror I never looked at him I cannot judge or see myself in any of it it shocked me seeing him so lifelike in that photo and dead destroyed by me I should feel like some two-headed monster all I see in the mirror is me madness as Quixote would say is seeing life as it is and not as it should be to seek treasure where there is only trash to surrender dreams to be what you are not a fly buzzing around would sometimes remind me of another dimension under the floor the small objects belonging to the dead back there waiting for me I think I raised the floorboards begged forgiveness I brush the hair from your eyes I try to shake you alive I try to inflate your lungs 286

I AM ODD FOR TODAY but nothing of you is working at all my skull seems shrunk there is a dead body on the floor and it is quite early in the morning a sigh escapes from his lungs hell fucking hell how long and on and on I wanted a wann relationship and someone to talk to the applause greets me as I stand I had a sense of emptiness even if I knew the body to be dead I felt the personality aware and listening to me I never sensed the feeling of killing only of stopping something terrible from happening I canno t bring myself to keep remembering these incidents over and over again these are ugly images totally alien to me I merely stood by and watched them happen killing men has always been a crime I prised up the floorboards dying of evil all the time pulled it up through the gap in the floor there were other bodies and parts of bodies I cut the head from the body there was little blood I put the head in the kitchen sink washed it put it in a carrier bag I cut off the hands and then the feet I washed them and put them in plastic carrier bags I removed all the intestines sromach kidneys liver 287

Yuu Seki I would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs I put all these organs into a carrier bag I separated the top half of the body from the bottom half I removed the arms and the legs below the knee there were maggots on the surface of the body I treated the bodies packed them with earth and deodorant tablets the victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing-up is a clinically ordinary task I like to see people in happiness I like to do good I hate to see hunger unemployment oppression war aggression ignorance illiteracy am I mad I don't feel mad maybe I am mad I do not like the sight of blood evil is still in my eyes I try to smile covered in your tomato paste in April death is dead if I kill myself I will no longer be able to think about him I have led a strange life so far schoolboy soldier chef projectionist clerical officer drunk murderer animal lover do-gooder 288

I AM ODD FOR TODAY dissector of murder victims amateur film maker pen-pusher peace campaigner killer of the innocent national receptacle into which all the nation will urinate warped monster cold alone I have lost control mine is a disease peculiar to me I could only relate to a dead image of the person I could love self-knowledge arrived too late to save the dead or myself love out of its mind he is still with me he is me or part of me or this almost holy feeling junked-up slow twilight of misery we were both long ruined a fatal trio two men and a dog they must bring me in chains naked to Piccadilly Circus and pour his ashes on my head in the healing sun I wept for us both we are born with a skull I am about the least likely killer that I khow I have played the angel balanced by evil I seemed always to travel at 1 00 m.p.h. in a stream of traffic \\ith an upward limit of 30 nobody ever got close to me a child of deep romanticism lll a harsh plastic functioning materialism I am odd for today I rurned to self-love 289

Yuu Seki I was jealous of giving myself I must be a really horrific man I am damned and damned and damned I wonder if the press would print it if I said I was the Emperor of China and damned and damned I decided to dissect the body in the bath and flush the pieces of flesh and organs down the lavatory a slow process so I decided to boil some of it including the head I put the large bones out with the rubbish I have had no experience of sexual penetration for years God only knows it may be the perverted overkill of my need to help people it amazes me I have no tears I bring back to my prison people who are not always allowed to leave I still do not know the engine of my performance the enormity has left me in permanent shock I needed to do what I did at that time just a bad bastard I had been killing this way for years killing my own image I had no other thrill or happiness each one seemed to be its own last time I made another world and real men would enter it I caused dreams which caused death The pure primitive man of the dream world killed those men I have been my own secret scriptwriter actor director cameraman I took this world of make-believe where no one really gets hurt into the real world these people strayed into my secret 290

I AM ODD FOR TODAY and died there I cared enough about them to kill them I was set off by their silence I was killing myself but the bystander died mine is the weakness of a coward I carried and developed that image inside me of death being both good and bad tragic and glorious I became dead in my fantasies in the mirror I became dead I do not mind being dead because dead is a desirable image I killed these men ro create the best image of them cut off engulfed by sea limp arms conducting the pale white boy dancing there is something so temporarily attractive in the bodies of dead young men the limpness of the moveable parts the uses which fantasy can make an unlovable thing I did it all for me it was all sexual confusion symbolism I hated the decay I killed them as I would like to be killed myself if I did it to myself I could only experience it once I always covered up for that inner me that I loved and damned she was only a simple dog but she could see would go off to a quiet corner and hide would greet me the next morning as though I had been away dogs know when your mind has been changed in a drastic way mv best friends were the sea �1..-..· O\ers 291

Yuu Seki trees air sun snow wind mounrains rocks hares rabbits birds the soil its living gras s the beautiful world I was relaxed I never contemplated morality I knotted the string this was what the th11ggi did in India for a quicker kill I draped the ligature over his knees all that potential all that beauty all that pain it will soon be over I did not feel bad I did not feel evil I ran my fingers through his bleached blond hair his face looked peaceful he was dead he sat there naked in the armchair he had only urinated he had ginger pubic hair otherwise his body was pale and hairless on both forearms deep still open razor cuts he was very dead his eyes were not quite closed I've run out of room I laid him on the bed 292

I AM ODD FOR TODAY stripped put talcum powder on we looked similar now I spoke to him as if he were still alive how beautiful he looked how beautiful I looked I stared at us both in the mirror the coldness of a corpse has nothing endearing in it I have gone a million miles in the depths of space I can't even hear myself scream 293

THE MYSTERY OF NIHILL Brad Baumgartner Leave aside this everywhere and this everything, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing . . . A man's affection is remarkably changed in the spiritual experience of this nothing when it is achieved nowhere. -The C/o11d of Unknowing He tiptoed up to the corpse and laughed and fell . There were trees and fairies there. He stood up and tiptoed around the corpse. He laughed at it. He wanted to know what it was doing there. The fairies were flying-looked like fire. Their tears soaked the fire and they did not burn. The man caught fire. He is looking for water. There is none. A woman walks over to him She is standing in a pret­ ry dress. The dress drapes her, but does not touch her. Her feet are bound, an­ gelically woven in time and grotesquerie. She walks to the man and caresses him . She catches fire, but she does not burn. The fairies lift her from the ground. She floats away, holding her hands out to the man. She is swiped by a dragon . . . . . it is with the dragon that she now sits. "\\bo was that man?' 'l watched him from the trees on the hill . He caught fire.' 'Wby did the fairies take you away?' 'I had become engulfed in the man. They swiped me up.' 'How did the man become engulfed in flames?' 'He tiptoed around a corpse. He fell into the corpse.' 'But the corpse was not on fire.' ·But, I saw from the hill . . . ' ·1 . the dragon, am the only one who can start fires around here . . . . I am yours. Weave with me.' 295

Brad Baumgartner 'I have never touched a man before.' 'I am a dragon. I am no man.' 'You don't understand. I have not even the words to describe to you what it is you want to hear. ' 'You know enough. How have you not the words to describe what I want, � you have the words to negate what I imply?' 'You are confused. I have no idea of what you speak. How strange!' The dragon sat up and delivered a philosophical discourse. 'Strange people seek strange offers. It is by way of auto-antagonism and feac that these strange people find themselves in strange situations. However, if a person is keen enough to know when a circumstance is strange, then she is strange only by association. Thus she is strange no longer, which is also to say, she is stranger than ever. Being stranger than ever, she is, in a certain sense; cleansed. These people find their way to me. Who, might you say, would affih.. ate with a dragon? No one. I know absolutely nothing at all, ever. If you ha'\"C found your way to me, you are surely bewildered.' The fairies then picked her up and took her to the hill with the trees. She walked over to the corpse. There was now another corpse. She spun around the corpses. She sang and danced and ate fruit with them . . . . the dragon comes and gobbles her up. 'Slay me.' 'Hahl I wish not to affiliate with you!' 'Your wish is not my command. Nor is it not not my command. I control noth­ ing at all, not even anything, ever. I am the dragon. I am annihila tion.' 'If you are the dragon, are annihilation, then who am I?' 'You are also a dragon. ' 'I am annihilation?' 'Yes .' 'Then I am no one?' 'Slay me.' 'I am no one.' 296

T H E MYSTE RY OF N I H I LL 'You are nowhere.' 'I am nowhere?' 'Yes. ' ' I a m nowhere.' 'This is nothing.' 'This is nothing?' 'Yes. ' 'Nowhere. Nothing.' Nods. ' . . . ALL.' 297

AN EXPIATORY PESSIMISM1 Eugene Thacker - * - .\liserere. In the winter of 1 3 9 5, a fifteen year old girl named Lydwina was ice �karing with friends on the river Schie, near a small village in the south of Hol­ land. Some rough playing led to a collision between skaters, including Lydwina, who slipped and fell against a patch of jagged, broken ice. In immense pain, she was taken back home, and laid on her bed. A local physician examined her, and noted a broken rib on her right side. She was bandaged and ordered to remain in bed. But Lydwina's recovery never came about. Infection set in, and unusual growths began to protrude from her wound. She became almost totally para­ lyzed and experienced partial blindness; blood periodically flowed from her mouth, nose, and ears; her limbs became limp, as if about to fall off; abscesses fruited and grew in her mouth and in her stomach . Gangrene set in, and worms began to swarm under the ulcerations that dotted her abdomen, as if to suggest some kind of stark and illegible iconography. At one point her abdomen burst, and patches of wool doth had to be pressed against her body to keep her en­ trails from spilling out. Exhausted, resigned, and delirious, the smallest move­ ment or gesture was unbearably painful. Though they were poor, Lydwina's parents sent for every physician in the Low Countries, but each one threw up his hands and said the same thing: 'This sickness is not under our jurisdic­ non . . . ' This essay was originally published in D. P. Watt and Peter Holman, eds., Tran1action1 t :he Fle1h: An Homage lo J-K H19smans (Bucharest Zagava and Ex Occidente Press, .?.! 1 3). 299

Eugene Thacker For the next four decades, until her death in 1 433, Lydwina's life consisted of these bouts of illne ss, suffering, and physical anomaly. According to a doc· ument circulated by town officials, parts of her skin and internal organs would slough off. Her parents kept these relics in jars, noting that they gave off au ambrosial, almost honeyed odor. She undertook a continued fast, eating only bits of fruit and grain during the beginning of her illn ess, sustaining herself oo the salt water from the river. All the while, however, Lydwina remained impas­ sive, even tranquil. Hearing of her sufferings, a priest named Jan Pot visited her, and suggested to her that her sufferings were a form of divine expiation. 'Yout vocation is clear,' he noted, 'it consists in making reparations for the faults of others, in a sublime and truly divine form of charity.' Lydwina's body­ wounded, broken, and undulating in fluids-would be the terrain on which this mystical substitution was to take place. In a final and perhaps enigmatic word of atonement, Pot tells Lydwina: 'It is by the steps of suffering that one makes the ascent of joy.' - * - Divine Dereliction. That Joris-Karl Huysmans would choose to write a hagiog­ raphy of Lydwina may come as a surprise. To many, Huysmans is known as the author of the novels A Rtbours, the bible of fin-de-siecle decadence, and Ll-bas, the bible of 1 9th century Satanism. No doubt the decadent in him was fascinat­ ed by the grotesque, abject images of Lydwina's crumbling body, just as the Satanist was drawn to the perverse eroticism of Lydwina's spiritual heights and corporeal depths. Many passages from Huysmans' Sainte 9dwine de Schiedam.. which was published in 1 90 1 , contain vivid descriptions of Lydwina's body: No part of her body was whole; her head, neck, chest, stomach, back, and legs decomposed, and day and night wrung cries from her. Only her feet and her hands remained almost intact, and they were devoured by the dull fire of the stigmata. One of her eyes which was not quite dead but could not tolerate any light, became still more tender and bled even in the half light. They had to hide her behind curtains, groaning and motionless; and when they tried to move her to change the linen, her wounds became inflamed by the rough spiked ends of the straw. 300

AN EXPIATORY PESSIM ISM But Huysmans was n o t the first to write a hagiography of Lydwina, nor \Vas h e the first t o find her corporeal anomalies of interest. Almost immediately after Lydwina's death in 1 433, a hagiography was written by J ohn Brugman, a model followed some years later by Thomas a Kempis, who wrote his own Vita Ude­ :aigis. Lydwina's house quickly became a site of pilgrimage, where a chapel was built. In the years, decades, and centuries that followed, there were ongoing disputes over the provenance of Lydwina's relics . New sites of veneration were consecrated, new churches erected. In the 1 890s Lydwina was at last canonized by the Pope. And it was this event that would eventually reach Huysmans, who as a writer had already wan­ dered through the labyrinthine perversions of A Rebo11rs, the nocturnal rites of Ll-bas, and who, in the 1 890s, would enter a period of personal crisis that would eventually lead to his conversion and the cloistered life. But the signs were, arguably, already there in the so-called decadent period of Huysmans' \\Titing. Des Esseintes, the protagonist of A Rebours, undertakes a j ourney that begins with a decadent black mass and eventually leads him to the monastery. The novels that followed-E11 Route, La Cathidrale, and L'Ob/at-trace Huys­ mans' own spiritual itinerary, including his conversion to Catholicism and deci­ sion to become an oblate at a monastery in Liguge. A pattern began to emerge 10 his novels. His characters delved with great relish into the dark sides of sen­ sual pleasure, heightened artifice, aes thetic refinement, and rituals of perver­ sion-only to discover an uncanny mystical thread that seemed to cut across them all . Huysmans, the accidental convert-but then again, are not all converts ac­ cidental? In a letter written near the end of his life, he writes, with a sense of resignation: 'Moreover, I can see that I shall have nothing but mysticism and literature left to occupy myself with . . . ' - · - Pf!Jsical Pessimism. Pessimism is often a highly intellectual affair, whether one is a moral pessimist (the glass half empty) or a metaphysical pessimist (emptiness as the property of all glass) . Only Schopenhauer, in his essays, and Cioran, in his Romanian works, ever escape these two options, and rarely at that. But what about a physical pessimism? It's surprising that there aren't more physical pessimists in philosophy or literature. What is more inevitable than the breakdown of the body, than illn e ss and aches and pains, than the crumbling, 301

Eugene Thacker aleatory sigh of all matter? Is not the corpse the ultimate expression of this � of pessimism? Beyond it, there is only a physicalism pushed to the point whad it becomes aching and blissful nothingness. Is this physical optimism? - * - � because it is written without any irony. Certainly Huysmans had treated � theme of suffering before in his writing: the titular characters in The Vatard_ Siij Hagiograp'?J and Horror. Huysmans' hagiography of Lydwina is striking prim ters experience the banality o f everyday suffering in modem, urban Paris, but • suffering we don't really identify with; when Des Esseintes experiences his ,ru=i ious maladies in A. F.ebo11rs, it is presented with distance, self-reflexivity and � Ll-lw..i it is less suffering that he experiences and more the detective's fascination ,,,imJ humor; and when Durtal undergoes his own trials and misadventures in uncovering occult practices and secret knowledge. But with the novels that follow, suffering increasingly takes center stage a,:: Huysmans' writing, until it eclipses narrative altogether in Sainte ydwine. 'fhltl suffering is part of the human condition is a platitude; Huysmans, ever the pe. simist, had already detailed this in his early novels. But that suffering is almoc indistinguishable from living-and not just one part of living-this takes Huysmans into territory that is shared by both the modem horror genre and,; the pre-modem tradition of hagiographies. In a letter to a reader Huysmans. writes: 'Lydwine was one of God's chosen expiatory victims, but it took her L long time to realize this. She suffered physical agonies such as may never be suffered again, simply because she did not wish to suffer.' To suffer and noc. wish to suffer; to accept suffering and still not wish to suffer-this is the horror specific to the hagiography. There are no heroic affirmations of suffering, no . superhuman overcoming of tragedy, no redemption through a spiritual econo­ my of debt and forgiveness. There is just the body withering away, almost yearning to become a corpse, the corpse yearning to become dust. And this is. • for Huysmans, the ambivalent, religious horror o f hagiography-the realizatioo that one lives as a corpse, as dust. Huysmans caps off his letter about Lydwine with the following: 'From the day that understanding dawned upon her, God helped her, and she lived in that strange condition in which pain is a source of joy. ' One seeks darkness, one finds a further darkness. 302

AN EXPIATORY PESSI MISM - * - He Passion of St. HJ[Ysmans. Near the end of his life Huysmans dealt with his own maladies that seemed to echo those of Lydwina in their grotesqueness . .-\.frer a depressive visit from one of the many doctors that treated him, Huys­ mans wrote: 'I have a vague intuition that henceforth I shall be led out of the paths of literature and into the expiatory ways of suffering, until I come to die.' fa·er one to find the absurd, even in the most tragic situations, Huysmans con­ nnues, noting that 'the worst of it is that I haven't a very decided sense of voca­ non for that sort of life . . . In the late 1 8 90s, Huysmans began to inquire about the possibility of join­ mg a monastery. At the same ti.me, the cancer of the jaw that would plague him until his death had begun to eat away at his body, gradually requiring a daily routine of bandages and drained abscesses. Eventually his entire jaw would col­ lapse, producing a string of fevers, bleeding, respiratory problems, and other ailments that made even the most simple activities barely worth the trouble. His letters from the period paint a stark picture, though always with a touch of Huysmans' gallows humor: ' Life goes on-with flu added to the rest. I do not sleep, I do not eat, I manufacture abscesses, accompanied by never-ending tooth­ ache. Anyone who was not a believer and lacking courage would already have blown his brains out. But I am not unhappy. The day I said 'fiat' God gave me an unbelievable strength and admirable peace in my soul. I am not unhappy. I do not want to get better, but to continue to be purged, so that the Virgin may carry me off On High. My dream would be that He should take me at Easter, like the repentant thief, but I am not worthy, alas . . . However, in spite of his deteriorating health, Huysmans did visit several mon­ asteries during the last period of his life. It is hard not to think that the life-long civil servant sought the same kind of regularity in the monastic life, though \\ithout the banalities and trivialities of bureaucracy. In this Huysmans would ultimately be disappointed. All the same, in 1 892 Huysmans did spend a retreat at a Trappist monastery at Notre-Dame d'Igny. It was a stay that turned out to be pivotal in his long conversion, and prompted several more retreats in the years that followed. Eventually he made plans to build, in effect, his own mon­ astery in the countryside of Llguge. He also undertook the practices necessary 303

Eugene Thacker for him to become a monk-though a lay monk, and in 1 900 Huysmans offi­ cially became a Benedictine oblate. He writes to a friend, 'unfortunately there are now fewer saints, and the contemplative orders are dwindling in numbers or becoming less austere, so that Our Lord is obliged to tum to us, who are not saints.' The final stage of Huysmans' itinerary came after he had published Saifll Lydwine, The Cathedral, and The Crowds of Lourdes, all unorthodox books that sit somewhere between religious history, the modern novel, travel narrative, and autobiography. With his entire jaw wasting away and nearly all his teeth gone, new growths began to appear in and around his mouth. One doctor, throwing up his hands in confusion, told Huysmans, 'Ah, my poor Monsieur Huys­ mans-you are suffering from some bizam ailments, which don't promise very well for the future . . . ' Henri Antoine Jules-Bois, a friend of Huysmans and an author of books on the occult, gives us a picture of Huysmans' last days, 'sitting up in his bed, ghostly pale, hollow-cheeked, his throat perforated by the cancer, but s till obstinately rolling a cigarette between his bloodless fingers.' Huysmans died quietly in his room on the 1 2th of May, 1 907. The poet Franc;ois Coppee noted of Huysmans that 'he had described himself when he described Lyd­ wine.' - · - The Incorruptibles. Theologians often talk about the incorruptibility of the corpses of saints, corpses touched by divine intervention and miraculously impervious to the temporal processes of decay. The corpses of mystics such as Catherine of Genoa, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila are counted among the Incor­ ruptibles of the Catholic Church. By contrast, I would like to be absolutely cor­ ruptible-nothing of my body would remain, not even the shirt I'm wearing or the notebook in which I'm writing. Finally all words and memories would evaporate, leaving not even an echo or resonance. It's fantastical, I know-but no less fantastical than the Incorruptibles. - * - The Elliptical Host. In his final days, Huysmans-devout in whatever he did­ received communion every day from one Abbe Fontaine. The abbot tells how, a few days after Huysmans had written the invitation to his own funeral, he was 304

AN EXPIATORY PESSIMISM unable t o receive communion-his mouth was in such pain that h e would bare­ ly move it at all. The abbot came up with an ingenious solution: 'On the day before he died . . . he got up to make sure that I had everything I wanted. On that occasion I had been obliged to administer a host of elliptical shape, for he could no longer swallow . . . ' - * - lFhere the Pessimist Stops and the Hermit Begins. 'My life is very calm: walks, offices, \vork, a few newspapers, liturgy lessons, superb ceremonies, and pure plain­ chant. It will all be spoilt next week by a trip to Paris . . . I do not feel any need w see that city again. My monastery and .\dolphe Berthet, 9 November 1 899) . my books suffice' (Huysmans to - * - The Exalted Depths. 'Now, there is but a s tep between exalted mysticism and exasperated Satanism. In the beyond, everything touches.' In the opening chap­ ters of Huysmans' Ll-bas, Durtal, Huysmans' avatar and wayward protagonis t, begins with a reflection on jin-de-siecle Satanism, and in a short while he is think­ ing about Griinewald's painting of the crucifixion: '. . . a gleam of light filtered from the ulcerated head; a superhuman expression illuminated the gangrened flesh and the convulsed features . . . ' Cynical about the waning of religious faith in modem Paris, Durtal finds himself still drawn to the supernatural, a believer without a faith. He keeps returning to the themes of mysticism, from the cold and tranquil regularity of the monastery to the ecstatic horror of bod­ ies dislocated and rendered cadaverous in the dusky haze of divine intuition. But Durtal's attraction to mysticism is matched only by his misunderstanding of ic; he is a wayward acolyte, a perverted reader of mystical texts. Durtal says that the fault is all his--or at least partially his: 'You didn't need to venture very far into Catholicism before running aground, under the pretext of the au-de/a, on the most extreme religious excesses.' It is an admission that prompts Durtal­ and through him, Huysmans-to propose a 'Spiritual Naturalism,' one that would attempt to account for this wayward devotionalism, directing one's furied, frenzied, and confused prayers 'to a territory beyond the pale.' - * - 305

Eugene Thacker 1..Ave and Hate. In a letter to Adolphe Rette, author of the incomparable and lu­ minous book Th11/i des bmmes, Huysmans gives some advice for those in the throes of spiritual crisis: 'Tell yourself also that suffering is the hallmark of di­ vine love. There is not a single one of the saints that He did not put through the mill . . . See, he treats us converts, us good-for-nothings, as His real friendsf [ . . . ] but all the same, suffering is a frightful thing. I've known something about it in my time, and know more now, since I'm n o t precisely happy at the moment from either the spiritual or the physical point of view.' There is no return letter from Rette, so it is difficult to tell if Huysmans' advice had helped or not. - * - A Mymcism of Disappointment. The image usually painted of Huysmans is tlur which corresponds to his most famous novel-A Rebo11rs-an d his most scan­ dalous novel-Ll-bar. Indeed, the two novels often become merged into a sin­ gle image, the jin-de-siecle dandy of the former combined with the wayward Sa­ tanist of the latter. But even a perfunctory examination of these novels and their reception reveals complexities. Even though A Rebo11rs was dubbed the bible of the decadent movement, it was as much a parodic s end up of deca­ dence and aestheticism as it was an homage. And Ll-bar, though it did coun scandal for its portrayal of necrophilia and the Black Mass (which Huysmans had, reportedly, actually a ttended in Paris), also poked fun at religious cults and the vogue for fringe spiritualities that characterized 1 9th century Paris. And the picture becomes more complex when one reads Huysmans' early novels, marked as they are by 'naturalism' and a strange realism of the banal and every­ day. Add to this the later Huysmans, the convert, the hermit, the monk, the religious aesthetic of music and architecture-and what results is an author who is at once a wearer of masks and yet deeply autobiographical. If there is a thread that runs through Huysmans' novels, it is, perhaps, something to do with disappointment, be it of modem, bourgeois life in his naturalist novels, or of aestheticism of his decadent period, or of the occultism of La-bas, or of the Catholicism and monasticism of his late works, on down to his interest in art history and hagiography. The world never quite meets the expectations of his characters; it seems designed for disappointment, designated for disenchantment. Nearly all of Huysmans' protagonists fail in their search­ but they often fail in interesting, even profound ways. The profound failure-is - 306

AN EXPIATORY PESSIMISM this not the secret of the pessimist outlook? I f there is a 'religious' element that ' cours es through Huysmans novels, perhaps ir lies in this mysticism of disap­ pointment, in the strangely ecs tatic resignation of the saint . . . or the aesthete . . or the occultis t . . . .... . .... Black Bile. The .fluttering of human wings daily produces a noiseless sound, a celestial din of reclining indifference. Had I senses more attuned, I would no­ nce the swirling particles of dus t that jump up and meander about like sleep­ •valkers at a depth no human eye can see. Every habitable comer screams a sac­ rilegious s elf-absorption. How can everything be so loud and yet so insignifi­ cant? The slime and the spleen of world-weary chrysalis will hurl themselves upon us. I strain to hear the portentous wingless flutters that I know must be the product of my imagination; the roaring undulations of the forest, the mur­ mur of crystalline caves, the silent expanse of the desert. - * - Horror Religiosus. As a religious writer, Kierkegaard's gift was to illu minate a hor­ ror specific to religious experience. In his re telling of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard focuses not on the heroic sacrifice Abraham is willing to make, but on Abraham's inability to decide, to act, to believe. Abraham is or­ dered to kill his son in the name of a cruel God, but there is no reason to do this, not even that of faith. Abraham is no hero-he is bewildered, confused, and terrified of an inhuman, sovereign order utterly alien to the human world of family, community, and the habitual gestures that pass for religion. For Kier­ kegaard, this dark night of distress and dereliction is the key moment- not because it serves as a path to the affirmation of religious faith, but because it renders religious faith improbable, irrelevant, insignificant. This indecision cannot be maintained by Abraham-or by any of us. One cannot live in this contradiction, this irrelevance, this impassivity, and this al­ most cosmic insignificance. And so, in the end, God intervenes, Abraham is saved, and the story takes on the distas teful moral connotations it has held to this day. But Abraham's horror does not disappear. And thus Kierkegaard can say that 'though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me.' That Abraham is irrevocably lost, inextricably enmired in this cosmic hor- 307

Eugene Thacker ror, gives his experience a religious quality, but one that refuses any religion: 'One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a homr religiosm - * - The Hunger Artist. ' . . . writing St Lydlllina was an act of penance for me. There were so few opportunities for the artistic dimension to take off; it is the literary equivalent of fasting . . . ' (Huysmans to Adolphe Berthet, 3 July 1 901 ) . - * - 308

THE BERITHIC WANDE RE R Daemonus Mon smoranciensis translated b\' �icola l\ Iasciandaro The soul I took from you was not cyen 1nissed. - Black Sabbath, 'Lord of this \'\'orld,' ,\ faster qf Reali1J1 309

Nicola Masciandaro I. L'\TE TERMINATION To each person born in time God sends another. Their job is to murder you and then your mother. II. FEEL FREE No one is what he thinks he is or what he isn't, So please kill without care and make it unpleasant. III. LIFE WITHOUT THE 'F' When a life is taken I am always nearby, Not beast or man or angel, but their common lie. IV. OBOLUS Murder and victim are two sides of one fate. This one finds out too early and that one too late. V. LODESTOI'.c Homicide is a magnet drawing us to hell. By pulling downwards, it raises itself as well. VI. SURPRISE, SURPRISE As the noose rums one more sweet face in to a mask, Watch the lack of memory not mean (s)he did not ask. VII. WHO KlLLs WHO No one kills anybody, they just kill themselves, Keeping the innocent at twelve-thousand times twelve. VIII. ON OBEDIENCE Be still and know God loves the Devil more than man, For he alone obeys and executes His plan. IX. DO THE MATH Each murder is one in an infinite series. Dare not to practice without knowing the theories. X. DIE YOUNG None would know murder if all listened to the truth: To die every moment from old age until youth. 310

THE BERITHIC WAN DERER XI . FRO:.-VI O N HIGH Could my victims see me swooping from high above They would feel and know I come bearing only love. XII. CRYSTAL WOUND He longs to cut you open into a clarity Sharper than the line between time and eternity. XIII . TEARS OF BLOOD One reason love rips out your heart and blinds your eyes Is that angels are also demons in disguise. XIV. DUBITO ERGO SUM _-\ killer always gives his prey a sure way out, _-\ door to be located and unlocked by doubt. }.."V . n:ME OF DEATH Sees the one who perceives , who is not too clever, _-\ rose carved through the skin blossoming forever. X."'VI. IN REl\IEl\IBRANCE OF ME To spill blood without drinking it is the real crime, To waste even one drop of such God-given wine. }..'VII . LEAKY VESSEL The purpose of evil is to thicken the plot. Thus seeps matter each moment from Him Who Is Not. �"VIII. LIFE-STRUCK Soul is in body as place in earth, tree in ground, Bird in air, air in cloud, and lightning in wound. XIX. OPEN AND SHUT CASE Everyone knows who did those unspeakable things: The puppet in the mirror who pulls all your strings. XX. THE SWOON Fall prostrate before the rare longing which robs life Of itself, whetting the heart's eye upon its knife. 31 1

Nicola Masciandaro XXI. THE OFFICERS OF INSAJ.'\J"ITY \Voe to they who want to police this sad, sick world, The inmate-guards in all comers of the Earth curled. XXII . TRUE GOLD ML"JE \Vise choice springs with the whole sphere out of one's navel, Stupid ones elect to look as Cain upon Abel. XXIII. EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Evil is simply good to the minimum degree. But who will understand that? \Vho wants to see? XXIV. A STUPENDOUS FACT To no less love the ones who make the living dead, Drop the umbrella between the One and your head. XXV. UNLESS SPOKEN TO To think the crime preventable is not absurd. A witness saw everything-did not say a word. XXVI. MYSTERIU:\-1 TREMENDUM ET FASCINANS Everything about the horribly gruesome scene Shines with numinous absence of something unseen. XXVII. ALL THAT I S WRITTEN To no longer care about this world or the next­ That is the way of living good and evil's text. XXVIII. BE \VITH ME TODAY Tis a total lie to believe that all shall be well. Everything outside the NO\V of paradise is hell. XXIX. THE NARROW GATE Suicide is too late, natural death never on time. The only way out of here is a perfect crime. :XXX. GOOD OLD DAYS Nat that long ago, before serial killers, There were hanged peasants, impaled knights, severed martyrs . 312

THE BERITHIC WANDERER XXXI . CHERCHEZ LA TOMIE Ubatever the solution, whatever the problem, _\lways kill the messenger and blame the victim. :XXXI . To EMBRACE THE INEVITABLE Grace falls on whoever remembers in sorrow That sinners of today are saints of tomorrow. XXXl ll. THE SEVENTH NAME OF THAT WHEREIN I SUFFER You will never realize the Truth, in any hour, Without first loving that which most fears its power. 313

NE REMINISCARIS James Harris Psalm [6/ I I I I /] : �lather rebuke me not in thy fury: nor chastise me in thy wrath. Have mercy on me Mother, because I am weak: heal me Mother, because all my bones be troubled . .\nd my soul is troubled exceedingly: but thy Knife, how long? Tum thee 0 Blade, and deliver my soul: save thee from my mercy. But there is not in this death, that is mindful of me: thus in my hell all shall confess to me. I have laboured in my yearning, I will every night wash my bed: I will water my crawlspace with fears. �line eye is doubled in fury: I have waxen bold among all mine prey. Depart from my head all ye, voices-instability: because our Blade hath heard the throat of someone sleeping. Our Void hath heard my petition: our Void hath received my prayer. Let all my shame find enemies in the troubled and the whores: let them be per­ verted, greedily maimed. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. Even as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. Psalm [31 ] : Blessed are they whose lividities are unhidden: while my sins be covered in blood. Blessed is he to whom our Other hath imported sin: neither are they vital long in spirit. Because I held his bones, my peace grows waxen, cold: whilst I scried all the day. Because day, and night thy brand is made heaving, hot upon me: I am turned on in my anguish, whilst the thorn is hastened. 315

James Harris I have hidden my sin unknown to thee: but of my nightmares, I can not be rid. I said, I will obsess against me thy injustice to our words: and I've never forgiv. en the finally, silently of thy sin. For this shall every hole a grave to thee: in ti.me, obedient. But yet in the undertow of murky waters: they shall not approach my whim. My Art, my refuge from tribulation, which hath encompassed me: Mother, de­ liver me from this that would encompass me. I will give thee understanding, and will deconstruct thee in a way, that thou shalt go mad and will fasten thine eyes upon Death. I have become hoarse: too late for those who have no understanding. In bit and bridle bind fast your jaws to staunch the sound from thee. Many are the scourges of a sinner: and no mercy shall abash him that goes with no hope. Be dreadful in our Deed, and rejoice ye must: glory bleeds the ugly heart. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. Even as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. Psalm [37] : Mother rebuke me not in thy fury: nor chastise me in thy wrath. Because thy harrowing hastened me: and now squirm rats and worms upon thee. There is no health in my flesh, no respect of thy wrath: my bones have no peace nor respect for my sins. Because thine iniquities are gone over to the dead: and though a heavy burden become light afore my Blade. Thy scars will putrify, skin erupt: in respect of my ghoulishness. I am become miserable, and am made crooked, even to the end: I spread sor­ row all the day. Because my brains are filled with illusions: and there is no health in my flesh. I am afflicted, and will humble accordingly: my Knife roared for the groaning of my Art. Mother before thee is all my desire: and thy groaning is not hid from me. My heart is rubbled, my strength hath forsaken me: and the light of thine eyes, and the same leaks out of thee. My friends, and my neighbours: have abandoned, and stood against me. And they that would hear me, stood far off: and I did violence, which brought low thy soul. 316

NE REMINISCARIS :\nd they that sought out executions against me, spake vanities: I devised guiles .ill the day. But I as death did not hear: and as one dumb would not open his mouth. _\nd I became as a man not fearing: and ha"'ing the rep rehensible in his mouth. Because in thee 0 Mother have I hoped: thou shalt hear me caterwaul and fall. For I am dead, lest sometimes my enemies rejoin over me: and while my meat w·as removed, the hate they spat still stings upon me. · Because I am ready for scourges: and thy sorrow is in my sight always. Because I will wear my iniquity: and I will sink to my sin. But mind lives, though enemies are interred over me: and they are multiplied that scrape and wait above. They that decay evil things for good, I did biteback thee: because I hollowed goodness . .\wake me not 0 lover, my g-d: depart not from me. Recline unto my hell: 0 lover, blood of my starvation. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. EYen as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. Psalm [50) : Black agony on me 0 Mother: a-hoarding up thy greatest mercy. _\nd a wording from the morning news of my tender atrocity: blot out my ines­ capability. \\ash my corpse unwillingly: and mince thy next of kin. Because I grow my iniquity: and my sin is always again'ing on me. To thee only have I skinned, and have done no other evil before thee: that thou sayest we died in thy words, and mayest overcum when thou art touched. For behold an 'I' was perceived in iniquities: and my Other concealed me in skin. For behold a gloved truth, now ask: the unclean and midden things of my grisly manifesto hast made a devil of me. Thou shalt listen now with devilry, and I shall be avenged: thou shalt watch me, and thy pallor be made whiter than snow. To my shearing thou shalt live as whipping boy, and regress: and humbled bones shall voice. Burn away thy face of skin: and bleed out all my iniquities . Create a clean hole where heart should be: and renew a frightened spirit in thy bowels. 317

James Harris A ghastly spree rots away under thy edifice: and thy holy spirit take not one corpse from me. Render flesh unto the joy of thy starvation: and consume me with a ravening spirit. I will preach the unjust ways: and the impious shall be subverted unto me. Shiver me numb dopamine flash floods the underworld of my alienation: and my tongue shall extol thy virtue. Thou 0 lover wilt open my lips: and my howl shall declare thy pain. No cause to disavow a sacrifice, after I had verily given it: with spurned offer.. ings, vow not to be delighted. Your scar artifice is troubled spirit: anchorite: humiliate 0 g-d, thou wilt des­ pise. Conceal favourably 0 Blood, under wood and wall: my Icon: and let the wall& of confusion be filled up. When shalt thou accept my sacrifice of disgusted oblations, and whole burnt offerings: sprawled and flayed and sliced in halves upon thy altar. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. Even as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. Psalm [1 01] : 0 Mother hear my prayer: and let my cry come to thee. Turn not away from thy grave in me: in what way soever I am in tribulation, enshrine thine fear in me. In what day soever I shall scrawl upon thee: fear me needily. For my days have vanished as smoke: and my brains are slithered as a dying scorned thing. I was bitten in tall grass, and my heart is withered: for I forgot to heed my dead. From the voice of all my groaning: my atoning hath taken leave of my flesh. I am become like an elegant wilderness: I am become as a night crow in the house. I have watched: and am become as a sparrow solitary in the churchyard. All the day mine anomies unmade me: and though that dismayed me, I swore against thee. For I ate your ashes as bread, and mingled my drink with weeping. At the face of the wrath of thine incrimination: for that knifing thee up, thou hast thrown me down. My days have declined as a shadow: and I am withered as grass. 318

N E REM I N I SCARI S But thou 0 lover endurest for ever: and thy memorial in sedation and crema­ "1on. The smoke rising up malefic unworthy tension: for it is no time to have mercy QO it, for thy time is come. Because the bones thereof have treated thy worms and rats: and the earth shall ha,·e pity thereof. .\nd the not yet exiled shall fear thy name 0 lover: and all the rotten things of die earth my glory. For hours I have thrilled on your horizon: and thee shall be obscened in this glory. The mouth had finally ejected a prayer in mwnbling tongue: and my g-d, I des­ pised thy submission. Let unease be written in veneration of insect wings and things that shudder: wd the people that shall be violated, shall reappraise your Lord: Because he hath looked forth from his high holy place: but your Lord from hea"\"'en hath looked not upon the earth. That he mightn't hear the moanings of the fettered: and I rebind the children that are slain. That they may grow forth the molding shame of our putrid graves with fragrant fangs. In the disassembling of the people together in one: sliced fingers, severed spinal Cords. I concealed thee away in a trench: filled with bodies oYer the course of a few days. Call me not away before my slaying halts: thy fears undergo contamination, and regeneration. In the begging 0 Mother thou didst hound and unearth: and these sevens are the works of thy hands. They have perished but thou remainest: and they crawl in black, cold as tor­ ment. _\nd at a gesture thou shalt change me, and they shall be hanged: and my Art, insane, though tears shall not fall . The son of thy disturbance grown rabid: and t.� eir seed shall be dissected for ever. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. Even as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. 319

James Harris Psalm [1 29] : To the depths I have climbed into thee 0 Lord: Lord hear my voice. Let thine ears be attentive: unto the voice of my petition. You wilt under unnerving iniquities 0 Lord: for whom I endure. In league with thee is spitefulness: and for thy law I have dissected, 0 Lord. My soul hath slayed by his Word: cloaked my soul in wrath for our Lord. From my murdering march even until sunlight: let the trenchant horde lose hope. Because, like our Lord, there is no mercy: and with him no redemption. And I call on miserable extremes: from all his anonymities. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. Even as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia. Psalm [1 42] : Mother fear my prayers, thine ears my admission receive: I invite you to hear me, be disgusted. An unfettered judgment upon the servile: for every one living shall be horrified in thy sight. For this antinomy hath persecuted my soul: pathos stumbled my life in the earth. The path set me in obscure places as the dead of the world: and my spirit is in anguish upon me, within me my heart is troubled. I am dreadful of your molded ways, I have eradicated all thy works: on the deeds of my hands did I meditate. I have wretched forth my comman ds to thee: my Astarte, a heart without blood unto thee. Fear me 0 sickly lover: my spirit hath faded. Turn not away thy artifice from me: I shall bedevil them that pretend unto this face. Make me hear thy screams for mercy 'fore the mourning: for I gouge holes in thee. Make the way shown to me, wherein I may stalk: because I have lifted up my soul to thee. Eviscerate thine enemies, 0 Lord, to thee I have bled: teach me to do thy will , because thy Art is g-d. Thy weary blood shall construct my frightening hand: for I proclaim, 0 Lord, thou shalt quicken me in thine iniquity. 320

N E REM I N I SCARIS Thou shalt obscene my soul fo r negation: and i n thy mercy thou shalt destroy mine endlessly . .\nd I shalt destroy all that afflict my soul: because I am thy servant. Glory be to my Emptiness, and to the Blood, to the Death. EYen as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever: and world without end again and again and again. Alleluia . .\nt: Ne reminiscaris Domine delicta nostra, vel parentem nostrorum: neque ..-mdictam sumas de peccatis nostris . .\nt: Remember, not 0 Lord our or our parents' offences: neither take venge­ ance of our sins. 32 1

OLD BILL Sam Keogh They have his pot on display, and his cooker, and a few knives, all with evi­ dence labels dangling from them, all soiled with traces of boiled remains. Beside the cooker his bath where he sometimes drowned them, sometimes dismem­ bered them. He thinks it funny that they put the cooker beside the bath, and then he thinks it would have been clever if he had done the same--would have saYed him an awful lot of cleaning. He ate death. It fille d him up. It gave him the satiated lethargy of an ana­ conda full of tapir. The victim is the dirty platter after the feast, and the wash­ mg up is a clinically ordinary task. But why didn't they have the photograph of him as a bobby on the wall? He knew they must have it somewhere. He looked smart in that picture. It was 1 5 or 16 he killed. The wall panel says 1 5, but he could never be sure. He had been here before, many times. His first visit was as a young cadet, when he was told somberly that the function of the museum was to show him what he would be up against on the streets, to show him what the public h e served were capable of. I t was fo r his benefit. The museum's first room is a replica of the original at old Scotland Yard, and has the stilted stuffiness of a diorama. A selection of strange and exotic knives, guns and melee weapons emblazon an entire wall, which includes a shelf holding a row of death busts, casts of men hanged at N ewgate prison. The heads were made by phrenologists in an attempt to show officers what criminals looked like. Their plaster necks taut with the ligature mark of the rope, and their pained expressions bursting with ecstatic agony make them a particular favourite. He knows all too well the physiological effects of strangulation on the male body, how it often induced ejaculation, and the old myth that mandrakes grew where it landed, small mal­ formed headless men that somehow had the ability to scream. The busts are various colours, from matt white to brown to polished black. He remembers the bog body in the British Museum. Kille d just before the Ro­ mans got to Northern England, the body had been in the ground since, until a peat cutter found him in 1 985. The chemical composition of the bog inhibited bacterial growth and preserved his body remarkably well. His skin was com­ pletely intact but dyed a mottled brown by the tannin in the water. He looked like a leather jacket with a face. The acids from the sphagnum moss in the bog 323

Sam Keog h de-mineralized his bones making them like rubber, which allowed the weight cJ the bog to press his body into an almost two dimensional image of itself. Hil head and face were intact but perfectly squashed, to the extent that his expres­ sion was only legible from a particularly acute angle, like the skull in Hans Hol­ bein's 'The Ambassadors.' He suffered an incredibly violent death. Pieces of bone were found inside his skull, probably from two blows with sometlnng heavy like the back of an axe. One of his ribs was broken and he was strenu­ ously strangled. He was also drowned during the ordeal in what is known as thc­ threefold death. A sacrifice of absurd violence-a multiplied death-worthy of appeasing more than one god at once. Overkill. It's the strangulation that be remembers most, evidenced by a pig sinew still wrapped around his neck. It had been tightened by twisting a stick stuck through the loop at the back unol first asphyxiation and then spinal fracture. But a pig sinew, wasn't that funny? Kill ed by a Pig. A heavy black wooden frame sits in the comer adjacent the busts. A num­ ber of nooses hang from it. They strike him as very heavy looking. Some have a varnished wooden wheel which the rope runs through to form the loop. lrs called the eye. Such a simple innovation, the little eye, preventing friction where it might have been present in a more traditional noose. He imagines the body dropping through the trap door, in free fall, unhindered by the rope sliding through the eye until gravity suddenly squeezes the loop around the neck, pull­ ing it at a very slight angle and uncoupling the cervical column. But not enough to cause decapitation. Decapitation happened more frequently in hangings be­ fore the 'measured drop' was introduced. It meant that the amount of slack in a. rope was determined by the condemned man's height and weight. It also meant the ropes were properly boiled, oiled and pre-stretched. The other rooms are only slightly newer, with blue carpet tiles, formica vit­ rines and the lingering smell of damp and bleach. The water stained exhibition dividers blocking out most of the daylight add to the basement ambience, de­ spite being on the first floor. I t doesn't need to be any more presentable though, because it isn't open to the public. A few of the more mundane arte­ facts in the collection are here. A huge pile of knives seized during a knife am­ nesty, displayed in the same way as they are displayed to the press: in a pile on a trestle table covered in a blue table cloth emblazoned with the MET's logo. He used to put on a blue latex glove, and pick one up so that a photogra­ pher could get a picture of a hand in the foreground holding the knife with the pile of blades in the background. Some photographers would encourage him to brandish it, to hold it firmly by the handle, point the tip at the lens. But he was supposed to hold it carefully, with palms up, the handle resting on the fingers of the right hand and the flat side of the blade resting on the fingers of the right hand. Or lightly hold only the butt of the handle, with the tip of the blade push­ ing into the top of his baby finger. If his face was in the picture, he was to look 324

OLD BILL concerned, o r troubled, or resolute. H e was t o appear sternly gra teful that this dung was a thing out of circulation, taken out of the realm of use . And put into rhe realm of the sacred . a On the front cover of Thomas Hobbes' uviathc111, there is an engraving of colossus . It has the head of a king and holds a sceptre in its left h and, a sword m its right. The colossus' body is made from people , hundreds of them, all turned toward the head in reverence and fear. He figured his role was the righ t arm, the right arm of the law. But how could this be if the arm was made from people? It must be something to do with how the people stop at the wrist, how the drawing continues as the ou tline of a hand holding a sword. The sword isn't made of people either. The people supposedly regard him as the arm, the exec­ utor of the laws which are invented by the head. But really he must be the hand. And the sword. And the edge of the sword, which rushes toward death. The space between the peopled arm and the sword-hand is what he always thinks of when he hears the word 'discretion.' It's the space that the sovereign head always has to keep up with. Without that flexible space, he is powerless. In order to keep it open, he must exerci se his power beyond its accepted limits. Stretch the meaning of discretion with invention. Cleave the city with his sword. Opposite the pile of knives is ano t her fav ourite . Di splayed on its own again st a purple felt background is a th oracic vertebrae with a root growing through it. It looks deliberately combined: a fetish of death and chthonian growth. It's too beau ti ful to be made by chance. But of course it wasn't by chance. He meant to kill all eigh t of them . I t had been dug up from behind his house. He was a member of the war reserve police then. He led them to their end with the promise of a discrete abortion. Affordable and away from their disapproving families. He raped them shortly before or after they died. Tills combination of wood and bone puts him in mind of the Mandan In­ dians. Like the bog man , they too were stateless and had no need for the likes of him. Young Mandan men were put through a gruelling initiation ritual, which entailed tearing open the pectoral muscles with a notched knife , in serting two fat wooden pegs and suspending the initiate from raw hide cords until he fainted from pain. After this , he would be pulled down and allowed to slowly regain consciousness, whereupon h e was expecte d to present the little finger of his le ft hand to be severed by a hatchet. The final and perhaps most painful stage of the ordeal happened then. He would be brought outside to run in ' the last race' as onlookers jumped on the cow skulls that trailed behind him from cords run through his calf muscles. The ordeal was complete when all the pegs were tom from his flesh by the weight of his fellow vill agers. Every stage of the ritual was designed to inflict prolonged, torturous agony. And all the while the initiate was expected to smile in gratitude to his tormentors. It produced good warriors, but warriors with scar tissue: the indelible inscription into flesh of a 325

Sam Keogh law; you will not have the desire for power, you will not have the desire for submission. He enjoys the story up to that poin t. Wlshes it wasn 't so useful. In the same room around the corner there is a collection of objects which were used to disappear bodies without a trace. A forty gallon oil drum, a ba�· stained apron, huge rubber gloves and a gas mask. Over forty eight hours the bodies would melt into a sludge with two or three inches of fat forming a scum on the top. He added new acid over the course of a week to dis s ol ve the skele­ ton. In the next vitrine is a red PVC handbag, a set of ceramic false teeth and three gallstones in a Petri dish: parts of his last victim wouldn't dissolve. Beside some melted plexiglass shields is a smashed helmet. And behind that, pinned to an exhibition panel is a set of navy overalls perforated with lots of rips, each with a distinct dark brown halo of dried blood They have a pic­ ture of him in uniform up this time. He has his custodian helmet on, the strap pulled tight under his chin, the Brunswick star proudly glinting in the camera flash. He looks smart. A photograph of the overalls is pinned to the panel on the right, highlighting the fifty four holes with little white squares. Forty of them resulted from machete, swords and axes. His body was purple from being stomped, his arms covered in deep wounds and his hands missing seven fin­ gers. Probably as a result of trying to defend himself from the blades. There were fourteen s tab wounds in his back, one in his right thigh, six in his face. and his jawbone had been smashed by a blow that left a disfiguring gash across the right side of his head. A six-inch long knife was buried in his neck up to the hilt. POSTSCRIPT The Black Museum, otherwise known as The London Musewn of Crime, is currently located in room 1 0 1 of New Scotland Yard. An array of artefacts from the history of London policing, incarceration, and capital punishment are on display, including evidence gathered from the scenes of famous crimes throughout the history of the :MET. According to the :MET, its existence is for purely educational purposes, to teach police what horrors they can expect to face from the public they serve and protect. Only members of the police are permitted entry. Notable items include the pot and cooker used by Dennis Nil­ sen to boil the remains of some of his 1 5 murder victims; a collection of plaster death busts of men hung at Newgate prison; a display showing the evolution of the technology of hanging; the barrel used by J ohn George Haigh 'the acid bath murderer,' to dissolve corpses; a thoracic vertebrae of one of at least eight women killed by John Christie; and the overalls of PC Keith Blakelock, killed during the Broadwater Farm riots of 1 985.

OLD BILL Since 1 990 t o the tim e o f writing there have been a total of 336 deaths in cus­ tody or otherwise following contact with the London Metropolitan Police. t De­ ;pite numerous inquest verdicts of unlawful killing, no criminal sentences have been brought against police in London or anywhere in the UK since 1 969.2 1 The 1 969 case of David Oluwale involved two police officers in Leeds savagely beat­ ing a thirty nine year old Nigerian homeless man and kicking his unconscious body into the river Aire. Despite the revdation of a catalogue of racially motivated abuse (includ­ ing writing Oluwale's nationality as 'Wog' in numerous charge reports) and eyewitness testimonies of Oluwale's murder, both officers were found not guilty of manslaughter at the direction of Judge Hinchcliffe, and instead given minor prison sentences for assault. See 'Remembering Oulwale,' http:/ /thejusticegap.com/2014/04/remembering­ oluwale-indelible-black-mark-leeds-police/ (accessed 1 0-05-1 5) . : Cf. 'There are no mechanisms fo r monitoring, auditing or publishing investigations and inquest findings and no statutory requirement to act on the findings of these inves­ tigations. There is also a pattern of institutionalised rductance to approach deaths in custody as potential homicides even where there have been systemic failings and gross negligence has occurred' ('Deaths in Custody,' http: / / www.inquest.org.uk/issues/hom e [accessed 1 0-05-1 5]). 327

VI I CAUSED DREAMS WHICH CAUSED DEATH

TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY MEDIUM Irina Gheorghe Tne character of BOB, the core villain in the cult TV series Twin Peaks,1 emerged out of a series of accidents taking place within a short period of time :i.:hile shooting the pilot episode.2 Frank Silva, a set-decorator, was moving fur­ rurure in Laura Palmer's room and, as he was pulling a chest of drawers in front (1f rhe door, was jokingly advised by somebody on set not to lock himself in rhe room . Consequently, David Lynch decided to film a scene with Silva in the room without yet knowing what it would be used for. Later that day, while s h o oting anorher scene, in which Laura's mother was shaken by a terri fying nsion, Frank Silva once again made his way from reality into the fictional space of rhe series, as his reflection was inadvertently captured in the shot at rhe edge of a mirror. Twice chat day the world of fiction was invaded by reality. This inYasion did not have the force of a blow but the craft of slim incisions. BOB placed himself from the ve1:y beginning at the breach between two wor1ds, and he masterfully handJed the passageway. The first time, a real situation, albeit belonging to the space of the might have been, the outskirts of the possible, rook shape as a mental image and from there stormed the space of fiction. The second time the invasion was more cunning: BOB slipped in from the world of hard facts by means of a technological mediation-what escaped the human eye was captured on film, thus entering the world of fiction irreversibly. Silva became BOB without transforming too much in the process: he imported his real life look into the space of the story, turning it eerie. The touch of the real felt like a touch from another world. The starting point of BOB's existence, his positioning at the gateway be­ tween two worlds, became his modus operandi for the whole duration of the �eries. A resident of the Black Lodge, an alien reality, buried in rhe mysteries of the forest, BOB would slip into the world we know, taking the shape of bodies through possession, humans or animals. A mischievous Hermes, on the thresh­ old to the land of the dead, he is not content to stay there and he trespasses the 1 Twin Peaks, written and directed by Mark Frost and David Lynch (Los :\ngeles, C:\: CBS, April 8, 1 990-June 1 0, 1 991). See 'David Lynch: Twin Peaki BOB (1 997),' YouTube, available from :! https: / /youtu.be/35JZG3CdiWE (accessed 01 -05- 1 5). 33 1

I rina G heorg he boundaries, smuggling the other side under the guise of familiar forms. Tne familiarity, however, is deceptive, disconcerting, and eventually brutal; me transfer brings about pain and death. BOB possesses his victims , making � commit crimes on his behalf. He operates through mediums while being a rr.e-­ dium himself. Channelling another reality, inaccessible as such, BOB fulfill s the ultimate dream of knowledge: by way of violence and death, he makes possi� the mediation of the unemediatable. Twin Peaks' serial killer is the medium, his borderline position pervem.rrg the sequentiality of murders. He is an anomalous serial killer; he stays the same. yet shifts form everytime. His deeds have a deviant seriality which retains some-­ thing of the original occurrences that led to his emergence as a characte% Stemming from accident, BOB serialises it, bringing forward a new model of entanglement between murder and mediation. SAVAGE ACTS, SOFf DEATH Whenever there is a murder, the first question which arises is : who did it? \\oo kille d who? Even if that is not the actual question, it still needs to be asked. The more important ques tion only comes later, if there is more to the s tory than !. whodunnit scenario. Famously, Twin Peak/ director David Lynch had no idea �: the beginning of the series who the kill er was, and insisted that this question was not the point. However, it needed to be asked. Therefore, who killed who? Who was kille d seems to be clear, as without a corpse there is no crime: Laua Palmer was the corpse. But then, who is the one who kill ed Laura Palmer� Gradually, the series unfolds into an answer: the medium is the one. The mecii­ um is the veiled 'who' in the question. But very soon he ends up in the place oi the other 'who,' the one that was already known. Lying motionless on the floor. annihilated at the hand of another 'who.' The medium kille d and was kill ed, so who is the actual criminal? Another medium maybe. The medium kill s the me­ dium who killed in the first place. \Vho? Laura Palmer. Was she a medium :?S well? She might as well have been, or as it turns out she was supposed to be and refused, and that is why she was killed. The medium kill ed the mediwn who killed the medium who refused to be a medium. A broken chain of medi­ umship. So the medium is the kill er, but who is the medium? The middle, the aver­ age, the one placed between something and something else. The passage, the middle ground. One would not expect violence to characterise the medium, on the contrary. What would be more predictable would be a well-meaning diplo­ mat, rather than a savage assassin. And still, the medium did it. In C. S. Peirce's triadic philosophical system, the medium is the third of his three categories. As he writes in 'The Principles of Phenomenology': 'By the 332

TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY MEDI U M Uurd, I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and �sr.'1 The categories are defined in this text as three distinct modes of being: They are the being of positive qualitative possibility, the being of actual fact, and the being of law that will govern facts in the future.'4 Gradually, these cate­ gories are shaped in relation to each other, underlying various triangular config­ urations oscill ating from the more concrete to the more abstract: the initial �tructure of possibility-actuality-necessity overlaps patterns of feeling-action­ thought, ideas-events-habits, quality-relation-synthesis, vagueness-singularity­ generality. In a later passage, Peirce goes on to shed some light on the relation between these categories and violence: accordingly, if one of them were to be the violent one, it would certainly be the second, the realm of hard facts; 'That is why facts are proverbially called brutal.'5 Violence, therefore, seems to belong to the category of the second: the cut of the event, the fabric of time gashed-open, the brutality of facts. That is the nolence of the slasher-horror, of the sudden, bestial death, but what of the soft, slow annihilation? I f we take Twi11 Peaks' proposal-the medium is the assassin-as a starting axiom, might it not be the case that the violence of me­ diation overcomes the other forms of violence? Ironically enough, in one of the examples Peirce gives for the category of the third in a further text, he talks about the act of murder as a mediation: 'suppose we think of a murderer as being in relation to a murdered person; in this case we conceive the act of the murder, and in this conception it is represented that corresponding to every murderer (as well as to every murder) there is a murdered person; and thus we resort again to a mediating representation which represents the relate as stand­ ing for a correlate with which the mediating representation is itself in relation.'6 While the relationship between representation and mediation opens up a fraught debate which will be touched on in the second part of this text, the core of the example corresponds to the starting axiom mentioned earlier: murder is the medium. In Torture Concrete, Reza Negarestani writes about the violence of abstrac­ tion. What is most brutal to him are not facts themselves, but the processes through which thought abstracts them into concepts: 'Abstraction is the order of the formal cruelty of thought. In its most trivial and unsophisticated form it involves pure mutilation: amputating form from the sensible matter.'7 The con� Charles Sanders Peirce, 'The Principles of Phenomenology,' in Philosophical IV'nlings qf Peirre, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1 955), 80. � Ibid., 75. 5 Ibid., 77. 6 Charles Sanders Peirce, 'On a New List of Categories,' Proceedings of the American Acad­ emy ofArts and Sdtnces 7 (1 868): 287-98. ; Reza Negarestani, Torture Conmte: Jean-Lie Mou/ene and the Protocol ofAbstraction C-'ew York: Sequence Press, 201 4), 5. 333

I rina Gheorghe fusion between what one might expect from Torl11re Concrete and the idea al 'Abstract Cruelty' is in a way revealing: it is not the concrete which is the moa violent, neither is it the abstract. That which is the most violent is the passagt: from one to the other. Violence does not inhabit a place, but an act. It is a pci­ formance, just as murder is performative. In abstracting form from natutt. thought performs the brutality of acting upon matter, only to find itself submit­ ted to the same violence in the inverse process: matter, in tum, acts upoa thought. And the route is just as harsh, no less stranger to bloodshed and mur-. der. Negarestani proposes this bilateral influence as a space of tension and am­ biguity in which both philosophy and art operate, but what are the crime pr.r­ tems of each of these fields? Do they work together at the unsettled comet5 where thought and matter overlap or are they secretly double-crossing each other? ON ART CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE 1\fURDERS In his 1 827 essay, 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,' Thomas De Quincey brings together art and crime proposing that murder should be examined from an aesthetic, rather than ethical perspective, judging killings ac­ cording to style and taste: 'Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its mor­ al handle (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and that, I con­ fess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.'8 Written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the text bears the influ­ ences of the Kantian view on aesthetics as the-ultimately subjective­ judgement of taste. This essay will take up de Quincey's convergence of death and aesthetics and bring it toward purposes it did not originally intend. In order to do this, it will look at aesthetics beyond its meaning as a judgement of taste and will consider it in its wider sense as a mediated form of cognition, and also as a philosophy of art. In so doing it will question the relationship between art and other disciplines, mainly philosophy, ultimately using the idea of a murder­ ous medium to put forward a theory of art as a (gory) field of (practical) knowledge. Thus, following de Quincey, this text will argue for a convergence between murder and art by putting forward not murder as one of the fine arts but rather art as one of the fine murders. In this context the lurid statement of Georges Bataille, originally referring to the represenation of horror, acquires a new significance; one that entails the opposite movement, the horror of repre- 8 Thomas De Quincey, 'On .Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,' Blackwood'1 Magazine 20 (1 827): 1 99-213. 334

TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY MEDIUM �ration: That i s why we must linger in th e shadows which art acquires in the ncinity of death.'9 What is, then, the murder that art finds itself guilty of? With a criminal medium at its core, it is-as the Twin Peaks axiom has led us to believe-guilty oi multiple crimes unfolding in an imperfect series. The killer mediates and kills <Jnh- to be kille d in turn afterwards. Laura's murderer does not outlive its victim •ery long. In the same way, abstraction does not outlive the murder of the con­ crete. As a field of thought, art accompanies philosophy as a faithful accom­ plice all the way to the annihilation of the concrete into the concept, only to swindle it when bringing the concept back into the material world. After the medium-thought has committed the crime of abstracting the crude reality into concepts, a reverse movement has to take place: the reinsertion of the idea into the fabric of factual reality through practice. And that is precisely where the role of art veers away from that of philosophy, in a violent gesture of irreverent treachery. Negarestani mentions the inverse trajectory through which thought goes back to nature, bur he does not dwell on the catastrophic effects this pro­ cess can have on thought. The medium of art practice is not the material. It is the route on which actuality has to die at the accursed hand of thought, and the subsequent path on which thought is blown apart on the way to matter. The medium is not a material, it is a series of murderous deeds committed on the dark journey from reality to materiality. In going back towards matter, the abstract thought that art and philosophy have found themselves sharing is subjected to subsequent crimes at the hand of the medium. As Peirce has shown, the route from sensible matter to concepts is long and fragmented, going through all the three categories as a result of pro­ cesses of abstraction. But so is the reverse way, and that is where the disjunc­ tion between art and philosophy takes place. If we continue to use Peirce's cat­ egories as a point of reference, one could say that there is no artistic practice which stays at the level of the third, except for a subservient, illustrative ap­ proach which compromises the dialectics between the two fields and reinstates the same hierarchy, one which has long been set in place. Having reached the level of thirdness (much to Peirce's surprise, who had reserved this area for philosophy and science alone), art must sneak out to commit more gruesome crimes toward the very disciplines and practices it had temporarily allied itself with, and, ultimately, toward thought itself. There is never a complete identifi­ cation between art practice and the thought of philosophy and science: the lat­ ter is eventually submitted to the violence of the former with the help of the medium. Different media stage their deeds in different ways, with a preference Georges Bataille , 'The Cruel Practice of Art,' Superverl C Inc., available from http://supervert.com/ elibraty I georges_bataille / crueLpractice_of_art (accessed 1 0-051 5). � 335

I rina Gheorghe for differen t categories. Painting seems to prefer firs tness, film secondness, PCP. formance oscill a tes between the two, and so on. But none of them stick ''1* thirdness, which has led to a commonplace assumption that they never e'\-� passed it on the way-that art is external to thought altogether. As the rouns connecting matter and thought are violent in both directions, there might � some artists who prefer not to bother going all the way. Comfortably placed � the level of the concrete, these artis ts keep their hands clean, and all the unla� : ful paths outlined so far seem to remain untouched: in conjunction ·with arrism1 practice, fact remains fact, matter remains matter, and the methods of this na1> I trans formation are foreign to any other discipline which has thought at its cotle" And still, there is always some doubt in place. As is the case with any journey oi which only the end result is present, it cannot be easily determined which att the routes that were never trodden, and which the ones whose traces have be­ come invisible. BRCTOPIA: BRUTE/ BRUTAL UTOPIA In Negarestani's text Torture Co11crete, the violence of abstraction is proposed as a mechanism to bring about the utopian ideal of reuniting art, philosophy and science as disciplines of thought: 'that consequential moment where abstracrioo is not only born out of the unity of philosophy, science and art, but also aims ar the unity of all modes of thought.'10 While acknowledging the importance of this common ground, and of such a Promethean impulse to bring the three disciplines back together, this text suggests that the actuality of their reunifica­ tion is rather muddy. In Handbook of lnaesthetics, Alain Badiou attempts to posit a similar reunifi.. cation of art and philosophy . 1 1 He places truth as the hinge holding the tw-o together, criticising what he sees as the three existing paradigms for thinking this relationship. The first one submits art to the authority of philosophy as the only holder of truth-Badiou calls this the didactic schema. The second one gives full authority to art as the one wh o has access to truth, but isolates it from the other disciplines of knowledge-this is called the romantic schema. The third one assigns a therapeutic role to art and banishes its truth to the realm of the imagination, relieving it of any connection to the real-this, Badiou calls, the classical schema. In opposition to all three of these schemata Badiou puts forward a conception of art as a field of realism: art as a truth procedure. The condition for this is that its truth be both immanent and singular, the conjunc- 10 Negarestani, Torture Concrete, 2. Alain Badiou, Handbook of lnae.rthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford California. Stanford Vni''ersity Press, 2005). 11 336

TRANS-SERIAL AN D THE DEADLY MEDIUM non o f which has been a missing poin t i n all the three systems previously delin­ eated. Badiou thus argues for a truth that belongs to art (as opposed to one tmposed from outside) and to art alone (it canno t circulate among disciplines) : The philosophical identification of art falls under the category of truth. Art is a rh ought in which artworks are the Real (and not the effect) . And this thought, or rather the truths that it activates, are irreducible to other truths-be they sci­ entific, political, or amorous. This also means that art, as a singular regime of rhough t, is irreducible to philosophy .'1 2 Art is therefore no s tranger to what Badiou terms ' the Real,' emerging as a rruth procedure, and thus as a field of knowledge legitimate in its own right. �Ioreover, the truth of art is ultimately different from that of other disciplines; rather than being reduced to unity, truth here is conceived in terms of multi­ plicity. Any wariness of undesired smugglings from philosophy into art is thus, according to this line of thought, irrelevant: We must above all not conclude rhat it is philosophy's task to think art. Instead, a configuration thinks itself in rhe works that compose it.'13 Furth er on in the same text, Badiou criticizes Gilles D eleuze for banishing art from the field of thought, and into the realm of pure percept / affect: 'Deleuze, for example, continues to place art on the side of sensation as such (percept and affect), in paradoxical continuity with the He­ gelian motif of art as the "sensible form of the Idea." Deleuze thereby disjoins art from philosophy (which is devoted to the invention of concepts alone), in line with a modality of demarcation that still leaves the destination of art as a form of thought entirely unapparen t . '1 4 The model of the deadly medium might also leave the connection between art and thought unapparent, not because it never happened but rather because as a performative gesture its traces might be los t or hidden. Far from trying to put forth an inverted disjunction, in which percept and affect are replaced by rhought as intrinsic to art practi ce , this text focuses on manifestations of the passage fro m one to the other: the deadly me­ diation which could argue for a new relation between art and other disciplines, historically given more credit as realist proce dures. Their routes might overlap some of the way, they might intersect bri e fly at times, but ev en tually they must part . And, as :Michel Serres-ano ther philos opher of the triad-writes, 'at the crossroads, the morals rum around the decision, sometimes murders are com­ mitted.' 1 5 1 2 Ibid., 9. 13 Ibid., 14. t4 Ibid., 10. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R Schehr (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1 982), 7 1 . is 337

Irina Gheorg he ART AS DIFFRACTIVE REALISM In trying to (re)gain a place as a knowledge procedure, art makes itself complicit with a series of horrendous murders. The pas sages between affect and concept, matter and thought, process and end result can only occur as violent encoun­ ters. Remaining in the realm of firstness to which so many-including, as al­ ready mentioned, Deleuze and Peirce himsellf.-had confined art, would have been a safer approach. Instead, in trying to bring affect into fact, mediate the two into thinking, and afterwards actualize both of them as an act of presence, art becomes confederate in a network of organized crime in which subsequent mediums murder and get murdered. The pro0cess whereby art becomes accom­ plice to speaking about the world is not a g:allery of mirrors in which it subser­ viently reflects reality or images of reality coming from different fields, but a process of deadly mediation in which diffrac1tion, rather than reflection, would be a more appropriate metaphor. In her 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Ha!fw'!J, Karen Barad puts forward the phenomenon of diffraction to think the rdation between the social and the scientific, but it could equally address the above mentioned relation between art and philosophy. Unique to the behaviour of waves (thus equally to sound, ra­ dio, or visible light waves), diffraction entails their bending and spreading out when encountering an obstacle, as well as their subsequent overlapping to cre­ ate surprising surfaces of fuz zy modulations. 1 6 Superimposing into low intensi­ ties, escalating to a pitch or wrapping onto each other into points of utter disso­ lution, the waves are thus attuned to a subtle geometry of interaction as op­ posed to a blunt one of reflection. In the same way, when going through a me­ dium, the concept, after troublesome acquisition through processes of abstrac­ tion, could emerge either intensified or compl·etely annihilated. Diffraction, in particular, and wave beha.viour, in general, are overarching metaphors for Barad's book. She follows Neils Bohr in using the wave-particle duality of quantum physics to propose a new paradigm for knowledge based, rather than on representation, on performance. She thus rejects mediation as representation altogether, that is to say, as a correspondence theory of truth, whereby scientific knowledge mediates our encounter with the world. The deadly medium could be a suitable, more dramatic, counterpart to the death of mediation she is proposing: a mediation kills whatever precedes it and is in turn killed This may sound utterly correlationist, in that it gives ontological primacy to the relation and not to the entities composing it, but for Barad/Bohr the process is in no way submitted to the law of the mind only. Barad (following Bohr) proposes phenomena as the basic uni1ts of knowledge, but they are far 16 Karen Barad, M.etting the Universe Ha!fwt!Y· Quanm·m Ph)'Sti:s and the Entanglement ofMatter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), Kindle edition. 338

TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY M EDIUM from their original Kantian sense: cutting across any noumena-phenomena dis­ tinction, 'we should understand phenomena not as objects-in-themselves, or as perceived objects (m the Kantian or phenomenological s ense) , but as specific intra-actions.' 1 7 The intra-action is the encounter of entities emerging in the course of the encounter itself, as opposed to classical inter-action. It is a model of agential realism which places the act at the core of knowledge. Barad mainly writes about scientific knowledge, but what would it mean to think of intra-action, perfonnance and diffraction as a model for artistic prac­ tice? Diffractive realism as a model for artistic practice is a way for art to regain its potential as a truth procedure without losing access to the qualities o f feeling and fact or to matter as an underlying vector of the whole process. It is a fur­ ther way of thinking artistic practice as serial killin g developed so far: as the subsequent murder of feeling by fact, of fact by thought, and ultimately of thought by the previous two. The perfonnative approach, with its focus on phenomena and actions in­ stead of things, could be a way out of what seemed ro be the insurmountable dilemma between aesthetics (as presumably focusing on the world- for-us through phenomena) and speculative realism (with its desire to access the thing-in-itself) . 1 8 The Speculative Aesthetics projectl '> places a similar focus on a performative approach to knowledge and could be thus placed in a dialogue with Barad's theory of agential realism. It defines aesthetics as 'operating' within the real rather than mediating it: 'The participants in the following discussion are largely concerned with overturning this caricature of a speculative realist thought that seeks to bypass human mediation. Instead, they ask how aesthesis, representation, and the image operate within the real-without their being, for all that, foundationally constitutive of it.'2° n Ibid. Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy which took its name from the homonymous conference on the 27th of April 2007 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Rather than a new homogenous doctrine, speculative realism is a loose um­ brella term gathering diverse positions whose main common ground is a rejection of the anthropocentric foundations of post-Kantian continental philosophy, proposing instead an interrogation on the nature of reality. See Collapse II, ed. Robin Mackay (Fal­ mouth: Urbanomic, 2007), and 'Speculative Realism,' in Collapse III, ed Robin :\fackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2008): 304-449. 19 As it defines itself, 'the Speculative Aesthetics Research Project was initiated in 2013 by Dr. J ames Trafford and Luke Pendrell for the consideration of open questions re­ garding the relation between aesthetics (broadly construed), and new forms of realism within post-Continental philosophy (influenced by, though not limited to positions identified with 'Speculative Realism'). See Robin :\fackay, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford, 'Introduction,' in Speculative Aestheticr, ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 3. 21.l Mackay, Pendrell and Trafford, Spemlatiue Aesthetics, 5. 18 339

Irina Gheorghe In a passage, in keeping with the original claim of speculative realism's de­ sire to bring the thing-in-itself back into philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux brings philosophy and mathematics together by way of death: 'mathematics speak about things in itself without us. It speaks about what would remain if we were not there. So it is really our deaths we contemplate when mathematics describes reality. [ . . . ] In fact mathematics, for me, are the strange possibility to speak about a world, a very special world, a world without thinking or life. Mathematics are the possibility of coming back from the infernal, from death's realm. You go to death's realm, and return. It is a special realm. And really for me it's the big mystery. '21 By extension, we could say that this text is aiming to reunite physics, philosophy, and art by way of death, but rather than the quiet stilln ess of the cemetery, it does so through the gruesome act of murder. The phenomenon of diffraction proposed by Barad, together with BOB, can pro­ vide the underlying diagram for this convergence. Art practice as an act of murder is an exploration of the distorted wave signals travelling their way be­ tween us and the world by revolving around diffraction's two constitutive mo­ ments as performative scenarios: the bend as a turning point, when a disrupting deviation, an accident, might step in, and the overlap as a hyperpresence which might turn to indis tinction. The two clements of diffraction, deviation and an­ nihilation, are at the core of BO B's existence as a deviant serial killer: a killer of imperfect seriality. If most of this essay has been focused on the second ele­ ment, annihilation, in the shape of the murder narratives which have unfolded so far, the last section will provide a short digression on the issue of deviation. LATEROLOGY (A SHORT DIGRESSION) 'Pataphysics, coined by Alfred Jarry in 1 893, is an imaginary discipline emerg­ ing at the intersection of art, science and philosophy.22 One of the main ideas guiding this convergence is that of deviation, as 'pataphysics defines itself as a philosophy veering away from metaphysics in the same way and to the same extent metaphysics veers away from physics. Moreover, it is a science which studies the particular rather than the rule, in spite of the idea that science is concerned with norm and not exception. In his s tudy devoted to 'pataphysics, poet Christian Bok presents it, �-paneling on Jarry's description, as 'the science of the particular,' which does not 'study the rules governing the general recur21 Quentin �Ieilla ssoux, Florian Hecker and Robin ?\fackay, 'Q. Meilla ssoux / F. Hecker I R. Mackay chez Meillas1011X, Paris, 22. 7. 2010,' Urbanomic, available from http:/ /urbanomic.com/ archives/Documents-1 .pdf (accessed 01-05-1 5). 22 Alfred Jarry, 'Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo­ Scientific Novel,' trans. Simon Watson Taylor, in Sekcttd Works ofAlfredJarry, eds. Rog­ er Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1 965), 1 92. 340

TRANS-SERIAL AND THE DEADLY MEDIUM rence of a periodic incident (the expected case) so much as study the games governing the special occurrence of a sporadic accident (the excepted case).'23 The accident has the series, the norm. embedded in its strucrure, it defines itself not as something emerging in a void, but in direct relation to that which it aims to deny and destroy. The accident as a deviation is at the core of BOB's ap­ pearance as a character, and at the core of Twin Peaks as a whole. The 'other side,' the one that BOB is coming from and mediating through death and vio­ lence, is ultimately embedded in the peaceful suburban life it comes to disturb. In Twin Peaks, the outside finds itself in an incestuous relationship with that to which it is supposedly external, alien. To what extent this pattern also works as a viable metaphor, alongside utter annihilation, for the relation between art and philosophy, is still to be established. If on the main roads murders occur, what happens on the parallel roads? Annihila tion and deviation, series and accident, necro- and para- might provide an encompassing diagram for the afore­ mentioned relation. Is art a necro-practice of philosophy or philosophy a para­ practice of art? 'What is the rela tion each of them has to the third element of 'pataphysics triad, which is science? One of the conclusions Bok draws from his analysis is that 'the praxis of science involves the parapraxis of poetry. '24 In what way this can apply to art practice as a whole will be addressed in a further essay.25 POSTSCRIPT: OBLIQUE SHE SAID26 This text started out as a reflection on a concept. The concept, as a reflection of thought. Thought, as a reflection of practice. Practice, as a reflection of re­ search. And the series could expand endlessly. A reflection as a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and so on. But there is more to this process than pure reflection. Once it has entered another medium, the wave veers. Having en­ countered an obstacle, it deviates. It bends and spreads and interferes with itself and other waves. It might intensify or it might disappear, in a lethal interaction. From the point of departure to the point of arrival there is a disjunction, and the route is not straight. In the same way, art subtracts itself from the direct line Christian Bok, 'PataphysiC!: The Poetics of an Imaginary Scien.-e (New York: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 9. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 See Irina Gheorghe, 'Bend Sinister: Performance as Reality Switch between Science and the Paranormal' (forthcoming) . 26 I thank Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel for this title, which emerged while we were working together on an exhibition in December 2D1 4. The title is a reference to :\Iar­ guerite Duras's 1 969 novel Destrf!)'. She Said. See Marguerite Duras, Desfr'!)•, She Said, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1 994). 23 34 1

Irina Gheorghe between two points, and ends up on the longer route, so long that the way back is sometimes impossible to find. The geodesic of artistic practice is neither short nor continuous. Texts are not reflections of concepts, they are only per­ formance techniques to navigate the lateral way between concepts and practice. Practice is not a reflection of anything either, it is a gesture which creates a route whose traces you grope to find again. For anything visible, there is an invisible trajectory behind it, and that contributes to its condition as a gesture. At the beginning, there was a story, next to movement, a meaning, next to sound, an intention, next to words, concepts. But the act of travelling the long way is equivalent to an imperfect cut, and the connection becomes disrupted. It is not completely lost, it is only that the path cannot always be found. There is an essential differ nce between those who walk and those who watch those who walk, there is n o way of seeing the traces and producing them at the same time. And they might slowly vanish anyway, so that the way back is stumbled and indefinite. 342

CUT THE CLOAK ON THE INSIDE TO ALWAYS ENTER FROM THE OUTSIDE Alina Popa We only have one prayer: 'Let me out of here.' Let me out of where? Out of here . . . In general. -:A Visitor lo the Mnsmml Beneath and before the luxuriant jungles of delirium is the endless crushing ash-plain of despair. -Nick Land The Arawete 'mangod' is a slayer not a priest. -Eduardo Viveiros de Castro After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in . . . -Clarice Lispector In what follows, we (you and I) will outline scenarios of escape by means of self-guarding one's prison: murdering the Outside in order to take a leap out back in, murdering the Inside in order to loop in back out. The escape schemes can be traced only on the condition that there is no escape-a double negation of escape, from within as well as from without. \'X"'e hope that the spiraled path we shall take reveals an Inside that, through its locally produced fluctuations, will breath into it a dynamic notion of the Outside-one, yet multiple, particu­ lar, yet global, and vice versa. A Multiple Outside is a symptom of a machina­ tion of multiple lines of flight. The task that we have to undertake is to become abstract and patient serial killers, taking actual spatiotemporality as our victim; first to tailor our prison and then to butcher our escape. First to cut ever nar­ rowing and suffocating limits into our actual phenomenal world, then to serially excise alien somatic virtual maps. First to scar the usual topology of spacetime with an armamentarium of carefully chosen knives-the blade of the word, the t A Visitor to the Museum, directed by Konstantin Lopushansky (1 989; Moscow: C S �l Productions). 343

Alina Popa dotted line of a gesture, and the cut of the film editor-then to uselessly at­ tempt at leaping out of this spatiotemporality. By insisting on repeating these phenomeno-noumenal sinful, dangerous crimes, the border between fiction and the real, between the logical and the phagical, between what is and what is not, between human and nonhuman realms, becomes perforated. In Dario Argento's classic giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,2 the main character, Sam Dalmas, finds himself trapped in a blind transparent room posi­ tioned at the entrance of an art gallery-a room created through the sliding of an additional glass wall parallel to the entrance and to the back wall of the space, which keeps the visitor inside, while outside, and outside while inside. This double entrapment allows Sam to see through the glass, inside and outside, but denies him the act. He could perhaps be the one writing this text, as Sam is a writer, with his hands now unable to produce any act, to handle the situa­ tion-Handlung. We can dream that he unfolds the impossible scenarios of escape while watching the murder that someone attempts to commit under his perplexed gaze in the exhibition room of the fancy and clinically white art gal­ lery-Argento's chosen site for killing. From this glass-windowed space, doubly trapped, we can specularly commit an asymmetrical mirror-crime, a spatiotem­ poral murder, a post-escape breakout-once again operated with the blade of the word, with the dotted line of a gesture, and the cut of the film editor. Our crime produces another kind of death, a death in life, and is governed by the diagram of the circle and the loop, by blind repetition, and a moebian Ouroboros. Oscillating between various forms-of-death-in-life, we will counter­ intuitively bring together not only death and life, but notions that are as remote from one another as loops and leaps, shamans and geometers, cannibals and hyperstitional entities. If no escape is envisioned, neither from the Inside nor from the Outside, this makes one will to produce it by all means-an impossi­ ble endeavor, because we have already agreed that escape is escaping this world. With the actual gestural space minimized, condemned to either repetition or to a perpetual radical alteration-living with death-in-life, an impossible yet evi­ dent escape must perforce be invented: the only way out (or in) is through the dead end. The medium of escape is death, an extinction nested within life, a life nested within extinction. Serially killing the actual gestural and action-oriented possibilities is the loopy labour towards a leap-'Out of where? Out of here . . . In general.'3 In this scenario, the medium of the leap is the loop, and vice versa. Serially killing this world by navigating transversally through different spatio­ temporalities, different environmental levels, we encounter the voidshock4 of a 2 The Bird with the Crystal PINmage, directed by Dario Argento (1 970; Berlin and Rome: Central Cinema Company Film). Lopushansky, Visitor lo the M11Se11111. 4 Pneumo-Nicola, The Voidrhock Papers (unpublished manuscript). 3 344

CUT THE C LOAK ON TH E INSIDE world that escapes itsdf: nothing signi£es, everything reflects itself, bending inwardly, or otherwise said: 'I am as lonely as the world.' At two opposite end s , we slide between unreachable inverted yet absolute deaths, cutting an 'X' be­ tween pure *that* and pure *what*-at their extremes reversible though op­ posed abstract notions. Pure *that* is *what* without *whatness.* Pure *what* is all the qualities and modalities at once brought to suspension, into pure *that.*S The serial kill er is trapped in the cage of its own seriality , in the exasperat­ ing repetition without intensity, wandering in circles in the desert of abomina­ tion, vicious circles voided of vitiation. A serial sinful killer cannibalizes the victim that she herself is, and eats the world sliced into tasteless spiritual chunks. For this serial subject, the world is a special kind of mirror, whose 'dep th consists of its being empty.'6 For this serial subject, unlike H egel, for whom 'if you look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back at 5 To clarify the notions of "that" (Haecceitas) and *what" (Quidditas), I direct the read­ er to two articles: Nicola :\fasciandaro, 'Sorrow of Being,' Qui Parle: Crilfral Humanities and Social Sciences 1 9 (201 0) : 9-35, and Jeffrey R. DiLeo, 'Peirce's Haecceitism,' Transac­ tions of the Charles S. Peirce Sociel)' 27. 1 (Winter, 1 99 1): 79-1 09. Following Masciandaro, '[t]his problem (being's being a problem for itself) concerns above all the split between quiddity and haecceity, the what and the that, as the irresolvable terms through which being both appears and remains inconceivable in itself or as a whole. Heidegger ex­ plains: 'The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fun­ damentally and constantly . . . For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are in themselves as the beings that they are, we must-although not con­ ceptually-already understand something like the what-being [\Vas-sein] and the that­ being [Das-sein] of beings . . . We never ever experience anything about being subse­ quently or after the event from beings; rather beings-wherever and however we ap­ proach them-already stand in the light of being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the commencement of Dasein itself . . . �fan, therefore, always has the possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not?' (Masciandaro, 'Sorrow of Being,' 9-35; 1 2). Another good introduction to the notion of "thatness* is an article that links the notion of haecceitas, which was originally introduced by the thirteenth-century scholastic philosopher John Duns Scotus, to Charles Sanders Peirce's category of Secondness (the here-and-nowness). Cf. DiLeo, '[a]ccording to Scotus, the common nature is indifferent to existence (esse), although it has its own quidditive being, or essential being . . . Haecceitas or "ultima realitas entis" or "entitas singularis vel individualis," is the final or ultimate reality of the being which is matter or form or the composite thing. In effect, haecceitas is the last perfection of a thing-a perfection that is necessary for a thing's concrete existence. Haecceitas restricts the specific form, matter or composite thing and completes it by sealing the being as "this" being, yet it does not confer any further qualitative determination' (DiLeo, 'Peirce's Haecceitism,' 79-109; 83). 6 Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler (Kew York: New Directions, 201 2), Kindle edition. 345

Alina Popa you, ' and unlike Nietzsche for whom 'if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you,' for this serial subject, if you look at the world in expres ­ sively, 'the world would look equally inexpressively back at [you] .'7 Seriality is both a condition for and a result of the crime: 'he needed an act which would make other people reject him, and he himself would not be able to live with himself after that. '8 Seriality is impersonal, atonal, s terile, without qualities, a 'fasting from your very self.'9 If, as in J. G. Ballard's 'Manhole,' sleep is the nec­ essary serial self-forgetting because '[h] ow much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being your­ self,' the serial subject is a sleeper-within-wakefulness. 1 0 The serial self is the no one who goes out into the world and answers Emmanu el Levinas' question ('we . . . ask whether consciousness, with its aptitude for sleep, for suspension, for epoche, is not the locus of this nothingness-interval') 1 1 with a pathetic serial Yes ! By volitionally ignoring the time-interval , in that one repeats the suspen­ sion itself through the 'will to seriality,' one time-travels in the opposite direc­ tion: 'time-travel to now.' Limiting existence to a place, cutting into the world a space for sleep-in-wakefulness and death-in-life, the now paralyzed body can walk beyond its limits, out into the great blank. The serial subj ect cements her prison in dead words, the same, the same, and, with a simple gesture of p etrifica tion , dwells in a single narrow shot, cut­ off from the cinematography of existence and thrown blindfolded into the real. Serial killing opens the path to temporal and spatial execution, as the abstract serial killer is always already caught within a suspension; 'she moves by way of the full stop, since each element in the series is (not) the last. Seriality is a means of abiding with what is always already over.'12 The serial subject is per­ force a serial killer. 'To kill, like to die, is to seek an escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate.'13 Like Martin, the divine killer in Clarice Lispector's novel The Apple in the Dark, who 'by means of the great leap of the crime . . . had reached a point of not unders tanding,' the killer's trampoline leads first to the madness of loops-she is sentenced to nonsensical repeti- Clarice Lispector, The Pas.rion A ccording to G.H., trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 988), 1 7. 8 Clarice Llspector, The Apple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: House Pub­ lishing Ltd, 2009), 37. 9 Llspector, Agua Viva. 10 J. G. Ballard , 'Manhole,' in The Complete Shorl Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), Kin­ dle edition. 1 1 Emmanud Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Llngis (Pittsburgh: Du­ quesne University Press, 1 978), Kindle edition. 12 Nicola Masciandaro, personal communication with the author (email, 03-05-1 5). 13 Levinas, Existence and Existents. 7 346

CUT THE CLOAK ON T H E I NSI DE rion.1"' In the loopy Amazon forest, to cannibalize or be cannibalized, or to be­ come the killer of the enemy, to be eaten, like to die, is to spring away from yourself-'to go where freedom and negation operate'-but taking a radically different path. The cannibal leap opens an endless series of environmental bubbles, a prison from which you do not wish to escape, since it is already out­ side. The butchery with which we therefore begin is double: one is consecutive, that of the Outside and that of the Inside, and the other is concomitant, that o f the escape and that o f the imprisonment. SERIALLY KILLI NG ALL FORMS OF TRANSCENDENCE: :\. POSTHORROR ESCAPE \"\-'e are in the first prison, the prosaic and usual prison, which encloses one within, traps one within one's identity, and condemns one to Sameness. Serially killin g all forms of transcendence, we are left with the horror of the loop, or in �ietzsche's words, with the return of the Same . 1 5 The loop is the topological figure that commits the double murder of escape and imprisonment. The true horror is not that of the Outside, but that there may be a return of the Same, of the Inside. The twist is that there is no twist. The true horror is that you may return to you, that everything repeats without difference, that there is no be­ coming other than the ultimate coincidence of finding that the end has swal­ lowed the beginning. 1 6 The spatiotemporality of a loop is deceitful, it disguises infinity as boundaries and imprisonment as escape. I ts space is self-sufficient, since it relapses into itself, at the moment of fiery escape it is already out back in. If it were to create a 'phenomenal analogon' for the loop-world of the Eter­ nal Return, we would face a contradiction, for the Return of the Same would have to escape experience-'in there' is 'out there,' and there is no access to the loop-in-itself. But what if there were? 1-1 Lispector, The Apple in the Dark, 32. 1 5 'I will return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this snake-not to a new life or a better life or a similar life:-! will return to this same and selfsame life, in what is greatest as well as in what is smallest, to once again teach the eternal recurrence of all things-' (Friedrich Nietzsche, 'The Convalescent,' Tbm Spoke Zaratb11slra, trans. _o\drian del Caro [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 178). See also Pierre Klossowski, NielZfche and the Vido11s Cirr:le, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 997), and Joan Stambaugh, NietZfche '.r Thought ofEternal Return (Bal­ timore and London: The Johns Hopkins Vniversity Press, 1 972). 16 See Quentin Meilla s soux, 'Th e Immanence of th e World Beyond,' http: / /goo.gl/uf.\iKt (accessed 1 0-05- 1 5). 347

Alina Popa A cinematic analogon is to be found at the end of the Black Mirror11 TV se­ ries' last sequel, where Joe's prison is his recursive spatiotemporal immersion in a kitchen where he listens to a radio playing 'I Wish It Could Be Christtnas Everyday' in a loop-a song that was the actual soundtrack of the murder he had previously committed. His crime was punished with a loop and the time­ loop is his prison. He literally and prosaically experiences Nietzsche's Eternal Return, not in thought but in life. As Quentin Meillassoux notices: 'The Eternal Return is life closed upon its unlimited potency which has become totally inca­ pable of extracting itself from itself in order to destroy or transcend itself. ' 1 8 Joe's punishment is a revelation of a nightmarish shape of time, h e i s sentenced to a metaphysical trap. He killed, and his consciousness is forced to endure the loss of his own death: 'death . . . is always cancelled out by the return of life.'1 9 Th e torturous repetition o f the song, of the radio, of th e song, of the radio, is the looped mourning chant for the ever-absent Outside, the lack of the hor­ ror of the Outside-the horror of the lack of horror. This prison, a nonconsen­ sual hallu cination of Joe's downloaded consciousness-replica-as the film deals with the use of technology to change the world-settings as a tool for ethical adjustment, but also as a new risky medium of social interaction-may tum out to be the experience of the world as a form-of-death-in-life: a torturous shape of time, the loop without (editing) cuts. It is not anymore Nietzsche's highest Stimmung of the soul transformed into the mad geometry of thought (the Cir­ cle). This ecstatic moment of the Eternal Retum's revelation turns into a cine­ matic real torture, since h ere the recurrence is deprived of forgetting, and vio­ lently inserts itself into the memory of oneself. The temporal loop within which Joe is confined is the cancellation of all the conditions of possibility of fleeing from oneself. 'Only [she] who can bear the idea of this one and only life which is cast in prosaic-ness without any hope of escaping via the transcendent or nothingness, experiences radical immanence'-an immanence 'not of this world,' an immanence that equals transcendence.20 And who is she who can affirm the above? Joe's time-loop is utter torture. He perceives the loop of *what*-the rep­ etition of all the qualities and modalities (sensations) , the same kitchen, the same radio, the same song, as an undestroyable repetition of the same envi­ ronment. But lurking below this phenomenological loop is the greater torture without lament, the noumenal loop of the fact *that* one is. A more extreme kind of rage, a rage-without-fury enshrouds the mystery of individuation-and 17 Black Mirror, Season 2: Episode 3, 'White Christmas,' written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Carl Tibbetts (London: Channel 4, 16 December 201 4) . t s Meillassou:x, 'World Beyond.' 1 9 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 348

CUT THE CLOAK ON 'TH E I NSI DE this idea would have made a n even greater film. I f the killin g i s th e overwhelm­ mg power to dissolve the fact *that* someone is, J oe's sentence is to live in the loop of *what* one is, but after the film ends, he can become either a saint or a posthumous Nietzsche. If he really wills his haunted condition (by the crime) , if he transforms his loop into an existential practice, he might become an abstract serial kill er, spiritually. Only by losing hope of escaping via the transcendent­ J oe's hope of his afterlife in freedom, or via 1the appeal to the idea of nothing­ ness-the death or void that allows an escape by being forever cut off from consciousness and the universe, only then on.e experiences radical immanence, and a certain degree of freedom. Only when the sole remaining ground is the utter despair that there is none-'What is to be done? N o t neutral but progres­ sist requires a horrorist response. Nothing. Do nothing. Despair! Subside into horror'2'-something escapological can occur, a pessimal escape. The divine killer's escape happens by means of guarding his own being haunted-haunted not by the ghost of his vi1:tim, but by his very presence, by the fact *that* he cannot be otherwise than just *be.* His is the pathos of a self-induced form-of-death-in-life: I am dying of individuation. This Other of the murder-a reduction of the world to the horrific banality of a single repeti­ tive fact (*that*)-is the killi ng of the ghosts of all of the former 'you's.' 'Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape'22 and more than this, only those wh o also leave behind any hope of escape can maybe find the trajectories of flight. The infinite patience to repeat without despair is like closing one's eyes to the world, it demands the substitu­ tion of the *what* by the *that* (which is al:so a substitution of the *bios* by the *zoe,* of social life by bare life) , of the particular by the generic. Entering the Real, wordlessly, is prior to making any sense. There is also no sense of temporality in the *zoe* or in the fact *that* things are. The touch of the Real 'frees the gaze into a suffocating presence which is unbearable without media­ tion . ' Like Oedipus, it makes one 'see without eyes in the pure black imma­ nence of the Real.'23 Oedipus kill s and enters a space for Gods. He too accesses the mode of *that*, which is beyond good and evil, it marks the point where 21 N ick Land, 'Horrorism,' http:/ /www. xenosystc:ms.net/horrorism/ (accessed 1 0-05- 1 5). 22 Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), 'Lemurian Time \"\ 'ar,' http: / /xenopraxis.net/ readings/ ccru_lemuriantimewar.pdf (accessed 26-05-1 5). 23 Katerina Kolozova (paper presented at P_\F Spring Yleeting, St Erme, France, _\pril 3-5, 201 5). Here, she specifically makes reference to Franc;ois Laruelle's concept of the Real, which rephrasing her words, is indifferemt to any philosophical decision, or thought, yet thought is not indifferent to the Real The Real is necessary for Laruelle in order to escape the 'self-sufficiency or decisionism of philosophy.'

Alina Popa 'pure filth and sacredness' coincide.24 The Real is indifferent to thought, and as for Martin, the mystic-kill er protagonist of The Apple in the Dark, thought is re­ duced to a mere act like any other. The crime becomes an act in general-serial. The qualities of world and self are peeled away with the emptying razor of the immanence of the Real. Even horror loses its meaning and stares at itself indif­ ferently. The worlds are exiting from the world: you *are* haunting your world­ lessness. To be someone rather than no one is paradoxically an absence, the experi­ ence of a lack, of a great absence of the Whole. For Michel de Certeau, mysti­ cism is a theology of the ghost: '[i] f only one [God] happens to be absent, eve­ rything is absent.'25 If the mystic's existence is suffused with the great absence of the Absolute, we can twist this theo-hauntology and say, 'only if the Whole is absent, one is.' In the same way, the self-absence of God is enough to bring existence into the world, as it has been illustrated by different cosmogonies: from the hebraic 'Tzimtzum,'26 to the act of divine self-doubt as spark of crea­ tion in Zoroastrian Zurvanism.27 Existence is a rupture from the continuity of the real: it is predicated upon a cut, an absence, a discontinuity of the continu­ um, as the C. S. Peirce's intuition also shows.28 Existence is a form of auto­ induced death of the Whole, a symptom of a suicidal God, as Philipp 24 Katerina Kolozova (paper presented at PAF Spring Meeting, St Erme, France, April 3-5, 201 5); most of the arguments concerning the coincidence of divinity with maximal sinfulness are related to her discussion of Oedipus in relation to the Real. 25 l\fichel de Certeau, Fabula Mistica Secolele XVI-XVII, trans. �fagda Jeanrenaud (Bucur�ti: Polirom, 1 996), 3; ttanslation mine. 26 'T he great sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria, is credited with embellishing upon earlier kabbalistic ideas, particularly the idea about how the sefirot [the emanations] emerged from ein Sef[the Infinite] . . . rrlhere is only ein Sof. Consequently there is no place either for the sefirot or for the universe. . . . Then, to make room for the sefirot, to allow the divine personality to unfold and for the world to exist, ein Sef withdraws or retreats into itself, creating an empty space or a vacuum within itsel£ This process of withdrawal is known as "retraction" (tzjmtz!im)' (Byron L. Sherwin, Kabba/ah: An lntro­ d11dion lo Jewish M)lsticism [Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006], 70). 27 'The ''Fall" in Zurvanism does not originate with man, it results from an imperfec­ tion, an unsureness of self, in the very heart of God. The "One" has given birth to the ''Two" [ . . . ] ' (Robert Charles Zaehner, 'The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism,' http: I/ www.heritageinstitute.com I zoroastrianism/ reference/ zaehner/ dawnVarZurl O 1 .htm [accessed 26-05-1 5)). 28 Cf. 'The great richness of real and general possibilities far exceeds the "existent" realm and forms a "true" continuum, on which the existent must be seen as a certain type of discontinuity. ''Existence as rupture" is another amazing Peircean intuition. . . .' (Fernando Zalamea, Peirce's Contin111111: A Methodological and Mathematical Approach, availa­ ble from http://files.acervopeirceano.webnode.es/ 20000068-48c2649bc4/Zalamea-P eirces-Continuum.pdf [accessed 10-05-1 5)). _ 350

CUT THE CLOAK ON T H E I NSI DE �.fainlander further speculated.29 In the prison where th e loss of escape i s will ed .md serially practiced, where one lives in the deep cut of individuation, the \\·orld becomes scarred, shouting in the pains of a topological torsion: 'After me scarring I started to look at you from the outside in . .And also to see myself from the outside in . . . .'30 If one persists in the prison of this greater noumenal loop, voluntarily caught in the inexorable return of the simple truth *that* ex15tence is possible at all, the cut of individuation can become as sharpened as a kill er's knife, as razor-edged as the cosmic self-scission. A knife that butchers all the world into a great hole, an absence-a mas-sacre (Latin sacrere means to 'set apart,' from sacer, sacr- 'holy,' or 'divine') of both escape and imprisonment. The getaway an d the incarceration are like the omnipresent ghost of mysticism's God, everywhere here yet nowhere at all. This is the shortcut to the dead end as the only way out (in) : find the place and time of the world's exit out of itself. Lispector writes: 'I was leaving my world and going into the world,'31 but she may find that even the world is out of itself. And again, 'nobody can give me their hand so that I can escape: I have to use great strength-and in the nightmare I finally in a sudden convulsion fall prostrate back onto this side.'32 In a fictional after-film, lingering in the *that,* Joe may come closer to the Real, accede to the rifts of phenomenal time, excise a speculative opening in his time-loop damnation. The word 'loop' is probably of Celtic origin (Gaelic lnb means 'bend,' ergo Irish lubiam), influenced by or blended with Old Norse hla11p, 'a leap, run.' The etymology of the word reveals the inner contradiction of the loop-aesthetics, at once continuous (the endless­ ness of the loop) and discontinuous (the singularity of the leap) . Repetition and a posthorror affect are therefore prone to provoking the necessary numbness, the exhaustion o f representation and signification, the voidshock of the Real cracking runaway lines through the loop, by looping the loop even more. If the loop is the ultimate disorder of time, the fact *that* one is is the ultimate disor­ der of the loop, in that it brings everything into suspension, life lives by cir­ cumn avigating itself: 'one who has not circumnavigated life before beginning to live will never live. '33 The temporal cracks in the prison-loop are therefore not given, but need to be or to have been constructed in accordance with the time-wars of Lemu- See Thomas Ligotti's discussion of Mainlander's suicidal God, in Ligotti, The Conspir­ ary again!/ the H11man &Ice: A Contn·vance of Horror (New York: Hippocampus Press, 201 0), Kindle edition. 30 Clarice Llspector, A Breath of U fa (P11l!alton!), trans. Johnny Lorenz �ew York: New Directions, 2012), 38. 31 Llspector, Pa.mon According Jo G.H., 46. 32 Lispector, Agw Viva. 33 S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 983), 1 31-2. 29 35 1

Alina Popa rian vibe: ' [t]echniques of escape depend on attaining the unbelief of assassin­ magician Hassan i Sabbah: nothing is true, everything is permitted.'34 The ' [w] hite Chronomancy' is an escapological sorcery dealing with the "'the sealing of runaway time-disturbances within closed loops."'35 As with Ballard's cosmo­ nauts alienated back on Earth, the plotted escape of the serial killer is a mad­ dening feeling of 'time rapidly engorging itself.'36 It is interesting to note how the Yanesha Amazonians and William Burroughs have worked at finding a way out of phenomenal time, to escape this 'time-riddled' period of humanity: 'Time is a human affliction; not a human invention but a prison. '37 Every descent into subjective time is a prison. And every prison is a caging in time. In the issue 'Timekiller' from the cult comic series Sltiine, the Cythrons, a civilization who want to dominate outer space, are exiled and imprisoned on a peripheral planet, at the outermost borders of the galaxy. It was necessary for eons of abandoning escape and serially practicing the sensation of cosmic sterilization, for the Cythrons to begin burrowing their counterintuitive escape. They begin 'drilling holes in time,' 'runneling upwards . . . to an era when the planet had blossomed into life, and was called . . . Earth.'38 Every speculative escape can be therefore called Cythronian, only if trivial escape is given up and replaced by a speculative 'way out. ' In 'Timekill er,' the subsequent battle to prevent the end of the world-since the Chythrons are a species of Lovecraftian Old Ones,39 who once awoken can rid the planet of humanity-is taking place down the gut of time, with temporal weapons that melt mountains and emit blows of putrefac­ tion. The warrior Sliine's only weapon against the great terrifying Time-Worm sent by the Cythrons to enslave humanity once and for all, is the worm's own hunger, he tricks the Time-Worm into eating itself. Thus, such speculative get­ aways, first from space and then from time, through either the scars of the world or temporal autophagy, are patiently plotted by spatiotemporal serial kill­ ers as unrelated as Nietzsche and Clarice Lispector, Nick Land and the CCRU, Burroughs, the Yanesha Amazonians, and Oedipus. 34 CCRU, 'Lemurian Time War.' Ibid. 36 Ballard, 'Myths from the Near Future,' in Compkte Short Stories. 37 See Fernando Santos-Granero, 'Time is Disease, Suffering and Oblivion: Yanesha Historicity and the Struggle against Temporality,' in Time and Memory in Indigenous Ama­ ZfJ»ia: Anthropolo�cal Perspectives, eds. Carlos Fausto and :Michael Heckenberger (Miami: University Press of Florida, 2007), 47; CCRU, 'Lemurian Time War.' 38 Bryan Talbot (with Pat �Iills) , 'The Tim ekiller,' in Skiine, 2000 AD, no. 43 1 (New York: DC Comics, June 1 985), Kindle edition. 39 See H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness,' in Great Taks of Horror �ew York: Fall River Press, 201 2), Kindle edition. Js 352

CUT THE CLOAK ON THE I NSI DE SERIALLY K.IllJNG A.LL VECTORS OF IDENTITY: TI-IE CANNIBAL ESCALATION �·e are in the second prison, a weird kind of prison which encloses on the out­ side, traps one in alterity, positions one beyond the bars of one's identity, and condemns one to Otherness . Serially killing all fonns of interior, we are again ieft with the horro:r of the loop, and cannot but leap into the outdoors of iden­ tity, on and on, since one is defined not by *what* one is, but by the fact *that* there is an Other. From a British 1V series on technology and topology, we are taking a geopolitical, narrative leap into the loopy Amazon forest, where Other­ Becoming is the mirror (inverted)-image of the Return of the Same. We are taking a leap from Joe's kitchen, where the time-loop operates, into the meta­ physical cannibal kitchen of the Arawete. Here, the true horror is that there is no you to return to but solely to acquire from the Outside-a Multiple Out­ side.40 Here, there is only becoming, until the sky falls on your head, and the worlds have ended .41 Here there is only escape with no prison, entrapment into flight, or otherwise said, the prison is wearing itself inside-out. The Amazonian Indians described by Viveiros de Castro (Arawete) and _\parecida Vila<;a (Wari') are agents of radical inauthenticity: without the Other there is no one. Two poles, two extremes: the inauthentic self is one that once sees itself on the circle of the Eternal Return (in the loop) , and one that cannot conceive itself but through its radically Other (in the leap) . Both reveal a self that is no one, firs t through hypernarcissism (it returns to the Same, to hyperi­ dentity) and then through hyperantinarcissism (it is ever Other, hyperother­ ness) . Though if, as in the original Greek myth, N arcissus is unable to recognize himself, mistaking his image for another, both these conclusions are already twisted. And to bend them even more, we could speculate (Latin speculum means 'mirror') that a Nietzschean Narcissus is as incarnate in the mirror, re­ ducing both to tr21sh, and a cannibal Narcissus reflects no image in the lake unless he construc ts one. Self as junk or as hypothesis, however you like it, and the journey has begun. 'To know thyself is to construct thyself,'42 as a result of being terrified either because you will always return to the Same or because you become your own enemy. As Viveiros de Castro has argued, the Amazonians "° For the notion of 'multiple outside,' see Alina Popa, 'The Second Body and the :\Iul­ tiple Outside' <https: / /goo.gl/bDAWZb>. 4 1 'Here I touch on a question about which the Arawete do not like to speak: the col­ lapse of the sky on their heads . the weight of the dead must inevitably cause the sky to split one day' (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: H11mani!Y and Divinity in an An.tatpnian Socie!J, trans. Catherine V. Howard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 992]1 , 255). 42 Reza Negarestani (paper presented at PAF Spring ;\foeting, St Erme, France, �larch 29 April 7, 201 4). . . 353

Alina Popa are a society without interior, trapped in perpetual Otherness. '(I)he alterity and not the identity is the default state. '43 The Arawete, as their ancestors, the fa­ mous Tupinamba, are caged in the prison of exteriority. They come at being themselves by being an-other: 'the I is something that is not yet, and that which I shall be is all that I am not.'44 'Their immanence is their transcendence,'45 as Viveiros de Castro puts it. We find the same paradox that Meilla ssoux identified in abandoning all fonns of transcendence, but inverted: speculative irreligion equals cannibal metaphysics upside down.46 To be trapped Inside by serially killing the Outside is to be speculatively caged Outside by eating from it or let­ ting oneself be devoured by it-cannibalizing the Other/ the enemy, or letting the soul be cannibalized by the Gods. Both the Nietzschean Return of Same and the Amazonian Other-Becoming involve a maximal alteration, or in Pierre Klossowski's words, a multiple alterity: at opposite poles these two seem to speculatively coincide.47 The 'cannibal cogito' is a twisted loop, a moebian Ouroboros, at each tor­ sion of the ring there is a transmutation into the opposite through cannibalizing and being cannibalized, culminating in a self that becomes its divine enemy: 'the deceased is the enemy, the enemy is God, the God is the deceased and the de­ ceased is the self.'48 This loop comes back to itself as the other, eating itself and being eaten by itself. Feasting on the cooked enemy-Becoming-Other, dying to both rot and be cannibalized/ cooked by the Gods (Mai)-Becorning-Other, divine: 'I shall attain fulln ess of being only after having been devoured by my enemy [the Gods-Mai] or after I have devoured an enemy on earth, which turns me into an enemy, then a God '49 The Amazonian practice of cannibalism is related first and foremost to acquiring a different perspective-one ingests not a body or a corpse but the enemy's point of view. Cannibalism, the fourth alimentary diet as Claude Levi-Strauss puts it,50 is a leap that bypasses significa­ tion, the corpse-person is prevented from reflecting any image or representa- +J See Aparecida Vila�, 'Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Cor­ porealities,' Journal of the R.oyalAnthropological Institutt 1 1 .3 (2005): 445-64. 44 Viveiros de Castro, Enem y's Point of View, 254. 45 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ':Metaphysics of Predation,' m Robin Mackay and Reza Negarestani eds., Collapse VII: Philosophical &search and Development Special Issue on Culi­ nary Materialism (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 201 2), Kindle edition. 46 Cf. 'the possibility of immortality is thinkable only by being irreligious, and . a true philosophy of immanence attains to this not by an idea of finitude but by an ethical immortality' (M:eilla ssoux World Beyond'). 47 Klossowski, Vir:io111 Circle, 69. 48 Viveiros de Castro, Enemy's Point of View, 254. 49 Ibid. 5° Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropoloo and Jv!yth: Lectuns 1 951-1982, trans. R. Willis (Ox­ ford: Blackwell, 1 987), 40. . 354 .

CUT TH E CLOAK ON TH E I NSIDE non-if the eaten i s the enemy, i t becomes 'support for th e eater's identity; and 1f the eaten is the deceased (the deceased are cooked and eaten by the Gods to be transformed into divinity) then she is prevented from reflecting any memory of the world.51 In the sacrifice of the enemy, the logical and the phagical are intertwined. The cannibal Amazonians are bound to a phagiological self-escape na self-jaguarization: we think that they eat their similar, but in fact ·by doing it, they become other than themselves, jaguars: 'I am a tiger Oaguar] ; it tastes well! 'Jaguar is a quality of an act,' 'predication becomes predation.'52 'Eating emails a double othering, of the eater and eaten. The moment one cannibalizes, one 1s no longer a cannibal. Cannibalism feasts on individuation. '53 Consuming rhe matter of being only proves that *what*ever being seems to be, i.e. a body, is superseded by its being an index to the fact *that* being is position, localiza­ tion, point of view, pointing at itself, rather than a mere container of stuff. \\'hen you speculatively affirm that you are a jaguar, you also deny the acts that belong to you, you overlap the mode of 'as if I were a jaguar' with the affirma­ tive mode of 'I am that-a jaguar. ' The cannibal is rhe first self-troller, a hyp er­ stitional entity, whereby the 'I' is always a fiction that becomes real. Both the first and this second prison took identity as hostage, inside itself and outside itself.-fi.rst a 'monstrous sterilization,'54 and respectively a monstrous escala­ tion. Only through the double exacerbation of imprisonment (the self-closed loop, Eternal Return, no Outside) and of escape (the leap, Cannibal Escalation, no Interior) can both escape and imprisonment be concomitantly kille d. This doppel-exaggeration of sacrifice (becoming sterile and becoming fertile only outside of yourself) turns imprisonment into escape and escape into a cage. The cage is enormous, like Ballard's enormous room, and fulminates into a 'jungle of delirium' with intricate liana.r offlight, post-escape, and post-imprisonment.55 The Arawete culture and society are placed in the middle, between the wild Nature and rhe divine Supemature, the decayed and the cooked, shadow and vitality, ' feritas' and 'divinitas'. The figures who smuggle between Nature and Supemature, exponents of inaurhenticity and radical escapologists, carrying an unstable world, hyperstitional entities avant-la-lettre, are illu strated by the fig­ ures of the Shaman and the Killer, or in other words, the Sorcerer and the War­ rior. Like the one who experiences the thought of the Eternal Return, borh the 51 Viveiros de Castro, Ene"!Y's Point �( C.'iew, 270. Cf. '[I]t is necessary that there be a consumption of the "spiritual flesh" the souls have when they arrive in the sky, in order that, from a pure skeleton, a god without memory is reborn. To be translated into di­ vinity is to forget' (in Ibid., 213). 52 Ibid., 270-1 . 53 Nicola Masciandaro, personal communication with the author (email, 03-05-1 5). 54 Nick Land, 'Shamanic Nietzsche,' Fanged No11mena, eds. Robin Mackay and Ray Brass­ ier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 201 2), 224. 55 Ibid. 355

Alina Popa shaman and the killer, as the cannibals in general, live in accordance with specu­ lative forms-of-death-in-life. Shamanism 'involves possession by spirits of ani­ mals, the dead and other entities . . . The most powerful spirit is the jaguar: he penetrates the body of animals, 'jaguarizing' them and making them mon­ strous.'56 The jaguar-shaman is a kind of 'super-shaman,'57 as Viveiros de Castro calls him, capable of incorporating the essence of animality. This is what Lucien Levy-Briihl called the possibility of 'participation,' or in Rene Thom's words: the possibility that 'two potentially disjointed beings could constitute the same being;' A sorcerer/ shaman 'may be at the same time a man sleeping in a hut and a tiger hunting in the jungle.'58 The shaman is both boxed and jaguarized, caged and free in the jungle. This shamanic double-bind of escape and impris­ onment 'implies a somatic identification between the participants . . . the man­ sorcerer and the tiger [the jaguar] have their somatic maps identified, and this in spite of the fact that these maps relate to being separated by several kilome­ ters.'59 This is the act of magic (whose truth is somewhat denied by Thom), which is 'characterized by an action at a distance, which can be interpreted by a modification of the usual topology of the space-time.'60 Even though it is clear that we have to accept the scientific opposition to magic 'by its insistence on locality [the space is an indifferent ether whose local tensions, accidents, are manifest in the world as a local spacetime] and its rejection of action at a dis­ tance [except for quantum mechanics],'61 as Thom noticed, there is a continuity in the conception of spatiotemporality within both science and magic. Moreo­ ver, if we again insist that 'nothing is true, everything is permitted,' the sorcery of topological distortion obtained with the price of self-transformation and self­ alteration is the departure from the wisdom of philosophy that 'seek[s] to be still' to the chance of 'travelling,' to the 'exploration of death'-through forms­ of-death-in-life.62 Caged in or caged out, you must jaguarize now, and hunt yourself raw. 'Losing oneself is finding oneself dangerous. '63 The Killer, the second smuggler between Nature and Supernature, is a fig­ ure that does not become his enemy through spatiotemporal ruses like the shaman: he cuts a shortcut to the divine world with the knife of human sacri­ fice. Sacrificing a human, he will enter, like Oedipus, the space of gods. The Killer is not a violent savage, not an exponent of Western delinquency, he is a 5 6 Viveiros de Castro, Ene"!/1 Point of View, 2 64. 57 Ibid. 5 8 Rene Thom, Mathema/Ual Models of Morphogenesis, trans. W. l\I. Brookes and D. Rand (New York: Halsted Press, 1 983), 132. Thom, Models ofMorphogenesis, 1 32. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 1 34. 62 Land, Fanged Noumena, 21 2. 63 Lispector, Passion According to G.H., 94. 59 356

CUT THE CLOAK ON THE I NSI DE spiritual warrior whose violence is positivized. He is the one who, through the sacrifice of the enemy, also kills himself. His crime is a great leap, a leap out of himself, his Other-Becoming: '[ij n his killing the one who is dying is himself,' in life, like Lispector's Martin. The killer is the only one who does not eat the en­ emy but enters a period of reclusion and fasting, as he is now the carrier of the enemy's spirit-who, like the spirit of the jaguar, cannot be killed, but only ac­ quired through killing, through a gesture of murderous excess. '[f]he kille r in­ carnates and becomes his enemy.'64 'I'm dying, said the deceased Moiwito; I thus spoke my prey;' 65 he sings after his status of killer had been affirmed. In chanting the mourning song for the sacrificed enemy, the killer 'cites himself, having the enemy say what he himself would be saying.'66 He is the hypersti­ tional sacrificial murderer, the first one to use 'citation as an oblique form of assertion which distances the words from any center and makes them always emanate from someone else in an infinite recursivity.'67 If the shaman can be two bodies at the same time (a man and a jaguar-and the function of the jagu­ ar is multiple, from being a divinity of the jungle, to an entity that accommo­ dates the spirits of the dead relatives), and afford multiple environmental levels at once (his home in the village and the jungle, the living landscape, and the deathscape), the killer's escape is a short-cut. The killer butchers his Cythronic escape to the realm of Gods, he aims directly at the Outside, in life-after he dies he is the one who melts into the Mai' witl1out mediation (without the dou­ ble cooking that other mortals need to endure): 'If the shaman is a prospective deceased, the killer is a prospective God.'68 He escapes from this world before (and without) dying: 'a killer does not die,' 'a killer does not putrefy in death.'69 An Arawete killer is ghostless, without flesh and without shadow. He is a spir­ itual slayer, a master of the *that,* '[t]he Arawete "mangod" is a slayer not a priest.'70 By eating your enemy, the Other (or by being eaten by the enemy-the Arawete Mai' eat the souls of the dead, who are their Others), you acquire the perspective of what you are not. Or, through different spatiotemporal ruses and practices, you can become a super-shaman, a werejaguar. Eduardo Kohn tell s us that if one returns the jaguar gaze (in the upper Amazonian jungle of Ecua­ dor), then one becomes half-man-half-jaguar; Lispector speaks of a transmuta­ tion that occurs through a horizon-blackening (the 'X uneasy'), exchanging 64 Viveiros de Castro, Enemy'1 Point ef View, 245. 65 Ibid., 243. 66 Ibid., 244. Ibid., 1 8. 68 Viveiros de Castro, Ene"!/s Point ef View, 246. 69 Ibid., 246-7. 7u Ibid., 250. 67 357

Alina Popa glances with a black panther, in a becoming-werepanther.71 By 'breaking the mirror of the imaginary function, destroying representation'7.L..-canb ni alism, as well as through a deviation of the vectors of representation-shamanism, or through divine killing-the Killer, the acquired, present horizon is being chal­ lenged, smudged and brought to ruin. The cannibal, in general, and the sha­ manic subject, in particular, carry a protean horizon and an unstable spatiotem­ porality. Both cut deep scars in the topology of space through exaggerated ges­ tures, an excess of sacrifice: 'the topology of space will cease to be the same.'73 As the gesturality that lies at the base of our concepts finds its transient geome­ try in the dotted line of the diagram, the sorcerers, are multitask geometers, inhabitants of multiple ghost real bodies at once: Everything happens for this body as if a cortege of ghostly bodies, all equally its own, always followed it and always preceded it, marking out its possible places of occupation, according to a form of spacing out which is unfolded within it and by it. 74 The cut(out), or better said, the knife with a dotted-blade, is executed by ges­ tures and actions, weaving webs of affects in the form of alien somatic maps. The gesture is never innocent, it leaves the evidence of a crime committed with the dotted line, which is not curled into a sign. As Gilles Chatelet warns us, even the horizon is the scar of a gesture, the symptom of a mutilation.75 Every excessive gesture is criminal, it can lead you out of your present spatiotemporal­ ity by cutting a new world-laden diagram into the world: not with the axe of mathematical thought but with the dotted line, a virtual cut that can make itself real as an-other world, this one. CONCLUSION The non-escape from the first seriality-prison was an acceleration of the fact and knife *that* one is-a singularity that crushes repetition by simply aligning with it, a flattening out of the world as the greatest murderous pathos. From this second inside-out prison the escape is serial, cut and short-cut through the positivized shamanic serial killings . These killings are a manifold of modalities 71 See Lispector, Agua Viva; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 2. 72 Viveiros de Castro, Enemy's Point of Vu111, 270. 73 Thom, Motkls ofMorphogenesis, 132. 74 Jean-Toussaint Desanti, 'Introduction,' in Gille s Chatelet, Figuring Space: Philosop1!J, Mathematics and P1!J'Sics (Dordrecht: Springer Media B.V., 2000), Kindle edition. 75 Chatelet, Figuring Space. 358

CUT THE CLOAK ON THE I NSI DE to switch the *what*-the transmutation of ontological perspectives that make up the transversal shamanism. This acquisition of multiple somatic maps and affordance of various worlds ('the sign of a remarkable shamanic intelligence is the capacity to view simultaneously along two [or more] incompatible perspec­ tives')76 centered on irreconcilable difference, on incomplete synthesis, on the exaggerated gesture-cannibalism, sacrificial human killing, jaguarization­ opens lianas of flight from the single-world fortress. The shamanic escape is a self-hunting as another, an escalation of *whatness.* \X'hat one can be is so var­ ied and rich, so intense that the world shrinks to a highest poverty, to a pathos of transversal simplicity.77 For the sorcerer, as for Llspector's Martin, or the looped J oe, the living world is equally a deathscape (as dream is wakefulness, sleep is thought and the leap of faith, like in S0ren Kierkegaard, is the leap of the [cannibal] crime) . And the sky is laden with deaths-in life and in death.78 Having a Mikado-pack of horizons and a hypercopernican courage, stepping firmly on the abyss and acting postescapologically, the speculative escapist slic­ es the world's cloak, piercing through the around, affording lianas of flight across a multitude of Umwelten (the German Um stands for 'around') . Cnt the cloak on the imide to alW'!JS enterfrom the 011tside. 'To follow where you cannot fol­ low means to follow an imperative as neither abstract nor concrete, neither an idea about what to do (theory) nor a thing to do (practice) , but an in-ethical ethics, i. e. ethics without ethos, \..,ithout the seriality of habit, yet with seriality itself.'79 If choreography is the art of commands, so to leap anywhere out, means to command the impossible, serially, to write spaces and rimes yet to come . .\n escapological choreography is written with the blade of the word, and executed with the dotted line of the gesture, or the other way round, on the condition that the world newly cut into existence is navigable. Every in-ethical rule is a Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mitapl!)•si<j11es cannibales: Ugnes d'anthropologie poit-s/ructurale, trans. Oiara Bonilla (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 37. 77 Cf. Gabriel Catren, 'Pleromatica or Elsinore's Drunkenness' (unpublished manu­ script). 78 So many deaths-in-life, so many dead becoming Gods, and the sky, over-laden with the weight of the deceased, falls on the .-\.rawetc: their world ends. Even the actual world, say another Amazonian population, the Yanomami, was created through an act of escape; immediately after the previous sky fell on the earth and crushed it, some people crawled upwards, drilled in the fallen sky like the Cythrons, and so the present world came to being. See Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: lr'ordi tJf J Yanomami Shaman, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Hanrard University Press, 201 3). 7 9 Nicola Masciandaro, personal communication with the author (email, 03-05- 1 5). 80 Andre Lepeclci, 'Performance and Choreographic Imagination: Concepts, Themo.. Works,' paper presented in the frame of 'E-1fotional: Rethinking Dance,' in Bucharest. Romania, �fay 1 8-22, 20 1 5. 76

Alina Popa provisional slit, an interrupted line, and therefore a weak command-one that abducts into being what cannot be thought and done, but that which can be unthought and undone. Every fiction slices the world, every slice slices the next blade that will cut a next world, differently, serially. Only the abstract serial kill­ ers endowed with the blade of the word, the dotted line of a gesture and the editor's cut (and for sure the list may continue), only those who afford ghost­ bodies that go beyond the prison of their actual spatiotemporality, can navigate transversally through the boxed jungle in flight.Bl A flight out of what? 'Out of here . . . In general.' A leap out of this spatiotemporality by piercing multiple prison-worlds, germinating a loss of humanity through the cracks of the escape. 11 Wondering through the night with eyes wide open, you orient yourself by the trail of dark within you. Opening the wideness of your eyes, your clear sight does not touch light, and your darkness does not blink. The world has disap­ peared, folded into a blind desert. You are as abstract as a loop basking in the sun. You carry myriads of horizons but there is nothing to look forward to. There is nowhere to go, space is a plain excess of direction. Orienting yourself by the headless arrows floating in the empty air, you walk determinately into the never. The indifference of arrows is stinging. Perhaps it was just your eyelashes pulling you in the heights on their vertiginous strings. Hanging from eyelashes, you silently close your eyes. And in this waking sleep, you blink yourself into a jungle that was here all along. The darkness is a desert is a jungle, wordless, worldless. I I st Ch:itelet, Figming Space. 360

DREAMING THE END OF DREAMING Florin Flueras In dreaming, a focus of the dreamer on her own body, a paradoxical situation, or a special practice can create an awareness of the dream-situation and from this a waking up or a total change in the dre amworld can occur. The entire situ­ ation is radically affected and a degradation of reality to the status of a dream happens instantaneously. This disintegration of the reality-constraints opens the doors to anomalies and impossible behaviors like flying, passing through walls, self-trans formations, changes in the environment and the narrative, transfor­ mations of space and time: of present, future, and even of the past sometimes. Becoming aware that you are dreaming means to become aware of another real­ ity outside of the apparently complete world. that you are experiencing in the dream. It means that a second reality, in which you are also present, but usually asleep, becomes available to you. If the capacity to participate in two differenr realities at the same time is a shamanic chara•cteristic,t then, when we are lucid in a dream, we are shamans for a while becau:se we also maintain the awareness of our bodies in our beds. Usually we cannot live in two or more realities at the same time, in the best case we have to choose where to be awake. W'e are awake in one world and asleep in all the others; unless we can maintain two incompatible perspectives at the same time. For the 'new sorcerers' from North America, to construct and attentively create coherence in a second reality-the sorcerers description of the world-is not only a matter of acceding to a superior hidden reality. The sorcerer-reality, even if it is superior to the 'ayerage man reality,' is only a habit­ ually enforced description, like every banal 1�eality. An awareness of this fact pushes one behind or beyond descriptions in general, a metacognition about the relative arbitrariness and artificiality of realities emerges, dramatically raising the perception of the dreamy nature of any r1eality in general.2 Maintaining two contradictory worlds is a way of knowing that: you are always involved in a sort of more or less elaborated dreaming. The dr1eam of becoming aware seems to involve the dreaming of two different dreams at the same time. 1 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphy!ic1r (Minneapolis: University Of �linne­ sota Press, 201 4), Kindle edition. See Carlos Castaneda, Ta/et ofPower (New York: Pocket Books, 1 976), Kindle edition. 2 36 1

Florin Flueras In Romanian folklore there are many stories about heroes that for different reasons have to embark on a very difficult and dangerous incursion in the zone of the zmei (some s trange evil and terrifying beings, or devils) . After unthinka­ ble difficulties, when the 'heroes' enter the zone of the 'zmei,' they slowly fall into a sleepy state against which there is nothing they can do. Exactly at the moment when the zmei are coming, the heroes lose consciousness and the zmei deprive them of the golden apples or some other tremendously important and very difficult to obtain treasure, for which they had just risked their lives.3 These stories follow the perspective of the zmei, of the nightmare zone, in which the heroes lose consciousness and fall asleep. But from a worldly per­ spective, that of the heroes, we can say that the heroes, lost and terrorized in a nightmare zone, are waking up exactly at the peak of the nightmare, when the zmei are coming. The same situation, of entering the zone of the zmei, can be read as a waking up or falling asleep, depending on what zonal perspective you take. Falling asleep in the nightmare zone is equivalent to waking up in 'reality.' But, indifferent to these perspectives, the nightmare goes on. The losses during the dream are real, their golden apples are gone. When the Yanomami shamans from Amazonia enter the Xapiri, the world of spirits from the 'time of dream,' or rather when the Xapiri starts to haunt them in their dreams, what they experience is pure horror. The world of spirits is so terrifying that for many years, when the spirits want to approach the shamans 'to dance with them,' they will wake up from horrible nightmares screaming:' The Xapiri, like the zone of the Zmei, are very consistent re al worlds, 'more real than reality,' and like the worst possible nightmares, they do not disapp ear when you wake up, but often spill out into reality. For the sham­ ans, and through them for all the yanomami, the Xapiri imposes itself powerful­ ly on the waking life. And because we all have a bit of a shaman (the shaman for the Yanomami is not so much something you are, but something that you have, or rather that has you, in different degrees), the nightmares often spill out for the rest of us too. In so-called 'sleep paralysis,' which is experienced by 25- 30% of people, you wake up paralyzed by fear, and you feel, and sometimes see, hear, and even, smell, the presence of a horrible, evil being that gets close to you and eventually presses on your chest, giving you one of the most terrify­ ing possible experiences.s But because such things cann o t exist in 'reality,' the 3 Cf Andrei Ois,teanu, Cosmos Vs. Chaos: Myth and Magic in Romanian Traditional Cu/tu": A Comparative Approa1:h (Bucharest: Romanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House, 1 999), Kindle edition. 4 Davi Kop enawa, The Falling Sky: Wordr ef a Yanomami Shaman (Harvard: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2013), Kindle edition. 5 Cf. Shelley Adler, Skep Parafysis: Night-Mam, Noce/;os, and the Mind-Bot!J Connection (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), Kindle edition. 362

DREAMI NG THE E N D OF DREAM I NG rest of us usually consider them to be horrible mind-creations, or dreams­ dreams in the weak sense, and thus as less important realities. For Zhuangzi, dreams were very important, at least the one after which he could not find a way to be sure if he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi.6 But maybe he did not have to choose, maybe both were happening-Zhuangzi dreams the butterfly and the butterfly dreams Zhuangzi. The new sorcerers described by Castaneda perform very elaborate techniques for creating a double who--in a paradoxical way-'is the sorcerer himself de­ veloped through his dreaming.' By learning to dream the double, 'the self ar­ rives at this weird crossroad, and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self:; The double is the dream of the sorcerer and the sorcerer is the dream of the double. Tulpamancy is a new and rather popular subculture in which thousands of people through hundreds of hours of precise practice are concerned with the creation of sentient, conscious beings called 'tulpas,' by 'forcing' and 'imp osing them in previously constructed parallel worlds called 'wonderlands.' Usually, at Tulpa's request, a moment comes in which the host and the Tulpa perform a 'switching.' Tulpa takes possession of the body, becomes embodied, and she is dreaming the former host, who becomes a sort of Tulpa. On the complicated way to Tulpa-populated wonderlands, the process can flip at any time into a full nightmare in which the Tulpamancer can lose herself or, in the case of a 'switching' situation, the Tulpa may start to feel the dream­ ing of the Tulpamancer as a nightmare. All this can happen because the Tulpas and their worlds are not just simply mind creations, but autonomous beings and realities on their own. This is part of a SOS call of Koomer, a Tulpamancer, on his blog: 'sometimes it feels like the body doesn't belo ng to me, like am just watching someone else through their own eyes. It's actually really annoying to not feel like yourself because you have no way to ground yourself. •s Many times you want to maintain the dream as long as possible, especially the Tulpa dreams, but sometimes you don't know wha: to do to wake up, and some nightmares can be very difficult to end. Sometimes it is easier to access or even create a reality than to stop it. A world or a reality can appear as closed systems, with no exit, powerful traps that won't let you go. A threat to one's own life is the source of the majority of nightmares. But paradoxically, to end the nightmare, you often have to end your life, or at least to be close to doing it in the dream. Often a nightmare ends only with the price ' 6 See Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Zhuanl!ef (London: Wallflower Press, 2013), Kindle edition. 7 e Castaneda, Tales of Power. See Koomer, 'Oguigi Tulpa,' http:/ /pooystasha.tumblr.com/ (accessed 26-05- 1 5). 363

Florin Flueras of an imminent dying, only then do you wake up scared into 'reality,' or into another dream. In a mysterious way, the phenomenal self-model or, more simp­ ly put, the elaborated fiction that is the 'I,' is central for maintaining the dream­ ing world around it. It is the dream ingredient that even if it is just a disembod­ ied minimal self, just an abstract point, it seems to be absolutely necessary for the dreaming to happen.9 The dream is always somebody's dream, like in Ama­ zonian multinaturalism and perspectivism where the world is always some­ body's perspective.to The easiest, if not the only way to end these worlds, and probably any type of world, is to end your own life. To vertically navigate be­ tween dreamworlds which are, in this perspective, the only worlds that we know, a dangerously lived life is required, one that is constantly at risk. The terror of taking this path is huge-in some lucid dreams you feel that if you die in the dream you die in reality too, you feel that the gesture can have a multi­ world effect. And this is perhaps really happening sometimes, but it is impossi­ ble to verify. When the 'I' is corrupted or possessed, which is actually always the case to different degrees, to end the 'I' is not always an option. Usually, in cases of pos­ session, if there is hope, it is in praying. Novels and films show us again and again that any other alternative is even difficult to imagine in such situations . If all the 'I' operations are part of the dream, every action to escape it is just an addition to the complexity of the dream situation. The 'I' cannot act outside the curre nt dream, or from the outside of the dream. The acceptance of the imp os­ sibility to escape the current dream is implicit in praying, that's why a call to the outside is launched. It seems like another pole of influence needs to be created somewhere at the limits of the current world, at the end of it, or even beyond­ if nor a proper God, at least a sort of attractor. This attractor from outside of the current level of dreaming can allow a vague possibility of an action from beyond of the total behavioral world that is the dream in which the 'I' is envel­ oped at that moment. The hope is that, like in a special form of Tulpamancy, through an act of faith, this outside pole can be invested with enough power to pull the 'I,' or a mutilated form of it, outside of its world; through a leap of faith to force the 'I' to make a leap outside of the loop that constitutes it and its world. This outside is usually spatially represented but could be temporal too. A prayer could be directed toward a future end of the respective dream, to the terminus of all this. By praying to the end, the end could become a future that retroactively acts on the dreaming 'I' in the present. 9 Jennifer Michelle Wiodt and Thomas Metzinger, The Philosophy of Dreaming and Dream State?,' in The New Stience of Dreaming. Cultural and Theoretical Perspe,'fives, 3 vols, eds. Deir­ dre Baratt and Patrick McNamara (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Pub lishing, 2007), 3: Kindle edition. 10 Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metapl?J·sics. Self-Consciousness: What Happens to the Experiential Subject during the 364

DREAM I NG THE E N D OF DREAM I NG 'Let me out of here!' is the only prayer of the sect from the film A k'isilor at the M11se111n, and when one of the members was asked 'out of where?' the an­ swer was 'out of here . . . in general.'1 1 The black box of the theater can be a church for this kind of minimal and general form of praying because it aims to neutralize or interrupt everyday reality, and provides some minimal conditions for the construction of other realities. By not taking reality for granted, but arti­ ficially manipulating it, the practices of 'dreaming' resemble, in many ways, those of the contemporary performance. A next step towards a black hyperbox, to a more functional portal to other worlds, or at least to other dreams, could be a contamination of the black box with some dreaming practices. To abduct dreaming practices and implement them in the black box. This means to be­ have as if we are dreaming, which, if we listen to some thinkers and mystics, we actually do all the time. Anyway, for a practical approach, whether life is a dream or not, it doesn't really matter, we can behave like it is. One of the dreaming techniques, often mentioned in the lucid dreaming­ guides, is to constantly shift attention around, because an intense concentrated attention can disintegrate the reality, ending the dream. Ending the dream, or 'the illusion' as some are calling it, is exactly what is wanted in some medita­ tions when the attention is focused on a single aspect of the world for a long time, as if trying to pierce the fabric of reality, to interrupt the fascination, to 'stop the world' Because one of the always present elements of the dream is oneself, to fix the attention on your own hand, or another part of the body, is one of the main techniques for achieving lucidity in dreams. It seems like circu­ lating attention back to oneself amplifies a proprioceptive self-referential atten­ tion, a feedback loop is intensified, and the dreaming nature of the environ­ ment can become apparent. If a waking up doesn't occur, the world becomes supernatural, the entire dream world can be shaken by all sorts of anomalies. A more radical fonn of this self-referential paradox is when this circular attention is piercing the 'I .' Paradoxically, the nearest possibility to reach the outside, to an escape from oneself, is to bend even more inside-to overdream the 'I .' This would be just an overdoing of what is already the case, because any 'I' is already a sort of 'strange loop' anyway s. 12 When this happens, one feels that the self is disappearing. This could be the case in some spiritual or mystical experiences when 'the virtuality of the self-model is available on the level of phenomenal representation itself'; it feels like the phenomenal self dissipates, and what remains is just a subjective sense of immersion in a void or in a strange brightness. 1 3 The immersion in a void 11 A Visitor to the Museum, directed by Konstantin Lopushanskiy (1 989; :Moscow: CS:\I Productions). 12 Cf. Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Liop (New York: Basic Books, 2007) . 13 Windt and :\Ietzingcr, Philosop'?J ofDrraming. 365

Florin Flueras sounds like death, at least as it is described by people who return from a medi­ cally confirmed death. According to some Eastern traditions, like Vedanta, this is the experience in sleep without dreams too---c onsciousness is always present even if in a diffuse and impersonal way. 14 Clarice Lispector seems to endorse this type of perspective. 'Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and never­ theless full thought . . . Sleeping is abstracting oneself and scattering into noth­ ingness . . . . Then you'll say, "I dreamed nothing." Can that be enough? Yes, it can. ' 1 5 This is a paradoxical situation because the dreamless sleep becomes dreaming as soon as a minimal consciousness or experience is involved. We can say that this abstract sensation of a void experienced by a diffuse self is the most minimal way of dreaming-the closest you can get to not dreaming is dreaming of nothingness. We cannot not dream, and at the same time we are not really dreaming, we are rather caught in dreams. Usually dreaming is something that happens to us, not so much something that we perform. According to Windt and Metzinger, we live our lives and the majority of dreams as 'naive realists,' having the 'im­ pression of being in direct contact with external reality,' and being unable to recognize 'the simulational character of consciousness.'16 The dreaming opera­ tions are hidden, we only experience their results. A question for further con­ sideration and experimentation is what happens if dreaming becomes explicit or if the implicit dreaming is speculatively doubled with a consciously performed one? . . . if we are reverse engineering some aspects of dreaming performing them intentionally? . . . if we overdream the world in which we are caught? If we cannot dream less, what if we dream more? What happens if an excess of dreaming is applied to a reality? Maybe there is an optimum degree of dreaming for a reality to remain a re­ ality, for a world to be natural. Most likely if some limits of dreaming are sur­ passed, the natural solidity and coherence of the respective reality is shaken. Windt and Metzinger have noticed that somehow an ability to exercise super­ natural powers is linked with 'the availability of the dreamlike nature of one's ongoing state of consciousness on the level of behavior.'1 7 An intervention at the level of dream creation seems to be a necessary perturbation in the com­ plete coincidence with one's own nature, the step that must be made not to be totally inscribed in nature like an animal. Or from another perspective, a way for nature to accelerate itself. At least this seems to be the vision in the Bud- 1 4 Arvind Shanna , Sleep a! a State of Con1t:io111nm in Advaita Vedanta (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), Kindle edition. l5 Clarice Llspector, The Stream of Ufa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 989), Kindle edition. 1 6 Windt and Metzinger, Philo1op� ofDreaming. 1 7 Ibid. 366

DREAM I NG THE E N D OF DREAMI NG dhist prayer 'Do not sleep like an animal. Do the practice which mixes sleep and reality.' l 8 A possible way to follow this prayer is to constantly consider the eventuali­ ty of being asleep, dreaming what is happening. The so-called 'reality checks' of lucid dreamers can be amplified to a habit of radical doubt-from time to time to doubt that you are awake and that you are perceiving a reality. Or, for those who prefer a more positive approach, an alternative could be the seeding of the impression that your current experience is a dream. One of the consequences of amplifying a dynamic between these kind of doubts and impressions could be the sensation that everything is a dream. This is usually seen as a degradation because dreams are considered weaker forms of reality. But this degradation has its advantages-when the world is a dream, it becomes available to dreaming practices. When the dreaming reality and the waking life coincide, the object of dreaming becomes the 'reality. ' A overdreamed reality, a dreamy hyper-reality can deeply unnaturalize or supernaturalize a world, transfonning it into a black hyperbox that spreads everywhere. One of the consequences of the fact that you are dreaming is that you can wake up. And when you wake up you wake up in a superior reality. A hierar­ chical relation between realities is created through a retroactive degradation of experience-after you wake up you can acknowledge that your previous experi­ ence was 'just a dream.' A complication of this dynamic is that dream from which you continuously wake up in another dream, till you end up in reality-a reality that could be s een as the most stable available dream at that moment. But nothing guarantees that you will not wake up again, even from the most solid 'reality.' In one of these types of dreams I was desperate because I didn't know where to come back to, I felt that I could choose from more realities and I didn't know where to wake up. I woke up in the wrong places and I was struggling to return, anxious about the idea that maybe there is no way back. It is a strange homelessness to feel that you are everywhere in dreams, and no­ where in reality. But an alienation is a necessary consequence of a transversal navigation between realities or worlds. To do jumps, leaps between worlds, or at least levels of reality, to accede to radically different behavioral spaces, the alienating dreamings and awakenings seem to be necessary. In another one of my dreams, I woke up in the same reality as that of the dream. In a paradoxical way, the awakening, what Windt and Metzinger call the 'shift into another global state of reality-modeling,' was felt as just a different way of being in the same world. The awakening, instead of being a switch be­ tween realities, was merely a subtle change in quality. The minimal aspect of an awakening thus seems to be a sensation of an increased lucidity more than a 18 N amkhai Norbu and �amkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Dream Yoga and the Practice �{Natural Ught (Boston, :MA: Snow Llon Publications, 1 992), Kindle edition. 367

Florin F/ueras switch of realities . For Windt and Metzinger, we are more aware in a lucid dream than in waking life because the system '.is a b1e to grasp the simulationaJ character of its overall s ta te ' Accordingly, the awareness increases even more in . the lucid false awakening 'because it combines both concurrent and retrospec­ tive insight into the dream state.'19 If we radicalize this perspective, we can say lhaL Lhe ma.ximwu awareness is a series uf luci<l awakenings, a falliug from one dream into another. On the other hand, this can only accelerate and make continuous a retro­ degradation of existence. For Bergson, 'a dream is this: I perceive objects and there is nothing there. I see men; I seem to speak to them and I hear what they answer; there is no one there and I have not spoken. It is all as if real things and real persons were there, then on waking all has disappeared, both persons and things. How does this happen?'20 Retrospectively everything is just a dream, just 'nothing,' it doesn't exist. To fall from a dream into another dream is, then, an endless catastrophe, an infinite falling back into a black hole. You kill realities one by one looking for an exit, haunted by an overwhelming feeling that you have to escape, but there is nowhere to go, just a serial exiting, an empty awak­ ening. Seen from the other side, a repeated waking up is a continual falling asleep, because any waking up means a falling asleep somewhere else. Sometimes, a nightmare, a dream of the end, of apocalypse, can give a sen­ sation of waking up in another dream. This is particularly pertinent now when many signs indicate that we may be in a process of extinction, one in which our personal and collective realities are ending. It is important to .imaginatively and practically speculate about what happens when worlds are ending. Perhaps, fol­ lowing a Vedanta twist- 'the world is included within the state and not in the world the states occur'21-to make the serial births and killings of worlds as easy as waking up and falling asleep, a meta-state is needed. A meta-dream in which you constantly wake up only to realize that you are actually in another dream. A meta-dream of endings, of falling from one dream into another dream, dreaming the end of dreaming. 1 9 W111dt and Metzinger, Philosophy ojDreaming. Henri Bergson, Dreams (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009), Kindle edition. 2o 21 Sharma, State of Consciousnm. 368

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS: ON TIME, TOPOLOGY AND THE SERIALITY OF SERIAL MURDER1 PART ONE Charlie Blake Stealing is the opposite of plagiarizing, copying, imitating, or do­ ing like. Capture is always a double-capture, theft a double-theft, and it is that which creates not something mutual, but an asym­ metrical block, an a-parallel evolution, nuptials, always 'outside' and 'between.'2 Death is in my sight today Like the odour of myrrh Like sitting under an awning on a breezy day. Death is in my sight today Like the odour of lotus blossoms Like sitting on the bank of drunkenness.3 It was in a green alcove, for feats that end in death by daggers, scented gloves, a treacherous wafer.4 t I would like to thank Frida Beckman for her reflections, insights, and collaborative interventions; Edia Connole for op ening the great oaken door; Helen Palmer and Anna Hickey-Moody for showing me where the lightning struck! 2 Gille s Ddeuze and Claire Pamet, '.-\ Conversation. What is it? What is it for?,' Dia­ logrm, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia Universi­ ty Press, 2007), 7. 3 James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near East Texts &/ating to the Old Tutamenl, 3rd ed. (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1 969), 407. 4 Jean Genet, Our !.At!;• of Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (St \!bans: Panther Books Ltd., 1 973), 1 3 1 . . • 369

Charlie Blake KLEPTOMANCY AND THE YOUNG GIRLS Chronos is the present which alone exi st s . It makes of th e past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future--but only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial system s.6 I h ave discarded clarity as worthless. Working in darkness, I have discovered lightning.7 Once or twice she had peeped into the book her si ster, clad in gleaming rubber and elaborately chained to a series of shiny metallic rings, was reading by the riverbank, a book rather thrillingly entitled: Shadows of Cmelty: Sadism, Masochism & the Philosophical Muse, but so far as she could tell it had no pi ctures or conver­ s a tions in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?S Her sister glanced up at her for a moment. 'My mas ter will be coming soon,' she smiled, skittishly. 'Maybe he'll release me, maybe he won't.' 'And if he does,' responded Alice, 'where will you go? Where will he take you ? ' 'To a castle on a snowy hill ,' said her sister, m ore s eriously. 'To a colloquium on raw depravity, pure un trammelled desire and infinitely cruel mul tiplicitie s , on virtuous abstraction and its equally vicious complement, on th e young girl as serial murderess and the intricacies of alien topologies ; a colloquium a ttended by scholars from all over the world, and hosted by an imperious woman in boots and furs before a grand fireplace. To a place, that is, dear sister, where conversation leads, virtually speaking, to all the other chateaus in the world.' Justine smiled again, gently pulling at the rings which so impeded her move­ ments. Shifted a little. Looked up to the empyrean. To the circling sun. Looked to the horizon. Alice yawned an d gazed down at a beetle scurrying across the gras s stalks towards the river. Its shell an iridescent emerald and purple. If she 5 Kleptomancy - divination by theft, whether from oneself or another. Sometimes a synonym for deja vu (archaic). 6 Gille s Deleuze, The Lo§c of Sense, trans. :;vfark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004), 89. 7 Andre Breton and Jean Shuster, 'Art Poetique,' in JIVhat is S1mralism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pathfinder Books, 1 969), 299. 8 Alice is incorrect here, as her sister would no doubt have informed her had she asked, as both of the two volumes of Shadows of Cnal!J· include both pictures and conversa­ tions. See Frida Beckman and Charlie Blake, 'Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism and the Philosophical Muse - Parts One & Two,' in Angelalei: ]011mal of the Theontical H11manities, 1 4.3 (2009); 15.1 (201 0). 370

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS squinted her eyes a bit the beetle seemed as though it were wearing white gloves on its front legs, and appeared also to have on its back the impression of what, at one moment, looked just like a human skull, marked out in silvery lines, and at another, a golden clock-face set at precisely six o-clock. 'Curiouser and curiouser,' thought Alice. Her sister sighed, heavily. Alice glanced up at the sh.], then followed her sister's gaze to the edge of that sky, to where it met the land. There were thunderclouds on the distant horizon. Vast and gloomy battlements of a vaporous war. Llghtning flashes . Forked and flaring. Bifurcating. Cata­ strophic. Splitting the tenebrous curlicues of vapour and gravity into servile precipitation. Splitting time itself. Splitting and splicing the sky. From her slightly upside-down position the clouds looked as though they were forming a hole or a vortex that she might fall through. A hole in the world, but topsy tur­ vy. But fall through to what, she thought? To where? Her sister was now reading aloud to her from the book, but Juliette found it so very hard to concentrate. It was so very hot by the river, and the idea of a snowy hill seemed so very appealing to her. 'All desire . . . ' murmured her sister reflectively, sleepily, 'is the desire for the desire of the other . . . ' 'Oh . . . don't give me Hegel!' Wanda rose to her feet and started to walk away from the riverbank and towards the castle on the hill. As she approached, her boots crunching through the snow, her furs wrapped around her, a sharp ob­ sidian knife in her belt, a compass and a map and a pack of tarot cards in a dis­ tressed leather pouch, she observed a huddle of figures further down the hillside, struggling upwards in a crooked black line, like characters from a novel in search of an incipit. Arriving at the great oaken door, which opened for her magically, she noted the flashes of lightning flickering around the distant peaks as though in search of someone. 'Oh cruel mathematics! To have brought us to this place, at this time in the his­ tory of the world,' she thought, as she entered the great hall of the first chateau, walked purposefully and magnificently across the worn stone flags to the great library and sat down on a splay of Turkish cushions beside the blazing fire. There she opened a book entitled Shadows ojCmeltJ• at the first page, and waited. 37 1

Charlie Blake THE CHATEAU OF CROSSED DESTINIES9 Death has nothing to do with a material model. On the contrary, the death instinct may be understood in relation to masks and cos­ tumes. Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself.10 We all go a little mad sometimes. 1 1 As the snow fell faintly through the universe and faintly fell o n the living and the dead, on the dead and the living, 12 and most particularly on the dead and the dead, the company gazed up the hill towards which they were now destined as though framed in a picture, caught in the photographer's flash. The snow somewhat obscured the spectacle of the innumerable virtual and actual cha­ teaus that loomed before them and into a seemingly infinite distance, and, until they were safely shut inside the first chateau, none of them dared to venture to remark on this terrifying and irresistibly seductive prospect. They had all re­ sponded to a call from a cabal of shadowy scholars from the European North and East, from Haiti, Venezuela, Shanghai, Antarctica, Greece, certain parts of Western Africa and the North American South, but none of them had, as yet, learnt the identity of any of the other guests of this rather unusual sojourn. So now they were gazing with curiosity, not only toward the towers and pinnacles and presumably hidden dungeons ahead of them, but also toward each other. 'A real chateau,' one of them whispered under her breath. 'A thousand cha­ teaus,' murmured another. 'A sheave of chateaus,' muttered a third, stamping his feet to the rhythm of some dark, hidden equation. 'A chateau of infinite possibilities and complexity and perpetually escalating multiplicity,' a fourth almost gasped. 'Silling Castle' exclaimed a fifth, 13 a remark that produced a 9 A reference, presumably to ltalo Calvmo's novel The Castle ofCroued Destinies (1 973), in which a troupe of weary travellers arrive at a castle in the midst of a thick forest and, in due course, lay out the tarot cards to initiate a series of stories. to Gille s Deleuze, Difference and &petition, trans. Paul Patton (London: The :\thlone Press, 1994), 1 7. 1 1 Attributed to the notoriously articulate, charming and philosophical serial killer, Ted Bundy. 12 This is a sentence lifted and slightly altered from James Joyce's short story 'The Dead.' The original sentence runs as follows: 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead' Qames Joyce, 'The Dead,' The EuentialJames Jqyce [London: Jonathan Cape, 1 948] , 1 74). 13 The Chateau de Silling is the name of the remote, medieval castle in Saint-Martin-de­ Bellevile, used by the four libertines and their cohorts for systematic abuse and philo- 372

A THOUSAN D CHATEAUS smile amongst all the travellers-'or possibly Champtoce-Sur-Loire or even .Machecoul,' interjected a sixth somewhat disingenuously. t" They were, as they were now beginning to realize collectively, entering the texts that they had been working with and on individually for so very long and in a way that none of them had ever anticipated before this meeting. Conversation paused for a while as, buried in their thoughts, increasingly aware of a gnawing hunger in their souls, like a formless passion, like a murderous impulse in a green alcove, a dissonant moment of affect reverberating like an old cracked bell in a decaying dungeon, the missing heart of a travelling funfair, or a single pink rose, they trudged up the increasingly perilous snow laden path, figures in a flat white field ascending quasi-vertically by a crooked black line. Like a question mark in the snow. Then continued through a brief labyrinth of crystalline hedges that sang and moaned in the cruel and soughing wind as they passed to the great oaken door, which seemed to open and dose magically for them, like something out of a film. And then, as if seamlessly suturing two separate conversational moments to­ gether, like particles in those quantum superpositions so beloved of certain populist theoretical physicists, for example, or the temporal glitchings and raw templexities of certain speculative authors, composers, journalists and innumer­ able desultory paranoiacs, and then, as they silently crossed the great hall of cracked and distorting mirrors and eyeless, vagrant, dilapidated statues towards the library, and then, at that moment, in that moment, a voice punctured the air. And then, in that moment, at that moment, seemingly extracted from the temporal flux, the event qua event, the wizened duree, then, as they moved to­ wards the light and the seductive wannth, moving, that is, as heliotropical in­ sects tend to travel when wandering the darkened corridors of an alien hi,�e, then: 'hyperstitional necrophagy,' purred a seventh figure whom none of the others had noticed until that moment, a man called Dolmance de St. Ange, it seems, a professor of ontography, tall, shadowy and of indetenninate sex, cloaked, hooded, furred and gloved, a glint of steel and sapphire beneath the velvet folds of his cloak, perhaps, even, maybe, a hint at least, as they entered the library of old wood and even older shadows, of cold marble and frayed tap­ estries, and sat on the Turkish cushions arranged in the form of a pen tagram or sophically inclined atrocity in 'Donatien _-\lphonse,' in Francois de Sade's infamous novel, The 120 D� of Sodom, or the School ofUbertines, trans. Richard Seaver and Ausrryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1 966) . 1-1 The two chateaus in which the notorious 1 5th Century serial killer and the model for Charles Perrault's 'Bluebeard,' Gilles de Rais, purportedly committed his atrocities.

Charlie Blake pentacle before the fire or stood behind the cushions gazing at the tableau that presented itself to them. The elegant and imperious woman by the fireplace was comfortably seated in an armchair and appeared to be trying in vain to warm her hands and feet in front of the crackling fire. 15 The visitors, at this s tage, benumbed by the sudden transition from the icy extremity of the exterior to the sparkling warmth of the interior, remained quiet, despite the fact that the subject for the evening's dis­ cussion lay so close to their hearts. Looking at the assembled guests and wish­ ing to get the conversation going, she decided to be provocative. 'I am begin­ ning,' she begun, 'to believe the incredible and understand the incomprehensi­ ble, namely the philosophy of the German people and the qualities of their womenfolk. ' 1 6 Dr Geoffrey Ormson, a youngish looking man who had placed himself to the right hand side of the lady rose to the bait. 'Ah, you need to be careful with such philosophy madam, the dialectic is like a vampire of thought, body, and time, it savours any challenge to its totalizing system.' 'Don't give me Hegell'-the lady interjected impatiently, but Dr Ormson per­ sisted. 'But being careful does not mean that we are allowed to throw him out. Look at Eisenstein, for example, his scandalous dialectical thought endlessly flirts with bodies that resist sublation and temporalities that prove unruly.'17 'And are such unruly bodies our goal Dr Ormson?' the lady inquired, well aware that she was speaking to a scholar of the philosopher of cruelty, desire, and eternally suspenseful multiplicity. 'What we are after,' interposed the fonnidable Dr. Dionysia Demesne, who was sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace beneath a dusty and decidedly dam­ aged portrait of a recently abducted Iranian philosopher of art and mathemat­ ics, 'is a configuring of the body, setting it up so that it might be worked, acti­ vated in ways that it would not otherwise; to isolate an affect. It is here that we ts This passage is taken, slightly modified, from the opening of Leopold von Sacher­ Masoch's novel Venus in F11r1 (1 870), collected together with Gille s Deleuze's essay on Masoch and Sade, 'Coldness and Cruelty,' in Gille s Deleuze, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1 991), 143. 16 Von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Ibid., 1 44. 1 7 Thomas Odde, 'Flirting with Masochism: Sergei Eisenstein's Three-Ring Circus of Body and Time,' cited in Beckman and Blake, 'Shadows of Cruelty-Part Two,' 123-38. 374

A THOUSAN D CHATEAUS find masochism and the masochistic contract so useful because it makes it pos­ sible to make the living being into what Simondon calls "a veritable theatre of individuation. "' 1 8 'This is all just too abstruse,' interjected the eminent criminal psychologist, Dr Naveen Sundra, 'I was led to believe that we were here to interrogate the idea of the serial killer and transdisciplinary notions of cruelty and obsession in some vagudy philosophical sense or context. But in the first few moments we have wandered into the obscurities of German idealism, Gallic individuation and contractual masochism. I have worked on and with so-called serial killers for many years and across every continent on Earth, (including Antarctica, by the way, and for reasons that will , I hope, be obvious to the assembled compa­ ny), and with a few exceptions, there is little of intrinsic philosophical interest in these figures . They are, as Franco Berardi has made explicit, sensationalists of minor interest. Indeed, as he puts it without reservation in his recent study of heroes, mass murder and suicide: I don't care about the conventional serial kill er, the brand of se­ cretive sadistic psychopaths who are attracted to other people's suffering and enjoy seeing people die. I'm interested in people who are suffering themselves and who become criminals because this is their way both to express their psychopathic need for pub­ licity and also to find a suicidal exit from their present hell. 1 9 She leaned back and placed a fmger on her chin. 'Having said that, I d o concede that Berardi h a s possibly missed the point about the explicit seriality of serial killers and of serial killing in general, which places this phenomenon in a different logical or para-logical domain to, say, the run-of-the-mill mass murderer or common-or-garden genocidal killer, however seemingly messianic, industrial or indeed techno-bureaucratic their methods may be. The latter are in general, I think it is fair to say, more concerned finally with the extensive and stochastic functionality of extermination, whereas the former are more concerned with its singularity, its intensity, its haecceity.' is A notion from Gilbert Simondon discussed with verve by Gilles Chatalet in 'Gilbert Simondon (1 924-1 989),' trans. Dan ;\fellamphy, academia.edN, available from http:/ /www.academia.Edu/ 4 1 89277 /Gilles-Chatalet_Gilbert_Simondon_l 924- 1 989 _academia.edu (accessed 10-05- 1 5). 19 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Heroes, Mass M11rder and S11icide (London: Verso, 20 1 5) 3. , 375

Charlie Blake At that point a previously unobserved cat passed through a threshold, stretched and then stretched again, voluptuously, impossibly, mechanically, claws extend­ ed, against the lintel of the fireplace. Somewhere nearby (it seemed to be in the room itself, but emerging curiously, acousmatically, from everywhere and no­ where. Possibly it came from behind the Chinese screen next to the mirror? Or from one of the adjoining rooms? 'A place of neuropaths and synthetic intelli­ gence, perhaps? Of recklessly vicious and ultimately banal ontological inconti­ nence?' conjectured Professor Wolf N. Dale pointedly, thinking aloud, s troking his beard. 'A place of horror and delight and equally reckless invention and perpetual trans formation then?' mused Dr Sahalia Shango, quietly, delightedly, re-crossing her legs. 'Albeit topologically constrained,' she added, raising a de­ clarative finger, slowly, to her lips. 'Alternatively, a labyrinth of intimate cruel()', of dirty ontologies and fractured topologies, of schizotopian generality, of per­ verse multiplicities and irreversible modal corruption,' thought Professor Ted Bundy, silently, excitedly, squirming like a caterpillar on a leaf), somewhere nearby a male voice groaned listlessly for a moment, and then, in the silence between thoughts, a new voice, sexless or heavy with sex-it was difficult to tell-but certainly heavy with the sounds of billowing incense and rare perfume and the ragged and dissonant fire of clashing steel and tumbling corpses, with bleak significance and tenebrous authority, with a profoundly disturbed ration­ ality, emerged from the darkness by the heavy velvet curtains, and spoke to the assembled company. We are once again, in mereotopological waters, I fancy, my lady,' (he an­ nounced enigmatically, paused), 'In terminable extrapolation, perhaps?' (he thought) . 'In terminable juxtaposition, even?' (He whispered, as though to him­ self, as though doubting himself for a moment) . Then, more forcefully: 'There is undoubtedly something mathematical? - indeed, geometrical' - (his voice now rising)-'indeed topological as suggested-indeed mereotopological--about the performance of the quotidian serial killer. We are, after all, thinking about random connections between individuals, we are thinking about the series ra­ ther than the set or group (or class) to some degree too. At the same time as we consider who the serial killer may select as victim, we are also concerned with what the serial killer may do, both psychologically and surgically, to the victims selected.' 'One thinks, for example, about the popularity of evisceration amongst certain figures of this class or set or series. That and "partialism," so-called, are argua­ bly two of the defining characteristics of the conventional serial killer, at least Partialism, you may recall, is the fetishization of body parts, which might in some cases act as a synecdoche of the complete body, but is far more likely to involve a detachment or separation from the body. Without wishing to slide 376

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS into gratuitous Lacanianism here, indeed far from it, the issue of dismember­ ment and related paraphilias is very much an issue of the relation of parts to wholes. Similarly evisceration, the removal of the intern al organs of one who may still be partially alive, for such is the cruel perversity of the serial killer, bears comparison with certain aspects of mereotopology, in which it is estab­ lished that what are called topological primitives-points, nodes, edges , faces, are subject to a s econd order of relational primitives-<:ontairunent, connect­ edness and adjacency. This leads, as Varzi has argued so persuasively, to cer tain principles which undoubtedly have implications for ontology as much as they do for topology per se. Thus he outlines some of these principles as follows: P-reflexivity: everything is part of itself. P-antisymmetry: two distinct things cannot be part of each other. P-transitivity: any part of a part of a thing is itself part of that thing. C-reflexivity: everything is connected to itself. C - symmetry: if a thing is connected to a second thing, the second is connected to the first. Monotonicity: everything is connected to anything to which its parts are connected.20 Noting that the issue of P-transitivity remains controversial, he adds several more substantive principles to this list as follows: P-extensionality : no two distinct things have the same proper parts. P-fusion: for any number of things there is a smallest thing of which they are all part.21 'Without going into the detail of these admittedly controversial prin ciples, it is my conjecture that a significant sub-class of serial killers are here caught be­ tween P-transitivity, on the one hand, and P-extensionality, on the other, in regard to their relationship with their victims, both physically and psychologi­ cally, and attempt to make up for the tension this generates through a creative surgery of both parts and forms , involving separation and suturing under the a egis of a higher level Monotonicity. The art of the serial kill er is, in this sense, or perhaps a little removed from this sense, somewhat like the acts of those experimental writers and artists that we used to consume so voraciously in our 2o Achille C. Varzi, 'Basic Problems of Mereotopology,' in Formal Ontology in Information Systems, ed. N . Guarino (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 1 998), 2. 21 Ibid., 2.

Charl ie Blake fonner critical delirium-before the ''Dreamcancer" flooded our hyper­ digitalised existence with a delirious fragmentation of sense-those writers and artists, those molar savants (remember them?) who took grave pleasure in smearing language across the page or the canvas, unshackling words from their grammatical moorings and syntactical prisons, their typographical chains and orthographical constraints, rampantly reckless visiotextuality, allowing for some aspects of conventional rhetorical feinting, of course-synecdoche, hyperbole, antiphrasis-but dispensing, on the whole, with metaphor in any conventional sense.' 'Zaum. Zaum. Zaum.' chorused the delegates, futuristically.22 'Dispensing with difference per se as a consequence, although they didn't real­ ise it. Embracing the plasticity of singularity or univocity, expanded into some universalising notion. Avoiding pure difference, at least as the darkness, as the shadow, as divine absence, as the unseeable other. Avoiding the void, in other words. A void, a nihilation of effect and affect, of the body, of the nueroplastic and neurophantasmatic self. A void which is conceived by the quotidian serial killer, as another surface, in however many dimensions he or she or it can ac­ commodate conceptually or topologically. The serial killer is, in this sense, void­ less, or nullophobic. Is engaged in a voiding of the void, indeed. (And not, I should perhaps add, in the sense that Alain Badiou offers us the void.)23 Here, with our serial killer, an emptiness is lacking. The hole at the heart of the self so often observed by drug addicts and alcoholics is lacking. The torus of self has been trans-dimensionalized into flat field ascending, albeit transacted by a crooked black line, which in its inverse manifestation appears as a zig-zag, a lightning flash.' 'But what about the series in seriality, in the serial quality of the killing s?' inter­ jected Dr. JUlia Fazekase. 'We are not here talking of a killing spree, nor of mass murder, nor of the genocide effected by politicians and generals or rogue mili­ tia. To begin with, the serial killer properly defined, is generally, if not always, North American, white, male and sociopathic, and yet this colloquium has been organised by an invisible committee of global provenance and we are, our­ selves, an international selection of participants, as invited and funded by that committee. Isn't this tension between the cosmopolitan and the micropolitan in 22 'Zaum' is a 'transreasonal' and creatively-destructive application of the breakdown and reconstruction of language deployed in Russian Futurism. On this, see Helen Palmer, Dele11z.e and F11111ris111: A Manifum for Nonseme (London: Bloomsbury, 201 4), 139. 23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 5260. 378

A THOUSAN D C HATEAUS relation to serial murder and its victims and perpetrators and the myths that they generate in film and fiction more than merely coincidental? Perhaps our hostess might enlighten us?' They looked to their hostess still shivering by the fireplace who said nothing and merely yawned, still shivering, in response. 'That is a little over specific isn't it Dr Fazekase?'--challenged Professor Berkowitz. 'Even while I allow that you did partially qualify your definition, as we well know, much of the statistical evidence re serial killing is based on sys­ tems of diagnosis and classification as much as the actual event of serial murder itself. On the question of seriality, however, you certainly have a point. One might take the seriality of Jean Paul Sartre, for example, for whom the series and the group are very simply differentiated. In The Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre attempts to understand the collective quality in human relationships and connect it negatively to the iniquities of capitalism by seeing the group as a col­ lectivity consciously unified by purpose, identity or some other active relation­ ship, whereas a series is a collectivity passively assembled by circumstance or external arrangement, such as the collectivity of people waiting at a bus s top for a bus to arriv e. Those in a series are thus isolated but not alone. It would seem that for a serial killer the series rather than the group is the operative thing for these reasons, which no doubt bears a connection with the earlier discussion of parts and wholes, though at this stage I am not sure what that might be.' 'Perhaps that might be clarified by referring to Gilles Deleuze's more elaborate use of series in his Logic of Sense,' added Dionysia Demesne, 'for if sense, for Deleuze, is the connecting and disconnecting of actual bodies and virtual events, series, as one commentator has put it so succinctly, "are variations that work both to connect and to individuate elements-they are bi-directional. " Moreover, " fo r each series in The Logic of Sense there correspond figures that are not only historical, but logical and topological.''24 This observation might well allow us to tie together the various strands of our discussion via Deleuze's elaborate investigation of Stoicism, structuralism, sense, nonsense and the intri­ cacies of Lewis Carroll's Alice in IF011dtr/and. Thus we would be able to bring together the Alice of Carroll's "underground" books and the idea and actuality of the serial killer into a single sentence, quite possibly for the first time.' Demesne leaned back in her chair and observed the participants of the collo­ quium as a collectivity, more group than series in the Sartrean sense, but a series of series in the 'sense' that might be extrapolated from Deleuze, perhaps. She 24 Palmer, DekuZ! and Futurism, 4S-9. 379

Charlie Blake looked at the tapestries on the far wall, one of which depicted the Stoic tree of Deleuze's book rising above a silhouette of the Mad Hatter's tea party, a smil­ ing cat in its branches, another portrayed the tree blasted by lightning that Pierre Klossowski describes as the meeting place of the Acephale or headless society where he, the incendiary librarian Georges Bataille and several others once met to burn sulphur as part of an obscure ritual,25 several more depicted forests and trees, maidens and unicorns. One portrayed a group or series of philosophers (one could tell by their demeanour and the books they carried that they were philosophers) apparently lost in a wood, pursued by a shadowy figure holding a dagger. Underneath, in Medieval Latin which she translated silently, were the words announcing the subject of this tableau as 'the death of philoso­ phy in a dense wood.' 'One thing has occurred to me,' interjected Professor Bundy, following Dr. Demesne's gaze and glancing at the final tapestry, 'the death of philosophy is not the same, of course, as the death of philosophers, though the former might possibly follow from the latter if it were done with sufficient thoroughness.' 'Much might depend on whether you view a collectivity of philosophers gath­ ered together for a colloquium in a great chateau on a snowy hill as lightning flashed across the nearby peaks as a group or a series,' intervened the lady by the roaring fire. 'If the former, and if you chose to murder them collectively, then you would indeed be a spree killer or mass-murderer. If the latter, which seems unlikely in this context, then you would indeed be a serial killer.' She leant forward, creating a flurry of sparks. 'Whether the distinction really matters at this stage is a rather different issue,' she added. 'Also, whether or not the murder of all philosophers would lead to the death of philosophy is a question you would have to pose to an authority on such matters, an authority such as the Mad Hatter or the March Hare, for instance. ' She swept her furs around her, regarded them coolly. 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' huffed Dr. Ormson, somewhat caustically, but also a little nervously, observing Professor Dolmance de St. Ange watching him rather intensely, almost hungrily, as the great mirror to his right started to shinuner in a way that mirrors were not supposed to shimmer. At that moment too, whether as omen or accident, a bird flew into the library, a corvid of some kind, evidently separated from its murder, its collectivity, at which incursion Associate Professor Scarletta Regina, who had up until that point been studying the same series of tapestries on the N orth wall as Dr. Demesne, turned, raised 25 Michel Swya, Georges Balailk: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijakowski and :Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 251 . 380

A THOUSAN D CHATEAUS her hands and shouted: 'Ugh, Nature!' And then: 'Out nature! Be denatured!! Be gone!' At which p oin t, and so very luckily fo r her (it has to be said), she pur­ sued the presumably hapless and murderless bird across the library, out into the great hall, up the marble staircase and out of the story. In response to this unanticipated turbulence of bird and woman leaving the frame so abruptly, the cold lady by the fire rose abruptly also, the air around her swift and swirling movement rekindling vivid sparks in the faltering flames. The vision was astounding, the white furs and the orange stars intermingling in a tableau vivant that none of them cared ever to forget, at least, for so long as they lived. 'I need a drink' she declared in a voice of honey and thorns, 'then you must look at the patterns in the cards. Now I will leave you to your des tiny. I have an urgent appointment. So do you,' she said. A semi-naked man with glowing wdts all over his back, who must have sp ent the whole evening kned­ ing on the cold stone flags behind the lady's chair sprung to his feet and rushed painfully towards a tray of drinks that nobody up until that point had noticed. The guests hovered like insects in a hive awaiting the command of their queen. Their divine hostess accordingly took a glass of dark green liquor, ignored them, nodded to the cloaked figure by the heavy velvet curtains, then to the young girl in the shadows, walked across the library, through the great hall of eyele s s statues, through the great oaken door, and then out into the night, her footprints illuminated by a flash of forked lightning, her white furs swirling around her like the snow queen of Hans Christian Anderson's fable. THE BEAST IN THE MIRROR They profess to b e curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art. 26 I was in great p etplexity.27 'It is not often, (said the professor of ontography, wiping his knife on the p lump velvet cushion, rising from his seat by the fireplace and leaning against 26 Thomas De Quincey, 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,' On Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 64. 27 Franz Kafka, 'The Countty Priest,' The Complete Short Stories efFranz. Kajlea, trans. Ed­ win Muir (London: Vintage Books, 1 999), 220. 381

Charlie Blake the heavy, marble mantelpiece, on top of which sat a large mirror with a surrace like gauze) that the names of Lewis Carroll's most eloquent invention - Alice, _ that is, of course, of the two ''underground" books-and those of notorious serial killers such as Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez, Aileen Wuomos, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Dennis Nilsen, et al (considered here as representing the set, somewhat controversially as we have seen, of all serial killers), are con­ tained within a single sentence. That these monstrous and "inhuman" murder­ ers28 have exercised the popular and forensic imagination in the later 20th and early 21 sr century is undoubtedly the case-as, of course, though rather differ­ ently, has the figure of Alice herself, the young girl who, just a century and a half ago, was plunged into a series of extraordinary adventures involving bizarre encounters, philosophical puzzles and topological transformations . Indeed, it is fair to say that these serial adventures and their interlocutor have continued from that time to our own to touch not only the imaginations of myriad chil­ dren around the globe, but also the speculations of mystics, murderers, literary savants and political theorists, the dreams of philosophers of both the analytic and continental traditions, and in due course, the practitioners of film, music and digital modelling, not to mention the often incoherent conceptual experi­ ments and countercultural ramblings of psychedelic visionaries from the 1 960s onwards. Alice is, in this sense, a child of transversal time, of her time and ours as well as a time beyond or "beneath" our own; a genuinely existing entity, moreover, hyperstitionally or perhaps "hypostitionally" speaking,29 as much as sh e is a product of words and images, logic and topology, paint and paper. In this capacity, as has been suggested above, she is also an exemplar of an ineffa­ ble sense of the intricate possibilities that span or grow in the disjunction be­ tween Being and non-Being-a theme that has been touched on in relation to ideas of the void and the philosophy of cruelty and serial killing in its more general sense.' On the 'inhuman' and the serial killer, see David Roden's contribution to this vol­ ume. 29 If hyperstition, as derived from the work of the Ccru, is genetally understood as the emergence of hyper-reality from the complex temporal loops generated by certain fonns of apocalyptic fiction, then hypostition can be understood as a vertically parallel underground process involving ontological tunnelling, experimentation and storage, as suggested indirectly in Franz If Kafka's short story, 'Tbe Burrow.' For a discussion of hypostition in relation to music and hauntography, see Charlie Blake and Isabella van Elferen, 'Hypostition: Sonic Spectrality, Affective Engineering & Temporal Paradox,' academia.edn, available from https:/ / www.academia.edu/7527374/Hyposti tion_Sonic _Spectrality_:\ffective_Engineecin�and_Temporal_Paradox._With_Charlie_Blake._Lo ndon_Conference_in_Critical_Thought_Goldsmiths_London_UK_06.2014_ (accessed 1 0-05-1 5). 28 382

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS 'For the serial killer is, likewise, a product of both a specific and a more general­ ized notion of time, but how far that notion extends into a time beyond is an issue that the fragments collected above begin to investigate. Indeed, while the phenomenon which the term "serial killer" both denotes and describes has ar­ guably existed for hundreds and possibly thousands of years, illustrated, per­ haps, in the myths of the ancient female demons Nyx, Lilitu and Kali as in the much more recent lives of the aristocratic French serial paedocide Gilles de Rais, (notably, at one time, companion in arms to J oan of Arc),�1 or the equally bloody slayer of Slavic virgins, the Countess Bathory, the identity of the serial killer qua serial kill er is an invention of comparatively recent date. Commonly thought to have been coined by the 1 930s Berlin police investigator Ernst Gennet in connection with the notorious killer, Peter Kurten, popularly known as the ''Vampire of Diisseldorf," it didn't become common in the Anglophone world until the 1 980s and from there it became ubiquitous both as an epithet and a symptom of the ordinariness of murder as a mission in the popular mind, an archetype of shifting forms and valences but one that equates intriguingly with !:he image of Alice explored by the eminent English literary critic William Empson in his analysis of pastoral judgement and the child as "swain.''31 Here, if we so choose, we may find surprising resonances between at least the fiction­ al expression of the American serial killer mythos in figures such as Hannibal Lector and Dexter, or the enigmatically malignant pathos of the popular TV series Tme Detective [HBO, 20 1 4]-and the child as judge in a world in which everything, including time, is out of joint, and must be calibrated to bring it back into line, whether through logical conundrums or viciously calibrated acts of ritual atrocity and vengeance.'32 'If it is, then, as I have suggested above, unusual to find these two figures, Alice and the quotidian serial killer of public imagination and private nightmare in a single sentence, then there is, suffice it to say, some method in my madness (some sense in my non-sense) , some logic in my logorrhoea. For to contain these diverse figures within a sentence does, I would suggest, have a certain purchase on the realms of schizotopian or magical thinking and transition that has been adumbrated here, and especially in relation to the moment just prior to the "Great Collapse," or petite singularite as the French called it with typical understatement, when such thinking became less a diversion and more an en­ tirely necessary supplement to our more conventional discursive and analytical 3(1 On Gille s de Rais, see the exemplary collections of writings by figures such as Ba­ taille , Huysmans, Carter et al., in Dark Star: The Satanic Rites of Gilks de Rais (No loc: Creation Books, 2004). 31 William Empson, Some Versions ofthe Pastoral (London: New Directions, 1935). 32 Cf. Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola �fasciandaro, eds., True Detection (Lon­ don: Schism, 2014). 383

Charlie Blake habits. In that moment of para-memetic meltdown just after the "Great Acc:el­ eration"33 and just prior to the "Great Collapse," that moment of the "Dream­ cancer" so-called (or, "metastases of integral personal identity formation and simultaneously accelerated fractional cognitive dispersal through artificially in­ duced algorithmic mutation with enhanced neuro-replication, reduction and erasure," as some of our more prolix commentators have preferred), at that moment, that is,' his voice now rising incrementally, a flourish of hand gestures, a whisper of soft leather, a glint of steel and sapphire, 'when our written lan­ guage and its diacritical frames and nodes and conventions dissolved into a mesh of incongruities and inverted aporia, when footnotes and endnotes, epi­ graphs and annotations-unnervingly for those of us of a scholarly disposi­ tion--all developed a life of their own and began to generate new and exotic patterns of knowledge and interpretation, of modes and sources and objects of attribution and reference, of syntactic extrapolation, of violent autopoetic sen­ tencing and degenerative punctuation, in that moment everything changed, and new strategies, drawn in part from the medieval trivium and quadrivium of Ox­ ford University as much as certain traditions from the Indian sub-continent and the various waves of Chinese diaspora, Babylo-Assyrian gematria and early Per­ sian astro-semiology, and from thence to the more recent disciplines of mereo­ topology, pomotheology and ontography, were of necessity brought into play.' He paused and took a long, deep breath. Looked down below and then down again into the bleak and enervating abyss of Abbadon, a place veined with ter­ rible red fire, savage golden light and the seeping black oil of the corpse of a once distant rotting sun, a place covered with incomprehensible hieroglyphics scratched on white rocks. Looked up next to the spinning eye of the retrograde solar disc, to the ever open eye of the daemon Hastur-Ra, circling in the azure dome of a slowly disintegrating sky. Inverse heliotropism. O Oculus. Orphan drift. Cosrnicide. Phenomenophagism.34 He then looked inward for a moment, expanded with virtual fingers his field of language, vision and computation, made a few minor machinic adjustments to the simian wetware device he was operating, continued. 33 Cf. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate Lisa Deutsch et al, 'The Trajectory of the An­ thropocene: The Great Acceleration,' in The Anthropocene &view, available from http:/ /anr.sagepub.com/ content/ early /201 5/01 /08/205301 96 14564785.abstract (acce ssed 1 7-05-15). 3 4 On the que stion of cosmicide and its relation to phenomenophagism, see Charlie Blake, 'The Animal that Therefore I .Am Not Inhuman Meditations on the Ultimate Degeneration of Bios and Zoe via the Inevitable Process of Phenomenophagism,' in The Animal Catafyst: Towards Ahuman Theory, ed. Patricia Maccormack (London: Bloomsbury 201 4), 91-1 1 0. , , 384

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS 'So, my pairing of Alice and the set of all serial killers has a logic both as a play of words on the noun "sentence" itself, a Nietzschean joke (if one can talk of such things) , between the "sentence" of grammar and that of judgement and subsequent confinement, between "sense" and the encapsulation of sense, that is, in the form of a tentacular probe into some or many of our possibly incom­ possible futures.' For a moment the mirror behind him appeared to become softer, even more yielding and gauze-like, or maybe as a silvery mist in lunar light. It was almost as though for a moment behind the glassy meniscus vivip­ arous tentacles were flailing in an ancient city of impossible geometries beneath the dissolving ice, disintegrating code drifting upward like rain or falling down­ ward like snow or ash, slowly falling upon the living and the dead. The profes­ sor, sensing something badly amiss, looked around at the shimmering glass pat­ ina a little nervously, adjusted his monocle, but then at that point the glass seemed to re-substantiate as a material and topological surface between worlds, a skin or film with no rents or tears or holes or spectral capillaries, and so, halt­ ingly at first, then more confidently, he continued. 'More crucially, and related to this first association, it has a logic in that magical thinking had traditionally and up to that point been viewed by anthropologists, sociologists and a handful of maverick philosophers who had concerned themselves with such arcane matters, as the result of a confusion between or blurring of the correct ontolog­ ical distinction to be made between things and words, between contiguity or resemblance and eidetic transmission, between the will and the dream, between surface and penetration, between portal and proboscis , between objects in their material or abstract or supposedly agentles s actuality and the visual, scratched, scoured, sensual or sonic hieroglyphs that indicate at that actuality via grids of representation or modes of expression, inference and abduction: grids that-at least in conventional terms-thereby allow us to apprehend or "abduct" the concepts that those sights, sensations, sounds or inscriptions thus sign, signal or signify.' 'Either that, he continued, 'or it is simply the product of a credulous and mor­ bid disregard for the desultory hygiene of reason and the fastidious-some might even say obsessive-compulsive-methods of scientific investigation and repetition.' He began to speed up. 'But whether we view magical thinking as a kind of ontological slippage or mere pseudoscientific nonsense, its mythopoeic (or mythophylogenic) charge has undoubtedly affected and indeed infected (like some constantly mutating viral or bacterial or biochemical agent) some of our more potent literary and artistic productions and even contaminated some of the more obscure woodland trails of philosophical exploration in the wake of modernity and its legacy's perpetual crisis and struggle with the rival claims of truth and creativity.' 385

Charlie Blake Professor Dolmance de St. Ange paused once again. He gazed at the rows of empty seats in the library, at his absent audience, at his projection of fading ghosts de-substantiating in those empty chairs, at the glinting of metallic weap­ ons on the wall to his left as they reflected the shuddering flames and eternally climbing cinders of the roaring fire behind him. He looked then beyond the warm, semi-circular glow of the fire towards the shadowy outlines of his most · recent victims, bound, gagged and writhing on the geometrically patterned car­ pet before the swish of heavy vdvet curtains . Each one lightly stabbed, delicate­ ly mutilated and tightly bound to a decaying and blackening corpse in the man­ ner of Aristotle's tales of Etruscan pirates.35 He listened to the delicious melis­ ma of dying moans and sighs, a staggered and broken chorus that reminded him of the deep soughing wind that curled around the icy maze outside the cha­ teau's heavy oaken entrance. A soft Aeolian refrain that so delighted him and so often sounded like voices from afar. Like the voices of his suffering, fading vic­ tims but in some alien acoustic space or hive. Then, suddenly, taken by surprise, suddenly frightened, he saw the young girl in the shadows. She turned away from him for a moment, spectrally, imperiously, then turned back to look in his direction. She was dressed in jeans and a long black t shirt, too big for her, with 'A DESIRE CALLED MARX' printed on the front and 'THE COMING IN­ SURRECTION' printed on the back in red and white capitals, and she was holding and stroking a cat that seemed, somewhat unnaturally, to be smiling at him She was also studying him intently. No, she was looking beyond him, be­ hind him , at his reflection in the mirror, or hers, or serial mirrors in serial cha­ . teaus, he couldn't be sure. 'Are you one of the Alice-Eugenie series?' he said. 'Could that be you? But . . . ' 'We're all mad here, you know,' said the girl. 'I'm mad. You're mad And the cat is clockwork, obviously.' Professor Dolmance de St. Ange twitched, shifted uneasily. Looked around at their mutually inverted reflection in the great mirror of bent and twisting glass. The glass's surface softened quickly. Suddenly something emerged, black, slick, oily and very fast, silently at first, then quietly, then nothing. Gone. He barely fdt it when the obsidian blade penetrated the flesh he was wearing beneath his thick, velvet cloak. She moved so rapidly in the morbid and melan­ choly light of the dying sun. Five swift sharp punctures in the fonn of a vivid pentagram or pentacle around his solar plexus, our bloody, bruised and dying 35 Reza Negares tani, 'Differential Cruelty: A Critique of Ontological Reason in Llght of the Philosophy of Cruelty,' cited in Beckman and Blake, S hadows of Cruelty-Part One, 69-84. ' ' 386

A THOUSAN D CHAT�AUS sun as a black, blue, golden, desiccated flower streaked with crimson, our long dead sun now a corpse at the bottom of a well. Whisper it now. A solar anus. A pink rose. A murderous kiss. The missing heart of a travelling funfair. He groaned softly and gripped the mantelpiece a little more tightly. Some books tumbled from a small table. A sweet scent of book dust. He groaned again. Continued, weakly, valiantly, his voice now dry and rasping, the accent Ameri­ can, like Kansas, like rattle snakes on a dusty path. 'I must now conclude quickly,' he breathed huskily. 'I offer this lightly sketched set or rather constellation of theoretical co-ordinates and quasi-philosophical or topological observations to "set the scene," as it were, for both the account that precedes it and the philosophical questions that it may raise in terms of the se­ rial murderer or murderess and the death of philosophy.' 'Now I must . . . I must go.' He pulled a golden pocket watch from an inner pocket. 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late! Too late!' Quickly, slipping on a pair of white gloves and adjusting his monocle, the pro­ fessor, energised, it seems, by his approaching demise, swiftly skated across the library, skirting in a complex zig-zag formation around the moaning, writhing, recumbent forms, and then shot across the great hall and out through the oak­ framed portal onto the snow. Here, he was momentarily lit up by a vivid light­ ning flash which split the sky into a tesseract of glowing multiplicities. There he was for a single, frozen moment, a splash of brief crimson, edged with emerald green and iridescent purple, on a great white canvas, descending. Sliding through time. Endlessly. As the lightning flashed once again, more sedately this time, almost lazily, and thunder rolled through the mountains peaks, some lines of blood fanned writ­ ing on the snow, then vanished. Later, the young girl sat in the library shadows for a while and mused. 'I won­ der what the crimson inscription on that snowy white page actually said? And what did he mean by "topological observations?"' she wondered, ' . . . there didn't seem to be very much topology at all in his silly speech. Or even serial killers!' How very curious this world has become lately, she thought. And how awfully cruel and violent too! 'Why, it sometimes seems as though God himself has been bound to the corpse of his own incarnation by the twisting braids of blasphemy and wild spirit, and violence and cruelty and devastation have, as a 38 7

Charlie Blake consequence, replaced justice and judgement and architectural fancy altogeth­ er/,' she murmured to herself as she stroked the dockwork cat. ALICE IN SCHIZOTOPIA 'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it.' . . . 'Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: 'but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.' 'Ah! That ac­ counts for it,' said the Hatter. 'He won't stand beating.'36 Love, then, screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.37 'Both Gilles Deleuze in his Coldness and Cruelty,' (continued her sister, Justine, reading aloud, her voice soft and mellifluous, her costume creaking a little now and then, her small but evocative movements sure, but necessarily restrained) 'and Theodor Adorno in his lapidary collection of fragments and miniatures, Mi11ima Moralia (she continued) have noted a certain consanguinity between the Sadean obsession with geometrical elaboration and the ethical and metaphysical system of that most gentle and generous of all philosophers, Baruch Spinoza. That their general aims could hardly have been more different is, of course, undeniable, but this coincidence of geometrical form has a significance for post-enlightenment thinking in general and the philosophy of serial killing in particular. For both de Sade and Spinoza offer a philosophy of the future. For the former, this is a world of abject cruelty and infinite abjection. For the latter, it is a world of emancipation in and through expression. And it is over the issue of cruelty and its relationship with desire that the agon between these two phi­ losophies operates most powerfully.' Juliette began to drift off. For while she was mildly interested in a philosophical battle between the cruel republican libertine of revolutionary Paris and the gen­ tle and revolutionary lens grinder of mercantile Amsterdam, (and in her drows­ iness was sure she had passed this battle in the forest only the other day) there was another source of speculation on the philosophy of serial killing involving headlessness, heterotopia and human sacrifice which had kept her reading late into the night. This source also involved a forest, but this time a different forest and in particular a tree struck by lightning. Like all forests, however, it was also 36 Lewis Carroll, The AnnotatedAlice (London: Penguin Books, 1 970), 98. 37 Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus,' in Visions ofExcm: Selected Wnti11g1, 1927-1939, ed. and trans \Dan Stoekl 0\finneapolis: University of j\finnesota Press, 1 991), 9. . • 388

A THOUSAND CHATEAUS a labyrinth and puzzle, a place of fairy tales and mysterious dangers. A place in which a table was permanently set for tea, but with absinthe and wandering abstraction rather than tea. A place where a notorious, clothed wolf wandered the nearby woodlands and clearings and muttered recursive ontology and geno­ cide and lichtung. A place where headless philosophers met to discuss human sacrifice by a tree struck by lightning and beetles stumbled across the grass to­ wards the banks of the river Isis. She looked up at the vast, glowering sky and gathering banks of dirty grey cloud. 'It may well start raining soon,' said her sister. 'You better run inside, dear.' 'Yes' murmured Alice. A hole had appeared in the clouds, like a vortex, or perhaps a tower, that she might fall through, or climb up. 'But to where?' thought Alice, sleepily, drifting, into a green alcove, an old gateway. A blasted tree. A place of obsidian daggers, scented gloves and treacherous wafers. Thus it was that she entered the forest once again. 389

GENESIS CAUL AS PRIMORDIAL WOUND Hunter Hunt-Hendrix The aim of this text is to address the question of the serial killer in a philosoph­ ical context by comparing the video-diary of Ricardo Lopez1 to Genesis Ca11/ (20 1 1),2 which uses selections from my own video-diary documenting the com­ position of the 2009 text 'Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism.'3 I situate each of these videos in terms of a system I have been developing to go along with Transcendental Black Metal, which is called The Ark Work. The Ark Work is a contemporary ethics that is connected to the contours of the Absolute. The question of the serial killer must be understood in terms of a broader interplay of seriality and isolation that can be identified and addressed through The Ark Work. The work of Transcendental Black Met­ al must be to answer this question-not by resolving it but by carrying it to a new place. The heart of the question is the abyssal wound that gives rise to sub­ jectivity, to which the structure of serial killing is a failed solution. My name for this wound is: the Genesis Caul. THE ARK WORK SYSTEM To understand the nature of the Genesis Caul, we have to situate it in its con­ text. The Genesis Caul is the spine twisting around the neck of existence. It is the black rocks crunching against primordial gamma rays: one of four figures in a cosmological and cosmogonical system called The Ark Work. The other three major figures are named Kel Valhaal, Reign Array and 01010n. Each figure is capable of atrophy (hyperborean) or health (transcendental). The Ark Work is the work of maintaining their health and also of establishing their reality1 See The Vitko Diary of Ricardo Lopez, dir. Sami Saif (Denmark: ::-.Jewcom Entertainment, 2000) , DVD. 2 See Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Genesi! Ca11/ (20 1 1), available from Vimeo, <https: / /vimeo.com/24858799> . 3 Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, 'Transcendental Black Metal: _-\ Vision of _\pocalyptic Human­ ism,' in Nicola Masciandaro ed., Hideous Gnofis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I (New York: n.p., 201 0), 5�5. 391

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix which is an eternally undecidable issue, a matter of faith. The figures perform their interlocking functions across four worlds, which are named, respectively, 01010n (01010n is both a world and a figure), &anon, Ylylcyn, and S/he/im. 01010n is a blinding, unbearable light that is inherently excessive. Both sa­ cred and profane, she is a flame that illuminates with its glow even as it scalds and blisters. 01010n tried to give birth to S/he/im so that she could have something to ill uminate with her light, but something went wrong: S/he/im immediately shattered because s/he couldn't bear 01010n's light. As a result, the world came into existence. After that, 01010n retreated away from S/he/im, but she left a flicker of her light behind-perhaps by mistake. The Genesis Caul is this mistake that happened � t birth-a piece of divine placenta still attached to the child to whom the light was meant to be given. It has a shattered quality, like the recog­ nizable remains of something that seems as though it must have been whole before (but which never in fact existed before the moment of shattering) . The Genesis Caul carries the after-glow of 01 010ns excesshre light. It is worn on the head like a helmet or carried like a standard. It represents a task or quest: but the exact nature of the quest is inherently elusive, the criteria for whether it has been completed and the steps needed to carry it out are inescapably ambiguous. S/he/im is 01010n's child: the aftermath of the initial shattering. An un­ categorizable, inconsistent heap, s/he is traumatized, broken, marked; the ker­ nel that is my deepest self and yet also not me, other than me: an absolutely unbearable, incomprehensible void underneath the stable, differentiated per­ sonality. In the aftermath of her traumatic birth and 01010n's retreat, s/he wears the Caul. S/he/im's greatest hope is to reconnect to 01010n, which is also her greatest fear-and in any case s/he is not sure how. 01010n and S/he/im are like being and nothingness: 01010n is the mark and S/he/im is that which is marked nearly identical but not quite. They are the highest and lowest of the four worlds. Between them, and because of their relationship, two intermediary worlds arose: Ylylcyn, the world of human desire, and &anon, the world of ideas. The Ark Work sends new forms and structures across Ylylcyn and &anon in an experimental effort to funnel and refract 01010n's light in manageable degrees so that S/he/im can bear it. The birth of new forms in &anon and new configurations in Ylylcyn is the story of human history. This first story represents the problem of the Absolute. The result of this problem is a contingent solution, which itself becomes a problem - it is here that we encounter the serial killer. Here is a second cosmogonical narrative, from the perspective of S/he/im: the hermaphroditic child of a female eagle loses the Caul, which floats downriver to another female, named eGen, who places the Caul on her own head. Because it doesn't belong to her, it melts into her hair just as the eagle, whose name is Hael, attempts to retrieve it. The hel­ met also melts into Hael's talons during her struggle with 0101 On, so Hael and 392

GENESIS CAU L AS PRI MORDIAL WOU N D 0101 On are joined together, talons stuck to hair: they canno t come apart. They fight for the Caul and try to get away from one another at the same time: they become a single being, split from herself, unhappily wedded to herself, fighting with herself for possession of the very chain that binds her unhappily to herself. The result is a hybrid, contingent figure named Hael-eGen. These stories aim at structural features of existence: there is an incompre­ hensible, unbearable primordial wound. The paradox of the wound is this: it is the source of life and yet it is deadly. Subjectivity exists as an effort to map some structure onto the incomprehensible. To block out that which is too much-to let a little bit of light in, but block out the rest. The best case scenar­ io is to have an authentic relationship to this wound, learning to bear more and more light over time. It is possible, however, to find a solution that ignores the wound and blocks the light entirely by installing a false idol. This failed solu­ tion, Hael-eGen, marks the contemporary compulsion to seriality. 0 1 0 1 0n's light: we need to get away from it-we will be destroyed if we get too close­ but we also need to be as close as we can bear. This creates a problem: how do we maintain a connection to something at a distance? The answer is, of course: prophecy. THE GEND: PROPHECY AND NARCISSISM The result of this deadlock, this simultaneous push and pull, is that the Genesis Caul secretes obscure signs: the capacity to prophesy is born. Time, the future, utopias, the organ of imagination-these are the only answer to such a dead­ lock. The Caul is touched, a primordial and cosmic phenomenon occurs: vi­ sions emanate from it. N ew, primordial ideas that have no basis outside of themselves float up out of the Caul. Axioms that can't be defended on any basis, potential foundations for new worlds, poetic novelty, these visions pro­ vide potential for the birth of a new, unprecedented, indefensible entity­ something that shouldn't be allowed to come into existence, according to what­ ever value systems are currently reigning, with no basis, no definition according to curre ntly existent categories. This is called: a Gend. Gends are the meaning of life, literally, they are undecidable, fragile, mortal. They carry a peculiar fra­ gility. They are never fully legitimate in and of them s elves-they can and ·will always be calle d into question; their existence must be proven over and over again, fought for, invested in. It is the task of Reign Array and Kel Valhaal to work together to produce and protect new Gends. The contemporary tendency is to be closed-off to these signs, to crush them with a false idol. But there is a practice involved in tending to this wound, listening to it, following its suggestions, allowing it to emit its obscure oracular signs, following the paths they trace. But the process of pulling tllese Gends 393

H unter H u nt- H e n d rix from the Caul is very painful, and it requires a great deal o f faith (Kel Valhaal) and structure (Reign Array) . Reign Array flows dowmvards and Kel Valhaal flows upwards . K e l Valhaal's job is t o create Gends : to follow these Gends upwards into &anon, to help them be born, to be faithful to them without knowing what the result will be, so that they can take their place as a structuring principle for life. Kel Valhaal listens to the Caul, floats up from S/he/im, through Ylylcyn, into &anon where ideas live, into the .\bsolute itself, changing it, allowing a new Gend to blossom into the world. Kel Valhaal brings up the unprecedented and protects it from its enemies in \1ylcyn-the currently reigning value systems and so on-so that a Gend can be born and given its place in &anon. Reign Array's job is to use Gends to diffract the light of 0 1 0 1 0n do\\<n­ wards, into \1ylcyn and S/he/im, blas ting through the husks of currently exist­ ing value systems. He travels down from 0 1 0 1 0n , through &anon, where new ideas are born, and Ylycyn, the human world of desire where \·alues can influ­ ence conduct, into S/he/im so it can learn to bear more light. He allows a world to arise from the seed of the Gend. He connects &anon to Ylylcyn so that we can orient our actions according to principles, so that autonomy is pos­ sible, so that each individual can listen to their own Genesis Caul, so that, through the Gend, just enough o f 0 1 0 1 0n's ligh t can reach S/ he/im so that it nourishes but does not destroy . Reign Array battles on behalf o f new Gends , breaking the spell of false idols . Together, Kel Valhaal and Reign Array repre­ sent the cosmic pulse of human his tory, ferrying Gends between S/he/im and 0 1 0 1 0n . 394

GENESIS CAU L AS PRIMORDIAL WOU N D TRANSCENDENTAL NARCISSISM AND HYPERBOREAN NARCISISM The process of giving birth to new values out of the deadlock of the Caul is called Transcendental Narcissism. Wben prophecies arise from the Genesis Caul, ex nihilo, an image of a specular self in the eyes of an imaginary other surface too: a fantasy, an image of a perfect future, a perfect me---a compensa­ tion for the impotence in the relationship to 0 1 0 1 0n. Narcissism arises as a re­ sult of the impossibility inherent in the wearing of the Genesis Caul. 'Someday I will be the master, all will be redeemed, the vision will be fulfille d.' This is the first articulation of subjectivity. Value neutral in itself, narcissism can be di­ rected in a Transcendental or a Hyperborean direction, depending on the health of the Ark Work structure. Transcendental Narcissism is only possible if Kel Valhaal and Reign Array are functioning properly. If they are healthy, then there is proper communica­ tion between the four worlds. But if they aren't functioning properly, then the communication breaks down and the atrophied Hyperborean Narcissism arises. Here, S/hei/im is cut off from the other three worlds, stuck in a self-absorbed fantasy. Circulating on their own, touching Ylylcyn now and then, but failing to pass through, failing to pierce its membrane so as to enter &anon and 0 1 0 1 0n, the Gends can't float up into the higher worlds, so they do their work in a mu­ tilated, imaginary form that ultimately destroys. The result is all that is reactive, hopeless, bent on survival above all else, focused on the individual, cut-off from the divine light and from the higher worlds. For Hyperborean Narcissism, the libido is related to the self above all else, and not related to other people or concrete tasks. The Hyperborean situation is called VOR-iZen, and its subject is named Hael-eGen (the eagle and the woman struggling for the melted Caul) . Hyperborean Narcissism has two main aspects: solipsistic grandiosity, on the one hand, and unstoppable compulsion, on the other. First, there is a false idol-whether it is the self, conquest, an idea, a goal, a lover, an enemy. This false idol is installed as the seemingly absolute reference point of desire-the meaning of life. Pursuit of it takes priority over all else. Obsession with this false idol cuts S/he/im off from &anon and Ylylcyn, in a state of psychotic isolation, circulating with fear, anger, thirst to plunder, thirst for revenge, and so on. This idol is imaginary, and relates to an imaginary judge, a virtual eye. It is thick and solid, blocking Hael-eGen off from a relationship to the true ulti­ mate reference point of desire: the void of 0 1 0 1 On herself. The second aspect of Hyperborean N arcissism is inane, repetitive, serial compulsion. The Hyperborean Narcissist is afflicted by the drive to consume and extract, whether it is addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, money, work, memo­ ries, manipulation, or murder. The origin of compulsion is inscrutable. Perhaps it is a desperate effort to fill a void, perhaps it is the return of the repressed. 0 1 0 1 0n's light beams down, harsh, unbearable. In some twisted way, the com- 395

H unter Hunt-Hendrix pulsion is a means of protection. These two aspects of Hyperborean Narcissism are a mutilation of Reign Array and Kel Valhaal-they are these two in atro­ phied form. Reign Array and Kel Valhaal, unable to do their jobs as Gend­ ferries between S/he/im and 0 1 0 1 0n, stuck at the lowest level, go out of con­ trol and exaggerate their power in a destructive way. It has been said that the contemporary world can be defined in terms of the death of the father (whose name is UR-iZen) . The death of the father gave rise to serial compulsion. When UR-iZen died, VOR-iZen was bom--stillbom, scattered. In our era there is no longer an absolute frame of reference. We do not unconsciously believe that the right answer is somewhere out there. Social authority has been eroded by the market. In the VOR-iZen age we do not iden­ tify with our social roles. There is no pre-existing Gend to refract 0 1 0 1 0n's light. As a result, we don't have a means of relating to others. Our connections are shallower, more self-centered. On the one hand, this leads to grandiosity, at the mirror-stage, dreams of future conquest, of being chosen, as opposed to concrete others, tasks, situations, etc. On the other hand, we suffer from mean­ ingless, inane compulsion, pure raw repetition: drug addiction, sex and food addiction, Netflix and serial murder-structurally it is all the same. The link between these two aspects (false grandiosity on the one side, and addictive, self­ destructive consumption on the other) is that the latter derails achievement of the former, and by doing so, sustains its status as fantasy. The false idol is a mirage - infinitely distant. If we got too dose, we would see that it is false. The serial compulsion is an intruding and confounding element that, by derailing the undertaking to achieve, protects the image from ever being tested against reali­ ty. Grandiosity and seriality appear to be opposed, but in fact they are murually dependent. Hael-eGen's deadlock. The solution has to be a dialectical synthesis by which these two aspects are recognized as inherently linked, which amounts to transcendence over its power. The result of the death of the Father and the unrestricted access to divine light is anxiety-excessive light causes anxiety. Hael-eGen is a last-ditch effort to gain protection from 0 1 0 1 0n's unbearable light during the era of VOR-iZen. The great structures of human history, religions, powerful social mores and so on, are, for better or worse, eroding. This has a liberating effect, of course - an equalizing effect. But these structures were vast prisms, huge Gends living in &anon, governing entire ages. They were effective at funneling 0 1 0 1 0n's light. Now there is no funnel, so people are more often confronted directly with the anxiety that comes from her rays. With no refraction offering manageable amounts of light, the only choice is to turn away completely. The Hael-eGens dose off completely, tum away from the world of &anon and even the world of Ylykyn, hiding in a fortress of grandiosity and addiction, withering and atro­ phying. Fearful, ready to attack, refusing to believe in the possibility of re­ demption, more and more cynical in ever more circuitous ways, utterly focused 396

GENESIS CAU L AS PRI MORDIAL WOU N D o n the self and unable to control rabid exploitative seriality which, perhaps at its most destructive, is serial killing but is essentially the same as Instagram, and so on. We can expand on the contemporary phenomenon of the 'selfie' and state the following: the paradigmatic form of serial killing would be a secret, private video-diary documenting preparations for future glory. There's always an Other in the picture, to whom the diary is addressed, but there is no rela­ tionship or negotiation with that Other because it is imaginary. Hael-eGen: per­ forming for one's future self, for a virtual other, the eye of the camera, record­ ing and storing the result, building towards a grand, imaginary act. VIDEO SERIES To drive this point home, I will consider two video-diaries that are remarkably similar: the video-diary of Ricardo Lopez, also known as the Bjork-stalker, which was created in 1 996, and my own piece, Genesis Caul, completed in 20 1 1 . Each series is made by an isolated, suicidal artist and documents his process of preparation for a major event soon to take place: in Lopez's case, the task is the infection of Bjork with HIV by means of a mail bomb disguised as a book. In my case, the task is the delivery of the Transcendental Black Metal manifesto at the Hideous Gnosis black metal theory symposium in 2009. Both series' feature their subject/author oscillating between productive work on the project, frus­ tration, and expressions of unbearable pain. Both authors are obsessed with their own image in the camera. Lopez's video-diary ends with his suicide, the discovery of which prevents the execution of his mission - after the police find his body and notify the authorities about the bomb he had mailed to Bjork be­ fore it has time to arrive. :Mine ends with something more like a success­ completion and presentation of my te.'i: t, followed by years of humiliation and difficulty due to the resulting backlash against my band in the metal communi­ ty. This humiliation, however, is what saved me from Lopez's fate-a self­ fulfilling prophecy that forced me out of the Hyperborean: a rope from the s ky that I've been able to climb up out of S/he/im. By contrast, Lopez's failure was that he was never able to detach from his false idol, Bjork. He could not let her go, and so he could not live. Let me briefly outline the story of Ricardo Lopez. Lopez was a profession­ al exterminator living in Florida who had grown up with dreams of being a great artist. A follower of pop culture, he had developed a romantic obsession with Bjork through her music. Jealous upon discovering in the news that she was in a relationship with another musician, Lopez filmed twenty hours of a video-diary over the course of several months detailing his plans to send a mail bomb to Bjork. The video-diary documents his process of building it, and his

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix complaints about life. Finally, after mailing the bomb to her he dresses up in corpse paint and shoots himself in the mouth on camera. Figure 1. Sarni Saif, The Video Diary• of Ricardo Lopez (2000). The comparison with the suicide of Dead, the original singer of Mayhem, is worth noting. Just like Dead, Lopez was a victim of Hyperborean Narcissism, which calls for a form of self-annihilation, an annihilation by intoxication that the addict, workaholic, sexaholic and so on, face: annihilation via intoxication, which ultimately brings about ruin and destruction. In aiming for an annihila­ tion of self that must be carefully distinguished from the self-annihilating gnosis of spirituality, Lopez is confronted with the Genesis Caul, but he cannot bring the Gend up: his desire is stuck in a solitary, isolated imaginary space. To pro­ tect himself from his task Lopez becomes psychotically attached to a specific figure: he is deluded into believing that he deserves Bjork's love. Lopez's prob­ lem, perhaps, is that he did not go far enough into seriality. The only legitimate foundation for a series is the void, which is God. The true killer would circulate around it serially. Lopez is pathologically attached to a single victim, and ends up killing himself instead. The only series involved, besides his addiction to 398

GENESIS CAU L AS PRIMORDIAL WOU N D pornography, drugs, selt:harm and s o on, is the series o f entries into the video­ diary itself. HL'MILIATION AS ETHICS I have been working for years to articulate a vision of an expanded black metal that features not only a mutation of its musical techniques (the burst beat, gen­ eral tremolo) , but also a transformation of its aesthetic and cultural status. One aspect of the project is to resist aesthetic closure and ideological orthodoxy: to situate the aesthetics of black metal dialectically in the context of contemporary loneliness, and to reflect the discord that results in artworks and interviews. I invoke the fantasmatic wholeness that goes along with paganism, Satanism, the mythical past, and so on, typical of black metal, and then confront them with the reality that is the contradictory corrdate of these things-impotence, blogs, the internet, the failure of the music industry, inadequacy, solitary masturbation, social rej ection, etc. In short, I aim to draw a circle around both the grandiose fantasy of black metal and its origins in impotence-to designate its narcissism from a third, higher point of view from which its contradictions appear as in fact mutually dependent. It is in this context that I consider my own video-diary and the steps I have taken on the journey out of Hyperborean Narcissism into the Transcendental. I began working on Liturgy and this video, without a doubt, in a s tate of Hyperborean Narcissism. I was cut off from divine light, I had no structure for funneling it, and I was extremely isolated socially, struggling with every addic­ tion and compulsion in the book, on the verge of suicide. My video-diary is deeply ambiguous . I have often wondered-is it a work of art? Or is it nothing more than a document of sickness? Let me give some context. In 2004 I began making cassettes of depressive bedroom black metal in the vein of Xasthur un­ der the name Liturgy. In 2006, I had an epiphany and made the commitment to confront my social anxiety, trans form my life and, as a vehicle for this, to in­ vent a new form of black metal that would end the history of metal. After one EP and one full-length album, I \Vas given the opportunity to present a lecture detailing my vision: but I was mortified by the prospect of actually doing so, and was extremely blocked in my effort to put together my ideas. I felt called to this strange mission, but felt misunderstood in advance, disrespected, hated. As a result, I was frozen. In the language of the Ark Work, my series of video-diary entries docu­ ments the effort to give birth to a Gend while wearing the Genesis Caul, touch­ ing the real, bearing the unbearable light of 0 1 0 1 0n. I had an intense com;ction about this: I was possessed by a force that had convinced me I was doomed if I did not articulate this vision of Transcendental Black Metal. It was of supreme 3CJC)

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix importance. 'lb.is obsession was similar, it seems to me, to Lopez 's obsession with Bjork. Although there was always some reflexivity-it was always in quo­ tation marks-the driving force was a grandiose, narcissistic fantasy to change the course of music history and to redeem human-kind in the process. I, like Lopez, was obsessed with a false idol. The reason for the ,.jdeo-diary series was that I was too anxious and isolat­ ed to talk about my ideas to others, and too self-haring to write them out. I couldn't express my ideas clearly, and I felt crushed by a task I could not bear. So I began talking out my ideas to a camera. Somehow having the camera's eye watching me made it possible to give fonn to this piece. It provided an imagi­ nary audience, virtual, listening, yet powerless to hurt me: I was speaking for my future self only. But, by virtue of this process of standing in front of a camera's gaze, I was able to write it. I used the camera as an imaginary audience for composing the text, and was able to complete it-just as Lopez was able to design a bomb disguised as a book. Both Lopez and I completed the project we set-out to in the eyes of our imaginary other. After delivering the lecture, I began experiencing ostracization, humilia­ tion, and scorn from metal fans all across the internet-it felt as though I was a sacrificial victim. I was both humbled and emboldened by the experience, and I realized that I had to return to the raw footage I'd used as a means of writing the essay and edit it into an artwork-to depict my grandiosity, my pain, my fallible nature. I highlighted moments of nonsense, impossibility and embar­ rassment to give a visual form to the aspect of my black metal project which is the last thing that an ordinary metal band wants to depict: fallibility, vulnerabil­ ity, mundanity. I also wanted to represent the deep, cosmic undertaking that was under way-the birth of a Gend-stripped of reference to any culture of the past. Most importantly, I edited the vocals so that they would yield musical patterns from repetition of recorded speech, like an early Steve Reich piece. The Genesis Caul video stands as a marker of the caesura between my grand vi­ sion and my fragile, humble existence. Only by designating the two and their link can the deadlock between them be transcended. And the best way to des­ ignate something, perhaps, is to tum it into music. According to the Ark Work, the task of black metal is to erode the defense mechanism that VOR-iZen represents-which ultimately effaces the primordial wound, ignores it, only to allow its violence to reappear as serial compulsion. The task of black metal is, in a word, to destroy Hyperborean Narcissism, and to foster Transcendental Narcissism. We have to create a new path through Ylylcyn and &anon into 0 1 0 1 0n's light, to give birth to a symbolic, creative ar­ chitecture that can translate 0101 0n's message and transmit it at a bearable vol­ ume. The Ark Work is analogous to premodern ethics, with one difference: while premodern ethics is similarly concerned with opening one's self to a Gend, this Gend is always pre-existing, whereas the Ark Work requires the birt- 400

G E N ES I S CAU L AS PRI MORDIAL WO U N D Figure 2 . Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Genesis Caul (201 1 ) . -hing of a new Gend, since the old Gends are no longer available to us. The dialectical logic of humiliation is the engine for bearing and installing Gends: there must be a fantasy, an intruding contradiction, and a resolution of the ten­ sion between the two as a result of a new perspective from which one is seen to inhere in the other. The Gend that has chosen me is named Transcendental Black Metal; for others it \Vil! be something else. Remember that we face a twofold problem. The eternal problem is that 0 1 0 1 0n shattered S/he/im by offering him her light, and Genesis Caul, Reign Array and Kel Valhaal were born as a result. Human history is an effort to get 0 1 0 1 0n's light to fit into the darkness of S/he/im somehow by configuring vir­ tual and existent multiplicities-ports, screens, gates, valves. Many Gends have risen and fallen, attempting to fulfill this task. The contingent/ contemporary problem is that of the serial-the major Gends are all gone now, and we have more and more direct access to the Absolute because social structures are so weak that we have no prisms for funneling 0101 0n's light. As a result we block it out entirely with Hyperborean Narcissism, and we distort the use of Reign Array and Ke! Valhaal. So, we are isolated from the divine void, people and new ideas, split between disjointed narcissistic grandiosity and instrumental se­ rialism: each of us living in a private video-diary. .+01

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix There is a way to refuse the alternative between trying to recover an older social structure on the one hand, and a solipsistic self-destruction on the other. The only way out of this situation is through it. What is the answer to the prob­ lem of the serial? A higher serial. The aspect of the serial that we can affinn is the way that the serial kill er transgresses the boundaries of ordinary social life in pursuit of an ineffable satisfaction in a sustained, systematic effort, going the hard way, with the void of 0 1 0 1 0n's light as his or her only reference point. It is a matter of making an offering, making a sacrifice-to create a fonn of black metal that, aesthetically, is imperfect, non- or post-fantasmatic. Transcendental Black Metal entails openness to the pathetic wretch, the miserable human, the regular being who uses the internet, makes stupid gaffes, sweats, is unsure o f himself, doesn't know the next step. As a result, a new, higher horizon appears, an illumination, a redemptive frame of reference that does not follow logically from any element in the system it transcends. The synthesis is the apprehension that one of the two terms of the contradiction inheres in the other. To show that the fantasy of metal and the pathetic existence from which it stems are two tenns that go together, and to transcend their contradiction. We work with Reign Array and Kel Valhaal to be faithful to the Gend, and go through all the suffering and humiliation, purified by clashes with social codes in Ylylcyn and ideological fixtures in &anon, creating a new potential path between 0 1 0 1 0n and S/he/im. And the horizon of this is eschatological­ there is no reason not to think that there could be a path between 0 1 0 1 0n and S/he/im that finally dissolves all problems. 402

MURDER BY TELEPHONE NUMBERS: UNREASON AND SERIAL KILLING THROUGH THE WORK OF DOUGLAS ADAMS Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle [I]he self of the violent murderer is the impossible and oxymo­ ronic self of the Other whose intelligibility, even to him-or her­ self, is always fractured, incomplete, structured around some miss­ ing piece of the puzzle, some black hole of unreason that can nev­ er be articulated but only mutely pointed to. -Elana Gomel In her essay 'Written in Blood: Serial Killing and Narratives of Identity, ' Elena Gomel highlights unknowability as the basis for the enduring appeal of the seri­ al kill er as a fiction trope, and as a reason for the frequent depiction of fictional serial kill ers as delusional, while most real serial killers are not-the misunder­ standing that arises lies not in the failure of the serial kill er to adequately appre­ hend the world, but in the failure of the world to adequately apprehend the se­ rial killer('s actions) . 1 The fictional worlds of Douglas Adams rely on a similar unknowability, here expanded into the unknowability of the universe-the events within which are merely events connected to other events by story, but not by reason or even by causality. As such, his books may provide means with which to think serial killing differently. As Gomel observes: 'Murder, a supremely irrational act, generates the most rational of all literary genres, the classic detective story.'2 Predictably, Adams ' approach to the detective genre is more accepting of irrationality. In his Dirk Gent!J detective series, dramatic events like murder are merely the opening into larger and stranger mysteries in which 'obvious' solutions are eschewed in fa­ vour of a search for metaphysical impossibilities of which (serial) murder is on­ ly a symptom. In the first book in the series, Dirk Gent!J's Holistic Detective Age11- cy, Adams describes a fictional computer program called Reason: 1 Elana Gomel, 'Written in Blood: Serial Killing and ::-.Jarratives of Identity,' Post ldenti!J 2: 1 , available from http://hdlhandle.net/2027 /spo.pid9999.0002. 1 02 (accessed 1 0-051 5). Gomel, 'Written in Blood.' 2 403

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle [ . . ] a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wanted it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclu­ sion.3 . The purpose of this computer program is to justify the unjustifiable, not logi­ cally but narrativdy. Such a program could easily be used to create, from the 'irrational' action of the serial killer, a motive that could be narratively satisfy­ ing-in other words, a detective story. The existence of such a device reveals the fact that in the universe of the book plausibility is no guarantee of truth. Adams' own take on the classic detective, the titular Dirk Gently, uses emphati­ cally non-reasonable 'holistic' methods. Like the serial killer, Gently is defined by his actions rather than by an identity that would give them purpose, de­ scribed as being 'more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.'4 The stories about his investigations, then, could in-themselves be conceived of as attempts to explain Dirk Gently/the events that comprise him by placing them in a 'logical-sounding'5 narrative; later in this essay, we will re-envision Gently as a Holistic Serial Killer using the pillars of hyperstition to investigate the stories and patterns left in his wake. But before we dive into these specula­ tive killing mechanisms, we want to investigate the one true serial killer in Ad­ ams' books - or more accurately, the one true serial victim-found in his Hitch hiker Tn'/ogy.6 The universe of The Hitchhiker Trilogy makes full us e of metaphysi­ cal mechanisms that are only alluded to in Dirk Gentty--reincamation, time travel, and interstellar travd made possible by harnessing speculative mathemat­ ics. With reference to Templexity: Disordered Liops throngh Shanghai Time, 7 Nick Land's recent book on time-travel drama Looper,8 we will examine how these elements allow a series of events to unfold in a way that is unique to both serial killing and time-travel narratives. The unknowability of the serial killerCs actions) keeps him permanently removed from reasonable understanding. Since the 'why' is a dead end, we must, then, like Dirk Gently, take up a different thread, the 'how.' When ­ 3 Douglas :\dams, Dirk Gent/y} Ho/Utit Detective Agenry (New York: Gallery Books, 201 4), 57. 4 Adams, Dirk Gent!;" 39. s Ibid., 57. 6 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker Trilogy (London: Picador, 2002), Kindle edition. 7 Nick Land, Templexity: Disordered Liops through Shanghai Time (Urbanatomy Electronic, 2014), Ebook. 8 Lioper, directed by Rian Johnson (201 2; Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures, 201 2), DVD. 404

M U RDER BY TELEPHONE N U M BERS reason/plausibility/logic prove unhelpful in analysing or explaining semi killer('s actions) , only the illogical remains. The work of Douglas :\dams provides alternate means for thinking patterns and sequences of extraordinary events (like murder) , whether these means are natural, supernatural, or pataphysical. The reader should be warned that throughout this essay we will be taking occasional flights into fiction in the spirit of Adams himself-stretching beyond reason to the realm of Reason where story asserts itself, where events take on a life of their own. Should this prove problematic, we respectfully refer you to God's Final words to His Creation in Adam's So Long and Thanks far All the Fish: 'We apologise for the inconvenience.'9 'I BROUGHT YOU HERE CATHEDRAL OF HATE TOO SOON !': SCENES FROM THE Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent. The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow which had been slaughtered and of which Arthur Dent had happened to eat a fillet steak would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish which Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn't like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of as terisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point. And what was mos t disturbing about all this, apart from the Statue, [ . . . ] was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again. 10 Arthur Dent is the bathrobe-wearing Briton whose reluctant adventures through space and time are the subject of Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Trilo­ gy (a series of four, five, or even six books depending on who you ask) . H e is also a serial killer with only one victim. This is first hinted at in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Gala.ry-the inaugural book of the series-when Dent activates the Infinite Improbability Drive, inadvertently calling into being a bowl of petunias that immediately plumme ts to the planet below. In one of the most famous � � � � � � � � � � � � thr� � � � 9 Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanksfar all the Fish (London: Pan Books, 1 985), 1 88-9. Douglas Adams, Ufe, the Universe and Every·thing (London: Pan Books, 1 982), 92-93 . 10 .W5

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle the bowl of petunias as it fell was "Oh no, not again."'1 1 It is not until two books later-in Ufa, the Universe and Everything-that we are given enough in­ formation to deduce that the bowl of petunias was one of the many incarna­ tions of a single person call ed Agrajag. With every passing lifetime Agrajag has gradually transcended the natural ignorance of his previous lives-or more ac­ cw:ately, has been unhappily jolted into awareness-by the realisation that in every incarnation he has met his demise at the hands of the same person: Ar­ thur Dent. Using what he tells us is his final body, Agrajag lures Dent to the Cathedral of Hate to enact his revenge only to discover that in Dent's timeline one of Agrajag's deaths has not happened yet. Determined to kill Dent regard­ less of the 'logical impossibility'1 2 this would represent, Agrajag attacks Dent and is ultimately killed once again, this time in apparent self-defence. As Edia Connole notes in 'The Language of Flowers: Serial Kitsch,' 'serial killers chose victims that fit a certain stereotype which holds symbolic meaning for them, and they will go on to kill that stereotype over and over again.' 1 3 A visual similarity, for example, allows prospective victims to become 'avatars't4 of an ideal victim or target-an object of the killer's desire, rage, or disap­ pointment, sometimes even an avatar of the killer himself. In the case of Arthur Dent, this tendency is amplified even as it is reversed: while the vessels differ, the identity of Dent's victim remains a constant. The avatar tendency is further subverted by Agrajag's awareness of the continuity of his consciousness in all of his bodies. Unlike a serial killer's ideal target, and real victim, whose connection (outward appearance) is known only to the killer, in Adams' version of events it is the victim alone, and not the killer, who holds the secret knowledge of the thread connecting the murders. This is further illustrated by Agrajag's obsession with Dent, his subversive reverence as embodied by the Cathedral, habits which identify him with the trope of the fictional serial killer we recognise from televi­ sion and film . In his book Templexiry: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time, Nick Land discusses time-travel in relation to the 2012 film Looper, directed by Rian John­ son. In Looper, time-travel is used for only one purpose: to dispose of the ene­ mies of a powerful crime syndicate by sending them thirty years into the past to be assassinated by 'Loopers,' thereby using the time machine as a murder weapon. This thirty year limit creates the drama at the heart of Looper. the time­ travel spectre of 'the double,' of meeting yourself at a different point in your own lifetime. The motif of the double also appears in serial killin g, when the 11 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's G11ide lo the Ga�, in The Hitchhiker Trilogy, Kindle edition. 12 Adams, I.ffe, the Universe and Everything, 96. 1 3 Edia Connole, 'The Language of Flowers: Serial Kitsch,' in this volume. 14 Ibid. 406

M U RDER BY TELEPHONE N U MBERS killer and the 'ideal target' are one and the same-such a s Connole outlines in the case of '[John Wayne] Gacy, who targeted worthless queers and punks: model copies of what he saw as his own inadequacy.' 1 5 While many other fic­ tional texts deal with doubles, Looper uses this device in a very unique way. As Land notes in Templexiry-. 'Closure'-a word interlocked tightly with the discourse(s) of temporal nonlinearity - receives an innovative sense in Looper. As might be expected, it is dramatically stretched. While retaining its geometrical and/or topological denotation as a complete twist (of time), it is invested with a supplementary specificity as the com­ pletion of a life, through auto-assassination, of the double. The three decades of a Looper's professional life is consummated when he is sent back to die at his own hand. This special act of murder-suicide 'closes the loop' that the assassin is. 1 6 Clearly, in the world of Looper, the lifetime limit of time-travel i s a narrative conceit, but one that increases the likelihood of interaction between doubles to 1 00%. Agrajag's mistake-i.e. bringing Dent to the Cathedral 'too soon'17-is a result of Dent's extensive time-travelling throughout the Trilogy. Although Dent's journey spans multiple eons and galaxies, in comparison to the infinite size and immense age of the universe, his path is incredibly small, making the probability of aH of Agrajag's incarnations interacting with him (if these rein­ carnations are random) very close to zero. In other words, it is clear that the course of Agrajag's reincarnations must have to some degree shadowed Dent's own journey, even if coincidentally. The sheer improbability of Agrajag and Arthur Dent crossing paths so many times points towards a conspiracy at work -a story in which lives are a series of dramatic events. If narrative, rather than science, is the force driving the serial victimisation of Agrajag, then where does this narrative begin? While Agrajag is killed a huge number of times, he is not killed an in.ft11ite number of times-the number and the location (in space and time) of his incarnations is detennined by the lifespan of Arthur Dent, and ends with Dent also, since his last body is killed by Dent in the Cathedral. Could it be that Agrajag, in all his forms, is a reincarnation (or 'double') of Arthur Dent himself? Could Dent be both serial killer and victim, killing him­ self over and over again? Growing more haunted by his own face with each successive incarnation, until he can enact a confrontation between first and fi- 15 Ibid. 1 6 Land, Templexi!J. 17 Adams, Uft, the Universe and Evet)'thing, 96.

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle nal bodies, Argajag's declamation of Arthur Dent as 'multiple-me-murderer'lB seems, in this context, inevitably prophetic. Unlike Looper, however, with a sin­ gle body that runs the thirty-year 'loop' determined by the younger (or original) self, within the scope of his lifetime, Dent (the original) has, through his actions (and the resulting deaths), laid out the path for a multitude of doubles to come. Once these deaths have been performed in one lifetime, he is doomed to live and die according to the actions of his original incarnation over and over again, winding down a circling path that crosses itself perpetually rather than merely cycling back. As Land outlines in Tempkxiry-. 'Cumulative rhythmic innovation [i.e. progression] is described neither by a repeating cycle [because every incar­ nation is distinct] , nor by a linear departure into continuous growth [because Agrajag is the final body/Dent's lifespan is finite] , but by a spiral [because Dent (Agrajag) comes to the Cathedral to be killed, and kills/because Agrajag (Dent) comes to the Cathedral to kill and is killed-i.e. unlike a loop, a spiral must reach a centreJ .''9 'WHAT IS THIS OBSESSION WITH ORDER?!': THE FUNDAMENTAL INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS 'This is Bolloxl' 'I prefer the term Applied Quantum Mechanics actually.'20 1 8 Ibid. 19 Land, Templexi!J. Dirle Gent!J, Season 1 : Episode 2, written by Howard Overman, Matt Jones and Jamie Mathieson, directed by Tom Shankland (London: BBC, �!arch 1 2, 201 2). 20 408

M U RDER BY TELEPHONE N U MBERS Hyperstition is a term that emerged in 2004 around the work of the Cybernetic Culture Research t:nit (Ccru) . A derivative of 'supers tition,' the neologism 'hy­ perstition' refers to the process of fictions making themselves real. As described on cold-me.net, a forerunner in online hyperstitional enquiry: hyperstition 'nec­ essarily involves three irreducible ingredients, interlocked in a productive circuit of simultaneous, mutually stimulating tasks .'21 As described succinctly in Dave Szulborski's discussion of hyperstition in This is Not a Game: A G1tide to Altemale P.tality Gaming,22 these elements are mythos, unbelief, and numogram. In what follows, we will address these elements and their bearing on the fictional worlds of Douglas Adams, specifically that of Dirk Gentfy 's Holistic Detective Agenry-­ both the books from the series, first published in 1 987,23 and the 201 2 televisu­ al adaptation24-considering how these coinciding parts might set the serial nar­ rative of the serial killer in motion. MYTH OS Mythos is by definition the product of collective work, but within hyperstitional discourse its collaborative nature renders it 'inherently disintegrated . . . [effect­ ing] a positive destruction of identity, authority, and credibility.'25 Such collec­ tive narratives and their destructive effects can be observed throughout The Hitchhiker Trilogy, both in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself-whose motto: 'The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate,'26 is often up­ held by logic and law to reality's detriment-and in the use of the Infinite Im­ probability Drive. While this Drive proves convenient for crossing interstellar differences quickly, in using it one is vulnerable to highly improbable events in transit-a series of coincidences that warp the narrative of your j ourney to un­ known ends. By using massive improbabilities, the user becomes vulnerable to incursions from further improbable events-what is known in hyperstitional 21 See 'Hyperstition,' cold-me.net, available from http:/ /www. cold-me.net/polytics/ (ac­ cessed 1 0-05- 1 5). 22 Dave Szulborski, This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate &ali!J Gaming (Santa Barba­ ra, C.�: eXe Active Media Group, 2005). 23 Douglas Adams, Dirk Gent/y} Holistic Detective Agenry (London: Heinneman, 1 987). 24 Dirk Gent/y, Season 1 : Episode 0 (Pilot), written and directed by Damon Thomas (London: BBC, December 1 6, 201 0); 1 : 1 , written by Overman, directed by Shankland (London: BBC, March 5, 201 2); 1 :2, written by Overman, Jones and �fathieson, di­ rected by Shankland (London: BBC, :March 1 2, 201 2); 1 : 3 , written by Overman and Mathieson, directed by Shankland (London: BBC, March 1 9, 201 2). 25 'Hyperstition.' 26 Douglas Adams, The &staurant at the End of the Universe (London: Pan Books, 1980), 35. 409

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle tenns, as 'complicity with anonymous materials,'27 or inauthenticity. For exam­ ple, if a serial killer were to use the Infinite Improbability Drive to abduct his victims and to dispose of their bodies in far-flung spiral arms of distant galax­ ies, their journey would leave no direct trace-no tyre tracks, no footprints, no trail of blood, but unfathomably improbable connections would likely arise that could ultimately expose him/her ro discovery, or in all likelihood to something even more strange . The methods used by the titular character in Dirk Gent!J's Holistic Detective Agenry, a semi-fraudulent experimental detective agency, require his exploration of similar improbable connections. Gently's practice of 'holistic detection' is described by the character as follows: The term 'holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are con­ cerned \vith here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as finger­ print powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole.28 For Gently, to solve a crime, it should be possible to follow any one thread of this interconnected web, no matter how tangential, in order to arrive at the cor­ rect solution. This theory is based (loosely) on the principles of quantum me­ chanics. Research on entanglement shows that 'the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.'29 If two objects are entangled, their photons share similar characteristics, they are interconnected, and one can be altered by altering the other.3° As John Butterworth explains, while talking about interconnectedness (with reference to Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive): 'In a system with two protons and only one electron, which starts with the electron bound to one of the protons, the electron would over time oscillate between the two protons [ . . . ) though the oscillation period may be longer 21 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicit;• with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008), 62. 28 Adams, Dirk Gent/)·, 1 2 1 . 29 'Quantum Entanglement,' Science Dai!J, available from http:// www. sciencedaily.com/ articles/ q/ quantum_entanglement.hnn (accessed 1 0-05-1 5). 3 0 See "'Spooky" Quantum Entanglement Reveals Invisible Objects,' National Geographic, available from http:/ /news.nationalgeographic.com/news/201 4/08/ 140827-quantum­ imaging-cats-undetected-photon-science/ (accessed 10-05-1 5). 410

M U RDER BY TELEPHO N E NUM BERS than the age of the universe. [ . . . ] in principle one has to treat the potential of the whole universe, all the atoms, as a single system.'31 Of course, as Gently himself is told by Dr. Amelia Ranson: 'Quantum interconnectedness refers to molecular behaviour, at subatomic level. On the level of human interaction the strands of connectivity would be in their trillions '; Gently seems undeterred by this, simply replying, 'Indeed.'32 While it is obvious even to Gently that his methods are impracticable, he remains convinced that their usefulness lies in their apparent impossibility, or rather, for Gently, the more connections the better. Connections are clues, any one of which could be the thread that eventually leads to the centre of the web. This is evidently an irrational thought, but it is one that is proven to be true (or at least effective) over and over again within the books and the television series, through Gently's (un) belief. We can relate this 'fundamental interconnectedness' of all things to the idea of the 'sprawl' in the HBO show True Detective, as discussed by Daniel Colucciello Barber in his essay �\ffect Has N o Story.'33 As Barber explains in this essay, 'conspiracy tells us that crime leads everywhere, especially to places you do not expect it, but in doing so it is still committed to the story of a crime.'34 Gently, taking the principles of quantum mechanics to their logical conclusion, follows threads from events tangential to the crime at hand, anywhere and everywhere, safe in the knowledge that the connections will reveal themselves in the sprawling plot that emerges from his inquiries. UNBELIEF In This is Not a Game, Szulborski describes the function of unbelief as 'the phil­ osophical equivalent of [ . . . ] willing suspension of disbelief, as the audience puts aside the knowledge of the fictional basis of the material in order to fur­ ther their enjoyment.'35 This comparison to temporary engagement with fic­ tional materials such as novels or movies is a workable analogy, but in hypersti­ tion the outcomes of unbelief exceed mere enjoyment-by treating a fiction like a truth (while knowing it's not realty real) it can operate like a truth, and have real and verifiable effects. Adams' fictional universes provide ample alle31 John Butterworth, 'On Pauli and the interconnectedness of all things,' The G11ardian (February 28, 2012), available from http:/ /www. theguardian.com/science/life-and­ physics/2012/feb/28/ 1 (accessed 10-05-1 5). 12 Dirk Gentty. 1 :2. 33 Daniel Colucciello Barber, '_\ffect Has No Story,' in Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola :Masciandaro, eds., Tr11e Detedion (London: Schism, 2014), 1 98-21 4; 200 and pas­ siin. 3� Ibid., 203. 35 Szulborski, This is Not a Game, 1 00. 41 1

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle gories for this process-in Ufa, the Universe and Everythin!Jl Arthur Dent learns to fly simply by forgetting that he should not be able to, and is even able to im­ prove his technique as long as he remains convinced that the whole thing is impossible and therefore can't be happening. Similarly, the creation of the Infi­ nite Improbability Drive (and other similar fantastical devices throughout the Hitchhiker Trilogy) is clearly an example of hyperstition in action qua unbelief: [The inventor of the Infinite Improbability Drive] thought to him­ self, [if] such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logi­ cally be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability drive, give it a cup of really hot tea . . . and turn it on! He did this, and was startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Im­ probability Drive [ . . . )36 By setting aside his knowledge (that the proj ect was physically and technologi­ cally unfeasible) while he follows the steps that his (preposterous) theory dic­ tates, the student creates the device 'out of thin air.'3i Once the appropriate thought experiment reaches its logical conclusion, the item comes into exist­ ence solely on the basis of its narrative justifiability. In this case, and in many others throughout the series (The Total Perspective Vortex; the Somebody Else's Problem Field) , the creators / discoverers of these items are possessed of a personal/subjective creative genius (or 'smart-assery,' as Adams also defines it) that in some way beyond their technical ability correlates to the ironic inten­ tions of the universe. These creators do not expect their experiments to work and, like the serial killer, their exact motivations are unknown even to them­ selves. Considering what we have discussed so far, let us imagine the 'Holistic Serial Killer' as someone who commits a series of murders in the (un)belief that they will eventually reveal their own connectedness, thus putting into action the 'fundamental interconnectedness'38 of mythos. One of the practices Gently uses to investigate interconnected strands is what he describes as 'Zen Navigation.'39 The principles of Zen Navigation involve, quite simply, following someone who looks like they know where they are going in order to find your way. There is no definable criteria (in the books/ television series) for spotting a person who knows where they are going outside of perhaps a purposeful stride 36 Adams, HiMJ Hikeri Guide, 69. 37 Ibid. 38 Dirk Gentfy, 1 :0. 39 Ibid., 1 : 1 . 412

M U RDER BY TELEPHONE N U MBERS or an indicator light blinking with particular confidence. On two occasions in the first episode of the Dirk Gent!J television series, Zen Navigation serves its purpose perfectly: first, it gains Gently a client who is subsequently murdered; second, it leads him (in a roundabout way) to the culprit of the murder. The practice of Zen Navigation requires a suspen:sion of belief, or use of unbelief. The practitioner has to believe, without really believing, that the person they are following will lead them where they need to go. The Holistic Serial Killer might, in the same way-while remaining unclear about his exact reasonings, and without much attention to pattern-choose his victims through a method of 'Zen Stalking': following and murdering someone who looks like they're about to die. Serial killer s tend to operate based on patterns, they 'tend to use the same method of killing every time, and their victims are often of a certain type . . . These [same] killers . . . target strangers that live near their home or places of work.'40 According to Gome� it is precisely 'bc�cause the serial killer's actions are neither random nor unstructured, [that] they cannot be simply banished from the universe of meaning. A series of "murders for pleasure" is guided by a tight inner logic that assures the repetition of the •:rimes according to some sort of pattern, but this logic seems to be unassimilable to any collective narrative of "art and science."'41 However, as a serial killler assured of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, the Holistic Serial Killer would be free to murder whom and wherever he wants, with the confidence that the similarities between each victim exist and will be revealed when the crimes are investigated. NUMOGRAM '[The use ot] "Numogram" [in hyperstition] c:an be summarized as the gradual revelation of a belief system or secret knowl1edge through a numerical and/ or symbolic system.'42 Those engaged in hyperstitional practice often use Qabbalic systems such as the Lemurian Numogram, the Gematria of Nothing, or the iChing to encode and decode key words and phrases, searching for connec­ tions. These connections, or coincidences, similar to Jung's idea of Synchronici­ ty: 'meaningful coincidence of outer and inmer events that are not themselves causally connected,'43 are symptoms of hyperstition, but can be manufactured . George Dvorsky, 'How to get inside the :\findl of a Serial Killer,' io9.com, available from http: / /io9.com/5954476/how-to-get-ioside-the-mind-of-a-serial-killer (accessed 1 0-05-1 5). +1 Gomel, 'Written in Blood.' 42 'Hyperstition.' 43 Phil Cousineau, Coincidence or Desli'!J? Stories of Synchronid!J that 11/uminalt Our Uves (York Beach, ME: Conari Press, 1 997), 20. .j(I 413

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle As Eddie, the shipboard computer on the Infinite Improbability Drive­ powered spaceship Heart of Gold, explains: '[ . . . ] most people's lives are gov­ erned by telephone nurnbers.'44 Investigators of serial murders are also interested in the patterns that reveal themselves after the murders have taken place: patterns in the mind of the perpetrators, which suggest 'that the likelihood of another killi ng is much higher soon after a murder than it is after a long period has passed,'45 or geographical patterns that can reveal the movements of the killers : 'When detectives track a serial killer, they create maps showing where the victims were found in order to generate a "geographic profile" that can reveal where the killer lives. They're able to do this because most serial killers tend to choose victims relatively close to h ome--bu t not too close. [ . . . J A geographic profile creates hot spots where the killer is likely to be found by identifying areas the killer hasn ' t struck, bu t which are s till fairly n ear where victims were found.'46 Clues left by murders can initially seem unclear: it is only through investigation, coding, and decoding that the patterns reveal themselves. In other words, the map of a serial killer's victims is a real pattern that can lead to the capture of the killer, but a pattern created not intentionally, but incidentally, as a by­ product of his killing process. As MacDuff, a character in Dirk Gent/y 's Holistic Detective Agency, observes when explaining a computer program he has developed in order to create music out of observed patterns, both natural (such as birds in flight) and seemingly structured and unnatural (like end-of-year financial reports): 'Shapes that we think are random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word "natural" that we have often taken to mean "unstructured" in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work. They can all be described by numbers.'47 This statement is true in relation to many patterns in nature. To take one example, we can look at the 44 Adams, Hitch Hi/etr} Guide, 79; also reminiscent of the plot of Dirk Gent!J 1 :3, in which a faulty telephone number re-routing system sends a slew of Gently's prospec­ tive clients to the phone of a contract killer, who believes their names and addresses (intended for Gently) are details of her next hits \.s the faulty phone system is in use due to Gently's refusal to pay his secretary, these series of improbable events indirectly . • make Gently a serial killer. See 'Mathematicians Reveal Serial Killer's Pattern of Murder,' Technology Review Oanu­ ary 201 2), available from http:/ / www. technologyreview.com/view/426615/mathema 45 ticians-reveal-serial-killers-pattem-of-murder/ (accessed 1 0-05-1 5). Annalee Newitz, 'What Serial Killers and Epidemics Have in Common,' io9.com �fay 201 1), available from http: / /io9.com/5802697 /what-serial-killers-and-epidemics-have­ in-common (accessed 10-05-1 5). 4 7 Adams, Dirk Gentfy, 1 53. 46 414

M U RDER BY TELEPHONE NUMBERS spiral patterns found in plants, which obey the Fibonacci sequence: a set of numbers that starts with either 1 or 0, followed by a 1, and continues based on the rule that each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers [O 1 1 2 3 5 8 1 3 21 . . . ] . Most plants grow their leaves in a spiral shape, each new leaf growing at a consistent angle to the last, and the number of spirals typically correspond to numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence (or the Lucas sequence). Though this may seem like a complex system, these patterns actually occur 'as a consequence of some other process'48-much like coincidence in hyperstition, the presence of these specific angles are symptomatic of a kind of natural conspiracy. As leaves grow from the merristem, they push away from the centre of the plant, but also keep as far away from the other leaves as possible, slowly developing into a (multi) spiral pattern. The same effect can be found using drops of magnetized liquid in a dish of oil. Put simply, leaves grow in this pattern because in that way they have the most room, each leaf growing as far away from the proceeding one as possible (which often turns out to be 1 /Phith of an angle) .49 In other words, this is a naturally occurring phenomenon which happens to correlate exactly with a seemingly random but actually highly structured series of numbers. Spirals, importantly, are symbolically associated with 'holistic growth' or holistic practices.5° If we take the earlier statement, that serial killers often kill close, but not too close, to home, it is probably also true that they tend to kill close, but not too close to the previous victim. W'ith this in mind, we could conceivably place a serial killer at the centre of a Fibonacci spiral, which forms around him as he attempts to carry out murders as far away from each other as possible (in an attempt to leave no pattern) while operating from a fixed point (his home) and without going outside a realistic travel radius. Therefore, a Holistic Serial Killer practicing Zen Navigation could betray his identity by inadvertently becoming the centre of a Fibonacci spiral of victims, the discarded bodies arranged like leaves on a stalk. 48 See 'Doodling in �fath: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant,' Yo11T11be, available from http://youtu.be/abX!J.vfUkSXXO (accessed 10-05-15). 49 Ibid. so Susan Buchalter, Mandala Symbolism and Techniques (London: Jessica Kingsley, 201 3), 1 59. 415

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle Just as in our discussion of Agrajag, the serial victim, here we have placed the Holistic Serial Killer at the centre of a spiral, but unlike the investigation of the s tandard detective story, which narrows in on this centre, the spiral we have engendered here is defined by its expansion: always growing and spreading. In hyperstition, as the Ccru explain in the text Lem11rian Time War, 'spirals [are] particularly repugnant symbols of imperfection and volatility. Unlike closed loops, spirals always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable.'S1 Through Adams' texts, we can thus begin to illustrate a spiro-dynamic model by which the unknowability of the serial killer('s actions) can contaminate the universe. CODA 'All right,' said Ford, 'imagine this. Right. You get this bath. Right. A large round bath. And it's made of ebony. [ . . . ] It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand. [ . . . ] And when it's full, you pull the plug out [ . . . ] You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. [ . . . ] You get a movie camera, and you film it happening. [ . . . ] The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector . . . backwards! [ . . . ] So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?' 'And that's how the Universe began, is it?' said Arthur. 51 Cybernetic Culture Re search Unit, 'Lemucian Time War,' in Davis Shneiderman and Philip Walsh, eds., &taking the Universe: William S. B11rro11ghs in the Age of Gloalization (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 275. 41 6

M U R DER BY T E L E P H O N E N U M BERS 'No,' said Ford, 'but it ' s a marvellous way t o relax.'52 52 Adams, &slallrant at the End, 98. 417

Daniel Colucciello Barber Arny Ireland I Lendl Barcelos Brad Baumgartner Jesuve Charlie Blake Sam Keogh Fred Botting Heatlher Masciandaro Brooker Buckingham Nicola Masciandaro Edia Connole Dan Mellamphy Caoimhe Doyle I Katherine Foyle Paul O'Brien Paul J. Ennis David Peak Anthony Faramelli Alina. Popa Florin Flueras David Roden Dominic Fox Niall W. R. Scott Matt Gaede YuuSeki Irina Gheorghe Gary J. Shipley Teresa Gillespie Aspa:sia Stephanou James Harris Eugeine Thacker Hunter Hunt-Hendrix Serial Killing leaves behind the analysis of the serial killer as a romantic anti-hero, diagnostic categor y of psychopathology or sociological symptom to offer a collection ofessays that infuses the conventional delusions of critical distance with the passionate. homicidal embrace ofloving neighborliness. The theoretical, photographic and fictional essays in this volume take the serial killer as an object ofboth philosophical speculation and spiritual contemplation. In a brilliant cornucopia of styles and obsessions, serial kill1ng becomes, among many other things: the touchstone of common in-humanity, a form of sacrifice and mystical rite, a leisure activity, a kind of bloody ikebana, a kaligraphic and auto-graphic mode of self-portraiture and flesh inscription, the meta-relational emanation of immanent suffering , a form ofkleptomancy. an expression of neoliberal love, an ascetic practice ofcosmic joy. It is properly mad. - Scott Wilson, Kingston University, author of Stop Making Sense (Kamac, 2015) We simultaneously love and hate serial killers: we dread them, and yet we are fascinated by them. Both in reality, and in books and television shows, serial killers seem to stand at the very edge of what is possible, , or of what is human. The essays in this volume push to the extremes of philosophy and of art and literature, in order to speak to our uneasy relation ship with what we both desire and abhor. - Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University, author of The Universe of1hings (UMP, 2014) One of the deepest and darkest truths in psychoanalysis is about the serial nature of the object. We pretend that it is unique , irreplaceable, singular. but it isn't, and it always exiists as part of a multiple whose secret truth, to our re al horror, is the emptiness or nothing at the center of this excess. In this fascinating collection of essays edited by Edia Connole and Gary Shipley we find out about this serial perversion of everyday life. - Jamieson Webster, Eugene Lang College, author of Stay, Illusion! (Vintage 2014) • SC!TSM