Other Endings
by Nick Land
This compilation of Reza Negarestani's writings is made available to an
international audience at a moment in history when the Orientalist taboo,
having only recently consolidated its mastery over discussions of NearEastern culture and politics, has been propelled by events into spectacular –
and almost certainly lethal – convulsions. Negarestani's name, preoccupations and matrix of socio-historical emergence can only further inflame
this situation. He arrives as a tourist in hell "carrying a jerry-can of gasoline."
Negarestani's first, perhaps even preliminary, provocation is his complete
indifference to the Orientalist role, with its appeal to deferential political
correctness or any other morbid spiritual masochism of distinctively Christian
cast. He entirely, and with the utmost casualness, disdains the platform of 'the
Other'. His 'otherness' - while allowing partial and complex identifications - is
not a marker of identity politics, less still a token of victimological credibility,
nor even a sustainable category. It is an otherness situated beyond the
threshold of a gate – of multiple gates – opened by meticulously selected
words from a wide variety of sources and tongues, invoked by a dark
cacophony of terrible and incoherent names. Even to speak of it – of them – in
such terms, in such a context, is to cling to a position framed by an already
devastated project of domestication, for purposes that are strictly pedagogical
and evanescent. Better by far – or worse beyond imagination – to have
already forgotten 'the Other' and be shifted into the dazzling rigorous
obscurities of the Thing, the Blob, the Z-crowd, Mistmare, GAS, Anonymousuntil-Now with its disease-drenched tails and Druj, Mother of Abominations.
From a certain perspective – an ultimately untenable one – what occurs in
these writings is indistinguishable from a systematic confusion of boundaries,
with the outside perpetually re-encountered on the inside, an inside that has
always come from without. The very prospect of appropriate positioning
undergoes prolonged, elaborate analysis, in order to demonstrate its essential
inadequacy and ineliminable insecurity. The outside has already and
ultimately taken over, and what remains - the relics and ruins meticulously
unearthed by Negarestani the archaeologist, ethno-historian and excavator
(for he is all these things too) – are testaments to a comprehensive pancultural catastrophe, leaving only violently decentralized 'polytics' in its wake.
Western readers can expect their peculiarly schizoid condition to be
"butchered open" by this work. At once desensitized to visceral multiplicity by
the 'Nietzschean' desecration of the Christian God's corpse, and
simultaneously prostrated before strange gods - intimidated by the conspiracy
of piety woven between Western multiculturalism and Islamist bombast - they
are likely to find nothing in Negarestani so shocking as the Islamic apostasy of
his writings, an apostasy which is itself virulently, profoundly and anomalously
Islamic, without the comfort of distantiation, bypassing every impulse towards
mere rejection and instead taking the form of an absolute intellectual
radicality, exposing an Islam which no longer tolerates cultural conformity
because it has been stripped down to a cosmic-historic event. These writings
are neither Islamist not anti-Islamic, but rather hyper-Islamic or trans-Islamic,
decoded from an ulteriority that neither politically and culturally instantiable
Islam nor any determinable alternative to Islam can ever make its own. More
distressing still, this orthodoxy to the point of black howling blasphemy feeds a
pathos of long-lost and perhaps never consistently attained comedy, an
understated comedic register of corrosive epistemological vitriol.
Consider a grotesquely reductive, violent, comic yet still suggestive thesis:
Islam is to Negarestani what Marxism is to Bataille. Everything is gathered at
the brink of a limit, enveloped by a totalization of unsurpassable subtlety and
comprehensiveness, within which every guile and stratagem of history finds
itself anticipated, drained utterly of implication and potentiality. Yet this
absolute absorption, this theomorphic black-hole, nevertheless receives only
the most tangential – even mocking – attention, not only because it is
assumed, pre-integrated (true otherness at last!), but far more significantly
because 'everything' happens beyond the limit, returns from beyond the limit,
as inappropriable yet operative excess overflowing the Omega-configuration
of Being. This is the double register continuously in play in Negarestani's
texts, a doubling that incarnates Shi'a 'taqqiya' ("Islamic hypercamouflage")
across all conceptual and thematic domains, as a simulacrum of "concrete
nomadism." It can easily be missed, since everything is restored, almost
unchanged, except for a sinister, nebulous, ultra-conceptual and subpsychological insinuation. What previously enjoyed the unchallenged authority
of elementary fact now transpires as puppetry, rhythmically jolted by the
reverberations of accomplished apocalypse – a formulation which itself
remains comically misleading unless the dramaturgy of revelation is itself
glimpsed askance, as if from the other side, staged out of the unimaginable.
Communist futurology has become merely ridiculous and in doing so it has
ceased to be comic. If anything it has become more frightening to those who
most ardently revile it, precisely because – as a refuge of enraged
impossibilism – it no longer indicates anything beyond itself. From being the
anticipated limit of social possibility, communism has decayed into the
impossible, thus appropriating the implacable nihilistic rage that is eternally
allied with impossibility. As an indefensible position, it has become
unassailable. Unbound from the vulnerability of the real, it persists only as a
testament to the abstract negation it once disdained.
The fact that the virtual Caliphate organizing global Islamist agitation could so
easily succumb to the same fatality, invested by the same forces – often
exactly and empirically the same forces – of grim negativity, serving only to
consolidate the dutiful vigilance of its opponents, makes the Negarestani
intervention exceptionally important. One might easily, although ironically say
'uniquely' important. It is precisely by re-polarizing this fatality, approaching it
– more precisely emerging from it – with an unprecedented seriousness that
is indistinguishable from the black excess of an extreme, posthuman comedy,
that it becomes entirely consistent with the "holocaust of freedom" of the
Cthulhu cults. A world enthralled by Islam, even, or especially, in its animosity,
is freed into the timeless nightmare of the 'Qiyamah' or Islamic Apocalypse,
where unity finds its consummate condensation and critical perfection,
simultaneously combusting into a pestilential redistribution of heretical
disorder and eternally unassimilable contagion.
Encountering these intimations of diffuse shape without form or substance,
strangers even to God, filtering unimpeded through curtains that closed for
ever upon the end of the world, there is every opportunity for bafflement and
exultation, for slowly unfolding ethnographic enlightenment and for sudden,
vertiginous descents into unillumined chasms of sacred horror. But most of all,
at least, most consistently, there is relief from the suffocating pieties of our
age – in all its dimensions – and for a peculiar delight that is only to be found
in the midst of unexpected extravagances of utter incorrectness.
Read Negarestani, and pray ...