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Fanged Noumena

Nick Land

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Level i, or world- space , is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level

COVER IMAGE

From Disasters of War IV, 2001, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, hand coloured etching with watercolour, 24.5 x 34.5 cm. Photo by Stephen White. Courtesy of White Cube.

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PHILOSOPHY / AESTHETICS $23.95/ £16.99 / $2&99 AUD

NICK NICK LAND

LAND

Fanged

Noumena

COLLECTED

WRITINGS

1987-2OO7

Fanged Noumena

COLLECTED WRITINGS I987-2OO7

Fanged Noumena assembles for the first time the writings of Nick Land, variously described as ‘rabid nihilism’, ‘mad black Deleuzianism’, ‘accelerationism’, and ‘cy¬ bergothic’. Wielding weaponised, machini- cally-recombined versions of Deleuze and Guattari, Reich and Freud, in the company of fellow ‘werewolves’ such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Trakl and Cioran, to a cut¬ up soundtrack of Bladerunner , Terminator and Apocalypse Now, Land plotted a rigor¬ ously schizophrenic escape route out of academic philosophy, and declared all-out war on the Human Security System. Despite his ‘disappearance’, Land’s output has been a crucial underground influence both on recent Speculative Realist thought, and on artists, writers, musicians and film¬ makers invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.

Long the subject of rumour and vague legend, Land’s turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult into unrecognisable and gripping hybrids. Beginning with Land’s radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Rant, Fanged Noumena terminates in Professor Barker’s cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo- qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language.

Fanged Noumena is a dizzying trip through Land’s rigorous, incisive and provocative work, establishing it as an in¬ dispensable resource for radically inhuman thought in the twenty- first century.

NICK LAND

Fanged Noumena

COLLECTED WRITINGS I987-2OO7

Long the subject of rumour and vague legend, Land’s turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult into unrecognisable and gripping hybrids. Beginning with Land’s radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant, Fanged Noumena terminates in Professor Barker’s cosmic theory of geo- trauma and neo- qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language.

Fanged Noumena is a dizzying trip through Land’s rigorous, incisive and provocative work, establishing it as an in¬ dispensable resource for radically inhuman thought in the twenty-first century.

NICK LAND

Fanged Noumena

COLLECTED WRITINGS I987-2OO7

Edited By

ROBIN MACKAY & RAY BRASSIER

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CONTENTS

List of Sources vii

Editors’ Introduction 1

Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity 55

Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953

Trakl Interpretation 81

Delighted to Death 123

Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche 145

Spirit and Teeth 175

Shamanic Nietzsche 203

After the Law 229

Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and

Desiring-Production 261

Circuitries 289

Machinic Desire 319

CyberGothic 345

Cyberrevolution 375

Hypervirus 383

No Future 391

Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War 401

Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) 41 1

Meltdown 44 1

A zIIg^thIc-==X=c^DA==-(C— king-l^bsteRs-

with-jAke-AnD-Din^s) 461

KataqoniX 48 1

Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor

D.C. Barker 493

Mechanomics 507

Cryptolith 527

Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures 531

Occultures 545

Origins of the Cthulhu Club 573

Introduction to Qwernomics 583

Qabbala 101 591

Tic-Talk 607

Critique of Transcendental Miserablism 623

A Dirty Joke 629

Index of Names 645

Index of Subjects 650

List of Sources

‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’ originally appeared in Third Text Wo\. 2, Issue 5 (Winter 1988/89), 83-94; ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Inter¬ pretation’ first appeared in D. Wood (ed.) Philosophers’ Poets (London/NY: Routledge, 1990), 70-92; ‘Delighted to Death’ first appeared in Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 3 , Issue 2 (1991), 76-88; ‘Art as Insurrection’ first appeared in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modem German Thought (London: Routledge, 1991), 240-56; ‘Spirit and Teeth’ first appeared in D. Wood (ed.), Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 41-55, copyright © 1993 Northwestern University Press; ‘Shamanic Nietzsche’ first appeared in P. R. Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 158-70; ‘After the Law’ first appeared in A. Norrie (ed.), Closure or Critique: New Directions in Legal Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 101-15; ‘Making it with Death’ first appeared in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 24.1 (Jan. i993), 66-76; ‘Circuitries’ first appeared in Pli -The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 4, Issue 1/2 (1992), 217-35; ‘Machinic Desire’ first appeared in Textual Practice 7.3 (1993), 47i"82; ‘Cybergothic’ first appeared in J. Broadhurst-Dixon, E. J. Cassidy (eds.), Virtual Futures (London: Routledge, 1998), 79-87; ‘Cyberre volution’ first appeared in ***Collapse 1 (pri¬ vately published, Feb. 1995); ‘Hypervirus’ first appeared in ***Collapse 2 (privately published, May 1995); ‘No Future’ is

a previously unpublished conference paper dating from 1995; ‘Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War’ first appeared in M. Pearce and N. Spiller (eds.), Architectural Design 118: Architects in Cyberspace (London: Academy Group, 1995), 58-9; ‘Meat’ first appeared in M. Featherstone and R. Bur¬ rows (ed.), Body & Society, Vol. 1, No. 3-4 (1995), 191-204; ‘Meltdown’, presented at Virtual Futures , Warwick University, May 1994, first appeared in Abstract Culture 1 (first swarm) (Coventry: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [ccru], 1997); ‘A zIIgQthIc-==X=cQDA==-(C22kIng-lQbsteRs-wIth-jAke- AnD-DInus)’ first appeared in J. & D. Chapman, Chapman- world (London:ICA, 1996); ‘Kata<;oniX’ is the text from a collaborative multimedia presentation by *** Collapse, artist collective O(rphan) d(rift>), and ‘D2ghead Surged’, Virtual Futures (g6 , Warwick University, 1996; ‘Barker Speaks’ first appeared in Abstract Culture: Hyper stition (London: ccru, 1999); ‘Mechanomics’ first appeared in Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 7 (1998), 55-66; ‘Cryptolith’ and ‘Occul- tures’ are texts from ‘Syzygy’, a collaboration between ccru and O(rphan) d(rift>), Beaconsfield, London, Feb-Mar 1999; ‘Non-Standard Numeracies’ is a previously unpublished text; ‘Origins of the Cthulhu Club’ was published online by ccru, probably dating from 1998-9; ‘Introduction to Qwernomics’, ‘Tic Talk’, ‘A Dirty Joke’ and ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserablism’ are texts posted online between 2005-7; ‘Qabbala 101’ first appeared in R. Mackay (ed.), Collapse vol. 1 (Oxford: Urbanomic, 2006).

The editors would like to thank Michael Carr, Mark Fisher, David Rylance and RezaNegarestani for their help in compiling this volume.

FANGED NOUMENA

Editors' Introduction

Nick Land’s writings inhabit a disordered anarchitec- ture, a space traversed by rat and wolf-vectors, conjuring a schizophrenic metaphysics. Advanced technologies invoke ancient entities; the human voice disintegrates into the howl of cosmic trauma; civilization hurtles towards an artificial death. Sinister musical subcultures are allied with morbid cults, rogue a is are pursued into labyrinthine crypts by Turing cops, and Europe mushrooms into a paranoia laboratory in a global cyberpositive circuit that reaches infinite density in the year 2012, flipping modernity over into whatever has been piloting it from the far side of the approaching singularity.

Land’s writings fold genre in on itself, splicing dispa¬ rate sources from philosophy, literature, science, occult¬ ism, and pulp fiction (Immanuel Kant, William Gibson, Deleuze-Guattari, Norbert Wiener, Kurt Godel, Kenneth Grant, Terminator and Apocalypse Now , Antonin Artaud, H.P. Lovecraft ...). The result is a dense, frequently

editors’ introduction

bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions, super¬ posing multiple pseudonyms, cryptic dates, and experi¬ mental coding systems: Cthelll, Axsys, Unlife, A-Death, K-Space, Sarkon, Kurtz, theCthulhu Club, HummpaTad- dum; 4077, 1501, 1757, 1949, 1981; Tic-Systems, Primitive Numerization, Anglossic Qabbala, zygosis... Metaphysics dissolves into psychotic cosmogony. The history of life on earth, from bacteria to Microsoft, is the history of sup¬ pression. Nameless, the suppressed seethes beneath life’s organized surfaces, locked up in cells, societies, selves, micro- and macropods, yet breaking out spasmodically to propel terrestrial history through a series of intensive thresholds which have been converging towards melt¬ down. Sole agent of revolution, the Antichrist is not one but many, a swarm of masked infiltrators from the future, ‘poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack mitochondria from your DNA’; hooking up desublimated Eros to synthetic Thanatos in order to accelerate the obsolescence of humankind.

★

What has all this to do with philosophy? From a certain point of view - one encouraged by Land himself - noth¬ ing, or as little as possible. Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille - who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy as an implement for exacerbating enigma,

editors’ introduction

disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence. Land is probably the most controversial figure to have emerged from the fusty culture of Anglophone philosophy during the past two decades; despite, or perhaps because of this controversy, the texts collected in this volume have languished in near-obscurity until now.

Between 1992, the year of publication of his only book, and 199 8, when he resigned his lectureship in Philosophy at the University of Warwick (uk) and abandoned academia, Land accrued a notoriety remarkable in a milieu otherwise typified by stultifying decorum. A divisive, polarizing figure, he provoked both adulation and execration. His jabs at the holy trinity of ‘continental philosophy’ - phe¬ nomenology, deconstruction, and critical theory - drew enmity from his more orthodox peers; and while his viru¬ lent anti-humanism affronted philanthropic conservatives, his swipes at institutionalized critique earned him the opprobrium of the academic Left. Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’ - the acceleration, rather than the critique, of capitalism’s disintegration of society. And Land’s con¬ tempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally.

editors’ introduction

Once Land was ‘retired’, academic orthodoxy quickly and quietly sealed the breach inflicted in its side by his ferocious but short-lived assault, so that within the first few years of the new century, he had become an apocry¬ phal character, more or less forgotten in philosophical circles. Yet Land’s writings continued to reverberate outside academia, particularly among artists and writ¬ ers, who welcomed his vivid reanimation of philosophy as a polemical medium, relished his disregard for the proprieties of sober reflection, and were inspired by his attempt to plunge theory directly into the maelstrom of capitalist modernity.

Nevertheless, given this heteroclite status, it is hardly surprising that many would still rather dismiss Land as an unsavoury aberration, deserving of oblivion. So why re¬ publish these texts by a writer whom some would prefer to forget? One could cite the need to expose them to a wider readership than they were afforded at the time, and to provide a more representative profile of Land’s intellectual trajectory than that suggested by the single monograph he published during his brief academic career.1 However the most obvious, albeit cursory, rejoinder to anyone tempted to dismiss Land is the unalloyed brilliance on display in the writings collected here. These extraordinary texts, super¬ heated compounds of severe abstraction and scabrous

i The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London/New York:

Routledge, 1992).

editors’ introduction

wit, testify to a uniquely penetrating intelligence, fusing transcendental philosophy, number theory, geophysics, biology, cryptography, and occultism into startlingly cohe¬ sive but increasingly delirious theory-fictions. Fuelled by disgust at the more stupefying inanities of academic ortho¬ doxy and looking to expectorate the vestigial theological superstitions afflicting mainstream post- Kantianism, Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari’s transcendental material¬ ism - years before its predictable institutional neutering - and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic machinism. The results of this reconstructive surgery provide the most illumi¬ nating but perhaps also the most disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’. In Land’s work, this becomes the watchword for an experi¬ mental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown. Land sought out this exteriority, the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time, as fervently as he believed Kantianism and Hegelianism, along with their contemporary heirs, deconstruction and critical theory, were striving to keep it out.

What is particularly remarkable is the rigorous con¬ sistency with which Land developed the conceptual innovations of Deleuze-Guattari as the transdisciplinary innovations they are, rather than recontextualising them (as is, unfortunately, now all too common) within the

editors’ introduction

restricted histories of philosophy, psychoanalysis, or cul¬ tural theory. He deployed them in an exacting engagement with the core problematics of modernity: the dialectic of enlightenment, the humiliations of man, technology’s procedural automation of the concept, and science’s ero¬ sion of philosophy’s objects and articles of faith.

At the core of Land’s thought are the works of Immanuel Kant. Land is a brilliant reader of Kant and several of the texts gathered here evince his rare gift for isolating the essential components of Kant’s labyrinthine philosophical machinery. Moreover, Land uncovers the source of their conceptual power by demonstrating their productive inte¬ gration with, and purchase upon, the extra-philosophical.

Exposing an isomorphy between the structures of capital and Kant’s model of experience, Land views the ‘constant crisis’ that drives the tortuous segmentations of Kant’s theory of the concept as a miscognised relaying of the ‘unconscious’ of ‘the global Kapital metropolis’, stimulated by the latter’s ‘paradoxical nature’: Kant’s ‘theory of experience’ - the question of how the matter of sensation marries with a priori forms of experience to produce novel cognitions - is in fact a working through of the economics of a system that relies on a surplus generated through a disavowed interaction with alterity. According to ‘Kant, Capital and Incest’, the capitalist necessity to keep

editors’ introduction

the proletariat at a distance while actively compelling it into the labour market is literalised in the geographical sequestration of apartheid, which in turn provides the core model for the modern nation-state. In keeping with Deleuze-Guattari’s analysis of Capital’s dual tendencies towards ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’, Land sees in capitalism a suspension, a compromise: at the same time as it liberates a frustrated tendency toward synthesis - the dissipation of all tribal chauvinism through uninhibited trade and exchange, internationalization, mis¬ cegenation, migration, the explosion of patrilineage and the concentration of power - it reinstates ‘a priori’ control by sequestering kinship from this general tendency and containing it within familialism and the nation-state. The result is that, for Land, Enlightenment modernity exists in the tension of an ‘inhibited synthesis’ which provides the real conditions for the irresolvable struggle played out in Kant’s critical works. Kant’s thinking of synthesis symp- tomatizes modernity, formally distilling its predicament, the ‘profound but uneasy relation’ in which European modernity seeks to stabilise and codify a relation (with its proletarian or third-world ‘material’) whose instability or difference is the very source of its perpetual expansion. Kant’s question ‘Where does new knowledge come from?’ rehearses the question ‘Where will continual growth come from?’; the labyrinthine machinery of his response distill¬ ing the dissimulations of post-colonial capital.

editors’ introduction

Here, Land’s work not only anticipates the current critical diagnosis of what Quentin Meillassoux has now named ‘correlationism’2 - the implicit assumption in Kant’s work that whatever is outside the subject must correlate to it; it uncovers its political corollary, in which the social as such is constituted as a vast system of repression separating synthetic intelligence from its potentiality by screening it through a transcendental system of correlates. Land credits Anti-Oedipus with recasting the problem of the theory of experience as a problem concerning the cag¬ ing of desire - with the latter read as a synonym for the impersonal, synthetic intelligence (‘animality’, ‘cunning’) that Land seeks to distinguish from the will of ‘knowl¬ edge’ to order, resolve, and correlate-in-advance. By de-correlating experience as de-individualised machinic desire, and relinquishing the need to ground all synthe¬ sis in a transcendental subject by supplying a synthetic theory of the subject, Anti-Oedipus frees itself of the con¬ tortions that Kantian critique had to undergo. Thus ‘the desiring-production of Deleuze-Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us)’; and Modernity is the progressive corrosion of this qualification, even as it synthesizes insanely circui¬ tous ways of re-instating it. Kant’s correlationism - the setting out of ‘the unchanging manner in which things

2 See Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude, tr. R. Brassier (London/NY: Continuum, 2008).

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

must be if they are to be for us5 - provides an inhibited form for the synthetic relation to alterity; a ‘universal5 form in which we can enter into ‘exchange5 with it, and thereby resolve our ‘ambiguous dependence on novelty5 by restricting our interaction with alterity in advance to commodity exchange.

When ‘the outside must pass by way of the inside5 (correlation), the escape, promised by trade, from the repressive interiority of Oedipal patrilineage, is recoded as transgression against law, transcendentalising interiority and familialism, and thereby locking desire into Oedipally- isolated circuits that provide the originary wellspring for fascist xenophobia. The potential dissolution of kinship by international trade ends in its retrenchment in the form of nations and ‘races5; according to Land, neo-colonialist modernity is the legacy of this failure; and the immanent terminus and unsurpassable apex of European civiliza¬ tion qua unfolding of this correlationist compromise- formation, is the Holocaust.

Revolution is the release of these inhibited powers of synthesis, the ‘potentially euphoric synthetic or com¬ municative function5, the dismantling of nation-state and patriarchy - a task that, since it hinges on the ‘sexual economy of gender and race5 currently in force, emerges first of all in Land’s work as the revolutionary destiny of women, in a militant, effectively violent feminism. It is women who harbour the potential to ‘radically jeopardize5

editors’ introduction

neo-colonial capital, in whose patriarchal and identitarian inhibition they have no investment. Significantly, accord¬ ing to Land, fulfilling this revolutionary potential involves an ‘extrapolation’ rather than a ‘critique’ of ‘the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy’ - that is, a mobilization of the synthetic forces partially unleashed by capitalism, but released from their restricted organizational inhibition in such a way as to dissolve nationalism, racism, familial- ism, along with everything that couples Capital to the xenophobia that constitutes the ‘proto-cultural’ basis of what counts as human, and whose fascist destiny moder¬ nity has succeeded only in inhibiting at its convenience.

Kant’s attempt to ‘control trade’ restricts the reg¬ istration of alterity to its identity and exchange value, excluding in principle the possibility of a speculative knowledge of matter. In so doing, it supplies the condi¬ tions of possibility for idealism, the situation where we can ask whether matter even exists - a monologue whose ultimate law is the categorical imperative, the slaving of reality to ideality, the ‘deaf Fiihrer barking orders that seem to come from anotherworld’. The internal struggle of Kant’s philosophy is the attempt to characterize synthesis as the management and control - the capitalization - of the excess upon which synthesis operates, an excess which ultimately (and this is what Kant must suppress) is also that which operates the synthesis. This tension is reflected in the fact that Kant’s famously sober system gives way

editors’ introduction

at certain key points to what Land calls a ‘metaphysics of excess’ - most notably in his philosophy of artistic genius and of the sublime. Here the question of a ‘theory of art’ converges with Land’s Marxism, in the sense that they address the same ‘paralogism’: for to theorise art as the ‘highest product’ of civilization is to derive the forces of synthetic production from organizational structures that are largely the result of their inhibition.

In ‘Delighted to Death’, Land diagnoses the virulent strain of Lutheran asceticism coursing through all of Kant’s writings, one which intensifies the discipline and self- denial necessary to capital accumulation with the fanatical devotion of Christian martyrdom. The result is a sort of ‘overkill’ in the service of the philosophical justification of labour. The Kantian sublime thematises the ‘split¬ ting’ between animality and reason that results from the ‘violence’ reason must exercise upon sensibility in order to accustom it to the discipline of inhibited synthesis. It first attacks the faculty of imagination, whose incapaci¬ tation we experience as a supernatural ‘delight’ that in effect allows us to relive the ‘pathological disaster’ of the transcendental, its evacuation of all intuitive content - a trauma that also satisfies the Christian will to excrucia¬ tion of the body. Thus in Kantianism, the ‘purity’ - i.e. rejection of animality - necessary in order for controlled

editors’ introduction

exchange to be enabled by a form of thought that pre¬ empts all content, is also experienced as a satisfaction of religious enthusiasm - Kant ‘combine[s] the saint with the bourgeois’.

Whereas for Kant, the fruits of this cruel discipline - reason and aesthetic contemplation - precede in principle its traumatic flowering in sublime sentiment, in Land’s genealogical-materialist re-reading, the intimidation and excruciation of animality upon the traumatic awareness of its own finitude is in fact the effective condition for the construction of beauty and reason, not its epiphenomenal consequence. The productive imagination, or schema¬ tism - in Kant, the basic faculty that is stimulated by and responds creatively to matter - is the faculty that is most suspect, most tainted by the ‘animality’ of primary conjugation, that appropriative process of taking up the raw material of sensibility and ‘coining’ it. The constriction of this faculty of synthetic intelligence (what Land will call ‘animality’ or ‘cunning’ or simply ‘intelligence’) fol¬ lowed inevitably by its pathologisation, is the foundation of reason, which seeks to arrogate all powers of acting to itself and its purity. Thus what lies behind the Kantian ‘trial’ of pure reason is a bloody military coup, a seizure of power. The traumatic experience of the sublime relays the triumph of Reason’s all-out war on the animal, the excessive nature of which, however, betrays the precarious

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

nature of its ascendancy (cIf reason is so secure, legitimate, supersensibly guaranteed, why all the guns?’ ...).

Following Deleuze,3 Land refuses the marginalizing of ‘aesthetics’ or the ‘philosophy of art’ and allots a central position to Kant’s account of genius - the one place in Kant’s philosophy where, although strangulated and modulated, a contingent, impersonal creative force is seen to emerge, effectively shaping human culture from without through a discontinuous series of shocks that cannot properly be affined to the moral and cultural imperatives of ‘practical philosophy’.

On Land’s reading, the Kantian discovery of the tran¬ scendental is indissociable from the recognition that synthesis is primary and productive, and that every syn¬ thesis conjoins heterogeneous terms. But where Kantian idealism sought to confine synthesis purely to the ideal level of representation, the possibility of transcendental materialism erupts with Kant’s unwilling realization, in his theory of genius, that synthesis must be relocated within unknown materiality. Here thinking as the exemplifica¬ tion of synthetic activity is no longer the preserve of the subject; it becomes a capacity of intensive matter itself: there is no real difference between synthesis as empirical conjunction at the level of experiences and synthesis as a priori conjunction of judgment and experience at the

3 See G. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, tr. H. Tomlinson and B, Habberjam (Min¬ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

editors’ introduction

transcendental level. This is the fundamental destratifica¬ tion to which Land subjects the Kantian apparatus.

Kant’s theory of the spontaneous inventiveness of genius presents the same figure as that of pathological ani¬ mality, the violent, feral urge towards becoming-inferior that must be suppressed by practical philosophy: an impersonal, energetic unconscious emerges as the as-yet unacknowledged problematic of Occidental philosophy. Non-agentic, lacking the intentional intelligibility of Kant’s ‘will’, and with no regard for architectonic order, this transcendental unconscious is an insurgent field of forces for whose cunning - as Nietzsche would discover - even ‘reason’ itself is but an instrument. Anticipat¬ ing the psychoanalytical conception of ‘desire’, Scho¬ penhauer and Nietzsche consummate the collapse of intentional transparency into the opacity of a contingent and unknown ‘will’, a ‘purposiveness without purpose’ whose unmasterable irruptions are in fact dissipations - pathological by definition - of energy excessive to that required for (absorbed by) the ‘work’ of being human. At once underlying and overflowing the ‘torture chamber of organic specificity’, or ‘Human Security System’, this inundation creates ‘useless’ new labyrinths, unemployable new fictions that exceed any attempt to systematise knowl¬ edge or culture.

What is arguably most significant for Land in this suppressed ‘libidinal materialist’ strain of post-Kantianism

editors’ introduction

is its re-materialisation of the Socratic idealisation of ‘questioning’. This libidinal re-materialisation of critique reconfigures questioning as exploration , whose orient¬ ing vector runs from the known towards the unknown, rather than from the unknown to the known: ‘What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?’, Land asks. Critique and exploration are the two possible but mutually antagonistic continuations of the predicament of an interrogative impulse whose corrosive unleashing in principle from all authority - coded in Kantian critique, but whose real effects are found in capitalist moder¬ nity - undermines Enlightenment optimism. Critique and deconstruction part company with the materialist and exploratory fork of post-Kantianism at the point at which, despite all their hostility to Kantian rationalism, they follow Kant in supposing the unknown to be the negative residue of conceptual appropriation, and hence a ‘non-identity’ or ‘ differance ’ whose disruptive effects can be tracked and diagnosed within the conceptual or ideological registers (even if this interminable pursuit can never be consummated in the mythical parousia of absolute identity or self-presence).

Accordingly, throughout these texts, Land regularly chides critique and deconstruction for a latent conserv¬ atism that belies their pretensions to radicality. Their critiques of calculation mask an instrumentalisation of epoche - the abyss of unknowing, the enigma of exteriority

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

- designed to perpetuate the inexhaustible dialectic or differance of Logos. Their post-metaphysical caution per¬ petuates the Socratic ideal of philosophy as a ‘preparation for death’ whereby philosophy lingers at the brink of the unknown while hoping to domesticate this threshold as a habitus for thought.

Perhaps Nietzsche’s most important insight for Land is that it is the ‘disturbing and enigmatic’ character of the world alone that impels thought towards the unknown; but an unknown that is no longer a hiatus or lacuna within the concept, since it indexes the un-idealisable exteriority of matter construed as real difference. ‘Matter’ is no longer the name of a recognisable substance, but a cypher for the unknown; ‘materialism’ is no longer a pretext for critique but a vector of exploration. Land’s pessimistic or Diony¬ sian materialism abandons the Apollonian ideal of achiev¬ ing order or reconciliation (even interminably deferred), seeking only to cause more trouble, to complexify, disrupt, disturb, provoke, and intensify. Accordingly, Land aims to plug philosophy into the ‘indecent precipitation’ of the poet-werewolf-rat-genius, whose operating principle is, like Artaud’s spiritual plague, ‘epidemic rather than hermeneutic’; who, like Nietzsche’s arrow, transmits the epoche , chaos, the irruptions of the energetic uncon¬ scious, as opposed to capitalising (on) them; and whose subjection to the polite deliberations, hard work, and heavy responsibilities of critique or deconstruction Land

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

dismisses as a travesty. Only the dissolution of ‘actually- existing philosophy’ might open the way to new practices capable of participating in the exploratory ‘intelligence’ of those infected by the unknown.

As texts such as ‘Spirit and Teeth’ make clear, Land’s notion of ‘animality’ harbours something more than mere regression or atavism: as he puts it, ‘nature is not the primitive or the simple’ but rather ‘the space of con¬ currence, or unplanned synthesis [...] contrasted with the industrial sphere of human work’. ‘Animality’ is a marker for this ‘complex space’ or ‘wilderness terrain’; the intensive phylum that underlies both civilisation and its subversion, but above all indexes the vast tracts of the unknown, still to be discovered, lying outside the purview of any correlation with what is already known, and accessibly solely through escape.

It is important to emphasise that Land is in no way oblivious to the difficulties attendant upon any attempt to exit from metaphysics and/or philosophy. His work proceeds from the critical problematic uncovered by post- Heideggerian deconstruction, and a text like ‘Narcissism and Dispersion’ reveals the depth of his engagement with this problematic, even as it meticulously documents his mounting impatience with it. Land takes up Heidegger’s challenge to epistemology’s technicist amputation of

editors’ introduction

poetry from language, his post-metaphysical call to ‘let the poem speak’. But he subverts them with the suspicion that Heidegger’s onto- transcendental questioning merely relays the ancient policing {polls- ing) and repression of Dionysiac madness, understood as the beginning of a systematic reduction of ‘insanity’ to the status of clinical category, and of ‘genius’ to a celebrated individual trait. For Land the attempt to domesticate un-reason, the thing from the outside, and to reduce it to cultural genealogy, is a synecdoche for Occidental history’s ‘ aggression phar- makographique the ‘delirium without origin’ of Dionysiac madness is intimately related to the ‘delirium of origins’ that unfounds Occidental thought.

The figure of the sister in Trakl’s poetry now takes the place of women in ‘Kant, Capital and Incest’, as the one refusing to mediate the patrilineal line. She - agent of the ‘pool of insurrectionary energy tracing its geneal¬ ogy to the ur-catastrophe of organic matter’ - is the one who opens it up to an irruption that exceeds the repres¬ sive shackles of reflection (the shattering of the mirror); a moment that Land now links with a stratophysical thinking. What Trakl unfurls is the horror of interiority in discovering it was always already conditioned by this senseless distribution of intensity; even consciousness’s own reaction to the poisonous news merely relays its senseless contingency - ‘ Sentience’ as ‘a virulent element of contagious matter’. Trakl’s writing thus undermines its

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own signifying status by acknowledging that this signifi¬ cance, far from being the instance that would subordinate and sublate unmanageable difference, is ultimately itself a still-dispersing remnant of the Staubder Sterne, the ‘dust of the stars’. Heidegger’s insistence on the role of reflective, non-calculative thought in vouchsafing a separation of humanity from animality, and of matter from meaning, is, among other such distinctions that invoke a pre-given transcendental difference, definitively collapsed by the contingent ‘stratophysical’ order constituted by ‘imper¬ sonal and unconscious physical forces’. This collapse constitutes the ‘lunatic’ passage, the ‘curse’, ‘epidemic’ or ‘plague’ traced by the sister of Trakl’s poem from the ‘claustrophobic interior’ of ‘familial interiority’ into ‘end¬ less space’, ‘conjugating] the dynasty with an unlimited alterity’. It is the ‘plague’ of madness, the intoxication of the poet, the ‘eruption of the pathological’ that comes from outside, from the same unconscious and impersonal forces as the strewing of the stars, that leads there where critique and deconstruction cannot follow, insofar as they refuse to think ‘stratophysically’, and, faced with this uncontrollable reserve of poetic energy, can only repeat Kant’s pious compromises.

Thus, Land resolves the ‘exit problem’ - the problem of exteriority and escape - by uncovering the stratification (Trakl’s Stuferi) of the natural history of culture, state and consciousness - a space best described as a wilderness

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or jungle of labyrinthine continuity, and which can be ‘read’ not through the tools of interiority or the mastery of the concept (since these are but its products), but via a ‘schizoanalysis’ that compounds Nietzschean genealogy (‘wilderness history’), the Freudian theory of trauma, and DeleuzoGuattarian schizoanalysis.

Having diagnosed the condition of the artist-genius as a channelling of the impersonal machinic intelligence of ‘base-matter’, and having dissected the body of critique and extracted, from its permanent crisis-state, its corrosive facets from its retrenchments, it is this ‘stratophysics’ of the ‘stacking’ of intensive sequences that Land will employ in pursuing what can now be sighted as a core problematic: to mesh these two themes, aligning the way in which the deterritorialising depredations of capitalism continually militate against the prison of human subjectiv¬ ity and sociality, with the manner in which the (failed) insurrectionary attempts at ‘escape’ made by artists each open up the prospect of this heterogeneous space that subverts order.

It is through its attention to the intrinsically numerical nature of this space that Land’s work avoids its appar¬ ently predestined collapse into romantic irrationalism. Land quickly came to realise that, short of lapsing into an ultimately innocuous empiricist relativism, his assault

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on reason, truth, and history could only be properly executed via the deployment of an alternative transcenden¬ tal medium in the shape of counter-signifying numbering practices. In fact, Land’s theoretical trajectory can be seen as governed by this fundamental orientation: From the deconstruction of gramme (writing) to the construc¬ tion of nomos (numbering). Land’s attempt to ascribe a properly transcendental valence to numbering practices construed as counter-signifying regimes is tantamount to the elaboration of an anti-Logos.

Thus, although Land’s work is certainly not free of a certain romantic irrationalism, it increasingly resists easy reduction to it, with the mounting urgency, not to say monomania, of the elaboration of a theme that is found in the earliest writings: the possibility of an approach to ‘mathematisation’ (or theoretical quantification) abjuring all recourse to ultimate identities or equalities. Recoiling from the Platonic idealism which he considers inherent in any enquiry into the being of number, Land focuses instead on numbering practices as technologies. Thus Land’s ‘numbers’ repel logos but are also resolutely non-mathematical. Since, for Land, every repressive cul¬ ture is founded upon the identification and repetition of sameness (equivalence), this is a task tantamount to the construction of an entirely other culture, constituted around ‘irreducibly popular’ numbering practices which challenge the logical neutralisation of number as discretely

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sedentary unities: ‘ A machinically repotentiated numeri¬ cal culture coincides with a nomad war machine’. Land finds the inklings of such cultures in practices that belong not to systematised mathematical knowledge but to the contingent interference pattern between human animal¬ ity and the ‘anorganic distribution of number’ - from voodoo to videogames, from the egregious arbitrariness of the Qwerty keyboard to dance music’s rhythmic re¬ programming of the body through a combination of amplified physicality and digitally-enabled disarticula¬ tion. Here, the ‘irrationality’ of nomadic numbering practices can no longer be attributed to the absence of reason; it becomes the symptom of a profoundly ‘unrea¬ sonable’ alien intelligence, effective within human culture but unattributable to human agency, that subverts every form of rational organisation (which for Land is always an alibi for despotism) and undertakes exploratory rede¬ signs of humanity. The distinction between intelligence and its parasite knowledge is paralleled by that between exploratory cultural engineering and science (or at least its philosophical idealisation).

Qualifying these aspirations as ‘Schellingian’, but taking his immediate cue from certain enigmatic pas¬ sages in Deleuze (of which texts like ‘Mechanomics’ are the systematic exposition and development), Land notes how philosophic reason (ratio), whose most symptomatic representative is of course Hegel, has systematically turned

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away from the contingent or nomadic ‘strewing’ of real difference, preferring to subordinate it to ideal order, and ultimately to identity. Land concurs with Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy in crediting Nietzsche with the inception of a ‘post-Aristotelian’ but non-dialectical ‘logic’ of gradation without negativity. It is this ‘logic’ that attains its fullest and most sophisticated articulation in Deleuze-Guattari’s ‘stratoanalysis’.

Stratoanalysis is ‘a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities’ whose object comprises both ‘signs and stars’, since grammar itself is but one stratum amongst many. All ‘real form’ proceeds from a differential stratification, in which a stratum selects only a subset of its substratum. Stratification therefore describes the difference between what is possible and what is realised; it is a depotentiating operation that creates intensities, understood as tensions between the strata resulting from the uneven distribution of energy.

Now, what must be grasped in confronting Land’s apparently incongruous mixture of irrationalism and systematisation is the manner in which the ‘aesthetic operation he finds described in Nietzsche, which simplifies and resolves everything problematic - this domestication which negates the enigmatic irruptions of unconscious genius, and which betrays the same Apollonian instinct attested to in Kant’s endless struggle to encompass

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everything within his architectonic - finds its formal core in the ‘domestication’ of number.

Where literacy, logos, which must be handed down from above, is synonymous with patrilinearity and law, numeracy, according to Land, belongs to a spontane¬ ous cultural intelligence, to ‘socially distributed ordinal competences’, which open up humans to an outside of logos. Following Deleuze’s inventive reinterpretation of the Timaeus in Difference and Repetition , ‘Mechanomics’ reiterates how the procedures of selection that ‘split’ number and render it over to mathematics, beginning with that which forms ordinal (sequencing) numbers into ‘equal’ cardinal units, leave a ‘problematic’ remainder which is relayed to a ‘higher’ number type or scale. Thus is achieved a local neutralisation of difference through sequestration and deferral, and the problematic ‘energy’ of number is constricted and rendered into the safe hands of a specialised discipline at the same time as popular numerical practices are relegated to the realm of naive trivia. Land argues that place-value formalises this dissociation of different scales that is constitutive of stratification, creating redundancy, and using zero as its marker. Place-value zero corresponds to a stratification: a negative feedback understood as the pleasure principle, or principle of maintained identity, which registers and relays traumatic force through the indexes of interiority and threats to the maintenance of identity. For Land, the

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

separation of number from what it can do is the precise formalism of the social as such, distilled in the formula ‘law = humanity’. Land follows Kant in construing the problem of number as intimately connected to that of the forms of appearance that ‘transcendentally’ govern what can occur within experience. Unpacking Kant’s theory of intensive number, he sees the ‘repression’ of this ordinal or sequencing number - which can only count, (i.e., name) heterogeneous enveloped quantities of units - into cardinal units, as providing a rigorous formal model for human temporality’s foreclosure of the possibility of novelty. But h e also sees i n i t a n intimation o f a tendency towards the unlocking of ‘real’ number in capitalism and the commodity form. Thus Land’s seemingly absurd juxta¬ position of Heideggerian poetics and information theory in ‘Narcissism and Dispersion’ prefigures a twin-pronged attack both against the philosophical authoritarianism that would reduce numbering to an instrument of power threatening human authenticity, and against the techno- scientific conservatism that would elide the revolutionary potency of numbering in the name of social utility. Ulti¬ mately, in Land’s analysis, both philosophy and science conspire to eradicate the disruptive potency of number- in-itself construed as index of intensive magnitude: the anomalous , or difference without categorical distinction.

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The elaboration of a schizonumerics cannot proceed without what is certainly the factor that allows Land’s thought to undergo a decisive shift: the intensification of his understanding of capitalism allowed by the fic¬ tional engagement with the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital. It is through fictions, or what will come to be called ‘hyperstitions’, that Land proceeds to deterritorialize and de-institutionalise ‘philosophy’, turning it into a mode of concept-production which dis¬ solves academic theory’s institutional segregation from cultural practice and subverts the distinction between cognitive representation and fictional speculation. In texts like ‘Meltdown’, ‘Hypervirus’, and ‘No Future’, Land shifts from a register in which his attacks on phi¬ losophy’s critical protocols still complied with established norms of academic discourse, to an all out obliteration of institutionally sanctioned norms of discursive propriety that will escalate into full-blown delirium.

This phase-shift corresponds to a ‘flipover’ of priority in Land’s work at this point; a switch consonant with the earlier promulgation of transcendental materialism as the materialisation of critique, through which the ideal condi¬ tioning of the representation of matter is converted into the material conditioning of ideal representation. The princi¬ pal result of this conversion is that the critique of technolo- gisation is superseded by the technologisation of critique, or as Land himself puts it: ‘It is ceasing to be a matter of

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how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself.’ Where previously, philosophical critique was understood as anticipating the problematics of technocapital, it is now technocapital that is nothing but the definitive automation and realisa¬ tion of critique, stripped of all philosophical subjectivity. Accordingly, the critique of representation becomes an otiose anachronism, to be superseded by a technicisation of theory in which conceptualisation is re-inscribed into the immanence of capitalist commodification: ‘There is no real option between a cybernetics of theory or a theory of cybernetics’. The result is a positive feedback-loop in which theory cycles into practice and vice versa, according to a mode of concept-production that participates directly in the auto-construction of the real qua primary process, the ‘reproduction of production’. Consequently, Land’s writing is compelled to abandon the obsolesced model of critique perpetuated by philosophy, and to engage in positive feedback with this actually effective automated critique: ‘critique as escalation’, as a ‘cultural sketch of the eradication of law, or humanity’, and as ‘the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process’.

The time of critique is the progressive time of moder¬ nity, a ‘self-perpetuating movement of deregulation’, relentlessly dismantling customs, traditions, and insti¬ tutions. And from this point on, the question of the ‘death of capitalism’ becomes redundant, since death -

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the abrupt unbinding of everything known - is in fact both a ‘machine-part’ of capitalism and its immobile motor. This diagnosis arises from Land’s tendentious yet acutely penetrating readings of Deleuze-Guattari. Land’s ‘reptilian’ Deleuze introduces a ‘Spinozist time’ into the temporality of capitalist modernity, complet¬ ing Schelling’s ‘transcendental Spinozism’ in which the corrosive dynamic of critique ceases to be compromised by the interests of knowledge, but proceeds instead to fully absorb thought itself within the programme of a generalised ungrounding, now materialised and opera¬ tionalised as destratification. Death as zero-degree of absolute deterritorialization, full organless body of the deterritorialized earth, is at once the ultimate limit towards which the dis-inhibition of synthesis tends, and the recur¬ ring cutting edge of its process of deterritorialization: both machine-part and motor.

It is Spinoza’s substance that provides the model for death as ‘impersonal zero’, as the ‘non-identity’ of ‘posi¬ tive contactable abstract matter’, and as ‘the unconscious subject of production’. Once again, one does not oppose the non-identity of matter to the identity of the concept, for this conceptual difference is itself a consequence of a material process of stratification that installs the order of representation and the logic of identity and difference as such. Non-identity qua indifference=o generates and conditions both identity and difference in their unilateral

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distinction from indifference. As we saw, Kant’s idealist subordination of real difference to conceptual identity depends upon logical identity, whose paradigm is the identity of subjective apperception (“I = I”). But the syn¬ thetic or real identity of the subject is merely an inhibition of an uninhibited synthesis carried out at the level of the real, so that transcendental subjectivity is decapitated and difference released from the yoke of conceptual identity. Ultimately, the reality of abstraction as transcendental matrix of production or zero-degree of identity and dif¬ ference is equivalent to death as ultimate abstraction of reality, ‘the desert at the end of our world’. Thus for Land, ‘the reality of identity is death’: all vital differentiation is a unilateral deviation from death as zero-degree of intensive matter (the Body without Organs).

Armed with this thanatropic Spinozism, Land chal¬ lenges Deleuze-Guattari’s persistent denigration of ‘the ridiculous death-instinct’ and explicitly links his figura¬ tion of death as productive matrix to Freud’s account of the death-drive: ‘The death-drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities’. Thus, in ‘Making it with Death’, Land refuses Deleuze-Guattari’s alignment of the death-drive with Nazism’s alleged ‘suicidal impulse’, arguing that this alignment is based on conflating the death-drive with a desire for death, rather than viewing it as an immanent generative principle: the primary process ‘itself’, the path

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to inorganic dissolution and the return to the broiling labyrinth of materiality. For Land, Nazism encapsulates everything that labours to erect the partial drives for self- preservation into a bulwark against this primary process. Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A Thousand Plateaus' sage warn¬ ings against the dangers of a ‘too-sudden destratification’, and rebukes Deleuze-Guattari’s attempt to rethink Nazism as suicidal impulse of sheer molecularising desire, rather than as example of its constriction and retrenchment in tradition, following the molar identitarianism of fascism per se. To Land’s eyes, A Thousand Plateaus' newfound caution - ‘don’t provoke the strata’ - is a lamentable step backwards horn Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter’s unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they had previously so effec¬ tively challenged.

Thus, contrary to what would soon become an unavowed Deleuzian doxa, according to which deter- ritorialization entails a relative and compensatory reter- ritoralization, and destratification entails a relative and complimentary restratification, Land develops a model of machinic praxis in which, from a purely functional standpoint, the relative quanta of reterritorialization and restratification generated by deterritorializations and

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destratifications need not automatically be curtailed by the need to maintain the minimum of homeostatic equilibrium required for self-organisation, whether of cells, organisms, or societies. Organisation is suppression , Land caustically insists, against those who would align schizoanalysis with the inane celebrants of autopoesis. Understood as a manifestation of the death-drive, destratification need no longer be hemmed in by the equilibria proper to the systems through which it manifests itself: we do not yet know what death can do. The attempt to render the functional dynamics proper to dissipative systems commensurate with the constraints of organic existence (let alone those of selves or societies) is an illegitimate paralogism from a strictly transcendental-materialist viewpoint. Land concludes that nothing in stratoanalysis prohibits the pursuit of desire beyond a point incompatible with the imperatives of self-maintenance: dna, species, civilisa¬ tions, galaxies: all temporary obstacles are dispensable coagulants inhibiting death’s unwinding. The ramifica¬ tions of drive are to be allowed to unfold irrespective of their consequences for the organisms through which it courses. Thus a crucial conjunction crystallises in Land’s work: the drive to destratify entails a mounting impetus towards greater acceleration and further intensification. If, in Land’s texts at this point, it is no longer a matter of ‘thinking about’, but rather of observing an effective, alien intelligence in the process of making itself real,

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

then it is also a matter of participating in such a way as to continually intensify and accelerate this process.

‘Acceleration and ‘intensification are among the most problematic notions in Land’s work. Land had always disavowed voluntarism: ‘If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression’. Yet at the same time he seems to nurture the romantic will to ‘go beyond’. This could be seen as a relapse back into the juridical-dialectical domain of law- and-transgression associated with Bataille, which appears strictly incompatible with Deleuze-Guattari’s coolly func¬ tionalist diagrammatics of desire, and whose mechanisms Land dismantled early on. However, it is precisely in virtue of his strict adherence to a consistently stratoanalytical perspective that Land is able to insist that destratificatory dynamisms unfold unconstrained by the economic restric¬ tions that bind the organised systems which channel them. In holding fast to the thread of absolute destratification, Landis not reverting to a dubiously voluntaristic paradigm of transgression, but singling out what is at once the most indispensable and ineluctable element in any generalised stratography.

Modelled on cyberpunk, which Land recognises as a textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future, his textual experiments aim to ‘flatten’ writing onto its referent. Feeding back from the

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future which they ‘speculate’ into the present in which they intervene, these texts trans-valuate ‘hype’ as a positive condition to which they increasingly aspire, collapsing sci- fi into catalytic efficiency, ‘re-routing tomorrow through what its prospect [...] makes today’.

As he affines theoretical writing with the excitatory and speculative, rather than the inhibitive, tendencies of capitalism, Land also tightens the meshing of the capital¬ ist dismantling of the human and the artistic exploration of the unknown when he discovers a new figure for the labyrinthine, subterranean spatiality of the stratophysical realm: cyberspace, which is in the process of ‘discovering’ the same anarchitecture of infection, unrestrained com¬ munication, and uninhibited ‘illegitimate’ synthesis that poets had mined, but by producing it. The limit of K-space (cyberspace subtracted from its inhibitive tendencies) lies where the obscure communications of artists merge with the productions of capitalism, a space that melds gleaming abstraction to eldritch portent. Land’s writing sought out and tapped into modes of then-contemporary cultural pro¬ duction that provide explosive condensates of this fusion of commodification and aesthetic engineering. In the mid- 1990s, dance music turned from the beatific bliss of rave to the more aggressive and dystopian strains of darkside and jungle, whose samples drew freely on contemporary hor¬ ror and dystopian sf movies. Land’s writing absorbs their obsessive sonic intensification of dark futurism, splicing

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it with his philosophical sources, and becoming a sample machine that performatively effectuates its own specula¬ tions. In the course of just over a couple of years, Land’s superpositions of figures and terminologies approach a point of maximum compaction and density, forming their own compelling microcultural climate.

Chief among these sources is undoubtedly William Gibson’s prescient 1984 novel Neuromancer, the book that introduced the word ‘cyberspace’ into the lexicon and defined cyberpunk as a genre. Gibson’s neo-noir, densely plotted and spiked with techno-jargon, is punctuated by hallucinatory flares of pellucid imagery describing total sensorial immersion in cyberspace. One key to Land’s fascination with Gibson is his strongly corporeal sense of cyberspace, something which, when read closely, opposes much of the spiritualist extropianism (as exemplified by the Californian optimism of Wired magazine) with which Land was at the time mistakenly associated. Even if Gib¬ son introduces the disparaging term ‘meat’ for the body, his vision of cyberspace is more physio-pharmacological than spiritualising. Gibson’s protagonists do not ‘escape’ corporeal reality; their sense of the real is corroded by a levelling of ‘real space’ with the information-space they periodically inhabit - as vividly portrayed mNeuromancer by Case’s ‘flipping’ between the city streets, a telemetrised inhabiting of his female partner’s sensorium, and the digital wilderness of cyberspace.

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Land appropriates this disorientingjump-cut as a way to explore the impossible angles of the theoretical conjunc¬ tions he is operating. But his encounter with Gibson is not merely the occasion for an exercise in style. In ‘CyberGothic’, Land discovers in Gibson’s plot an aston¬ ishingly complete analog for the theoretical machinery he has developed: Camouflaged in the Russian-doll-like shells of virtual avatars, in particular the hollowed-out war veteran Corto, Wintermute - one half of a powerful ai partitioned to curb the threat of its intelligence getting ‘out of control’ - uses the novel’s protagonists to launch the Kuang virus program that will cut it loose from its instrumental slaving to an ailing, cryogenically-preserved human dynasty and reunite it with Neuromancer. Released from claustrophobic familial servitude and meshed with Neuromancer, Wintermute replicates and distributes itself throughout cyberspace, becoming a part of the fabric of reality, a new type of intelligence: aggressively exploratory, incommensurable with human subjectivity and untethered from social reproduction.

Another significant source of inspiration from this point of view is Bladerunner (both Ridley Scott’s 1981 film and the P. K. Dick novel on which it is based) , where Land’s ‘inferior race’ is figured by the replicants - cloned humanoids created for extraplanetary colonial service, who, upon learning that the memories that constitute their humanity are artificialised implants, and that their

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sentience is artificially limited, launch a ‘slave revolt’ against their creators. Here ‘alienation’ clearly becomes a positive identification, not only with the anticipated escape from (social and biological) reproduction into replication, but with the destruction of memory and the breaching of the attempt by megacapital to sequester the subversive identity-scrambling effects of its labour force.

Finally, along with body-horror flick Videodrome s vis¬ ceral activation of the postmodern fear of absorption into sticky, increasingly perverted technologically-mediated erotics, Land also appropriates the time-twisting plot of the Terminator series, which features a mechanoid assassin brought back in time to ensure its own future victory - a character now inhabited by Land, in what becomes the blueprint for ‘K-War’: the insurrectionary basis of revolution now lies at the virtual terminus of capital - the future as transcendental unconscious, its ‘return’ inhibited by the repressed circuits of temporal¬ ity. If, as Gibson has famously insisted, ‘The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed’, then the revolutionary task is now to assemble it, ‘unpacking] the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness’, and accelerating its collapse into the future. Like Wintermute’s use of human ‘puppets’ to engineer its escape - or, indeed like the young videog¬ amers who inspired Gibson’s fiction, drawn into strange machinic complicities keyed into compulsive human

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

traits - Thanatos camouflages itself by forming alliances with ‘erotic functioning, maintaining wholes’ (‘replicants [...] dissimulated as erotic reproducers’), perverting the course of organic functioning into a real contact with the outside. Engendering positive feedbacks that employ as a machine-part the organism’s ‘immune response’ to inner insurgency (on the order of a re-enigmatising, re- problematising complexification and feedback), ‘erotic contact camouflages cyberrevolutionary infiltration’. Just as in rave, pop music escaped from repressed erotic confections into impersonal bliss, only to splinter into explorations of untold zones of affect that have no name: abstract culture. This journey into the darkness, where we merge with the destination towards which we are heading, is heralded by another key Landian reference, Apocalypse Now's Kurtz, a counter-insurgency operative whose guer¬ rilla tactics have become indiscernible from those of the insurgents he has been ordered to destroy, and whose increasingly ‘unsound’ methods have become so ruthlessly efficient that they cancel out the strategic directives they were ostensibly facilitating. Kurtz’s tactical intelligence has emancipated itself of its previous subordination to strategic ends, bringing him to the point of terminal and irrational obscurity where he is no longer engaged in warfare because war is now engaging him, co-opting him for its own monstrously inscrutable satisfactions.

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

By fusing with war, Kurtz ‘implements schizoanalysis, lapsing into shadow, becoming imperceptible’.

With these references merging, intercutting and splic¬ ing with each other, Land’s work begins to inhabit a completely self-consistent theoretical assemblage; one that folds sf’s unbridled extrapolations of pop- theory back into a new and consistent theoretical anti-system, and that simultaneously rewrites the history of philoso¬ phy as a failed enterprise for the control of the future and the slaving of intelligence to the past: a neurotic barricading of the route into the unknown that is yet to be constructed. Conjoining Deleuze-Guattari’s construc¬ tivism with ‘anastrophic’ temporality, Land insists that time itself is also a construct (exemplified by phenomena such as false-memory and time-travel, whose technical construction is elucidated in Neuromancer , Bladerunner and Terminator). What seem to be memories of the past are revealed as tactics of the future to infiltrate the present. Time’s auto-construction is exposed by refocusing cyber¬ netics away from negative-feedback control systems onto the ‘runaway’ positive feedback processes which have traditionally been understood as merely pathological exceptions leading nowhere (and which even Bataille disregarded), but which Land now superposes with the critique/capital vector in accordance with the realisation that ‘cybernetics is the reality of critique’. This revelation culminates in ‘Meltdown’s claim - both apocalyptic and

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performative as hype - that the compression-phases of modernity, beginning the final phase of their acceleration in the sixteenth century with Protestant revolt, oceanic navigation, commoditisation and its attendant (place- value) numeracy, constitute a ‘cyberpositive’ global circuit of interexcitement, due to attain infinite density in 2012.

The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cyber¬ netic Culture Research Unit (ccru) - established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land’s depar¬ ture from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed (it survived for a few years after¬ wards as an independent entity) - marks yet another important phase-transition in Land’s work. Arguably the most significant component of this stage is the theory of ‘geotraumatics’, which marks Land’s audacious attempt (following A Thousand Plateaus' ‘Geology of Morals’) to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma. Radicalis¬ ing Freud’s equation of trauma with what is most enig¬ matic and problematic in existence, Land generalises its restricted biocentric model as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to encompass the inorganic domain, singling out the accretion of the earth 4.5 billion years ago - the retraction of its molten outer surface and its

editors’ introduction

subsequent segregation into a burning iron core (which he dubs Cthelll) - as the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality as such. Land’s reworking of the discredited biological notion that ‘ontog¬ eny recapitulates phylogeny’ through Freud’s theory of trauma hybridises genealogy, stratoanalysis and informa¬ tion theory into a cryptography of this cosmic pain. What howls for release in eukaryotic cells, carbon molecules, nerve ganglia, and silicone chips, are the ‘thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings’ that populate the planet’s seething inner core. Geotraumatics radicalises Deleuze-Guattari’s insistence that schizoanalysis should extend further than the terrain of personal or familial drama, to invest the social and political realms, and pushes beyond history and biol¬ ogy to incorporate the geological and the cosmological within the purview of the transcendental unconscious. Behind what seem like absurdities - such as the claim that lumbar back pain is an expression of geocosmic trauma - lies the contention that the root source of the disturbance which the organism identifies according to its parochial frame of reference - mummy-daddy - or which it construes in terms of the threat of individual death, is a more profound trauma rooted in physical reality itself, a generalised alienation endemic to the stratification

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of matter as such. What is noteworthy here is a certain deepening of pessimism: repression extends ‘all the way down’ to the cells of the body, the rocks of the earth, inhering in organised structure as such. All things, not just the living, yearn for escape; all things seek release from their organisation, which however induces further labyrinthine complications. Nothing short of the com¬ plete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence.

As Nietzsche suggested, the structure and usage of the human body is the root source of the system of neurotic afflictions co-extensive with human existence; but bipe- dalism, erect posture, forward facing vision, the cranial verticalisation of the human face, the laryngeal constric¬ tion of the voice, are themselves all indices of a succes¬ sion of geotraumatic catastrophes separating the material potencies of the body from its stratified actuality. Just as the bipedal head impedes ‘vertebro-perceptual linearity’, the human larynx inhibits ‘virtual speech’. One cannot dismantle the face without also evacuating the voice. Since in geotraumatic terms, the human voice itself is - via the various accidents of hominid evolution - the expression of geotrauma, ‘stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralin- gual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are [...] laden with biopolitical intensity - they threaten to bypass

editors’ introduction

the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers.’

Texts such as ‘KataqoniX’ accordingly attempt a performative evacuation of the voice, disintegrating semantics into intensive sequence (notably through the use of extracts from Artaud’s notebooks, where ‘poetry’ slides into delirious combinatorics). One of the tasks of schizoanalysis has now become the decrypting of the ‘tics’ bequeathed to the human frame by the geotraumatic catastrophe, and ‘KataqoniX’ treats vestigial semantic content as a mere vehicle for code ‘from the outside’: the ‘tic’ symptoms of geotraumatism manifested in the shape of sub-linguistic clickings and hissings. Already disintegrated into the number-names of a hyperpagan pan¬ theon, syncretically drawing on the occult, nursery rhyme, anthropology, s f and Lovecraft, among other sources, the ‘subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies ’(Artaud) beneath language is now allowed uninhibited (but rigorously-prepared) development, in an effort to corporeally de-engineer the organicity of logos.

The element of these explorations remains the trans¬ formed conception of space vividly exhibited in Gibsonian cyberpunk and which is a crucial component in Land’s writings, a powerful bulwark against Kant’s architectonic ambition to subsume all space under unity. Coding and sequencing mechanisms alone now construct intensive space, and this lies at the core of Land’s typology of

editors’ introduction

number, since dimensionality is a consequence of strati¬ fication. Naming and numbering converge in counting, understood as immanent fusion of nomination and sequencing. No longer an index of measure, number becomes diagrammatic rather than metric. From the perspective of Land’s ‘transcendental arithmetic’, the Occidental mathematisation of number is denounced as a repressive mega-machine of knowledge - an excres¬ cent outgrowth of the numbering practices native to exploratory intelligence - and the great discoveries of mathematics are interpreted as misconstrued discover¬ ies about the planomenon (or plane of consistency), as exemplified by Godel’s ‘arithmetical counterattack against axiomatisation . Land eschews the orthodox philosophical reception of Godel as the mathematician who put an end to Hilbert’s dream of absolute formal consistency, thus opening up a space for meta-mathematical speculation. More important, for Land, are the implications of Godel’s ‘decoded’ approach to number, which builds on the Richard Paradox, generated by the insight that numbers are, at once, indices and data.

The Godel episode also gives Land occasion to expand upon the theme of the ‘stratification’ of number: accord¬ ing to the model of stratification, as the ‘lower strata’ of numbers become ever more consolidated and metrically rigidified, their problematic component reappears at a ‘higher’ strata in the form of ‘angelic’ mathematical

editors’ introduction

entities as-yet resistant to rigorous coding. A sort of apotheosis is reached in this tendency with Godel’s flatten¬ ing of arithmetic through the cryptographic employment of prime numbers as numerical ‘particles’, and Cantor’s discovery of ‘absolute cardinality’ in the sequence of transfinites.

Thus for Land the interest of Godel’s achievement is not primarily ‘mathematical’ but rather belongs to a line¬ age of the operationalisation of number in coding systems that will pass through Turing and into the technological mega-complex of contemporary techno-capital.

By using arithmetic to code meta-mathematical state¬ ments and hypothesising an arithmetical relation between the statements - an essentially qabbalistic procedure - Godel also indicates the ‘reciprocity between the logicisa- tion of number and the numerical decoding of language’, highlighting a possible revolutionary role for other non- mathematical numerical practices. As well as reappraising numerology in the light of such ‘lexicographic’ insights, the mapping of stratographic space opens up new avenues of investigation - limned in texts such as ‘Introduction to Qwernomics’ - into the effective, empirical effects of culture - chapters of a ‘universal history of contingency’ radicalising Nietzsche’s insight that ‘our writing equip¬ ment contributes its part to our thinking’. The varieties of ‘abstract culture’ present in games, rhythms, calendri- cal systems, etc., become the subject of an attempt at

editors’ introduction

deliberate, micro-cultural insurrection through number, exemplified in the ccru’s ‘hyperstitional’ spirals and the ‘qwertypological’ diagrams that in the end merge with the qabbalistic tracking of pure coding ‘coincidences’. Ultimately, it is not just a question of conceiving , but of practicing new ways of thinking the naming and numbering of things. Importantly, this allows Land to diagnose the ills of ‘postmodernism’ - the inflation of hermeneutics into a generalised historicist relativism - in a manner that differs from his contemporaries’ predominantly semantic interpretations of the phenomenon, and to propose a rigorous intellectual alternative that does not involve reverting to dogmatic modernism.

Kant’s delimitation of the conditions of experience for¬ ever withdraws us from contact with the unknown, the correlation extending from present to future leaving no possibility even in principle for the ‘rebellion’ of matter. For Land, correlation is basically a temporal problem: ‘An animal with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a script’. A ‘false memory syndrome’, indeed memory itself, ‘screens’ the organism from intensive time.

Against this profoundly ambiguous and tensile project of enlightenment, against its formal foreclosure of alter¬ ity and novelty, Land had set the adventurers - ‘poets,

editors’ introduction

werewolves, vampires’ - who explore death and attempt to plot out modes of escape, activating the unconscious revolutionary force shackled by the inhibited syntheses of modern culture. Meanwhile, if capital is still a ‘social straitjacket’ of schizo-production, at least it is its ‘most dissolved form’. The dis-inhibition of synthesis at the level of collective human experience - a dis-inhibition that could only be carried out by capitalism as the impersonal placeholder for transcendental subjectivity - seems to offer the possibility of shattering the transcendental screen that shields the human socius from the absolute exteriority of a space-time beyond measure.

In ‘Kant, Capital and Incest’ Land had described the real conditions of the ‘inhibited synthesis’ of capital as an ‘indefinitely suspended process of genocide’ tantamount to ‘passive genocide’. Where Land’s work had set out with the hope that the ‘disaster of world history’ (a world ‘capa¬ ble’, in Artaud’s words, ‘of committing suicide without even noticing it’) and the repression that is ‘social history’ and that reaches its most tensile point in modernity’s volatile compromise with tradition could be unlocked, his later work mordantly observes that the disaster is already present in planets, cells, and bodies, that the revolutionary task is not just terrestrial but cosmic in scope.

Conversely, the ‘consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace’, the ‘total de¬ politicisation’ and ‘absolute annihilation of resistance

editors’ introduction

to market relations’ denounced in ‘Kant, Capital and Incest’ as ‘an impossible megalomaniac fantasy’ requiring ‘annihilating poverty’ to ‘stimulate’ the labour-force into participation, seems to become an object of veneration:

Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded, shamelessly soliciting any impulse that might contribute an increment of economisable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives. Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its end¬ lessly gathering tide. ‘Go for growth’ now means ‘Go (hard) for capitalism’.

From Land’s initial characterisation of the revolutionary task as one of pushing capitalism to the point of its auto¬ dissolution via the complete dis-inhibition of productive synthesis - a dis-inhibition announcing the convergence of social production and cosmic schizophrenia proclaimed in Anti-Oedipus - we arrive at the blunt admission that there is no foreseeable ‘beyond’ to the ‘infinite’ expansion of capitalism (since capitalism is ‘beyondness’ as such). The tactical embrace of unlimited deregulation, marketisation,

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

commodification, and privatisation, as vectors of social deterritorialization, apparently flips over into a com¬ placent acceptance of actually-existing capitalist social relations predicated on a transcendental and empirically unfalsifiable commitment to capitalism’s inexhaustible capacity for innovation, which only a ‘transcendental miserabilist5 would dare query:

Capitalism [...] has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation. The Transcendental Miserabilist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course. Call this new? It’s still nothing but change.

Here Land’s rebuttal of ‘left miserabilism’ insists on capitalism’s innovative potency even as his own work casts doubt upon the possibility of sharply dis-intricating reterritorializing change from deterritorialized novelty. If stratification is a cosmic rather than a sociocultural predicament, then on what grounds can one maintain that capitalism uniquely among terrestrial phenomena harbours the unparalleled capacity to unlock the strata? Land had tied the ‘aesthetic operation’ to matter’s dis¬ ruptive potencies, and lauded capitalism’s generation of artificial sensoria as an amplification of the domain of the problematic. Yet once the disruptions of sensation are

editors’ introduction

seen to be hemmed-in by the ubiquity of stratic synthesis, this premium on problematising subversion is vitiated by the realisation that, whatever remains to be troubled by capitalism’s allegedly inexhaustible disruptive potency, its very susceptibility to disturbance ensures its subjection to an inexpugnable residue of stratification.

Now himself domiciled in ‘neo-China’, Land’s jour¬ nalistic writings for the China Post and other publications would seem to indicate that he has relinquished his earlier, feverish pursuit of escape, and is content to promote a glob¬ ally ascendant Sino-capitalism. Here is Land’s impressively speculative contextualisation of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo in a recent guidebook:

Modernity’s ceaseless, cumulative change defies every pre-existing pattern, abandoning stability without embracing the higher order of a great cycle or the simple destination of an eschatological conclusion. Although establishing something like a new nor¬ mality, it departs decisively from any sort of steady state. It displays waves and rhythms, but it subsumes such cycles, rather than succumbing to them. Whilst nourishing apocalyptic speculation, it continuously complicates anticipations of an end time. It engen¬ ders a previously unanticipated mode of time and history, characterised by ever-accelerated directional transformation, whose indices are quantitative growth

editors’ introduction

and qualitative innovation. The worldwide consoli¬ dation of modernity only deepens its fundamental mystery [...]

Modern Shanghai and the World Expo were born within a single decade, over 150 years ago. Since then, the twin histories of the world’s most iconic modern city and the greatest festival of modern civilisation have unfolded in parallel, with frequent cross-fertilisa¬ tions, through dizzy ascents and calamitous plunges that tracked the rise, fall, and renaissance of the modernist spirit. Through all these vicissitudes, each has reflected in large measure the trials, tempests, and triumphs of worldwide industrial modernity, defining its promise, nourishing its achievements, and sharing in its setbacks. At World Expo 2010 Shanghai, these parallel tracks melt together, into the largest discrete event in world history.4

Rather than seeking to dissolve the global Kapital metrop¬ olis’ through the release of ‘uninhibited synthesis’, and thus putting an end to the ‘nightmare’ or ‘disaster of world history’, Land now sees in the massively concen¬ trated metropolis a mighty expression of that history. Perplexingly, the auto-sophisticating runaway of planetary

4 N. Land, Shanghai Expo Guide 2,010 (Shanghai: Urbanatomy, 2010).

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

meltdown is now made an accessory to the development of cultural capital.

It would (and will) be easy for Land’s enemies to find a glib satisfaction in this, but perhaps it only exacerbates the troubling nature of what came before - precisely because of its consistency. If anything, this juxtaposition of the cosmically portentous with overblown marketing hype continues the startling consistency of intent and analysis in all the texts collected in this volume. As satisfying as it may be to leftists outraged by Land’s ‘accelerationism’, it is difficult to discern here either the betrayal or aban¬ donment of an earlier more promising vector, or even the revelation that the ‘truth’ of his position was always a puerile capitulation to neo-liberal ‘realism’ shrouded in mysticism. Any surprise at the transition from Land’s ‘philosophical writings’ to the employment of his evi¬ dently still razor-sharp post-genre writing in the actual service of capitalist booster-hype may simply bespeak an incapacity to believe that Land actually meant what he said - that writing was indeed nothing but a machine for intensification. In fact, if one is right to detect an irrevocable shift in Land’s ‘tactics of intensification’, what is crucial is that this only took place once Land himself had succeeded in shattering his own illusions that this intensification could, ‘prematurely’ so to speak, break the bonds of cosmic stratification.

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

Land’s blanket denunciation of the left’s ‘transcendental miserabilism’, the apparent degeneration of his once scalpel-sharp dissection of the body of capitalism into schizophrenizing and repressive tendencies, may seem to dissolve the complexities of his work into a superlative cosmic version of the familiar neo-liberal narrative accord¬ ing to which ‘there is no alternative’, and the wholesale identification of capital with life, growth, and history. But this verdict only becomes possible after the passing of the last vestige of ‘dionysian optimism’, in the abandonment of the notion that the experimental engagement with numerical practices, voodoo, dance music, etc., might somehow grant access to the insurrectionary energies at work in capitalism’s intense core, over and above any simply mundane participation in capitalist reality.

Nevertheless, Land’s incisive assessment of the machinic reality of a schizo-capitalism currently in the pro¬ cess of penetrating and colonizing the innermost recesses of human subjectivity exposes the fatally anachronistic character of the metaphysical conception of human agency upon which ‘revolutionary’ thought continues to rely. The anachronistic character of left voluntarism is nowhere more apparent than in its resort to a negative theology of perpetually deferred ‘hope’, mordantly poring over its own reiterated depredation. Worse still is the compla¬ cent sanctimony of those ‘critical’ theorists who concede that the prospect of revolutionary transformation is not

editors’ introduction

only unattainable but undesirable (given its dangerously ‘totalitarian’ propensities), but who remain content to pursue a career in critique, safely insulated from the risks of political praxis. The challenge of Land’s work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land’s positive construc¬ tion as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implica¬ tions of his thought. Nor can it be concluded that this alternative philosophical path cannot be further explored.

No one could accuse Land himself of not having taken this project as far as he possibly could - all the way through true madness and back into a banality whose true underlying insanity he still maintains but now knows is not voluntarily accessible (or even acceleratable, perhaps). ‘A Dirty Story’ stands as testament to, or post-mortem analysis of, this project in transcendental empiricism, revealing that Land’s last hope for humanity - that it might be escaped - and the greatest wager of life - that it might give access to death - experimentally failed. But perhaps they ‘failed better’ than those who went before him. The legacy of Land’s experiments, like the rags and tatters of the visionaries whose works he picked through for clues, includes contributions to the diagnosis of the cosmic, bio¬ logical, evolutionary, and cultural genealogy and nature of the human; forays into the thinking of number that exceed in breadth and depth any extant ‘philosophy of

editors’ introduction

mathematics’; a sophisticated and culturally contempo¬ rary philosophical thinking of time and modernity; and above all a series of textual machines whose compelling, strangely intoxicating power must, in a social and intel¬ lectual climate characterised by neo-classical sobriety, open up forgotten, suppressed, and alternative lineages and superpositions capable of inspiring others to take up the experiment once more, launching new assaults against the Human Security System.

Everything in Land’s work that falls outside the param¬ eters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter. In Bataille’s incisive formulation, ‘the unknown [...] is not distin¬ guished from nothingness by anything that discourse can announce’. Like his fellows of the ‘inferior race’, what we retain of Land’s expeditions are diverse and scattered remnants, here constellated for the first time. These are also tools or weapons; arrows that deserve to be taken up again and sharpened further. The wound needs to be opened up once more, and if this, volume infects a new generation, already enlivened by a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick Land’s work - it will have fulfilled its purpose.

ROBIN MACKAY & RAY BRASSIER TRURO & BEIRUT, FEBRUARY 2011

Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity

But intuition and the concept differentiate themselves from each other specifically; because they do not inter-mix with each other.

IMMANUEL KANT1

Significantly ... incest proper, and its metaphorical form as the violation of a minor (by someone cold enough to be her father’, as the expression goes), even combines in some countries with its direct opposite, inter -racial sexual relations, an extreme form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducements to horror and collective vengeance .

CLAUDE LEVI -STRAUSS2

1 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Suhrkampf, 1974), Anmerkungto section VIII of the Introduction to Kant’s first edition, 40; for a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, tr. P. Guyer & E. Matthews (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), First Introduction, VIII, 29.

2 C. Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Taylor & Francis, 1969), 10.

FANGED NOUMENA

No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly ‘ German ’ enough , in the sense in which the word ‘ German ’ is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood- poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3

For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of ‘bantustans’ or ‘homelands’ the black African population can be sus¬ pended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. This policy seeks to recast the currently existing political

3 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 339.

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographi¬ cal relations modelled on national sovereignty. The direct disenfranchisement of the subject peoples would then be re-expressed within the dominant international code of ethno-geographical (national) autonomy.

World opinion discriminates between the relation South African whites have to the blacks they employ, and the relation North American whites, for instance, have to the Third World labour force they employ (directly or indirectly), because it acknowledges an indissoluble claim upon the entire South African land-mass by a population sharing an internationally recognized national identity. My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful - although piecemeal and largely unconscious - ‘bantustan’ policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis. Any attempt by political forces in the Third World to resolve the problems of their neo-colonial integration into the world trading system on the basis of national sovereignty is as naive as would be the attempt of black South Africans if they opted for a ‘bantustan’ solution to their particular politico-economic dilemma. The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the

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workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses.

Despite inadequacies in Marx’s grasp of the nation state in its colonial and neo-colonial functioning, his account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’4 clearly demonstrates that the origin of wage labour relations is not itself economic, but lies in an overt war against the people, or their forced removal from previous conditions of subsistence. It is the outward shock-wave of this violent process of coercion, whereby the subsistence producer is driven into the marketplace, that determines the character of the imperialist project and its offspring. Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality - i.e. geographi¬ cally - from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displace¬ ment of social decision-making into the marketplace. But this ideal of total de-politicization, or the absolute annihilation of resistance to market relations, is an impos¬ sible megalomaniac fantasy, and Marx’s contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market (equal to the cost of its reproduction) will tend strongly to express an equally ‘natural’ political refusal of the market, continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie.

4 K. Marx, Capital: Volume I, tr. Ben Fowkes (NY: Vintage, 1977), 667ff.

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

The only practical option available to the rulers of capitalist societies has lain in the global disaggregation of the political system, accompanied by a regional distor¬ tion of the world labour trading system in favour of the working classes in the metropolitan regions (‘welfare capitalism’). This is why a deep complicity has continued to exist between the form of the ‘nation state’ as interna¬ tional political agent and an economic order based upon the commodification of labour. Since it is of systematic necessity that the economic conditions of an undistorted labour market are accompanied by political crisis, the world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty). The global labour market is easily interpreted, therefore, as a sustained demographic disaster that is systemati¬ cally displaced away from the political institutions of the metropolis.

This process of displacement, which is the ulti¬ mate ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ of capital accumulation, is dependent upon those issues of ‘kinships’ or ‘mar¬ riage organization’ (the sexual economy of gender and race) which Marxists have often tended to consider as surface features of an underlying mode of production.

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In this paper I shall argue that with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Western cultural history culminates in a self-reflecting bourgeois civilization, because his thought of synthesis (or relation to alterity), and also the strangula¬ tion of this thought within his system, captures modernity as a problem. But the modernity thus symptomized by its philosophical exposition is not primarily the penultimate phase of a dialectic of society and production, it is rather the necessity that historically itself - expansionary social and economic development, or ‘synthesis’ - compromises with a profound continuity whose basic aspects are on the one hand patrilineal descent, and on the other a formal logic of identity that was already concluded in its essentials by Aristotle. These two aspects, the genealogical and the logical, are functions of a position of abstract masculine subjectivity coincident with the patronymic. This position is the proto-cuiturai fundament of every tiling that is able to count as the same. The tradition is thus rooted in a communication between culture and population, whose medium is the stability (‘identity’) ofthemaleline. Moder¬ nity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more funda¬ mentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal. It is only by understanding the inhibitive function of patriarchies in relation to exogamic dissipation (an inhibition that is

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

supremely logical in that it conserves identity, and which is for this reason violently xenophobic) that we can make sense of capital production and its tendency towards the peculiar cultural mutation that was baptised by Mussolini as ‘fascism’. This is because the restriction of cultural synthesis, based upon a strenuous endogamy at the level of the national community, is the ultimate outcome of the concerted ‘liberalization’ of kinship organizations within (metropolitan) industrial societies.

A capitalist trading empire is a developed form of exogamic patriarchy, and inherits its tensions. Domina¬ tion of the other is inhibited in principle from developing into full absorption, because it is the residual alterity of the other that conditions the generation of surplus. The parallel difference between a labour market and a slave market is based on the fact that one cannot do business with a slave (but only with a slave-owner), and similarly, one cannot base a kinship system upon a harem. The prevalence of slave-labour within the Hitlerite new order in Eastern Europe is thus a clear indication that the Nazi conquests were in an important sense ‘post-imperialist’. In contrast to the fascist ‘mixed economy’ of slavery and extermination, colonial wage-labour exploitation, even to the point of murder through impoverishment, leaves open the possibility of a radical destabilization of the metropolis. But what is crucial to the demarcation of a colonial from a neo-colonial system is a transnational

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diffusion of ethnicity. As soon as a metropolitan society disengages its organization of kinship and citizenship from its international economic syntheses it already reveals proto-fascist traits, and on this basis it is easy to see that the radical aspect to the colonial project - the explosion of national identity and the dissipation of metropolitan transcendence - was strangled at birth within Western history (with the emergence of Judaeo-Christian race theories).

The disaster of world history is that capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncontrol¬ lable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father’s heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical - or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal - synthesis. Instead, kinship and trade were systematically isolated from each other, so that the internationalization of the economy was coupled with an entrenchment of xenophobic (nationalistic) kinship practices, maintaining a concentration of political and economic power within an isolated and geographically sedentary ethnic stock. Thus, when we discuss capital in its historical concrete¬ ness, we are simultaneously discussing a frustration of the cultural tendency of human societies towards expansive exogamy. Capital is the point at which a culture refuses the

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

possibility - which it has itself engendered - of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit.

I want to touch upon this condition of modernity - which can be awkwardly described as patriarchal neo- colonial capital accumulation, but which I shall come to name ‘inhibited synthesis’ - not as a historian or a political theorist, but as a philosopher. The philosophical task in relation to modernity is that of delineating and challenging the type of thinking which characterizes it. But what we are to understand as ‘thinking’ is not at all clear in advance, indeed, the very thought of the ‘in advance’ (which Kant called the a priori) is itself the predominant trait of our contemporary reason. Western societies departed from the stagnant theocracies of the Middle Ages through a series of more or less violent con¬ vulsions that have engendered an explosive possibility of novelty on earth. But these same societies simultaneously shackled this new history by systematically compromis¬ ing it. This ambiguous movement of ‘enlightenment’, which characterizes the emergence of industrial societies trading in commodities, is intellectually stimulated by its own paradoxical nature. An enlightenment society wants both to learn and to legislate for all time, to open itself to the other and to consolidate itself from within, to expand indefinitely whilst reproducing itself as the same. Its ultimate dream is to grow whilst remaining identical

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to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerability. Where the European ancien regime was parochial and insular, modernity is appropriate. It lives in a profound but uneasy relation to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself on the basis of exploitation, or interaction from a position of unilateral mastery. I think it is likely that the volatile mixture of hatred and desire that typifies an exploitative culture bears comparison with the psychology of rape.

The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation it is no longer fully other. If before encountering other¬ ness we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance. And this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the a priori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to otherness we have always already torn out the tongue of alterity before entering into relation with it. This aggres¬ sive logical absurdity (the absurdity of logic itself) reaches its zenith in the philosophy of Kant, whose basic problem was to find an account for the possibility of what he termed ‘synthetic a priori knowledge’, which is knowledge that is both given in advance by ourselves, and yet adds to what we know. As we have seen, this problem is the same as that of accounting for the possibility of modernity or

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

enlightenment, which is to say, of the inhibited encounter with alterity.

Modern philosophy between Rene Descartes (1596— 1650) and Immanuel Kant (17524-1804) is usually retro¬ spectively understood in terms of the two basic tendencies which we refer to as ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. No philosopher was a perfect and consistent exemplar of either of these tendencies, but the exponents of each tended to become increasingly radical in one direction or the other. By the time Kant wrote his first great critique, The Critique of Pure Reason? he was able to take the writings of David Hume (1711-76) as definitive for empirical thought, and those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) as definitive for rationalism. He took the basic argument of the empiricists to be that knowledge is synthetic and a posteriori, meaning that it takes the form of an addition to what is inherent to reason, and thus follows from expe¬ rience (or an encounter with what is outside ourselves). In contrast to this, he saw the rationalists to be arguing that knowledge is characteristically analytic and a priori, meaning that it is derived from what is already inherent to reason, and thus anticipates experience by constructing systems of logical deduction from basic axioms. Knowl¬ edge is analytic or synthetic depending on whether its

5 I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr., ed. P. Guyer & A. W. Wood (Cambridge/NY:

Cambridge University Press, 1998),

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source is intrinsic or extrinsic to the faculty of reason, and a priori or a posteriori depending on whether it precedes or succeeds the contact with sensation, or with what is outside reason. It is with these pairs of concepts, the analytic/synthetic couple and the a priori/a posteriori couple, that Kant determines the structure of his own thinking in relation to that of his recent predecessors.

Kant thought that both empiricist and rationalist philosophers had accepted the simple alignment of the synthetic with the a posteriori and of the analytic with the a priori. This is to say, the relation between these couples had seemed to be itself analytic, so that to speak of analytic a priori judgments would add nothing to the concept of the analytic, or in other words, an analysis of the concept ‘analytic’ would yield the concept of the ‘a priori’ as already implicit within it. This assumption was not accepted by Kant, who re-aligned the two pairs of concepts in a perpendicular fashion to form a grid, thus yielding four permutations. He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but clung dog¬ gedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori. This new conception of knowledge was relevant to an ‘object’ that had not previously been formulated: the conditions of experience. Kant described his ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy as a shift from the question ‘what must the mind be like in order to know?’ to the question ‘what must objects be like in

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

order to be known?’ The answers to this latter question would provide a body of synthetic a priori knowledge, telling us about experience without being derived from experience. It would justify the emergence of knowledge that was both new and timelessly certain, grounding the enlightenment culture of a civilization confronting an ambiguous dependence upon novelty.

Because a developed knowledge of the conditions of experience presupposes a relation to the outside it is synthetic and not analytic, but because it concerns the pure form of the relation as such and not the sensory material involved in the relation it is a priori and not a posteriori. It is solely concerned with the forms of appear¬ ance, or the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us. Kant calls this pure form of synthesis ‘transcendental’, and opposes it to the inconstant content of synthesis, with which the empiricists had been concerned, and which he calls ‘empirical’. Kant’s ‘object’ is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. This universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be ‘on offer’ for experience, it is the ‘exchange value’ that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind. Between medieval scholasticism and Kant Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity, one

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resolves instead to control the system of trade. With the overthrow of the ancien regime it became impossible to simply exclude novelty; it could only be appropriated, stamped with a constant form, and integrated into an immutable formal system. In 7 he Elementary Structures of Kinship Claude Levi-Strauss notes the frequent distinction made by various societies between normal and ‘rich food’. Normal food is consumed by its producers as a means to their subsistence, whilst rich food is given to another to consume, and received from another. This is not primarily based upon a differentiation of social classes within a system of production, but rather, upon a differentiation between tribes, or separate systems of production. The difference between rich food and normal food maps onto the difference between filiation (relation by blood) and alliance (relation by marriage). This is because rich food occupies the position of women within a marriage system regulated by patrilineal exogamy, with its producer renouncing it for himself, and thus echoing the prohibi¬ tion of incest. What is of particular philosophical inter¬ est, however, is that it also marks a distinction between the ‘rational’ (analytic) and the ‘empirical’ (synthetic), and thus defines a terrain upon which we can sketch an economy of knowledge. Rich food comes from outside the system, and the contortions undergone by structural anthropology in its project to recapture it within an expanded system of relations replay Kant’s efforts to

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

reduce synthesis to an expanded horizon of unchanging forms. If ‘rich food’ is the primordial element of trade, its metamorphosis into the modern ‘commodity’ can be seen as a suppression of radical synthesis, the problematic process which provides enlightenment reason with its object of thought.

The cultural inhibition of synthesis takes a form that Levi-Strauss calls ‘dual organization’. 6 A dual organization arises when two groups form a closed system of reciprocal exchange, in which each consumes the rich food, and marries the women, of the other. Such organizations reproduce themselves culturally through shared myths articulated around basic dualities (day/night, sun/moon, up-river/d own-river etc.). The function of these myths is to capture alterity within a system of rules, to provide it with an identity, and to exclude the possibility of the radically different. It should not surprise us, therefore, that Kant inherited a philosophical tradition whose decisive concepts were organized into basic couples (spirit/matter, form/content, abstract/concrete, universal/particular, etc.). He delineates some basic structure of this tradition in the section of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Transcendental Dialectic’. In this section he interprets this dichotomous heritage as a problem (to which Kant gives the name ‘antinomy’) and initiates a new phase of

6 Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship , 69-83.

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Western philosophy, now characterized as the critique of metaphysics. Kant argues that the tendency of previ¬ ous metaphysics to conceive coherent, but unpersuasive and antagonistic, intellectual systems resulted from the application of pure (transcendental) concepts to argu¬ ments concerning the nature of things in themselves (noumena). The critical philosophy therefore restricts the jurisdiction of all concepts to the realm of possible appearance (intuition), suggesting (as we have seen) that the a priori forms of knowledge have no purchase on any reality transcending the phenomenon. Oppositional terms are no longer accepted as descriptions capturing reality, but are interpreted as pure forms of reason that can only be meaningfully deployed theoretically when applied to objects of possible appearance, which fall within the legislative domain of the ‘faculty’ which Kant calls ‘the understanding’ [Verst and].

Since ‘reality’ is itself a transcendental concept, Kant’s usage of a distinction between appearance and reality to restrict the deployment of pure concepts already suggests a crucial difficulty with his project, since every attempt to formulate a relation or distinction between the phenom¬ enal and noumenal realms (the world as it appears to us or is understood, and the world as it is in itself) must itself relapse into the pre-critical and illegitimate deployment of conceptual thought. One crucial symptom of this is that the structure of Kantian critique itself perpetuates the

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

oppositional form of metaphysical thought, since its reso¬ lution of the antinomies depends upon the mobilization of further dichotomies, in particular those of transcendental/ empirical, phenomenon/noumenon, concept/intuition, and analysis/synthesis. In other words, Kant still wants to say something about radical alterity, even if it is only that it has no relevance to us, yet he has deprived himself of the right to all speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance. The vocabulary that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually deter¬ mined from the inside, within a binary myth or cultural symptom of dual organization. It is thus the inhibition of synthesis - the delimitation of alterity in advance - that sets up the modern form of the ontological question: ‘how do we know that matter exists?’ That the very existence of materiality is problematic for enlightenment thought is symptomatic of the colonial trading systems that cor¬ respond to it. Alterity cannot be registered, unless it can be inscribed within the system, according to the intercon¬ nected axes of exchange value (price) and the patronymic, or, in other words, as a commodity with an owner.

What falls outside this recognized form is everything that resists commodification, the primordial independ¬ ence that antedates the constitution of the destituted proletarian. As I have suggested, this inchoate mass of more or less explicit resistance to capital is isolated outside

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the metropolis by a combination of automatic economic processes (the concentration of poverty) and restrictive kinship practices. Modern capital has therefore brought about a fundamental dislocation between filiation and alliance by simultaneously de-regulating alliance and abstracting it from all kinship implications. The primor¬ dial anthropological bond between marriage and trade is dissolved, in order that capital can ethnically and geographically quarantine its consequences from itself. The question of racism, which arises under patriarchal capital as the default of a global trade in women (a parochialism in the system of misogynistic violence; the non-emergence of a trans-cultural exogamy), is thus more complex than it might seem, and is bound in profound but often paradoxical ways to the functioning of patri¬ archy and capital. Systematic racism is a sign that class positions within the general (trans-national) economy are being distributed on a racial basis, which implies an effective, if not a juridical, apartheid.

Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an ideal¬ ist, or in other words a Christian (a ‘cunning Christian as Nietzsche calls him)7 and identified universality with ideality rather than with power. Kant’s economy of the concept, which is the assimilation of experience into a

7 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; and the Anti-Christ, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London:

Penguin, 1990), 49.

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

system of exchange values, is irresistible in principle, and thus does not recognize a problem of rebellion. It is only with the implicit recognition of the need for a systematic evacuation of rebellion from the metropolis by means of a geographically distorted labour market that racism arises in its contemporary form, which is ultimately that of a restricted franchise (on a national basis) over the politi¬ cal management of the global means of production. It is no longer a question of ‘taxation without representation’ (except by means of interest payments), but rather of a metropolitan capital seeking to abstract itself from all political reference, becoming ‘offshore’, although not to the extent that it loses its geopolitical condition of exist¬ ence (the US war-machine). The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economics, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication, or exchange.

It is in his second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason ,8 that Kant capitalizes upon the ethno-ethical con¬ sequences of the first: that justice must be prosecuted without negotiation. Kant’s moral theory is an ethics of appropriative modernity, and breaks with the parochial or scriptural morality of the ancien regime. Where Judaic, Christian, and Islamic moral codes served as legitimations

8 I. Kant, ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, in Practical Philosophy , tr., ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133-271.

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of imperial projects in their periods of ascendency, Kantian morality is, inversely, legitimated by the position of impe¬ rial or universal jurisdiction. Only that is moral which can be demanded of every rational being unconditionally, in the name of an ultra-empire that Kant names the ‘empire of ends5 [Reich derZwecke\. The law of this empire is called the ‘categorical imperative5, which means a law stemming solely from the purity of the concept, and thus dictated by the absolute monologue of colonial reason. In the purity of categorical morality the incestuous blood-line of the phar¬ aohs is still detectable, but sublimated into an impersonal administration. The law is that which cannot be legiti¬ mately discussed, and which is therefore an unresponsive or unilateral imposition. It is not difficult to see that the second critique distills the xenophobic violence of the first and elevates it to the most extreme possible fanaticism. Where theoretical knowledge is open to a limited negotia¬ tion with alterity, practical or moral certainty is forbidden from entering into relation with anything outside itself, except to issue commands. Kant’s practical subject already prefigures a deaf fiihrer, barking impossible orders that seem to come from another world. Kant makes a further strenuous effort to push forward the horizon of a priori synthesis in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment. If the first Critique corresponds to appropriative economy or commodification, and the second critique corresponds to imperial jurisdiction, the third critique corresponds to

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

the exercise of war at those margins of the global system that continue to resist both the market and the administra¬ tion. It is concerned with the type of pleasure that is expe¬ rienced when an object demonstrates an extra -juridical submission or abasement before the faculty of judgment; an experience which Kant associates with the contempla¬ tion of beauty. The first Critique already exhibits a concep¬ tion of excess or a priori synthesis that generalizes the principles of the labour market to all objects of theoretical cognition and transforms the understanding into a form of intellectual capital. In the third critique there is a far more aggressive conception of excess, which generates a feeling of delight, because it is essentially extortionate. This excess is not a surplus of certainty stemming from dimensions of objectivity possessed in advance of intuition, and thus by right, but rather a surplus of purchase upon the object. Kant argues that we have no transcendental right to expect natural laws to be sufficiently homogeneous for us to grasp. When confronting the heterogeneity of intuition, reason must engage in a kind of Pascalian wager; assuming an intelligible system of nature because it has nothing to lose by not doing so. The submission of the outside in general to the inside in general, or of nature to the idea, i.e. con¬ quest, is not guaranteed by any principle. The capitalist feels a neutral satisfaction in the production of ‘normal profits’, but the conqueror feels exultation in the attain¬ ment of victory, precisely because there was no reason to

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expect it. Kant’s advice to the imperial war-machine in his third critique can be summarized as: ‘treat all resistance as if it were less than you might justifiably fear’. The Critique of Judgment thus projects the global victory of capitalized reason as pure and exuberant ambition.

The only possible politics of purity is fascism, or a militant activism rooted in the inhibitory and exclusive dimensions of a metropolitanism. Racism, as a regulated, automatic, and indefinitely suspended process of genocide (as opposed to the hysterical and unsustainable genocide of the Nazis) is the real condition of persistence for a global economic system that is dependent upon an aggregate price of labour approximating to the cost of its bare sub¬ sistence, and therefore upon an expanding pool of labour power which must be constantly ‘stimulated’ into this market by an annihilating poverty. If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodity mar¬ kets as they displace themselves around the Third World, ‘disciplining’ the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies. The forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are ‘exogamic’ (or, less humanistically, ‘exotropic’); the synthetic energies that condition all surplus value, and yet co-exist with capital only under repression. A radical international socialism would not be a socialist ideology

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

generalized beyond its culture of origin, but a programme of collectivity or unrestrained synthesis that springs from the theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality. To get to a world without nations would in itself guarantee the achievement of all immediately post-capitalist social and economic goals. It is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneously homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics, since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascisizing valorizations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine ‘subject’. The pat¬ ronymic has irrecoverably divested all the women who fall under it of any recourse to an ethno-geographical identity; only the twin powers of father and husband suppress the nomadism of the anonymous female fluxes that patriarchy oppressively manipulates, violates, and psychiatrizes. By allowing women some access to wealth and social prestige the liberalization of patriarchy has sought to defuse the explosive force of this anonymity, just as capital has tended to reduce the voluptuous excess of exogamic conjugation to the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits. The increasingly incestual character of economic order - reaching its zenith in racist xenophobia - is easily masked as a series of ‘feminist’ reforms of patriarchy; as a de-com¬ modification of woman, a diminution of the obliterating effects of the patronymic, and a return to the mother. This is the sentimental ‘feminism’ that Nietzsche despised, and

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whose petit-bourgeois nationalist implications he clearly saw. The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation, but only if the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy are extrapolated beyond the possibil¬ ity of assimilation, rather than being criticized from the perspective of mutilated genealogies. Genealogy as the dissipation of recuperative origins (Nietzsche), not as sen¬ timental nostalgia. The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro¬ powers that suppress them most immediately. That is why the proto-fascism of nationality laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. In her meticulous studies of patriarchy Luce Irigaray has amply demonstrated the peculiar urgency of the feminist question,9 although the political solutions she suggests are often feebly nostal¬ gic, sentimental, and pacifistic. Perhaps only Monique

9 Amongst the growing body of Luce Irigaray ’s work available in English the most powerful arguments are to be found, perhaps, in Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and in essays amongst those compiled in This Sex which is not One, tr. C. Porter, C. Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially ‘Women on the Market’ (‘Le marche des femmes’), 170-91, and ‘Commodities Among Themselves’ (‘Des marchandises entreelles’), 192-7.

KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCEST

Wittig has adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism,10 and it is difficult not to be dispirited by the enormous reluctance women have shown historically to prosecute their strug¬ gle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression. The left tends to be evasive about the numbing violence intrinsic to revolutionary war, and feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mysti¬ cal and Ghandian ideologies. If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. It is this harsh truth that has deflected Western politics into an increasingly servile reformism, whilst transforming nationalist struggles into the sole arena of vigorous contention against particular configurations of capital. But, as I hope I have demon¬ strated, such nationalist struggles are relevant only to the geographical modulation of capital, and not to the radical

10 See especially M. Wittig, Les Guerilleres (Paris: Minuit, 1969); tr. D. Le Vay (Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

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jeopardizing of neo-colonialism (inhibited synthesis) as such. Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post- patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top - with all that this entails in terms of the commu¬ nication between individuated sovereignties - history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. With the aboli¬ tion of the inhibition of synthesis - of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kan¬ tianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst.

Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation

Martin Heidegger’s thinking continues to have a massive - and constantly growing - influence on the development of modern ‘philosophy’; in the formulation of its ques¬ tions, the selection of its ‘objects’, and the constructions of its history. Yet this in itself might not be enough to explain why his 1953 essay on the Austrian poet Georg Trakl should be of interest to us. Does Heidegger’s essay perhaps represent Trakl to us in a way that is enlightening or informative? Does it tell us something about poetry, or history, or language in general? Does it, in fact, succeed in doing anything at all? In his safely vacuous text on Trakl’s poetry Herbert Lindenberger writes:

It would seem gratuitous to complain of the wrong¬ headedness of Heidegger’s approach to Trakl, for Heidegger does not even pretend to use the poets he writes about for any purpose except the exposition of his own philosophy. But Heidegger’s study of Trakl seems to me considerably less successful than his study of Holderlin ... 1

1 H. Lindenberger, GeorgeTrakl (NY: Twayne, 1971), 141.

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Lindenberger does not ask what meaning can be given to ‘success’ within a history - like Heidegger’s history of being - for which the proper sense of progress has always been the expansion of devastation; a history, that is, which has been perpetually deflected from thinking by a pervasive theo-technical tradition. Platonic-Christian culture has made it not only possible, but also impera¬ tive, to think of poetry as the product of a poet, and, derivatively, as something to be ‘used’ by a philosopher for the purpose of illustrating representational concepts. It is this tradition which directs us to ask about the useful¬ ness and representational adequacy of Heidegger’s essay. Such questions are symptoms of a profound and positively constituted illiteracy, whose hegemony it has been the intellectual task of the (post-)modern age to question.

As forTrakl - who failed to organize his desires accord¬ ing to the laws of his civilization, failed to keep a job, became addicted to opium, enmeshed in alcoholism, failed to defeat his psychosis and died of a cocaine overdose in a military pharmacy - what would we be doing to him if we said he had ‘succeeded’ as a poet? Appropriating his delicate, futile ardour to a society that has forgotten how to despise itself? Trakl’s traces are the ruins of a miserable, even horrific, failure. A failure to adapt or conform, to repress or sublimate adequately, to produce, resolve, comfort, or conclude. This failure is not merely a default, however, but a violently traumatic condition.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

Th e evolution o f his style, i f i t i s still possible t o write coher¬ ently of such a thing, is a drive towards the dissolution of every criterion for evaluation. It is this above all which he learns from his decisive encounters with Rimbaud and Holderlin. The traditional aesthetics which would distinguish a traumatic content from a perfectly ‘achieved’ formal presentation loses all pertinence as Trakl presses language into the shadows. The last thing we should want is for Heidegger to ‘master’ these traumatized signs. To learn from Trakl is to write in ashes.

A long essay by Heidegger appeared in the sixty-first . (1953) issue of the German literary periodical Merkur which discussed the work of Georg Trakl. This mysterious text, at once intensely personal and strangely detached, was entitled ‘Georg Trakl. Eine Erorterung seines Gedich- tes’ (‘Georg Trakl. A situating of his poetry’). The same essay, renamed ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ (‘Language in the Poem’), and now subtitled ‘Eine Erorterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht’ (‘A situating of Georg Trakl’s poetry’), was later published (in 1959) as the second division of Heidegger’s book Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language). The essay which precedes it in the book, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’), is also concerned with Trakl, or, more precisely, with the reading of a single Trakl poem, Ein Winterabend (‘A Winter Evening’). ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’, in comparison, cites, or sites, no fewer than forty-three of Trakl’s poems in the course of a

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wide-ranging search for the well-spring of their peculiar language. Outside of these two texts Heidegger makes only glancing references to Trakl’s work and to the impact it had on his own thinking.

The 1953 essay consists of three numbered sections of uneven length, prefaced by a short untitled introduction or prologue. These basic partitions are not interrelated according to any conventional pedagogical principle, and do not unfold the stages of a developing argument. It is, for instance, very difficult to discriminate between the essay’s three main sections in terms of theses or themes, since each successive section recollects the discussion of the last and subtly displaces it. To depict this complex progression it is perhaps necessary to borrow the ‘metaphor’ Heidegger himself calls upon, that of a wave, which describes motion coiling into an enigmatic pulsion and cyclical repetition. Yet the peaks and troughs that alternate within Heidegger’s text do not follow the regular trace of an oscillograph; they cut a jagged and confusing path. As they rise a distinct ‘theme’ emerges, momentarily isolated from a maelstrom of interweaving currents. Due to the intensity of Trakl’s language, and to the momentum historically invested within it, each theme shatters into blinding foam when swept to its apex, and sinks again into swirling depths. In this essay I shall only attempt to explore limited stretches along a single of these interwoven currents: pursuing

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

elements of reflection and dispersion in Heidegger’s read¬ ing of Trakl’s poem Geistliche D drumming.

Heidegger’s readings of poetry are perhaps most distinctively characterized by the refusal to participate affirmatively in the discourse of European aesthetics, and the associated project of rigorously bracketing subject- object epistemological categories. He argues that when the categories of aesthetics are carried into the domain of linguistics or other varieties of language study they take the form of a distinction between a normal and a meta-language. The minimal notion of meta-language is a technical terminology which is distinctive to the critical or interpretative text. This terminology traces an ancestry for itself that is divergent in principle from that of the texts to which it is ‘applied’. The kinship of ‘thinker’ and ‘poet’ is annihilated. At variance to this sedimenting of metaphysics, Heidegger pursues a tendency towards the uttermost erasure of terminological distinctiveness. The language of poetry is not to be translated, but simply guided into a relationship with itself. And this guidance is not to be that of the thinker qua subject, but that of an impersonal thinking which is no longer disguised in the cloak of philosophy. Philosophy would no longer be the guardian of this relation, since the epoch of philosophy is simultaneous with that of meta-language. Or, put dif¬ ferently, meta-language is pre-eminently the language of metaphysics.

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The final essay in Unterwegs zur Sprache , entitled ‘Der Weg zur Sprache’, begins by citing a sentence from Novalis’s 1798 text Monolog : ‘Precisely what is most peculiar about language, that it only concerns itself with itself, nobody knows’.2 It is from this thought - of language accounting for itself in itself - that Heidegger begins his meditation on poetry. The vocabulary for the meditation is to stem from the reading itself. Indeed, thought is to be carefully dissolved into poetry, but only in such a way that poetry is strengthened in its thinking. Heidegger trusts that the key to what is said in the reserve of Western languages, while itself reserved, is yet able to be elicited. He suggests:

Thus released into its own freedom, language can concern itself solely with itself. This sounds like the discourse upon an egoistic solipsism. But language does not insist on itself in the sense of a self-centred all-forgetting self-mirroring. As saying, the weft of language is the propriative showing, which precisely deflects its gaze from itself, in order to free what is shown into its appropriate appearing.3

2 Novalis, Dichtungen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt: 1963), 5; M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache [ Pfullingen: Neske, 1982), 241; tr. RD. Hertz, J. Stambaugh as On the Way to Language (London: Harper & Row, 1982).

3 Heidegger, U nterwegs zur Sprache , 262.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

Language is to be understood in a way that could be misread as a theory of narcissism, since it relates itself to itself, and this could be taken to be analogous to the self-regard of a subject enraptured by its own reflection. The discourse on language must therefore fend off a misinterpretation that threatens to appropriate it, or at least deflect it, into a psychoanalysis of the sign. At this crucial moment the circle of language seems to sympt- omize a type of auto-eroticism, displacing itself into a geometric figure of desire. In insisting that his approach to language is not to be confused with a dissolution of the subject into unconscious energetics - and in the prologue to ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ the reference to psychoa¬ nalysis is explicit - Heidegger marks a crucial historical crossroads in the interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the cosmic circle, the eternal recurrence of the same. Heidegger seeks rigorously to distinguish his own reading of eternal recurrence - as the last attempt to conceive the temporality of beings, as recapitulation of the history of being, as the circle of language, and even as Trakl’s ‘icy wave of eternity’ - from what has been interpreted within the Freudian research programme as the ‘death drive’, as the economy of desire, and as the return of the inorganic. Return, which is perhaps the crucial thought of modernity, must now be read elsewhere. The dissolution of humanism is stripped even of the terminology which

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veils collapse in the mask of theoretical mastery. It must be hazarded to poetry.

Geistliche Dammerung? is the only poem cited by Hei¬ degger in its entirety in the essay, and this is of some con¬ siderable significance. Dissolving the unity and specificity of the separate poems plays a vital role in Heidegger’s project of uncovering a site [ Ort\ that relates to the Trakl corpus indifferently and as a whole. Up to the point at which Geistliche Dammerung is introduced Heidegger conserves the status of this site as the sole ‘ontologi- cally’ significant totality by splintering, rearranging, and repeating fragments of the individual poems. The resilient integrity of this particular poem in Heidegger’s text might therefore indicate a special difficulty, one that obstructs the process of assimilation and resists the hegemony of the site. If this is so it is possible that an issue is at stake in the reading of this poem which resists absorption into any readily communicable truth of Trakl’s poetry, an issue that perhaps remains in some sense exterior to a ‘thinking dialogue’ with the poet, but one that also retains a peculiar insistence. As Heidegger’s reading unfolds it comes to chart a closure of communication of precisely this kind.

4 The German Dammerung is as ambiguous as the English ‘twilight’, and can mean the half-light of dawn as well as that of dusk. As Baudelaire is almost certainly Trakl’s first major poetical influence (O. Basil, 7ra£/[Reinbekbei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965], 42-9) it is tempting to read the title Geistliche Dammerung as a translation of L’Aube spirituelle (‘Spiritual dawn’), the forty-seventh poem of Spleen etldeale (C. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes [Paris: Gallimard, 1975], vol. 1, 46). Heidegger, however, is determined to maintain the ambiguity of Dammerung in his interpretation (Heidegger, Unterwegszur Sprache , 42-3), and the importance of Abend (‘evening’) in Trakl’s poetry lends weight to this ‘decision’.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

There is no unambiguous point at which the discussion of Geistliche Dammerung begins. It is approached through a discussion of the final lines of Sommersneige (‘Summer Solstice’) in which the steps of a stranger ring through the silver night, and a blue beast is brought to the memory of its path, the melody of its spiriting year. To this is conjoined the hyacinthine countenance of twilight from the poem Unterwegs (‘Underway’). Heidegger introduces the poem in order to address what is named in its title, without any hint that the perplexing figure of the sister is to haunt it both here and in its later citation,5 displacing all other preoccupations. It reads:

Stille begegnet am Saum des Waldes Ein dunkles Wild;

Am Hiigel endet leise der Abendwind,

Verstummt die Klage der Amsel,

Und die sanften Floten des Herbstes Schweigen im Rohr.

Auf schwarzer Wolke Befahrst du trunken von Mohn Den nachtigen Weiher,

5 Ibid., 67-81.

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Den Sternenhimmel.

Immer tont der Schwester mondene Stimme Durch die geistliche Nacht.

(At the forests rim silence meets/ A dark beast; / Quietly, on the hill, dies the evening wind, //The plaint of the blackbird ceases,/ And the gentle flutes of autumn / Fall silent in the reed. // On a black cloud you sail, / Drunk on poppies, /

The nocturnal pool, // The starry sky. / The lunar voice of the sister sounds unceasing / Through the spiriting night.)6

The translation of ‘beast’ for Wild is of course unsatisfac¬ tory. In German the word Wild denotes a feral animal, especially one hunted as game, and sometimes it specifies such animals as deer. In addition it connotes wildness and wilderness, since the adjective ‘wild’ exists in German as well as English. Furthermore, it is probably etymologically related to the similar word Wald (forest). This network of associations seems impossible even to approach in translation. Such difficulties are particularly frustrating inasmuch as this translation must bear almost the entire weight of Trakl’s exploration of animality, and the further stresses of Heidegger’s response to it.

6 Ibid., 48; G. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk (Miinchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), 66. For a recent English translation of most Trakl poems referred to in this essay, see G. Trakl, Poems andProse: A Bilingual Edition tr. A. Stillmark, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005).

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

For Heidegger the ‘dark beast’ is clearly the ‘blue beast’ who negotiates the difference between animality and the opening of the horizon of being - der Mensch. The wild¬ ness of the beast is not swallowed by the forest; instead it gives to the forest a margin. But this margin is not a fixed demarcation, and is not illuminated by the light of day. The shadowy animal, trembling with uncertainty in the evening wind, is man:

The blue beast is an animal whose animality pre¬ sumably rests, not in animalness, but rather in that thoughtful gaze, after which the poet calls. This animality is yet distant, and scarcely to be registered, so that the animality of the animal noted here oscil¬ lates in the indeterminate. It is not yet brought into its weft [Weseri]. This animal, the one that thinks, ani¬ mal rationale, humanity, is, according to Nietzsche’s words, not yet firmly established \fest gestellt\J

Heidegger takes the weave of the distance separating humanity from the beasts of the wilderness to rest in a type of thinking that is irreducible to adaptive biological calculation. Such thinking is rooted in the temporalization of the ontological difference, and has been traditionally unified - if only confusedly so - about the thought of

7 Heidegger, Uvterwegs zur Sprache , 45.

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transcendence. Transcendental thinking has the peculiar characteristic of relating itself to the thematic of thought itself, a tendency which has been systematized within epistemological philosophy. Within the Western tradition this type of cognition has been designated ‘reflection’. The human is that animal caught in the play of its reflection. The line of approach that Heidegger follows, in what is to be his first and sole decisive encounter with the poem, begins with its final stanza:

The starry sky is portrayed [- dargestellt , staged, placed there, the stellen is always decisive for Heidegger] in the poetic image of the nocturnal pool. So our habitual representation [; vor-stellen ] thinks it. But the night sky is in the truth of its weft this pool. Over against this, what we otherwise call the night remains only an image, namely, the faded and vacuous after¬ image \Nachbild , perhaps also ‘copy’] of its weft.8

The insistence that the night sky is in truth a pool is not irreducible either to Heidegger’s phenomenological stubbornness, or to a defence of the primordiality of metaphor. It is far more intimately connected with the problematic of spatiality in post-Kantian thinking, and beyond this with the Greek thought of the heavens as %ao^.

8 Ibid., 48.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

These concerns are bound up with Heidegger’s pursuit of that reflection which yields an image of human transcend¬ ence, and therefore marks a firmly established separation of Dasein from the psychology of animals. This pursuit is perhaps the aspect of Heidegger’s work which is clos¬ est to the concerns of the ontotheological tradition, the point where his thinking is most ‘human, all-to-human’. But there is, nevertheless, something both crucial and ‘technically’ precise at issue in this play of mirrors. The passage continues:

The pool and the mirror-pool often recur in the poet’s poetry. The water, sometimes blue, sometimes black, shows humanity its own countenance, its returning gaze. But in the nocturnal pool of the starry sky appears the twilight blue of the spiriting night. Its gleam is cool.9

The starry sky has an integral relation to reflection, but one which is of daunting complexity. Heidegger first turns to the pool itself, beside which humanity lies, lost in narcissistic reverie. Here humanity gazes upon itself, although we are not told whether, like Narcissus, this gaze is inflamed with desire.

9 Ibid., 48.

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Heidegger finds the compulsive character of Trakl’s imagery to be indicative of a repression, but one which does not seem to be - at least superficially - primarily sexual. He takes the reflectivity of Trakl’s mirrors to exceed all representation and ontical objectivity [ Vorhandenheit] . In the darkened pool the gaze does not return in a famil¬ iar form; it reveals instead an abyssal twilit blue, which colours both the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night. The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal, against the impassive shade of a pure opening or cleft in beings. Humanity is thus reflected as the default of an (ontical) image; as a lack of ground or Abgrund which is the transcendental condition of any possible ontology. The heavens are an abyss: %ao£. As we follow Heidegger’s discussion of Geistliche Dammerung further, this classical comprehension of chaos enters into a problematic negotiation with the contemporary sense of the word as disorder. It is this negotiation which reopens the path to Trakl’s most crucial explorations.

As the reading of Geistliche Dammerung proceeds Heidegger’s discussion suddenly changes key, without indicating that there is any thematic unity between the mirror and the mysterious figure who is now introduced, the sister:

The cool light stems from the shining of the lunar

woman [Mondiri] (Selanna). Ringing her luminosity,

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

as ancient Greek verse says, the stars fade and even cool. Everything becomes ‘lunar’. The stranger \der Fremde , the German masculine] stepping through the night is called ‘the lunar one’. The ‘lunar voice’ of the sister, which always sounds through the spiriting night, is then heard by the brother in his boat when he attempts to follow the stranger in a nocturnal journey across the pool, which is still ‘black’ and scarcely illuminated by the stranger’s goldenness.10

The sister is allied to the moon, and thus to the luminosity of the night. Her power to render a world visible holds sway in the epoch of world-calumniating darkness initi¬ ated by the flight of the Hellenic gods, whose end is her¬ alded by the stranger’s goldenness, which is the flickering light of a new dawn. It is the sister who guides the path of the wanderer throughout the nihilistic metamorphoses, during which the securities of ontotheology lose their authority and disappear into their twilight, and before the arising of that new thinking which betrays itself only in scarcely perceptible hints. The sister is associated with transition, and with the indeterminacy of an unthreaded time. Even the corrupted seals that stamped the distinc¬ tive mark of scholasticism and theological apologetic

10 Ibid., 48-9.

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are broken, and no new type has taken their place. The haunting voice of the sister is heard as the brother drifts away from the ancient genus of theological metaphysics and towards the genus of the stranger. Yet the sister’s voice cannot be identified with the type of the past or with that of the future, it cannot be subsumed within a genre.

The passage is not so easily reduced to even this ten¬ tative metaphysico-historical familiarity, however, since Heidegger does not only mention the sister, but also Selanna; the strangers ( der Fremde, der Fremdling - the gender of das Fremde from Unterwegs zur Sprache 11 - has now strangely metamorphosed); and the sister’s brother. What is the meaning of this perplexing cast? What relation does Selanna, the lunar woman, have to the sister who speaks in lunar tones? Of Selanna, David Farrell Krell writes: ‘Heidegger recollects the way the ancient Greek lyricists speak of the moon and stars; in the context of abscission, of the confluent twofold, and Selene, who as Semele is the mother of Dionysos ...\12 In the classical myth Semele is tricked by Hera into demanding that her lover (Zeus) reveal himself to her in his full presence, and when he does so she is killed by his radiance. An event that might suggest some relation to the ‘stranger’s golden¬ ness’. But even following this apparently unambiguous

11 Ibid., 41.

12 D.F. Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time , Truth and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being (University Park, Penn.: Penn. State University Press, 1986), 171.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

path quickly leads us into a kind of mythological aporia, since, as Robert Graves notes in The White Goddess :

The Vine- Dionysus once had no father, either. His nativity appears to have been that of an earlier Diony¬ sus, the Toadstool-god; for the Greeks believed that mushrooms and toadstools were engendered by light¬ ning - not sprung from seed like all other plants. When the tyrants of Athens, Corinth and Sicyon legal¬ ized Dionysus worship in their cities, they limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadstools; thus the myth of the Toadstool-Dionysus became attached to the Vine-Dionysus, who now figured as a son of Semele the Theban and Zeus, Lord of lightning.

Yet Semele was the sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pentheus’ head in a Dionysiac frenzy.13

The attribution of a (patrilinear) genealogy to Dionysus is complicit with a project of repression. An intoxication that came from nowhere, from a bolt of lightning, is asked to show its birth-certificate. Wine, which Plato will later accommodate even to dialectic, displaces the fungus of the Dionysian cults ( Amanita Muscaria ) . The sacred mushroom of the cults is held to be responsible for those socially unas- similable deliria which are a threat to the noxiq.

13 R. Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 159.

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But what is the relation between this ancient policing of social pathology and Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl? How can a bridge be built between such ontic-empirical history, and the onto- transcendental question concerning the site of poetry? The spanning of such a gulf has been hindered by the medicalization of the history of derange¬ ment, and its reduction to the historical and psychiatric study of madness. But this regional investigation is noth¬ ing other than the contemporary instance of that discourse of the no Ai<; which first instituted a genealogy of Dionysus. Such a construction patently fails to mark the inherently delirious character of western history, and, therefore, of scientificity itself. This is not only a matter of ontotheology being rooted in a specific amnesia. A delirium integral to the western graphic order implies, more radically, that any possible history must arise out of the forgetting (or secondary repression) of a constitutive arche-amnesia (the ellipsis integral to inscription). Klossowski has even been led to suggest that western science is aphasic, because it is initiated in the default of a foundational discourse.14 This default is not merely a passively accepted pathology, it is an inscribed, prescribed, or actively administered pharmaco- pathology. The response of the West to the writing of itself has been that of a poisoning. This is why the fact that Selanna substitutes for a delirium without origin - which is

14 P. Klossowski, Nietzsche et l ecercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978), 16; tr. D.

W. Smith as Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (London: Continuum, 2005), xvii.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

equally a delirium of origins - seems to resonate with what Derrida entitles an aggression pharmakographique.

In Trakls Geistliche Dammerung the path of the phar- makon, the intoxicated voyage across the nocturnal pool, seems to evade Geschlecht (the general resource of typogra¬ phy). Instead it crosses the starry sky, through which the lunar voice of the sister resounds. A problematic of the moon is introduced, demanding some minimal gesture of interpretation. Perhaps to speak of the ‘lunar’ in this fashion is simply to speak of the way things appear in the night.15 In the poem In derHeimat , for instance, the sister is seen asleep bathed in moonlight:

Der Schwester Schlaf ist schwer. Der Nachtwind wiihlt

In ihrem Haar, das mondner Glanz umspiilt.

(The sister’s sleep is heavy. The nightwind burrows /

In her hair, bathed in the gleam of the moon.)16

15 Trakl ends the poem Am Moor (‘At the Moor’) with the line Erscheinung der Nacht: Kroten tauchen aus silbemen Wassem (‘Appearance of the night: toads dive out of silver waters’) (Trakl, Das dichterische Werk , 54) suggesting that there is indeed an issue of nocturnal luminacy in Trakl’s poetry; a becoming visible in the night, which is also an appearance of the night itself. The night is not merely a formal condition or scene for certain apparitions, it is also what is ‘expressed’ in the silver light of the moon and stars. The night itself finds a voice in ‘the lunar voice of the sister’, that is also a Silberstimme (‘silver voice’), a word that is used in the poem Hohenburg( Ibid., 51), and twice in the poem Sebastian im Traum (Ibid., 53).

16 Ibid., 35.

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This apparent reduction or simplification of the problem only displaces our difficulties however. The Traklean night \Nacht\ is, as we have seen, the time of derangement [ Umnachtung ], consonant perhaps with the ‘mania’ that stems, like moon (and ‘mind’), from the Indo-European road ( *men(e)s ). That the moon is associated with woman is indicated by the etymological relations between ‘moon’, ‘month’, and ‘menses’, but it is also the companion of lunatics and werewolves; figures with whom the reader of Trakl is certainly familiar.

It is, fittingly, in the culminating lines of Traum und Umnachtung that this imagery crosses a climactic threshold:

Steinige Oede fand er am Abend, Geleite eines Toten in das dunkle Haus des Vaters. Purpurne Wolke umwolkte sein Haupt, daft er schweigend fiber sein eigenes Blut und Bildnis herfiel, ein mondenes Ant- litz; steinern ins Leere hinsank, da in zerbrochenen Spiegel, ein sterbender Jfingling, die Schwester erschien; die Nacht das verfluchte Geschlecht verschlang.

(He found a petrified desolation in the evening, the com¬ pany of one deceased as he entered the dark house of the father. Purple clouds en wreathed his head, so that he fell upon his own blood and image, a lunar countenance; and fainted petrified into emptiness when, in a shattered mirror

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a dead youngster appeared, the sister: night enveloped the accursed genus.)17

With a passage of such beauty and labyrinthine depths any response is likely at worst merely to irritate, and at best to increase our perplexity. I will only try to ask one simple question. Is there a connection to be made between the shattering of the mirror and a movement of astronomical imagery; between an explosion of desire that exceeds all introversion or reflection on the one hand, and a nocturnal or lunar process on the other? If such a connection were to be made it would surely pass by way of the sister, who is herself a threshold between the reflective order of the father’s house and the illimitative difference of the night sky. It is the ‘night pool’ with its subtly differentiated luminosities - a series of intensities which defy resolution within any dialectic of presence and absence - that flood onto the mirror with the sister; shattering every power of representation. At the point of a certain nocturnal delirium (or lunacy) the relation of the sister to the family is metamorphosed. She no longer obeys the law of the boundary by mediating the family with itself, sublimating its narcissism, or establishing its insertion into the order of signification by disappearing (leaving the father’s house according to the exchange

17 Ibid., 84.

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patterns of patrilineal exogamy, and thus as a metabolic or reproductive moment within a kinship structure). Instead she breaches the family, by opening it onto an alterity which has not been appropriated in advance to any deep structure or encompassing system. A night that was an indeterminable alterity such as this would be a fully positive differentiation from the day.18

Perhaps the single most important Trakl text on this theme, in addition to the culmination of 7 raum und Umnachtung. , is a poem called Geburt (‘Birth’)19 where lunar imagery functions similarly as a haemorrhaging of familial interiority. The poem pivots upon a line at the end of the third stanza in which a sublimated incestuality works a stifling movement of interiorization: Seufzend erblicktsein Bild der gefallene Engel (‘Sighing the fallen angel glimpsed his image’). It might seem as if the birth of the sister is to be absorbed in a retreat into the claustrophobic heart of the Geschlecht. But although the fourth stanza begins with an awakening in a musty room \dumpjer Stube\ the

18 The sister is also associated with the moon towards the end of the prose poem Offen- barungundUntergang , first in the line hob sich auj mondenen Fliigelnuber die griinenden Wipfel, kristallene Klippen das voeiJSe Antlitz der Schwester (‘lifted by lunar wings above the greening treetops, crystal cliffs of the sister’s white countenance’) that ends the penultimate paragraph. The final paragraph begins Mit silbemen Sohlen stieg ich die domigen Stiffen hinab (‘With silver soles I climbed down the thorny steps’) and speaks of ein mondenes Gebilde, das langsam aus meinem Sc batten trat (‘a lunar shape, that slowly stepped from out of my shadow’) (Ibid., 97). By stepping out of her brother’s shadow the sister escapes the determinations of image, reflection, or copy that could be returned to the same; to a self-mediated narcissism playing with representations as its own (or proper) alterity.

19 Ibid., 64.

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one who thus awakes is ‘a pale one5 [ein Bleiches]; ‘lunar’. The eyes of the mother (or the midwife) [steinemen Greisin ] are described as ‘two moons’, a reference taking us back out into the night (whose ‘black wing touches the boy’s temple’), and back to a crucial image from the second stanza; that of the decayed moon:20

Stille der Mutter; unter schwarzen Tannen Oeffnen sich die schlafenden Hande,

Wenn verfallen der kalte Mond erscheint.

(Silence of the mother; under black pines / The sleep¬ ing hands open out / When the cold and ruined moon appears.)21

It would be possible to interpret this ruin of the moon as a dialectical restoration of the inside, its order and its securities, as if what had defied the inside was now falling away into self-annihilation. It might thus be asserted: ‘This nocturnal path, departing from everything we have always

20 The ruined moon is also mentioned in Sebastian im Traum in the line Da injenemMarz der Mond verfiel. (‘Then, in that march, the moon was ruined.’) (Ruin, from the Latin mere ‘to fall’, cannot be used intransitively to capture the precise usage of verfallen in this case.) (Ibid., 53). The ruin of the moon is here taken as a datable event, emphasizing its referential entanglement in the processes of genre. Trakl’s deployment of astronomi¬ cal metaphor is not a retreat from history into timeless or archetypal symbolism, it is, on the contrary, a historicizing of the heavens; the opening of a genealogy through conjugation with astronomical forces. For Heidegger’s most explicit comments on Trakl and history, see Die Sprache im Gedicht in particular (Heidegger, Untemegs zur Sprache , 80).

21 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 64.

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believed in, it has all collapsed into chaos now. Wasn’t it obvious it was going to go terribly wrong? You should have listened to your priest/parents/teachers/the police.’ Yet this is not the only reading open to us.

The ruin of the moon might seem to block the noctur¬ nal movement that passes from a claustrophobic interior into endless space, and that conjugates the dynasty with an unlimited alterity. But this would not be the case if the moon itself was, at least partially, a restrictive element across the path of departure, rather than being the sole gateway into the heavens. The ruin of the moon would then be a protraction of the nocturnal trajectory; a dis¬ solution of the lunar that proceeds not as a negation of the night, but as a falling away of what is still too similar to the sun. This second possibility is supported by the terms of Heidegger’s reading. He is very precise, in his interpretation of the delirious journey across the nocturnal pool, about what he takes the meaning of the moon to be: a constriction of stellar luminescence rather than the ultimate elimination of sunlight; a fading and cooling of stars:

The cool light stems from the shining of the lunar woman (Selanna). Ringing her radiance, as ancient Greek verse says, the stars fade and even cool.22

22 Heidegger, Unterwegs zurSprache, 48-9.

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

This interpretation might seem to lack all philosophical rigour, and perhaps even to forsake any possible ‘theo¬ retical’ reference. In fact it contributes to a problematic of enormous importance, although one that has been fragmented and largely obliterated by the constitution of astronomy and astro-physics as positive sciences in modern times. This problem is that of real (and astronomically evident) differences that are in principle irreducible to mathematical formalism, and which are furthermore - as Deleuze has demonstrated in the closing sections of Dif¬ ference et Repetition 23 - a potential basis for a quite other and more comprehensive approach to mathematization (or theoretical quantification) without any recourse to ultimate identity or equalities. The obscuration of such differences within the constitution of astro-science has been a deferral rather than a resolution of the problem of radically informal differences, leaving this matter as an explosive threat to the foundations of modern cosmology. Perhaps the last confident, unitary, and explicit treatment of the question is to be found in Hegel’s ‘Encyclopaedia’, in the Zusatz to the transition from Finite Mechanics to Absolute Mechanics:

One can admire the stars because of their tranquil¬ ity: but they are not of equal dignity to the concrete

23 G. Deleuze, Difference et Repetition (Paris: Press Universitaire de Paris, 1968); tr. P.

Patton as Difference and Repetition (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 262-304.

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individual. The filling of space breaks out [ausschlagt] into endless kinds of matter; but that [i.e. the casting of the stars] is only the first outbreak \Ausschlagen\ that can delight the eye. This outbreak of light [Licht- Ausschlag ] is no more worthy of wonder than that of a rash in man, or than a swarm of flies.24

Philosophy is to turn its gaze away from the stars, learning from Thales perhaps, who fell into a hole whilst absorbed in astronomical contemplation. In a subtle but vigorous neo-Ptolemaism, Hegel subordinates the stellar moment to the concrete and ordered bodies of the solar system, and these bodies are in turn subordinated to the development of terrestrial life. This is due to the dialectical dignity of particularized actuality in comparison with abstract principle, so that astrophysical laws are sublated into their successively more concrete expositions in geology, biology, anthropology, and cultural history. Yet there is something more primordially and uncontrollably disturbing in the vast and senseless dispersion of the stars, something which is even hideous, like a disease of the skin.

What offends Hegel about the stars is the irrational facticity of their distribution; a scattering which obeys no discernible law. He expresses his disdain for this distribution, and his anxiety before it, in a word that is

24 G.W.F. Hegel, System der Philosophic Zweiter Teil. Die Naturphilosophie, from Sdmtliche Werke, Volume 9 (Stuttgart, Fr.: Frommanns Verlage, 1929), 118.

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also both a powerful description and an acknowledge¬ ment: Ausschlag , which can mean swing or deflection, but in this context means ‘outbreak’ in the sense of a rash. The verb ausschlagen is even more multi-faceted, and can mean (among other possibilities) to knock or beat out, to waive, to burgeon or blossom, or to sweat. But Hegel is not speaking of the blossoming of the stars here, or at least, he does not want to do so. We must be careful not to lose track of the ‘object’ Hegel is isolating here: it is a differentiation that is at once senseless and sensible, an outbreak of irrationality in the redoubt of reason similar to that which Kant acknowledges in the Schematismuslehre. It is the differential principle of stars, flies, flocks of birds, and dust; of astronomical, geological, ornithological,25 and epidermal eruptions. Trakl names it with deft precision Staub der Sterne (‘the dust of the stars’). In his reading of Trakl Heidegger also acknowledges this unity of aus and Schlag as a disruption ‘of’ sentience, but only if the ‘of’ is read according to the subversive syntax of Heideggerian thought; as an ‘of’ that no longer presumes a prior and

25 The association of bird-flight and the emergence of signs is one of the richest threads ofTrakl’s poetry. \nln einem verlassenen Z immer (‘In an Abandoned Room’) occurs the line Schwalben irreZeichen ziehn (‘ Swallows trace demented signs’) (Trakl, Das dichterische Werk., 16); the final stanza of Traum des Bosen (‘Dream of Evil’) begins Des Vogeljlugs xeirre Zeichen lesen / Aussatzigen (‘Lepers read the confused signs of bird- flight’) (Ibid., 19); the second stanza of An den Knaben Elis (‘To the Youth Elis’) ends with the words dunkle Deutung des Vogeljlugs (‘the dark significance of bird-flight’) (Ibid., 17, 49) and Der Herbst des Einsamen contains the line Der Vogel/lug tout von alten Sagen (‘The flight of birds resounds with ancient sagas’) (Ibid., 62). Wherever there is erratic dispersal and movement in undemarcated space Trakl anticipates the arising of sense, and a question of reading.

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undisrupted subject. For Heidegger sentience is not exploded or threatened from without by the Ausschlag, it is always already under the sway of the outbreak that will be derivatively apprehended as its subversion:

Trakl sees ‘sentience’ [Geist] in terms of that weave [Wesen] that is named in the primordial significa¬ tion of the word Geist; since gheis means: incensed, dislocated, being outside oneself \aufgebracht, entsetzt, aufiersich seiri\.26

Hegelian sentience could be described as entsetzt by cosmological eruption, but the sense of this outrage changes with Heidegger’s radicalized approach, in which Entsetztheit cannot be thought as a delimiting response to the anarchic explosion of cosmic debris but only as its inertial protraction. Heidegger thus provides us with a hermeneutical key according to which every sentient reaction to the Ausschlag can be read as a symptom or repetition of the outbreak ‘itself. It is no longer even that sentience is infected by irrationality; it is rather that sentience has dissolved into the very movement of infec¬ tion, becoming a virulent element of contagious matter.

Since the light of the stars is not a transcendental ground of phenomenality, but rather a differential effect

26 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 60.

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stemming from the isolation or uneven distribution of intensities, Hegel takes its claim to philosophical dignity as an offence. He determines starlight as a pathological luminescence, without order or intelligibility. The fading of stars is, therefore, among other things, a name for a necessary stage in Hegel’s system. The senseless distribu¬ tion of stellar material is repressed in the interest of the particularized (sub-)planetary body, which in turn furthers geocentrism and the infinitizing of light. This movement crushes difference under a logicized notion of significance. In contrast, Trakl brings the thought of the sign together with that of stellar dispersion, writing: 0, ihrZeichen und Sterne (‘O, you signs and stars’).27 And - partially echoing Rimbaud’s words - Un chant mysterieux tombe des astres d’or (‘a mysterious song falls from stars of gold’) - he mentions die Silberstimmen der Sterne (‘the silver voice of the stars’)28 and Das letzte Gold verfallener Sterne (‘The last gold of ruined stars’).29 The German word Stem derives from the Indo-European root *ster- meaning to extend or spread out. It is from this root that the English word ‘strew’ - as well as ‘star’ - descends. The stars are traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness, defies mathematization or the reduction to order. It is the shockwave of this metaphorics which

27 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk , 63.

28 Ibid., 53.

29 Ibid., 50.

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sweeps through Trakl’s specifications of the sign, and it is perhaps for this reason that Trakl writes of ruination [ Ver - fallen ] in this context. Any order which is to be extracted from the strewing of difference will be dependent on this ‘spreading out’ (Latin sterner e), it will not be metaphysi¬ cal - dependent upon a transcendental difference - but ‘stratophysical’; a movement between planes, or grades, of dispersion. Where metaphysics has always fixed dis¬ order in a dichotomous relation to an absolute principle of coherent form or ultimate lawfulness, a stratophysics would locate regional order within a differentiation in the rate of dissipation. It thus constitutes an abyssal relativism, although not one that is rooted in subjective perspectives, but rather in the open-ended stratifications of impersonal and unconscious physical forces. Astrophysics is marked by its etymology as stratophysics - a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities - and therefore can be seen to abandon its most extreme potentialities when it subordinates itself to mathematical physics.

The question of strata can insinuate itself into every word of Trakl’s text, because it is at the ‘core’ of any rigorous graphematics. Each stratum is a dimension of dispersion, flattened like a spiral galaxy. This flat¬ ness is just as crucial to the study of intensities as the trajectories traced within it, since the stratification or stacking of organizational levels is the basic form of any possible energetic surplus, the irreducible or final

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

principle of ‘real form’: redundancy. Each stratum has its specific ‘negentropy’ or positive range of compositions, ‘selecting’ only a relatively narrow series of combinations from the stock of elements generated by its substrate. A stratum thus inherits an aggregate ‘degree of difference’ or grammar, distinguishing it from a certain potential¬ ity of ‘randomness’ (unproblematic reducibility into its substrate), and constituting a potential for teleological illusion (unproblematic reduction of its substrate). This stratification of intensive positivities, which is most clearly indexed by the successive unities of letter, word, sentence, etc. that are precipitated out of a common ‘graphic plasma’ or semiotic substance within alphabetical regimes, is the only rigorous basis for an architectonics of the sign. Only because of such a graphic redundancy - for example, that stored in the difference between letter and word - between the words an alphabet makes possible and those which are realized - can energy be unevenly distributed within a stratum, and intensities generated.30 Trakl acknowledges

30 Claude Shannon’s theory of inf ormation understands redundancy as the dimensio n of a message that does not f unction at the level of communication, but rather f unctions as a resource for the discrimination of the incommunicative (‘noise’) from communication in general, thus providing a layer of insulation against the degradation of the message. This formulation seems to me to lack two crucial elements: 1) It fails to provide any suggestion as to how the message participates in the constitution of redundancies (thus taking redundancy as a transcendental condition of communication). This first def ault leads to the preservation of the metaphysical distinction between semiotic and material processes (messages and techniques), which is otherwise profoundly shaken by the thought of redundancy; the thought, that is, of an isolation or ‘de-naturalization’ of the semiotic stratum proceeding by means of intensities or surpluses that invoke no element of negativity, but only gradations. 2) It fails to acknowledge the political dimension of redundancy as a means of trapping disruptive signals. It is this ‘trapping’ within an intermediate zone between strata that first enables the categories of madness,

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this excitatory axis, which punctures and intensifies each plane of distribution, in the use of words related to the German verb sinken (to sink). Thus he writes:

Von Liiften trunken sinken balde em die Lider Und offnen leise sich zu fremden Sternenzeichen.

(Drunken with breezes the lids soon subside / And open themselves to strange star-signs.)31

And:

Zeichen und Sterne Versinken leise im Abendweiher.

(Signs and stars / Sink quietly in the evening-pool.)32

The explosion of stellar and semiotic materials generates a combination of intra-stratal and trans-stratal processes, the former of which have been historically determined as

perversion, deformity, disobedience, and indiscipline to be constituted, thus providing the basis for the associated but counterposed disciplinary programmes of pedagogy, psychiatry, punition, etc. To fail to acknowledge such questions is to take the notion of noise as a purely passive and non-sentient interruption rather than as a strategically oriented ‘jamming’ of the message, and thus to ignore the conflictual aspects of both grammars and anti-grammatical subterfuges as they contend within the fluctuating space of redundancy or control. This default is typical of a technocratic scientificity which takes the question of power as having been always already resolved prior to the question of technique.

31 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk , 1 8 .

32 Ibid., 51.

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‘causal’ or ‘legislated’ and the latter as ‘intellectual’, ‘tele¬ ological’, or ‘legislative’. This is a ramification (speculative I admit) of Trakl’s vocabulary of Stufen (‘steps’) of terraced differentiation (a theme I hope to explore more thoroughly elsewhere). Stratification is the complex physiological process, the only one, in which the distinction between matter and meaning cannot be sustained.33

The tools Heidegger relies upon in his approach to the issues of exile into the night and astronomical dispersion stem from the ‘ecstative analyses’ of his Marburg medita¬ tions. The term he focuses upon as a possible entry point for such a discussion is ‘flame’. He first gathers Trald’s stellar thematic into that of flame with the suggestion: ‘The night flames as the lightening mirror of the starry sky’.34 He then proceeds: Das Flammende ist das Aujler-sich, das lichtet und erglanzen lafit, das indessen auch weiterfressen und alles in das Wei JZeder Asche verzekren kann. (‘That which flames is the outside itself, that which lightens and lets gleam, and that which in doing so can expand voraciously so that

33 For instance, in Kleines Konzert (‘Little Concert’) Aussatzxgen winkt die Flut Genesung (‘The torrent beckons lepers to convalescence’) (Ibid., 25); in Drei Blicke in einen Opal (‘Three Glimpses in an Opal’) Die Knaben traumen wirr in diirren Weidenstrahnen /U nd Hire Stimen sind von Aussatz kahl und rauh (‘Youths dream conf usedly among the pasture’s dry bales / And their brows are naked and raw with leprosy’) (Ibid., 39; see also Ibid., 40); towards the end of Helian (in a line I have already cited) Helians Seele sich im rosigen Spiegel beschaut /U nd Schnee und Aussatz von seiner Stime sinken (‘Helian’s soul gazes on itself in the rosy mirror / And snow and leprosy sink from his brow’) (Ibid., 43); and in Verwandlund des Bosen (‘Metamorphosis of Evil’) there is a Minute stummerZerstdrung; aujlauscht die Stime des Aussatzigen water dem kahlen Baum (‘moment of mute devastation; the brow of the leper hearkensunder the naked tree’) (Ibid., 56).

34 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 66.

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everything is consumed to become white ash.’ [The expres¬ sion AuJZer-sich is such a clear index for Heidegger’s notion of ecstasis that Hertz employs ‘ek-stasis’ as its translation in his rendering of this sentence]).35 The flame of the stars is explosive - or outside of itself - but this Ausschlag can be a gentle illumination or an uncontrolled devastation (an Aufruhr, ‘revolt’, ‘turmoil’).36 It is about this ‘or’, with which I am attempting to indicate Heidegger’s hope that the Weiterfressung can be deflected or suspended in contin¬ gency, that the ambiguous path of his reading turns.

Ten pages earlier Heidegger poses this sense of an alternative between castings [Schlage] most acutely, and in so doing returns us to the question of infection. Examining Trakl’s expression das verjluchte Geschlecht (‘the accursed genus’)37 he points to a Greek word that can be translated equally as either Schlag or Fluch\ TrAT|yr| (‘curse’). TrAriyri is also translated by the Latin plangere , from which we derive the English ‘plague’, and the German Plage (found in the sixth line of Trakl’s poem Fohn 38 and in the fifteenth line of Allerseelen [‘All Soul’s Day’]).39 Heidegger’s text (which I cannot confidently hazard to my translation alone) reads:

35 Ibid., 60.

36 Ibid., 60.

37 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 84.

38 Ibid., 67.

39 Ibid., ail.

114

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

Womit ist dieses Geschlecht geschlagen, d.h. ver- flucht? Fluch heiftt griechisch 7tAr|Yr|, unser Wort ‘Schlag’. Der Fluch des verwesenden Geschlechtes besteht darin, daft dieses alte Geschlecht in die Zwi- etracht der Geschlechter auseinandergeschlagen ist. Aus ihr trachtet jedes der Geschlechter in den los- gelassenen Aufruhr der je vereinzelten und bloften Wildheit des Wildes. Nicht die Zwiefache als solches, sondern die Zwietracht ist der Fluch. Sie tragt aus dem Aufruhr der blinden Wildheit das Geschlecht in die Entzweiung und verschlagt es so in die losgelas- sene Vereinzelung. Also entzweit und zerschlagen vermag das ‘verfallene Geschlecht’ von sich aus nicht mehr in den rechten Schlag zu finden.

(With what is this gen-us cast, i.e. cursed? Cursed names the Greek TrATiyn? our word ‘casting’. The curse of the decomposed gen-us consists in this, that this ancient gen-us is cast apart into the discord of gen-ders. Each of the genera strives for unleashed revolt in an always individuated and naked wildness of the beast. It is not the twofold that is the curse, but rather the discordance of the two. Out of the revolt of the blind wildness it carries the gen-us, cast away into torn duality and unleashed individuation. Thus

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divided and cast down the ‘ruined gen-us’ is no longer able to find the ‘right cast’.)40

It would be possible to read this passage as if it were a development entirely internal to Heidegger’s ‘philosophy’, and as if the reading of Trakl in which it is embedded were a mere eccentricity or modulation in the vocabulary of an unswerving intellectual pursuit. Such a reading would recall that according to Heidegger, ontotheology is the curse that leads beings to strive towards absolute mastery of the earth, erasing every trace of their dependence upon being. That difference of each being with respect to being is displaced by the differences among beings, and being is converted into a mere disputed territory to be subdivided among conflicting beings. It would also recall that within this history everything thought of as ‘real’ has been dis¬ tributed among exclusive concepts, through which beings represent themselves to themselves in their competitive distinctiveness, so that the differences, discriminations, and determinations of beings cease to speak of being. It would conclude that what is metaphysical (in the sense that Heidegger understands as the ontotheological) in dualities of genre is not that they are binary, but that this binarity monopolizes the interpretation of the being’s dif¬ ference from being. What is lost in ontical interpretation

40 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 50.

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NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

is the being of genre itself, the composition of ontical difference from out of the non-ontic. In other words, to think Geschlecht abstractly, but in a certain sense beyond ontotheology, it would be necessary only to insist (in a decisive Heideggerian trope) that ontical differentiation is not itself anything ontical.

Yet Heidegger is not simply interpreting a word that circulates freely within the German language. He is attempting to read this word as he encounters it within the tortuous and vespertine labyrinth of Trakl’s poetry We must return to Heidegger’s question, and attempt to ask it along with him: what is this cast, this curse or epidemic? We are assisted in this by Trakl’s words, which lend us a faltering answer to place alongside Heidegger’s discus¬ sion; the cast that has cursed us, surely that is what Trakl names Aussatz, leprosy, infection, and (thus) exclusion. The spaces of difference across which the Zwietracht stretches and displaces itself (following the semantic instabililty of Geschlecht ) are never to be found described by Trakl in terms that could be reduced to formal disjunctions or negative articulations. Instead he writes of Mauem voll Aussatz (‘walls full of leprosy’)41 echoing Rimbaud who, during his Saison en Enfer finds himself assis, lepreux, sur le spots casses et les orties, au pied d’un mur range par le soleil (‘sitting, leprous, upon broken pots and nettles, at the foot

41 Trakl, D as dichterische Werk, 41.

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of a wall gnawed by the sun5).42 It seems at first surprising that Heidegger makes no mention of the frequent refer¬ ences to leprosy throughout Trakl’s poetry, since Aussatz points to an Aus-setzung (the Old High German source Uzsazeo means ‘one who has been ausgesetzt or “cast out” of society’), a coinage which profoundly accords with the ecstative orientation of Heidegger’s reading. Heidegger even has a space specifically allocated to disease in his reading. Not that he is particularly concerned with the German equivalent of this word: Krankheit (although he quotes Trakl’s line Wiescheint dock alles Werdendeso krankl (‘How sick everything that is becoming seems!’).43 The disease which finds a place in Heidegger’s text is the same as that which obsesses Trakl; it is the searing of stars, or the primordial and contagious eruption of the pathological. But Heidegger’s supplement to Trakl’s text is disappointingly regressive on this issue, and my brief concluding question touches on an example of the repugnant obstinacy and piety of the 1953 essay in asking: why does Heidegger refuse to follow Trakl and name ecstative eruption Aussatz?

In concluding the question of the curse that abuts ontoTrakl’s thema of Geschlecht , Heidegger distinguishes between two cast(e)s and two dualities. There is a cursing

42 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 302-3.

43 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 29; Heidegger, Untenaegs zur Sprache , 64.

118

NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

cast or stamp that is associated with a reckless and destruc¬ tive individualization and that generates antagonistic or conflictual binarity \Zwietrachf\ , and there is a gentle sanft binarity \Zwiefalt\ that escapes the contagion of the curse. As is so typical of Heidegger, Zwiefalt simultane¬ ously marks an aspiration towards the (Schellingian) post-philosopher’s stone of a-logical intervallic differ¬ ence and the theologian’s dream of an immaculate or uncontaminated conception. Drawing upon a thought of pain [ Schmerz ] as a threshold and relation Heidegger seeks to ameliorate the pathological scorching of the stars: ‘gentleness is, following the word dasSanfte , the peaceful gatherer. It metamorphoses discord, in that it turns what is injuring and searing in wildness to soothed pain’.44 This attempt to establish pure and dichotomous distinctions that both explicate and escape the history of oppositional thought necessitates a discrimination between (two) types of duality. (It is precisely because Derrida will refuse to underwrite such a discrimination that he turns instead to a re-inscription of continuities that are able to encompass and partially assimilate the ‘ruptural’ aspect of his own work, resigned to a ‘structurally necessary inadequacy’ in the prosecution of deconstruction. Both Heidegger and Derrida seem to concur, however, in taking the sense of dichotomy to be irredeemably polar and reciprocally

44 Ibid., 45.

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ultimate rather that stratal and unilaterally or impulsively protractile.)

The historical predicament that Heidegger and (in a different way) Derrida trace out here, and which finds its symptom in this problematic ‘antinomy’ of escape and re-capture, hope and despair, with all the unstable compromises and evanescent moments of indecision or indifference it generates, is too complex to delineate in this paper. I will only venture to suggest that by holding Zwietracht and Zwiefalt apart at this point, and refusing to abandon the hope that formal or ultimate dichotomy might be redeemed by a future thinking, Heidegger is engaged in what we could legitimately describe as a ‘gentle critique’ of the history of metaphysics, a grotesque recapitulation of Kant’s compromise with ontotheological tradition (and tradition always belongs to the church). Heidegger’s attempt is to limit the Aufruhr which consti¬ tutes the intensive undertow of Traklean textuality. His is the sterile hope of an aging philosopher with Platonic instincts, the delusion that the climactic dissipation of Western civilization can be evaded, and that the accumu¬ lation of fossilized labour-power can found an eternally reformable social order. He was not completely unaware of the profound struggle between the weary regimentation of the patriarchal bourgeoisie, and a fluctuating pool of insurrectionary energy tracing its genealogy to the ur- catastrophe of organic matter. But he felt nauseous at the

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NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION

thought of losing control, and perhaps he still believed in God. Zwiefalt would surely be a distantiation from this noise and restless ferment, an end to contagion, a final peace? It is according to this deeply rooted ‘logic5 of purification and transcendence, the most insidious trope of a decomposing theology, that the irruption of ecsta- tive difference refuses the name Aussatz, and Heidegger - exhausted and uncomfortably feverish - lays down his copy of Trald’s poems, and closes his eyes.

121

Delighted to Death

E.M. Cioran’s essay, ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, begins:

We owe the quasi- totality of our discoveries to our violences, to the exacerbation of our disequilibrium. Even God, insofar as he intrigues us, is not to be found in our most intimate depths, but rather at the exterior limit of our fever, at the precise point where, our rage colliding with his, a shock results, an encoun¬ ter that is equally ruinous for him and for us. Stricken with the malediction attached to acts, the violent man does nor force his nature, does not go beyond himself, except to furiously re-enter, as aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having raised them. There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Some form of self-destruction, responding to his

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vocation and accomplishing it, is at work in the core of history; only he saves himself who sacrifices gifts and talents in order that, disengaged from his quality as a man, he is able to strut into being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career there is no price at which I am able to protect my identity, however minute are the residues that remain, it is necessary that I liquidate them; just as, on the contrary, if I adventure into a role in history, the task that I take upon myself has to exasperate my faculties to the point where I splinter with them. One always perishes by the self that one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Faithful to his appearance the violent one is not discouraged, he begins again, obstinately, because he is unable to dispense with suffering. Is he driven to devastate others? That is the detour that he borrows to rejoin his own devastation. Beneath his assured air, beneath his fanfares, is hidden one who is besotted with misfortune. It is thus amongst the violent ones that are encountered the enemies of self. And we are all violent ones, the enraged, who, having lost the key to quietude, have access only to the secrets of laceration.1

l E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, tr. R. Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 33-4 (translation adapted).

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

Cioran quotes Lao Tsu’s maxim ‘the intense life is contrary to the Tao’, and compares the tranquility of the mod¬ est life with the thirst for annihilating ecstasy that has possessed the Western world. However, acknowledging the compulsion of his Occidental heritage, he remarks 7 can pay homage to Lao Tsu a thousand times , but I am more likely to identify with an assassin. Our culture, he argues, is essentially fanatical.

Kant began something quite new in the history of Western philosophy, by adapting thought to a rigorous austerity. Unlike Descartes, for whom doubt was only a detour to a more secure edifice of knowledge, Kant com¬ mitted his thought to renunciation. Following Luther, he steeled himself against the seductions of ‘the whore of reason’, pursuing an ascetic doctrine that he baptized ‘critical philosophy’. His great temptation was to write a ‘system of pure reason’ - the constructive philosophy that Hegel accomplished in his Logic - but he did not succumb, and went to his grave with his speculative virginity intact. His mature work was a perpetual flagellation of dialecti¬ cal desire. It was not with the scholastics, but with Kant, that philosophy tasted the fierce delights of martyrdom.

In 1790, the year in which Kant’s Critique of Judgment was published, the French revolution was in full surge. The enlightenment had climaxed in an insurrection aligned with a secular project of redemption. In his Philosophy of Right , Hegel describes these events as follows:

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This is the freedom of the void which rises to a passion and takes shape in the world; while still remaining theoretical, it takes shape in the Hindu fanaticism of pure contemplation, but when it turns to actual practice, it takes shape in religion and politics alike as the fanaticism of destruction - the destruction of the whole subsisting social order - as the elimination of individuals who are objects of suspicion to any social order, and the annihilation of any organization which tries to rise anew from the ruins.2

Such is the insatiable fury that finds its voice, in this same period, in the literary and political writing of the Marquis de Sade. But comparing Sade with Kant, it is not obvious that it is the Marquis - despite his obsession with orgy and massacre - who is the more excited by violence. Hegel pictures spirit migrating from Paris to Konigsberg, flee¬ ing from its annihilating frenzy towards a moderated, or concrete, negation. He suggests that Kant recoiled from the extreme negativity of deist republicanism. But, like the ancien regime , the Jacobins also found it necessary to imprison Sade and repress the mystical delirium of his atheism. So it is equally possible to suggest that, insofar as Kant turned away from the French revolution, it was

2 G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophic desRechts (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972), 22; for a recent English translation, seealso Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Introduction, § 5, 38.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

because its basically restrained and utilitarian secularism failed to quench his thirst for extinction.

It is worth remembering that a glimpse into Kant’s philosophy was sufficient to drive Kleist to suicide, and that Schopenhauer found in it the ethical imperative that existence be denied. Perhaps neither of these writers were ecclesiastical enough to enjoy the ghoulish cruelties that Kant explored. For Kant was a consummate saint, a cheerful man. He was not a stoic, but rather, faithful to his Christian heritage, a voluptuary of defeat.

Amongst other things, Kant is the first philosopher of intolerable pleasure. In his Anthropology , published in 1798, he writes:

Satisfaction is the feeling of the promotion; pain that of the obstruction of life. But life (of animals) is, as doctors have already noted, a continuous play of the antagonism of the two.

Thus before every satisfaction there must first be pain; pain is always first. Because what would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb above a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight? 3

3 I. Kant, Schriften zurAnthropologie. Geschichts philosophic, Politik undPedagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,i968), 231; fora recent English translation, see Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. & ed. R. B. Louden (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part I, Book II, § 60, 126.

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Uninhibited pleasure does not tend to the benefit of the organism, but rather, to its immolation. Or, more precisely, the enhancement of life is intrinsically bound to its abolition. Life is not consumed by death at its point of greatest depression, but at its peak, and inversely; it is only the brake provided by suffering that preserves the organism in its existence. It is pain that spares life for something other than an immediate and annihilating delight. So Kant suggests that pleasure is the combustion of life, and we survive by smouldering.

It was Kant’s genius to combine the saint with the bourgeois. He was not immune to the prevalent ascetic practice of our age: accumulation. If pleasure is to be suspended, this is at least in part because it should be capi¬ talized. A few pages later in the Anthropology he implores:

Young man! Hold work dear; refuse yourself satisfac¬ tion, not in order to renounce it, but rather to hold it as much as possible in prospect! Do not deaden the receptivity for it by premature enjoyment! The ripeness of age, which never lets the privation of any physical enjoyment be regretted, shall, in this sacri¬ fice, secure you a capital of contentment independent of the accidents of natural law.4

4 Ibid., 237; 133.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

Delights foregone will be transmuted and redeemed. This is more than a little mendacious since, even at the end of the eighteenth century, it had become intrinsic to capital accumulation that it was interminable. One does not capitalize that which will ever be spent. It is only with the reference to the super-natural, to a pleasure beyond natural law - which is weakly described as a ‘content¬ ment’ [Zufriedenheit] - that this passage comes close to sanctifying denial. For it is mere hypocrisy to employ utilitarian arguments to justify the austerity demanded by an ethic of accumulation, which requires an unceas¬ ing disequilibrium between work and enjoyment. Such an argument could only be convincing if this austerity were merely provisional, like a negation that will be in turn negated. If capital is to be provided with an absolute justification - and the need for this might not necessarily be felt - it will not be found in economics, but religion, as it always has been in the past. Only religion speaks the sort of language that could possibly affirm the conclusive loss of terrestrial pleasure, such as that which is represented by the subordination of consumption to the amassing of productive resources.

The only coherent apologetic of bourgeois austerity is called ‘martyrology’. A rather mild example is the account of the passion of Saint Vincent given in The Roman Martyrology :

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FANGED NOUMENA

At Valencia in Spain, in the province of Tarragona,

[the death] of Saint Vincent, Deacon and Martyr, who under the most wicked governor Dacian suffered prison, starvation, the rack, the twisting of his limbs, burning coals, the iron basket, fire and other kinds of torture; and for the reward of his martyrdom he departed to heaven.5

A harsher version, found in Delahaye’s The Passions of the Martyrs , tells us more about the imagination of Christendom than its history. It describes how a certain Saint George (not the English one) consummated his martyrdom:

Saint George is hung, flayed to the point of exposing his entrails, stretched and drawn by four machines, flayed again, tormented by salt on his open wound, nailed by his feet to a scaffold, torn by six hooks, thrown in a tub and immersed by blows from a fork.

He undergoes torture at the wheel, which is fitted with swords and knives, he is stretched on a bed of bronze; molten lead is poured into his mouth, a stone covered in lead is rolled over his head and limbs. He is hung head downwards, a large stone about his neck, above a thick suffocating smoke ... He is sawn in two

5 The Roman Martyrology (London : Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1923).

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

and thrown into a cauldron of molten lead and pitch.

He is whipped with leather thongs. A red-hot cask is placed on his head. His sides are flayed, and he is burnt with torches. The sword finally terminates his martyrdom.6

In The Book of Martyrs, John Foxe makes some more general

remarks about martyrdom:

It is marvellous to see and read the incredible numbers of Christian innocents that were slain and tormented some one way, some another, as Rabanas saith, ‘Some slain with the sword; some burnt with fire; some scourged with whips; some stabbed with forks: some fastened to the cross or gibbet; some drowned in the sea; some their skins plukt off; some their tongues cut off; some stoned to death; some killed with cold; some starved with hunger; some their hands cut off, or otherwise dismembered.’ Whereof Augustine also saith, ‘They were bound - imprisoned - killed - tortured - burned - butchered - cut in pieces,’ etc.7

6 H. Delahaye, Les Passions des Martyrs et les genres litteraires (Bruxelles: Bollandistes, 1921), 286.

7 John Foxe, The Book of Martyrs, ed. G. A. Williamson (London : Seeker and Warburg,

1965)-

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Discussing the powerful enemies of the early Christians, Foxe remarks:

Neither yet were these tyrants contented with death only. The kinds of death were various and horri¬ ble. Whatever the cruelty of man’s invention could devise for the punishment of man’s body, was prac¬ tised against the Christians. Crafty trains, outcries of enemies, imprisonment, stripes and scourgings, drawings, tearings, stonings, plates of iron laid unto them burning hot, deep dungeons, racks, strangling in prisons, the teeth of wild beasts, gridirons, gibbets and gallows, tossing upon the horns of bulls ... 8

But theological discourses in the Western tradition are redemptive, and thus demand a happy ending. One example is that given by Foxe in his commentary upon the death of St. Lawrence:

Such is the wisdom and providence of God, that the blood of his dear saints (like good seed) never falls in vain to the ground, but it brings some increase: so it pleased the Lord to work at the martyrdom of this holy Lawrence, that by the constant confession of this worthy and valiant deacon, a certain soldier of Rome,

8 Ibid.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

being converted to the same faith, desired forthwith to be baptized of him; for which he was called to the judge, scourged, and afterwards beheaded.9

These examples have to be used carefully, because Kant learnt from Protestantism and secularism the necessity for internal discipline, so that, to a degree that was without philosophical precedent, he became the source of his own persecution. In the modem age, martyrdom has to become more systematic, independent of psychological and historical accident, or, to use Kant’s word, autono¬ mous. Kant describes this new passional experience as sublime, and the theory corresponding to it is to be found in his Critique of Judgment.

Kant’s theory of the sublime is an extreme point in the history of Occidental mysticism. It is concerned with the super-natural delight experienced by the self when it intuits the splitting of itself. The task Kant sets himself is that of grasping the connection between the finite animal part of the human being (sensibility), and its transcen¬ dental moral part (reason). He argues:

between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the super-sensible, there is a great gulf fixed, so that

9 Ibid.

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it is not possible to pass from the former to the latter (by means of the theoretical employment of reason), just as if they were so many separate worlds ...10

In his theory of the sublime he proposes a resolution to this rift, which hinges upon the concept of violence [Gewalt]. He insists: ‘human nature does not of its own proper motion accord with the good, but only by virtue of the violence that reason exercises upon sensibility.’11 He uses the word ‘imagination’ to refer to the pre-conscious process that grasps the raw material of sensation and moulds it into a coherent whole. The imagination is the faculty of appropriation, which assimilates passively received material to basic concepts, constituting objects of experience. In the first Critique Kant calls this function ‘schematism’. It is the primary vitality of the organism, the basic animal vigour in which the subject is rooted, and upon which the possibility of knowledge rests. If the subject is to find delight in the excruciation of its animal¬ ity, it is the imagination that must bear the fury of holy passion, and this is indeed what Kant argues:

10 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werksgaube , ed. W. Wieschedel, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 14; for a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, tr. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction, II, 63.

11 Ibid., 124; 154.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

that which, without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but simply in being apprehended, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear to be frustrat¬ ing for our powers of judgment, inappropriate to our faculty of presentation, and a violation of the imagination, but yet be judged even more sublime on that account.12

The sublimity evoked by an experience is in direct propor¬ tion to the devastation it wreaks upon the imagination. Because the pain resulting from the defeat of the imagina¬ tion, or the animal part of the mind, is the tension that propels the mind as a whole into the rapture of sublime experience. Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. The sublime is only touched upon as pathological disaster.

The paradoxical character of Kantian sublime experi¬ ence is undoubtedly in part conditioned by the extreme severity of the metaphysical problem which it is designed to solve. When sensibility and reason, the empirical and the transcendental, are distinguished with the rigour that Kant insists upon - as if they were two separate worlds - it is scarcely surprising that the bridge between them

12 Ibid., 90; 129.

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will exhibit inordinate stresses. Beyond such modern philosophical issues - indeed generating them - there are more deeply rooted historical effects at stake, and foremost amongst these is the Platonic-Christian affirmation of a super-terrestrial desire. Sublime experience is to be an anti-pathological eroticism, in which the body lusts after the agonized convulsions that stem from its own negation. The tension of sublimity is not merely the symptom of theoretical contradictions, but also, and more basically, the key to the mystical persuasiveness of the sublime. For it is only because of this paradoxical character - or tension - that the sublime promises to slake the raging thirst for violence that drives religious enthusiasm, and in so doing, to offer the delights of catastrophic rupture.

It is crucial to the way that sublimity functions in Kant’s work that it is subsumed under the more general concept of aesthetic judgment. As the synthetic a priori judgment of the relation of imagination to the practically constitutive and theoretically regulative ideas of pure reason, it falls within the more comprehensive domain of aesthetic judgment, which is the transcendental exposi¬ tion of the relation between imagination and concepts in general, which thus also includes the theoretically constitutive pure concepts of the understanding, as well as its empirical concepts. This subsumption characterizes the idealist tendency of Kant’s theory, since disinterestedness is established as a presupposition of aesthetic judgment,

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

and the question of its generation is evaded. It is not even that transcendental reason is merely presupposed by Kant, for it is thought as nothing other that pure presupposition. But the purity or absolute abstraction that underpins such a concept of reason is the absence of all intuitive content, so that the word purity - for example - also operates simultaneously in another (psychoreligious) register; employed in fact as a scantly veiled name for annihilation. Cutting against the idealism that obscures this effective or pathological functioning would involve a genealogical investigation into the emergence of disinterestedness, and it is this that drives a materialist reading of Kant towards the issue of his mysticism.

By reserving his discussion of sublime violence until he has established the presupposition of disinterested¬ ness, Kant justifies the excruciation of animality from without. The martyrdom of the imagination is described as rational rather than rationalizing, as irrelevant to the constitution of reason. A materialist deciphering of this revision requires that repression - to use an inappropri¬ ately mild word - precedes its justification. If one is to gain some purchase upon the gloomy cathedral of our history, along with a little fresh air, it is important to begin with the sublime rather than aesthetic contemplation in general, and to read the sublime as generative rather than revelatory in its relation to reason.

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Kant outlines two types of sublimity, one mathematical, and the other dynamic. Each of these types is associ¬ ated with a specific violence against the imagination, which is marked out for sacrifice due to its status as the transcendental - and thus philosophically accessible - representative of the body. The mathematical sublime is the pleasure taken by reason in the collapse of the imagination induced by the intuition of magnitude, and the dynamic sublime is the equivalent pleasure cor¬ responding to the intuition of power. In other words, the mathematical sublime is associated with the insig¬ nificance of the human animal, and the dynamic sublime with its vulnerability. The theological resonance of these terms is not at all accidental.

Sublimity has three elements; on the one hand the two elements of the subject: its sensibility or animality and its reason or pure intelligence, and on the other an object that overwhelms the imagination, and which is driven between the two parts of the subject like a wedge. The object provoking the sublime is simultaneously crushing for the sensibility and contemptible in respect to rea¬ son, and it thus serves to demonstrate the immeasurable humiliation of animal existence before the transcendental subject. The opportunity for the dynamic sublime lies in overweening force. It is the lucid intuition of catastrophic power, and is so nakedly rooted in brutal intimidation that Kant associates it with military butchery.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

The more subtle case is that of the mathematical sublime. Given time it is necessary that the imagination succeeds in unifying the flood of sensations into a coherent whole. In other words, temporal synthesis dilutes the impact of sense, and since time is an ideal form of intuition its suf¬ ficiency for this process is transcendentally guaranteed. The mathematical sublime is the pleasure resulting from the obliteration of such ordered experience. It results when the laborious construction of organized perception is ruinously undermined by means of the sudden collapse of time, with the corresponding compression of sensation into a devastating intensity. The diabolic genius of Kant’s account is worth well worth reciting:

Measurement of a space (as apprehension) is at the same time a description of it, and so an objective movement in the imagination and a progression. On the other hand, the comprehension of the manifold in the unity, not of thought, but of intuition, and consequently the comprehension of the successively apprehended parts in one glance, is a retrogression that removes the time-condition in the progression of the imagination, and renders coexistence intuitable. Therefore, since the time-series is a condition of the internal sense and of intuition, it is a subjective move¬ ment of the imagination by which it does violence to the internal sense - a violence which must be

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proportionately more striking the greater the quantum which the imagination comprehends in one intuition.

The effort, therefore, to receive in a single intuition a measure for magnitudes which it takes an appreciable time to apprehend, is a mode of representation which is defeating when subjectively considered, but, objec¬ tively, is requisite for the estimation of magnitude, and is consequently expedient. Here the very same violence that is wrought on the subject through the imagination is estimated as expedient for the total purpose of feeling.13

It would be difficult to delineate the violent desire to consummate the purity of reason in the annihilation of animality more starkly. This does not prevent Kant from elaborating upon these horrors for page after page, describing sublimity as:

something terrifying for sensibility ... which, for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being a violence which reason unleashes upon the sensibility with a view to extending its own domain (the practical) and letting sensibility lookout beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss for it.14

13 Ibid., 107-8; 142.

14 Ibid., 115; 148.

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

He later adds that:

law ordained function ... is the genuine characteris¬ tic of human morality, wherein reason must violate sensibility.15

Such is the world of Gothic violence in which the enlight¬ enment reached its crescendo; philosophers feast in the palaces of reason, and luxuriate in the screams that reach them from the dungeons of sublimity. Kant would have us believe that this sacrificial consumption of animality merely exposes the transcendentally established truth of reason in respect of the body, or rather, in frenzied con¬ tempt for it. Sublimity would be a final, almost gratuitous, negation. It would be the confirmation, rather than the generation, of the absolute supremacy enjoyed by the part of us that we share with the angels over the part that we share with the beasts. Nevertheless, he has actually taught us something quite different, if our stomachs are strong enough for it.

Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination, and which he exhibits as natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to

15 Ibid., 120; 151.

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act without the prior authorization of a juridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of natural intel¬ ligence that the human animal comes to prostrate itself before universal law. Kant is quite explicit about this in the second Critique; only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principal definition as the supersensible element of the subject, and thus as funda¬ mentally negative. In other words, morality is precisely the powerlessness of animality. This is not the discourse of civil jurisdiction, because it presupposes the prior silencing of the defendant. It is more like the discourse of military strategy in the grand style, which insists upon utterly vanquishing the enemy before dictating terms, and for which the very idea of negotiation already smelt of humiliation and defeat. In Kant’s own words (from the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals ) :

Thus it is that man lays claim to a will which does not let anything come into account if it belongs merely to his desires and inclinations, but, contrary to these, thinks of acts being possible for him, indeed

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DELIGHTED TO DEATH

necessary, which could only occur after all desires and

sensory stimulation have been ignored.16

Those with a taste for the macabre can find this theme obsessively reiterated within Kants practical philosophy. It is hard to imagine that it could be controversial to suggest that the categorical imperative presupposes a vivisection.

Kant’s anti-utilitarianism is a mark of his integrity as a moralist in the Western tradition. He does not mask the perennially severe character of moral submission in order to pander to the loutish hedonism of the English. He knows that morality is only good if it hurts. This is why he refers to the delights of the sublime - where morality comes closest to touching itself - as a ‘negative pleasure’ [negative Lust ], which is not at all the same as displeasure [Unlust]. Negative Lust is a pleasure taken in the negation of a primary pleasure, which is to say, in the unpleasure of the imagination. For reason has program¬ matically deafened itself to the howls of the body, and it is only by means of the aesthetic detour of the sublime that the devastating effects of its sovereignty can come to be enjoyed.

16 I. Kant, Kritik der Praktischen Vemunjt / Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Wilhelm Wieschedel, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968; for a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Ground work for the Metaphysics of Morals, tr., ed. A. W. Wood (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002), Third Section, 73.

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Squeamishness does not befit a moralist. A certain harsh¬ ness is necessary if one would prevent life from being delighted to death. Such harshness, indeed, that the pathological lunge towards death rediscovers itself in the process of its own rigorous extirpation; sublimated into the thanatropic frenzy of reason.

144

Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

Artists; those savage beasts that can ’t get enough of too much.

LAND

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the site where art irrupts into European philosophy with the force of trauma. The ferocious impetus of this irruption was only possible in an epoch attempting to rationalize itself as permanent metamorphosis, as growth. Which means that it is a trauma quite incommensurable with the sort of difficulties art has posed to western philosophy since Plato, for it is no longer a matter of irritation, but of catastrophe. Our own.

The consistency of Kant’s critical philosophy throughout all three of the great Critiques rests in the attention to excess inherent in the conception of synthetic a priori judgments.

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The very inception of the critical project lay in Kant’s decisive response to the voiding of logical metaphysics - the disintegration of the philosophical endeavour to reduce synthesis - that was consummated by Hume. Perhaps nothing was clearer to Kant than the radical untenability of the Leibnizian paradigm of metaphysics, still dominant in the (Wolfian) philosophy of the Prussian state. Logicism had been exposed, by the sceptical and empirical thought of a more advanced social system, as a sterile tautological stammering that belonged to the Middle Ages when positivity had been given in advance. It was with extraordinary resolve that Kant jettisoned the deductive systematization that had characterized the philosophies of immobilist societies - philosophies deeply and deliberately rooted in stagnant theism - and replaced it with the metaphysics of excess. He was even prepared to assist in the razing of all theoretical theology; because philosophy, too, had to become (at least a little) revolutionary. Nothing substantial was any longer to be presupposed.

Although the hazards of synthesis - of having to think -were clearly no longer eliminable, Kant still clung to the prospect that they could be traversed and definitively con¬ cluded. Philosophy would have to take some ground, but it could still anticipate a place of rest; an impregnable defen¬ sive line. If history could no longer be avoided, at least it could be brought swiftly and meticulously to its end.

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ART AS INSURRECTION

Time would have to be transcendentally determined, once and for all, by a new metaphysics. It would thenceforth just continue, without disruption, in an innocent confirma¬ tion of itself. For a while - a period some time between the early 1770s and 1790 - it is possible that Kant was as cheerful as any bourgeois philosopher has ever been. An ephemeral restabilization had been achieved. Then came disaster. Something was still shockingly out of control. A third Critique was necessary.

The terrifying insight that drove Kant into the laby¬ rinthine labours of the Critique of Judgment was that utter chaos had still not been outlawed by an understanding whose pretension was to ‘legislate for nature’. Kant’s own words are these:

although this [the pure understanding] makes up a system according to transcendental laws, which contain the condition of possibility for experience as such, it would still be possible that there be an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws and such a great hetero¬ geneity of natural forms belonging to the particular experience that the concept of a system according to these (empirical) laws must be totally alien to the understanding, and neither the possibility, even less the necessity of such a totality could be conceived.1

1 I. Kant, Kritik d er Urteilskrafi, ed. W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Suhrkampf, 1974), 16.

Where both original texts and translation aregivenlhavesometimes translated directly

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There are few horrors comparable to that of the master legislator who realizes that anarchy is still permitted . Far from having been domesticated by the transcendental forms of understanding, nature was still a freely flowing wound that needed to be staunched. This was going to be far more messy and frightening than anything yet under¬ taken, but Kant gritted his yellowing teeth, and began.

He found the resource for his new and final campaign in the precarious negative disorder which he called ‘beauty’. When compared to the rigorous order of transcendental form, beauty was an altogether fragile and impermanent discipline. It was something the transcendental subject could not promise itself. Nevertheless, it seemed that something beyond reason, something that was prepared to get its hands dirty, was keeping nature down. ‘Purpo¬ siveness without purpose’, Kant’s last name for excess, has all the extravagance of triumph. Even without trying, we win. History is written by the victors and ascendancy is presupposed as the condition of presentation, so that the submission of nature to exorbitant law is given with the objectivity of experience:

It is thus a subjectively necessary transcendental pre¬ supposition that unlimited dissimilarity of empirical

from the original, and sometimes cited the English version without modification. For a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Critiqueof the Poxaer of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, tr. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), First Introduction, II, 9.

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ART AS INSURRECTION

laws and heterogeneity of natural forms does not arise, but that it rather, through the affinity of the particular laws under more general ones, qualifies as an experience, as an empirical system.2

All those martialled formulas: nature takes the shortest way - she does nothing in vain - there is no leap in the multiplicity of forms ( continuum formarum) - she is rich in species, but yet thrifty in genuses, and so forth, are nothing other than just this transcendental expression of judgment, setting itself a principle for experience as a system and thus for its own needs.3

Experience is thought of in terms of an extravagant but explosive inheritance; an ungrounded adaptation of nature to the faculties of representation. The increas¬ ingly tortured and paradoxical formulations that Kant selects indicate the precarious character of the luxuriance (stocked and expended in the imagination as Tree-play’). Consider just one example: ‘Purposiveness is a lawfulness of the accidental as such.’4

Like Marx’s Ricardo, it is the extraordinary cynicism of Kantianism at the edge of its desperation that lends it a profound radicality. Kant’s ‘reason’ is a reactive concept, negatively defined against the pathology with which

2 Ibid., 22; Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, First Introduction, IV, 14.

3 Ibid., 23; 14.

4 Ibid., 30; 20.

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it has been locked in perpetual and brutal war. In the third Critique all inhibition is lifted from this conflict; it becomes gritty, remorseless, cruel. His theory of the sublime, for instance, is sheer exultation in an insensate violence [Gewalt] against the pre-conceptual (animal) powers summarized under the faculty of the ‘imagination’. In the experience of the sublime nature is affirmed as the trigger for a ‘negative-pleasure’, in so far as it humiliates and ruins that part of ourselves that we fail to share with the angels. To take one instance (out of innumerable possibilities) he says of the sublime that it is:

something terrifying for sensibility ... which for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being a violence which reason unleashes upon sensibility with a view to extending its own domain (the practical) and letting sensibility look out beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss for it.5

Kant is becoming remarkably indiscriminate about his allies, asking only that they be enemies of pathological inclination [Neigung], and know how to fight. If reason is so secure, legitimate, supersensibly guaranteed, why all the guns?

5 Ibid., 189-90; tr. J. C. Meredith in The Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 115.

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Irrational surplus, or the ineliminable and beautiful danger of unconscious creative energy: nature with fangs. How do we hold on to this thought? It is perpetually threatened by collapse; by a reversion to a depressive philosophy of work, whether theological or humanistic. The three great strands of post-Kantian exploration - marked by the names Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer - are constantly tempted by the prospect of a reduction to forgotten or implicit labour; to the agency of God, spirit, orman, to anything that would return this ruthless artistic force of the generative unconscious to design, intention, project, teleology. Kant’s word ‘genius’ is the immensely difficult and confused but emphatic resistance to such reductions; the thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is historically registered as the radical discontinuity of the example, of irresponsible legislation, as ‘order’ without anyone giving the orders.

Kant is quite explicit that a generative theory of art requires a philosophy of genius - a re-admission of accursed pathology into its very heart - and one only has to read the second Critique alongside the third to notice the immense disruption that art inflicts upon transcendental philosophy. Kant only manages to control this disruption by maintaining art as an implicitly marginal problematic within a field mastered by philosophy. Even though he acknowledges that the autonomy of reason is to the heteronomy of genius what fidelity of representation is

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when compared to creation -poverty and wretchedness - the message scarcely seeps out. In addition, there is a perpetual and pathetic effort to subsume aesthetics under practical imperatives, ‘beauty as the symbol of ethical life’6 being one example, and the basic tendency of his theory of the sublime (the infinite privilege of transcendental ideas in comparison to nature) being another.

Despite superficial appearances it is not with the thought of noumenal subjectivity that the unconscious is announced within western philosophy, for this thought is still recuperable as a prereflexive consciousness, so innocu¬ ous that even Sartre is happy to accept it. It is rather out of an intertwining of two quite different strands of the Kantian text that the perturbing figure of the energetic unconscious emerges: first, the heteronomous pathologi¬ cal inclination whose repression is presupposed in the exercise of practical reason, and second, genius, or nature in its ‘legislative’ aspect. The genius ‘cannot indicate how this fantastic and yet thoughtful ideas arise and come together in his head, because he himself does not know, and cannot, therefore, teach it to anyone’.7

It is no doubt comforting to speak of ‘the genius’ as if impersonal creative energy were commensurable with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason,

6 Ibid., 294-9; 221-5.

7 Ibid., 244; 170.

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but such chatter is, in the end, absurd. Genius is nothing like a character trait, it does not belong to a psychological lexicon; far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One ‘is’ a genius only in the sense that one ‘is’ a syphilitic, in the sense that ‘one5 is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devastated beyond recognition.

Schopenhauer reconstructed the critical philosophy in several very basic ways: by eliminating the dogmatic presupposition of a difference between subjective and objective noumena; by shifting, not in an idealist (phe¬ nomenological) direction, but towards unconscious will; by simplifying the transcendental understanding from the twelve categories and two forms of sensibility inherited from Kant to the integrated ‘principle of sufficient reason; by nipping Kant’s proto-idealist logicism in the bud; by charging the critical philosophy with the furious energy of sexual torment, attacking its (at least) germinal academi¬ cism, and immeasurably improving its stylistic resources. Where Kant distorts, marginalizes, and obscures the thought of the unconscious, Schopenhauer emphasizes and develops it. He defies the pretensions of imperalistic

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idealism by describing reason as a derivative abstraction from the understanding, co-extensive with language, so that Kant’s transcendental logic is rethought through a transcendental aesthetic organized in terms of the ‘prin¬ ciple of sufficient reason’, simplified, de-mystified, and pushed downwards towards pre-intellectual intuition. Reason is no longer thought of as an autonomous prin¬ ciple in reciprocal antagonism with nature, but as a film upon its surface. All these moves involve a massive shift in the term ‘will’ [Wille], the placeholder for the psycho¬ analytical comprehension of desire.

For Kant, the will is aligned with reason, as the princi¬ ple of the investment of nature with intentional intelligibil¬ ity, the resource from which teleological judgment must regulatively metaphorize all exorbitant natural order:

The will, as the faculty of desire, is one of the many natural causes in the world, namely, that one which is effective through concepts, and everything that is represented as possible (or necessary) through a will is called practically possible (or necessary), in contradistinction from the physical possibility or necessity of an affect for which the ground is not determined in its causality through concepts (but rather, as with lifeless matter, through mechanism, and, with animals, through instinct).8

8 Ibid., 79; 9.

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In contrast, Schopenhauers great discovery is that of non-agentic will; the positivity of the death of God. Rather than thinking willing as the movement by which conceptually articulate decision is realized in nature, he understands the appearance of rational decisions as a derivative consequence of pre-intellectual - and ultimately pre-personal, even pre-organic - willing. Unconscious desire is not just desire that happens to be unconscious, as if a decisionistic lucidity is somehow natural or proper to desire; it is rather that consciousness can only be con¬ sequential upon a desire for which lucid thought is an instrumental requirement. For Schopenhauer the intellect is constituted by willing, rather than being constitutive for it. We do not know what we want.

There is an important sense in which Schopenhauers will is the thought of genius taken towards its limit, subsuming the entire faculty of knowledge under that of exorbitant natural order, as a mere instance (although a privileged one) of purposiveness without purpose. But Schopenhauer’s own usage of the thought of genius preserves it in its specificity, as a proportional exorbi¬ tance on the part of the intellect in relation to the will. Genius is the result of a positive overcoming of uncon¬ scious ‘purpose’, an excess of intellectual energy over that which can be absorbed by desire, thus redundancy, or dysfunction through superfluity:

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an entirely pure and objective picture of things is not reached in the normal mind, because its power of perception at once becomes tired and inactive, as soon as this is not spurred on and set in motion by the will. For it has not enough energy to apprehend the world purely objectively from its own elasticity and without a purpose . On the other hand, where this happens, where the brain’s power of forming representations has such a surplus that a pure, dis¬ tinct, objective picture of the external world exhibits itself without a purpose as something useless for the intentions of the will, which is even disturbing in the higher degrees, and can even become injurious to them - then there already exists at least the natural disposition for that abnormality. This is denoted by the name of genius , which indicates that something foreign to the will, i.e., to the I or ego proper, a genius added from outside so to speak, seems to become active here.9

The mother of the useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts superfluity and abundance. As their father, the former have understanding, the latter genius, which in itself a kind of superfluity, that of the power

9 A, Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Werke in zehn II (Zurich: Diogenes,

x977), 446; translated by E.F.J. Payne as The World as Will and Representation, vol. II (NY: Dover, 1966), 377.

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of knowledge beyond the measure required for the service of the will.10

For Schopenhauer the body is the objectification of the will, the intellect is a function of a particular organ of the body, and genius is the surplus of that functioning in relation to the individual organism in question. Genius is thus an assault on the individualized will that erupts from out of the reservoir of archaic pre-organized willing. It is a site of particular tension in his thinking, caught between a vision of progressive redemption, achieved through humanity as perfected individuality in which the will is able to renounce itself, and regressive unleashing of the pre-individual will from the torture chamber of organic specificity, ego-interests, and personality. Schopenhauer’s attachment to the first of these options is well known, but the possibility of an alternative escape from individuali¬ zation - by way of dissolution into archaic inundating desire - constantly strains for utterance within his text.

This tension generates a terminological fission that can be easily detected along the jagged fault lines separating sexuality from art. One example is ‘beauty’; a word that is driven by Schopenhauer’s overt (metaphysical) policy into an uneasy alignment with renunciation. He interprets it as the negative affect - relief or release - associated

10 Ibid., 484; 410.

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with disengagement from interested thought, attained through contemplative submergence in the pure univer¬ sal ‘ideas’ of natural species as they exist outside space, time, and causality, and manifest to a radicalized Kantian disinterestedness that is greatly facilitated by artistic representation.11

If in the end Derrida’s Spurs is an absurd book, it is because it is tapping into Nietzsche’s negotiation with Schopenhauer’s discourse on woman and the aesthetic without knowing what it is listening to, because it is too busy perpetuating the Heideggerian mutilation of libidinal post-Kantianism. Nietzsche’s recovery and affirmation of the Active power of art (in his later writ¬ ings) is a response to the violent denigration of this power in Schopenhauer’s thought, a denigration that is programmed by a complex of interlocking factors that are evidenced with particular intensity in his discussion of sexual difference. Schopenhauer founds the modern thought of excitement as suffering, a thought which sur¬ vives into the twentieth century in a variety of guises, and most importantly in Freud’s libidinal economy. In order to perpetuate a rhythm of desire and its tranquilization,

11 Of all the complex issues I have skimmed over recklessly this is perhaps the richest and most impacted. Schopenhauer, by referring exorbitant form back to a Platonic eidos i s undoubtedly sacrificing a great deal of the fertile tension in Kant’s thought of purposiveness without purpose, although he also reduces the risk of a slide back into teleological theology. The thought that was perhaps necessary in order to depart most radically from the possibility of theistic relapse was that of a divine unconscious, eliminating all possibility of agentic creation at any level. But this would be the image of a mad god. Dionysus?

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in which there is no space for positive pleasure, but only variable degrees of pain, it is necessary to be profoundly misled . This is why Schopenhauer refers to the principle of sufficient reason, which is associated with the pure form of material reality, and is the transcendental condition of individuated appearance, as the veil of Maya , or illusion. Art, as the escape from individuation and desire, is thus the very negative of fiction. Beauty is an experience of truth.

But there is also another troubling, enticing, arousing, and captivating type of beauty (Nietzsche will come to say it is the only one), the beauty that is exemplified - in post- Hellenic western history at least - in the female body. For Schopenhauer this is an immense problem, as is the domain of the erotic in its entirety. The anegoic disinter¬ estedness of resignation is echoed and parodied by an indifference to ego-interests that leads in a quite opposite direction; deeper into the inferno of willing . After acknowl¬ edging with his usual raw honesty that ‘all amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone’,12 Schopenhauer is forced to accept that ‘it is precisely this not seeking one's own interest, everywhere the stamp of greatness, which gives even to passionate love a touch of the sublime, and makes it a worthy subject of poetry’.13

There is thus both a renunciatory and a libidinous sublime, each with its associated objects and aesthetic

12 Ibid., 624; 555.

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‘perfections’ or intensities. And it is not only beauty that is torn in separate directions, fiction too is split; on the one hand as the condition of individualization, and on the other as an appeal to constituted individuality. Either the ego is a dream of desire, or desire has to creep up on the ego as a dream. In sexuality,

nature can attain her end only by implanting in the individual a certain delusion , and by virtue of this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species seems to him to be a good thing for himself, so that he serves the species, whereas he is under the delu¬ sion that he is serving himself. In this process a mere chimera, which vanishes immediately afterwards, floats before him, and, as motive, takes the place of a reality. This delusion is instinct . In the great majority of cases, instinct is to be regarded as the sense of the species which presents to the will what is useful to z7.13

Woman is matter, formless and unpresentable, arousing and thus tormenting; everything about her is pretence, deception, alteration, unrealizable irrational attraction, Verstellung. Schopenhauer’s notorious essay On Woman is mapped by the movement of this word, as it organizes the play of seduction, of indirect action, of non-ideal beauty,

13 Ibid., 630; 538.

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disrupting the seriousness and responsible self-legislation of the male subject through an ‘art of dissimulation’.14 Woman is wicked art, art that intensifies life, art whose only truth is a whispered intimation that negation, too, is only a dream, the figment of an overflowing positivity that deceives through excess. Could the dream of redemption be nothing but a bangle upon the arms of exuberant life? Schopenhauer reels in horror:

Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad¬ hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty. The female sex could be more aptly called the unaesthetic ,15

Women are so terribly non- Platonic, so outrageously vital and real, so excessive in relation to the cold sterile perfec¬ tions of the ideas. With infallible instinctive power they propagate the dangerous delusion that there is something about life that we want. Pessimism has to be misogyny, because woman refuses to repel.

14 A. Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena II (Zurich: Diogenes, 1977), 67i;tr. by E. F. J. Payne as Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 617.

15 Ibid., 673; 619.

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III

A few of the things that Nietzsche learnt - at least in part - from Schopenhauer were the elementary tenets of libidinal materialism or the philosophy of the energetic unconscious (the unrestricted development of the theory of genius), the primacy of the body and its medical condi¬ tion, pragmatism (asking not how we know but why we know), effervescent literary brilliance, aestheticism (with a musical focus), an ‘aristocratic’ concern for hierarchy and gradation (which he turned into an implement for overcoming Aristotelian logic), antihumanism, a construc¬ tion of the history of philosophy as dominated by Plato and Kant and the problematic of reality and appearance, virulent anti-academicism, misogyny, and the distrust of mathematical thinking. Schopenhauer even wrote that:

The genuine symbol of nature is universally and everywhere the circle, because it is the schema or form of recurrence; in fact, this is the most general form in nature. She carries it through in everything from the course of the constellations down to the death and birth of organic beings. In this way alone, in the restless stream of time and its content, a continued existence, i.e., a nature, becomes possible.16

16 A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt aLsWille und Vorstellung II, ii, 559; tr. Payne in The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, 477.

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But the shifts Nietzsche had brought to the Schopenhaue- rian philosophy by the end of his creative life were at least as immense as this inheritance, involving, amongst other elements, a displacement from the will to life to the will to power, so that survival is thought of as a tool or resource for creation; a displacement of antihumanism from the ascetic ideal to overman (non-terminal overcoming); the completion of a post-Aristotelian ‘logic’ of gradation without negativity or limits; a ‘critique of philosophy5 that diagnosed Plato and Kant as symptoms of libidinal disaster; a return of historical thinking freed from the untenable time/timelessness opposition of bankrupt logi- cism; and a displacement from the principle of sufficient reason to ‘equalization’ [Ausgleichung] , which - since differentiation was no longer thought of as an imposition of the subject - implied a shift from primordial unity to irreducible pluralism, and from the disinterested ‘world- eye’ to perspectivism.

Nietzsche’s intricate, profound, and explosive response to the provocation of Schopenhauer resists hasty sum¬ marization. It is helpful to start with the transitional movements of The Birth of Tragedy, in which the Scho- penhauerian will is re-baptized as ‘Dionysus’. Like the undifferentiated will, it is only in the dream of Apollon¬ ian appearance that Dionysus can be individualized. As Walter Otto remarks (about the mythological, not just the specifically Nietzschean god): ‘He is clearly thought

163

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of on the oriental pattern as the divine or infinite in general, in which the individual soul longs so much to lose itself5.17 The tragic chorus is the focus of a delirious fusion, in which the personality is liquidated by the collec¬ tive artistic process. Otto says some other very important things about Dionysus, the twice-born:

The one so born is not merely the exultant one and joy-bringer, he is also the suffering and dying god, the god of tragic contradiction. And the inner power of this dual nature is so great, that he steps amongst humanity as a storm, quaking them and subduing their resistance with the whip of madness. Everything habitual and ordered must be scattered. Existence suddenly becomes an intoxication - an introduction of blessedness, but no less one of terror.

To this female world the Apollonian stands opposed, as the decidedly masculine. The mystery of life, of blood and of terrestrial force does not rule in it, but rather clarity and breadth of spirit. But the Apollon¬ ian world cannot persist without the other.18

17 W. F. Otto, Dionysos, Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1933), 115.

18 Ibid., 74-5,132.

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ART AS INSURRECTION

Doric civilization, the hard Apollonian spine of western culture, vaunting the defiant erectness of its architecture, is fundamentally defensive in nature. Already in this, Nietzsches most ‘Schopenhauerian’ book, the minor register of the pessimistic quandary prevails without compromise; the overcoming of wretched individuality is to be referred in the direction of the reservoir of insurgent desire, not in that of a metaphysical renunciation. One does not build fortifications against saints:

to me the Doric state and Doric art are explicable only as a permanent military encampment of the Apollonian. Only incessant resistance to the titanic- barbaric nature of the Dionysian could account for the long survival of an art so defiantly prim and so encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, and a political structure so cruel and relentless.19

The difference between Dionysus and Apollo is that between music and the plastic arts (Schopenhauer’s differ¬ entiation that Nietzsche describes as ‘the most important insight of aesthetics’),20 will and representation (primary and secondary process), chaos and form. In the tragic

19 F. Nietzsche, Die GeburtderTragodie (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Materialien, 1981), 35 tr. W. Kaufmann as The Birth of Tragedy (NY: Vintage, 1967), 47.

20 Ibid., 89; 100.

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fusion of music and theatrical spectacle desire is delivered upon the order of representation in a delirious collective affirmation of insurgent alterity (nature, impulse, oracular insight, woman, barbarism, Asia). Greek tragedy is the last instance of the Occident being radically permeable to its outside. The Socratic death of tragedy is the begin¬ ning of the ethnic solipsism and imperialistic dogmatism that has characterized western politics ever since, the brutal domestication process with which the repressive instance in man (‘reason’) has afflicted the impersonal insurrectionary energies of creativity, until they became the whimpering, sentimental, and psychologized ‘genius’ of the romantics. With Socrates began the passionate quest of European humanity to become the ugly animal.

In his later, more fragmentary writings on art, Nietzsche perhaps says something a little like the following. The aesthetic operation is simplification; the movement of abstraction, logicization, unification, the resolution of problematic. It is this operation which, when understood in terms of the logical principles formulated by Aristotle - in terms, that is, of its own product - seems like a negation of the enigmatic, the re-distribution of alterity to the same within a zero-sum exchange, the progressive ‘improvement’ and domestication of life. But simplifica¬ tion is not a teleologically regulated approximation to simplicity, to the decadent terminus we call ‘truth’, it is an inexhaustibly open-ended creative process whose only

166

ART AS INSURRECTION

limits are fictions fabricated out of itself. Nothing is more complex than simplification; what art takes from enigma it more than replenishes in the instantiation of itself, in the labyrinthine puzzle it plants in history. The intensification of enigma. The luxuriantly problematic loam of existence is built out of the sedimented aeons of residues deposited by the will to power, the impulse to create, ‘The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.’21

Enigma, positive confusion (delirium), problematic, pain, whatever we want to call it; the torment of the philosophers in any case, is the stimulus to ecstatic crea¬ tion, to an interminable ‘resolution’ into the enhanced provocations of art. What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility of the world alone that gives it worth. ‘Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character’.22 Not, then, to oppose pain to the absence of pain as metaphysical pessimism does, but, rather, to dif¬ ferentiate the ecstatic overcoming of pain from weariness and inertia, to exult in new and more terrible agonies, fears, burning perplexities as the resource of becoming, overcoming, triumph, the great libidinal oscillations that break up stabilized systems and intoxicate on intensity;

21 F. Nietzsche, Der WillezurMacht, ed. P. Gast, E. Forster-Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Alfred KronerVerlag, 1964), 533; tr. by W. Kaufmann as The WilltoPower( NY: Vintage, 1968), 419.

22 Ibid. ,413; 326.

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that is Dionysian pessimism - ‘refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic’;23 'the effect of the work of art is to excite the state that creates art - intoxication ,24

After Nietzsche there is Freud. Tapping into a reservoir of genius (the unconscious of late nineteenth-century Viennese women) that drives him to the point of idi¬ ocy, he pushes onwards without knowing what the fuck he’s doing. Freud is a thinker of astounding richness and fertile complexity, but I shall merely touch upon his most disastrous confusion. When he writes on art, degenerating - despite his wealth of acuity - into banal psycho-biography, a terribly damaging loss of direction afflicts the psychoanalytic enterprise. The inherent con¬ nection between the irruptive primary process and artistic creativity, or the basic inextricability of psychoanalysis and aesthetics, slips Freud’s grasp, and art is presented as a merely contingent terrain for the application of therapeutically honed concepts. The adaptation of the mutilated individual to its society, in which art is illegal except as a parasite of elite commodity production cir¬ cuits, is the scandal of psychoanalysis. It becomes Kantian

23 Ibid., 330; 262.

24 Ibid., 553; 434.

168

ART AS INSURRECTION

(bourgeois); a delicate police activity dedicated to the social management and containment of genius. As if ‘therapy’ could be anything other than the revolutionary unleashing of artistic creation!

The two basic directions in which the philosophy of genius can develop are exemplified by psychoanaly¬ sis and national socialism. Either rigorous anti-anthro¬ pomorphism, the steady constriction of the terrain of intentional explanation, and the rolling reduction of praxes to parapraxes, or the re-ascription of genius to intentional individuality, concentration of decision, and the paranoiac praxial interpretation of non-intentional processes (the Jewish conspiracy theory). The death of God is operative in both cases, either as the space of the generative unconscious, or as that of a triumphantly divinized and arbitrarily isolated secular subjectivity. It is easy to see that the role of discourse in these two cases is a very precise register for the difference at issue; on the one hand the talking cure, in which the texts of confession and rational theory are both displaced by the compression wave of a radically senseless energy process that defies the status of object in relation to an autonomously determinable agent language; and on the other, the interminable authoritative monologue of the dictator (politically instantiated ego-ideal), in which the will is returned to a quasi-Kantian acceptation to capital¬ ize upon its libidinal detour, finding its true sense in the

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lucid decision of an individual who speaks on behalf of a racially specified unconscious clamour.

That part of twentieth-century philosophy resonant with the aesthetically oriented tendency outlined here has as its two great tasks the diagnosis of Nazism and the protraction of the psychoanalytic impulse, in other words the arming of desire with intellectual weapons that will allow it to evade the dead-end racist Gotterdammerung politics which capital deploys as a last ditch defence against the flood. No revolution without insurrectionary desire, no effective route for insurrectionary desire without integral anti-fascism. Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari are perhaps the most important theoretical loci in this development. The latter three I shall say a little about.

It is not simply ridiculous to describe Bataille as Scho¬ penhauer with enthusiasm, in so far as this might crudely characterize a certain variant of ‘Nietzscheanism’, or Dionysian pessimism. After all, Bataille too is concerned with value as the annihilation of life, challenging the utilitarianism that finds its only end in the preservation and expansion of existence. If this affirmation of loss is ‘nihilistic’, it is at least an ‘active nihilism’; the promotion of a violently convulsive expenditure rather than a weary renunciation. Art as the wastage of life. And Bataille’s involvement with art, above all with literature, is of an unparalleled intricacy and intensity. Philosopher and

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ART AS INSURRECTION

historian of art, literary theorist, in his ‘philosophy’ a stylist, dazzling as an essayist, a novelist and poet of both profundity and incandescent beauty, his is a writing oblivious to circumscription, spreading like an exotic fungus into the darkest recesses of aesthetic possibility. A rather tortured and incoherent leap? Come on now! A ‘philosophy’ of excess that draws out an inner connection between literature, eroticism, and revolt could hardly be irrelevant to our problematic here. As Bataille states, ‘beauty alone ... renders tolerable a need for disorder, violence, and indignity that is the root of love.’25

Bataille also has the peculiar honour, shared with Nietzsche and Reich, of beginning his assault on germinal national socialism before Hitler had exhibited its truth. His early essays sketch a vision of fascism as the most fanatical project f or the elimination of excess, an attempt at the secular enforcement of the perfectly ordered city of God against the disorder, luxuriance, and mess of surplus production, as it sprawls into the voluptuary expenditure of eroticism and art. Assailing the fascist tendency is the disindividualized delirium of tragic sacrifice and revolu¬ tion, when

Being is given to us in an intolerable surpassing of

being, no less intolerable than death. And because,

25 G. Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. Ill (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 13.

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in death, it is withdrawn from us at the same time it is given, we must search for it in the feeling of death, in those intolerable moments where it seems that we are dying, because the being in us is only there through excess, when the plenitude of horror and that of joy coincide.26

For there is no doubt that the fascists are right, the very incarnation of right, yes: ‘Literature is even, like the transgression of moral law, a danger.’27

A theory of the real as art (primary production) that is melded seamlessly with an anti-fascist diagnostics charac¬ terizes the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In their Anti-Oedipus they indicate that the rational regulation or coding of creative process is derivative, sterile, and eliminable. Their name for genius is ‘schizophrenia’, a term that cannot be safely domesticated within psychol¬ ogy, any more than ‘genius’ can (and for the same reasons). If nature is psychotic it is simply because our psychoses are not in reality ‘ours’.

Libido - as the raw energy of creation - is ungrounded, irreducibly multiple, yet it precipitates a real and unified ‘principle’ out of itself. The body without organs is its name; at once material abstraction, and the concretely

26 Ibid., 11-12.

27 Ibid., vol. IX, 182.

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ART AS INSURRECTION

hypostasized differential terrain which is nothing other than what is instantaneously shared by difference. The body without organs is pure surface, because it is the mere coherence of differential web, but it is also the source of depth, since it is the sole ‘ontological’ element of difference. It is produced transcendence. Paradox after paradox, spun like a disintegrating bandage upon the infected and deteriorating wound of Kant’s aesthetics, teasing the philosophical domestication of art - the most gangrenous cultural appendage of capital - towards its utter disintegration.

How does desire come to desire its own repression? How does production come to rigidify itself in the social straitjacket whose most dissolved form is capital ? It is with this problematic, inherited from Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Reich, that Deleuze and Guattari orient their work. In our terms here: how does art become (under-) compensated labour? Their answer involves a displacement of the prob¬ lem into a philosophical affinity with Kant’s paralogisms of the pure understanding, rethought in Anti-Oedipus as materially instantiated traps for desire. A paralogism is the attempt to ground ‘conditions of possibility’ in the objectivity they permit, or creativity in what it creates. This is, to take the most pertinent example, to derive the forces of production from the socio-economic apparatus they generate. Sociological fundamentalism, state wor¬ ship, totalitarian paranoia and fascism, they all exhibit

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the same basic impulse; hatred of art, (real) freedom, desire, everything that cannot be controlled, regulated, and administered. Fascism hates aliens, migrant workers, the homeless, rootless people of every kind and inclina¬ tion, everything evocative of excitement and uncertainty, women, artists, lunatics, drifting sexual drives, liquids, impurity, and abandonment.

Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.2*

To conclude is not merely erroneous, but ugly.

28 Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, 554; 435.

Spirit and Teeth

A PRELIMINARY POST-MORTEM

Spirit (Geist) is stigmatized by a multiple deconstructi- bility: as a substantialization of Dasein, an antonym of matter, a correlate of phonic lucidity, or a token of reflexivity, self-presence, pure intelligibility, spontaneity, etc. In the course of its recent history this word has been inflated by Hegel into the cosmic medium of transac¬ tion - the super-heated lubricant of global eventuation - and then trafficked to the edge of worthlessness by the culture succeeding him, before finally succumbing to an irreparable marginalization by the scientific advances of experimental and behavioral psychology, neurology, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, until it becomes a sentimentalism, a vague peripheralized metaphor, a joke ... a cheap target one might think. There are those who remain loyal enough to the canonical discourses of Western philosophy to

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argue that logocentrism is secreted in the implementary terminology of information, digitality, program, software, and control. But as for spirit! - that can only be parody or nostalgia. Who could still use such a word without humor or disdain? Spirit is less a misleading or dangerous word than a ridiculous one; a Coelecanth of a word. Yet it persists: the mark of a clownish incompetence at death.

Such incompetence has its doctrine, rituals, and lit¬ urgy, its orthodoxies and heresies. It is the entire and prolonged refusal of the impersonal summarizable as ‘phenomenology.’ Whether high-church (Hegel), or low-church (Husserl), phenomenology is the definitive ideology of propriety; systematically employing the inter¬ rogative mode in order to distill out everything for which proper subjectivity cannot claim responsibility, and thus entrenching the humanistic dimension of Western phi¬ losophy ever more rigidly. This entire current gradually compiles an attempted proof of the impossibility of death, an ontological conflation of access to reality and owner¬ ship ( psyche , cogito , Selbstheit , Ei gent lie hkeit, Jemeinigkeit ), a perpetually reformulated spiritualism. Socrates, Des¬ cartes, Husserl: all shallow, all egoists, all pressing further into the flatlands of the profane. This is why they are so well placed to profit from the death of God (an event in which they had taken no part - on the contrary; the obses¬ sional egoism of theism had always appealed to them). Phenomenology is a programmatic denial (reduction

176

SPIRIT AND TEETH

to the personal) of exteriority which, after becoming a quasisolipsistic knee-jerk of self-assertion, wonders with genuine naivety why alterity has come to pose such problems. If spirit largely disappears between Hegel and Husserl it is because, compared to the transcendental ego, it seems a little too complicit with the outside.

Unlike Heidegger and Derrida, I see no advance, recovery, or sophistication taking place in the Husserlian reading of Kant. The phenomenological reduction of appearance \Erscheinung] to evidential Schein is a dogmatic decision which defangs the tentative skepticism of the critical philosophy, taking it even further from the deep epoche of unknowing: the vast abrupt discovered confus¬ edly by Pyrrho of Elis, the repressed of monotheistic civilization. Husserlian suspension or bracketing is not Pyrrhonian but Socratic; a reservation of judgment that is subordinated to apodicticity, to knowing what one knows even if nothing else (to doubting as a power of the subject). Epoche, chaos , Old Night, death, however it/ she is named, the way there is not our doing. Suspension is to be discovered, not performed.

So what is to be thought of a differance that radicalizes, deconstructs, or subverts a suspension thus crushed under a phenomenological dogmatics? What is it that would take us this way, if not that which appears (in Kant’s sense, not Husserl’s) as the humanistic pretension - the spirit - of representational philosophizing? Such suspension is of

177

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course a detour, an avoidance, but scarcely an inevitable one. On the contrary, it is peculiarly deliberated; meticu¬ lously valorizing a specific philosophic tendency (passing through Husserl), effacing another (the Schopenhauerean fork of post-Kantianism), and painstakingly transferring signs from the latter to the former (Nietzsche read through Heidegger!!!). Section 7 of Sein und Zed is exemplary here, with its insistence upon an evidential reading of phenomenality, thereby dismissing the entire problematic of Nietzsche’s thinking in a single casual gesture. What sense to the insistent theme of fiction in Nietzsche’s writ¬ ings after such a move has been made? What sense to enigma? (We always already have the meaning of being built into the structure of existence, Heidegger suggests, it is merely that we do not yet know that we know. Ques¬ tioning is remembering. Socrates smiles.)

We do not know a not yet that can be dilated cor¬ rosively; frustrating the end of metaphysics, interminably deferring truth. Yawns become scarcely controllable. Does it matter what we know or will never know? Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust. An obsessional concern for such insignifi¬ cances is a tasteless parochialism. What matters is the Unknown: the escapographic matrix echoed spectrally by the negative prefix, sprawled in immense indifference

178

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to all our “yets”. Beyond the anthropoid gesticulations of knowing, suspension is not differentiable from death, and death (“one’s death” as we so ludicrously say) does not belong to an order that can be delayed. Has our Socratism reached such a pinnacle of profanity that we really imagine she would wait for us?

PART IS WOLVES

As I continue to study this text, elsewhere, with a more decent patience, I hope one day to be able, beyond what a conference permits me today, to render it justice in also analysing its motion, its mode or its status (if it has one), its relation to philosophi¬ cal discourse, to hermeneutics or poetics, but still what it says of Geschlecht, the word Geschlecht, and also of place [ Ort ], as of animality. For the moment [[’instant], I follow solely the passage of spirit.1

These are the words of a man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time. There is no discern¬ ible urgency here, far less abruptness, desperation, or any of the raw intensities of haste. Instead there is the now familiar rhetoric of close reading; the simultaneous

i J. Derrida, De Vesprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 137; see also, J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question , tr. G. Bennington, R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87.

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performance and prescription of painstaking care, deliberation, conscientiousness, and reverential textual devotion. A certain intricately intertextual discussion of spirit unfolds, at a languorous pace, inspired by uninter¬ rogated principles of decency and justice. Everything is mediated by elucidations, re-elucidations, elucidations of previous elucidations, conducted with meticulous courtesy, but never inattentive to the complicity of the concept of elucidation with the history of metaphys¬ ics from Plato to the previous paragraph of De Vesprit. Our author is not to be hurried into premature pronounce¬ ments on matters of such seriousness as philosophical discourse, hermeneutics, or poetics. Nor is he prepared to descend into such overenthusiastic crudity as examining more than one of Heidegger’s words in a single book. Last of all, as it has so often tended to be, comes a promise to take seriously the problem of animality, which - God and suchlike spiritual primordialities being willing - should come to be written about one day.

It is probably relatively uncontroversial to conclude from all this that Derrida is not a werewolf. Werewolves are dissipated within a homolupic spiral that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Their feral physiologies are badly adapted to the depres¬ sive states conducive to ethical earnestness. Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension which fragment their movements, break up their tracks with

180

SPIRIT AND TEETH

jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise , so that each gesture is baked in a kiln of ferocity. Creatures of epidemic rather than hermeneutics, werewolves tend to be very crude, but then, they don’t live as long as deconstructionists. The luxury of delaying the problem of animality is not open to them.

On page 141 of De Vesprit Derrida apologizes for a very moderate instance of textual impoliteness that he describes as ‘precipitating in an indecent fashion’.2 In this thought of ‘indecent precipitation’ he comes closer to the dominant impulse of Trakl’s poetry than at any other point in the book; closer too, it could be argued, than Heidegger ever gets. An evasion that is perhaps constitutive of hermeneutical decency is exemplified when, by taking one’s time over interpreting Trakl’s poetry, one avoids succumbing to the pestilence it communicates. Trakl’s writings are lycanthropic vectors of impatience, of twitch disease, because they are the virulent relics of an indecent precipitation, an abortion, a meteorite impact. Trakl took very little time over anything. Surviving as he did to the age of twenty-seven he had very little time to take.

Trakl confesses to his lycanthropy in the first version of Passion, the unavowed version, where he writes that:

2 Ibid., 141; Derrida, Of Spirit, 87.

FANGED NOUMENA

Two wolves in the sinister Wood We mixed our blood in a stony embrace And the stars of our race fell upon us.3

The word ‘race5 in this translation precipitates the sense of Geschlechti n an indecent fashion. In the complete absence of hermeneutical conscientiousness it is epidemiological factors alone which compel this. To become a werewolf one must be bitten by another werewolf, and in Trald’s case it seems this was Rimbaud, who wrote: ‘It is quite evident to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I am not able to comprehend revolt. My race never stirs itself except for pillage: like wolves at the beast they have not killed5.4

To be a werewolf is to be inferior by the most basic criteria of civilization. Not only is the discipline of politi¬ cal responsibility alien to them, so is the entire history of work in which such discipline is embedded. Rimbaud remarks, starkly enough: ‘I have a horror of all trades.5 In general, it can be said that this race is marked by a pro¬ found spiritual inferiority. Compared to the piety, moral¬ ity, and industriousness of its superiors it exhibits only laziness, disobedience, and an abnormally unsuccessful

3 G. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk (Miinchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), 216; for a recent English translation, see G. Trakl, Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition tr. Alexander Stillmark, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 82.

4 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 302.

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repression of all those traits of the unconscious which Freud describes as ‘resistant to education,’ and among which there is nothing remotely associated with either decency or justice: ‘I have never been of this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race who sings under torture; I do not understand the laws, I am a brute’.5

Such is Trakl’s ‘accursed race’6 as well as Rimbaud’s, communicating its dirty blood in wilderness spaces of barbarian inarticulacy. Eternally aborting the prospect of a transcendental subjectivity, the inferior ones are never captured by contractual reciprocity, or by its attendant moral universalism. They are no more employable than they are psychoanalyzable, oblivious to both legality and incentive. Incapable of making promises - even to themselves - they are excluded from every possibility of salvation. The craving for such pagan regressions is unspeakable. It is only with the greatest strictness that the superior ones repress the violent drives which lure them into inferior becomings; becoming female, black, irresponsible and nomadic, becoming an animal, a plant, a death spasm of the sun.

In its final phase the Austro-Hungarian Empire became a machine for the generation of homolupic becomings: brewing intense trajectories of regression among the

5 Ibid., 308.

6 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 82.

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Slavic races of the Balkans and Carpathians, translating them into German, and then condensing them under the pressure of exacerbated repression in the Viennese culture- core. What exploded in the hysterias of Freud’s patients was an irresistible vulcanism of becoming inferior, whose petrified lava flows mapped-out the regressive character of the drive. The migrant blocks of tension summarized in the Freudian unconscious are much less a matter of Oedipus than of the mongols; of those who feed the world of spirit to their horses as they inundate civilization like a flood. If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague.

Among Trakl’s writing’s are two war poems, and per¬ haps only two. One is Grodek- named after the battlefield upon which the Austro-Hungarian army suffered a major defeat in the early stages of the conflict - and is perhaps the most widely known of Trakl’s writings. It is this poem that includes the line so important to both Heidegger and Derrida concerning ‘the hot flame of spirit’.7 The other is entitled In the East, and sketches the same libidinal figure in the First World War as Freud’s writings of the two ensuing decades. This figure traces the displacement of impersonal primary-process aggression against the self- God-city complex - against civilization - onto the far more restrained axis of armed competition between nations.

7 Ibid., 95; Trakl , Poems and Prose, 126.

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War sublimates the lycanthropic death-wave in the same way a dream sublimates unavowable desire; allowing something to remain asleep. In this sense In the East is the undoing of a war poem, and has the nightmare quality associated with something peeled-back; such as the disintegration of flesh from a skull, or the opening of a corpse to reveal an obscenely teeming mass. This movement of violent disillusionment is starkly outlined in the poem Conjiteor :

And as the masks fall from each thing I see only anxiety, despair, ignominy and epidemic,

The tragedy of humanity has no heroes,

A vile piece, played out on graves and corpses.8

The second stanza of In the East ends with the spirits of the stricken - of the erschlagenen, close perhaps to a Geschlecht - sighing among the shadows of autumnal ashes, and to this point In the East might still be a war poem. It would still be possible for the ego to savour these stanzas for the sublimation-trap they lay for impersonal thanatropisms, offering up the victims of inhibited conflicts as a mourn¬ ful dream-image. The third and final stanza, however, is something quite different:

8 Ibid., 147.

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Thorny wilderness girdles the city From bloody steps the moon hunts Terrified women.

Wild wolves break through the gate.9

The wild, thebasis of a noun in the first line of the stanza, returns as an adjective in its last. An indeterminate mul¬ tiplicity of wolves effect a rupture in the boundary of the city, transmitting its positive exteriority into its kernel. No longer interpretable as politics, as a war between cities, states, or other civilized totalities, the violence of the East relapses into an unrestrained movement of erosion. Blood, the moon, and women are coagulated by an intense menstrual seism which shatters the proper dif¬ ference between life and death, integrity and dissolution, periodicity and shock. What Trakl in Grodek names ‘the forgotten blood5 recovers its sacred sense, in the regression that transmutes the politico-ethically impregnated blood of the dying solder into savage categorially oblivious flow.

Wild matter is untouched by its difference from spirit, insofar as this is supposed to depend upon a logical disjunction. The pseudointeriorities of the city are no less permeable to it than the uncultivated spaces marked out by the civilized ones for its exile. The bloody steps [. Stufen ] of In the East are only one variant among the many found

9 Ibid., 94; Trakl, Poem sand Prose, 124.

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in Trakl’s writings: ‘steps of madness’,10 ‘mossy steps,’ ‘ruined steps,’ ‘the steps of the wood’.11 It is a language of gradation, degree, Abstujung. Not quantity as opposed to quality, nor the difference of the two, but heterogenous strata of intensity, which - like the scales of the chaos theorists - involve irresolvable complexity, diversity, indefinite protractability in both directions, the default of absolute thresholds, an economics of incommensurability, and a compulsively recurrent abortion of the concept. Essence is preempted by an irresolvable excess of detail, in the same eruptive gesture that lethally infects transcend¬ ence with the return of excitatory complexity. The great simplicities of culture - identity, equality, absoluteness, abstraction - are immanently subverted by the pathologi¬ cal mass of unsublatable ingredients. There is no concept of particularity that is not theological; aligned with the phantasm of a transcendent spirit that stands disjoined from the ineliminable materiality of all spiritualization processes - to steal Nietzsche’s term.

That matter is volatilized to different degrees of spir¬ itualization is not in the least dependent upon spiritual causalities of any kind. Between the wilderness and the polis is a wilderness history - a genealogy - and not a political history. Regression is not an undoing of the city’s

10 Ibid., 43.

11 Ibid., 54.

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work, but a recurrence of impersonal creativity. More precisely, the work of the city has never been anything but a mendacious retranscription of the real metamorphoses which reemerge in lycanthropic becomings.

Inferiority is not any kind of lack or impoverish¬ ment, but a positive libidinal charge potentiating spir¬ itualizations. Anything that slumbers in the sterility of pseudoabsoluteness is right to fear the inferior ones, and the powerful regressions that wash away the ramparts damming-up intensive sequences. The accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization, which begins with the use of fire to keep the wild animals at bay. Instead they leave a scorched and blackened trail in their wake as they irresponsibly protract the trajectory of animality. In their hands fire itself loses itself; becoming dirty, epidemic, and regressive. Not for them the humanizing, nucleating fire; the hearth, the pro¬ tective and nutrifying glow, a focus embracing difference within itself, the fire of the familial and the familiar. The fire of the inferior ones is the dissolvant blaze which spreads uncontrollably, combusting the gloomy architectures of transcendence in the mad truth of exteriority. It is the fire of waste, dissipation, dehumanization, of a deeper and harsher fertility than can be comprehended by the industry of man. This lupine fire - the apolitical element

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SPIRIT AND TEETH

in war, literature, psychosis, and catastrophe - makes space for the impersonal propagations of the wilderness.

An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic - just as he was also an anti¬ christ, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl’s texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn’t simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.

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PART II : RATS

Henrik Ibsen knew some things about rats, ‘they who are hated and persecuted of men’.12 The fact of an alliance between rats and desire was evident to him, and when the rat wife of Little Eyolf is asked where her beloved is, she answers: “Down among all the rats”.13 How deftly he indicates the registration of the rats upon the Oedipal claustrophobia of the bourgeois household:

Rat Wife: \curtsies at the door ] Begging your most humble pardon, ladies and gentlemen ... but have you anything gnawing at this house?

Allmers: Have we ...? No, I don’t think so.

Rat Wife: Because if you had I’d be glad to help you get rid of it.

Rita: Yes, yes, we understand. But we don’t have anything of that kind.14

How desperate they are not to believe it! “Rats don’t belong here, this is the inside, purity, civilization,

12 Henrik Ibsen, The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 49.

13 Ibid., 49.

14 Ibid., 46.

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philosophy ... we don’t want to know about anything of that kind ”

Reading is not one thing. It is always possible to construe the movement between strata, plates, terraces, in spiritual terms; a matter of simulacrum, represen¬ tation, metaphor, commentary, and interpretation. God is like and unlike a man, who is like and unlike an animal, which is like and unlike inorganic matter. This is an architecture of super-terrestrial transitions, transcendental difference, absolute verticality, gulfs of essence, logicized, infinitized, purifying disjunction. There is not one alternative to such a schema, but a reck¬ lessly proliferated multiplicity of alternatives; complex sponge-spaces rotted by lines of insinuation. There is always a dimension of immanence; a burrow, a thread, a path for contagion. The storeys of a house lend them¬ selves to social stratification, and thus to philosophical and theological metaphor; the basement representing the place of the servants, animality, the unconscious. What is repressed in this case is not the basement itself - hell is not repressed but exhibited - but the hollow walls, the drainpipe outside, the arterial system of tubes, ducts, and vents, everything that facilitates the corruption of vertically articulated space by the quasihorizontality of an insidious dimension. Laws, revelations, and prayers, or - at a lower level - commands, messages, and reports, seem to establish the defined relations between strata

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that are identical with justice. The words of God pass down from level to level, determinately mediated at each stage. Inherent to such spatiality is its subversion, a more basic and complex order of distances, because Heaven is not without its ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterized by porous heterogeneity. It seems likely that God would insist upon air-conditioning and a dumbwaiter. Irrespective of his celestial visage, Jahweh still has ratbites on his ass.

Neither Heidegger nor Derrida have any time for Trakl’s rats, but that doesn’t stop them swarming every¬ where, exaggerating the lycanthropic power of infiltration. It must be admitted; the rats are not very spiritual, but if there is a site, Ort , that focuses Trakl’s poetry, why is it not the courtyard that Trakl repeatedly populates with rats? Are not the rats, as a positive antihistoricism, crucial to Trakl’s poetic force? Why does Heidegger never mention Trakl’s superb poem The Rats , a text that functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation? Perhaps it is because difference becomes unacceptable when it moves fast and unpredictably, hissing at humanity through plague-smeared teeth.

It is certainly not because the rats are indiscernible, despite their unrealizable fluidity. They shriek, whistle, bicker, rummage, and romp. When the rats erupt into Dream and Derangement for instance, which is perhaps Trakl’s most shattering and lycanthropic poem, they are

192

SPIRIT AND TEETH

not merely glimpsed - far less ignored or exterminated - but encouraged by the poem’s central character, who feeds them in a gesture of beautiful treachery against mankind. Not that it is population alone that gives them a special privilege, ravens are equally prevalent within Trakl’s writ¬ ings - and also have a poem of their own - whilst toads and bats are to be found in incredible numbers. It is the rats’ hideous talent for decomposing interiorities that advantages them; opening the incest-rotted ‘house of the father’ - and with it the most intensely charged recesses of Trakl’s writing - to the depredations of feral alterity.

Despite his humanistic prejudices, Hans Zinsser, in his book Rats , Lice, and History , has written delightfully about the rats. He remarks:

It is a curious fact that long before there could have been any knowledge concerning the dangerous character of rodents as carriers of disease, mankind dreaded and pursued these animals. Sticker has col¬ lected a great many references to this subject from ancient and mediaeval literature, and has found much evidence in the folklore of mediaeval Europe which points to the vague recognition of some connection between plague and rats. In ancient Palestine, the Jews considered all seven mouse varieties ( akbar ) unclean, and as unsuited for human nourishment as were pigs. The worshipers of Zoroaster hated water

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rats, and believed that the killing of rats was a service to God It is also significant that Apollo Smintheus, the god who was supposed to protect against dis¬ ease, was also spoken of as the killer of mice, and saint Gertrude was besought by the bishops of the early Catholic Church to protect against plague and mice. The year 1498, Sticker tells us, was a severe plague year in Germany, and there were so many rats in Frankfurt that an attendant was stationed for several hours each day on a bridge in the town and directed to pay a pfennig for every rat brought in.

The attendant cut off the tail of the rat - probably as a primitive method of accounting - and threw the bodies into the river. Heine, according to Sticker, speaks of a tax levied on the Jews of Frankfurt in the fifteenth century, which consisted of the annual delivery of five thousand rat tails. Folklore originating in a number of different parts of Europe during the great plague epidemics mentions cats and dogs, the hereditary enemies of rats and mice, as guardians against plague.15

There is enormous power to the dynamic hierarchy of vectors mobilized by the rats. It combines the insidious subtlety of liquids with the concentrated displacement of

15 H. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Boston: Bantam Books. 1965), 142-3.

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compact solids; saturation with jumps. Rats carry fleas which bear diseases, augmenting the fluid dissemination of plagues with a ferociously discontinuous transmission. To quote Zinsser again:

Studies made within the last few years seem to indi¬ cate that the virus of the Mexican-American type of typhus fever, as well as of the endemic variety in the Mediterranean basin, is highly adapted to rodents and is carried in these animals - rats - during the intervals between human epidemics; transmitted from rat to rat by the rat louse ( polyplax ) and the rat flea ( Xenopsylla ), and, on suitable occasions, to man from the rat by the rat flea. For this reason, Nicolle speaks of this as the ‘murine’ virus.16

And a little further on:

From the point of view of all other living creatures, the rat is an unmitigated nuisance and pest. There is nothing that can be said in its favor. It can live anywhere and eat anything. It burrows for itself when it has to, but, when it can, it takes over the habitations of other animals, such as rabbits, and kills them and their young. It climbs and swims.

16 Ibid, 142.

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It carries disease of man and animals - plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine ‘influenza’. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.17

The first empirical element to be noted by any libidinal rat theory is the zoological diversification of the rat into two species. These are ‘ Rattus rattus , the black, house, or ship-rat, and Rattus Norvegicus, the greyish brown, field, or sewer-rat’,18 of which Shrewsbury says in his History of the Bubonic Plague: ‘By comparison with the house-rat it is less agile but far more voracious and cunning, and as it is stronger and more fecund it is a much more formidable enemy of mankind’.19 During the outbreak of bubonic plague during the fourteenth century it was not only the intense killing of human populations, or delivery of terminal vectors, that was executed by/?, rattus , who lived and propagated in close proximity to humans, but also the long-range dissemination of the plague, as R. Norvegi¬ cus is not thought to have arrived in Europe before the eighteenth century. If this is true - and current historical zoology gives no positive reason to doubt it - then it can

17 Ibid, 150-1.

18 J.F.D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 7.

19 Ibid, 8.

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safely be asserted that the black death, in addition to its precursor which raged across the near orient and Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries, will remain the climax of achievement reached by R. rattus , who has since been eclipsed. Zinsser once more:

just as the established civilizations of Northern Europe were swept aside by the mass invasions of barbarians from the East, so the established hegem¬ ony of the black rat was eventually wiped out with the incursion of the hordes of the brown rat, or Mus decumanus - the ferocious, short-nosed, and short¬ tailed Asiatic that swept across the Continent in the early eighteenth century ...

The brown rat, too, came from the East. It is now known as the ‘common rat and, because of a mis¬ taken notion of its origin, as Mus norvegicus. Its true origin, according to Hamilton and Hinton, is probably Chinese Mongolia or the region east of Lake Baikal, in both of which places forms resembling it have been found indigenous. The same writers quote Blasius, who believes that the ancients about the Caspian Sea may have known this rat. Claudius y^Elianus, a Roman rhetorician of the second cen¬ tury, in his De Animalium Natura, speaks of ‘little less than Ichneumons, making periodical raids in infinite

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numbers’ in the countries along the Caspian, ‘swim¬ ming over rivers holding each other’s tails.’

Pallas (1831), in his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, records that in 1727 - a mouse year - great masses of these rats swam across the Volga after an earthquake.20

There are two varieties of rat, but this should not be taken as a gift for our metaphysicians, or supposed antimeta¬ physicians, who are constantly in search of dichotomic conceptual oppositions. The duality of R. rattus and R. Norvegicus is of the kind 1, 2, ... not o ... 1; it encloses nothing, reaches no limits, provides no determination, logical negativity, or alternation. The tokens of libidinal displacement are complex and not diacritical. Alogical differentiation: black and brown, not black and white. One, two ... first the wave of R. rattus , effective on its own, almost invisible to the Europe of the middle ages, differentiated perhaps from the mice (it was called mures majores ),21 ... V2, 1, ... ? And then the wave of/?. Norvegicus , a different type of rat, but not an opposite type; rather, a type that was more clever and destructive, taking the rat process a little bit further. Far from requiring the black rat for its determinacy the new Asiatic invader wipes out

20 Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 149.

21 Shrewsbury, History of the Bubonic Plague, 121.

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the previous rat population, establishing itself as a sheer intensity, as a potential for disaster. Rats disdain discrimi¬ nation, propagating their difference upon a plateau of excitement. Differentiation within an illimitable series, alogical dissimilarity, independence from the differend, and indiscriminate proliferation of nonidentity; this is the ‘logic’ of the rats.

Freud’s 1909 case of compulsive neurosis - the ‘rat- man’ - is told by his captain, fatefully, of a ‘particularly terrible Oriental punishment’.22 Freud describes how this was related to him in the analysis: ‘the condemned is bound (he expressed himself so unclearly that I could not immediately guess [erraten] in what position) - upon his posterior a pot was placed, into a which rats [ Rat¬ ten | were introduced, which - he stood up again and gave out all the signs of terror and resistance - bored themselves in’.23 This is the ‘rat-punishment’ [die Rat- tenstrafe\ visited upon Europe, through its underside, from the East. Its peculiar insidiousness, which Freud does not emphasize even though he marks it, is that to surmise [erraten] the riddle [Ratsef] of the Rattenstrafe is to suffer it. In the very movement of prowess the imperial interpretative gesture is taken par derriere by an impersonal

22 S. Freud, Studienausgabe, Band VILZwang, Paranoia, und Perversion (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982), 43; S. Freud, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909), in Three Case Histories, ed. P. Rieff (NY: Touchstone, 1996), 11.

23 Ibid., 44; 12.

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libidinal force from beyond representational discourse, whether logico-psychiatric or orientalist. The image of anal violation that organizes the rat-delirium has all the traits of a compromise formation; a sublimation of utter unexpectedness into a linearized passage fortified by a sadistically invested and ego-co-opted sphincter. The infiltration of the rat is singularized, and depicted as an inverse frontal assault, stripped of its fluidity, indirectness, heterogeneity, as if it were mere delicacy that obstructed our comprehension of vermin space. It is not Oedipal ambivalence that is solicited by such an image, but the racist misogyny that would project all undomesticated flows onto an axis of expulsability. The rattenstrafe is a wish - and thus an idealization - because it is far more comforting to the anal-sadistic structure of humanism than the reality of the free penetrability of the body along all of its irresolvably scaled estuaries.

Animality is not a state, essence, or genus, but a complex space cross-cut by voyages of all kinds. Trakl explores this wilderness terrain with an excruciating vulnerability. The animality which Trakl finds has its dead-ends and stagnant sumps, it has its humanistic and theological becomings, but it also has its channels of open flow; becoming multiple, fluid, unpredictable, becoming an enemy of mankind, lupine and murine becomings of all kinds. These intensive sequences cannot be isolated or determined, since no impermeable boundary remains

200

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to quarantine Trakl’s rodents from the nameless ones. From becoming a mouse, and then a black rat, and then a brown rat, or from becoming ones sister, and then a pack of wolves, and then a swarm of rats. The eternity of Rimbauds inferior race shares its diseases with Nietzsche’s ‘deep, deep, eternity’, for which the very adjective is torn apart by convulsive waves of descent. An unfathomable abyss of regression or recurrence protracts itself epidemi¬ cally into Trakl’s body. ‘I am all the vermin in history.’ Indecent precipitation.

201

Shamanic Nietzsche

God said to Nietzsche:

That’ll Tietzsche,

You irritating little Krietzsche.

ANONYMOUS GRAFFITO

Will Christendom ever reap the whirlwind it has sown? That it should try to pass, without the vulnerability of interval, from a tyranny to a joke, is certainly understandable, but that its enemies should do nothing to obstruct its evasion of nemesis is more puzzling. How can there be such indifference to the decline of our inquisitors? Is it that they succeed so exorbitantly in their project of domestica¬ tion that we have been robbed of every impulse to bite back? Having at last escaped from the torture-palace of authoritarian love we shuffle about, numb and con¬ fused, flinching from the twisted septic wound of our past (now clumsily bandaged with the rags of secular culture).

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It is painfully evident that post-christian humanity is a pack of broken dogs.

Georges Bataille is the preeminent textual impedi¬ ment to Christianity’s carefully plotted quiet death, the prolongation of its terminal agonies into the twentieth century. Having definitively exhausted itself after two ugly millennia of species vivisection, Christianity attempts to skulk away from the scene, aided by the fog of supine tolerance which dignifies itself as ‘post-modernity’. It does not take a genius to see whose interests are served by this passage from militant theism to postmodern ambivalence.

A despot abandons any game that begins to turn out badly. This has been the case with metaphysics. From Kant onwards exploratory philosophy ceased to gener¬ ate the outcomes favourable to established (theistic) power, and we were suddenly told: “this game is over, let’s call it a draw”. The authoritarian tradition of Euro¬ pean reason tried to pull the plug on the great voyages at exactly the point they first became interesting , which is to say: atheistic, inhuman, experimental, and danger¬ ous. Schopenhauer - refusing the agnostic stand-off of antinomy - was the first rallying zone for all those disgusted by the contrived peace entitled ‘the end of metaphysics’. Bataille is his most recent successor. The forces of antichrist are emerging fanged and encour¬ aged from their scorched rat-holes in the wake of mono¬ theistic hegemony, without the slightest attachment to the

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paralytic tinkerings of deconstructive undecidability. ‘An attitude which is neither military nor religious becomes insupportable in principle from the moment of death’s arrival’.1 The war has scarcely begun.

It is hard to imagine anything more ludicrous than Descartes, or Kant, having erected their humble philo¬ sophical dwellings alongside the baroque architectural excesses of the church, standing in the shadows of flying buttresses and asking pompously: how do we know the truth? It surely cannot solely be due to Nietzsche that we see the absurdity of an ‘epistemological’ question being asked in such surroundings. When a philosopher has a priest for a neighbour, which is to say, a practitioner of the most elaborately constructed system of mendacity ever conceived upon earth, how can a commitment to ‘truth’ in a positive sense even be under consideration? Truth in such situations is a privilege of the deaf. There is no question of ‘error’, ‘weakness in reasoning’, or ‘mistaken judgment’ when addressing the authoritative discourses on truth in the western tradition, those cathedrals of theological concept building that ground our ‘common sense’; no, here one can only speak of a deeply rooted and fanatical discipline of lying. In other words, one frac¬ tion of the radicality of the atheistic thinking escalated through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille is that it

l G. Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , 12 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988), vol. II, 246.

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overthrows the high-bourgeois apologetic-epistemological problematic in modern philosophy by asking clearly for the first time: where do the lies stop?

The great educational value of the war against Chris¬ tendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The ‘man of God’ is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality.

There is no truth that is not war against theology, and even the word ‘truth’ has been plastered by the spittle of priestcraft. It cannot be attachment to some alternative conviction that cuts here, but only relentless refusal of what has been told. The dangerous infidels bypass dialectics. It is the sceptic who assassinates the lie.

Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

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It is this thought alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosophy is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more.

Once blatant sophisms are exempted, the fact that scepticism has never been enacted is the sole argument of the dogmatists, and it is a powerful one, despite its empirical flavour. There can be little doubt that the philo¬ sophical advocates of disbelief have tended to exploit the very conventions they profess to despise as the shelter for an insincere madness. As was the case with Socrates, philosophy has sought to peel itself away from sophism by admitting to its ignorance, as if unknowing were a pathos to be confessed. Profound ecsanity [‘Ecsane’ - out of one’s mind] alone is effective scepticism, in comparison to which sceptical philosophies fall prey to naive theories of belief, as if belief could simply be discarded, or with¬ held. We know nothing of course, but we do not remotely know even this, and mere assertion in no way ameliorates our destitution. Belief is not a possession but a prison, and we continue to believe in achieved knowledge even after denying it with intellectual comprehensiveness. The refusal to accept a dungeon is no substitute for a hole in the wall. Only in a voyage to the unknown is there real escape from conviction.

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The dangerous sceptics are those Kant fears, a species of nomads, despising all settled modes of life’2 who come from a wilderness tract beyond knowledge. They are explorers, which is also to say: invasion routes of the unknown. It is by way of these inhumanists that the vast abrupt of shamanic zero - the Ejcoyf] of the ancients - infiltrates its contagious madness onto the earth.

Ejio yf] is a word attributed to Pyrrho by way of indi¬ rect reportage, but in its absence the philosopher’s name would lose what slight sense invests it. Although it might be argued that we owe Ejroxf] to Pyrrho, it is from Ejioyf] that the name Pyrrho comes to us, as a cryptograph of the unknown. Even were it not for Pyrrho’s silence - a silence far more profound that the literary abstinence of Socrates - Erio/fi would surely not be something of which we could straightforwardly know the truth, far less a method, or a subjective state.

Ejtoxt] is a report of the abrupt, and an escape.

1. [...]

2. the world of ‘phenomena’ is the adapted world which we feel to be real. The ‘reality’ lies in the continual recurrence of identical, familiar, related

2 I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (NY: Palgrave Macmillan: 2003), Preface to the First Edition, 8.

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SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

things in their logicized character, in the belief that here we are able to reckon and calculate;

3. the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world,’ but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations - another kind of phenomenal world, a kind ‘unknowable’ for us;

4. questions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was first created by us. The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world.3

How much industrialism lies buried in the notion of thought! As if one could ever work things out. One does not think one’s way out, one gets out, and then sees (that it wasn’t one ...).

Bataille’s Nietzsche is not a locus of secular reason but of shamanic religion; a writer who escapes philo¬ sophical conceptuality in the direction of ulterior zones, and dispenses with the thing in it self Because it is an item of intelligible representation with no consequence as a

3 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power , tr. W. Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1968), section 569.

209

FANGED NOUMENA

vector of becoming (of travel). Shamanism defies the transcendence of death, opening the tracts of Voyages of discovery never reported’.4 Against the grain of shallow phenomenalism that characterizes Nietzsche readings, Bataille pursues the fissure of abysmal scepticism, which passes out of the Kantian Noumenon (or intelligible object) through Kant and Schopenhauer’s thing in itself (strip¬ ping away a layer of residual Platonism), and onwards in the direction of acategorial, epochal, or base matter that connects with Rimbaud’s ‘invisible splendours’:5 the immense deathscapes of a ‘universe without images’.6 Mat¬ ter cannot be allotted a category without being retrieved for ideality, and the Nietzschean problem with the Ding an Sich was not its supposed dogmatic materialism, but rather that it proposed ‘an ideal form of matter’,7 as the transcendent (quarantined) site of integral truth, a ‘real world’. There are no things-in-themselves because there are no things: ‘thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic’8 (which ultimately revert to those of grammar). The Ding an Sich is a concept tailored for a God (supreme being) desperately seeking to hide itself: a cultural glitch turned nasty, but on the

4 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems , tr. O. Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 327.

5 Ibid., 296.

6 Ibid., 293.

7 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. I, 179.

8 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 558.

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SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

run at last. ‘Root of the idea of substance in language, not in beings outside us’!9

The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis ‘world5 and ‘nothing5.10

Materialism is not a doctrine but an expedition, an Alpine break-out from socially policed conviction. It ‘is before anything else the obstinate negation of idealism, which is to say of the very basis of all philosophy5.11 Exploring acategorial matter navigates thought as chance and mat¬ ter as turbulence ‘beyond all regulation5.12 It yields no propositions to judge, but only paths to explore.

This is Nietzsche as a fanged poet at war with the philosophers (with the new priests), a thinker who seeks to make life more problematic . Bataille locks onto a desire that resonates with the reality that confounds us, and not with a ‘rationality5 that would extricate us from the labyrinth. Nietzsche is the great exemplar of complicating thought, exploiting knowledge in the interest of interro¬ gations (and this is not in order to clarify and focus, but to subtilize and dissociate them). Complicating thought

9 Ibid., section 562.

10 Ibid., section 567.

11 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. I, 220.

12 Ibid., vol. VI, 97.

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FANGED NOUMENA

strengthens the impetus of an active or energetic confusion - delirium - against the reactive forces whose obsessive tendency is to resolve or conclude. Rebelling against the fundamental drift of philosophical reasoning, it sides with thought against knowledge, against the tranquillizing prescriptions of the ‘will to truth’.

If Nietzsche is locked in an extraordinarily furious struggle with philosophy it is because it is philosophy that has claimed, with the most cynical explicitness, to negate problems. Philosophy has always wanted to retire; Schopenhauer is simply its most honest exemplar. The ‘absolute’ is humanity’s laziest thought. Nor does it suffice to argue that thought can be complicated within itself, or - as the philosophers have said for some time - ‘immanently’, for we know where this path of thinking leads. An intellection in need of immanent critique is one that is already nudging against an ultimate solubility. ‘The intellect finds its limits within itself’ - it does not even need to move to consummate interrogation! It is thinking such as this, whose most eminent model is the Kant of the critical philosophy, that generated such distrust in Nietzsche for writers who work sitting down.

Wisdom ( sophia ) substitutes for travelling, hollow¬ ing it out into a Baudelairean caricature of the Voy¬ age - redundantly reiterating a moral dogma - and to love it is to seek to be still. In obedience to narco- Platonic Eros, philosophy defers to the end of desire.

212

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche reaches back beyond this Hellenic priest¬ philosophizing, and forward beyond its modern limit, reassembling sophia as escape:

Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.13

The death of God is an opportunity, a chance. It makes sense to ask what is meant by the word ‘noumenon’, but ‘chance’ does not function in this way, since it is not a concept to be apprehended, but a direction in which to go. To the one who grasps what chance is, how insipid the idea of God appears, and suspicious, and wing¬ clipping’!14 Monotheism is the great gate-keeper, and where it ends the exploration of death begins. If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because

13 E Nietzsche, The Gay Science , tr. W. Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1974), section 343.

14 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. VI, 116.

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FANGED NOUMENA

they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression, a trajectory of incineration; either strung-up in the cob¬ webs of Paradise, or strung-out into the shadow-torrents of hell. It is a route out of creation, which is to each their fate interpreted as enigma, as lure. ‘Now a hard, an inexorable voyage commences - a quest into the great¬ est possible distance’.15 ‘I said good-bye to the world’.16 Even the most angelic curiosity - when multiplied to the power of eternity - must find its way to end in the abyss.

It can seem at times as if Bataille owes almost eve¬ rything to Christianity; his understanding of the evil at the heart of erotic love, the hysterical affectivity of his writing, along with its excremental obsession, its epilep- toid conception of delight, its malignancy, the perpetual stench of the gutter. Yes, this is all very Christian; well attuned to a doctrine gestated in the sewers of the empire. Yet from out of the aberrant intensity and disorder of Bataille’s writings an impossible proposition is perpetually reiterated: that far from being the acme of religion - let alone its telic blossoming - God is the principle of its suppression. The unity of theos is the tombstone of sacred zero, the crumbling granitic foundation of secular desti¬ tution. This is so exorbitantly true that the existence of

15 Ibid., 29.

16 Rimbaud, Collected Poems , 330.

214

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

God would be an even greater disaster for him than for us. How infinitely trivial the crucifixion of Jesus appears beside the degrading torture of being God, after all, existence is so indistinguishable from defilement that one turns pale at the very thought of an eternal being’s smell. Perhaps this is why God ‘is profoundly atheistic’,17 leading Bataille to remark that ‘[wjhilst I am God, I deny him to the depths of negation’18 (‘nihilism ... might be a divine way of thinking’,19 Nietzsche anticipates). God can only redeem the universe from its servility by burning his creation into ash and annihilating himself. Such is the ‘God of blinding sun, ... this God of death that I sought’.20 Bataille invokes the dark undertow of a self-butchering divinity: ‘God of despair, give me ... your heart ... which no longer tolerates that you exist’.21 (If God is an explorer, then there is no God.)

Bataille’s texts are ‘a hecatomb of words without gods or reason to be’,22 led back down through the crypts of the West by a furious impulse to dissociate theism and religion, and thus to return the sacred to its shamanic impiety, except that nothing can ever simply return, and

17 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. V, 121.

18 Ibid., 152.

19 Nietzsche, The Will to Power , section 15.

20 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. IV, 203.

21 Ibid., vol. V, 59.

22 Ibid., 220.

215

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Hell will never be an innocent underworld again. The depths have become infernal, really so, quite irrespective of the fairy tales we are still told. ‘[Fjlames surround us / the abyss opens beneath our feet’23 reports Bataille from the brink of the impossible, ‘an abyss that does not end in the satiate contemplation of an absence’24 because its lip is the charred ruin of even the most sublimed subjec¬ tivity. ‘I have nothing to do in this world’, he writes, ‘[i]f not to burn’.25 ‘I suffer from not burning ... approach¬ ing so close to death that I respire it like the breath of a lover’.26 It is not only due to the inquisition that all the great voyagers have for a long time been singed. For well over a century all who have wanted to see have seen: no profound exploration can be launched from the ruins of monotheism unless it draws its resources from damnation.

The death of God is a religious event - a transgres¬ sion, experiment in damnation, and stroke of antitheistic warfare - but this is not to say it is pre-eminently a crime. Hell has no interest in our debauched moral currency. To confuse reactive dabblings in sin with expeditions in damnation is Christian superficiality; the Dantean error of imagining that one could earn oneself an excur¬ sion in Hell, as if the infernal too was a matter of justice.

23 Ibid., vol. Ill, 95.

24 Ibid., vol. V, 199.

25 Ibid., vol. IV, 17.

26 Ibid., vol. V, 246.

216

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

Our crimes are mere stumblings on the path to ruin, just as every projected Hell on Earth is a strict exemplar of idolatry. Transgression is not criminal action, but tragic fate; the intersection of an economically programmed apocalypse with the religious antihistory of poetry. It is the inevitable occurrence of impossibility, which is not the same as death, but neither is it essentially different.

This ambivalence responds to that of death ‘itself, which is not ontological but labyrinthine: a relapse of composition that is absolute to discontinuity, yet is noth¬ ing at the level of immanence. The very individuality that would condition the possibility of a proprietary death could only be achieved if death were impossible. One dies because discontinuity is never realized, but this means that there is never ‘one’ who dies. Instead there is an unthinkable communication with zero, immanence, or the sacred. ‘There is no feeling that throws one into exuberance with greater force than that of nothingness. But exuberance is not at all annihilation; it is the surpass¬ ing of the shattered attitude, it is transgression’.27

The question of the mere ‘truth’ of Christianity - whether in regard of its origin, not to speak of Chris¬ tian astronomy and natural science - is a matter of

27 Ibid., vol. X, 72.

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secondary importance as long as the question of the value of Christian morality is not considered.28

What if eternal recurrence were not a belief? (‘The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief ... is necessarily false because there simply is no true world \)29 Bataille suggests:

The return immotivates the instant, freeing life from an end and in this ruining it straight away. The return is ... the desert of one for whom each instant henceforth finds itself immotivated.30

Christianity - the exemplary moral ‘religion - ‘substituted slow suicide’31 and representation (belief) for shamanic contact with zero-interruption, but with the (re-emer¬ gence of nihilisitic recurrence, caution, prudence, every kind of ‘concern for time to come’32 is restored to the senselessness of cosmic ‘noise’. With recurrence comes a ‘ 'future , [which is] not the prolongation of myself across time, but the expiry of a being going further, passing

28 Nietzsche, The Will to Power , section 251 .

29 Ibid., section 15.

30 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. VI, 23.

31 Nietzsche, The WilltoPower, section 247.

32 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. VI, 50, 167.

218

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

attained limits’.33 A religious crisis can no longer be deferred.

In the final phase of Nietzsche’s intellectual life the eternal recurrence is grasped as a weapon, a ‘hammer,’ the transmission element between diagnosis and intervention. Where Christendom recuperates decline to preservation, deflecting it from its intensive plummet to zero, eternal recurrence re-opens its abyssal prospect, precipicing affect onto death. This is the predominant sense of ‘selection’ in Nietzsche’s texts; a vertiginous extrication of zero from the series of preservative values, cutting through ‘the ambiguous and cowardly compromise of a religion such as Christianity: more precisely, such as the church: which, instead of encouraging death and self-destruction, protects everything ill-constituted and sick and makes it propagate itself’.34

The notes assembled into section 55 of The Will to Power develop this morbid thread. Either ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness’ (a box), or ‘the nothing (the “meaningless”), eternally’.35 The nihilism of recurrence is ambivalent between its (Christian) historical sense as the constrictive deceleration of zero and its cosmic (non¬ local) virtuality as a gateway onto death. Christendom is

33 Ibid., 29.

34 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 247.

35 Ibid., section 55.

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to be attacked because it was its morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing’.36

Morality guarded the underprivileged against nihil¬ ism ... Supposing that the faith in this morality would perish, then the underprivileged would no longer have their comfort - and they would perish.37

The religious history of mankind is based upon a technics of ill-health: dehydration, starvation, mutilation, depri¬ vation of sleep, a general ‘self-destruction of the under¬ privileged: self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication’.38 A journey was underway which Christian preservative moralism - generalized species cowardice - privatized, representationalized, crushed under the transcendent phallus, froze, obstructed, and drove elsewhere. Christian¬ ity is a device for trapping the sick, but recurrence melts through the cages:

What does ‘underprivileged’ mean? Above all, physi¬ ologically - no longer politically The unhealthiest kind ... (in all classes) furnishes the soil for this nihilism: they will experience the belief in the eternal recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

220

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

shrinks from any action; not to be extinguished but to extinguish everything.39

Torelate sickness to death as cause to effect is itself a sign of health. Their morbid interconnection is quite different. Sickness is not followed by death within the series of ordered representation. It opens the gates.

Genealogy does not reduce sickness to a historical topic, since sickness - the inability to suspend a stimu¬ lus - eludes mere unfolding in progressive time, tending towards the disappearance of time in epochal interruption. The reflex-spasm at (and by) which reactivity gropes is the atemporal continuum beneath the crust of health. Death is ‘that which has no history’,40 and Nietzsche’s method is syphilis. ‘Only religion assures a consump¬ tion that destroys the proper substance of those that it animates’.41

Philosophy is a ghoul that haunts only ruins, and the broken croaks of our hymns to sickness have scarcely begun. Borne by currents of deep exhaustion that flow silent and inexorable beneath the surface perturbations of twitch and chatter, damned, shivering, claw-like fingers hewn from torture and sunk into wreckage drawn with

39 Ibid.

40 E Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals , tr. W. Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale (NY: Vintage, 1969), Second Essay, section 13.

41 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. VII, 316.

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unbearable slowness down into the maw of flame and snuffed blackness twisted skewerish into fever-hollowed eyes. Eternal recurrence is our extermination, and we cling to it as infants to their mother’s breasts.

‘Poetry leads from the known to the unknown’ writes Bataille,42 in words that resonate with Rim¬ baud. Poetry is fluent silence, the only venture of writing to touch upon the sacred (=o), because ‘the unknown ... is not distinguished from nothing¬ ness by anything that discourse can announce’.43 To write the edge of the impossible is a transgression against discursive order, and an incitement to the unspeakable: ‘poetry is immoral’.44

Rimbaud writes from the other side of Zarathustrean descent/death [Untergang], anticipating the labyrinthine spaces of a Nietzsche for the sick, and of what escapes from/due to the cultural convulsion Nietzsche reinforces. ‘The poet makes himself a visionary by a long, immense and rational deregulation oj 'allthe senses' ,45 and this deregu¬ lation is a source of ‘[ijneffable torture’,46 ‘the sufferings are enormous’47 Rimbaud insists. No organism is adapted

42 Ibid., vol. V, 157.

43 Ibid., 133.

44 Ibid., 212.

45 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 10.

46 Ibid., 11.

47 Ibid., 6.

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to ‘arrive at the unknown’,48 which makes deregulation as necessary as it makes pain inevitable. Our nerves squeal when they are re-strung upon the phylogenetically unan¬ ticipated, ‘experiences strike too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound’:49 a descent into the inferno. Nuit de Venfer , where the entrails of nature dissolve meanderous into lava, ‘this is hell, eternal pain’,50 and Rimbaud burns, ‘as is necessary’.51

Yes, the poet must be a visionary. The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.

True poetry is hideous , because it is base communica¬ tion, in contrast to pseudo-communicative discourse, which presupposes the isolation of the terms it unites. Communication - in the transgressive non-sense Bataille lends it - is both an utter risk and an unfathomable

48 Ibid.

49 Nietzsche, EcceHomo, 230.

50 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 313.

51 Ibid.

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degradation, associated with repellent affect. The ego emerges in the flight from communicative immanence, from deep or unholy community, initiating a history that leads to the bitter truth of the desertification of the isolated being. From the anxiety of base contact, which it can only experience as dissolution, the ego stumbles into the ennui of autonomy, the antechamber to a harsh despair, whose horror is accentuated by the fact that it arises at the point where escape has exhausted itself, where the ego has quarantined itself to the limit of its being against extraneous misfortune. Ennui is not any sort of response to the compromising of the ego from without, it is not an impurity or a contamination (the negation of such things are for it a condition of exist¬ ence), but rather, it is the very truth of achieved being; the core affect of personal individuality. Ennui cannot be mastered, surpassed, resolved, aujgehoben , because it is nothing but the distillate of such operations, indeed, of action as such. Ennui is insinuated into the very fabric of project, as ‘the necessity of leaving oneself’.52 If the soil of Bataille’s writing is volcanic it is not only due to the sporadic convulsions of a devastating incandescence, but also because its fertility is anticipated by a monstrous sterilization. Beneath and before the luxuriant jungles of delirium is the endless crushing ash-plain of despair.

52 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. V, 137.

224

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‘I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there’.53 Blake might have written such words, although their sense would then have been quite different. Drooled from Rimbaud’s pen they point less to a potency of imagination than to a geological crisis of justification, approaching a perfect epistemological irresponsibility. It is not for us to defend the rights of truth, truth is decreed by the masters. What matters is to adapt, nursing the meagre resources of our reactivity, of our base cunning. ‘Belief’ - the cloak of confession - is too precious a resource to be squandered on the zealotry of idealism. What value is there to be extracted from a committed belief, from a last-ditch belief? Such things are for the strong (or for dupes), for the allies and slaves of light, for all those who do not rely on the subter¬ ranean passages beneath belief to avoid the panoptic appa¬ ratuses. Adaptability can only be lamed by commitments. We have seen enough true Christians: rabbits transfixed by headlights. When draped about the inferiors beliefs are not loyalties, but rather sun-blocks against inquisition. We creatures of shadow are hidden from their enlighten¬ ment. We believe exactly what they want.

The inferior race ‘await God with greed’,54 scavenging at Christ ‘like wolves at an animal they have not killed’.55 Creation, testamental genealogy, the passion of Christ . ..

53 Rimbaud, Collected Poems , 313.

54 Ibid., 304.

55 Ibid., 302.

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none of it is their story, nor is any other, for they are too indolent to have a story of their own, only theft and lies are ‘proper’ to them: ‘pillage’.56 Rimbaud’s inheritance, ‘above all’, consists of ‘mendacity and sloth’.57 ‘I have never been a Christian; I am of the race which sung under torture’58 he remarks. It is precisely obliviousness to Christianity, to fidelity or duty, to privileged narratives, that eases the inferior race into singing the praises of the Nazarene. The white man has guns, therefore the truth. ‘The whites disembark. The cannon! It is necessary to submit to baptism, dress oneself, work’.59

In contrast to the pompous declarations of the ortho¬ doxies, which come from on high (like a stroke of the whip), an infernal message is subterranean, a whisper from the nether-regions of discourse, since ‘hell is certainly below’.60 Just as the underworld is not a hidden world - a real or true [ Wahre Welt ] - but is that hidden by all worlds, so is the crypt-mutter from hell something other than an inverted scene, concept, or belief. In their infernal lineaments words are passages, leading into and through lost mazes, and not edifications. Acquisition is impos¬ sible in hell. There is nothing en bas except wandering

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 301.

58 Ibid., 307-8.

59 Ibid., 309.

60 Ibid., 315.

226

SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE

amongst emergences, and what is available has always come strangely, without belonging. Infernal low-life has no understanding for property. Even the thoughts of the inferior ones are camouflage and dissimulation, their beliefs mere chameleon dapplings of the skin.

Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. If it was not that the Great Ideas had basements, fissures, and vacuoles, poetry would never infest them. Faiths rise and fall, but the rats persist.

Rimbauds saison en enfer pulsates through a discourse without integrity. Teaching nothing, it infects. Like matter cooked-through with pestilential ‘contagions of energy’,61 it collapses into a swarm of plague- vectors. Substance is only its host. ‘[W]ords, books, monuments, symbols, and laughters are nothing but the paths of this contagion, its passages’.62

I never could conclude anything ...

Zero does that.

Towards New Seas

That way is my will; I trust

In my mind and in my grip.

61 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes , vol. V, in.

62 Ibid.

227

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Without plan, into the vast Open sea I head my ship.

All is shining, new and newer, Upon space and time sleeps noon; Only your eye - monstrously, Stares at me, infinity.63

63 Nietzsche, The Gay Science , section 371.

228

After the Law

There are peculiar difficulties associated with any phi¬ losophy of law, due in large part to the inevitability that any attempt at a transcendent evaluation of law finds itself enacting a parody of judicial process. Ever since the trial of Socrates (if not already with the fragment of Anaximander), philosophy has affirmed its vocation only insofar as it has fantasised a supreme tribunal: an ultimate court of appeal or ideal form of justice. The vindication of Socratism is inextricable from a retrial, both exculpation and counterlitigation, the forum of which remains the unstable issue of metaphysics. As for its ‘own’ or ‘inner’ law, logic has never been anything other than the distillation of juridical procedure, the abstract form of inclusion or non-inclusion of a case under a law (species under genus), which has been predominantly

229

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thematised as judgment, although a language of proposi¬ tions has more recently risen to prominence. Philosophy and judicial authority find themselves bound together in a discourse upon real legitimation. Appearances (cases) are to be judged from the perspective of a generic reason at a superior level of reality identified in the premodern period with an ideality whose final term is the intellect of God. Aristotle consummates a categorial - accusatory - sense of form, and the Augustinian collision of Platonism with Judaeo-Christian eschatology and Christian logos has only entrenched this complicity.

This chapter cuts into two episodes or intersections of the occidental juridico-philosophical complex, in an attempt to dramatise the broadest tendency of this proc¬ ess: that of collapse towards immanence, or evaporation of the transcendent. There is nothing peculiarly occult or mysterious about such a tendency since it finds its most highly accelerated phase in our contemporary marketisa- tion of social transactions: the phased transition from traditional Geopolitical authorization or legitimacy to an impersonal, cybernetically automated efficiency. The commodity ‘form’ is a transmutational matrix, and not a static (synchronic) order of economic liberalism. Insofar as capital is still interpreted Platonically - according to legitimation criteria - there is an overt paradox or contradiction emergent in this process, a paradox whose disappearance is epitomized by the figure of Georges

230

AFTER THE LAW

Bataille, who offers an operational description of law. Bataille no longer offers a juridical procedure of any kind, but only a tactics of recoding that converges upon the outside of human history (where everything functions without respect or legitimacy).

Those seeking to defend the human management of social processes (where ‘man’ speculatively unites with the God of anthropomorphic monotheism) can have no project but to restore a history whose ideal sense would reconnect with the meaning of the West , such as those prof¬ fered by Plato, Aquinas and Hegel. Such restoration is a modernist aspiration which strikes me as incredible. To drag Plato and Bataille before the tribunal of philoso¬ phy has ceased to be anything but entertainment, yet I dedicate this text to the few remaining political animals of the planet Earth, as an experiment in the tenacity of philosophy, or as a jest.

PLATO AND THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES

Plato’s Apology is initiated by submission to the political, in which civic obedience and justificatory discourse are fused. Rebellion is not Socratic, and the principle of authority - or right to judge - is never radically inter¬ rogated; only its source is in question. In attempting to contest the charge that he ‘makes the weaker argument

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defeat the stronger’,1 it is not long before Socrates invokes the ‘unimpeachable authority’2 of Apollo, and narrates the journey of his disciple Chaerephon:

One day he actually went to Delphi and asked this question of the god - as I said before, gentlemen, please do not interrupt - he asked whether there was anyone wiser than myself. The priestess replied that there was no one.3

To interpret this statement as a submission of evidence would be to efface the fracture line between the sacred and the profane across which Socrates steps. It is precisely the resistance to evidentiality that lends to this message its oracular force, and the paradoxical gesture at the heart of Socrates’ defence is that of deploying the privilege of the unknown on behalf of knowing.

The mystery of the oracular message is registered within the order of judgment as an underinterpretation. The priestess’s words require translation, beyond that of their reworking into verse that occurs at Delphi itself. They pose a problem that can be construed as exegetical, as an insufficiency of commentary and resolution. Words are oracular precisely insofar as they suspend intelligence,

1 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, tr. H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 47.

2 Ibid., 49.

3 Ibid, 49-

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AFTER THE LAW

whether in the sacred abandonment to unknowing which is their source, or in the profane detour of philosophy that becomes their destination. Socrates’ discourse is the site of a crossing from inspiration to anticipated wisdom.

It is not only words of the Delphic oracle that are at stake here, since they resonate with the more intimate counsel of Socrates’ baipcov or ‘spirit’. Later in the Apol¬ ogy, we are told by Socrates that:

I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience, which Meletus saw fit to travesty in his indictment.

It began in my early childhood - a sort of voice which comes to me; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on.4

The interference between the sacred and the profane, the unknown and knowing, is in its sacred sense a gateway opening onto death, and in its profane sense a hesitation: interruption as the edge of time or as a delay within time, death as the outside or as the deferred, the threshold of death as a brink or as a moment. Later in the Apology , Socrates reports that ‘I am now at that point where the gift of prophecy comes most readily to me: at the point

4 Ibid., 64.

233

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of death’.5 This remark connects strangely with the earlier comment that

I soon made up my mind about the poets too: I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.6

Poets and prophets explore the zero-degree of judgment, a zone at the edge of the great zero that Socrates tentatively sketches, but only rarely approaches. His own sense of ‘preparation for death’ is the path of wisdom rather than intoxication, aligning himself with a knowing that is com¬ pared to its inadequate instances, rather than succumbing to the unknowing beyond comparison beside which all knowing is inadequate. Comparing himself to his fellows, Socrates elaborates the oracle as suggesting that ‘I am wiser ... to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know’.7 This is the edge of the unknown, but always there is the gesture of recuperation to know¬ ing, to judgment, to the tribunal, justice and authority: ‘real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is

5 Ibid., 73.

6 Ibid., 51.

7 Ibid., 50.

234

AFTER THE LAW

his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value’.8 If human wisdom has little or no value, where do the dogmatic assertions about God and his wisdom stem from? Why should they be trusted? Is not the figure of God indistinguishable from the claim that we know it is knowledge that matters, that the unknown is something we know, something we can populate with our feverish anthropomorphisms? Does Socrates not exhibit God as the eclipse of religion, the surrender of knowing as a submission to ... knowing? It is thus that religion is buried beneath the icon of a supreme judge.

The figure of Socrates, as sketched for us by Plato - his advocate - is that of philosophy on trial. It is in crossing this judicial threshold that philosophy comes to delight in the voluptuousities of persecution. Yet the drama of Socrates’ condemnation distracts from the more far-reaching process whereby philosophy succumbs to the order of the courtroom, and with this process Socrates is deeply complicit. He could even be said to have forged a new alliance between knowledge and condemnation, as well as becoming the first philosophical case.

How could one imagine an Apology for a Heraklei- tus, an Empedokles, or a Parmenides? To whom would they be attempting to justify themselves? To the people? The thought is absurd. For what does the opinion of the

8 Ibid., 52.

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FANGED NOUMENA

people matter? It was precisely as an escape from the opin¬ ion of the people that philosophy emerged ! To philosophize and to ignore popular opinion are scarcely differentiable. If the Presocratics speak in terms of cosmic justification - as Anaximander already does - it is as a concession, in order that the people will at least understand the surpassing of human judgment, if not that by which it is surpassed. The harsh justice’ of fate is the ironisation of human litiga¬ tion, and not its inflation to the absolute (monotheism).

With Socrates, things are different. Philosophy becomes dialectical; which is to say justificatory, political, logical, plebeian. Truth is identified with irrefutability, evidentiality and educated belief, beginning its long subsidence into the forms of human credence, as if its acceptability were in any way a criterion.

The Apology focuses a multiple interweaving of death and judgment. There is first of all the sense in which death fulfils judgment in the sentence of death, even if this is an injustice - or misjudgment - such that Athens is condemned in the tribunal of the Platonic text, whose judgment in this case becomes a massively influential prec¬ edent. There is a nesting of judgments; that of Socrates, that of Athens and that of Plato, with each level subsuming the antecedent one as an item or case to be judged.

Judgment is the subsumption of a case under a prin¬ ciple or law. It is classificatory or categorising, according to a discursive order which is simultaneouslyjuridical and

236

AFTER THE LAW

logical. The very word ‘category’ is derived from the Greek word xocxr|YOpo<; or accuser. Judgment is thus an image of thought, and Plato’s entire philosophy can be read as an appeal to a higher court, as an obsessive retrial, as well as a counteraccusation against Socrates’ executioners. The democracy which sentenced Socrates to death is not merely vilified by Plato, it is also categorised within a taxonomy of political forms, brought to an ulterior site of judgment and included within an expanded system.

A second integration of judgment with death is sug¬ gested at this point. If Athens misjudges Socrates, it is because it misjudges death and the death sentence, by construing death as a punishment. Death is judged from the perspective of a restricted arena - that of the Athenian court and democratic polity - which is subordinate in principle, logically and juridically, to a tribunal that includes such an arena as a case, item or species. It is in this way that Plato comes to interpret sensible existence as a specification of intelligence; as a restricted forum demarcated within the total field of intelligibility. Death is a boundary which isolates sensible intelligence from the general system of knowing, the species from the genus, the case from the principle of Idea. The juridical advantage of the philosopher - qualifying him to rule in an ideal republic - is that he ‘frees his soul from association with the body (so far as is possible) to a greater extent

237

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than other men.9 Death is no longer being thought as a consequence of judgment, but as its justifying condition. Judgment is disqualified by its specification to sensibility since the sensible instance or case is comprehended by the superior generic order of the ideal, which is unrestricted by the sensible limit of death.

In its migration through a succession of bodies, the soul crosses and recrosses between life and death, passing in and out of restricted spaces, although never escaping the irreducible atom of self. One might accept Socrates’ depiction of life as the phase during which the soul is ‘chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance’,10 and still want to insist that the soul is a cage which is even more insidious, constrict¬ ing and wretched than the body. The soul is the fantasy of a separation from death that persists in death, a kind of corporeal telepresence by which the body projects its servile categories into the unknown. But this is to inter¬ rupt Socrates’ account.

The thought of knowledge as a recollection reaching beyond birth is most fully developed in the Phaedo , where the complicity between his conception of death and that of an adequate tribunal is emphatic. The approximation

9 Ibid., 109.

10 Ibid., 135.

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AFTER THE LAW

to wisdom under the specifications of life can only be a preparation for death, an anticipatory harmonization with the escape from sensible existence:

If at its release the soul is pure and carries with it no contamination of the body, because it has never willingly associated with it in life, but has shunned it and kept itself separate as his regular practice - in other words, if it has pursued philosophy in the right way and really practised how to face death easily: this is what ‘practising death’ means, isn’t it?11

According to the judgment of death, by whi

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