The Whim

Abstract: Absolute Secrecy, or, On the Infinity of Individuation

2012-02-14T19:21:00.000-05:00

Now a hidden word [verbum absconditum] was spoken to me,and my ears as if by stealth received the veins of its whisper. In the horrorof the vision by night, when deep sleep is wont to hold men, fear seized me,and trembling, and all my bones were shaken.

– Job 4:12-3

To preserve a place is topreserve distinction. Therefore I pray God to make me free of God, for myessential being is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures. For inthat essence of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I wasmyself and knew myself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own causeaccording to my essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming,which is temporal.

– Meister Eckhart

[T]he essence of my self arisesfrom this—that nothing will be able to replace it: the feeling of myfundamental improbability situates me in the world where I remain as thoughforeign to it, absolutely foreign.

– Georges Bataille

No light has ever seen the blackuniverse . . . Black is entirely interior to itself and to man.

– François Laruelle

My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me.

– Isaiah 24:16

Premodern mystical discourse, being rooted in the possibility ofSt. Paul’s rapture (‘this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the bodyor out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot betold, which man may not utter’, 2 Corinthians 12:3-4), is governed by afundamental optimism regarding the availability of an absolute secret, anultimate truth that is knowable, only to the individual and precisely not tothe world as such, an infinite whisper that is irrevocably found within anuncanny domain of event or experience in which the individual, in knowing thesecret, and in keeping with the etymological concept of the word (secretum,from secerno: to setapart, sever, disjoin), is cut off fromhimself, as indicated by Paul’s use of the third person. Thus for Dionysius,the realization of the absolute truth, that which is “beyond assertion ordenial,” coincides with “being neither oneself nor someone else” (Mystical Theology). Or as MargueritePorete says, “the secret treasure of this goodness . . . annihilates her withinherself (Mirror of Simple Souls).Starting from a recognition of the complicity between mystical secrecy and the problemof corporeal individuality within this tradition, my paper will pursue the thoughtof individuation as absolute secret truth—a truth that is absolutely secret(unknowable outside of its own reality) and a secret that is absolutely true(real beyond all other knowledge)—in order to expose a mystical fact: that theopacity of the real, the hiddenness of the in-itself or blackness of theuniverse, is nothing other than theinfinity of the event of oneself. Necessarily, this argument will follow theproblem of individuation far beyond its ontological confinement to the passion offacticity, the philosophical imprisonment of being-oneself to a fundamentaldislocation within being (i.e. being-there). Instead, I will assert the truthof a new form absolute mysticism, one which unveils the question ofindividuation as an infinite passion that forever dislocates or topologicallydestroys the ground of ontology itself.

Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia

2012-02-13T23:02:00.001-05:00

[for Dark Chaucer]

percutis, ut sanes, et occidis nos,ne moriamur abs te

– Augustine, Confessions

Synopsis: St. Cecilia’s botched beheadingmasterfully sculpts the conundrum of life/death liminality into a horrificthree-day dilation of the moment of martyrdom, opening the decollative blowthat typically coincides with receiving its crown into a series of unfinishedneck-cuts. Pinched between the cruelty of the headsman’s impotence, the idioticinflexibility of the law, and her own sacred durability, Cecilia embodies theparadoxical idea of an unending, asymptotically inconclusive decapitation, aninfinite series of beheading blows that never severs the head. Her hacked neckfuses into one form the two principles it figurally evokes: the unbeheadabilityof the body of God—“illius enim capita membra sumus. Non potest hoc corpusdecollari” [We are limbs of that head. This body cannot be decapitated][2]—andthe semi-living nature of fallen humanity, as signified through medievalallegorical interpretation of the traveler who is attacked by robbers on theroad from Jerusalem to Jericho and left “half alive/half dead” [semivivus, emithane] (Luke 10:30). The unity of this form is equivalent to thedifferential non-difference (half alive = half dead) between the Greek andLatin terms. The three-fold opening intensively multiplies the “zero degree oftorture”[3]into a single tertium quid that isindifferently beyond the distinction between life and death. Being half dead,Cecilia is ultimately alive. Being half alive, Cecilia is ultimately dead. Dwellingin the hyper-intimacy of extreme dereliction, Cecilia is a lacerated,ever-dilating theopathic icon of divinity’s absolute indifference to life anddeath. Her three-day rest from both, during which she simultaneously doesnothing and works all the more fervently, exemplifies the “passivity andabsence of effort . . . in which divine transcendence is dissolved.”[4]

Thre strokes in the nekke he smoot hire tho,

The tormentour, but for no manerchaunce

He myghte noght smyte al hir nekkeatwo;

And for ther was that tyme anordinaunce

That no man sholde doon man swich

penaunce

The ferthe strook to smyten, softeor soore,

This tormentour ne dorste donamoore,

But half deed, with hir nekkeycorven there,

He lefte hir lye, and on his wey hewent.

(Second Nun’s Tale VIII.526-34)[5]

Threstrokes in the nekke he smoot hire tho

The representation of the threestrokes emits several rays of darkness, that is, occult illuminations ofsignificance from what the image hides. First, there is the darkness of the threenessitself, the obscurity of its relation to the semi-beheading event. That thereason for the three is later provided in no way erases this significantobscurity. Not only does the explanation not touch the question of threenessitself, it rather exacerbates the obscurity by linking threeness to thearbitrariness of the law, superadding the abstract/bureaucratic violence of lawper se to the palpable violence of the strokes and thus intensifying theirnumerical enigma. This conjunction—an excellent object for contemplating moregenerally the intimacy between law and number, all the hidden complicitiesbetween the law of number and the number of law—is essentially temporal, arepetition of momentary indistinction between the time of the act (“tho”) andthe time of the law (“ther was that tyme an ordinaunce”) that incisionallycounts and literally strikes law upon body. (The word law, via OE lagu, itselfindicates something set down, a stroke, and is related to lecgan [lay], which also means to slay, strike down; cf. theexpression to lay into someone). Thedarkness of this relation, the hidden mechanical link between the constitutivetime of the active instant and the historical time of its situation, opens intothe deeper darkness of the triune law of time itself (past, present, future),the inescapability of its numbering. In light of Aristotle’s definition of timeas “the number of movement in respect of the before and after,”[6]thre strokes is simply a literal intensification of the wound of time,the continuum of its cutting into being.[7]Still, however deep a significance for the three is given, it never touches thethreeness of the stroke itself as a specific phenomenal reality. For that issomething, in its immediate facticity, behind which cause and reasonnecessarily recede. Three in this sense is the real time of (thinking with) theone experiencing being beheaded, with her who is being capitally cut off fromall that does not matter by facing a simple brutality of one, two, three—the essential count ofex-per-ience itself or out-through-going. To see this experience (as opposed toimagining what it is ‘like’) means seeing a superlativeidentity between three and Cecilia’s semi-beheading, a direct and immediateidentity. This threeness, as the primary, first-word feature of the event, isthe threeness of beheading itself, an essential threeness of the act that isparadoxically disclosed, like the being of Heidegger’s hammer, when beheadingbreaks down or fails to fulfill itself. The essential ‘count’ of beheading isthree, in the sense of being a tertiumquid produced in the severing of the head/body binarism. Cf. “Severing alsois still a joining and relating” and Dante’s description of the infernalcephalophore Bertran de Born as “due in uno e uno in due” (Inferno 28.125).[8]Beheading unlocks the invisible head-body holism, the conjunction of each beingwithin the other, into the negative conjunction of severed head and body. Decapitation’s count is three,and in three distinct ways: 1) serially,decapitation is the weird third thing that follows the separation of head (one)from body (two), a neither-head-nor-body that includes and emerges from both;2) additively, decapitation is thesum of its parts: head plus body (head + trunk) equals three, where head mustbe counted twice, as head and as part of body; 3) synthetically, decapitation is three as the union of its dualities,its two-in-one and one-in-two. The threeness of beheading may also be soughtwithin its twisted temporality, its being a specular folding of past, present,and future, or “an event that ends before it begins and begins after it ends.”[9]

Second, there is the darkness ofthe syntactical contraction of the three strokes into one act. By eliding theexperiential space between the strokes, this contraction deepens the event bynot dramatizing it, like off-stage violence in a Greek tragedy. Three strokes in the nekke, as if partof one design (an idea artistically realized in the Cecilia sculpture at thecathedral in Albi), silently equates the passing of the strokes with theunrepresentable, leaving it suspended and all the more present as somethingthat does not enter into memory. Why? Because the passing of the three strokes,the durational suffering of them, is something radically unworthy ofrecollection. Not because it is to be forgotten, but because it is only known without recording, understoodimmediately in the absence of memorial entrapment and deformation. This silentpassing of the strokes does not simply encode trauma, the real live wounding that never passes into language andis (dis)remembered symptomatically. It is something deeper: the exact opennessof being wounded that will not, by its own deep transcendence of suffering in suffering, be circumscribed in anyrepetition whatsoever. Behind the baser darkness of the terrifying dilation ofdecapitation’s ideal instantaneity into three-fold time there lies the morebrilliant darkness of Cecilia’s radical or totally rooted self-opening underthe blade, her unrecordable dismembering. The unending opening of beheadinginto three exposes the shining obscurity of the deeper time that is the very place of Cecilia’s rootedness in God,the enigmatic ease of her actually being what Gawain only momentarily and withgreat difficulty achieves: “grathely hit bydez and glent with no membre / Botstode stylle as the ston other a stubbe auther / That ratheled is in rochegrounde with rotez a hundredth” [Truly he awaits it and flinched with nomember, but stood still as a stone, or a stump that is anchored in rocky groundwith a hundred roots].[10]This rootless rootedness or abyssal stillness is the passional seed andprefiguration of the three-day half-death that follows (537)—a temporalimitation of Christ’s entombment that the triune beheading law enables withperfect providential perversity, intimating a ready-made path to revolutionarysalvation via suffering of the law’s very letter, i.e. martyrdom as hyper literalhead tax: “Render unto Caesar . . .” (Matthew 22:21). The saint’s living threedays in half-death is not simply the effect of surviving three strokes. It isthe fulfillment and produced end of her real passive acting or intentionalendurance of all of them as one. Without this mysterious intention the specificduration of the survival would be senseless, whence Cecilia’s subsequentrevelation of her secret request, To hanrespite thre dayes and namo (543), and its correspondence with thethree-stroke maximum: This tormentour nedorste do namoore. Note also the formulation of the wish, as if theprolonging of her death were a postponement of, or even rest from, execution (respite also connotes cessation ofsuffering),[11]rather than its brutally extended form. Occupying the negativity of limit (namoore), the full threshold of the end,Cecilia here demonstrates how transcendent ceaselessness is a constraint-basedart, a spiritual exercise that necessarily and paradoxically operates withinstrict conditions. Never ceasing—Shenevere cessed (124); nevere cessed(538)—is an infinite work of finitude, not a task of those who think they haveall day. The darkness of Cecilia’s intense openness to beheading may thus beformulated as an aggressive form of amorfati that fiercely insists from within on experiencing all three strokes,on passing through the full force of necessity, precisely without recourse toany external means that would enforce or facilitate that passage. Theprolongation it produces is not a matter of experience-hunger, of wanting morelife. Rather it is the need to arrive oneself to the real end, as opposed tomerely being there when it is over. The last thing a saint wants is to die inher sleep. Die awake, so awake that experience runs ahead of death; show up, finally. Cecilia is not loitering orlingering on the boundary between this life and the next – “surely it is theheight of folly for you to linger on this bridge.”[12]She is crossing it so busily that death itself cannot happen or take placewithout protracted difficulty. In sum, the real subject of Thre strokes in the nekke . . . is the preposition in, the place where Cecilia’s desireoperates, freely exposing the strength of its utter submission to God. Julianof Norwich understands this: “I harde telle . . . of the storye of SainteCecille . . . that she hadde thre woundes with a swerde in the nekke . . . Bythe stirringe of this, I consyvede a mighty desire, pryande oure lorde God thathe wolde graunte me thre woundes in my life time [contrition, compassion, andlonging for God] . . . withouten anycondition.”[13] Asdoes Bataille: “incapable of doing anything—I survive—in laceration. And withmy eyes, I follow a shimmering light that turns me into its plaything.”[14]

Third, there is the darkness of theheadsman’s intention. The primary and normal sense is that the headsman is notintending three strokes but is attempting thrice to behead her in one. This issupported by the assumption that this is what he, as headsman, should beintending and by the subsequent indication that was unable to (He myghte noght), which implies that hewas in fact trying his best or attempting to apply a maximum of strength andskill to the effort. This is also supported by the earliest version of the Passio and subsequent versions. “[Q]uamcum speculator tertio ictu percussisset, caput eius amputare non potuit.”[15]“Quam spiculator tribus ictibus in collo percussit, sed tamen caput eiusamptare non potuit.”[16]“The quellar smot with al his mayn, threo sithe on the swere / He ne mighte fornothinge smitten hit of.”[17]Yet there are other more obscure possibilities, various clouds in theheadsman’s will, divisible into those that fall under the normal sense of hisintention and those that do not. The former will be more properly discussedwith respect to the next line. The latter comprises several intersectingpossibilities, all of which are supported by the basely literal sense of Thre strokes . . . he smoot hire,namely, that the headsman simply struck Cecilia three times in the neck. Someof these are: 1) that the headsman wanted to torture Cecilia, to deny her aquick death, either by protracting the beheading or not beheading her at all;2) that he did not want to harm Cecilia, but was compelled to, and thus did sominimally; 3) that he didn’t care about what he was doing and performed thetask without proper intention; 4) the he was intentionally conflicted, subjectto opposed desires, and acted through some complicated combination of theabove, perhaps changing his mind in the process. There is also a third andstranger kind of intentional darkness that is between and outside thesedistinctions, namely, the possibility that the headsman did indeed try his bestbut only via a pure and spontaneous decay of intention, a nameless form ofvolitional perforation whereby the will, not in relation to any otherinterfering object but precisely in relation to nothing, secretly and suddenly(sua sponte), lacks itself. Suchintention is dark in the sense of being the subject of a clinamen or weird swerve that occurs, as Lucretius says, at nofixed place or time, only here the clinamenmust be construed as itself weirded by the full perseveration of the originaryintention—a swerve that travels in a straight line, as it were. Such a darkwill, a will that purely is and is not one’s own, is well figured in the threenon-severing strokes in that they do hit their mark, but inexplicably withoutrealization of the intention for doing so. Although this potential negativespontaneity of the headsman’s will must be thought apart from possibilisticconditions or chance, it may be inversely compared to the event and experienceof hitting a target by only diffidently or naively attempting to, that is, thesituation where one succeeds in fulfilling an intention without really trying to. In that case, anintention’s deficiency becomes the paradoxical means of its realization, sothat one strangely cannot take credit forsucceeding at what one meant to do. In this case, an intention’s integrityis the paradoxical site of its non-realization (but not because of any externalfactors), so that one must take credit (if that were possible) for failing atwhat one meant to do on the basis of thatmeaning alone, that is, for a pure, unknowable, and thus unconfessable kindof failure that cannot properly be located in the will, or its application, orthe difference between them. Although this third kind of intentional darknessis very difficult to conceive in practical terms, it may be fittingly definedin this hagiographic context as a momentarynegative occasionalism or local withdrawal of divine omnipresence asuniversal intermediary of all action. The idea of such withdrawal alsofurnishes a more general theory of passion miracles, which so often involve asuspension of the capacity for things to touch, especially in the context ofthe comic impotence of violence to effect its ends. This may be conceivedexternally (blades fail to cut, fire fails to burn, etc.) but also internally,with respect to the mechanics of mental powers, so that the headsman’s will maybe thought as failing to touch itself and thus spinning in place like adisengaged primum mobile. The willstill moves, gives every appearance of being itself, yet is somehow suspendedin an essential detachment from its own being. Such a darkening of theheadsman’s will, which may be correlated as well to the executioner’straditional head covering and its symbolic removal of personal agency fromlegal murder, thus represents the perfect profane counterpoint to the celestialmotion of Cecilia: “[As] hevene is swift and round and eek brennynge, / Rightso was faire Cecilie the white / Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkynge, /And round and hool in good perseverynge / And brennynge evere in charite fulbrighte” (SNPro VIII.114-8). Ultimately, the dark will of the headsman isvisible as the intimate shadow of Cecilia’s own, the adjacent negative outlineof her alchemical burning and melting into God.

Hemyghte noght smyte al hir nekke atwo

The headsman’s failure to severCecilia’s neck, considered as an evental contradiction or prevention of hisexercised will, fulfills the characteristically Christian renunciatory logic ofstrength-through-weakness: “for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians12:10). There is a real dialectical relation between Cecilia’s self-exposureand her material power to withstand the tormentor’s blows. The obscurity ofthis relation concerns the actual location of this strength, which may beunderstood as existing everywhere, nowhere, or locally somewhere. Of thesepossibilities, locating the power in her neck seems the simplest and mostphysically plausible solution. It also offers the beauty of an inversere-writing of the biblical trope of “stiff-necked” (durae cervicis) pride (e.g. Exodus 34:9, cf. “la cervice miasuperba,” Purgatorio 11.53), wherebythe humble neck, bending itself freely before the blow, achieves a trulysuperior durability. Literalizing in reverse the psychomachean allegory ofHumility’s decapitation of Pride,[18]Cecilia’s humbly-strong cervix stops the instrument that would violate it,exposing the fundamental weakness of its wielder vis-à-vis her uncuttablesancity—a correlative fulfillment of the verse, “Dominus iustus conciditcervices peccatorum” (Psalms 128.4) [The Lord who is just will cut the necks ofsinners]. As this line is read by Augustine in reference to “proud sinners inparticular, the arrogant, stiff-necked kind,”[19]so Cecilia’s saintly neck-strength signifies an ordinate spiritual obstinacyand pride, a pure relentless refusal of the false which is paradoxicallydemonstrated in the inviolable openness and impenetrable nudity of an extremepassivity that renders action itself passive and inoperative, making agency thecomically abject subject of its patient. On this point the impotent headsman isunveiled as the profane opposite of Cecilia’s angelic protector, who willinstantly kill whoever improperly touches her body: “I have an aungel whichthat loveth me, / That with greet love, wher so I wake or sleepe, / Is redy aymy body for to kepe. / And if that he may feelen, out of drede, / That ye metouche, or love in vileynye, / He right anon wol sle yow with the dede” (VIII.152-7).In light of this aura of protection, it is all the more meaningful, as an imageof authentic or do-it-yourself sanctity, that Cecilia appears to survivebeheading on her own strength, without external intervention of the sortprovided by John the Baptist when Sanctulus of Nursia, facing the power of “thestrongest headsman, of whom there was no doubt that with one stroke he couldsever the head,” calls out “Saint John, get hold of him!” and “instantly thestriker’s arm became stiff and inflexible, and held the sword heavenward.”[20]Still, the precise nature of the no manerchaunce whereby the executioner myghtenot sever Cecilia’s neck remains uncertain. The expression no maner chaunce signifies impossibilityas a negativity or limit that governs probability from the outside and alsosuggests the idea of proving that impossibility through exhaustion ofpossibilities, the failure of trial and error. This sense fulfills the weakersense of myghte, “in which theability or potentiality becomes mere possibility,”[21]whereas the stronger sense (to be strong, have power, be able) makes less sensewhen governed by no maner chaunce.[22]Indeed, the semantic hierarchy of the verb provides a good account, whateverthe specific actuality of the event, of the swordsman’s situation as asuffering of the demotion of one’s power into an unavailable option, thebecoming impossible of a power. The causal darkness of the scene thus liesprecisely in its representation of an odd event of obstacleless interruption:nothing interferingly stops you fromdoing what you are doing but something nonetheless prevents it from happening. The negative or non-eventreaches reversely into new and seemingly impossible forms of impossibility, allthe stranger because things areworking, moving forward, namely, the sword is indeed cutting into Cecilia’sflesh. The wonder of the semi-beheading revolves around a pair of unaccountableintersecting conjunctions: the executioner’s simultaneous impotency andeffectivity, and the saint’s simultaneous durability and receptivity. Tosynthesize these double sides of the situation is difficult. Moving in thedirection of diffuseness, we may imagine deficient blows slicing into minimallyresistant flesh, a kind of pathetic miraculous in which the divine power canonly barely raise itself into the world by displacing a little of the world’sown force, sucking a small amount of power from the agent and blowing it intothe patient. Moving in the direction of intensity, we may imagine very powerfulblows slicing maximally resistant flesh, a kind of heroic miraculous in whichthe divine power cannot resist dramatically presenting itself by meeting theforce of the world face to face, inspiring the patient with power to endure anequally inspired agent. Alternately, we may imagine some admixture of the twoalternatives spread across the three strokes, or a mutual cancellation of themaltogether: a truly ridiculous eventuality in which the saint requires nodivine intervention whatsoever because her neck is naturally strong enough tosurvive three blows from an inept headsman. All possibilities violate thedecollative ideal of instantaneous death and thereby only exacerbate thespectacle of suffering, multiplying the three blows into a matrix ofpossibilities that nowhere presents any relief from their endurance. Nor is thedarkness of the situation’s causal insolubility ever resolved. Rather, it ismarvelously all-the-more occluded by the raw presence of Cecilia’s sufferingand the subsequent revelation of her wish, in which the weird how of the event is transmuted into thefulfillment of its demonstrative actuality: “Thre dayes lyved she in thistorment . . . ‘I axed this of hevenekyng’” (537-42). And yet the specificity of the request and its fulfillmentonly underscores the realization of a precise modulation of psycho-physical forcesthat ends life in three days through wounds. Volitionally persevering herself asan unseverable unicity that will notbe cut “atwo,” Cecilia chooses, with more or less understanding of that will’soperation, even the terms of her affliction.[23]

HalfDeed

The term half deed correctly translates seminecemfrom the original Passio: “seminecemeam cruentus carnifex dereliquit” (38). In the Legenda Aurea, which Chaucer also drew upon, semivivam sometimes occurs.[24]The interchangeability of the terms is indicated by an entry in the Medulla Grammatice: “Seminecis: halfdede, half kwyk,”[25]but similar attention to literal correctness is shown in the two versions ofthe Wycliffite Bible, which translate the half-alive victim of the goodSamaritan parable (“et plagis impositis abierunt semivivo relicto,” Luke 10:30)with “half quyk” and “half alyue”[26]and in Langland’s version of the parable: “for semyvif he semed, / And as nakedas a needle, and noon help abouten.”[27]Half-dead may enjoy a certain generalconceptual priority over half-alive,insofar as the term is deployed by the living, from the perspective of life,within which it seems more natural to think the liminal state in terms of theconstitutive opposite (death) rather than the pure privation of one’s ownstate. The distinction between the interchangeable terms is also clearlyrelated to the connoted futurity ofemphasis, where the chosen term implies a potential for or movement intoits increase, i.e. half-alive asnearly dead and (perhaps) going-to-live, half-deadas barely alive and (perhaps) going-to-die. The distinction was in factimportant to medieval exegesis of good Samaritan parable, for which half-alive signifies the fallen butredeemable nature of sinful humanity,[28]as clarified in the twelfth-century LambethHomilies: “They (the devils) left him half alive; half alive he was whenthat he had sorrow within himself for his sins. Here we ought to understand whyit says ‘half alive’ [alf quic] andnot ‘half dead’. Hereof we may take an example by two brands (torches), whenthe one is aquenched altogether, and the other is aquenched except a littlespark; the one that hath the one spark in it we may blow and it will quicken(revive) and kindle the whole brand. The brand that is wholly quenched, thoughone blow on it for ever, may never again be kindled. These two brands betokentwo men: the one sinneth and is sorry for his sin, but cannot subdue his flesh. . . This other man sinneth and loveth his sins.”[29]In light of the half-alive/half-dead distinction, there are several specificsenses to Chaucer’s use of half deedin relation to Cecilia. First, half deed emphasizesthe fact that she is going to die, that she is closer to death than life, yetprecisely for that reason nonetheless alive and indeed paradoxically living allthe more intensely in intimacy with the other side of life for the three daysduring which she “never cessed hem the faith to teche / That she hadde fostred”(538-9). Second, the term emphasizes, in light of the allegorical logic of theSamaritan parable, Cecilia’s independence from external divine aid, the factthat her martyric miracle consists only in a little more life. That is all sherequires. No supernatural displays, no hagio-grotesque cephalophory, nodramatic leap into the al di là, justa three-day expansion of the “zero degree of torture” into an opportunity “thatI myghte do werche . . .” (545). Rather than a liberating spiritualconsummation of the sort exemplified by Prudentius’s account of St. Agnes’sbeheading, in which angelic flight follows a swift death,[30]Cecilia’s passion fulfills itself in her staying here, in remaining, lying inthe state in which the world leaves her. Third, half deed harmonizes with the principle of mors mystica, the mystic death to self necessary for divine union, asper Julian of Norwich’s “mighty desire” for an unconditional spiritual woundingcited above. It places the saint, still living, wholly within death, disclosing at once the saint’s self-transcendence andthe fundamental unreality of death itself. Here half deed perfectly signifies the essential negativity of therealization of a pure, as it were, contentless plenitude, like the actus purus identified with God, inwhich experience, the whole out-through-going of temporal being, is abandonedin the very midst of time, “not an experience of absence but rather an absenceof experience—or even better, a point of indiscretion where this distinctionwould itself collapse.”[31]Fourth, half deed partakes ofChaucer’s characteristic death-privileging interest in figuring life/deathliminality: “neither quyk ne ded” (Tr 3.79), “Always deynge and be not ded” (BD588), “Myself I mordre with my privy thought” (Anel 291), “My throte is kutunto my nekke boon . . . and as by wey of kynde / I sholde have dyed, ye, longetyme agon” (PrT VII.649-51), “and leften hire for deed, and wenten away” (MelVII.972) . . . This interest is most clearly shown in his handling of the sceneof Arcite and Palamon’s discovery in the Knight’sTale. Boccaccio, his source, places great emphasis on the vital sensitivityof the wounded knights, who cry out when they are found: “due giovani feditidolorando / quivi trovaro, sanz’ alcun riposo; / e ciaschedun la mortedomandava, / tanto dolor del lor mal gli gravava” [they found there two youngmen critically wounded and in constant pain; and so much did the pain of theirinjuries afflict them, that each one begged to die].[32]Chaucer elides completely this pain and passion, replacing it with a doublenegative that pushes their being into a more purely liminal state ofsuspension: “Nat fully quyke, ne fully dede they were” (I.1015). Subtractedfrom both life and death, the double knights appropriately inhabit a strangekind of vaguely intensive double death, half-dead to life and half-dead todeath, which produces a dark suggestion proper to the tale: they may be broughtback to life, but only for further death. The scene provides a clarifyingcounterpoint to Cecilia’s passion. Where the Theban knights’neither-live-nor-dead state represents a passive death-in-life that may beawakened to deathly passion, Cecilia’s half-death embodies an activelife-in-death that expresses and opens into supra-living passion, “brennygeevere in charite ful brighte” (VIII.118), i.e. the superessential divine lifethat “live[s] in a fashion surpassing other living things.”[33]Crucially, however, Chaucer places the superlative intensity of Cecilia’ssaintly living wholly within thislife, without any reference to another world or afterlife, and thus necessarilywithin death—an orientation that participates in the tale’s emphasis on the availabilityof paradise in the temporal here and now: “The swete smel that in myn herte Ifynde / Hath chaunged me al in another kynde” (VIII.251-2). There is anotherworld: this one. Cecilia’s half-death is deathly, ghastly, an ‘unbearable’torment of being neither here nor there, alive nor dead. Yet it is so preciselyas an index of the general lived nature of mortal life vis-à-vis its radicalpotential to produce and experience the true anagogy of the present, a foretaste of eternity that needs no future or other world. Next to this revolutionary life, the whole world is indeed half-dead.

Helefte hir lye, and on his wey he went

The executioner’sabandonment of Cecilia, especially with the reference to “his wey,” which isnowhere in the sources, evokes the dereliction of the victim in the goodSamaritan parable, left “half-alive” on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.In this context, the executioner emerges more specifically as a liminal figure intentionallyhalf way between the thieves who harm the victim and the travelers who fail tohelp him. He is like the thieves in that he is the direct agent of the violenceand a willing participant in its purpose. He is like the passersby in that heis not himself the cause of the violence, but someone who similarly fails to helpthe victim, neither caring for her nor mercifully killing her. In these termshe is a special kind of subject of the law, the subject who enforces its letterbut remains neutral with respect to the present, situational question of itsspirit, someone seemingly equally unable/unwilling to either stand outside thelaw (do anything beyond it) or transgress it (do anything against it). Thetormentor’s walking away is a conspicuous index of this inability/unwillingness,an a-instrumental surplus action that also marks him as a subject in the firstplace, an individualized intentional being who exists in relation to thingswhether he will or no. Crucially, the action encompasses opposite possibilities,possibilities which indeterminately coincide around the specificity of “hisway,” that is, around the indication that the tormentor does not simply walkaway, but takes a way specific to him. On the one hand, the tormentor’s walkingaway suggests the idea of open refusal, not in the name of anything, but simplyin the name of what is other than the situation at hand. On the other hand, thewalking away suggests not refusal at all, but only a movement into nothing, orthe movement of whatever kind of self-interest, having ‘something better’ todo. There is no deciding the intention of the tormentor’s walking way—that isthe point. He appears only in his disappearance and through a fundamentalambivalence, at once a potentially redeemable subject of the drama, an outsiderwith a future perhaps intimately related to its truth, and its worst kind ofprotagonist, a pure practitioner of its (ideological) structure, the trulyneither-living-nor-dead, neither-hot-nor-cold subject whose business-as-usual, spiritless‘life’ is nothing but a self-serving and sleepily sinful concatentation of omissivecommissions and comissive omissions.

Chaucer’sinterest in the figure of the executioner as subject is also indicated by hisnon-translation of the vilifying, objectifying adjectives applied to him in thesources (cruentus, truculentus). Instead, the poet giveshim no adjectives at all and signifies him deictically, “This tormentor,” whichhas the effect of identifying him as a specific person, an individual. This darkwho is neither a character nor a merehuman prop, but someone whose intentionality is essentially and constitutivelybound up with the climactic event of the drama, but in a fundamentallyimpersonal way. As my analysis has shown, Cecilia’s near beheading isunthinkable without reference to what is ‘going on’ with the headsman, what isup with him. His failure to finish the job is not only negatively at the centerof the show, but is ironically upstaged by the saint’s dynamic ability to completeher work three days beyond the evident hour of her death. It signifies both asa negative exemplum of the work-ethic that governs the tale and as anindispensable cog in the providential logic of the hagiography. What accountsfor Chaucer’s creation of this indeterminate space of identity around Cecilia’stormentor?

Nothing, I prefer to think.Allowing the headsman to walk away and be his own his own no-one, Chaucerexercises a dark, inscrutable charity toward an even darker subject of thespiritless law.

[2] Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, 88.5, PL 37: 1122.

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of thePrison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 33.

[4] Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone(London: Continuum, 2004), 135.

[5] TheRiverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

[6]The Basic Works ofAristotle, ed.Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), Physics, 220a.

[7] The identification of the threestrokes with time, as a perfect intersection of chronos and kairos,passing time and the moment of opportune crisis, is supported by theapocalyptic dimensions of the tale. See Eileen S. Janowski, “Chaucer’s ‘SecondNun’s Tale’ and the Apocalyptic Imagination,” Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 128-48.

[8] “[A]uch das Trennen ist noch einVerbinden und Beziehen” (Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,”in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55[Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970], 337). Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. GiorgioPetrocchi, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979). On these principles, see And TheyWere Two In One And One In Two, eds. Nicola Masciandaro & EugeneThacker (New York: n.p., 2011).

[9] Nicola Masciandaro, “Non potest hoc corpus decollari:Beheading and the Impossible,” in HeadsWill Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and Culture, eds. LarissaTracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012).

[10] Poemsof the Pearl Manuscript, eds. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978), lines2293-5.

[11] MED, s.v. respite, 1b.

[12] Hakim Sinai, The Walled Garden of Truth, trans. David Pendlebury (London:Octagon Press, 1974), 52.

[13] TheWritings of Julian of Norwich, eds. Nicholas Watson & JacquelineJenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 65,my emphasis.

[14] OnNietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (London: Continuum, 1992), 91.

[15] Giacomo Laderchi, S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta.. . (Rome, 1723), 38.

[16] Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. T. Graesse (Leipzig:Impensis Librariae Arnoldianae, 1850), 777.

[17] TheLife of St. Cecilia, ed. Albert S. Cook Boston, 1898), 91.

[18] See Psychomachia, lines 280-6.

[19] Expositionsof the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004),128.4.

[20] Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. WilliamGranger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2.140.

[21] MED, s.v. mouen, 3.

[22] More generally, the text requiresus to undecidably entertain the differences between a) the headsman in no wayhaving sufficient power to sever Cecilia’s neck (because it is too resilient,naturally or supernaturally); b) the headsman’s having sufficient power tosever her neck and in no way being able to activate it for some reason; and c)the headsman’s having sufficient power and activating it but in no waysucceeding to sever her neck because of some contingency. Inability must bedistinguished from impossibility, even though they may overlap. Aristotleconsiders the senses of inability as privation of potency in Metaphysics, 1046a.

[23] My argument thus fulfills, bytaking one step further, Elizabeth Robertson’s reading of Chaucer’s Cecilia asexemplar of the “inherently radical nature” of choice (“Apprehending the Divineand Choosing to Believe: Voluntarist Free Will in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 46 (2011): 130. Robertson emphasizes “Cecilia’schoice to exert her free will . . . despite extreme physical exertion” (129)and more importantly, discerns how violence is the tale is “a metaphor for thenature of choice itself” (130) in light of the voluntarist understanding ofchoice as marking “a radical shift from one domain to the next, fromindeterminacy to determinacy, from potency to act” (130). My point is thatprecisely in these terms Cecilia’s will must be read as mysteriously touchingand operating upon the real of her own execution.

[24] Sherry L. Reams, “The Second Nun’sPrologue and Tale,” in Sources andAnalogues of the Canterbury Tales I, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel,2 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), I.514.

[25] MED, s.v. half, adj. 1c.

[26] MED, s.v. half, adj. 1c.

[27] TheVision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C.Schmidt (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1978), B.XVII.57-8.

[28] See, for example, Origen, Homilies on Luke, trans. Joseph T.Lienhard (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), Homily34; Augustine, Sermo 131.6; PL38:732.

[29] OldEnglish Homilies and Homiletic Treatises, ed. Richard Morris (London: N.Trubner & Co., 1868), 80.

[30] “[S]he bowed her head and humblyworshipped Christ, so that her bending neck should be readier to suffer theimpending blow; and the executioner's hand fulfilled her great hope, for at onestroke he cut off her head and swift death forestalled the sense of pain. Nowthe disembodied spirit springs forth and leaps in freedom into the air, andangels are around her as she passes along the shining path” (Prudentius, Crowns of Martyrdom, 14.85-93).

[31] Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 257.

[32] Teseida2.85, cited from Sources and Analogues ofthe Canterbury Tales, II.138.

[33] Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), DivineNames, 5.3.

Mysticism or Mystification?: Against Subject-Creationism

2012-01-27T16:51:00.000-05:00

[This essay is a response to Timothy Morton's "Waking Up Inside An Object," for a forthcoming issue of ELN]

In the abandon in which I am lost, theempirical knowledge of my similarity with others is irrelevant, for the essenceof my self arises from this—that nothing will be able to replace it: thefeeling of my fundamental improbability situates me in the world where I remainas though foreign to it, absolutely foreign.

– Georges Bataille

Nature is much greater than what a man canperceive through the ordinary senses of his physical body. The hidden aspectsof nature consist of finer matter and forces. There is no unbridgeable gulfseparating the finer aspects of nature from its gross aspect. They allinterpenetrate one another and exist together.

– Meher Baba

To preserve a place is to preservedistinction. Therefore I pray God to make me free of God, for my essentialbeing is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures. For in that essenceof God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knewmyself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to myessence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal.

– MeisterEckhart

In response to the many points addressed in TimothyMorton’s exuberant and phenomenologically faithful description of what thesubject, among other things, is, I will try to develop the one idea which Iconsider to be its most important possibility. This idea, which Morton’sthinking both entertains and occludes, is best expressed in the negative: the subject is not a product of the universe.Or, as the American sage Vernon Howard expresses it, “A body came into theworld, but it wasn't you.”[1]Morton’s essay moves towards this principle insofar as it understands thesubject as deep, that is, profoundlycomplicit and secretly constituted with the nature of everything. Neither asecondary emergence from things nor a transcendental precondition for them, thesubject is universal and found everywhere as “the withdrawn strangeness ofobjects as such.” At the same time, Morton’s essay moves away from the idea ofthe non-produced nature of the subject insofar as it understands the subject asflat, as everywhere ontologically thesame and essentially inessential, something that consists in nothing other thanits own withdrawnness or impotentiality to be exhausted by events andappearances, a pure locality. Neither a self nor not a self, the subject is notat all a real or substantial ground of anything (not a soul), but only thehyper-situational core of that which exists in a “crowded bunch . . . ofstrange strangers all the way down and all the way up,” a contingent weirdthing whose “quintessence” is the “irony” that you are hopelessly enmeshed in auniverse with no outside, drowning in “the ocean of the story.”

Staying within this flat depth or deepflatness (depending on your perspective), Morton’s vision of the reality of thesubject hovers between mysticism and mystification, and with a correlativelyambivalent aesthetic affect: “Infinite coexistence. The thought of it should betruly horrible and depressing, as well as strangely funny and ironic.” On theone hand, there is the assertion of a fundamental absolute reality, a manifoldendless all to which every individual is intimately and mysteriously bound. Onthe other hand, the intimacy and mystery of this binding (of the individual tothe universal) is totally insignificant or without truth in that it marks only aninviolable absence of access to the all. There is a deep, mystical or hidden reality,a secret that encompasses all things, but that reality is itself mystified, ahyper-secret that is not even negatively knowable and may well be empty orbanal: “Everything in the Universe from goldfish to intergalactic dust cloudshides the rules of its game from all comers, including themselves.” The truthof the subject, then, lies in its being the silent term of an invertedtautology: the secret of everything is that everything is secret. Wheretraditional mysticism is grounded in faith or intuition of an unspeakable yet subjectivelyrealizable absolute secret (more or less, that the self is God), Morton’spostmodern installation of a self-secret subject is rooted in a species ofmystical identification with the sensation of being, the felt predicament ofsubjectivity, such that mysticism, far from being an ultimate relation to theuniversal, becomes the mystifying domain of things themselves, an uncannilyontological world of disoriented objects: “this shared sensual space in whichobjects smack, insinuate and burst into one another.” This intellectualprocedure is wholly in keeping with the way object-oriented ontology (OOO) ingeneral tries to realize phenomenologicallythe speculative impulse as defined by Meillassoux: “we must transform ourperspective on unreason, stop construing it as the form of our deficient graspof the world and turn it into the veridical content of the world as such – we mustproject unreason into things themselves.”[2]In doing so, OOO effectively explodes the self-world correlation into themanifold cosmos itself, giving paradoxical birth to a philosophically regularendless universe composed entirely and essentially of manifest hiddenness.

I posit that what is really at stake here philosophically,what is dramatized in the intellectual hovering between mysticism andmystification, is a conflicted need (a mix of desire and fear) to finally letgo of, or fatally reinvent, creationism. By creationism I mean not thereligious variety, although the theology of creation is certainly relevant tothe question, especially in light of the idea of divine creation as an event ofur-withdrawal, a withdrawal of God.[3]I mean instead the more generalized and harder-to-shake-off sense that oneself,along with everything else, is somehow an effect or product of a broaderexpansive universe, a grand ‘out there’ whose reality is prior to andfundamentally independent of one’s own. This belief in and perspective towardsthe world as an autonomous Real which is and must be whether one is or not, asit were, is inseparable from the general concept of subject as an individuatedentity that is subject of world andits own event within it. The subject on this view is something produced orcreated by and within the universe in an uncanny event of oneself that is typicallyidentified with birth: “To be born is both to be born of the world and to beborn into the world.”[4]Thus, despite the apparently absolute, blank unintelligibility of this event,the radical capacity of consciousness both to ignore and reject it, and the problematicintellectual status of the creationist principle, a species of fundamentalistcreationism continues to be maintained at the level of the subject (and in theservice of identity as such) by philosophy and thinking in general. Let’s callthis subject-creationism, the ideathat the subject (and superiorly the ‘thrown’ philosophical subject as someonewho is aware of this) is a pure secondary product of the universe. Whataccounts for this idea? Many would answer that it is simply patently true, abrute and inarguable fact that one’s being oneself is an ex nihilic event orreal absurdity, a pure creation of things. I think that thinking so is only away of numbing and normalizing a rather amazing and ultra-dynamic phenomenon, onethat inherently demands intellectual and scientific investigation, and thataccepting that ‘it is as it appears’ is comparable to ‘knowing’ the earth is flat.[5]Like any other anomaly, the individuated event of being requires speculativeand empirical investigation, rather than relegation to a putatively purelymetaphysical domain of mysterious final causes. My point here is not to promoteany specific alternative to this subject-creationism (e.g. metempsychoticevolution), but to insist on the necessity and wisdom of refusing it, ofwielding thought in revolt against any closure-by-contingency of the subject’sevent. This means holding onto, as a kind of holy trinity of individuation, allthree seemingly contradictory principles indicated by the epigraphs above,juggling or maintaining simultaneously in circulation that: 1) one is anabsolute alien; 2) everything is coexistent and differentially touching in theall; 3) oneself and the universe are equiprimordial. Among the many related obstaclesand acrobatic deficiencies this task presents, two deserve special comment:history and philosophy.

The problem of subject-creationism obviously concernspostmedieval developments in the idea of the subject, the shift from cosmo-centricityto cosmo-eccentricity, for example, as well as the broader insidiousinstitution of temporal history, human and otherwise, as the prime location or stageof the subject. Of this, the topical transition from place to time in Petrarch’smountain summit meditation is a suitable icon: “Hence a new thought occupied mymind, one which shifted my focus from place to time.”[6]This shift is also foundational for later forms of cosmic horror that explorethe essential impossibility of the subject, as indicated by Lovecraft’sdefinition of time as “the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thingin the universe.”[7] Yetto historicize the subject, to treat it as itself a matter of time, also risks/intendsevading and repressing the problem, disserving its ungraspable real immediacyin the name of a contextual understanding that only defers the real ofsubjectivity, its now, into a hallucinatory future-present. Whence Nietzsche’scritique of the “noble faith” of philology, “that for a sake a few who always‘will come’ but are not there, a very great deal of painstaking, even uncleanwork needs to be done.”[8]The contradiction inherent to this dynamic of temporal avoidance is symptomizedin the present age’s conjunction of historicism and escapism. The more theunitary fact of being-subject is coopted by the story of a singular-multiple we, the more intense the imperative toescape, precisely as a negative means of experiencing that fact, given thatescape is an intimate exponent of the negativity of coming-to-be: “escape is the need toget out of oneself, that is, to breakthat most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi]is oneself [soi-même]. . . . It is being itself or the ‘one-self’ fromwhich escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation. In escape the I fleesitself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or of what it willnot become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes.”^{^[9]}

A particularly sneaky philosophical form ofescape, or pseudo-escape, one that is also proper to historicism itself, is to maintaincategorically that being has no summit, no position wherein it is perfectlydisclosed to itself, that all being is a being-within something else, and thatto behold and attempt a summit is a dangerous and irresponsible delusion. Stay where you are, this exile is home.The imperative is rhetorically powerful, and full of creative and contrary possibilities,but it will never blind me to the inexhaustible unhomeliness of this life, theliterally essential error of ‘being’ a subject. On this point, Morton’s subjectappears to surf an exciting wave between terror and freedom that flows upon thesea of an endless within, dancing tognostic jazz in a mood of mobile, nomadic claustrophobia. Waking up inside anobject is Lovecraftian – “I know not where I was born, save that the castle wasinfinitely old and infinitely horrible”[10]– but also liberating and fun because it takes place with the idea that thereis no outside, only an infinite enclosure whose extent ruptures enclosure’svery possibility and meaning. Instead of the Nietzschean awakening to theabsence of a selfless outside and the sonic pleasure of forgetting so – “For me—howcould there be something outside of me? There is no outside! But we forget thiswith all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!”[11]– we are presented its inverse: there is nothing that the self is not within(in the restricted sense) and the truth of music is to awaken us to thisemergent fact – “A terrible signal, too weak to even recognize” (TalkingHeads). From the historical point of view, this is an interesting andsignificant move in that it neo-medievalizes subjectivity, restoring it tocosmic place and rescuing it from the blindness of anthropocentric history. Yetby investing so much ontological capital in the within, the move inescapably betrays its own condition ofpossibility, namely, that the consciousness of being within is proof of beingwithout. Or as Plotinus put it, “Soul is not in the universe, on the contrarythe universe is in the Soul.”^{^[12]}

Historicism’sbuttressing of subject-creationism is of a piece with what François Laruellehas with ruthless eloquence criticized as philosophicaldecision, the impure decision to philosophize, to treat reality as therefor philosophy, as its object, and thus also transcendentally ‘create’ thephilosophical subject. “The philosophical Decision is an operation oftranscendence which believes (in a naïve and hallucinatory way) in thepossibility of a unitary discourse on Reality. . . . To philosophize is todecide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to beable to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason (Logos).”[13]The decision is hallucinatory in the sense that it forecloses the Real in thename of philosophy, giving instead a World which is “a mixture of the(hallucinated) Real and of the philosophical logico-real,” a Worldconstitutionally opposed to the real Real or “the One . . . the real insofar asit forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc.).”[14]Philosophy is thus profoundly and significantly bound to the subject who thinksitself away from, forgets to inherit, and abandons its own immanent and perhapsinfinite reality, who sees and identifies itself as created in the image of the world. This is precisely the substance of the quarrelbetween philosophy and mysticism, as Laruelle articulates: “Philosophy is thisorganon, this a priori form which, giving us the World, forecloses themystical experience which intrinsically constitutes humans and which is aquestion of rediscovering, not in its reality which has never abandoned us, buton the mode of thought and by the non-philosophical force of the latter.”[15]

Theabandonment of subject-creationism thus opens itself as a proper avenue for theapplication of non-philosophical thought, a way to newly exit and enter thisplace around the pivot of an essential error, embracing, as Reza Negarestanicalls it, the folly of the impossible:“averting the path of the state or capitalism is no longer a matter of treasonor disobedience but the folly of the impossible – trying to walk away from theworld. . . . only byrigorously embracing this folly can we develop a genuine non-restricteddialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and unbind a world whosefrontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths are absolutelyfree.”[16]Here one may take a hint from the mystic who, in desperate flirtation withrefusal of the ‘gift of being’,[17]wrestles createdness to the ground and finds the summit where one is “neitheroneself nor someone else.”[18]

There is nocontradiction between embracing this folly and one’s neighbor, a not-so-strangestranger.

[1] Vernon Howard, Your Power of Natural Knowing (New LifeFoundation, 1995), 164.

[2] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity ofContingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 82.

[3] For example: “The doctrine of tzimtzum, of God’s self-limitation,states that the primeval act of creation by God was not one in which theInfinite left its mysterious depths, an act of emanation from within towithout, . . . but that this primal step was in fact ‘the contraction of theInfinite from Himself to Himself, an act of self-gathering and contractionwithin Himself in order to create the possibility of the processes of the world”(Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility ofJewish Mysticism in Our Time [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,1997], 151). The principle of divine withdrawal is also proper to theemanationist model of creation: “[T]he very cause of the universe . . . isalso carried outside of himself . . . He is . . . enticed away from histranscendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he doesso by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless,within himself” (Pseudo-Dionysius, TheComplete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem [New York: PaulistPress, 1987], Divine Names, 4.13,p.82).

[4] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologyof Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 527.

[5] Two promising lines of inquirythat cannot be pursued here come to mind: 1) The question of a structuralanalogy between flat ontologies and flat earth theories. What is the newexperience that would discover the real curvature behind OOO? 2) The questionof the analytical applicability of OOO to the fact of individuation. Isindividuation an object?

[6] Francesco Petrarca, Ascent of Mount Ventoux: the Familiaris IV,I (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2006), 101.

[7] H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes onWriting Weird Fiction” (1937), cited from Benjamin Noys, “Horror Temporis,” Collapse 4 (2008): 277.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. JosefineNauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99,

[9] Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003), 55. See also Nicola Masciandaro, “The Sorrow of Being,” Qui Parle 19 (2010): 9-35.

[10] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider,” .

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian DelCaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175.

[12] Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: LarsonPublications, 1992), 472.

[13] François Laruelle, Dictionary ofNon-Philosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins (n.p., 2009), 56.

[14] Ibid., 88, 86.

[15] Ibid., 53.

[16] Reza Negarestani,“Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,”unpublished.

[17] As described, for example, in The Cloud of Unknowing: “Alle menhan mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote andfelith that he is. Alle other sorowesben unto this in comparison bot as it were gamen to ernest. For he may makesorow ernestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that heis. And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yitnever parfite sorow” (The Cloud ofUnknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval InstitutePublications, 1997], 43: 1554-61, my emphasis).

[18] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, Mystical Theology, 1011A, p.137.

On the Mystical Love of Black Metal

2011-11-28T06:38:00.000-05:00

Deep in the shadows wings take to flightthrough clouds of chaos where stars die

– Inquisition, “Across the AbyssAncient Horns Bray,” Ominous Doctrines ofthe Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm

Thedeeper secrets of a spiritual life are unravelled to those who take risks andwho make bold experiments with it. They are notmeant for the idler who seeks guaranties for every step. He who speculates fromthe shore about the ocean shall know only its surface, but he who would knowthe depths of the ocean must be willing to plunge into it.

– Meher Baba, Discourses

[E]very visible and invisiblecreature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition. For . . . the more secretly it is understood,the closer it is seen to approach the divine brilliance. Hence the inaccessiblebrilliance of the celestial powers is often called by theology “Darkness.”

– John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon[1]

The world—insofar as it is absolutely,irreparably profane – is God.

– GiorgioAgamben[2]

O blissful distance from God, howlovingly am I connected with you!

– Mechthild of Magdeburg

I love black metal. In secret. In the secrecywherein black metal keeps its own secret, above all from itself, and below. “Lovesets on fire the one who finds it. At the same time it seals his lips so thatno smoke comes out. Love is meant to be experienced and not disclosed. What isdisplayed is not love. Love is a secret which is meant to remain a secret savefor the one who receives it and keeps it.”[3] As Bathory sings in The Return, “Dark as her closed eyelids / Her secret . . . Shedon’t fear the flames . . . BORN FOR BURNING.”[4] Or as Marguerite Porete, burned for heresyin 1310, explains, the annihilated soul (a secret who unknown to others anditself) “is the phoenix who is alone; for this Soul is alone in Love who aloneis satisfied in her.”[5] So is it true what The Scapegoat said, that “thefirst rule of black metal is that YOU DO NOT FUCKING TALK ABOUT BLACK METAL.”[6] About, from OE onbutan, means ‘on the outside of, around’. No one speaks about black metal – they do not know what they are talking about, norwhat they are doing (forgive them). Discourse on black metal is blasphemy,heresy, sacrilege. That is the condition of its truth, that it break faith withitself. “It seemed to her a kind of blasphemy,” writes the compiler of Angelaof Foligno’s Memorial, “to try toexpress the inexpressible. . . . More than anyone else I ever knew, she was inthe habit of saying: ‘My secret for myself’.”[7] And this secret love (of black metal) isalso precisely, perfectly, what demands discourse. “I want to speak about it,”says the Soul to Love in Porete’s text, “and I don’t know what to say about it.Nevertheless . . . my love is so certain that I would prefer to hear somethingslanderous [médiscance] about youthan one should say nothing about you.”[8] The secret is what can and must endure allblasphemy. This black metal love, inviolable in the radically immanent solitudeof its negative transcendence, is born for burning: “She is not afraid to die /She will burn again tonight / (she will always burn) / But her spirit shallsurvive.”[9] Do not talk about it. We will speak in black metal, there, where the secretof black metal is, wherever black metal is the secret of itself. Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult.Because black metal is love.

The mystical love of black metalis not a distinct or particular form of the love of black metal, not one of severalloves, but the very love of black metal love itself, its pure and purifyingform, the superlative intensity of a love that is essentially mystical, ahidden love of the Hidden. All love of black metal is, willy-nilly, mystical. Mysticallove of black metal is its true love. This is my theoretical blasphemy, to out theblack metal head as secret mystic heart, to accuse black metal of divine love. Theindictment is distorted, twisted as usual around the complicity betweeninquisition and heresy, at once ridiculous and patently true, a sentence whosedenial is simultaneously meaningless and indicative of a profound, unspeakable significance.I envision the prosecution of it as an inversion of the medieval precedent groundedin a schematic genealogical analogy that contains a modicum of historicaltruth: contemporary theory is to medieval theology as black metal is tomedieval mysticism – a connexion that, stretched upon the cross of modernity,becomes evident in contestation over heterodoxy. In the premodern situation, ahypocritical, falsely-orthodox theology faculty accuses the mystic of heresy:becoming God. In the postmodern situation, a hypocritical, falsely-hereticaltheory faculty accuses black metal of orthodoxy: loving God. Where the materialflame reveals the first to be a true saint, the intellectual flame reveals thesecond to be real mysticism.

Meaning what? How is black metal,a musical art, real mysticism? I am not referring to black metal’s mysticalthemes, or to mystics who love black metal. I say black metal itself is a realmysticism. One might say, and surely someone has, that black metal is asubjectless and objectless mysticism, mysticism without self and without God.But black metal love has a living subject, the black metal head, and an actual object,the black metal art. So we must refine this to mean that, mystically, the blackmetal head is a subjectless subject of an objectless object, a self withoutitself (metal head) in love with a God who is not God (metal). Subject andobject remain, but only without themselves through a mutual transformation thatinters and occludes each term in the other. Head becomes metal, yet remains ahead. Metal becomes head, yet stays metal. This is the essential reality ofblack metal as mysticism, its being a musical materialization of the mysticalrelation in which the transcendent subject and object, self and God, areequally dislocated and secreted in an immanent and blackened inter-becoming ofmetal with everything, an amorous pestilential alchemy that nigredically meltsbeing into an ancient cosmic essence that cannot be, taking flight throughclouds of chaos where stars die, into the darkest divine body, named byEriugena as “that which neither creates nor is created . . . [which] is classedamong the impossibles, for its essence lies in not being able to be [cuius differentia est non posse esse].”[10]The mystical experience of black metal is likewise something that cannot happen.One is somehow there to hear and see it, but the experience is not one’s own. Itis more like black metal possesses things in order to experience itself, notreductively, but in a way that hiddenly opens into the All, that leads without locatinginto the “Hidden Secret Sabbat summoningmy name” (Inquisition, “The Initiation,” Intothe Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult). Dagon says, “The music is thedrug, the poison, the spiritual experience and even war all in one dose. Cometo an Inquisition event and I promise you will walk out feeling just fine. Ican’t use many words here.”[11]As if within the negative magnetism of blackening sonic pressure the twinengines of mystical ascent, intellectusand affectus, head and heart, areprojected into a twisted transposition of the lover-beloved dyad. Head,embodying intellect, is now metal, the materialization of the object of lovephantasmatically held in the heart, and heart (the place of feeling, memory,experience, self-presence etc) is now exploded into space-filling metal sounditself, an omnipresent, diffused but essentially dislocated sonic heart thateverywhere feels all the more intensely without oneself, a transsubjective volitionalfield that, rather than holding within itself the image of what it lacks,continuously auto-deictically shows the fact of its own being what it wills. This, it seems to me, is aperfect inverse of the traditional model of the mystical intimacy of divine longingor ‘holy desire’, wherein the heart is an interior domain paradoxicallylacking, as absent presence and present absence, the Being that most acutelypenetrates and informs it, like a mirror into which self and God are alwaysboth looking, glimpsing but never grasping the other, fitfully speaking acrossimpassible proximate distance.[12]Where the ideal atmosphere of that spiritual heart is silence, the medium ofincommunicable communication whose ocular analog is the gaze, the atmosphere ofblack metal mystical intimacy is noise, the medium of communicable incommunication whose ocular analog is the stare. DiamandaGalás expresses something of this noisy heart-exploding becoming-metal: “Noise blasts a human being into infinity andhe lands in an iron chair without a nametag, an overwounded fleshmachine melteddown into an unrecognizable form.”[13]

The reality of black metal asmysticism may thus be thought as the secret shadow of the transformation conventionallyfigured in Christian mysticism as the becoming-fire of black metal: “All loveis a fire, but a spiritual fire. What a corporeal fire does for iron, the fire. . . does the same for an impure, cold, and hardened heart. In consequence ofthe infusion of such a fire, the human mind gradually removes all blackness,coldness, and hardness; and the whole mind changes into the similitude of himwho inflames it. The whole mind becomes white-hot from the igniting of thedivine fire; it flares up and, at the same time, liquefies in the love of God.”[14]I conceive the love of black metal as an inside-out flame of this fire, a hyper-coldor meta-hot black flame (cf. Sabbat’s “Black Fire” et al) within the heart ofthe metal head that preserves and ensures, precisely by preventing, the all-outbecoming-fire of love. For such a dark burning, as the very vehicle of theopposite of transubstantiation (in which accidents survive the alteration ofsubstance), is also discernible within the metaphor as the secret virtue of ironthat allows its cold black hardness to be affected by fire, to preserve itselfin the midst of burning, and to achieve total transformation without loss ofits own substance, that is, to reallyachieve it. As Eriugena says, describing the becoming-divine of the individual,“Iron or any other metal melted into fire is seen to be converted into fire, sothat it appears to be pure fire, yet the substance of the metal is safelypreserved.”[15] Noone would claim that the capacity of black metal to remain black metal in themidst of the infinite fire of love is incidental to its mystical, divinebecoming. Rather, this complicit resistance is its very ground, what givesflame to fire in the first place, what permits fire to be its endlessly burningself, what effortlessly suffers forever the perverse infinity of divine loveand overmasters even its own being totally overcome by it. “Once my soul waselevated,” says Angela, “. . . I did not see love there, I then lost the lovewhich was mine and was made nonlove [nonamor]. . . . Afterward, I saw him in a darkness . . . anything conceivableor understandable does not attain this good or even come near it. . . . In thisgood, which is seen in the darkness, I recollected myself totally.”[16]The icy burning of the black metal essence that burns so hot that even thefieriest infernal love-fire is burnt by it and retreats more secretly within themetal substance is the profound property of an infinite, non-subtractableindividuality, a one of many who is nonetheless and all the more One withoutnumber, the only and final insurance that when you become God, you can reallysay, with Al-Hallaj, I am God, theTruth. In being melted, in wholly changing into the similitude of him whoinflames it, the iron is most intensively weaponized, made into asuperdirectional liquid blade, something cutting in all directions at once, allthe more easily wielding itself even against the All. ‘It is a certain andnecessary truth,” says Meister Eckhart, “that he who resigns his will wholly toGod will catch God and bind God, so that God can do nothing but what that manwills.”[17]Note that, in Inquisition’s “Summoned by Ancient Wizards Under a Black Moon,”fire is accordingly invoked as both ultimate wieldable weapon and medium of finalself-dissolution: “I will open gates of unknown time / I will breathe my firetowards the cosmic eye . . . Far before all time, far beyond all time / I shallfade away in the fire realm below.” The love of black metal is a mystical swordof unconquerable fire. I lose myself in the analogy. Let’s return to theargument.

The love of black metal is asecret, inverted mysticism, a hidden love of hidden universal divine reality,the absolute continuum that holds the supreme, superessential essence of yourso-called self. It is the love of something (black metal) that materially makesand perceptually does what mysticism spiritually is, namely: “a most secret [secretissima] talking with God, nolonger through a mirror and through the images of creatures, but the kind wherethe mind transcends all creatures and itself, and relaxes [otiatur] from the acts of all the powers that are able to graspanything created, in the desire of seeing and holding him who is above all,waiting [expectans] in the darknessof the privation of actual comprehension, that is, in the darkness of theactual unknowing of all things, until the one it desires may manifest himself.”[18]It therefore does this precisely as if notdoing it, as if not withdrawing fromthe mirror of things but staying, aesthetically dwelling in its very darkness, not seeking the face to face vision thatthe dark mirror promises and prevents, but artistically folding and vinyllypressing vision into the darkness of the mirror itself, compounding darkness indarkness so as to sonically fly away free from the necessity of vision alltogether. “O Cryptic One I see – black / the veiled one chanting near . . . theshadow one in the mist / Wings flock to my crypt, I fly to my throne”(Inquisition, “Desolate Funeral Chant,” OminousDoctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm).

Thelove of black metal is an inside-out mysticism, not only in the sense of a profanationof mysticism, but in the deeper sense of a mystical inversion of mysticism, anunconscious occult recording or perverse intuitive preservation of theheterodox love of God. Inversion must here be recognized as a universal logicaloperator for transpositionally revealing-by-concealing and concealing-by-revealingthe essence of something. Inversion is a secret, cultic veneration of whatremains in-version, immanent within the midst of turning. It is a destructive-creativedisclosure of the still point or axis of inversion, for instance, the martyric momentof identity with Christ on the Petrine cross (somewhere near the navel),[19]a minimum intersection at the center of all difference that antipodal movement atonce occludes and twistingly intensifies. Inversion repeats without repetition,without recording, keeping the old as the shadow of the new. The love of blackmetal, far from being mere medievalism or anti-modern nostalgia for a lost sacredworld, is a new (blind) perception ofspiritual reality.[20]An insoluble sonic synthesis or a-synthesis of premodern mystical negativityand the expanding image of the unbounded cosmos. Dagon says: “The massivechaos, titanic cosmic bodies that dwindle around, everything around us is somassive and powerful that I see the parallel of what all the known mythologieshave written about heaven and hell as a direct inspiration from it (space) assomething we have been overlooking our entire lifetime. . . . The simple notionthat my spirit is as ancient as time time itself, I am here in ‘modern times’but my spirit is very old therefore my inspiration is old and cryptic . . . theeternal black universe, the cosmic sea of Lucifer. How can one not beenlightened by such greatness after a deep look into something so primitive,vast and timeless. . . . the cosmos and all nature holds the secrets ofmankind, creation and destruction, everything about it is so Satanic inessence, so ‘Black Metal’ essence.”[21]

The love of black metal twiststoward absolute cosmic exteriority along a mystical path of intensiveinversion. Ordinate mysticism takes an inward and upward path to God as thesource and goal of everything, withdrawing from the exterior phenomenal worldin order to ascend beyond it to the One in a movement that is anabatic (rising,upriver) and anagogic (leading upward).[22]The love of black metal, reversely and contrarily, leads downwards and outwardsinto a paradoxically disordered and multiple cosmos that is no less divine,pursuing a musical path that is catabatic (descending) and apogogic (leadingaway). Where music traditionally aims to mimetically ascend to hyper-centraldivine truth through the harmony of the celestial spheres, black metal’s noisyanti-modern sonic drive coordinately plunges into the depths only to releaseand radically fly upon the infinite centrifugal power or negative cosmic windof sound itself. “Through cosmic chaos, through burning stars, abyss horns nowbray. . . . The kingdom closes through which I fly as darkness opens / OurEarth has opened as lunar craters become infernos / As ancient hymns call Ising the song in caves of sorrow / The echoes wander with lifeless moan ashorns are braying” (Inquisition, “Across the Abyss Ancient Horns Bray, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual MysticalMacrocosm).

As if black metal were indeed asubcultural Dionysian echo of antinomian or ‘anarchic’ medieval spirituality,the truth of Marguerite Porete the real outsider occluded in the inquisitorial memoryof Baphomet (the putative god of the Templars who were burnt only weeks beforeher in Paris), black metal truths remain backwardsly legible within medievalmystical discourse, above all in places where the ordered and integrativemovement of the return to the One is reversely accented toward individualreality. A short list:

1) Irreligion. The principle thatdivine truth lies beyond religion, an institution that separates rather thanunites world and God. “[T]his Soul is above the law, / Not contrary to thelaw,” says Porete, in the voice of Holy Church.[23]As opposed to such persons she calls “donkeys, [who] seek God in creatures, inmonasteries for prayer, in a created paradise, in words of men and theScriptures.”[24]

2) Freedom. The principle ofabsolute independence. “This Soul, says Love, is free, yet more free, yet veryfree, yet finally supremely free . . . She responds to no one if she does notwish to.”[25]Nor is she “a servant of onself.”[26]Eckhart: “The just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, . . . and the closer he is to freedom . . .the more he is freedom itself. Whatever is created, is not free. . . . There issomething that transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact withcreated things . . . not even an angel has it . . . It is akin to the nature ofdeity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common with anything.”[27]

3) Intoxication. The principle ofradical, concernless bliss. “And she is inebriated not only from what she hasdrunk, but very intoxicated and more than intoxicated from what she neverdrinks and nor will ever drink.”[28]

4)Knowing oneself as totally evil. The principle that you are intelligible onlyas pure perversion of the good. “[T]his Soul knows in herself only one thing,that is, the root of all evil, and the abundance of all sins without number,without weight, and without measure.”[29]“This is the sign of the spirit of truth,” says Angela of Foligno, “to realizethat God’s being is total love and to acknowledge oneself as total hate.”[30]

5)Dereliction, desolation, and despair. “I perceive that demons,” says Angela,“hold my soul in a state of suspension; just as a hanged man has nothing tosupport him, so my soul does not seem to have any supports left. The virtues ofmy soul are undermined . . . and when it when it perceives all its virtuesbeing subverted and departing . . . the pain and the anger that it feels pushesit to such a point of despair that at times it cannot weep and at other timesit weeps inconsolably. There are even times when I am so overwhelmed with ragethat I can hardly refrain from tearing myself apart.”[31]

6)Rejection of creationism, the pervasive insidious habit of thinking being ascreature or inscrutable effect of an external cause, whether divine architector a mute given cosmos that it is stupidly ‘out there’ before and after one’sown being. Eckhart says no: “For in that essence of God in which God is abovebeing and distinction, there I was myself and knew myself so as to make thisman. Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, andnot according to my becoming, which is temporal.”[32]Don’t worry about how to return or keep or throw away the ‘gift of being’.

7)Paradoxical denial of God. The upside down truth on which the Christianecclesia and black metal kvlt are both founded. “I pray to God to make me freeof God,” says Eckhart.[33]The negation is necessary to open the continuum, to realize the universal as anopen system, i.e. a world of wonders and monstrous births. Logically, thecontinuum is what is thinkable in negation as the difference between X and notnot X. Their equation is the basis for the apogogic or indirect proof, whichKant notes “can produce certainty, to besure, but never comprehensibility of the truth in regard to its connection withthe grounds of its possibility,” calling it “more of an emergency aid than aprocedure which satisfies the aims of reason.”[34]It is valid only within closed, finite systems, in “sciences where it isimpossible to erroneously substitute the subjective for the objective.”[35]In the procedure of apophatic mysticism (negating what is not God), theindeterminacy of the apogogic, the gap between X and ~~X, is figured in therecognition that the negation of the not-God does not produce God but leadsonly to the place of God and that afurther negation of the negation conditions divine illumination, whichtranscends both objective subjectivity and logical binarism, realizing a truththat, as Dionysius says in the MysticalTheology, is “beyond assertion and denial.” “Here,” he continues, “beingneither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completelyunknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowingnothing.”[36]Essential to this deployment of the negative is the principle, contraAristotle, that negation is not theopposite of assertion, but the assertion of what is beyond it, a term ofintensification that negatively indicates what is in excess of the positive,such that “one might even say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which isabove being. Repelling being, it struggles to find rest in the Good whichtranscends all being, in the sense of a denial of all things.”[37]Black metal is similarly intelligible as intensive negation, negativeindication of the excess beyond God, exuberant sacrilegious signification ofdivinity in excess of deity. And/or intensive double negation: aesthetic formaldemonstration of the denial of divine inexistence, negation of the God who isnot (neither with nor without assertion of a God-to-come). Investment in doublenegation is correlative to open or non-positive affirmation, futurity, and the tautologicalwhylessness of the will to live, famously presented by Eckhart as an endlessiterable question and answer between man and Life: “If a man asked life for athousand years, ‘Why do you live?’ ifit could answer it would only say, ‘I live because I live.’ That is becauselife lives from its own ground, and gushes forth from its own. Therefore itlives without Why, because it livesfor itself.”[38]Here the depth of the continuum is perfectly exposed in the difference betweenwilling to be and not willing not to be. The essence of holy desire or divinelove is defined in medieval mystical texts not only (and less) in terms of itsabsolutism (for the all-in-all, Bataille’s ‘desire to be everything’), but interms of negative continuity, as desire that will not go away, a ceaselessnessat once affiliated with cosmic order (Dante’s ‘love that moves the sun and theother stars’) and what aims beyond it, within the unlimitedness of desire forself-becoming. “For not what thou arte, ne what thou hast ben, beholdeth Godwith his merciful ighe, bot that that thou woldest be” (Cloud of Unknowing).The whole of the law shall be . . . Denial of God = non-propositionalaffirmation of the anarchy of divine life . . .

Andso forth. I say nothing, and could say too much more of the same. Ominous doctrinesof the perpetual mystical macrocosm are not doctrines of in the sense of about.They are about the perpetual mysticalmacrocosm only insofar as the words name the black metal they entitle, insofaras black metal is the ominous doctrines, called by a name that never ceasesbleeding into the thing itself. Ominous doctrines of the perpetual mystical macrocosm, the very doctrines of themacrocosm itself, that belong to it, that are it. There is no understandingwithout being them. “Gloss this if you wish, or if you can,” says Porete, “Ifyou cannot, you are not of this kind; but if you are of this kind, it will beopened to you.”

Whatwill?

(asksthe last human being, blinking)

[1] “[O]mnis visibilis, et invisibilis creatura Theophania i.e.divina apparition potest appellari; . . . siquidem . . .in quantum occultusintelligitur, in tantum divinae claritati appropinquare videtur. Proinde aTheologia coelestium virtutum, inaccessibilis claritas saepe nominatortenebrositas” (De divisione naturae,[Monasterii Guestphalorum: Aschendorff, 1838], III.19)

[2] TheComing Community, 89.

[3] Meher Baba, Listen Humanity(New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 19.

[4] Bathory, “Born for Burning,” TheReturn (Black Mark Productions, 1985).

[5] Marguerite Porete, TheMirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press,1993), ch. 11. On self-secrecy, cf. “But who they are [says Love to the threetheological virtues(faith, hope, charity)] . . . this is known neither to younor to them” (ch.19); “She is where she loves . . . without her feeling it”(ch. 41); “. . . the true seed of divine Love, which makes the Soul completelysurprised, without being aware of it” (ch.18).

[6] .

[7] Angela of Foligno, CompleteWorks, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 248.

[8] Mirror of Simple Souls,ch. 11.

[9] Quorthon, “Born for Burning,” TheReturn.

[10] De divisione naturae,1.

[11] Interview: Inquisition, .

[12] Cf. the opening prayer of The Cloud of Unknowing: “God, unto Whomalle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privéthing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert
with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, andworthilich preise Thee. Amen” (ed. Patrick J. Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI:Medieval Institute, 1997], 21.

[13] Cited from blurb to Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise (Zone, 2011).

[14] Richard of St. Victor, Onthe Trinity, 6.12.

[15] “Ferrum aut aliud aliquod metallum in igne liquefactum, in ignemconverti videtur, ut ignis purus videatur esse, salva metalli substantiapermanente” (De divsione naturae,4.8).

[16] CompleteWorks, 202.

[17] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’ C Walshe (New York:Herder & Herder, 2009), sermon 10, p.92.

[18] Mystical Theology: TheGlosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste on DeMystica Theologia, ed. and trans. James McEvoy (Paris: Peeters, 2003), p.65[citing Grosseteste’s commentary on 1.1.].

[19] Cf. Valter’s commentary on Aarseth’s bellybutton as punctum, “Black MetalGetting Medieval,” Documents < http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.com/2009/03/black-metal-getting-medieval.html>.

[20] Cf. “I think that black metal is an artistic movement that iscritiquing modernity on a fundamental level saying that the modern world viewis missing something. It’s missing acknowledgement of a spiritual reality. Thatestrangement from spiritual knowledge is the source of very deep sadness andalienation. I think that is fundamentally what black metal is all about” (AaronWeaver, An Interview with Wolves in theThrone Room’s Aaron Weaver < http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/05/an_interview_w_13.html>)

[21] Cited from />,,

[22] See Plotinus, Enneads, 4.8.1; Augustine, Confessions,7.10,16; Pseudo-Dionysius, MysticalTheology, 1.1.

[23] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 121, p. 196.

[24] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 69, p. 144.

[25] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 85, p.160.

[26] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 48, p. 127.

[27] CompleteMystical Works, Sermon 17.

[28] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 23, p. 105. Cf. “[the] God-intoxicated . . .experiences just that same senation that a drunkard enjoys, and cares for noone and nothing, in proportion to the extent of his intoxication; thedifference is that his intoxication is continual,that it may increase but can never decrease, and it has no physicalor mental reaction. It is a state of permanent and unalloyed intoxication” (Wayfarers, 22).

[29] Mirrorof Simple Souls, Chapter 11, pp. 88-9.

[30] CompleteWorks, 229.

[31] CompleteWorks, 197.

[32] CompleteMystical Works, Sermon 87.

[33] CompleteMystical Works, Sermon 87.

[34] Kant, A789-90/B817-18.

[35] Anthony Winterbourne, The Ideal and the Real: An Outline of Kant’s Theory of Space, Time andMathematical Construction, 117.

[36] 1001A, 1048B.

[37] Divine Names 697A. “Now we should notconclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, butrather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this” (Mystical Theology100B). “In it is nonbeing really an excess of being” (Divine Names 697A).

[38] Sermon 13.

Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia, note 1

2011-10-28T12:45:00.000-04:00

Thre strokes in the nekke hesmoot hire tho,[1]

[1] The representation of the threestrokes emits several rays of darkness, that is, occult illuminations ofsignificance from what the image hides. FIRST, there is the darkness of thethreeness itself, the obscurity of its relation to the semi-beheading event.That the reason for the three is later provided in no way erases thissignificant obscurity. Not only does the explanation not touch the question ofthreeness itself, it rather exacerbates the obscurity by linking threeness tothe arbitrariness of the law, superadding the abstract/bureaucratic violence oflaw per se to the palpable violence of the strokes and thus intensifying theirnumerical enigma. This superadditive conjunction – an excellent object forcontemplating more generally the intimacy between law and number, all thesecret complicities between the law of number and the number of law – isessentially temporal, a repetition of momentary indistinction between the timeof the act (tho) and the time of the law(ther was that tyme an ordinaunce) thatincisionally counts and literally strikes law upon body. (The word law, via OE lagu, itself indicates something set down, a stroke, and is relatedto lecgan [lay], which also means to slay,strike down; cf. the expression to layinto someone.) Still, even if a more satisfying reason or cause for thethree were given, it could never touch the threeness of the stroke itself as aspecific phenomenal reality. For thatis something, in its pure facticity and eventfulness, behind which any cause orreason must necessarily and totally recede, all the more so when we are insympathy with the to-be-beheaded, with the one who is being capitally cut offfrom all that does not matter by facing a simple brutality of one, two,three. What, then, is this threeness?Can we answer directly, leaping beyond the labyrinth of symbolic andallegorical possibilities? Is there a superlativeidentity between three and Cecilia’s semi-beheading? An immediate answer isthat threeness, as the primary, first-word feature of the event, is here thethreeness of beheading itself, an essential threeness of the act that isparadoxically disclosed, like the being of Heidegger’s hammer, when beheadingbreaks down or fails to fulfill itself. The essential ‘count’ of beheading isthree, in the sense of being a tertiumquid produced in the severing of the head/body binarism. Cf. “Severing alsois still a joining and relating” (“[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbindenund Beziehen,” Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55[Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970], 337) and Dante’s descriptionof the infernal cephalophore Bertran de Born as “due in uno e uno in due” (Inferno 28.125), on which see And They Were Two In One And One In Two,eds. Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker (New York: n.p., 2011). Beheading unlocksthe invisible head-body holism, the conjunction of each being within the other,into the negative conjunction of severed head and body. Decapitation’s count is three, and in three distinctways: 1) serially, decapitation isthe weird third thing that follows the separation of head (one) from body(two), a neither-head-nor-body that includes and emerges from both; 2) additively, decapitation is the sum ofits parts: head plus body (head+trunk) equals three, where head must be countedtwice, as head and as part of body; 3) synthetically,decapitation is three as the union of its dualities, its two-in-one andone-in-two. The threeness of beheading may also be sought within its twistedtemporality, its being a specular folding of past, present, and future, or “anevent that ends before it begins and begins after it ends” (Nicola Masciandaro,“Non potest hoc corpus decollari:Beheading and the Impossible,” in HeadsWill Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and Culture, eds. LarissaTracy and Jeff Massey [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012]).

SECOND, there is the darkness ofthe syntactical contraction of the three strokes into one act. By eliding theexperiential space between the strokes, this contraction deepens the event bynot dramatizing it, like off-stage violence in a Greek tragedy. Three strokes in the nekke, as if partof one design (an idea artistically realized in the Cecilia sculpture at thecathedral in Albi), silently equates the passing of the strokes with theunrepresentable, leaving it suspended and all the more present as something thatdoes not enter into memory. Why? Because the passing of the three strokes, thedurational suffering of them, is something radically unworthy of recollection,not because it is to be forgotten, but because it is only known without recording, understood immediately in the absence of memorialdeformation. This silent passing of the strokes does not simply encode trauma,the real live wounding that never passesinto language and is (dis)remembered symptomatically. It is something deeper: theexact openness of being wounded that will not, by its own deep transcendence ofsuffering in suffering, be circumscribedin any repetition whatsoever. Behind the baser darkness of the terrifying dilationof decapitation’s ideal instantaneity (Foucault’s “zero degree of torture”) intotime or the three-way “number of movement with respect to before and after”(Aristotle), there lies the more brilliant darkness of Cecilia’s radical ortotally rooted self-opening under the blade. The unending opening of beheadinginto three exposes the shining obscurity of the deeper time that is the very place of Cecilia’s rootedness in God,the enigmatic ease of her actually being what Gawain only momentarily and withgreat difficulty achieves: “grathely hit bydez and glent with no membre / Botstode stylle as the ston other a stubbe auther / That ratheled is in rochegrounde with rotez a hundredth” [Truly he awaits it and flinched with nomember, but stood still as a stone, or a stump that is anchored in rocky groundwith a hundred roots] (Poems of the PearlManuscript, eds. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron [Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978], lines 2293-5).This rootless rootedness or abyssal stillness is the passional seed andprefiguration of the three-day half-death that follows (537) – a temporalimitation of Christ’s entombment that the triune beheading law enables withperfect providential perversity, intimating a ready-made path to revolutionarysalvation via suffering of the law’s very letter, i.e. martyrdom as hyperliteral head tax: “Render unto Caesar . . .” (Matthew 22:21). The saint’sliving three days in half-death is not the simply the effect of surviving threestrokes. It is the fulfillment and produced end of her real passive acting or intentionalendurance of all of them as one. Without this mysterious intention the specificduration of the survival would be senseless, whence Cecilia’s subsequentrevelation of her secret request, To hanrespite thre dayes and namo (543), and its correspondence with thethree-stroke maximum: This tormentour nedorste do namoore. Note also the formulation of the wish, as if theprolonging of her death were a postponement of, or even rest from, execution (respite also connotes cessation ofsuffering, see MED s.v. respite, 1b),rather than its brutally extended form. Occupying the negativity of limit (namoore), the full threshold of the end,Cecilia here demonstrates how transcendent ceaselessness is a constraint-based art,a spiritual exercise that necessarily and paradoxically operates within strict conditions.Never ceasing – She nevere cessed(124); nevere cessed (538) – is aninfinite work of finitude, not a task of those who think they have all day. Thedarkness of Cecilia’s intense openness to beheading may thus be formulated asan aggressive form of amor fati thatfiercely insists from within on experiencing all three strokes, on passingthrough the full force of necessity, precisely without recourse to any externalmeans that would enforce or facilitate that passage. The prolongation itproduces is not a matter of experience-hunger, of wanting more life. Rather itis the need to arrive oneself to the real end, as opposed to merely being therewhen it is over. Cecilia is not loitering or lingering on the boundary betweenthis life and the next – “surely it is the height of folly for you to linger onthis bridge” (Hakim Sinai, The WalledGarden of Truth, trans. David Pendlebury [London: Ocatagon Press, 1974],52). She is crossing it so busily that death itself cannot happen place withoutprotracted difficulty. In sum, the real subject of Thre strokes in the nekke . . . is the preposition in, the place where Cecilia’s desireoperates, freely exposing the strength of its utter submission to God. Julianof Norwich understands this: “I harde telle . . . of the storye of SainteCecille . . . that she hadde thre woundes with a swerde in the nekke . . . Bythe stirringe of this, I consyvede a mighty desire, pryande oure lorde God thathe wolde graunte me thre woundes in my life time [contrition, compassion, andlonging for God] . . . withouten anycondition” (The Writings of Julian ofNorwich, eds. Nicholas Watson & Jacqueline Jenkins [University Park,PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006], 65, my emphasis). As doesBataille: “incapable of doing anything – I survive – in laceration. And with myeyes, I follow a shimmering light that turns me into its plaything” (On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone[London: Continuum, 1992], 91).

THIRD, there is the darkness ofthe headsman’s intention. The primary and normal sense is that the headsman isnot intending three strokes but is attempting thrice to behead her in one. Thisis supported by the assumption that this is what he, as headsman, should beintending and by the subsequent indication that was unable to (He myghte noght), which implies that hewas in fact trying his best or attempting to apply a maximum of strength andskill to the effort. This is supported by the earliest version of the Passio and subsequent versions: “quamcum speculator tertio ictu percussisset, caput eius amputare non potuit”(Giacomo Laderchi, S. CaeciliaeVirg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . [Rome, 1722], 28); “Quam speculatortribus ictibus in collo percussit, sed tamen caput eius amptare non potuit”(Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea,ed. T. Graesse [Leipzig: Impensis Librariae Arnoldianae, 1850], 777); “Thequellar smot with al his mayn, threo sithe on the swere / He ne mighte fornothinge smitten hit of” (The Life of St.Cecilia, ed. Albert S. Cook [Boston, 1898], 91). Yet there are other moreobscure possibilities, various clouds in the headsman’s will, divisible into thosethat falls under the normal sense of his intention and those that do not. Theformer will be more properly discussed with respect to the next line. Thelatter comprises several intersecting possibilities, all of which are supportedby the basely literal sense of Threstrokes . . . he smoot hire, namely, that the headsman simply struckCecilia three times in the neck. Some of these are: 1) that the headsman wantedto torture Cecilia, to deny her a quick death, either by protracting thebeheading or not beheading her at all; 2) that he did not want to harm Cecilia,but was compelled to, and thus did so minimally; 3) that he didn’t care aboutwhat he was doing and performed the task without proper intention; 4) the hewas intentionally conflicted, subject to opposed desires, and acted throughsome complicated combination of the above, perhaps changing his mind in theprocess. There is also a third and stranger kind of intentional darkness that isbetween and outside these distinctions, namely, the possibility that theheadsman did indeed try his best but only via a pure and spontaneous decay of intention,a nameless form of volitional perforation whereby the will, not in relation toany other interfering object but precisely in relation to nothing, secretly andsuddenly (sua sponte), lacks itself.Such intention is dark in the sense of being the subject of a clinamen or weird swerve that occurs, asLucretius says, at no fixed place or time, only here the clinamen must be construed as itself weirded by the fullperseveration of the originary intention – a swerve that travels in a straightline, as it were. Such a dark will, that purely is and is not one’s own, iswell figured in the three non-severing strokes in that they do hit their mark,but inexplicably without realization of the intention for doing so. Althoughthis potential negative spontaneity of the headsman’s will must be thoughtapart from possibilistic conditions or chance, it may be inversely compared tothe event and experience of hitting a target by only diffidently or naivelyattempting to, that is, the situation where one succeeds in fulfilling anintention without really trying to. In that case, an intention’s deficiencybecomes the paradoxical means of its realization, so that one strangely cannottake credit for succeeding at what one meant to do. In this case, anintention’s integrity is the paradoxical site of its non-realization (but notbecause of any external factors), so that one must take credit (if that werepossible) for failing at what one meant to do on the basis of that meaning alone, that is, for a pure,unknowable, and thus unconfessable kind of failure that cannot properly belocated in the will, or its application, or the difference between them.Although this third kind of intentional darkness is very difficult to conceivein practical terms, it may be fittingly defined in this hagiographic context asa momentary negative occasionalism orlocal withdrawal of divine omnipresence as universal intermediary of allaction. The idea of such withdrawal may also furnish a more general theory ofpassion miracles, which so often involve a subtle suspension of the capacityfor things to touch, more specifically, the comic impotence of violence toeffect its ends. The may be conceived externally (blades fail to cut, fire failsto burn, etc.) but also internally, with respect to the mechanics of mentalpowers, so that the headsman’s will may be thought as failing to touch itselfand thus spinning in place like a disengaged primum mobile. The will still moves, gives every appearance ofbeing itself, yet is somehow suspended in an essential detachment from its own being.Such a darkening of the headsman’s will, which may be correlated as well to theexecutioner’s traditional head covering and its symbolic removal of personalagency from legal murder, thus represents the perfect profane counterpoint tothe celestial motion of Cecilia: “[As] hevene is swift and round and eekbrennynge, / Right so was faire Cecilie the white / Ful swift and bisy evere ingood werkynge, / And round and hool in good perseverynge / And brennynge everein charite ful brighte” (SNPro 114-8). Ultimately, then, the dark will of the headsmanis visible as the intimate shadow of Cecilia’s own, the adjacent negativeoutline of her alchemical burning andmelting into God, or the “passivity and absence of effort . . . in which divinetranscendence is dissolved” (Georges Bataille,On Nietzsche, 135).

G5: On the Love of Commentary

2011-10-11T23:57:00.000-04:00

Glossator 5 (2011): On the Love of Commentary

Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Scott Wilson

What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk

Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson

When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick

All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece’s Addresses - Eileen A. Joy

Plato’s Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock

Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet - Gary Shipley

On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “L’amour en éclats [Shattered Love]” - Mathew Abbott

The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore

Tearsong: Valentine Visconti’s Inverted Stoicism - Anna Kłosowska

On the Way: Sorrow of Being

2011-10-04T14:09:00.001-04:00

Sorrowof Being

Nicola Masciandaro

He who increasesknowledge, increases sorrow.

–Ecclesiastes 1:18

Atthat time the two of us were in Heliopolis and we both witnessed theextraordinary phenomenon of the moon hiding the sun at a time that was out ofseason for their coming together, and from the ninth hour until evening it wassupernaturally positioned in the middle of the sun.

–Pseudo-Dionysius, Letter Seven

This book offers, through creative interpretationof select medieval texts, a non-systematic speculative realist ontology ofsorrow in the mystical tradition, that is, a thinking of the reality of sorrowin relation to the absolute and beyond the humoral confines of the human. RadicalizingHeidegger’s insight that “the being of Da-sein is care [Sorge, sorrow],” it argues that sorrow belongs universally to thefact of being itself, as well as to the obscurer region of nonbeing. Prior to andbeyond the parameters of mundane emotion, sorrow exists in the universal formof the negative identity of thoughtand being, in the pure negativity through which thought and being are the same.Sorrow, far from being limited to the evolutionary environment of our terrestrialsphere, is more properly conceived as a weird kind of cosmic substance composedof all being’s refusal of itself. Grasping sorrow in these terms does notrender actual sorrow irrelevant, but instead redeems its palpable darkness fromboth the hallucinogenic obscurity of affordable, instrumentalized problematicity(sorrow as problem to be fixed or solved in the interest of making everythingalright) and base ‘Manichean’ materiality (sorrow as merely an evil psychical ingredientin things).[1]In this theory of sorrow, sorrow is projectively restored to reality as notonly a reflective index, but a perfectible operation of the universal, a wayforward into new reality. The sorrowof being, in the mystical mode of a most radical sorrow that one is, is not an affective byproduct of knowledge, but thevery means of intensifying knowledge of the real, of actually realizing itstruth. Touching at once the wondrous general fact of being (Why something instead of nothing?) andthe horror of individuation (Why am I me?),the sorrow of being follows the dark but inversely paradisical path along the twistedroot that grounds all entities to the outside. Sorrow reveals the ‘twist’ ofthe root as the total cosmic complication of the individuated entity: its ultimateconfounding of distinctions as to what is inside/outside, self/world,creature/creator. In the context of the speculative realist will to escape thecorrelation of self and world, the sorrow of being is not simply a passion, butthe digestible substance of facticity, the unavoidable portal through whichphilosophy must pass in order to go beyond itself.^{^[2]} More thana feeling, it is the live form of the refusal of the principle of reasonwhereby the absolute is alone thinkable.[3]Or, in the words of Bonaventure, this sorrow is the gemitus cordis [groaning of the heart] that is the essential doubleof the fulgor speculationis[brilliance of speculation] whereby mind is desirously led beyond itself.[4]

[1] My dialectical openingof the sorrow of being thus draws inspiration from Reza Negarestani’s critiqueof affordance (as illusory and restricted from of openness) and hopes, throughthis special form of the ‘folly of the impossible’, to extend its work of unbinding:“only by rigorously embracing this folly can we develop a genuinenon-restricted dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and unbind aworld whose frontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths areabsolutely free” (Reza Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought onGeophilosophical Realism”).

[2] “We now know thelocation of this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit fromitself—it is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are ableto make our way towards the absolute” (Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity ofContingency, trans. Ray Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], 63).

[3] “The absolute isthinkable only by a refusal of the principle of reason. . . . speculation,understood as thought about the absolute, is possible only by not beingmetaphysical” (Quentin Meillassoux, “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” 444). Accordingly,the principle of the sorrow of being demands understanding thought’s ‘notbeing’ metaphysical in a literal sense. The sorrow of being is the realnegative form whereby thought is notmetaphysical.

[4] “No one is disposed inany way to the divine contemplations which lead to ecstasies [excessus] of the mind without being, like Daniel, a person of desires [virdesideriorum]. But desires are inflamed in us in a double way, namely,through the cry of prayer which makes us roar with groaning of the heart, andthrough the brilliance of contemplations, by which the mind turns itself mostdirectly and intensely to the rays of light” (St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Works of St. Bonaventure: Volume II,trans. Zachary Hayes [New York: Franciscan Institute, 2002], Prologue.4, trans.modified).

On the Mystical Love of Black Metal (P.E.S.T. abstract)

2011-09-21T19:12:00.000-04:00

Deep in the shadows wings take toflight through clouds of chaos where stars die

– Inquisition, “Across the AbyssAncient Horns Bray,” Ominous Doctrines ofthe Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm

That which neither creates nor is created . .. is classed among the impossibles, for its essence lies in that it cannot be [cuius differentia est non posse esse]

– John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon

The love of black metal twists toward absolutecosmic exteriority along a mystical path of intensive inversion. Ordinatemysticism takes an inward and upward path to God as the source andgoal of everything, withdrawing from the exterior phenomenal world in order toascend beyond it to the One in a movement that is anabatic, apophatic, and anagogic(Plotinus, Enneads, 4.8.1; Augustine,Confessions, 7.10,16;Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology,1.1). The love of black metal, reversely and contrarily, leads downwards and outwards into a paradoxically disordered and multiple cosmos thatis no less divine, pursuing a musical path that is catabatic, cataphatic, andapogogic (a path, however, that necessarily twists these terms according to itsown essential negativity). Where music traditionally aims to mimetically ascendto hyper-central divine truth through the harmony of the celestial spheres, blackmetal’s noisy anti-modern sonic drive coordinately plunges into the depths onlyto release and radically fly upon the infinite centrifugal power or negative cosmicwind of sound itself. Crucially, this distinction, between the ordered mysticallove of God and the disordered mysticism that love of black metal inescapablyis, is not a pure opposition. Like the Petrine Cross that at once marks the temporallyseparate twin foundations of the terrestrial ecclesia and the heavy acosmic kvlt,black metal love is a most intimate transposition of its spiritual precursor, adissemblance that exacerbates and intensifies the still, unmoving point ofidentity with what it inverts. This point, the secret moment or punctum around which black metalassemblies anarchically gather, is perversely legible in moments of black metalcomplicity with essential ‘disordering’ counter-movements within medieval mysticaldiscourse, for instance, Richard of St. Victor’s representation of the God-enflamedsoul as spontaneously sinking intothe divine will like liquefied black metal (Onthe Four Degrees of Violent Charity), Mechthild of Magdeburg’s exaltationof the soul’s descent into the night of separation: “O blissful distance fromGod, how lovingly am I connected with you!”, and Meister Eckhart’s prayer to berid of God. Arguing that the modern love of black metal is, willy-nilly, aprofound and fresh form of mysticism, a desperate contemplation of the divine manifestingthe ‘desire to be everything’ (Bataille), this lecture will demonstrate, withspecial reference to the works of Inquisition and John Scotus Eriugena, howblack metal and mysticism are lovingly united in the dark pestilential space ofexcessive and compound negativity, a new realm of the not not God.

Now Available: AND THEY WERE TWO IN ONE AND ONE IN TWO

2011-09-15T14:15:00.001-04:00

AND THEY WERE TWO IN ONE AND ONE IN TWO

Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker, Editors

Contents

Dominic Pettman, What Came First, the Chicken or the Head?

Eugene Thacker, Thing and No-Thing

Alexi Kukuljevic, Suicide by Decapitation

Alexander Galloway, The Painted Peacock

Evan Calder Williams, Recapitation

Nicola Masciandaro, Decapitating Cinema

Ed Keller, Corpus Atomicus

Appendix

Charles Baudelaire, Une Martyre

Eugene Thacker, eclipse and iris

Nicola Masciandaro, Diminutive Catalog of Christian Beheadings

Hank Cochran, Make the World Go Away
Leighton Pierce, Limit of Appliance #4

Öykü Tekten, Symposium Photographs

Available here.

Gird Thyself

2011-09-09T14:23:00.000-04:00

9. Thing-in-Itself and Appearance

553 (1886-1887)

The sore spot of Kant's critical philosophy has graduallybecome visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction"appearance" and "thing-in-itself"--he had deprived himselfof the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as herejected as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to a cause ofphenomena--in accordance with his conception of causality and its purelyintra-phenomenal validity-- which conception, on the other hand, alreadyanticipates this distinction, as if the "thing-in-itself" were notonly inferred but given.

554 (1885-1886)

Causalism.--It is obvious that things-in-themselves cannotbe related to one another as cause and effect, nor can appearance be so relatedto appearance; from which it follows that in a philosophy that believes inthings-in-themselves and appearances the concept "cause and effect"cannot be applied. Kant's mistakes --

In fact, the concept "cause and effect" derives,psychologically speaking, only from a mode of thought that believes that alwaysand everywhere will operates upon will--that believes only in living things andfundamentally only in "souls" (and not in things). Within themechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space andtime), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics--with which, asone must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but ratherdesignated and distorted.

555 (1885-1886)

Against the scientific prejudice.--The biggest fable of allis the fable of knowledge. One would like to know what things-in-themselvesare; but behold, there are no things-in-themselves! But even supposing therewere an in-itself, an unconditioned thing, it would for that very reason beunknowable! Something unconditioned cannot be known; otherwise it would not beunconditioned! Coming to know, however, is always "placing oneself in aconditional relation to something" one who seeks to know the unconditioneddesires that it should not concern him, and that this same something should beof no concern to anyone. This involves a contradiction, first, between wantingto know and the desire that it not concern us (but why know at all, then?) and,secondly, because something that is of no concern to anyone IS not at all, andthus cannot be known at all.--

Coming to know means "to place oneself in a conditionalrelation to something"; to feel oneself conditioned by something andoneself to condition it--it is therefore under all circumstances establishing,denoting, and making-conscious of conditions (not forthcoming entities, things,what is "in-itself").

556 (1885-1886)

A "thing-in-itself" just as perverse as a"sense-in-itself," a "meaning-in-itself." There are no"facts-in-themselves," for a sense must always be projected into thembefore there can be "facts."

The question "what is that?" is an imposition ofmeaning from some other viewpoint. "Essence," the "essentialnature," is something perspective and already presupposes a multiplicity.At the bottom of it there always lies "what is that for me?" (for us,for all that lives, etc.)

A thing would be defined once all creatures had asked"what is that?" and had answered their question. Supposing one singlecreature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things, weremissing, then the thing would not yet be "defined".

In short: the essence of a thing is only an opinion aboutthe "thing." Or rather: "it is considered" as the real"it is," the sole "this is."

One may not ask: "who then interprets?" for theinterpretation itself is a form of the will to power, it exists (but not as a"being,' but as a process, a becoming) as an affect.

The origin of "things" is wholly the work of thatwhich imagines, thinks, wills, feels. The concept "thing" itself justas much as all its qualities.--Even "the subject" is such a createdentity, a "thing" like all others: a simplification with the objectof defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from allindividual positing, inventing, thinking as such. Thus a capacity as distinctfrom all that is individual--fundamentally, action collectively considered withrespect to all anticipated actions (action and the probability of similaractions).

557 (1885-1886)

The properties of a thing are effects on other"things": if one removes other "things," then a thing hasno properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no"thing-in-itself."

558 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The "thing-in-itself" nonsensical. If I remove allthe relationships, all the "properties," all the"activities" of a thing, the thing does not remain over; becausethingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic, thuswith the aim of defining, communication (to bind together the multiplicity ofrelationships, properties, activities).

559 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

"Things that have a constitution in themselves"--adogm idea with which one must break absolutely.

560 (Spring-Fall 1887)

That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apartfrom interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: itpresupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that athing freed from all relationships would still be a thing.

Conversely, the apparent objective character of things:could it not be merely a difference of degree within the subjective?--thatperhaps that which changes slowly presents itself to us as"objectively" enduring, being, "in-itself"--that theobjective is only a false concept of a genus and an antithesis within thesubjective?

561 (1885-1886)

Suppose all unity were unity only as an organization? Butthe "thing" in which we believe was only invented as a foundation forthe various attributes. If the thing "effects," that means: weconceive all the other properties which are present and momentarily latent, asthe cause of the emergence of one single property; i.e., we take the sum of itsproperties--"x"--as cause of the property "x": which isutterly stupid and mad!

All unity is unity only as organization andco-operation--just as a human community is a unity--as opposed to an atomisticanarchy, as a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity.

562 (1883-1888)

"In the development of thought a point had to bereached at which one realized that what one called the properties of thingswere sensations of the feeling subject: at this point the properties ceased tobelong to the thing." The "thing-in-itself" remained. Thedistinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-us is based on theolder, naive form of perception which granted energy to things; but analysisrevealed that even force was only projected into them, and likewise--substance."The thing affects a subject"? Root of the idea of substance inlanguage, not in beings outside us! The thing-in-itself is no problem at all!

Beings will have to be thought of as sensations that are nolonger based on something devoid of sensation.

In motion, no new content is given to sensation. That whichIS, cannot contain motion: therefore it is a form of being.

N.B. The explanation of an event can be sought firstly:through mental images of the event that precede it (aims);

secondly: through mental images that succeed it (themathematical-physical explanation).

One should not confuse the two. Thus: the physicalexplanation, which is a symbolization of the world by means of sensation andthought, can in itself never account for the origin of sensation and thought;rather physics must construe the world of feeling consistently as lackingfeeling and aim--right up to the highest human being. And teleology is only ahistory of purposes and never physical!

563 (1886-1887)

Our "knowing" limits itself to establishingquantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity asqualities. Quality is a perspective truth for us; not an "in-itself."

Our senses have a definite quantum as a mean within whichthey function; i.e., we sense bigness and smallness in relation to theconditions of our existence. If we sharpened or blunted our senses tenfold, weshould perish; i.e., with regard to making possible our existence we sense evenrelations between magnitudes as qualities.

564 (1885-1886)

Might all quantities not be signs of qualities? A greaterpower implies a different consciousness, feeling, desiring, a differentperspective; growth itself is a desire to be more; the desire for an increasein quantum grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world everything wouldbe dead, stiff, motionless.-- The reduction of all qualities to quantities isnonsense: what appears is that the one accompanies the other, an analogy--

565 (Fall 1886)

Qualities are insurmountable barriers for us; we cannot helpfeeling that mere quantitative differences are something fundamentally distinctfrom quantity, namely that they are qualities which can no longer be reduced toone another. But everything for which the word "knowledge" makes anysense refers to the domain of reckoning. weighing, measuring, to the domain ofquantity; while, on the other hand, all our sensations of value (i.e., simplyour sensations) adhere precisely to qualities, i.e., to our perspective"truths" which belong to us alone and can by no means be"known"! It is obvious that every creature different from us sensesdifferent qualities and consequently lives in a different world from that inwhich we live. Qualities are an idiosyncrasy peculiar to man; to demand thatour human interpretations and values should be universal and perhapsconstitutive values is one of the hereditary madnesses of human pride.

566 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

The "real world," however one has hithertoconceived it, it has always been the apparent world once again.

567 (March-June 1888)

The apparent world, i.e., a world viewed according tovalues; ordered, selected according to values, i.e., in this case according tothe viewpoint of utility in regard to the preservation and enhancement of thepower of a certain species of animal.

The perspective therefore decides the character of the"appearance"! As if a world would still remain over after onededucted the perspective! By doing that one would deduct relativity!

Every center of force adopts a perspective toward the entireremainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode ofresistance. The "apparent world," therefore, is reduced to a specificmode of action on the world, emanating from a center.

Now there is no other mode of action whatever; and the"world" is only a word for the totality of these actions. Realityconsists precisely in this particular action and reaction of every individualpart toward the whole--

No shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance--

The specific mode of reacting is the only mode of reacting;we do not know how many and what kinds of other modes there are.

But there is no "other," no "true," noessential being--for this would be the expression of a world without action andreaction--

The antithesis of the apparent world and the true worldreduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing."--

568 (March-June 1888)

Critique of the concept "true and apparentworld."-- Of these, the first is a mere fiction, constructed of fictitiousentities.

"Appearance" itself belongs to reality: it is aform of its being; i.e., in a world where there is no being, a certaincalculable world of identical cases must first be created through appearance: atempo at which observation and comparison are possible, etc.

Appearance is an arranged and simplified world, at which ourpractical instincts have been at work; it is perfectly true for us; that is tosay, we live, we are able to live in it: proof of its truth for us--

The world, apart from our condition of living in it, theworld that we have not reduced to our being, our logic and psychologicalprejudices, does not exist as a world "in-itself"; it is essentiallya world of relationships; under certain conditions it has a differing aspectfrom every point; its being is essentially different from every point; itpresses upon every point, every point resists it--and the sum of these is inevery case quite incongruent.

The measure of power determines what being possesses theother measure of power; in what form, force, constraint it acts or resists.

Our particular case is interesting enough: we have produceda conception in order to be able to live in a world, in order to perceive justenough to endure it--

569 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Our psychological perspective is determined by thefollowing: 1. that communication is necessary, and that for there to becommunication something has to be firm, simplified, capable of precision (aboveall in the [so-called] identical case). For it to be communicable, however, itmust be experienced as adapted, as "recognizable." The material ofthe senses adapted by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, madesimilar, subsumed under related matters. Thus the fuzziness and chaos of senseimpressions are, as it were, logicized;

2. the world of "phenomena" is the adapted worldwhich we feel to be real. The "reality" lies in the continualrecurrence of identical, familiar, related 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 "thetrue world," but the formless unformulable world of the chaos ofsensations--another kind of phenomenal world, a kind "unknowable" forus;

4. questions, what things "in-themselves" may belike, 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 therecould not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world--and whetherthis creating, logicizing, adapting, falsifying is not itself thebest-guaranteed reality; in short, whether that which "posits things"is not the sole reality; and whether the "effect of the external worldupon us" is not also only the result of such active subjects--The other"entities" act upon us; our adapted apparent world is an adaptationand overpowering of their actions; a kind of defensive measure. The subjectalone is demonstrable; hypothesis that only subjects exist--that"object" is only a kind of effect produced by a subject upon asubject a modus of the subject.

10. Metaphysical Need

570 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

If one is a philosopher as men have always beenphilosophers, one cannot see what has been and becomes--one sees only what is.But since nothing is, all that was left to the philosopher as his"world" was the imaginary.

571 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

To assert the existence as a whole of things of which weknow nothing whatever, precisely because there is an advantage in not beingable to know anything of them, was a piece of naivete of Kant, resulting fromneeds, mainly moral-metaphysical.

572 (1883-1888)

An artist cannot endure reality, he looks away from it,back: he seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowyresidue one derives from colors, form, sound, ideas, he believes that the moresubtilized, attenuated, transient a thing or a man is, the more valuable hebecomes; the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism, which, however,involved yet another bold reversal: Plato measured the degree of reality by thedegree of value and said: The more "Idea", the more being. Hereversed the concept "reality" and said: "What you take for realis an error, and the nearer we approach the 'Idea', the nearer we approach'truth'. "--Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; andbecause it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishingit is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance tobeing! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was soconvinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes"being","causality" and "goodness", and"truth", in short everything men value.

The concept of value itself considered as a cause: firstinsight. The ideal granted all honorific attributes: second insight.

573 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

The idea of the "true world" or of "God"as absolutely immaterial, spiritual, good, is an emergency measure necessarywhile the opposite instincts are still all-powerful--

The degree of moderation and humanity attained is exactlyreflected in the humanization of the gods: the Greeks of the strongest epoch,who were not afraid of themselves but rejoiced in themselves, brought theirgods close to all their own affects--.

The spiritualization of the idea of God is therefore farfrom being a sign of progress: one is heartily conscious of this whenconsidering Goethe--in his case, the vaporization of God into virtue and spiritis felt as being on a coarser level--

574 (1883-1888)

Senselessness of all metaphysics as the derivation of theconditioned from the unconditioned.

It is in the nature of thinking that it thinks of andinvents the unconditioned as an adjunct to the conditioned; just as it thoughtof and invented the "ego" as an adjunct to the multiplicity of itsprocesses; it measures the world according to magnitudes posited byitself--such fundamental fictions as "the unconditional","endsand means'',"things","substances", logical laws, numbersand forms.

There would be nothing that could be called knowledge ifthought did not first re-form the world in this way into "things",into what is self-identical. Only because there is thought is there untruth.

Thought cannot be derived, any more than sensations can be;but that does not mean that its primordiality or "being-in-itself"has been proved! all that is established is that we cannot get beyond it,because we have nothing but thought and sensation.

575 (1885-1886)

"Knowledge" is a referring back: in its essence aregressus in infinitum. That which comes to a standstill (at a supposed causaprima, at something unconditioned, etc.) is laziness, weariness

576 (1883-1888)

Psychology of metaphysics: the influence of timidity.

That which has been feared the most, the cause of the mostpowerful suffering (lust to rule, sex, etc.), has been treated by men with thegreatest amount of hostility and eliminated from the "true" world.Thus they have eliminated the affects one by one --posited God as theantithesis of evil, that is, placed reality in the negation of the desires andaffects (i.e., in nothingness).

In the same way, they have hated the irrational, thearbitrary, the accidental (as the causes of immeasurable physical suffering).As a consequence, they negated this element in being-in-itself and conceived itas absolute "rationality" and "purposiveness."

In the same way, they have feared change, transitoriness:this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences (thecase of Spinoza: an opposite kind of man would account change a stimulus).

A creature overloaded and playing with force would callprecisely the affects, irrationality, and change good in a eudaemonistic sense,together with their consequences: danger, contrast, perishing, etc.

577 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Against the value of that which remains eternally the same(vice Spinoza's naivete; Descartes' also), the values of the briefest and mosttransient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita--

578 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Moral values even in theory of knowledge: trust inreason--why not mistrust? the "true world" is supposed to be the goodworld--why? appearance, change, contradiction, struggle devalued as immoral;desire for a world in which these things are missing; the transcendental worldinvented, in order that a place remains for "moral freedom" (inKant); dialectic a way to virtue (in Plato and Socrates: evidently becauseSophistry counted as the way to immorality); time and space ideal: consequently"unity" in the essence of things; consequently no "sin," noevil, no imperfection --a justification of God; Epicurus denied the possibilityof knowledge, in order to retain moral (or hedonistic) values as the highestvalues. Augustine, later Pascal ("corrupted reason"), did the samefor the benefit of Christian values; Descartes' contempt for everything thatchanges; also that of Spinoza

579 (1883-1888)

Psychology of metaphysics.--This world is apparent:consequently there is a true world;--this world is conditional: consequentlythere is an unconditioned world;--this world is full of contradiction:consequently there is a world free of contradiction;-- this world is a world ofbecoming: consequently there is a world of being:--all false conclusions (blindtrust in reason: if A exists, then the opposite concept B must also exist). Itis suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desiresthat such a world should exist; in the same way, to imagine another, morevaluable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer:the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative.

Second series of questions: for what is theresuffering?--and from this a conclusion is derived concerning the relation ofthe true world to our apparent, changing, suffering, contradictory world: (1)Suffering as a consequence of error: how is error possible? (2) Suffering as aconsequence of guilt: how is guilt possible? (--experiences derived from natureor society universalized and projected to the sphere of "in-itself").If, however, the conditioned world is causally conditioned by the unconditionedworld, then freedom to err and incur guilt must also be conditioned by it: andagain one asks, what for?--The world of appearance, becoming, contradiction,suffering, is therefore willed: what for?

The error in these conclusions: two opposite concepts areconstructed--because one of them corresponds to a reality, the other"must" also correspond to a reality. "Whence should one derivethis opposite concept if this were not so?"--Reason is thus a source ofrevelation concerning being-in-itself.

But the origin of these antitheses need not necessarily goback to a supernatural source of reason: it is sufficient to oppose to it thereal genesis of the concepts. This derives from the practical sphere, thesphere of utility; hence the strength of the faith it inspires (one wouldperish if one did not reason according to this mode of reason; but this is no"proof" of what it asserts).

The preoccupation with suffering on the part ofmetaphysicians--is quite naive. "Eternal bliss": psychologicalnonsense. Brave and creative men never consider pleasure and pain as ultimatevalues--they are epiphenomena: one must desire both if one is to achieveanything--. That they see the problem of pleasure and pain in the foregroundreveals something weary and sick in metaphysicians and religious people. Evenmorality is so important to them only because they see in it an essentialcondition for the abolition of suffering.

In the same way, their preoccupation with appearance anderror: cause of suffering, superstition that happiness attends truth(confusion: happiness in "certainty", in "faith").

580 (Spring-Fall 1887)

To what extent the basic epistemological positions(materialism, idealism) are consequences of evaluations: the source of thesupreme feelings of pleasure ("feelings of value") as decisive alsofor the problem of reality!

--The measure of positive knowledge is quite subsidiary or amatter of indifference: as witness the development of India.

The Buddhistic negation of reality in general (appearance =suffering) is perfectly consistent: undemonstrability, inaccessibility, lack ofcategories not only for a "'world-in-itself," but an insight into theerroneous procedures by means of which this whole concept is arrived at."Absolute reality," "being-in-itself" a contradiction. In aworld of becoming, "reality" is always only a simplification forpractical ends, or a deception through the coarseness of organs, or a variationin the tempo of becoming.

Logical world-denial and nihilation follow from the factthat we have to oppose non-being with being and that the concept"becoming" is denied. ("Something" becomes.)

581 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Being and becoming.--"Reason", evolved on asensualistic basis, on the prejudices of the senses, i.e., in the belief in thetruth of the judgments of the senses.

"Being" as universalization of the concept "life"(breathing), "having a soul", "willing, effecting,""becoming".

The antithesis is: "not to have a soul," "notto become," "not to will." Therefore: "being" is notthe antithesis of non-being, appearance, nor even of the dead (for onlysomething that can live can be dead).

The "soul," the "ego" posited asprimeval fact, and introduced everywhere where there is any becoming.

582 (1885-1887)

Being--we have no idea of it apart from the idea of"living."-- How can anything dead "be"?

583 (March-June 1888)

( A )

I observe with astonishment that science has today resigneditself to the apparent world; a real world--whatever it may be like--wecertainly have no organ for knowing it.

At this point we may ask: by means of what organ ofknowledge can we posit even this antithesis?--

That a world accessible to our organs is also understood tobe dependent upon these organs, that we understand a world as beingsubjectively conditioned, is not to say that an objective world is at allpossible. Who compels us to think that subjectivity is real, essential?

The "in-itself" is even an absurd conception; a"constitutioning-itself" is nonsense; we possess the concept"being," "thing," only as a relational concept--

The worst thing is that with the old antithesis"apparent" and "true" the correlative value judgment"lacking in value" and "absolutely valuable" has developed.

The apparent world is not counted as a "valuable"world; appearance is supposed to constitute an objection to supreme value. Onlya "true" world can be valuable in itself--

Prejudice of prejudices! Firstly, it would be possible thatthe true constitution of things was so hostile to the presuppositions of life,so opposed to them, that we needed appearance in order to be able tolive--After all, this is the case in so many situations; e.g., in marriage.

Our empirical world would be determined by the instincts ofself-preservation even as regards the limits of its knowledge: we would regardas true, good, valuable that which serves the preservation of the species--

a. We possess no categories by which we can distinguish atrue from an apparent world. (There might only be an apparent world, but notour apparent world.)

b. Assuming the true world, it could still be a world lessvaluable for us; precisely the quantum of illusion might be of a higher rank onaccount of its value for our preservation. (Unless appearance as such weregrounds for condemnation?)

c. That a correlation exists between degrees of value anddegrees of reality (so that the supreme values also possess the supremereality) is a metaphysical postulate proceeding from the presupposition that weknow the order of rank of values; namely, that this order of rank is a moralorder--Only with this presupposition is truth necessarily part of the definitionof all the highest values.

( B )

It is of cardinal importance that one should abolish thetrue world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of theworld we are: it has been our most dangerous attempt yet to assassinate life.

War on all presuppositions on the basis of which one hasinvented a true world. Among these is the presupposition that moral values arethe supreme values.

The supremacy of moral valuation would be refuted if itcould be shown to be the consequence of an immoral valuation --as a specialcase of actual immorality--it would thus reduce itself to an appearance, and asappearance it would cease to have any right as such to condemn appearance.

( C )

The "will to truth" would then have to beinvestigated psychologically: it is not a moral force, but a form of the willto power. This would have to be proved by showing that it employs every immoralmeans: metaphysicians above all.

We are today faced with testing the assertion that moralvalues are the supreme values. Method in investigation is attained only whenall moral prejudices have been overcome:--it represents a victory overmorality--

584 (March-June 1888)

The aberration of philosophy is that, instead of seing inlogic and the categories of reason means toward the adjustment of the world forutilitarian ends (basically, toward an expedient falsification), one believedone possessed in them the criterion of truth and reality. The "criterionof truth" was in fact merely the biological utility of such a system ofsystematic falsification; and since a species of animals knows of nothing moreimportant than its own preservation, one might indeed be permitted to speakhere of "truth." The naivete was to take an anthropocentricidiosyncrasy as the measure of things, as the rule for determining"real" and "unreal": in short, to make absolute somethingconditioned. And behold, suddenly the world fell apart into a "true"world and an "apparent" world: and precisely the world that man's reasonhad devised for him to live and settle in was discredited. Instead of employingthe forms as a tool for making the world manageable and calculable, the madnessof philosophers divined that in these categories is presented the concept ofthat world to which the one in which man lives does not correspond--The meanswere misunderstood as measures of value, even as a condemnation of their realintention--

The intention was to deceive oneself in a useful way; themeans, the invention of formulas and signs by means of which one could reducethe confusing multiplicity to a purposive and manageable schema.

But alas! now a moral category was brought into play: nocreature wants to deceive itself, no creature may deceive--consequently thereis only a will to truth. What is "truth"?

The law of contradiction provided the schema: the trueworld, to which one seeks the way, cannot contradict itself, cannot change,cannot become, has no beginning and no end.

This is the greatest error that has ever been committed, theessential fatality of error on earth: one believed one possessed a criterion ofreality in the forms of reason--while in fact one possessed them in order tobecome master of reality, in order to misunderstand reality in a shrewdmanner--

And behold: now the world became false, and precisely onaccount of the properties that constitute its reality: change, becoming,multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war. And then the entire fatality wasthere:

1. How can one get free from the false, merely apparentworld? (--it was the real, the only )

2. how can one become oneself as much as possible theantithesis of the character of the apparent world? (Concept of the perfectcreature as an antithesis to the real creature; more clearly, as thecontradiction of life--)

The whole tendency of values was toward slander of life; onecreated a confusion of idealist dogmatism and knowledge in general: so that theopposing party also was always attacking science

The road to science was in this way doubly blocked: once bybelief in the "true" world, and again by the opponents of thisbelief. Natural science, psychology was (1) condemned with regard to itsobjects, (2) deprived of its innocence--

In the actual world, in which everything is bound to andconditioned by everything else, to condemn and think away anything means tocondemn and think away everything. The expression "that should notbe," "that should not have been," is farcical-- If one thinksout the consequences, one would ruin the source of life if one wanted to abolishwhatever was in some respect harmful or destructive. Physiology teaches usbetter!

--We see how morality (a) poisons the entire conception ofthe world, (b) cuts off the road to knowledge, to science, (c) disintegratesand undermines all actual instincts (in that it teaches that their roots areimmoral).

We see at work before us a dreadful tool of decadence thatprops itself up by the holiest names and attitudes.

585 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

Tremendous self-examination: becoming conscious of oneself,not as individuals but as mankind. Let us reflect, let us think back; let usfollow the highways and byways!

( A )

Man seeks "the truth": a world that is notself-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world--a world inwhich one does not suffer; contradiction, deception, change--causes ofsuffering! He does not doubt that a world as it ought to be exists; he wouldlike to seek out the road to it. (Indian critique: e.g. the "ego" asapparent, as not real.)

Whence does man here derive the concept reality--Why is itthat he derives suffering from change, deception, contradiction? and why notrather his happiness?--

Contempt, hatred for all that perishes, changes, varies--whence comes this valuation of that which remains constant? Obviously, the willto truth is here merely the desire for a world of the constant.

The senses deceive, reason corrects the errors;consequently, one concluded, reason is the road to the constant; the leastsensual ideas must be closest to the "true world."--It is from the sensesthat most misfortunes come--they are deceivers, deluders, destroyers.--

Happiness can be guaranteed only by being; change andhappiness exclude one another. The highest desire therefore contemplates unitywith what has being. This is the formula for: the road to the highesthappiness.

In summa: the world as it ought to be exists; this world, inwhich we live, is an error--this world of ours ought not to exist.

Belief in what has being is only a consequence: the realprimum mobile is disbelief in becoming, mistrust of becoming, the low valuationof all that becomes--

What kind of man reflects in this way? An unproductive,suffering kind, a kind weary of life. If we imagine the opposite kind of man,he would not need to believe in what has being; more, he would despise it asdead, tedious, indifferent--

The belief that the world as it ought to be is, reallyexists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world asit ought to be. They posit it as already available, they seek ways and means ofreaching it. "Will to truth"--as the impotence of the will to create.

To know that something is thus and thus:

To act so that something becomes thus and thus:

Antagonism in the degree of power in different natures.

The fiction of a world that corresponds to our desires:psychological trick and interpretation with the aim of associating everythingwe honor and find pleasant with this true world.

"Will to truth" at this stage is essentially anart of interpretation: which at least requires the power to interpret.

This same species of man, grown one stage poorer, no longerpossessing the strength to interpret, to create fictions, produces nihilists. Anihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, andof the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view,our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathosof "in vain" is the nihilists' pathos--at the same time, as pathos,an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

Whoever is incapable of laying his will into things, lackingwill and strength, at least lays some meaning into them, i.e., the faith thatthere is a will in them already.

It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to whatextent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure tolive in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of itoneself.

The philosophical objective outlook can therefore be a signthat will and strength are small. For strength organizes what is close andclosest; "men of knowledge," who desire only to ascertain what is,are those who cannot fix anything as it ought to be.

Artists, an intermediary species: they at least fix an imageof that which ought to be; they are productive, to the extent that they actualyalter and transform; unlike men of knowledge, who leave everything as it is.

Connection between philosophers and the pessimisticreligions: the same species of man (--they ascribe the highest degree ofreality to the most highly valued things--).

Connection between philosophers and moral men and theirevaluations (--the moral interpretation of the world as meaning: after thedecline of the religious meaning--).

Overcoming of philosophers through the destruction of theworld of being: intermediary period of nihilism: before there is yet presentthe strength to reverse values and to deïfy becoming and the apparent world asthe only world, and to call them good.

( B )

Nihilism as a normal phenomenon can be a symptom ofincreasing strength or of increasing weakness:

partly, because the strength to create, to will, has soincreased that it no longer requires these total interpretations andintroductions of meaning ("present tasks," the state, etc.);

partly because even the creative strength to create meaninghas declined and disappointment becomes the dominant condition. Theincapability of believing in a "meaning," "unbelief."

What does science mean in regard to both possibilities?

1. As a sign of strength and self-control, as being able todo without healing, comforting worlds of illusion;

2. as undermining, dissecting, disappointing, weakening.

( C )

Belief in truth, the need to have a hold on somethingbelieved true, psychological reduction apart from all previous value feelings.Fear, laziness.

The same way, unbelief: reduction. To what extent itacquires a new value if a true world does not exist (--thus the value feelingsthat hitherto have been squandered on the world of being, are again set free).

586 (March-June 1888)

The "True" and the "Apparent World"

( A )

The seductions that occur from this concept are of threekinds

a. an unknown world:--we are adventurers, inquisitive-- thatwhich is known seems to weary us (--the danger of this Concept lies in itsinsinuation that "this" world is known to us--);

b. another world, where things are different; something inus calculates, our still submission, our silence, lose their value-- perhapseverything will turn out well, we have not hoped in vain --the world wherethings are different, where we ourselves-- who knows?--are different--

c. a true world: this is the most amazing trick and attackthat has ever been perpetrated upon us; so much has become encrusted in theword "true," and involuntarily we make a present of all this to the"true world": the true world must also be a truthful world, one thatdoes not deceive us, does not make fools of us: to believe in it is virtuallyto be compelled to believe in it (--out of decency, as is the case among peopleworthy of confidence--).

The concept "the unknown world" insinuates thatthis world is "known" to us (is tedious--);

the concept "another world" insinuates that theworld could be otherwise--abolishes necessity and fate (useless to submitoneself--to adapt oneself--);

the concept "the true world" insinuates that thisworld is untruthful, deceptive, dishonest, inauthentic, inessential--andconsequently also not a world adapted to our needs (--inadvisable to adaptoneself to it; better to resist it).

We therefore elude "this" world in three ways:

a. by our inquisitiveness--as if the more interesting partwere elsewhere;

b. by our submission--as though it were not necessary tosubmit oneself--as if this world were not a necessity of the ultimate rank:

c. by our sympathy and respect--as if this world did notdeserve them, were impure, were not honest with us--

In summa: we have revolted in three ways: we have made an"x" into a critique of the "known world."

( B )

First step toward sobriety: to grasp to what extent we havebeen seduced--for things could be exactly the reverse:

a. the unknown world could be a stupid and meaner form ofexistence--and "this" world might be rather enjoyable by comparison;

b. the other world, far from taking account of our desireswhich would find no fulfillment in it, could be among the mass of things thatmake this world possible for us: to get to know it might be a means of makingus contented;

c. the true world: but who is it really who tells us thatthe apparent world must be of less value than the true one? Does our instinctnot contradict this judgment? Does man not eternally create a fictitious worldfor himself because he wants a better world than reality? Above all: how do wearrive at the idea that our world is not the true world?--it could be that theother world is the "apparent" one (in fact the Greeks thought of,e.g., a shadow kingdom, an apparent existence, beside true existence). Andfinally: what gives us the right to posit, as it were, degrees of reality? Thisis something different from an unknown world-- it is already a wanting to knowsomething of the unknown-- The "other," the "unknown"world--very good! But to say "true world" means "to knowsomething of it"--That is the opposite of the assumption of an"x" world--

In summa: the world "x" could be in every sensemore tedious, less human, and less worthy than this world.

It would be another thing to assert the existence of"x" worlds, i.e., of every possible world besides this one. But thishas never been asserted--

( C )

Problem: why the notion of another world has always beenunfavorable for, or critical of "this" world--what does thisindicate?--

For a people proud of itself, whose life is ascending,always thinks of another kind of being as a lower, less valuable kind of being;it regards the strange, the unknown world as its enemy, as its opposite; itfeels no inquisitiveness, it totally rejects the strange--A people would neveradmit that another people was the "true people."--

It is symptomatic that such a distinction should be at allpossible--that one takes this world for the "apparent" one and theother world as "true."

The places of origin of the notion of "anotherworld": the philosopher, who invents a world of reason, where reason andthe logical functions are adequate: this is the origin of the "true"world;

the religious man, who invents a "divine world":this is the origin of the "denaturalized, anti- natural" world;

the moral man, who invents a "free world": this isthe origin of the "good, perfect, just, holy" world.

What the three places of origin have in common: thepsycho-logical blunder, the physiological confusions.

By what attributes is the "other world," as itactually appears in history, distinguished? By the stigmata of philosophical,religious, moral prejudice.

The "other world," as illumined by these facts, asa synonym for nonbeing, nonliving, not wanting to live--

General insight: it is the instinct of life-weariness, andnot that of life, which has created the "other world."

Consequence: philosophy, religion, and morality are symptomsof decadence.

God's Machine Gaping: On Gary J. Shipley's Theoretical Animals

2011-09-05T17:41:00.000-04:00

Like floating down a divinelylimitless fluvial junkyard, like knowing in ever more concrete and literal waysthat life is a corpsy dream from which you do not wake, like moving along anopium-stream of deathly imagining towards some sea that only invisibly andnever arrives, like some gnostic conspiracy in which certain favorite authors (maybeBaudelaire, Lovecraft, Lautréamont, McCarthy, Rimbaud – “Si je désire une eaud'Europe, c'est la flache / Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé / Unenfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche / Un bateau frêle comme un papillonde mai”) would be only indigent fellow informants. . . reading Theoretical Animals placesone in a terrifyingly vexed position – traumatic and unspeakably hopeful – ofbeing singular witness to the diurnal drama of cosmic crime. To ‘review’ itwould be wrong, a violence to the kaleidoscopy of a truth that is prismaticallyevident in each opening of the page: “I can’t believe I’m still waiting to getout” (102). I cannot read the book in modern, serial fashion, but must only consultit oracularly, like a sepulchral tome of inverted koans. And this hapticrelation is continually mirrored in its murderous mudlark world: “Half an arm, cleanly severed at the elbowlays hidden in a riverbank slagheap. On the inside of the wrist is a skull withcoded teeth. . . . One is led to suspect that this is not an isolated instance,that this has happened before and will happen again” (64). There is no end tothe consultation, to the violence of our freshly wanting to know what it is allabout. Proving the magic, this is what the text now says about its use: “Stickypatrons wriggling from the waist down discuss the importance of hermeticprecautions. At specific intervals each reads aloud from one of the manyinstruction manuals fastened to the walls with thin blue ropes” (59). Aphilosophical consolation, but one in which, around the flabby gravity of bodies,philosophy and consolation are only mutual, manual laminates.

The reason why the work is calledTheoretical Animals is that itsvisions, whatever beauty or horror they happen to be of, always restore one tothe beauty-horror of vision itself, to the fact of being something chainedalive in the grotto of seeing in all its senses. And this is a fact thatShipley’s scenes often dramatize and refract: “A sliver of sunlight found its way into that grim basement, and Isaw on the faces of my fellow players the look that was my own I saw lust freeof restraint; I saw hunger thriving in its processes, a hunger that had made amirage of every forseeable end. I found myself digging down into their blankeyes for company and finding nothing but endless reflections chasing theirsource” (54). Or: “I looked and themirror infected me. I did not recognize my contamination” (114). Whichsuggests a good way of grasping the book as whole, as a kind of decaying, nigredictransmutation of Plato’s cave parable into a dream-river awash with objectswhose truncated incompleteness proves that they are but will never only beshadows. There is another way out behind and below the puppet show, a dark streamrunning through the earth. The current, co-extensivewith pathetic human consciousness itself, is suffused, like water electrifiedwith broken machinery, with the divine shock of citation: the power of seeinganything to break free from the false world: “A stumbled montage of mutilated words and open mouths shield usfrom irrelevant friends” (116).

P.E.S.T. (Philial Epidemic Strategy Tryst)

2011-08-15T22:39:00.000-04:00

Details here.

Punctum Books

2011-08-14T09:15:00.000-04:00

punctumbooks.com

Half Dead (abstract)

2011-07-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

Thre strokes in the nekke he smoot hire tho,

The tormentour, but for no maner chaunce

He myghte noght smyte al hir nekke atwo;

And for ther was that tyme an ordinaunce

That no man sholde doon man swich penaunce

The ferthe strook to smyten, softe or soore,

This tormentour ne dorste do namoore,

But half deed, with hir nekke ycorven there,

He lefte hir lye, and on his wey he went.

(Second Nun’s Tale VIII.526-34)

St. Cecilia’s botched beheading masterfully sculpts the conundrum of life/death liminality into a horrific three-day dilation of the moment of martyrdom, opening the decollative blow that typically coincides with receiving its crown into a series of unfinished neck-cuts. Pinched between the cruelty of the headsman’s impotence, the idiotic inflexibility of the law, and her own sacred durability, Cecilia embodies the paradoxical idea of an unending, asymptotically inconclusive decapitation, an infinite series of beheading blows that never severs the head. Her hacked neck fuses into one form the two principles it figurally evokes: the unbeheadability of the body of God – “illius enim capita membra sumus. Non potest hoc corpus decollari” [We are limbs of that head. This body cannot be decapitated] (Augustine) – and the semi-living nature of fallen humanity, as signified through medieval allegorical interpretation of the traveller who is attacked by robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and left “half alive/half dead” [semivivus, emithane] (Luke 10:30). The unity of this form is equivalent to the differential non-difference (half alive = half dead) between the Greek and Latin terms. The three-fold opening intensively multiplies the “zero degree of torture” (Foucault) into a single tertium quid that is indifferently beyond the distinction between life and death. Being half dead, Cecilia is ultimately alive. Being half alive, Cecilia is ultimately dead. Dwelling in the hyper-intimacy of extreme dereliction, Cecilia is a lacerated, ever-dilating theopathic icon of divinity’s absolute indifference to life and death. Her three-day rest from both, during which she simultaneously does nothing and works all the more fervently, exemplifies the “passivity and absence of effort . . . in which divine transcendence is dissolved” (Bataille).

Excerpt from Decapitating Cinema (the last)

2011-06-15T18:54:00.002-04:00

Cinema is more than moving photography, more than motion picture. It is also and essentially a form of writing, a scripting of phantasmatic experience. To understand its decollative logic thus requires thinking the relation between beheading and script: a form of writing that is essentially non-inscriptional, that removes itself from the written, the extra-written filmic thing that is rather an object of writing beyond writing, a kind of unfinishing postscript. The relation between the two (beheading and script) is immediately obvious as a pure intersection of what is removed: the identity of head and script as something whose removal is at the center of cinematic event. Of course innumerable things are removed in the course of cinematic production. Most are of the order of scaffolding or worldly supports. Only head and script, I will posit, are essentially removed in cinema, removed at a profound level or intensive degree that only they can (and must) be removed in order for cinema to take place.

The removal of head and script do not happen one after the other, but are operative as one continuous movement: a confiscation of script that sets in motion the beheaded cinematic subject as re-emergent scriptor. Script is not read or interpreted from or through a film. Rather it is written anew through the severing of the head of the one who witnesses it, who sees it with understanding, a severing whose efficient cause is the removal of script itself. Script corresponds, basically, to what is supposed to happen. That is what it encodes. But for it to happen in film, that is, for the movie to virtually event rather than only masqueradingly present its happening, script must be confiscated in a manner that seamlessly installs the viewer’s severed head (the post-capital perceptual center that is mobiley captured by the cameral effect) as its ‘intimate’ spontaneous speaker. It is the efficiency and cleanness of this confiscation that constitutes the cinematic art, a causing-by-stealing-to-more-impressively-reappear whose perfection equates to keeping our trunkless heads, like still spinning tops, speaking as long as possible. Good cinema is like a good beheading. The executioner decapitates the victim in one clean stroke and raises the head, liminally still living (enjoying the movie), for all to see. Bad cinema is like a bad beheading. The headsman botches the job, pathetically butchering the victim so that their head, when raised aloft, has already flown the realm of being theirs (not enjoying the movie) and is only part of a corpse. In one direction, cinema heads toward hagiographic cephalophory, the killing of someone who outlives their being beheaded in a dramatic, eternalizing way. In the other direction, cinema heads towards stillborn, merely staged execution, the beheading of someone who is already dead.

This is why, after the confiscation of Hallaj’s prayer for martyrdom, the Sufi’s severed head remains speaking for the duration of a feature-length film:

In his pocket they found a sheet of paper on which was written in his own hand the verse of the Throne (Qur’an 2:256), followed by this prayer (du’‑a’): ‘O God, inure my heart to submit to You, cut away from my spirit all that is not You, teach me Your Supreme Name (ism a’zam), grant me whatever You permit and deprive me of whatever You forbid, give me what no one cares about, through the truth of H.M.S.’.Q. [Sura 42 initials], and make me die a martyr of K.H.I.’.S [Sura 19 initials].’ They confiscated this paper, and then he was beheaded. The trunk remained erect for two hours and the head fell between his two legs, repeating a single phrase ‘Only One! O Only One!’ And when people drew near him, they saw that his blood spilling on the ground had written ‘God! God! God!’ in thirty-five places.[1]

As the number of times the martyr’s body bloodily exscribes the name of God corresponds to the conventional maximum number of sequences in a modern sound film,[2] so the scene allegorizes the maximal production of cinematic script as an effective martyrdom, the killing of someone whose dying gives witness, in the mode of spiritual birth, to what is never born and never dies. The fate of place in this scenario is fantastic, occupying an indescribable third zone between the singular topical stillness of the beheaded trunk and the multiplication of sites for the divine name that become legible in nearness. This zone could be called nearness itself, or the nearness of nearness – only the word would appear to locate it on a spectrum between presence and remoteness, losing sight of the fact that for this kind of nearness, both the absolutely here and the infinitely remote are equally proximate. What gives or grounds this ‘nearness’ (which might be written nearness in order distinguish it from ordinary spatial nearness and address its sonic quality: the auricular hyper-intimacy of a musical becoming-immanent of the visible) is screen, khoric placeless place identified by Lovecraft as “neither wall nor absence of wall,” the barrier behind everything that all vision sees through without passage. Screen is the immediate material analog of the substantial invisible unity of all things, the unity that consists, not in their being-one, but in their being ‘on screen’ or com-positionally with the only One, the one-without-number which is thinkable solely through topological error, for instance, by conceiving the One as either ‘behind’ the screen, beyond it, or as screen ‘itself’. As intimated in Polanski’s parting shot-gaze of Macbeth’s head (see note 6), the martyric vision of the beheaded constitutes a simultaneous being-seen and becoming-eye of the screen of the real. The simultaneity of this being-becoming signals the fulfillment of script-to-screen transition, the arrival of the eye into radical theory or realization of vision as very root of the seen. As Eckhart says, “the eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me.”^{^[3]} Here, in a vision whose eye is the organ of a radically singular non-individuated identity, Dionysius’s “being neither oneself nor someone else” (Mystical Theology, 1001A), one – whoever that is – wholly and really is the writing of the name of the invisible. Joining camera and projector in the single unitive eye of a severed body, the beheaded mystic prophesies cinema, without reference, by being it, by incarnating in the dilated space of its scission “a certain type of filming capable of . . . letting us travel to the confines of creation through the simple juxtaposition of a small number of trembling images [i.e. thirty-five signatures of God]. In this radical impressionism, the never-seen would be within our grasp. The cinema would become the perfect instrument for the revelation of possible worlds which coexist right alongside our own.”[4] That is, an instrument of revelation re-lying on nothing other than being what it reveals (re-veils), a scaffold built on the nothingness of life itself or its being-cinema. Shutter of the world. “Something had happened to the lighting, there was something wrong with the sun, and a section of the sky was shaking.”[5]

[1] Louis Massignon, The Passsion of Al-Hallaj, trans. Herbert Mason, 4 vols., Bollingen XCVIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 2.18.1

[2] “A sound film would most commonly contain between fourteen and thirty-five sequences” (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], 62). Many of Stanley Kubrick’s films, for example, have “the same number of narrative units: thirty-five” (Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, 2^nd ed. [Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001], 8).

[3] Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 57.

[4] Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Dis Voir, 2005), 90.

[5] Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Capricorn, 1959), 219.

On Commentary (Para-Academia & Theory-Fiction)

2011-05-22T13:02:00.001-04:00

Below is the audio from the "On Commentary" session of the Para-Academia & Theory-Fiction class presented by The Public School New York and The Hollow Earth Society and hosted by Observatory. A second session is in the works on Bataille/Lovecraft. Or download.

Cf. Nomad

p.s. thanks to Daniel Whistler and Zachary Price for a couple easily recognizable but unacknowledged references/ideas.

Ni Wood: On (the Necessity of) Being at One's Wits' End in The Cloud of Unknowing

2011-05-11T10:02:00.000-04:00

[pdf]

“Standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing NIGH to the divine [pros to theio gignomenos], he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity [enthousiazon]” (Plato, Phaedrus, 249d). “NEARLY mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close” (H. P. Lovecraft, The Outsider). “The pattern he has selected may seem queer, out of the way, and VERGING on insanity; but this happens because it is isolated from its inner context, and is appraised mechanically and superficially, by the outer and conventional measures of normality. Very often, the inward aim of the dynamic patterns animating the lives of such apparently insane persons is God, or Truth” (Meher Baba, The Wayfarers).

Madness, an obscurely essential theme in The Cloud of Unknowing, appears there in several modes traversing the boundaries between human, God, and devil: First, there is the madness to which all demons are driven by “the werk of the soule,” the apophatic forgetting of creation and dwelling in the cloud or darkness between oneself and God.[1] “Alle seintes and aungelles han joie of this werk, and hasten hem to helpe it in al here might. Alle feendes ben wood whan thou thus doste, and proven for to felle it in alle that thei kun” (3). Second, there is the madness to which phantasmatically deluded contemplatives drive themselves under the devil’s guidance by perceptually confounding and inverting the natural order of corporeal and spiritual things. This spiritual mis-work “is neither bodily worching ne goostly worching. . . . it is a worching agens kynde, and the devel is the cheef worcher thereof. And it is the rediest way to deth of body and of soule, for it is woodnes and no wisdom, and ledith a man even to woodnes. And yit thei wene not thus, for thei purpose hem in this werk to think on nought bot on God.” Not sensing the true mystical or hidden prepositionality of spiritual ascent – “how a man schal drawe alle his witte withinne hymself, or how he schal clymbe aboven himself” – they “turn theire bodily wittes inwardes to theire body agens the cours of kynde; and streynen hem, as thei wolde see inwards with theire bodily ighen, and heren inwards with theire eren, and so forthe of all theire wittes, smellen, taasten, and felyn inwardes. And thus thei reverse hem agens the cours of kynde and with this coriousté thei travayle theire ymaginacion so undiscreetly, that at the last thei turne here brayne in here hedes.” Thus set in error, the contemplative falls prey to the devil who, hiding under this distorted remembrance of God – “the mynde of God wol he [the devil] not put fro hem, for feerde that he schuld be had in suspecte” – intensifies and validates the delusion with “fals light or sounes, swete smelles in theire noses, wonderful tastes in theire mowthes, and many queynte hetes and brennynges in theire bodily brestes or in theire bowelles, in theire backes and in theire reynes, and in their pryvé membres,” so that without the intervention of a “merciful miracle” they “schul go staryng wood to the devil” (51-53). Third, there is the pure madness of the devil’s essential infernal nature whose direct sight instantly causes permanent madness, which the Cloud-author addresses in the context of judgmental religious zealotry and the loss of discretion. Persons suffering from this condition are deceived by the devil, who “ful wonderfuly . . . wol enflaume here braynes to meinteyne Goddes lawe, and to distroie synne in all other men.” Reproving everyone, they “sey that thei ben steryd therto by the fiire of charité and of Goddes love in theire hertes. And trewly thei lighe, for it is with the fire of helle wellyng in theire braynes and in theire ymaginacion.” While not defined as madness per se, this inferno-critical zeal formally participates in the devil’s own nature, as reported by “some disciples of nygromauncye . . . unto whom the feende hath apperid in bodily licnes.” For when the devil thus appears, he always has “bot o nose-therel, and that is grete and wyde. And he wil glady kast it up, that a man may see in therate to his brayne up in his heed. The whiche brayn is not elles bot the fiire of helle, for the feende may have none other brayn. And yif he might make a man loke in therate, he kepeth no beter; for at that lokyng he schuld lese his witte for ever” (55). So, as the devil “figureth in some qualité of his body what his servauntes ben in spirit,” such indiscreet reprovers “have bot o nose-therel goostly,” in contradiction with the naturally split nostrils of humans that “bitokeneth that a man schulde have discrecion goostly, and kun dissevre the good fro the ivel, and the yvel fro the worse, and the good fro the betyr” (55). Fourth, there is the near or virtual madness of the real mystic who, in working to destroy the final and foundational obstacle between himself and God, namely, the “the nakid wetyng and felyng of thin owen beyng,” goes “ni wood for sorow.” “Alle men han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and felith that he is. Alle other sorowes ben unto this in comparison bot as it were games to ernest. For he may make sorow earnestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he is. And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parfite sorow. This sorow . . . makith a soule abil to ressseive that joye, which revith fro a man alle wetyng and felyng of his being. This sorow, yif it be trewly coseyvid, is ful of holy desire; and elles might never man in this liif abide it ne bere it. For ne were it that a soule were sumwhat fed with a maner of counforte of his right worching, elles schuld he not mow bere the pyne that he hath of the wetyng and felyng of his being. For as ofte as he wolde have a trewe wetyng and a felyng of his God in purtee of spirit, as it may be here, and sithen felith that he may not – for he findeth evermore his wetyng and his felyng as it were ocupied and fillyd with a foule stynkyng lumpe of himself . . . – as ofte he goth ni wood for sorow; insomochel, that we wepith and weilith, strivith, cursith, and banneth, and schortly to sey, hym thinkith that he berith so hevy a birthen of hymself that he rechith never what worth of hym, so that God were plesid. And yit in al this sorrow he desireth not to unbe, for that were develles woodnes and despite unto God” (44).

As my title indicates, I am interested in the principle of necessity at work within this de facto mystical typology of madness. Why? Because I do not see that there can be any real theory of madness, any intellectual vision of it, that is not a knowing of its necessity. Seeing madness for what it is means seeing that it must be, its self-identical immanence, at once in itself (the space wherein the mad one, to truly be mad, must be mad, really at his wits’ end) and in relation to madness’s own end, what it is driving one to (the space where the mad one is mad for some mantic reason), in this context, hell or God. Nietzsche expresses this necessity, identifying madness as a vital condition for noetic novelty, the only way new ideas become real: “when . . . new and deviate ideas . . . again and again broke out, they did so accompanied by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea . . . Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this? Something in voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of weather and the sea . . .? Let us go a step further: all superior men . . . had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad.”[2] Crucially, Nietzsche’s words attend without nomination to a kind of Quixotian play or indetermination between actual and virtual madness, indicating a subtle relation between madness’s noetic necessity and its nearness, a secret intersection, as my epigraph’s imply, between the power and the proximity of madness. This is precisely the dynamism that is communicated between the hands and madness, for example, in the clenched and hidden hands that reveal a turning of the manual power back into the mind.[3] So Augustine’s mind reaches for a hand to hold still the heart in a vision of the real Present: “Who will hold fast the human heart so that it may stand and see how eternity, standing beyond past and future, speaks both past and future? Is my hand capable of this? Or can the hand of my mouth accomplish such a great thing through language?”[4] The hand of madness, the haptic nearness of its power, is a matter of present time. Its necessity pertains to the temporal substance that is neither chronos or aiôn but the very immanent dilation or stretching open of the present beyond the limitations of past and future. The need to be mad is itself the nearness of the active or creative present, a must-be that belongs, not to the twin hallucinations of instant and eternity (the duplex apparitional phantasm of what is always/never passing), but to the more original and universal now that demonically exists beside them, that attends like weather from a cosmic outside and waves from dark inner seas. Madness is so intimate with time, so fiendishly present to it, that it is radically reasonable to say that madness is time. Discover this equation. It is the broken, present-at-hand yet paradoxically nevertheless and all-the-more ready means of warding off the foetid apparition, the foul stinking lump of oneself, which presses so close.

The identity of time and madness is visible in Augustine’s perpetuated remark about time’s inverted apophatic intelligibility, its being known in negative unknowing, that is, not negating that you know, but in purely negating, as if in absolute spontaneous preemption, that you do not: “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not know.”[5] The literal meaning is supreme: time is known in the negative-without-negation presence of a nemo, a not-man (ne+homo) who asks what is time, a question posed by nobody. Time is known mantically, through a positively mad intuition whose madness lies in its having no time to be about time in the form of answer to anyone’s question, in its necessarily being a knowledge that answers (to) no one. The explanation of time to someone, by contrast, is a negatively mad ignorance, the madness of an explaining that eclipses knowledge of the explained.[6] Note the formal similarity between such knowing of time through no one’s query and the negative, solely monitory wisdom of the Socratic daimon, never named as a spiritual entity, but only as an impersonal but familiar divine sign – a prophetic presence whose singular doubling of identity is occasionally there yet never inoperative (Socrates says it always [aei] warns him) and thus deeply analogous to consciousness itself as a necessary, inevitable dilation of the momentary, so that there is, for example, time to do anything.

Time-madness identity is even more visible in Meher Baba’s speedy distinction between God, man, madman, and mast (divinely mad person): “Mind stopped, is God. / Mind working, is man. / Mind slowed down, is mast. / Mind working fast, is mad.”[7] Here it is the temporality of mind itself that ontically modulates between God and human on a spectrum of madness (though it should be emphasized that the ‘human’ has no genetic or historical specificity in his evolutionary cosmology; it simply means the form in which the development of consciousness is full and thus capable of God/Self-realization). The human, vis-à-vis self-conscious divinity or God, is flanked by opposed but temporally correlative forms of madness such that its own ordinary operative nature look like only a median mind-speed, a mediocre or B- madness that both ensures practical functioning and displaces radical development. Doubly framed by insanity and God-intoxication, the human emerges as a utile but essentially obsolescent state of time. “Level-1 or world space [writes Nick Land] 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 2?”[8] The term garbage time eloquently captures the complex of an expiring or evaporating state (perforce ungraspable as such from within its sanity-to-itself and perceivable only in near madness) in which production of and concern for refuse are constitutionally fused into self-obsolescence or being-garbage. And there is every reason to keep open the comparison here between the anthropocenic ecological echo of the idea – the spectacle of homo sapiens garbaging itself to death – and the negative or tensional complicity between mystical madness and filth. As the cloud-dwelling contemplative goes nearly mad for sorrow over his own foetid factcity as the only and ultimate escape route out of individuated existence,[9] so is global eco-emergency a form of mass secular and semi-insane mystical sorrow expressive of deeply vexed impatience with, and desire for, intensified immediacy of the forced temporariness and disposableness, or more essentially, the necessary disposality, of human-being. Note furthermore the important psychic link between sorrow, or affective counter-volitional refusal,[10] and refuse as what is rejected and cast away. Here is found the weird paradoxical link between madness and filth, the madman’s personal affinity for dirt that is grounded in rigorous and essential indifference towards it, an indifference that may radically express or be rooted in real mental cleanliness, the perfectly careless purity of a playing soul that will not be washed, yet a non-innocent purity strangely continuous with the deathly seriousness of someone who must be clean of oneself.[11] “I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness [says a Lovecraftian hero] in my single minded fever to unearth the lurking fear.” [12] And filthiness too is a matter of proximate affinity: dirt itself is clean. So near madness can be visualized as the achievement of a purifying and essential cleanliness of being-in-dirt. Or as St. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2).

To see the necessity of madness in the Cloud of Unknowing demands, not diffusive explaining or theorizing, but the single mindedness of envisioning or theorying the unitary time of its four-fold appearance, intellectually entering the wholism of its must-be. In other words, seeing this madness with the radical, transcendent-immanent literalism of photography, described by Laruelle as “a hyperphenomenology of the real” that thinks the “undivided giveness of the apparition,” the givenness that “is the thing itself in-its image, rather than the image-of-the-thing”[13] – a blind but open visioning homologous to knowing when no one asks or answering via questioning-by-camera. Such seeing is itself proper to the supreme, unconquerable ordinariness of mysticism as a mode of vision that finds ultimate truth in a flattening of knower and known that inversionally releases, like a Petrine cross, the infinite and total intensive depth of reality.[14] “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me.”[15] I.e. the eternally identifying vision-in-One whose durational projection is the proverbial too long it takes to go mad looking in a mirror. This is the world where the image looks back, a capacious no-place whose abyss sees into you and the lovely reflection loves Narcissus. Similarly, perceiving the Cloud’s madness is needing to see it all-at-once, in a way that makes it look back as the very mode of its perceiving, in the inescapability of a now that is not instantaneous but fluidly frozen or solidly dilated, just as a photograph, or the multiple sense of medieval scripture, finds different forms pressed within a unitary temporal plane. A vision of necessity that madly intersects with the necessity of vision itself and thus also sees the moment of vision within the principle of madness.

All these criteria are precisely confirmed in the Cloud’s four-form scheme, which stretches the unwitnessability of madness itself between the pure fiery dementia of the demonic brain and the supremely proximate madness of the ecstatic mystic so that what-madness-is, its substance, is prismatically refracted across the space between human and demon, the entities who are photographically close, one to the other, in each definition of madness the text provides. This proximity is itself co-substantial with time, insofar that demon, as fallen angel, is simultaneously what negatively precedes and preconditions human and what perpetually strives to retard its afterlife towards chronic sub-eternity or damnation – a striving that is formally inseparable from and providentially bound to what it inverts: spiritual aspiration towards the eternal present.[16] The near madness of existential mystical sorrow, dangerously shadowed by the rigorous volitional logic of the desire “to unbe . . . that [is] develles woodnes and despite unto God,” is the perfection or more properly apotheosis, of this proximity, its extremest realization that at once fulfills and fatally exceeds all other instances of it in the moment of becoming-divine. It is the anagogy or being raised up of the four senses of madness, the one that realizes and shows the necessity of their identity. Read this way, the real mystic is revealed to be, not one of several distinctions, but the truly immanent human as a madly inverted experientia crucis, a heretic body constituting – and needing to constitute as its only way out of itself – the upside down crucifixion of time. Not an essence, but a unitary hybrid never once and now no longer human, a friendly no-one or ‘nameless wild one’[17] for whom near madness is not a flirtation or perilous approach of the mind towards its loss, but the putting-to-use or wielding of the very necessity of time as an operational nearness, the turning of time into a virtue or power by letting it fall to a never-ending halt. “Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful, and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”[18] This near madness – inverted name for intimacy with true, singular sanity – is the human becoming capable of being mad. Hanging in effortless liberatory flight, its body stretched across the intersection of the evolutionary or human need to ‘become what you are’ and the chaotic or demonic ‘desire to be everything’, this weirdly inevitable creature here touches all at once the four temporal dimensions of its loved torment. From this perspective what matters is not what each intellectually ‘means’, but the immediate and as-if neutral significance of their time-structure. At the right hand: the non-stop continuity that must end of demon-tormenting contemplation, that is, allegorical time, time whose truth lies in signifying other than it is. At the left hand, the instantaneous once-and-forever singular moment of looking through the devil’s nostril, that is, literal time, time whose truth lies in perfect and unique irrevocability. At the head: the illusory false present of perverse, seeing-what-you-do-not-have aesthetic imagination, that is, tropological time, time whose truth lies in the projection of what one must do/become. At the feet: the let it be now of mystical impatience, refusal of every this for the real Present, that is, anagogical time, time whose truth lies in absolutely untimely suspension – heels kicking at everything.

The necessity of being at one’s wits’ end is a pure necessity, a necessity without object, and thus a necessity that only frees one more and more from being a subject of needs. Near madness is the only alternative for staying close to being what one must.

On the other hand, Firdawsi reports in the Book of Kings that the followers of Mazdak, the heretical 6^th-century Persian wise man, “were planted there head down, with their feet in the air, like trees. . . . If you have any sense, [he says] you will not follow Mazdak’s way.”

[1] The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997). References are to chapter number.

[2] Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Maudemaire Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §14.

[3] For artistic examples, see Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: Wiley, 1982), chapter 3.

[4] "Quis tenebit cor hominis, ut stet et videat, quomodo stans dictet futura et praeterita tempora nec futura nec praeterita aeternitas? Numquid manus mea valet hoc aut manus oris mei per loquellas agit tam grandem rem?" (Augustine, Confessions [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951], 11.11).

[5] “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions, 11.14).

[6] Note how the logic identically applies to madness as explanation for all-too-intuited horror: “madness . . . was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naïve as to deny that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely” (H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, [New York: Modern Library, 2005), 38). That time itself a horror is a maddening horror is of course central principal of this work: “the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice . . . we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species . . . we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least 500, 000 years, and in all probability even longer . . . The pictorial bands . . . had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design . . . embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity” (46-56).

[7] The Wayfarers, 19.

[8] Nick Land, “Meltdown,” in Fanged Noumena, eds. Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier (London/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011), 456.

[9] Cf. Hegel’s understanding of the necessity of madness (for development of higher rationality) as expression of contradiction in individuated being – “The necessity of madness, that is, the necessity of going through the stage of madness, is due to the fact that ‘the soul is already in itself the contradiction of being an individual, a singular, and yet at the same time immediately identical with the universal natural soul, with its substance’ (Enz. 164, 125)” (Ferit Güven, Madness and Death in Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005], 37) – and Levinas’s definition of the grounds of escape: “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même]. . . . It is being itself or the ‘one-self’ from which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation. In escape the I flees itself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or of what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes” (Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 55). Rosmini comments on Hegel: "What reason could we find for this whim that being would have to negate itself, to refuse to recognize itself, to make this mad attempt to annihilate itself?" (Saggio storico-critico sulle categorie e la dialettica). See also Nicola Masciandaro, “The Sorrow of Being” Qui Parle 19 (2010): 9-35 and “Eros as Cosmic Sorrow: Locating the Limits of Difference in Julian of Norwich’s Divine Shewings and The Cloud of Unknowing,” Mystics Quarterly 35 (2009): 59-103.

[10] “[C]um . . . dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis voluntas tristitia est” (Augustine, De civitate Dei, 14.6, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 5th ed. [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981]) [sorrow is the will’s disagreement with something that happened against our will].

[11] “From general standards of society, religion, health, morality and so forth, cleanliness of body and mind are indispensable. It is, however, very easy to keep the body clean; but cleanliness of mind is very difficult indeed. The more one gets attached to body cleanliness for merely selfish reasons, the less are the chances of having a clean mind. If, however, one is given up wholly to mental cleanliness, which means becoming free from low, selfish, impure desires and thoughts of lust, greed, anger, backbiting, etc., the less is one's mind attached to bodily needs and bodily cleanliness. All this applies to ordinary persons. Now of the five types—God-merged, God-intoxicated, God-absorbed, God-communed and God-mad—the God-absorbed and God-communed can more or less keep their bodies clean. Their minds are almost automatically clean due to their being absorbed in God, or in communion with God. But the God-mad, the God-intoxicated and the God-merged all invariably have dirty bodies, live in dirty surroundings, and may have dirty physical habits. A God-mad has a clean, pure mind. A God-intoxicated has a mind, but no thoughts, for his mind is simply enjoying the intoxicated state. A God-merged has no mind—he is fully merged in God. So in these three cases their mental cleanliness and purity cannot be questioned. Now why should their bodies and environments be dirty? You will find that the majority of ordinary mad people have very little consciousness of their bodies. So if an ordinary mind, when mad, does not pay attention to bodily cleanliness, then the three types of God men, who unconsciously or consciously know all the universe to be zero, body to be a shadow, and whose minds are absolutely unattached to the body, cannot be expected to keep their bodies and surroundings clean. When the mind does not pay attention to the body, the body, naturally, automatically survives and looks after itself. Now because of a kind of universal working on the gross plane, a sort of automatic attraction takes place, which causes a man who is indifferent to cleanliness to be attracted to place himself in dirty surroundings. He does not purposely choose an unclean place, but tends to gravitate towards it, for he is himself quite indifferent either to cleanliness or to dirt on the physical plane. For those who are God-mad, God-intoxicated, or God-merged, this dirtiness does not affect their health, because the mind is not attached to the body. For these souls, good or bad, cleanliness or dirt, a palace or a hut, a spotless avenue or a filthy gutter are all the same, and they are driven into any of these places according to circumstance. It is natural for a mast to have a dirty body, and it is natural for him to be driven to dirty surroundings; but if the devotee of a mast happens to give him comfort and cleanliness, he takes it because it is forced on him—but he is quite indifferent to it” (Meher Baba, Wayfarers, 33-4).

[12] H. P. Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 75.

[13] François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photographyi, trans. Robin Mackay (London/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011), 95.

[14] “They hanged him this way and he began to speak. ‘Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For the first man, whose race I bear in mine appearance (or, of the race of whom I bear the likeness), fell (was borne) head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore: for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down—who also cast his first state down upon the earth—established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the creation wherein he made the things of the right hand into left hand and the left hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good. Concerning which the Lord saith in a mystery: Unless ye make the things of the right hand as those of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom. This thought, therefore, have I declared unto you; and the figure wherein ye now see me hanging is the representation of that man that first came unto birth’” (Acts of Peter).

[15] Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 57.

[16] The inversion is precise in Dante’s representation of hell-dwellers as permanently blind to the present, as Farinata explains in Inferno 10.100-8. Infernal knowledge advances only towards a frozen chromos, pure archivicity: “tutta morta / fia nostra conoscienza da quell punto / che del future fia chiusa la porta” (Inf 10.106-8) [all our knowledge will be dead from that moment when the door of the future shall be closed]. Cf. worry as a displacement from the present that demands absolute release: “Worry is a necessary resultant of attachment to the past or to the anticipated future, and it always persists in some form or other until the mind is completely detached from everything” (Meher Baba, Discourses, 3.122).

[17] “One bright Sunday, as he was sitting withdrawn and deep in thought, there came to him in the calmness of his mind the figure of a rational being who was sophisticated in speech but inexperienced in deeds and who overflowed with rich ostentation. He began speaking to the figure thus: Where do you come from? It said: I never came from anywhere. He said: Tell me, what are you? It said: I am nothing. He said: What do you want? It answered and said: I want nothing. And he said: This is very strange. Tell me, what is your name? It said: I am called nameless wild one. The disciple said: You are well named ‘the wild one’ because your words and answers are completely wild. Now tell me something I shall ask you. Where does your wisdom take you? It said: to unrestrained liberty (Henry of Suso, The Little Book of Truth, Chapter 6, cited from Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, ed. and trans. Frank Tobin [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989], 326). A hyper-negative liberty that must be distinguished from the deferred nothing-but-not-yet offered by nihilism: “That one must lose sight of names and nouns does not suggest that one must turn away from the world, which predication does serve to organize. The Nameless Wild One merely turns from this world when letting go the conventional delusion that this one is the only world possible (”Nameless Wild One: The Ethics of Anonymous Subjectivity – Medieval and Modern,” Common Knowledge 12 [2006]: 219-251).

[18] Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing [Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publication, 1963], no. 37.

Madness, or, the Human as Demonic Crucifixion of Time

2011-05-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

Another Excerpt from Decapitating Cinema

2011-04-28T09:47:00.000-04:00

The path to Dante’s cephalophore, the crowning figure of Inferno 28 who uniquely incarnates the spectacular signifying essence of life in hell – “Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso” (Inf 28.142) [Thus is observed in me the retribution] – is prepared by a meta-bellic spectacle of human carnage situated quantitatively beyond the threshold of discourse.

Chi poria mai pur con parole sciolte

dicer del sangue e de le piaghe a pieno

ch’i’ ora vidi, per narrar più volte?

Ogne lingua per certo verria meno

per lo nostro sermone e per la mente

c’hanno a tanto comprender poco seno.

(28.1-6)[1]

Who could ever fully tell, even in unfettered words, though many times narrating, the blood and the wounds that I now saw? Surely every tongue would fail, because of our speech and our memory which have little capacity to comprehend so much.

Psychically previewing Bertran de Born’s own detached brain, the pilgrim’s ocular head here occupies the visually severed, essentially cameral and independent position of that which takes in the immanent plenitude of an all that does not and never will enter into any perspectival assimilation.[2] Here language can only attest, via a negative deixis, to a witnessed something that remains ungraspable and unrepresentable as object, what Dante nominates only in the mode of a manner or way — “il modo de la nona bolgia sozzo” (28.21) [the foul fashion of the ninth pouch] — that no reassembly of the war-slain would ever equal (“d’aequar sarebbe nulla” 28.20). The overt emphasis on the power of vision in this canto,[3] in addition to being a poetic recognition of gore’s incommensurable sensory excess, the aesthetic crisis of seeing the unspeakable, thus enters more deeply into the violence of vision itself and its special correlation to the unitive-partitive structures of scandal and schism. This violence may be conceived as the cinema of seeing per se, its self/world-severing movement, according to which the overwhelming spectacle of disjoined bodies is properly understood to be not only a certain kind of seen thing but a transparency of vision, a seeing-though into what vision itself is, namely, a force of dis-cernment, a specular mirror-knife that seizes world by cutting-splicing into its indivisible unity. It is precisely this force that is displayed through the pilgrim’s gazing into the first “seminator di scandalo e di scisma” (28.35) [sower of scandal and schism] he meets, the prophet Mohammed.

Figure 13. Gustave Doré, “The Mutilated Shade of Mahomet” (detail)

Mentre che tutto in lui veder m’attacco,

guardommi e con le man s’aperse il petto,

dicendo: “Or vedi com’ io mi dilacco!

vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!

(28.28-31)

While I was all absorbed in gazing on him, he looked at me and with his hands pulled open his breast, saying, “Now see how I rend myself, see how mangled is Mohammed!”[4]

Mohammed effectively separates himself under Dante’s attaching/attacking gaze (m’attacco), returning a look that invites and effects further opening, a dilation whose freshness and non-finality is marked by the verbal aperture of a neologism (mi dilacco, I open, separate myself).[5] Between the poet and the prophet’s canonically unportrayed face there is an affectively cinematic loop, the impressional interplay (‘press play’) of a moving unity-in-separation and separation-in-unity that subtly re-experiences without regress the traumatic circle that all the discord-sowers tread.[6] Rather than merely reenacting or recording the torment, the filmic encounter (in the sense of an event that that passes within and is traced upon a subtle medium of shared vision between the living and the dead) reproposes it in a space that is itself dynamically open and capable of new forms of knowledge and experience, of scientific event, the space marked out by the multiplicative dilation of the present beyond past and future that the pilgrim’s interventive musing over Mohammed initiates:[7]

“Ma tu chi se’ che ’n su lo scoglio muse,

forse per indugiar d’ire a la pena

ch’è giudicata in su le tue accuse?”

“Né morte ‘l giunse ancor, né colpa ’l mena,”

Rispuose ’l mio maestro, “a tormentarlo;

ma per dar lui esperïenza piena,

a me, che morto son, convien menarlo

per lo ’nferno qua giù di giro in giro;

e quest’ è ver così com’ io ti parlo.”

Più fuor di cento che, quando l’udiro,

s’arrestaron nel fosso a riguardarmi

per maraviglia, oblïando il martiro.

(28. 46-54)

“But who are you that are musing on the ridge, perhaps to delay going to the punishment pronounced on your own accusations?”

“Neither has death yet reached him, nor does guilt bring him for torment,” replied my master, “but in order to give him full experience, it behooves me, whom am dead, to lead him down here through Hell from circle to circle; and this is as true as that I speak to you.”

More than a hundred there were who, when they heard him, stopped in the ditch to look at me, forgetting their torment in their wonder.

Mutually saturated and suspended in an indeterminate medium, the neither-subjective-nor-objective mood wherein consciousness is cinematically captured, these moments collectively mark, without collapse of their distinctions, a plenitude of experience that is paradoxically available in the positive forgetfulness of wonderful detachment.[8] Note the formal continuity across several instances of abeyance: the poet’s musing, the perceived possibility of his being one of the damned, Virgil’s definition of the reality of Dante’s otherworldly journey in terms of verbal facticity — a wry reflection of the fictive actuality of poetic vision, the again-looking of marveling that momentarily forestalls pain. Fusing these in a dilated moment of inoperative suspense, the scene produces a spectacle homologous to the oxymoronically headless perspective of cinematic experience, its production of post-capital points of view for the head. Just as filming first-person experience ironically requires cameral displacement of the actor’s/character’s head, so the narrator’s first-person view — “s’arrestaron . . . a riguardami” [they stopped to regard me] — is not a stable position but a mobile yet nevertheless substantial relation between his being looked at and the dead poet’s ‘impossible’ witnessing that he is/was indeed there, a relation that obliviates without negating Dante’s own cephalic, essentially self-located identity.[9] In other words, Dante here produces a scene — and this exposes why the Commedia exceeds and eludes cinematography, because its author is at once director, protagonist, and camera — that dramatizes full experience [esperïenza piena] as a certain kind of headless seeing comparable to cinema in which vision is presently drawn beyond, yet strangely without being severed from, capital ego-perspective or the inherent individualization of consciousness. Of course this seeing is something the poem does not and cannot say, something instead to be drawn from and illuminated within the text – a procedure comparable to photography as a hyper selective and erotically tendentious letting-something-be-drawn-by-its-own-light. So Dante and the sowers of discord, with Mohammed as focal point, may be here construed as pausing to motionally photograph or film each other avant la lettre, that is, prior to any captioning of photography, of what it is for or what it represents. Photography in a non-photographical sense: “One does not photography the World, the City, History, but the identity (of) the real-in-the-last-instance which has nothing to do with all of that.”[10] The positive cinematic potentiality of the scenario is thus co-substantial with a kind of bleeding of experience into the Real beyond history, a creative present-minded forgetfulness operative through cameral anarchy: “Photography is a positive and irrevocable chaotizing of the Cosmos. All is lived in an ultimate manner in the affect and in the mode of . . . non-thetic identity.”[11] The affect of non-thetic identity is the feeling of a being that is post-capitally positioned, that no longer places itself (tithenai, to set, to establish) within, nor alienates itself from, the head, but which rather sees Identity or experiences the real as vision-in-One – a seeing that allows the locus of vision, via vision’s inherently screenic or ‘panpsychist’ theoretical mobility, to bleed beyond its fictive anchoring in the head, that no longer hesitates to let vision itself be seen by no-one in the midst of being someone.[12] The decapitating lesson to be witnessed in this cinematic scene, that which prepares the way for the arrival of an actual cephalophore, is that real heedlessness is a losing of one’s head without severing, a cutting off of head in the spontaneous wakeful forgetfulness of ever having one. This is why Dante writes “oblïando il martiro” [forgetting martyrdom], using a word that is inextricably bound, and can even alone signify, beheading as consummate witnessing of the invisible.[13] For the radically immanent, almost senseless yet totally profound meaning of this phrase is its expression of a forgetting of beheading, the oblivion of decapitation’s very possibility, or, the dawn of beheading’s unforgettable impossibility.[14]

Figure 15. Bertran de Born in L’Inferno (Bertolini/Padovan, 1911)

Dante’s experience of the cephalophore Bertran de Born accordingly takes the form of an unforgettable special visual effect whose indelible impressionality is at once the cinematic negative of its first filming (Fig. 15), which uses a theatrical black-on-black effect to enforce optical forgetting of the body and head of the conjoined actors, and an intensity of the cephalophoric relation between poet and pilgrim, the two-in-one-and-one-in-two ‘Dante’ who makes a lamp of itself in order to walk pre-mortem in the afterlife:

Io vidi certo, e ancor par ch’io ’l veggia,

un busto sanza capo andar sì come

andavan li altri de la trista greggia;

e ’l capo tronco tenea per le chiome,

pesol con mano a guisa di lanterna:

e quel mirava noi e dicea: “Oh me!”

Di sé facea a sé stesso lucerna,

ed eran due in uno e uno in due;

com’ esser può, quei sa che sì governa.

(28.118-26)

Truly I saw, and seem to see it still, a trunk without the head going along as were the others of that dismal herd, and it was holding the severed head by the hair, swinging it in hand like a lantern, and it was gazing at us and saying: “Oh me!” Of itself it was making a lamp for itself, and they were two in one and one in two—how this can be, He knows who so ordains.

Literally reflecting the bi-locative and mnemonically dilated dynamic of consciousness itself (truly I saw and seem to see it still), the figure allegorizes the corporeal dilemma of being someone (O me!) as an essentially projective situation of self-severing. Here, the entity or thing that one is is revealed to be, neither a subject nor an object, but a pro-ject, a throwing forth of itself in and out of itself. The weird equivalence of it and they – Di sé facea a sé stesso lucerna, / ed eran [Of itself it was making a lamp for itself / and they . . .] – here corresponds to a pre-/post-numerical identity that is both outside and inside duality, namely, the identity of one who is two-in-one and one-in-two.[15] Formulated infernally, such an identity is the profanely literalized version of the transcendence-immanence dyad according to which the existence of God and cosmos is alone intelligible, as (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, the mystical ur-cephalophore of medieval tradition, explains: “He . . . is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself” (Divine Names, 4.13).^{^[16]} Namely, there is a palpable sense in this scene that Bertran de Born, who made “il padre e ’l figlio in sé rebelli” (28.136) [the father and the son rebel against each other], figures an anti-trinitarian tertium quid, an un( )holy spirit whose violent dis-integrity mark it as heretically anomalous vis-à-vis the divine cosmic system, an impossible to understand thing-that-should-not-be whose pure and supreme unintelligibility expresses something intimately and perfectly exterior to God, an excessively literal and willfully incommensurable object of divine knowledge. This cephalophore is a real special effect or individuated appearance that God knows, not in the mode of being its creator or designer, but solely in the capacity of being its director: the ultimate default position of God as one-without-a-second and ruler of all (che sì governa). In other words, a final identity or man-in-person that is fully and actually human in the sense proper to the non-philosophical critique of the Trinity:

The man of whom we speak is his own real identity, the irreducible core which makes him human and does not just differentiate him from the rest of Creation, to which he otherwise belongs, but from this as well. Understand then that this real and not transcendent identity (in-Man) is the phenomenal content of that which theologians sought as ‘person’ when composing the Trinity.[17]

The cinematic lesson of Dante’s Bertran is that cephalophory is the express condition of the real-in-the-last-instance, a schismatic self-belonging far better than being-no-one that endlessly places one in direct acosmic blind relation to divine knowledge or gnosis. Cephalophory is the radically transcendent participation-in-nothing that immanence itself, far beyond its own infinite resources of remaining, always already secretly is. The most intimate opposite of saintly head-bearing, which instead signifies the temporal-becoming-eternal moment of martyrically seeing or finally facing one’s own divine essence (Fig. 16),[18] infernal cephalophory is the real present and essentially self-severed or auto-spectral state of all who are finding themselves in this fundamentally cinematic life-in-illusion, who are enjoying suffering and suffering enjoying the vision-in-Many of being-in-universe.[19] What is special about the self-projective spectacle of Bertran de Born is that he, terribly blind to his true specialness or literal imaging forth of the situation of all, thinks the horror of being himself to be so uniquely special:

“Or vedi la pena molesta,

tu che, spirando, vai veggendo i morti:

vedi s'alcuna è grande come questa.”

(28.130-2)

“See now my grievous penalty, you who, breathing, go to view the dead: see if any other is so great as this!”

This is the ironically common error that constitutes his unique instantiation of hell, the mistaken identification of himself as privileged subject of hell – a mistake that necessarily results in his being the visible essence of the very principle of hell itself: “Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso” (28.142). That life or being-in-universe in a cinematic illusion is not at all horrible. Quite the opposite. What is horrible is that the cosmic illusion goes unrecognized as such, that it is mistaken in specific, arbitrary, and selfish ways for being real and thus becomes an object of diurnal unending general horror (worry).[20] Dante’s most celebrated and intensely decapitated subject is a cinematic post-cephalic ‘lesson in heresy’ whose contradictory learning (doing as it does and not as it says) consists in seeing it as oneself whoever you are, seeing that every other is “grande come questa,” as great as this. A lesson very similar to that presented, like a new and terrifying Platonic cave parable, in Lovecraft’s Through the Gates of the Silver Key, easily interpretable as projective allegory of the silver screen or true picture of the reality that cinema per se represents:[21]

For the rite of the Silver Key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent – a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space . . . Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions no so much visual and cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.[22]

Bertran’s carrying of his lantern-like projective head is a corresponding suspension of the how of consciousness that unveils the capital illusion of head itself as locus and agent of vision. It is a real fiction whose horror is to exacerbate a ‘martyrically’ revealed fact: the reality of something else that sees seeing, an unbeheadable or acephalic witness of one’s own vision that cannot possibly be a self in any ordinary sense. To see this requires no illumination other than the simple blind rediscovery of one’s own head as obscure cameral twin of the dark cosmos, the cave within the cave of which Lovecraft speaks.

[1] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

[2] “One does not photograph the World, the City, History, but the identity (of) the real-in-the-last-instance which has nothing to do with all of that” (François Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography, 48).

[3] See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 151-3. Akbari traces a transition from extromissive to intromissive metaphors across the Commedia and their transcendent synthesis in the vision of God (in both senses).

[4] The auto-imperative (a command that also works upon itself, see how I . . .) captures the self-maiming logic of schism – doing violence to the body of which one is part: “the schismatic intends to sever himself from that unity [intendit se ab uniate separare] which charity creates” (Aquinas, Summa theologica, II-II.39.1) – and eerily prophesies the terroristic mangling of Islam (Fig. 14).

Figure 14. Iraqi soldier holds aloft the head of a dead suicide bomber

Note how Mohammed’s repetition of come [how] continues the bloody modal rubric of the ninth bolgia cited above (“il modo . . .” 28.21), as if gore is essentially a negative intensity of style. Cf. “I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion” (H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness [New York: Modern Library, 2005], Chapter 4, my italics).

[5] The auto-opening evokes the al-sharh or dilation of Sura 94 in the Koran, “Did we not dilate your breast . . .” interpreted as God’s opening of Mohammed’s chest and purification of his heart. Karla Mallette calls the scene “a grotesquerie, a carnivalesque inversion of an episode recounted with awe in the Islamic popular tradition” (“Muhammad in Hell,” Dante Studies 125(2007): 213 – an awe in which the pilgrim’s gaze also participates. Crescini comments, as cited in Singleton, “Lacca is the ‘haunch,’ the ‘thigh’ . . . . di-laccare means ‘to separate, divide, spread, open the thighs’; and therefore it generally means ‘to spread,’ ‘to open’.” The sexual connotation reinforces the cooperational structure of the encounter, the sense in which staring is an aesthetic copulation with its object, as well as exacerbates the infernal un-manning of Islamic militancy.

[6] Mohammed explains to the pilgrim: “Un diavolo è qua dietro che n'accisma / sì crudelmente, al taglio de la spade / rimettendo ciascun di questa risma, / quand' avem volta la dolente strada; / però che le ferite son richiuse / prima ch'altri dinanzi li rivada” (28-37-42) [A devil is here behind that fashions us thus cruelly, putting again to the edge of the sword each of this throng when we have circled the doleful road; for the wounds are closed up before any of us pass again before him].

[7] A present all the more poignant in light of the fact that the present is precisely what hell-denizens do not see, as Farinata explains in Inferno 10.100-8. Infernal knowledge advances only towards an absolutely final decapitation: “tutta morta / fia nostra conoscienza da quell punto / che del future fia chiusa la porta” (Inf 10.106-8) [all our knowledge will be dead from that moment when the door of the future shall be closed].

[8] I borrow the term ‘positive forgetfulness’ from the Supplement to Meher Baba’s God Speaks: “The whole philosophy of approaching and realizing the Truth hinges on the question of what we may call forgetfulness. The word ‘forgetfulness’ used here must not be associated with its commonly accepted meaning of forgetting to post a letter, or of a state of mind that is simply dull and blank. Forgetfulness in this special sense is an attitude of mind that develops gradually into spiritual experience. External renunciation is not forgetfulness, because it is mostly physical and partly mental; but internal renunciation, when it becomes purely mental, does assume the quality and dignity of forgetfulness. Thus one may renounce the world, but it is not so easy to forget it. Forgetfulness in this special sense thus explains the secret that lies behind all happiness, spiritual or otherwise, that human beings experience. The Sufi term for this forgetfulness is bikhudi, and it should not be mixed up—though it often is—with bihoshi (unconsciousness). . . . The whole philosophy of happiness and unhappiness therefore hinges on the question of forgetfulness of some kind or another, and of remembrance of some kind or another. Remembrance is an attachment of the mind to a particular idea, person, thing or place, and forgetfulness is its opposite. Once it is understood that remembrance causes pain, it follows that the only cure is some kind of forgetfulness, and this forgetfulness may be either positive or negative. The positive forgetfulness is one in which the mind remains aware of external stimuli, but refuses to react to them. The negative forgetfulness is either mere unconsciousness—a stopping of the mind as in sound sleep—or an acceleration of it as in madness, which has been defined as a way of avoiding the memory of suffering. Either sleep or madness may be artificially induced in various degrees by the use of intoxicants or drugs; but this also is a negative way of overcoming remembrance. Positive forgetfulness, then, is the cure, and its steady cultivation develops in man that balance of mind which enables him to express such noble traits as charity, forgiveness, tolerance, selflessness and service to others. One who is not equipped with this positive forgetfulness becomes a barometer of his surroundings. His poise is disturbed by the slightest whisper of praise or flattery, and by the faintest suggestion of slander or criticism; his mind is like a slender reed swayed by the lightest breeze of emotion. Such a man is perpetually at war with himself and knows no peace” (211-13). Cf. Purgatorio 2.67-75.

[9] Cf. “How are they filmed, these first person experiences? Two ways are possible: either a headless dummy is photographed, with the camera in place of the head, or else a real man is photographed, with his head held far back, or to one side to make room for the camera. In other words, to ensure that I shall identify myself with the actor, his head is got out of the way; he must be my kind of man. For a picture of me-with-a-head is no likeness at all, it is the portrait of a complete stranger, a case of mistaken identity. [Corollary: “one does not photograph the object or the ‘subject’ that one sees—but rather, on condition of suspending . . . the intentionality of photography, one photographs Identity—which one does not see” (François Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography, 47)] It is curious that anyone should go to the advertising man for a glimpse into the deepest– and simplest–truths about himself; odd also that an elaborate modern invention like the cinema should help rid anyone of an illusion which very young children and animals are free of. But human capacity for self-deception has surely never been complete. A profound though dim awareness of the human condition may well explain the popularity of many old cults and legends of loose and flying heads, of one eyed or headless monsters and apparitions, of human bodies with non-human heads and martyrs who (like King Charles in the ill-punctuated sentence) walked and talked after their heads were cut off — Fantastic pictures, no doubt, but nearer than common sense ever gets to a true portrait of this man” (Douglas Harding, On Having No Head).

[10] Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography, 47-8. Dantean photography, the ‘non-philosophy’ of the Commedia, is thus more generally the radical immanence of the ‘poem,’ the identity-movie of the poem itself that is fundamentally independent of and indifferent to its apparently self-defining purposes.

[11] Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography, 47-8.

[12] Cf. Harding’s account of his revelation of heedlessness: “Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two round windows at the world. Now I find it isn’t really like that at all. As I gaze into the distance, what is there at this moment to tell me how many eyes I have here – two, or three, or hundreds, or none? In fact, only one window appears on this side of my façade and that is wide open and frameless, with nobody looking out of it.” (On Having No Head).

[13] As in John’s representation of “the souls of them that were beheaded [animas decollatorum] for testimony [testimonium, marturion] of Jesus” (Rev 20:4). That Dante uses the word in relation to Holofernes (Purg 12.60), whose beheading by Judith is not a martyrdom in the religious sense, demonstrates its specific reference to decapitation. At the same time, the association with religious martyrdom is indelible, as in the sweetly bitter account of Dante’s crusading ancestor Cacciaguida: “Quivi fu’ io da quella gente turpa / disviluppato dal mondo fallace, / lo cui amor molt’anime deturpa; / e venni dal martiro a questa pace” (Par 15.145-48) [There by that foul folk was I released from the deceitful world, the love of which debases many souls, and I came from martyrdom to this peace]. Dante’s use of the term in relation to the sowers of discord carries secondary semantic complications (which is presumably why Singleton chooses to translate with the more literal ‘torment’). In addition to signifying the souls’ literal pain or sensation of suffering, as well as their noetic consciousness of it (the fact that they are suffering), the term generates other senses, for example: 1) that their present torment is a martyrdom, a violent witnessing of/giving-witness to spiritual truth, such that the schismatic is paradoxically sanctified in hell in a kind of sublime hagiographic profanation (Cf. “We are saints / In hell . . . Abattoir, abbatoir, mon Dieu quelle horreur” [Judas Priest, “Saints in Hell,” Stained Glass]); 2) that scandal and schism (laying traps/stumbling blocks for others and splitting off from unity) are obviated by the oblivion of martyrdom, in the sense of a forgetting of the imperative to become a martyr and/or in the sense of a retribution-defusing forgetting of martyrdom-events; 3) that by giving witness to the wonderful presence of a living being in hell the sowers of discord temporarily experience the real life within their living death, not substantially, but by a pure forgetting of the principle of witnessing-by-death, that, by a spontaneous overcoming of the idea that there is an other side of life that dying attests to. More generally, Dante use of martiro underscores concern with the question of the righteousness of those who give their lives within non-Christian faiths. Hence the importance of Mohammed as marker of schism. “Dante condemns Muhammed and Ali as individuals, not as emblematic representatives of a certain collectivity. . . . Schismatics lack ‘charity’ (the love that binds together the peaceful community) but they do not lack faith . . . Dante surely knew that in presenting Muhammad as a schismatic he was not calling into question the truth of Muhammad’s faith. What Dante did not know is that the essence of his political vision—which involves overcoming the boundaries that divide communities against each other, yet without assimilating diversity into a single hegemonic entity—is truly consonant with the essence of Muhammad’s” (Gregory B. Stone, Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 56).

[14] See Nicola Masciandaro, “Non potest hoc corpus decollari: Beheading and the Impossible,” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and Culture, eds. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011), Chapter 1.

[15] This is a strong reading in the sense that I am not accepting the common gloss that would parse the singular-plural person dilemma along the body/spirit distinction, for instance, as Maramauro’s commentary (1369-73) does: “ED ERANO DOI, idest lo capo e lo busto, E UNO, idest una anima sensitiva in doi parte.” I prefer the reading that Dante here presents an essential contradiction or impossible reality, as Castelvetro (1570) explains with regard to divine omnipotence: “Ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due. Pare contradizione; perciochè due non possono essere uno, nè uno può esser due; e nondimeno erano uno, considerando l'unità dello spirito, che reggeva concordevolmente l'una e l'altra parte, come se fosse uno congiunto e non seperato in due; e questo medesimo spirito, perchè si divideva reggendo le due predette parti seperate, si poteva domandare essere due. E perchè questo non avviene ne' capi e ne' busti separati in questo mondo, soggiugne: Come esser può que’ sa, che sì governa; cioè dio sa come questo sia possibile nello ’nferno, trattando così i dannati quando gli piace; quasi dica: dio fa queste cose, che paiono impossibili a noi, per tormentare i dannati con pene non usate.” That is, the essential contradiction of a divided person.

[16] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 82.

[17] François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Continuum, 2010), 23, my emphasis.

[18]

Figure 16. St. Denis: “Tunc erigens se sancti viri corpus exanime, apprehendit propriis manibus sanctum caput abscissum” (Legenda Aurea) [Raising itself, the lifeless body of the holy man then grasped with his own hands the sacred severed head]

[19] Cinema is an excellent instrument for holding in mind the structure of auto-spectral or self-projective being. A mixture of common sense and rumor, going back at least to the Middle Ages, lets us know that life near/after death is intensely self-filmic: “The fret and fury of immediate responses to the changing situations of earthly life is replaced in life after death by a more leisurely mood freed from the urgency of immediately needed actions. All the experience of the earthly career is now available for reflection in a form more vivid than is possible through memory in earthly life. The snapshots of earthly life have all been taken on the cinematic film of the mind and it is now time to study the original earthly life through the magnified projections of the filmed record on the screen of subjectivised consciousness" (Discourses 3.64). Auto-spectrality is cinematic in the sense that watching the film of one's life means being both alive and dead in a wonderful way. My life is over, but I am still experiencing it. I still live, but I am already dead. Something like this seems to be the natural state of all things to themselves, the reality of their being whoever they are. So the universal chaos or the cosmic abyss, instead of being an absolute place or principle from which everything contingently hangs, is more like the spontaneous cosmic machine or ultimate undesignable instrument through which the auto-spectral existence of each being is maintained simultaneously as itself and as a relation to innumerable other unpredictable beings. The evolution of consciousness as projection is a major theme of Meher Baba’s writings, in which God or the Real is portrayed as a kind of absolute spontaneous projector of itself: “When it manifests, the Nothing, which is most finite and latent in the Everything, projects out from a most finite point in the Everything where the Nothing as most finite is embodied. . . . when the most finite Nothing gets projected as Nothingness through the most finite creation point, which is also in the infinity pervaded by the infinite trio-nature of God, the projection of the most finite Nothingness—closely linked with and upheld by the all-pervading infinite trio-nature of God—gradually expands ad infinitum and manifests apparently as infinite Nothingness or as infinite Creation” (God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose).

Figure 17. Meher Baba at Paramount Studios.

[20] Presumably a truly universal or absolutely wholesale mistaking of being-in-universe for the real would hold other, anarcho-paradisical possibilities. Whence the mystical telos of horror, to realize life as illusion via the anamnesis of negative wonder: “Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings. . . . What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness” (H. P. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi [New York: Penguin, 2004], 252).

[21] “The allegory of the cave is the text of a signifier of desire which haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention” (Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 307).

[22] H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gate of the Silver Key,” Dreams in the Witch House, 272. The cinematic structure of Lovecraftian atheological gnosis – the reason it demands to but cannot be represented in cinema, that cinematic production is necessarily yet obsessively blind to it – is literalized in From Beyond: “Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre” (28). Cinematic unrepresentability is formally identical to the non-locatability of self as head in the sense that cinema does not portray, but is headless seeing. Cf. “The self as imperceptible, Carter’s great horror revelation, affects the reader of Lovecraft but only through the project of baroque spectatorship can this be felt cinematically. To represent it is an anathema” (Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality [Burlington: Ashgate, 2008], 94).