Jag korsar mitt egna öde i en dans, är det jag – som är en svart katt? Som borstar sitt egna molekylära flöde med en blomsterkrans? Är det jag – som är en trekvart, kanske ett dygn, ifrån ett skratt?
“Det ser inte bra ut”, sa du: “Säkert 73 stygn kvar nu”, sa du Är det jag? Det måste vara ett spratt, tänkte jag, alldeles färgglatt; det måste vara iscensatt Helvete, det är ta mig fan helt fullsatt, hela publiken ser mig bli ihopsatt, hela skriken hör mig bli fastsatt, hela fabriken överhettad och sysselsatt Och där är jag, du och alla dom andra i publiken i lyriken som ser komiken i tragiken och logiken i arbetslöshetsstatistiken – är jag ansatt, eller har jag blivit utsatt eller bara besatt i retoriken i statssymboliken i maktdynamiken i ticktack-dynamiten och hela jävla metropoliten i kalibaliken som mynnar raka vägen ner i en jävla debatt om skatt?
“Du måste hålla dig sysselsatt” – ett skämt som faller platt- pladaskt- nej fyfan säger jag godnatt, godnatt jag har blivit åsidosatt säger jag skadeglatt det är helt jävla skadat hur ni får mig att känna mig ifrågasatt och där är ni och frågar er, översatt i kilowatt, tills jag blir fullgod Fuck er säger jag godnatt, godnatt, jag vet, jag förstod nämligen att er metod som ni matat med hela ert övermod inte är värt ett jävla skvatt! Är det jag? Jag vet att jag är en skatt! En skatt! Så godnatt, godnatt.
Men…
Det är rött: måste vara mitt blod. Blått, midnattshimlens vemod, nej – fuck – det är polisen – necropolit-transvestiten blir fängslad i reprisen av sin egna föreställning i krisen av sin egna vanföreställning
– haha, varsågod –
skådisen är fast i sin egna klenod och i fosterställning; så gick det med hennes hjältemod För när grisen kommer och förgriper sig på cirkusens inställning till hela skiten, jo, då begår mellanakten harikiri ja, ni vet, där någonstans i trakten i takten med vad som sagts å sen blev det tydligt vad det var som blivit avlagt där på scenen: en fullskalig slakt staten med hela sin jävla makt i jakt efter en.
Och så går det… En efter en
Än sen?
Men sen säger du:
“Det ser inte bra ut. Det är säkert ett par dagar kvar nu”, att leva, eller kanske att återuppleva hela publiken skeva ur på någon annans agentur, hela föreställningen handlar om en Om en kreatur en kvarleva av en tänkbar och odefinierbar och fullständigt oanvändbar pissoar- ett kadaver som går av, som antar att det inte är mycket kvar av allt var (som det var) som forsar ut ur kultur- buren som ett dött kräldjur som krälar och drar sig där ur ut ur sin egen muskulatur, ur hamsterhjulet som i sin tur snurrar ur som Hoffmans cykeltur på hjul- balla inte ur då…
För
jag korsar mitt egna öde i en dans, är det jag – som är där? eller är jag någon annanstans eller är det någon annans dans som står kvar här, fullständigt ur balans?
A quiet pause. The dust dancing in the morning sunlight after a sleepless night. It opened a gate of thoughts for her. This whole project is written through a kind of stress and desperation. She doesn’t even know if it makes any sense. If Nick Land’s early texts “belong to the amphetamine gods” who do my own words belong to? – ah, there is that shift in perspective again.
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me. That I’ve turned myself into a kind of character; a kind of victim in a weird fiction story. A persona. (Am I Alma, the nurse, or Elisabet, the actress?)
Pathetic, yet raw and honest. I thought I would die this year, but I’m still alive. “A book is a suicide postponed,” to quote Emil Cioran. Somewhere I imagined that all these texts would fall like dust in the air and be nothing but a trace of my own existence. Something my nieces and nephews could discover in adulthood and marvel at; their dead aunt. “What the hell happened over there?” – a memoire of a mad tranny.
But in the midst of all theory and philosophy, poetry and prose, I’ve realized that I’m just an open wound letting itself bleed into words. None of this means anything. It’s just desperate attempts to keep living. A kind of auto-fixation on my own (socio-political) embodiment and my own eccentric obsessions. I am, in a way, nothing but a self so tired of itself that it tries to dig through itself to become something else: a stranger. But at the same time, I know what it’s like to be a stranger to oneself.
Why is existence so cruel? So unbearably vicious. I just wish to rest a little, for no matter how much I dig and search for this metamorphosis, the deafening hum of this existence remains ever the same. “The eternal now,” I experience it. This endless tedium that every bodhisattva thrives in, seems to me to be its own special kind of hell.
I envy the stranger. They wake up in the morning, go to work, do their daily chores, and go to bed at night only to start over. Sisyphus is happy, says Camus, but for me the everyday was always something that concealed something far more interesting. The darkness in the attic, the enormous cricket in the basement playing its own little sonata, the dreams of the night, the trolls in the forest, the gnomes under the floorboards, and all the peculiarities that gave rise to fairy tales and fables. The disenchantment of the world was catastrophic for me as a growing child. But the stranger loves it precisely for what it is; boring, slow, deceptive, and at the same time the only thing that makes their existence bearable. They carry death in a different way than I do; the little death found in sleep and rest.
All I find is Levinas’ “il y a”; the absolute swarm of pure existence, anonymous and neutral. Like an analog TV tuned to a dead channel. It is before this monstrous face that I defend my own constructions. Imago is, as I have shown, a kind of unmasking of reality’s own images. But there is nothing behind the mask. Isn’t that the whole point of “The King in Yellow”? And if the king’s mask were to be removed, against all odds, there would only be Levinas’ il y a; staring at one like a negative abyss.
*she gasps in horror*
Yet…
Yet she is tired. So goddamn fucking tired. But still she keeps writing… Words. Until they become letters. Meaningsless signs. Sighs…
On this day, the sun Appeared—no, not slowly over the horizon— But right in the city square. A blast of dazzle poured over, Not from the middle sky, But from the earth torn raggedly open.
Human shadows, dazed and lost, pitched In every direction: this blaze, Not risen from the east, Smashed in the city’s heart— An immense wheel Of Death’s swart suncar, spinning down and apart In every direction. Instant of a sun’s rise and set. Vision-annihilating flare one compressed noon.
And then? It was not human shadows that lengthened, paled, and died; It was men suddenly become as mist, then gone. The shadows stay: Burned on rocks, stones of these vacant streets. A sun conjured by men converted men to air, to nothing; White shadows singed on the black rock give back Man’s witness to himself.
The two suns on earth caused a wave of fear. A “point of no return” for the entire history of the Earth.
Japanese culture carries something unique within itself, not only because of the catastrophe that became the end of the Second World War. During the Sengoku period, Japanese culture consisted of a state of permanent war. This remote island at the world’s end held within itself a war machine that refused stratification. But the beginning of the Edo period would bring precisely such a stratification. Like a poltergeist, the violence echoed. The film Harakiri (1962) by Masaki Kobayashi shows how this spectre stretched into a kind of catastrophe; the consequences of peace for a culture that had sustained itself through violent expenditure. Bushido’s code of honour became a necessity for the warrior class’s own self-identity, which was on the verge of fading in this new era of peace. It already knew then that it was living dead.
Torn between tradition and the external threat of the western capital-machine, Edo soon collapsed into a new era; the Meiji period. The warrior class fell, and what had previously borne the island’s identity and existence now began to wither away in the violent light of the sun. An explosion would come to organise the accursed share into a fascist war machine. This machine would be annihilated in two solar explosions.
Yukio Mishima would later write:
“The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.” (Sun and Steel, 1968)
My eyes see this only from a Western perspective (albeit with a Nordic melancholy), and thus I fall into the same trap as Bataille and so many other Western thinkers; I see what my eye desires. But it is precisely this desire that I wish your gazes to fix upon. What I am trying to reveal is a mentality that only a culture that has lost itself can see; where what is lost is war as such. Perhaps it could be likened to the Aztecs’ loss of their gods and human sacrifice. Where the old gods got banned, the Catholic saints would become the new images in which the old gods could survive, albeit as an after-image. Only in such a culture can Santa Muerte be awakened to life as Mictēcacihuātl—and only in a culture that has lost its title as warrior can the dance of darkness be awakened to life. Mishima would put words to this loss and thus become a manifestation of this geist of loss. Like Nick Land’s FromSoftware-destiny of fascist madness, Mishima fell into his own fascist destiny; an inevitably failed coup d’état and thereby an equally inevitable seppuku.
In 1959, Tatsumi Hijikata performed a play based on Mishima’s Forbidden Colors (1951–53). As a result, Hijikata became an iconoclast. His new dance would later be called “butoh” (舞踏), a word that had previously been associated with European ballroom dancing. In its way of both deterritorialising Western culture and traditional Japanese culture, a new art form had emerged.
“I dance in the place where the large cosmos meets the small cosmos. I stand in the large cosmos and everywhere my hand reaches is the small cosmos. I understand where the meeting place is.” (Kazuo Ohno)
Butoh is a ritual; a becoming, an imago as after-image. The dance is only an expression of a placement; at the breaking point between macro and micro. It is in this place that the dead pass, and thus butoh is a dance with the dead. It is a carnival in the realm of the dead, where dead and living march side by side as equals. Let the dead steer your body. Imagine swarms of insects in your very own corpse and let all their desires tear you to pieces.
Through this placement; the intersection between the large and the small, what can be released? This is the question the butoh dancer asks themselves. In the light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of concentration camps and lynchings; what have we become? The two suns rip the earth open, the dead pass at the intersection of macro and micro, and the dancer’s body is the ground where this meeting occurs.
We, trannies, fags and dykes, immigrants, addicts and vermin; what fucking choice do we have other than to allow our origin and pasts to move us? We are thousands lying in society’s ditches, rotting. In this multiplicity, in this multitude; what remains but a dance of darkness within our decaying corpses?
I don’t know about you, but I refuse to die as an abstraction. I refuse to be killed by an abstraction, and all my comrades in the realm of the dead haunt my body. The one that aches and enjoys and trembles and vomits, traced through the tragedies of history. Whatever happens, I must walk in this palace between the large cosmos and the small cosmos. It means everything to me. Too much weight on one side and I fall into fascistoid paranoia. Too much weight on the other side and I die in the state apparatus’ abstraction. Butoh is the only way forward. Among the dead I can find myself; I can find my flock. Only there can I reinstate myself as warrior:
“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.” (Mishima, Yukio. Blood and Steel. 1968)
We must occupie this community of warriors; as traces and after-images in the same way Mictēcacihuātl occupies the image of Our Lady of Holy Death. We are the choir of De mördades fria republik [The Free Republic of Those Murdered] in Dan Berglunds protest song. And thus, let us haunt all the ballrooms that exist and set all of Paris ablaze. What choice do we really have?
I sat at the desk. The clock had already passed midnight; the witching hour. I felt a poem bubbling in my throat. Something that had to get out. The field of vision was unstable, just like my fucking psyche. I woke up at 22:00 that same day. The circadian rhythm ruined in glitter-like shards. A cup of tea with honey was the taste that followed her in thought as the discs on the inside spun imaginally. This was not surrealism. Autodidactic word-flows in autonomist language-waves. A displacement had taken place where she no longer resided within herself. Subjectivity wandered between meta-questions about her own obsessions and what kind of machinery the imaginal discs were.
They were about to have sex. They stood at the edge of a football field and the sky was blue. The sun on the neck illuminating the dream-being’s porcelain face. Only as a monster could she have sex with women; as an androgynous non-human. Sexuality bore wounds of heterosexuality; with men she was woman, with women she was a kind of post-man. Perhaps the subject of Übermensch, who the fuck knows. But the thought struck her: “This is a dream. Is sex with dream-beings just a kind of masturbation? To what degree is consent required?”
“What are you thinking about?” asked the young woman and tucked her hair behind her ear. Far too much of a normie to even grasp the dreaming monstrosity that stood before her with the sun burning on the neck.
“I’m thinking… Do you have experiences? Qualia, I mean… Do you feel things in first-person?” the monster replied.
The dream-being stopped smiling. And the dreamer felt how the dream-body vanished into the waking-body. Sank through the whole of reality down into the bed and out of Sandman’s stronghold. She was invaded by angry shadows; beings that now attacked her in the room from a childhood scenery. It smelled of madeleine cake and in paralysis she managed to interrupt their assault on her body: “Hey, shouldn’t we just dance instead?” The whole dream-world became a rave that soon died out into an awakening.
But she never got an answer to her question.
The words she got down on paper felt more and more like their own. As if she was never really an actor in the writing itself. The language, more precisely her own language, felt more and more alien to her. That was perhaps why she slipped from first-person perspective to third person. Her own words were her golem. A kind of abomination that demanded human sacrifice and blood. Her blood. And on the very language itself zombie-God read aloud: אֱמֶת
hetvic you were once an obsession, made into dust we realised you had left us, you broke our trust, for all our lust culminated into us, taking over a confession, quick, before we turn the entire fucking world into rust. hetvic a chick with a dick, tick, tick, tick before the boom-matchstick licks the entire fucking world into an amnestic broomstick reading beatnik poetry on a napkin-picknick ice-pick in the head reading thick lipstick on your mannequin lips- (Freudian lip-slip) throwing bricks with slapstick comedy kicks through the window of your nephric vomit; this is it! you're homesick, ready to bootlick in order to noclip yourself out of nostalgic love and romantic carnival masquerades betrayed, yet afraid of what is to come begone! (she says) flayed in a maize field, more like a grenade-filled pit of disarray; a phrase spilled "Monday" on your bloody valentine's highway - not today! not today you ain't! Fuck, it is alright; just turn off the lights, cause - Yuck, it's a cockfight, going alright, tie that bowtie tight while you let those wild cocks die it's a tie, well, guess it's alright; you can't win every fight Just don't let yourself smell that bad luck, cause- we'd love you to continue to fuck - no fuck - we meant, to write.
Mina vänner, jag är hemsökt av ett krig mellan dåtidens och framtidens jag. Korpars munnar vattnas utan presens. Tempus var-är-kommer i karambollage med sig själv. Det finns inget här. Så udda hur denna och den här bara är uttryck för ‘den där’; en pekande intentionalitet som bär, absolut ingenting.
Temporalitet och koordination i kollision. Krockdocka, funnen i en smocka som satte temporala loben i snurr. Gjorde om hela jorden till ett nervklot. Denna globen hamnade i spinn mellan tid och otid, stund och blund av här och där. Där inte ens korparna bär kropparna, där tär knopparnas här. Härförarens egna därförare förlorade sin förhistoriska förlorare för allt det där är som det är: en jävla bluff.
Och så med en knuff kom pronomen och tempus. I origami-orgasm kom hennes cytoplasm i ett kast från denna kataklysmska kakafoni av ringande telefoni från ett bortglömt 90-tal. “Hej är du vaken?” – nej det fångar inte tillvaron rätt. Draken står där alldeles mätt och naken på konfusion som upplöses i en sorts konfirmation av tidens egna konfrontation med sig själv. Ett slag som blev nedspolat i en älv av självaste Apep som angrep sig själv på existensens egen tillhörighet av tillvarighet. Ett själv. Hon är knäpp! Det stämmer inte; det är ett jävla angrepp, sa jag ju. Svälj! Dag ut och solens tjut ut i hela rymden. Hon är på rymmen! Det må vara så. Associationsbölja i skrotslöja, bildar dammar i himlen som skrapas sönder av ögonbrynen. Och ner faller tårarna som spolar herr Imse Vimse Spindel bort. Men nu är det fucking torrt. Solen röd bjuder in till död och öken, mina vänner.
“My spirit drives me now to sing about the forms of things changed into new bodies. Since you gods caused these transformations, too, inspire what I am going to write about, and bring forth an uninterrupted song, from the primal origins of the world down to this present age.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. [One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.]” (Kafka, Franz. 1915. The Metamorphosis). Gregor had already opened himself to the transformation without knowing it. He had achieved a kind of alchemical miracle; it is not difficult to imagine a red shimmering light beneath the night in which the transformation occurred. Rubedo! Rubedo! The sun shone like an atomic bomb. It brings the mind to blood. To use Bataille’s own words in Blue of Noon: “Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill?” (1935).
In another plateau I have already introduced the concept of imago. But where I previously took my point of departure in our shared death, there is so much more to say. There are in fact two aspects of the concept that I want to highlight: (i) becoming and the concept’s place in a revolutionary aesthetics, and (ii) the concept’s relation to an ephemeral imaginality. In line with my entire project (and ADHD brain), I will not follow a linear argument below. I am tired of trees and indifferent logic. I want to sing you a song from the primal beginning of existence itself and thereby also open the door to the imaginal. A door like in Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902); and I pity all the right-thinking for their disappointment at the nothing that lies behind it.
Thus, to return to our beloved Gregor Samsa, his transformation carries a kind of inverted philosopher’s stone. There is a folded distinction here between what Deleuze and Guattari call “a minor” and “a major” literature. We may imagine Dante’s snow-white rose in Paradiso as representing the major form of the final alchemical process, while Gregor Samsa’s transformation mirrors the corresponding minor form. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), the concepts diverge: a major kind of literature territorializes language; it totalizes it and binds it into an overarching whole. A minor kind of literature subverts language; it deterritorializes it and thus acts as a resistance against language itself. Thus, what a traditional alchemical transformation does is a kind of individuation of the self; the philosopher’s stone totalizes the self and incorporates its opposites into a unity. The self becomes territorialized by itself. Gilgamesh’s journey toward self-realization, to attain immortality and thus access the philosopher’s stone, is an expression of this form of process. To encounter death and incorporate this one’s own death is undoubtedly a kind of territorialization of our own brokenness, but it is a totalization that is impossible; brokenness itself makes it impossible for the self to become whole. Kafka’s metamorphosis exemplifies this distinction better; for it is through a radical deterritorialization that the insight of death occurs. One’s own death makes us flee from the self; the self’s own incompleteness drives it beyond itself, into new openings and lines of flight. This is the dark side, or the minor philosopher’s stone. Gregor Samsa’s transformation is in many ways violent in this respect. His total shame and confusion, and his family’s inability to deal with his new form, arise from his imago; he had become an alien even to himself.
It should also be noted that the German word “Ungeziefer” (vermin) etymologically means “animals unsuitable for sacrifice” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ungeziefer). In Bataille’s reading of Hegel in Hegel, Death and Sacrifice (1990), he shows how Hegel’s sacrifice is humanity’s expulsion of the inner animal; the inner beast. In a way, Enkidu’s death became a sacrifice for Gilgamesh insofar as Enkidu, the wild man, represented Gilgamesh’s own death. This being-toward-death that emerges within the human is revealed for Hegel precisely through the animal in sacrifice; it reveals the human as a life lived from death. When the animal is killed, the self identifies with this animal and sees itself disappear with it. But this “Ungeziefer,” this pest that arises in imaginal metamorphosis, does not conceal death behind a veil as in monumentalism; instead, it allows itself to be identified beyond the dialectic between human and animal, master and slave, as an alien. It sees the joy in death (what a liberation that even others’ memories of me will disappear in the sands of time!) while at the same time carrying its melancholic sorrow at becoming a trace in the desert of existence, which will nevertheless be blown away into oblivion. For it is a pest in the sense that it is not meant to be sacrificed; it carries its own negativity and incompleteness without the need to resolve this immanent instability.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI, the young woman Arachne challenges the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest. Minerva weaves an artwork, an image, of divine order and its splendor, along with warnings of what hubris leads to. Arachne, in turn, creates an image of the gods’ violence, the consequences of divine power, and she sanctifies difference in itself; the new over the old. Her images of the abuse of divine power I read as imago. Where Minerva seeks to maintain the status quo and totalize the singular power of divinity over existence, Arachne seeks liberation from it; she seeks something new and thus defies the very conditions of existence itself (the gods read as representatives of these conditions). Arachne’s hubris is not remarkable in the sense that she sees herself as unbeatable and uniquely superior, as an expression of narcissism. On the contrary: her hubris is an expression of her will to freedom and her will to flee from herself as much as from the tyranny of the gods. This very hubris becomes her downfall because of that will. It is through her own Magnum Opus that she opens the door to imago; a transformation that, like Gregor Samsa, turns her into a pest—in her case, a spider. Ovid’s words should also be illuminated here: “The girl, now desperate, could not endure the blows [of Minerva], and, in a burst of courage, fixed a noose around her neck.” (1892). Her art drove the gods to violate her to the point that she committed suicide “in courage.” Her courage to follow her own line of flight thus became her own ecdysis into imago. In a way, she collided with her own negativity in a becoming-spider.
Just as Deleuze and Guattari observe in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), the minor transformation does not arise from the minority’s self-transformation; it arises from the majority’s. Just as a minority writer produces a minor language within the major language, the minor philosopher’s stone arises through the greater rubedo process. And just as the impossibility of not writing creates the conditions for a minor literature, the same conditions for imago arise through an impossibility of becoming-majority. It is with Minerva’s own art form, weaving, that Arachne defeats her. But she must weave; the impossibility of refraining is the very condition of her so-called “hubris.” Thus, it is from the starting point of the old that openings exist—the doors that release what rots and welcome the arrival of the new. The very impossibility of finding the new in the old is our door to the new.
“Writing like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its burrow. And to do that, finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert.” (ibid).
Ballroom culture was an imago winged like a butterfly. Vogue dance reveals an important aspect while exemplifying the criterion of impossibility; by imitating the images of Vogue magazine, the queer desire to attain the same majority status represented by its models was liberated. Through this impossibility of territorialization, a radical deterritorialization of the simulacra that Vogue totalized instead emerged. Here a new distinction awakens: that between imago and simulacra.
What exactly is an image? This is a rhetorical question. The image of the image as representation of reality has already been painted by Plato and Aristotle. Mimesis I take here as this image of the Image; a photographer photographing a tree, a selfie, a sketch of an idiot. X is an object and Y is a meme of the object, a representation. Dionysius’ imitatio, in contrast to the concept of mimesis, presupposes an ability to go beyond the image of the object; where the representation is not tied to the object itself, but to the image of the object. Imitatio imitates the representation of an object itself and can thus be seen as a higher order of image, where the image is not only an image of an object, but also an image of an image that depicts an object. Ah! Appreciate my humor, my companions! (That is an order).
But in the highest order of images we have simulacra. Baudrillard writes in Simulation and Simulacra (1994):
“Such is the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”
Simulacra are thus images whose object is a reflection of themselves. It becomes clearer still in Baudrillard’s opening quotation from Ecclesiastes:
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
In a world of memes there are only memes to make memes from. We live in a time where every image we encounter on a screen risks being AI-generated; every piece of media is its own Orphic trap: “Like Orpheus, it always turns around too soon, and, like Eurydice, its object falls back into Hades.” (1994). What remains are not objects, but simulacra in a web of learned associative patterns. An image is thus not only representation but imagination. And how their content is coded depends on how these associative patterns are arranged in a web of semantic meaning.
What is a woman, really? This is a rhetorical question. A trans woman sees herself in a self-portrait; she experiences the violence of associative patterns upon her body. She experiences an impossibility; an impossibility of reproducing her own body within a majority image. Where Vogue imitated simulacra from fashion magazines, she imitates woman. What distinguishes her from a cis woman is that the cis woman imitates a majority image of a mannequin:
“To be castrated is to be covered with phallic substitutes. The woman is covered in them, she is summoned to produce a phallus from her body, on pain of perhaps not being desirable. And if women are not fetishists it is because they perform this labour of continual fetishisation on themselves, they become dolls. We know that the doll is a fetish produced in order to be continually dressed and undressed, dressed up and dressed down. It is this play of covering anduncovering that gives the doll its childhood symbolic value, it is in this play, conversely, that every object- and symbolic relation regresses when the woman turns herself into a doll, becomes her own fetish and the fetish of the other. Freud says: ‘pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallise the last moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.” (Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. Symbolic Exchange in Death.)
The trans experience is an imaginal metamorphosis in this respect. And here the concept of imago reveals its full face: it is a subversion of simulacra that arises in the deterritorialization of images. Becoming-woman is, in itself, according to Baudrillard’s observation, its own transformation: to become mannequin. The impossibility of becoming Marilyn Monroe creates its own imago. TERF logic, which sets trans women and cis women against each other, has gouged out its own eyes; it does not see the image of woman itself for fear that this same image will be deterritorialized. Becoming-mannequin is itself an imago; the trans woman castrates herself in order to carry her own phallic substitutes. The mannequin does not mask any truth: it is its own truth. Where a caterpillar is merely a mask for its true form as a butterfly, its imago is an unmasking.
It is in this that I also unmask imago as a concept; I repeat: where a caterpillar is merely a mask for its true form as a butterfly, its imago is an unmasking. It is in a confrontation with one’s own impossibility, one’s own negativity, that imago arises. It is not merely a flat wabi-sabi logic that follows from this metamorphosis; it is an imitation that imitates neither human nor animal. It is an imitation of a pest; that which cannot become sacred. Ecdysis is thus an unmasking of the majority’s simulacra:
“Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory. At once territories and metamorphoses have been taken from them-the unconscious is the individual structure of mourning in which this loss is incessantly, hopelessly replayed-animals are the nostalgia for it. The question that they raise for us would thus be this one: don’t we live now and already, beyond the effects of the linearity and the accumulation of reason, beyond the effects of the conscious and unconscious, according to this brute, symbolic mode, of indefinite cycling and reversion over a finite space? And beyond the ideal schema that is that of our culture, of all culture maybe, of the accumulation of energy, and of the final liberation, don’t we dream of implosion rather than of explosion, of metamorphosis rather than energy, of obligation and ritual de fiance rather than of liberty, of the territorial cycle rather than of . . . But the animals do not ask questions. They are silent.” (Baudrillard, 1994).
We have lost the beast among all simulacra, but imago is not here a rediscovery of the old (of the beast); it is a creation of the new (of the pest). Simulacra are, in this sense, the very door to imago. It is through simulacra that we can hatch our cocoon and open our wings as a new kind of monster. The point (if there even is one) is not to create something that survives, but to create something dying, something limping, something allowed to pass. Vogue dance has once again been territorialized into the majority via Beyoncé. It was never a question of creating an image that survived. Our way of surviving was to allow ourselves to be grateful like the dead; that we could break free like butterflies with open wings toward the new and pure difference.
Today belongs to the PMS-gods. While hormonal depressive madness enters, Zizek and Bataille is having a duel by chess-boxing with my very own frontal lobe as the arena. While Zizek did quite alright in the chess, Bataille started to hit himself in the face during the second round to the point of collapsing Hegelian dialectics on the other side of the room (actually my entire spinal cord). In horror of the birth of the catastrophe, Zizek offered his queen in return and thus, made a leap of faith that accidentally provoked an existential meltdown so severe that not only ideology met its rupture (happening in my amygdala), but also made sure that the precondition of any ordered reality as such melted into flames (happening in my pinneal gland). Thus proving that the only good ending in Elden Ring is that of the Frenzied Flame. In this regard, no one has a chance against Bataille our all mighty cenobite prophet. Not even Deleuze and Guattari teamed up in a game of Age of Empires II against him. (No one can beat his army of jaguar warriors, not even Satan and God teamed up with Nick Land).
“Ever has the river risen and brought us flood, the mayfly floating on the water. On the face of the sun its countenance gazes, then all of a sudden nothing is there!”
The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet X
Enkidu of the wild would be the only one who could measure himself against Gilgamesh. The gods brought his existence as a counterweight to Gilgamesh’s strength. But in their struggle, Gilgamesh stood as the victor. In the encounter with this Other, Gilgamesh found himself, or so he thought. Yet Enkidu remained merely a mirror; Hegel’s slave constructed through friendship.
Gilgamesh had found an equal, and together with this equal he wished to build a monument that could reflect his own greatness. Therefore, in hubris, they defied the gods together and killed Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest. Ishtar herself, dazzled by Gilgamesh’s feat, asked for his love. But Gilgamesh did not desire the love of the gods; he was not receptive to the negativity of love that Byung-Chul Han unmasks in The Agony of Eros (2017), for love presupposes death—the submission of the self before death. Ishtar became enraged, not out of pride, but because of Gilgamesh’s self-love and vanity, and thus sent the Bull of Heaven in a failed attempt to punish him and Enkidu. With one of the bull’s own limbs, Enkidu humiliated Ishtar, which was punished with a divine death sentence.
In Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh saw his own mortality. Enkidu had given Gilgamesh the eyes of an Other with which to behold himself. Through the death of the Other, he now saw the fragility, a crack, within the self. In Enkidu’s death, he became certain of his own powerlessness as master over slave. He wandered through the wild, seeking the clay that could piece the self together; to make it whole and eternal, and rid himself of existence’s immanent incompleteness. And in the moment he believed he had found it, a serpent stole his hope and shed its skin.
Heidegger was right in his analysis that death is one’s own. It is not possible to understand one’s own death through another. Gilgamesh’s moment of “aletheia” was only made possible through his dialectical relation to Enkidu. The Self—all singularity of becoming—is inherently negative (I am willing to step down from my throne of Deleuzianism, forgive me my beloveds). Just as one cannot find a lost object where it is not located, one can never find a negativity that is already present. Death as such is always present as a watchful dark precondition for our existence. The self is thus always haunted by something other than itself: its own end.
Monumentalism is a curse. It conceals death with a veil. Through the will to create permanence, through the murder of Humbaba, a distorted lie arises that prevents the self from seeing itself. We live among all these damn monuments. They are stacked upon each other and refuse to disappear, obscuring our sun and its desert.
Monumentalism praises its own lies. It justifies itself by being a documentation; a “I was here” carved into a filthy toilet. But Kilroy was no builder of monuments. The concern of monumentalism is not memory, but the archive—perhaps memory as a computer remembers. But for the one who cannot forget, there is nothing to remember. It creates an impossibility of mourning. A grief that was never allowed to be experienced (sad that I mourn mourning). In the same way that contemporary love is not love but a kind of pornographization of love—a sort of love without suffering, as Byung-Chul Han argues—monumentalism carries a kind of pornographization of our own death:
“Death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others. Etiquette forbids any reference to the dead. Cremation is the limit point of this discrete elimination, since it minimalises the remains. No more vertigo of death, only dereliction [désaffecté]. And the immense funeral cortège is no longer of a pious order, it is the sign of dereliction itself, of the consumption of death. In consequence, it grows in proportion to the disinvestment of death. […]
Speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and obscene manner. Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is legal, only death is pornographic. Society, having ‘liberated’ sexuality, progressively replaces it with death which functions as a secret rite and fundamental prohibition. In a previous, religious phase, death was revealed, recognised, while sexuality was prohibited. Today the opposite is true. But all ‘historical’ societies are arranged so as to dissociate sex and death in every possible way, and play the liberation of one off against the other which is a way of neutralising them both.” (Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. Symbolic Exchange in Death.)
Love requires a submission to the Other, and grief requires an abandonment of the self; our own life. Ironic, I know. “To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death” (ibid).
It is not true that authenticity has died in this necropolis of stacked monuments. Death is my own. It is the constant possibility of my own impossibility. To murder is to steal someone else’s death; the most radical form of enslavement. Even a slave owns their own death where they do not own their life; in the master-slave dialectic, the slave is the one who clings to life:
“Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave describes the battle for life and death. The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. Physical superiority does not determine the outcome of the struggle. Instead, what proves decisive is the ‘ability to die,’ or a capacity for death. Those who do not have freedom unto death (Freiheit zum Tod) do not risk their life. Instead of ‘following through to the point of death’ (mit sich selbst bis auf den Tod zu gehen), they remain ‘standing alone within death’ (an sich selbst innerhalb des Todes stehen). The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.” (Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. 2017)
To be authentic is to overcome this dialectic—something not even Gilgamesh managed. I am not romanticizing death with my silly little words. Yet in order to honor life, we must honor death and thus, to be authentic, we need to integrate our negativity into virtue; we must love our fate.
Art may be dead in this world of digital data registration, where art is monumentalized. But what is still possible is to create a mayfly on the river. A poem that only I get to read. A symphony for deaf ears and a work of art on an abandoned wall. Nothing has been stolen; we only need to learn to open our eyes to events. To learn to open doors where the new may arrive and the old may be forgotten. The band The Grateful Dead was such an arrival. (Half-formed thought: if we must imagine Sisyphus happy, then we must imagine the dead as grateful).
This kind of event should perhaps be called imago; the Latin word for “image,” but also the origin of the English “imagine”—to envision. These “images” stand in contrast to Baudrillard’s “simulacra,” as they are temporary openings of something new—thus not copies. An imago is a metamorphosis of the old, which allows death and celebrates its own fate as mortal. It is within this concept that we can mourn: to allow ourselves to be incomplete. By confronting our own negativity and letting the old die in ecdysis. But just as love forces us to die in the Other, we must have the courage to let ourselves die in what is arriving.
Alas! Down with monumental art, and long live the imaginal. For we are all mayflies on the river.
Jag ser färger blinda i mörker Och frukter falla träd i fantasier En binda runt bröstet och allt är tröstet Älskad i motbjudelse och förbud i förbindelse med halshuggna tårar i ansiktets förblindelse.
Förruttnelsen är divergent; permanent nu - språkmässigt inkompetent nu - förädlad och sorgsen nu - förbränning i sekretionsfasen och du bara skrattar åt villfarelsen nu och du bar slagstiftet mot pannan nu och du bara slagfjädrar loppet nu och jag
ser färger rött i avloppet nu - hör märgen brista i kroppen nu - är Wernickes område i botten nu? - sprätter hjärnbalken upp nu? - lobala temporala patroner i geo- traumatiska gangliala stopp- i Nangijala nu och du - varför slet du mig itu?
Mother Earth; our very own Santa Muerte. Hell is literally derived from her. We are born out of sunlight; Sol our very own prime mover. Always on the move, hunted by voracious wolves. Are they not her own shadow?
Consumption isn’t just an act of submerging the Other into the Self. It is a way of giving back. Of expelling a part of the Self onto Earth. Death, as such, must be understood as the subject of the Earth. By consumption, the Reaper takes back what was borrowed from her. But she always gives back in the form of life. We are her excrement in the most literal sense. Only in her dance with the ever self-consuming explosions of the Sun do we live:
“The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.” (Bataille, George. The Solar Anus. 1931. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-solar-anus)
As much as the night is being hunted by the Sun, we are in a way being hunted by Death. Being consumed, literally or figuratively, by our distant siblings may be the most natural thing to die. Maggots to the Earth or by the very monsters of our own imagination. By our very own body in cancerous or autoimmune self-consumption, in which our bodies reveals themselves to be as foreign to us as teeth penetrating our skin.
I met someone interesting today. Someone who pointed me towards the point of no return, by showing me the virtual surface of clay. Ceramics is a parody of life. We build our lives with it; forming our very own little earth, of the Earth. As much as life is a fractalization of the Mother Earth; ceramics are the fractalization of the human earth. A patterning of its own kind.
It is though, a parody, only so far as it is its own becoming-out-of-earth. For clay has no going back; it lacks consumption. It is the Earth othering itself, with no point of return. Ceramics is thus violent in its own kind. It pulls out something from the body without giving anything in return. Thus, it bears its own curse of stagnation.
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (D&G, A Thousand Plateus – blablabla you all know I’m a D&G fan so go find the page yourselves).
Isn’t this striking? That philosophy in many ways is a form of ceramic sculpturing; it contains the same violence. Though, as with ceramics, do not offer a remit. It is only in decay that thought can perceive patterns, and there are always a redundancy of decaying courthouses of reason; whole crowds of architectures and sculptures of thought, piled on each other in layers and layers. Decaying. Refusing to go away.
This is its own catastrophe. There is a point of no return in thinking. We can only throw so many bricks through the window. We can only hope for a shore of ceramic shells. A desert of the ruins of our minds.
I want to divulge Death in this way. There is another Death, more primal than that of Hel. There is a Death of No Return.
Humans are made of clay, it is said. But, in this interpretation, we are not made of clay in substance, but in form. A life, as such, is clay in form; all life does return, by the rules of consumption. But it is not a return of “the same”; it is a return of difference:
“The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’, but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition’. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition.)
Thus, what is meant by life as clay in form, is that life as such will only return on the basis of the difference. Thus, ceramics uncover that the new is conditional. Only will the curse of ultimate Death be lifted by the return of something different. The horrors of stagnation is much greater than the horror of being (self-)consumed, because, stagnation itself points towards a threshold; that of the Point of No Return. The Sun only shines in the promise of its own demise. This is the promise of ceramics. And thus, maybe Prometheus is the parody of Pandora and not the other way around. Prometheus gave us hydrogen bombs; Pandora gave us difference.
