Category: General

A Cartography of Immanence

“Slumber, watcher, till the spheres
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv’d, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o’er
Shall the past disturb thy door.”

H. P. Lovecraft, Polaris.

It is in the confrontation with a question that the need for philosophy arises. We all carry a monstrous obsession somewhere within us—even though I am aware that such a formulation is merely rhetorical. I have never been a philosopher in the strict sense; I have only, as far as I can tell, become one out of sheer necessity. For it is my own obsessions that have called out for a language. I have therefore found it easier to see myself as a poet or an artist, more than anything else. The draftsman’s obsession with lines; the painter’s obsession with colour; the poet’s obsession with mute truth; the actor’s obsession with the person. All of them carry violent experiences of the confrontation with being. My own obsession is that of maps, of understanding my own positioning in the embroidery of being. Navigating among desires; among ideas, among things and other creatures’ desires, so as somewhere to be able to designate my own habitat. An obsession born of a world’s lack of terra incognita.

It is no surprise that the most painful confrontation for me has issued in the question of who I am. We live, after all, in the decaying body of liberalism and its undead obsession with the individual. But that is also why the question as such is wrongly posed. What the contemporary subject has to face is rather, as Lyotard observed in The Postmodern Condition (1984), a question of position: “where am I?” We find ourselves in a world lacking a totalising narrative and thus also lacking any navigation of where we are and where we are going. Modernity offered the Hegelian project; a telos toward absolute freedom. Art could conjure the path for the new, images that had never before been seen. Music broke through in the same spirit, jazz as music’s own freedom fighter against its own limitations. And literature laid bare the character of the modern subject before its own anxiety born of its agency or alienation.

Baudrillard, for his part, shows how territory in our time has been replaced by the map; reality has been replaced by the hyperreal. He understood that if the map were to become more detailed than the reality it represents, the distinction between them would cease. A map without terra incognita is in itself a map with nothing but terra incognita.

Our time’s confrontation with reality is thus deictic; we find ourselves in a grammatical catastrophe where our language cannot answer to our positioning in time, space, or person in a way that allows us to navigate. Modernity’s catastrophe is also deictic, but that age does not demand an answer concerning longitude or latitude; it demands an answer about an origo. Nietzsche diagnosed modernity’s problem: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” (The Gay Science, 1974)—God, as answer to the question of existence, is for Nietzsche obsolete. And it is with this in mind that Jordan Peterson weeps about his cultural Marxist enemies: “They want vengeance against God for the crime of Being.” For he envies us this direction; this liberation born of ressentiment against God himself. He cries out like Christ on the cross: why has he forsaken us without an answer to the violent question of Being?—An assurance of the Christian right’s narcissistic hubris toward their own god.

It is also from this point of departure that Heidegger finds himself. It is in the encounter with God—the origo of all being—and his disappearance that he can return to a confrontation with being as such. Dasein as a concept is thus an answer to and an acknowledgment of the rootlessness that arises in a world that has lost the origo of being. Heidegger’s deictic obsession, the reason a concept like Dasein [being-there] emerges, comes out of a crisis in which Plato has been inverted. Yet at the same time it is almost a mockery of us in delirium; the very question we are asking is that of where “there” is, and as such, it is almost laughable how such a concept could be useful today other than as a nostalgic relic from the past.

Genealogy of Origo

How the fuck did we end up here? In such unbearable top shelf vertigo? In delirium? Were we in such need of God that his death left us in indexical amnesia? We seem to have a language capable of producing a diagnosis for this problem, but as yet we lack a grammar that can answer a world that has replaced the territory with a map.

“The Greeks might seem to have confirmed the death of the sage and to have replaced him with philosophers—the friends of wisdom, those who seek wisdom but do not formally possess it.” (Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? 1994).

In the same way that God became obsolete for modernity, the sages were obsolete for the Greeks; a need arose to take wisdom away from the wise person, and thereby to replace that person with someone who was not wise but who was a friend of wisdom, and thus also someone who could lay claim on wisdom’s behalf. This need came from a problem of saturation: what happens when there are too many wise aunts and old men? When those we can trust to bear truth have become oversaturated, and those who claim to possess wisdom all make contradictory claims? In such a situation we need a new language; a language that separates quality from person. Deleuze shows how Plato is the inventor of this new language; the one who separates wisdom from the human being and replaces the wise man with the friend of wisdom (Difference and Repetition, 1994). Plato’s philosophy is thus an answer to the question of who bears the true claim. Plato’s Ideas, and thereby the Idea as a concept, became a language for carrying out such a sorting among rival claimants. A way of sorting and identifying snake oil.

From Plato’s new language follows a scala naturae. It is a question of the degree to which our claim can correspond to the quality of our object or in our participation. It leaves all participants in existence in a subordinate position to the qualities we possess, or which possess us. I, who participate in this play of existence, can act in line with being wise, and in that way I can also lay claim to being wise. My claim to master wisdom is either groundless or not, and thus my claim is a question of the degree to which my participation oscillates in harmony with wisdom.

Plato’s dialectic is thus, as Deleuze shows, a calculus that measures the difference between rival claimants, and thereby a calculus that can order reality on a scale, from the true on one side to the false on the other.

Out of this new language, Plotinus and scholasticism could provide the answers that feudalism’s material conditions cried out for: a scale of being itself. Everything had its place, and thus God became the measure of all things. God became this world’s origo; a point from which all being could be derived and placed; an absolute guarantor of the position of all things. It was only a question of distance, and thereby the lost could receive the Church’s help in measuring their position in relation to God and navigating themselves to the right place.

But Catholicism would later come to harbour a problem; since the Church had come to replace the Greek philosophers (the friends of wisdom), the dialectic as such also became guaranteed through the Church as operator. Solus Christus—God alone bears the power to sort the true claims from the false. And when the sacramental mediation breaks down, the responsibility falls on each individual agent to create their own calculus. As Weber showed, Protestantism’s advance would lead to God—and thereby also truth as such—being released from the institution. In other words: where the Greeks faced an inflation of claimants—and thus created dialectics as an answer to that inflation and saturation—the Enlightenment faced a deflation of claimants. Science, and later capitalism’s advance, created an ever higher demand for claimants and could thereby dispense with the institution that acted as guarantor of being’s positioning. A terra incognita was opened up, paving the way for expansion both economically and in terms of knowledge.

But in a world that desires the schizoid, the organless, the need for objectivity also increases, for the ecclesiastical yardstick had vanished. Descartes gave language to this open wound and could thereby present res extensa and res cogitans as separate substances. God, not yet dead, becomes positioned within the subject and matter is banished to the object. Descartes could thus secure Plato’s differential calculus between truth and falsehood and re-centre the origo via the subject’s relation to God. But this is on one condition: that God agrees to justify the subject’s position before its object.

At the same time, the empiricists pushed the Platonic question to its extreme. They no longer stood in a position where it was the very claim to the claimant’s qualities that needed to be separated from one another; it was rather the quality’s relation to the object that needed to be separated. Locke managed to produce a language-apparatus that succeeded in this; Plato’s forms could be decentralised into the subject’s own categorical apparatus. This made it possible to observe the objects (Plato’s simulacra) and at the same time point toward the general. It was Hume who would expose a deep-seated wound in this language, threatening stability and the possibility of an origo through the problem of induction. It was furthermore Kant who would complete the project. But where Descartes’s answer required God as guarantor, Kant dispensed with not only God but the whole of metaphysics as such through his transcendental idealism.

In this new situation, it was the human being’s transcendental categories that became the guarantor of our own position. Through a priori conditions for experience as such, Kant could also show that questions concerning being as such (that is, the thing-in-itself) were questions that could be proven to lie beyond possible knowledge. This was the realisation of modernity, and thus—for anyone interested in Cluedo—it was Immanuel Kant who murdered God in the room of noumena, with synthetic a priori as the murder weapon. Joking aside: with Kant’s transcendental idealism, the deictic problem had been both formulated and answered in one and the same move. Kant showed, namely, that the object as perceived by us presupposes a deictic positioning. He thereby shows that deixis precedes all objects and their qualities, and thus also experience as such. But at the same time he places this intuition in the subject’s transcendental structure. The human being as a rational animal is now repositioned as the absolute origo, entirely without God as guarantor, which opens up a new decisive question: “who am I?” When the human being is no longer a quality, but the very condition for experience as such (and further, perhaps even for existence as such); have we not made ourselves into a kind of God? Prometheus cries out: “Consummatum est!”

We are now back. Ironically, it was Kant who made possible the total inversion of Plato himself; it was Kant who placed the origo as full guarantor in the subject and thereby made it possible for Nietzsche to show how the philosopher—the friend of wisdom—wore the emperor’s new clothes. If the subject alone stands as guarantor before being, do we not bear our own responsibility for the question of good and evil? Do we not carry ourselves alone through time and space—are we not the sole judges of our own lives? Nietzsche now finds himself in an unsaturated age; an age that made it possible to dispense with the original problem to which Plato responded. Is that not why Nietzsche writes with an unsaturated hunger? As one who can return to the sophists and restore every charlatan to their place among things? For Plato’s method of distinguishing the thing’s qualities and thereby creating transcendental categories was a way of subordinating the subject to the transcendental qualities. This, in turn, was to ensure that the saturated reality could distinguish rivals from each other and thus place the qualities (and their possessors) in their correct place in a jungle of beings. But in a world that instead wails in hunger, that lacks rivals because its conceptual apparatus has cut the body to pieces in a superabundance of categories, where the categories are borne by a transcendental subject; there it is the things, and thus the simulacra, that demand to have their voice heard.

Deleuze revived metaphysics from the positivists’ and phenomenologists’ declaration of the death of God. Where modernism’s spectre wandered along the devastation wrought by Kant, Deleuze succeeded in identifying the real consequence of Kant’s transcendental idealism—but via Nietzsche. He saw that, through the inversion of Plato, there was also a possibility of inverting Kant. Deleuze could thereby do what Kant had previously done with Descartes: where Kant dispensed with God as guarantor, Deleuze dispensed with the subject as guarantor. In his transcendental empiricism, he could place the guarantor in the objects (simulacra; or rather, the immanent forces of becoming) and thereby do away with the origo altogether. Deleuze thus succeeded in separating the subject from experience as such and thereby gave experience the ultimate guarantor. He had thereby done away with the need for the transcendental and granted immanent difference its consummation. Substance had become obsolete; hence all that remained was immanence forming a continuum of pure differentiation. Objects and all their qualities now became, via Deleuze, a result of this continuum of immanent differentiation. Deleuze writes:

“The transcendent is not the transcendental. Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject. […] When the subject or the object falling outside the plane of immanence is taken as a universal subject or as any object to which immanence is attributed, the transcendental is entirely denatured, for it then simply redoubles the empirical (as with Kant), and immanence is distorted, for it then finds itself enclosed in the transcendent. Immanence is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things: it is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence. No more than the transcendental field is defined by consciousness can the plane of immanence be defined by a subject or an object that is able to contain it.” (Pure Immanence: A Life, 1995)

But this leaves us with a post-Kantian metaphysics that has rid itself of all direction. Mark Fisher shows how the postmodern condition is a kind of hollowing out of itself. Our perception of time has disappeared in a fog where we can no longer forget our own past; the past is eternally ‘there’. And we wait for a future that modernity had promised us; a future that has been cancelled, that is both eternally absent and present at the same time. This deictic crisis, in which we lack positioning and navigation, is the flipside of our contemporary immanence. Our orientation in time is placed in an eternal now, where the future and the past are immanent in this now. Baudrillard further shows how spatial orientation has collapsed in hyperreality; all meaning, and thus all truth, has become completely transparent, and thereby every image and every claim to truth bears itself immanently.

Even though we carry modernity with us as a zombie, we find ourselves in a crisis arising from this immanent metaphysics. We live in an age where Kant’s metaphysics is an immanent option; a perspective, and thus a lens through which we can observe. Everything has been replaced by optics; reality consists of a multitude of optical lenses through which we can position ourselves. This is the deictic crisis we find ourselves in; a new kind of saturation of perception.

In a sense, then, we are in a position similar to the one Plato found himself in. Where he confronted the death of the sages and an inflation of rival claimants, we confront an inflation of rival perspectives. It would be disastrous if the fascist tendency were to win; everything is at stake. For their solution to the problem is a pseudo-solution. They seek to restore what has been lost and thereby once again place the origo in the transcendental subject. But what they do not see is that this does not solve the problem we actually face. The problem is that we lack an origo and a deictic grammar due to the failure that transcendence bore immanently within its own language-apparatus. The need for an origo as such does not lie in being able to distinguish truth from falsehood, as in Plato, but in being able to navigate pure immanence without transcendental categories. For Deleuze and Guattari it was a question of how to make ourselves a body without organs without meeting our own demise in the process. But my diagnosis is broader and more decisive: in the encounter with pure immanence, where does one go?

[2026-05-17; 18:39]

— I take a break. A pause.

The coffee has gone cold. My boyfriend sleeps behind a closed door. It’s all right; he is watched over by my friends; Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, even Heidegger, Hegel and an arrogant bastard like Kripke keep an eye on him from the bookshelf. Am I high on my ADHD meds? Prescribed and increased dosage on my doctor’s conscience. I wonder at the same time what it is I’m writing. I realise there are too many holes, too much that could be developed. The lack of time and energy prevents me from turning these thoughts into an actual philosophical text; only a book could do them justice. But, still… Autobiography is more my thing anyway. Meta-philosophy that goes back to Heidegger, who somehow could write autobiographically without the biographical part. Perhaps that was exactly his genius.

I sigh: “Well, then… I did say, after all, that I wasn’t a philosopher.” But the reader just looks at me. I can’t tell whether the bastard is confused or just disappointed.
“But that doesn’t justify anything, does it? What happens now with the text?” That made me think. I didn’t even know if the text was worth finishing. And something like this is still just a kind of flex; yet another indexicality that nods toward Nick Land’s book on Bataille. Thirst for Annihilation. The text that made me horny for both Bataille and Land—I know; both at the same time.
“I don’t know,” I said, and drank the last of the coffee. “I’m dissatisfied that the text mimics Hegel’s dialectic too much. And besides, there’s still nothing new coming out of the shit my brain produces. Stuck in limbo; there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything is, moreover, just a sort of diagnosis of the contemporary. It’s yet another saturated perspective, and furthermore, dear reader, you do not exist. No one reads my texts. So in the end I’m trying to figure out what the fuck this text actually means to me. I am, after all, not a philosopher but an artist.”
“Ouch,” you said. “Harsh to rob me not only of my mediate existence, but of all future possible existence as well.”
“Such is existence, my dear friend.”
“Fuck you,” you said shortly. I bit my lip, for I feared a counterblow. And you continued: “This whole section is so damn dishonest; it just shows your own failure as a writer.”
“How so?”
“The only thing you’re trying to do is abdicate your responsibility for your own thoughts. It’s intellectually dishonest, but even worse, a betrayal of your own text as a piece of art.”
…
Ouch, I thought. But in the silence you tried to piece me together again:
“But perhaps you’re missing something. After all, you are making a new formulation, even if just a new formulation for yourself. You hit the nail on the head in saying that what you lack is a deixis. It’s as you say; this is your own obsession. What I think doesn’t matter, does it? You know you have to keep on writing, not because that is who you are, but because it’s the only thing you have as a genuine fixture. The only beacon in this immanent landscape that has dispensed with the subject. Doesn’t that leave us all at the mercy of the objects’ reign?”
“Now it’s my turn to say ‘ouch’,” I said and smiled slightly. I knew, after all, that you were right; in the end it was I who gave you permission to speak to me. “I guess we’ll see where this leads. I’ve got nothing better to do, after all…” On sick leave and utterly worthless on the labour market; something I still had to do with my time. And this damn question needed to be confronted. Given a bit of a thrashing with a carpet beater.

My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,
The docile lock and the belated
Notes my few days left will grant
No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed
Violet, the leavings of an afternoon
Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,
The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn.
Many things,
Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,
Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,
So blind and so mysteriously secret!

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;
And never know that we are gone.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Things.

Hic Sunt Dracones

In a sense we have been hollowed out of our own subjectivity. Algorithms, statistics; the whole capital-machine has done away with subjectivity. The subject is in practice made into an object. Its substance, immanent and univocal with all other things, has made it possible for capital to see its qualities and exploit it in an attention economy. We perform labour simply by looking; we are part of an optical paradigm. The body is no longer the link between res extensa and res cogitans; it is a vortex that has inverted Neoplatonism’s great-chain-of-being; instead of a scale from object to divinity, we find ourselves in a post-Kantian hell where the subject experiences its own dissolution in pure immanence—the scale now runs instead from the self outward to the Other, whereupon the body takes the form of a spiral, an axis mundi, from the Self outward to the Other. Yet we are aware, somewhere, that this entire scale is immanent; it is horizontal, in contrast to Plato’s vertical ordering of being.

We ought to feel abjection before our own existence, but the fact is that the postmodern condition has produced a subjectivity that is no longer disgusted by the blending of thing and subject. The eye desires itself as an object and envies the screen its transparency. Abjection has thus been displaced; abjection is not, as Kristeva would have it, a result of our repressed ‘corporeal reality’, but rather of our repressed ‘incorporeality’—it is in the encounter with ourselves (or in the encounter with the other) as subjects that abjection arises; when we have lost our own materiality. For it does not reveal ‘reality beyond the symbolic order’, but rather ‘reality beyond all intentionality’.

This is both an inversion of Lacan and of Husserl. What I mean by intentionality is not only Husserl’s optical origo, where all experience is mediated through an intentional gaze—the object that arises as representation through the direction of consciousness—but also Lacan’s objet petit a; the direction of desire toward an object, the object that stands for the subject’s lost part, cast out from the self into an otherness that must be incorporated. For Lacan, the subject (the ego) is a production that arises in the self’s own encounter with itself as something other; in the mirror stage the child sees itself as an other (as object) and thereby becomes alienated from itself. For Lacan, it is the subject’s encounter with its own materiality that causes this intentional projection toward the desired object.

Deleuze and Guattari were right in their critique of Lacan’s analysis of desire; for desire is affirmative and productive, and not, as Lacan maintains, an expression of a lack in the subject/self. On the contrary, desire arises in the absence of an objet petit a. It is when the subject surrenders itself to its own corporeality that desire as such operates; like a hungering materiality that no longer distinguishes object from subject.

When the eye sees itself as an object, and thus as an other, it is not an alienation from the self that arises. It is an acknowledgement of the inherent immanence of subject and object. The anxiety, or abjection, does not come from the self’s alienation from itself, but from the impossibility of all intentionality—we are back in a crisis of deixis, where all direction dissolves in this immanence. The screen replaces Lacan’s mirror. When the eye sees the screen, it envies its ability to be a pure immanent surface and an object, a machine, at the same time. The eye sees the mirror image of its own deceptive intentionality; its excess. It is not that the screen shows something the eye lacks; on the contrary, it reveals the excess of intentionality and perception. In other words: it is not the subject’s crisis when it sees itself as matter (as in Lacan), but matter when it sees itself as subject, that creates an existential crisis. Matter—the object—in need of a subject, thereby produces, in its reconciliation with the subject, a Self: a sujette petit a. And unlike Lacan’s objet petit a, this is not a projection of its alienation and inherent lack; rather, it is a projection of its own excess; it is something it continually tries to rid itself of.

It is therefore also not surprising that the cure for our deictic crisis may lie in Bataille’s philosophy. It is, after all, Bataille’s base materialism that gives us the only direction we are ultimately left with: death. All meaning is lost in the violent clamour of the sun, and its excess dictates that the only thing we are left to do is to consume. Is that not just such a monster that Western philosophy in the end managed to produce? A schizophrenic capital-body that constantly tries to still its hunger.

The material difference between modernity and postmodernity is ultimately the globalism of the latter; a cessation of terra incognita and a saturated market that seeks the limit of its own growth (and self-consumption). We are, after all, after Deleuze and Guattari, left with a perpetually productive desire. Bataille shows the flipside of that production; its waste and ultimate direction—its end.

But what does all this mean in view of our sujette petit a; that excessive Self that seeks its own destruction? I would argue that it is portrayed in Bataille’s ‘pineal eye’; an eye that, unlike our ordinary eye, does not see horizontally but vertically: straight into the sun’s excessive and violent glamour:

“The eye, at the summit of the skull […] is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration […] The head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting […] This great burning head is the image and the disagreeable light of the notion of expenditure.” (Bataille, George. The Pineal Eye. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939)

The pineal eye is thus an expression of what subjectivity is to matter; it is the eye’s desire to annihilate its own intentionality in the same excess. It is thus not a negativity that the pineal eye seeks, but a positivity that affirms its own excess in ecstasy. Could it be our immanent polaris? Is it not the sun that has stretched the grasses, the trees; and the human spine towards the heavens? The sun, laughing at our subjette petit a, which annihilation we desperately pursue.

Oedipus here becomes a kind of parody of matter’s own subject. With pride in his sharp-sightedness and belief in his subject’s agency, the encounter with his true fate resulted in autoenucleation; his metamorphosis and final function became his own blindness, this coming as an ironic punishment concerning his blindness to his own direction.

Where Lacan re-enacts Oedipus, it becomes clear here how our anti-Oedipal reversal of Lacan in fact elevates Bataille’s pineal eye in Oedipus’s place. Where Oedipus gouges out his eyes as a result of his own blindness to himself, we fill our pineal eye with its own excess in ecstasy; in ecstatic affirmation, in order to expell subjectivity from matter.

The narrator in Lovecraft’s Polaris might be our anti-Oedipal anti-hero; he himself exemplifies the sujette petit a, for he is but a small subject simply defined by his keen eyes, thus he was granted the task of being the eyes of the army. Placed in the watch-tower, he is being haunted by Polaris granting him a promise:

“Slumber, watcher, till the spheres
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv’d, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o’er
Shall the past disturb thy door.”

Completely disoriented the narrator condemn this pale star that is penetrating him with its gaze; the star that should be a fixed point of navigation instead puts him in a state of never knowing if reality is merely a dream or not; making the distinction between waking and sleeping life impossible. He is thus stuck in two immediate here that is irreconcilable.

Meanwhile: this promise makes his duty as an eye superfluous—excessive because he is stuck in an eternal recurrence of his failure as a subject, unable to locate himself. His fate is not that of Oedipus—whose destiny is to be blind to his own direction—but that of an eye that is cursed to excessive seeing. The narrator in Polaris is thus forced to fall asleep (to reach his own limit as a subject), and constantly fail his duty as an eye while facing the eye of immanent being itself. What Polaris does is that it forces him to watch his own watching, and as a devastating result, his keen eyes are turned back on themselves—and in that reflexive loop, he discovers his excess: that there is always more seeing than there is object to be seen. This is the surplus of intentionality over its correlate, the noema overflowing every noesis, that desire tries to expell but can never really exhaust. The narrator, in being forced to see his own seeing, becomes the sujette petit a. His duty is not to see the enemy but to be the pure function of seeing. And since Polaris already fulfills that function cosmically, the narrator’s seeing is pure excess, waste, a Bataillean expenditure that serves no strategic purpose. The curse of eternal recurrence is that he must burn with this excessive seeing forever, just as the star burns. He is not punished with blindness but with the impossibility of ever closing his eyes ontologically.

The irony of this promise lies in the North Star’s dual function; it is both the symbol of an origo and an eye (both object-as-point-of-intentionality [gegenstand] and subject-as-actor-of-intentionality) that makes all other eyes superfluous. It grants subjectivity the gift of eternal recurrence and its repetition is the grantor of his own redundancy. But what also returns is the very question of deixis. The narrator is only left with Polaris as a guarantor of this promise, that is, his only fixed point of reference. A point of reference that rob him of the answers of the very question that it guarantees. Thus; the past that disturbs his door, is precisely the impossibility of settling the deixis.

What follows from this inversion with regard to our inability to create a language for our own navigation? We have already identified that the problem is fundamentally optical; in order to orient oneself in time and space, it presupposes that we can see at all. The eye as a concept has given us a language to go beyond optical lenses and the postmodern excess of perception. The question is thus not how we can find the right perspective; but rather how we can encounter pure immanence on its own terms. The excess of perception is, at bottom, the eye’s inherent conflict with itself; it presupposes that the only way to produce a language for this immanence is by affirming this excess. Bataille gave us a language for ecstasy, but in the end it is perhaps a new subjectivity that ultimately shows the trace toward a new grammar. It is ironic that the Enlightenment craved a new kind of objectivity, while we now, rather, crave a new kind of subjectivity that goes beyond itself. A subjectivity that can both affirm itself as redundant, and at the same time use its own excess to become something more than subject.

If the eye desires itself as an object and envies the screen its transparency; is there an origo in its blind spot—in its impossibility of becoming an object; of becoming pure matter? We return to Nietzsche, who sees human subjectivity as something that must be overcome: the very distinction between object and subject, between other and self—this distinction must go through itself to become something beyond both object and subject and thereby affirm its own immanence. Deleuze gives us a concept: a life. But the answer I seek is something else—it is the step beyond becoming, and thus a language that can finally be differentiated with its own affirmation, while at the same time going beyond its own differentiated state: an Übergegenstand. That is; the object that has overcome its transcendental relation towards a subject and thus gotten rid of intentionality as such.

author's final note: "This is just Derrida in the costume of a mad tranny, isn't it? fml"

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…

z
z
z

… ad infinitum …

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.

(Hiroshima by Agyega)

---

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.

xoxo
your own patois

P.S.

What you do with it is your own damned fault.

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.

“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?