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Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice, Vol 15 (2008)

This paper is commentary on The Gay Science §276 in light of the cybernetic.3 The natural connection between the cybernetic and Nietz sche’s amor fati is evident in their intersection within the principle of interface as the site of steering or helmsmanship (kubernēsis). Nietz sche names this love under the double sign of Januarius — at once the two-faced god of beginnings/doorways/gates and the saint whose annually liquefying blood signals the miracle of spiritual renewal — and installs it as a navigational protocol in the form of a new year’s resolution: “Let that be my love from now on!” Amor fati, I will affirm, is the protocol for navigating interface itself, a pure cybernetic law that steers steer-ing per se around the radically immanent negative interfacial pole of looking away: “Let looking away be my only negation!” Love of fate, the positive formulation of not worrying, is a pros-thetic intrinsically necessary for manipulating the inoperability of interface, its being “a medium that does not mediate.”4 Far from representing an immaterial or merely subjective affect, amor fati enjoys a terrifying invisible positive traction and in-escapable occult influence upon all interfaces.

I see an elision or lacuna in these proceedings, possibly signif-icant: the lack of discussion, in a conference rather inspired to speculate objects in the mirror of medieval works, of the me-dieval origins of the concept and word object. Is this an over-sight, a structural failure of vision to bump into what it ought to see? Or is it a purer kind of non-event, the causeless not-happening of something? Sometimes I get the feeling that what does not h appen is inexplicably powerful, an abyssically negative spontaneity ruling and seducing all existent things from its universal invisible domain. The issue might provide an interesting playground for thinking the objecthood of the inexistent, of what is not there. This is a good limit-problem for any philosophy wanting to relate to reality as constituted by how things are. It is also a question that the medieval, as a zone where a saint recommends preaching to non-existent creatures, philosophers theorize divine alteration of the past, and mystics see nonbeing as an excess of being, is already an-swering.But I prefer not to go there, wishing that I could instead move (or realize that I am only ever moving) like the guild navigator in David Lynch’s Dune: “I did not say this. I am not here.” Instead I will close the event by trying to open it into some avenues of understanding along which the medieval origination of object might lead the way. To find the start of these avenues, imagine a generic medieval intellectual, that is, someone infused with ‘the love of learning and the desire for God,’ encountering contemporary object-orientedness. First the bad news: there is no absolute knowledge, no arriving at the omnipresent center. Then the good news: we really have figured out what everything is: objects. Bad news: objects in-commensurably withdraw, remain irreducible to relation, are never knowable in themselves, so no theosis, henosis, subject-object union, incarnation, soul-body suppositum, eternal in-dividuals, or anything like that. Good news: it is because of the above that anything is happening at all . . . and so forth. May-be the fellow would find relief, like a good bloodletting, in the demotion of his desire from the desire to be everything to a desire to be with things. Perhaps he would despair. Perhaps he would think he was in paradise, intoxicated with the idea that these objects are God. Or perhaps he would object, discover-ing new truth through his own understanding of the word object

Introductory comments: I will address divine darkness by fo-cusing on the distinction between thought and experience, a distinction which parallels the distinctions between thatand what, and between soul (or life) and body. I am interested here in darkness as an occluded relation or blind spot between thought and experience. At the same time I would like to ground the concept of divine darkness in the traditional aim or purpose of mystical contemplation, which is to become God, to achieve union with God. This is a desire which is legi-ble, but also refused in Bataille’s work, in which we see a kind of reification of the limit of experience and with it, necessarily, a mystification of mysticism. An important figure for my re-sponse is the figure of the cephalophore, the head-bearing saint. Of course Dionysius the Areopagite, identified as St. Denis, was a cephalophore. I will try to suggest that the ceph-alophore should be reinvented by speculative medievalists as a human ideal proper to congested humanity, the anthropo-cene, the so-called age of man—the global dead which Eugene ended with. I should also note that there is an intimate rela-tion between the mirror and beheading. When we look into a mirror or speculate, we are non-violently beheaded.

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book’s own theory of creativity – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity” – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

Cyclonopedia is a book that opens Earth to the divini-ty of reality. The intoxicating effect of its theory-fiction terror is to defuse the double, mutual hostage-taking of philosophy and religion, their shared aporet-ic stand-off according to which reality remains the occluded object of fiction and divinity the eclipsed object of theory. Here theory-fiction is not a cool new hybrid capable of synthesizing and rescripting their domains towards an iterable new science or disci-pline. It is not about unifying and resolving their dou-ble truth. Instead the book is a trisonic betrayal that is treacherously against both via treason of each to the other. Cyclonopedia thus takes place in a new time that it instantiates and narrates: Incognitum Hactenus, or anonymous-until-Now, “a double-dealing mode of time connecting abyssal time scales to our chronologi-cal time, thus exposing us to the horror of times be-yond.” Anonymous-until-Now is the time of Cyclonopedic writing, the date of this symposium, an evental logic that deals with local and cosmic time as it does with fiction and theory. In this time, “things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chrono-logical time.”Chronos leaks into theory (the vision of aiôn), aiôn leaks into fiction (the narration of chronos). Inverting the messianic now wherein time is kairically suspended above chronicity as “the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us [il tem-po che ci resta],”Cyclonopedia chronically inters kairos into a time we no longer need to make time begin: the time that never was ours. Now that all life is over, every moment is opportune, the time of human gods and divine demons, a present stretching far be-yond the limits of past and future. In place of the ex-pectation of resurrection the book offers a funerary feast: “God turns himself into a good meal for the hu-man, the earth and the outside.” In place of Arma-geddon it offers the terrestrial playground of White War, the abode of unbounded, as opposed to final, conflict, “at once the white of impenetrable fog and the color of peace.” Incognitum Hactenus is a revolu-tionary enthymeme or argument-without-assumption, applicable in all spheres, that stabs at the heart of the mutual exclusiveness of plans and peace, the wanting-to-have-it-both-ways of human worry whose global monument is the Middle East Peace Plan.

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer’s poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an “assortment,” if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.

St. Cecilia’s botched beheading in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale masterfully sculpts the conundrum of life/death liminality into a horrific three-day dilation of the moment of martyrdom, opening the decollative blow that typically coincides with receiving its crown into a series of unfinished neck-cuts. Pinched between the cruelty of the headsman’s impotence, the idiotic inflexibility of the law, and her own sacred durability, Cecilia embodies the paradoxical idea of an unending, asymptotically inconclusive decapitation, an infinite series of beheading blows that never severs the head. Her hacked neck fuses into one form the two principles it figurally evokes: the unbeheadability of the body of God —“illius enim capita membra sumus. Non potest hoc corpus decollari” [“We are limbs of that head. This body cannot be decapitated”]2 — and the semi-living nature of fallen humanity, as signified through medieval allegorical interpretation of the traveler who is attacked by robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and left “half alive/half dead” [semivivus, emithane] (Luke 10:30). The unity of this form is equivalent to the differential non-difference (half alive = half dead) between the Greek and Latin terms. The three-fold opening intensively multiplies the “zero degree of torture”3 into a single tertium quid that is indifferently beyond the distinction between life and death. Being half dead, Cecilia is ultimately alive. Being half alive, Cecilia is ultimately dead. Dwelling in the hyper-intimacy of extreme dereliction, Cecilia is a lacerated, ever-dilating theopathic icon of divinity’s absolute indifference to life and death, its being superessentially beyond both. Her three-day rest from both, during which she simultaneously does nothing and works all the more fervently, exemplifies the “passivity and absence of effort . . . in which divine transcendence is dissolved.”