Superfly

Buzz Factory

Given the ubiquity of musca domestica, flies have been a wonderful example of this neighbourly economy of jouissance from King Lear to the Cramps, Kurt Neumann and Cronenberg to Wire. Not ‘hurting a fly’ is the acme of Christian pity and Buddhist piety, being ‘a fly in the ointment’ is the desire of anyone hoping to subvert a repressive system, and so on. No doubt since the migration of homo sapiens from Africa, musca domestica have been the constant companions and noisy neighbours of human beings, lodging in the margins of human civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. The House Fly is, therefore, a perfect object of ecological desire, named after the oikos, dweller in our house and environment, living off the waste products that define and embroil every culture: s/he is my constant companion, a neighbor with whom I share my home, but who does not treat it like one; a partner with whom I identify, but who is also other to me; an in-human double who’s annoying buzzing presence indicates that she enjoys herself too much at my expense, and whose body I can in turn enjoy in compensation by squishing her; a creature that I cannot help both love and torture for making me suffer.

Damien Hirst’s artwork A Thousand Years (1993) continues this tradition: a large steel and glass display case is divided in two by an interior pane with four holes cut into it. Inside, on one side, a rotting cow’s head infested with maggots sits beneath an ‘insect-o-cutor’; in the other is a white MDF box. As the maggots pupate into flies the chances of their generally limited average life span of around 7 days is curtailed. Most would die on their maiden voyage. Some, however, will make it through the holes into the relative safety of the adjoining case containing the white box. In the corners of both cases are dishes of sugar and water. It is a machine for killing flies, while offering the chance of a number of flies living out their lives, mating, reproducing and so on. Certainly enough survived to sustain the process. As a work of art, it invites identification as it offers the art lover the opportunity to view the whole lifespan of a creature from birth to death in a way that, even under confined conditions, owes much to chance and individual ‘choice’. As Timothy Morton writes of Blake’s poem, The Fly, Hirst’s work sets up a dual process of identification with ‘the “evil” (the “thoughtless”, “blind” mechanical operation [of the insect-o-cutor] and with the insect’ (Morton: 202).

Evil is certainly evoked in the title of Hirst’s piece, A Thousand Years, recalling the ‘thousand year Reich’ promised by the National Socialists in Germany. Given this, it is impossible not also to see in Hirst’s piece a reference to Auschwitz. But this is not just an extermination machine, this is also a breeding factory and a sustainable environment. Hirst thus brings out continuities between art, fascism and the ecology management of animals. The piece evokes Auschwitz, but also the increasingly industrialized ways in which animals are bred in captivity for slaughter; and not just bred, but by extension these days artificially inseminated, genetically manipulated and produced. The correlation between this and Auschwitz invites the contemplation of greater horrors: imagine, ‘for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or fire’ (Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’). This is, perhaps, the darkly satirical element to the work. But precisely as such, ecological desire is provoked and affronted by the way in which the work relies on the equally dark correlation between flies and human beings made for example by deep ecologist Arne Naess when he asserts that ‘I will never say I have a higher right to life than a mosquito’, mosquitoes of course having been ‘responsible’ over the years for millions of human deaths -- deaths that are no doubt essential if the balance of life on earth is to be maintained in the face of human over-population. Poised between the solar death of the insect-o-cutor and the nuturing corpse of the earth, the fly-humans live out their brief allegorical lives in a utopian-dystopian sustainable environment as an art work.

While there is no need to speculate about authorial intention, one is tempted to ask, following Schopenhauer, what exquisite sensitivity must Hirst possess to require the audacious buzzing of flies to be compensated by the music of its eternal annihilation. Buzzzzzap! Sizzle; the soft fall to the floor of the fly-corpse. Hirst’s fly amusia balances his suffering against the extermination of both humans and flies (imagined or real) on the plane of aesthetic enjoyment. What Hirst has nevertheless produced is a mean machine for both realizing ecological desire and satisfying its death drive. The machine produces happy flies pupating in an ideal environment (the rotting carcass), feeding on sugar, flies that one might identify with and love as people, flies endowed with human ‘choice’ and a singular destiny as to the time and manner in which they live and die. They can fly through the hole to safety or they can fly too close to the insect-o-cutor and be zapped. The fact that many do the latter maintains the fantasy of ecological balance. Imagine the congestion without it. Furthermore, perhaps, future adaptation will result in evolved avoidance of insect-o-cutors etc... This is to say that the ecological art lover can contemplate in satisfaction the management of his noisy neighbour’s jouissance even as the death drive is sustained through the sound of perpetual buzzing annihilation.

CULTURE/CLINIC – CALL FOR PAPERS

C/C is an English-speaking international journal of Lacanian psychoanalysis designed to bridge the gap between cultural and clinical elaborations by generating a dialogue between practitioners and the University.

Jacques-Alain Miller and Maire Jaanus, joint editors-in-chief for Culture/Clinic have decided on the two first themes for the launch of C/C in 2011 by Minnesota UP:


1) "All Mad"

In his last teaching Lacan reaches the conclusion that we are all delusional. So we are all mad. In his own teaching Miller suggested the expression 'a universal clinic of delusion'. At the time of the desperate search for mental health as key both to happiness and social order, psychoanalysis rather sees madness as the distinctive sign of speaking beings. It is thus inscribed more in the humanist lineage of Erasmus than in the classification in boxes of the DSM V. Yet the psychoanalytic clinic recognises the import of clinical categories and has made advances in generating models for these categories.


2) "Governing by numbers"

Governing is an impossible profession, said Freud. So is psychoanalysis. But it does not prevent us from either analyzing or governing, quite the contrary. This issue will broach the question through the clinic of discourses developed by Lacan from Seminar XVII onwards. The question of the development of the incidences of science on the discourse of the Master has transformed politics and practices of government. Is the Empire of the number taking over from that of the signifier? In which ways? And with what effects?

The Editors of C/C invite you to send your contributions on either one of these themes by July 15 2010. We are aware of the short time allowed for these first contributions but we would like to get the Journal off the ground as rapidly as we can. Texts should be between 5000 and 8 000 words, preferably in English (but can be sent in French too) at the following email address: cultureclinic@gmail.com

Please circulate this call for papers to anyone you think would be interested in contributing, or relevant mailing lists.
Suggestions or inquiries can be addressed to
veronique.voruz@le.ac.uk

Marie-Hélène Brousse, Managing Editor, C/C
Véronique Voruz, Coordinating Editor, C/C

Buzzing 2: Ecological Love and the jouissance of the fly

Man is ... a funny sort of animal, is he not? Where in the animal kingdom is the discourse of the master? Where in the animal kingdom is there a master? . . . if there were no language there would be no master ... because language exists you obey. Jacques Lacan, ‘Milan Discourse’ (1972).

Jouissance of the Other ... of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not a sign of love’. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (1972)

In Ecology without Nature (2007) Timothy Morton mounts an impressive attack on the ‘eco-mimesis’ that characterizes much environmental art and criticism which, in the wake of Romanticism, constructs a fantasy of immersion in the natural world that is indistinguishable from the contemplative state of the ‘beautiful soul’ whose pleasure precludes acknowledgement of participation in the environment and consequently ethical responsibility for it. In contrast, Morton wants to abolish the dream of nature and replace it with an ecology that recognises the creatures of the world as independent subjects with whom we should interact as such. Morton concludes his book by suggesting that the ‘best way to have ecological awareness is to love the world as a person’ (201). Furthermore, he writes, ‘the best way to love a person is to love what is most intimate to them, the “thing” embedded in their make up’(201). His specific example is provided by William Blake’s poem ‘The Fly’: ‘Am not I / A fly like thee? / And art not thou / A man like me?’ (see above)

What Morton means by ‘thing’ is not exactly clear, but given the prominence of Jacques Lacan in his readings (pp. 198, 202-3) I am assuming that it is a reference to the centrality of ‘das ding’ to Seminar VII. What, then, is das ding of the fly? It is a strange question because das ding is an effect of language; for Lacan, only speaking beings relate to a Thing around which the (death) drive, articulated by the whole Vorstellung of the subject, its means of self-representation, circulates. I am not sure that flies speak, although certainly they buzz. Can this buzzing represent the fly for the buzzing of all the other flies or for other speaking, musical, noise-making beings so that it might be loved as a person? What (ecological) system would need to be in place for this to be possible, and for such 'love' to become structurally mutual?

For Lacan, the very structure of the signifying chain implies some Thing outside it upon which the chain uncertainly grounds and articulates itself. The order of intimacy imagined for the world of nature, particularly animal nature, is often associated with the jouissance that has to be sacrificed in the name of human civilization. It is towards this jouissance that the drive aims, thereby becoming a death drive because it is located beyond the pleasure principle that marks the limit of civilized comforts that are always of course more or less comfortable for some. Projected in the void, the Thing is identified as both the absolute Good beyond the symbolic order and the absolute Evil of suffering implied through its deprivation by the Other. This Other, moreover, is always represented by another person, one’s neighbour, whom Christ commands that one love as oneself. Lacan notes that Freud ‘stops in horror’ at the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ since it summons-up the unfathomable hostility that inhabits the neighbour that one recognises on the basis of one’s own hostility. ‘And what is closer to myself than that kernel of jouissance in myself to which I dare not approach?’. At the interior limit of the Thing (on the basis of which Morton suggests we must love another creature as a person), equivalence is established between jouissance and suffering: ‘he’ always enjoys at my expense and vice versa.

Animals are located squarely in this economy when Jeremy Bentham makes what is probably the founding ecological statement relative to ‘man’ and his animal neighbours: ‘The question is not can they reason, can they talk, but can they suffer?’ Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823). If animals can suffer, they can also enjoy, and it is certain that man sees that everywhere he looks. Moreover, it is on this essentially economic and imaginary basis (calculating the jouissance of the other) that ecology seeks to intervene in the world. This economic relation is also central to Blake’s poem, where, in the first stanza, it is precisely the jouissance of the little fly’s ‘summer’s play’ that provokes the violence of the poet’s ‘thoughtless hand’ (his unconscious wille or death drive, no doubt). Accordingly, this thoughtlessness immediately provokes the thought of equivalence between man and fly because the poet’s own jouissance (dancing, drinking, singing) will at some point be brushed aside by some other ‘blind hand’. The fourth stanza begins with a typical Blakean conditional: ‘If thought is life ... And the want / Of thought is death’, ‘Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, Or if I die.’ While the ambiguity of this last stanza, based as it is on a conditional, can mean so many different things, Morton reads the poem as a ‘Cartesian meditation’ so that even though the mutable pleasures of the body are perceived to be as ephemeral as a fly, subject to the ‘blind’ vicissitudes of life and death, they provide the essential locus of happiness. At the same time, thought is able to maintain a sovereign distance through identifying with both. ‘Instead of bemoaning the fate of living beings ... the poem identifies with the “evil” (the “thoughtless,” “blind” mechanical operation) and with the insect’ (202). For Morton the poem has the doubleness of a Cartesian-Utilitarianism. Perhaps this can provide the rationale for an ecological, machinic ‘thought’ to manage the problem of the other's jouissance through a regime of happiness in which humans and animals (even flies) are equivalent and have equal rights? ‘Social mediation’, Morton writes, ‘is required to aid the creature’, a mediation based on what society imagines and ‘thinks’, which is to say calculates, about the creature’s ‘thing’, its jouissance (Morton, 2007: 202).

It is here that the ‘Cartesian-Utilitarian’ ecology seems to take on the same structure as contemporary capitalism where the master signifier is concerned with accounting for the right to jouissance. In his Milan Discourse (1972), Lacan provides an algorithm for capitalist discourse by adjusting slightly the Discourse of the Master. Capitalist Discourse is produced when the subject ($) displaces the signifier of the master from the position of agent to that of (repressed) truth below the bar (see above).

In ecological terms, we could say that Man-the-master (Man who masters nature precisely as an effect of naming it) is displaced by the animal-subject ($) who is liberated through its right to jouissance/happiness (a) which bears on it from the position of production. The signifier that marks the difference between ‘man’ and the ‘animal’ is displaced and they enjoy an imaginary equivalence in which an animal can be loved as a person even as humans are understood purely in terms of their drives and interests, calculated statistically, and understood through ‘swarm’ behaviour as part of ‘hive minds’ that ‘buzz’ in the network biosphere. It is of course this system of ‘bionomic’ ecological capitalism (S2) ‘socially mediates’ to produce the conditions that enable the animal-subjects ($) to enjoy and be happy. (S1) represents the laws of governance that command and regulate capitalism (S2) and its institutions to produce the surplus jouissance (a) that enables the animal-subjects to enjoy more or less equally in bovine contentment. Following the arrows, it can be seen that the discourse works in a continuous loop like a machine. In his Milan address, Lacan commented that ‘it is the cleverest discourse that we have made. It is no less headed for a blowout. This is because it is untenable . . . it suffices so that it goes on casters (ça marche comme sur des roulettes), indeed that cannot go better, but that goes too fast, that consumes itself, that consumes itself so that it is consumed (ça se consomme, ça se consomme si bien que ça se consume)’ (11). The animal-subjects consume themselves in the all-consuming machine, but they do it more or less painlessly; jouissance is regulated, distributed through the excess commanded by the ‘blind hand’ of the bioeconomic machinery of joy – or at least until the blow out.

Buzzing (1) Schopenhauer, amusia and the fly

Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself … Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea trans. Haldane & Kemp, 1964 (I, III: 333)

It is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways (333).

According to all this we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing — Music never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself (338).

We might just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will (340).

The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose. Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism (137).

Unlike his Romantic contemporaries … Schopenhauer views this abstract Wille as impersonal, blind, and indifferent to our wants and desires. There is no nature-for-us, much less any being-on-the-side of nature. Furthermore, the wille is, in itself, ‘nothing’, a gulf at the heart of the world as Vorstellung. Eugene Thacker, ‘Three Questions on Demonology’ in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I edited by Nicola Masciandaro, Open Access, 2010.

Neither will nor Idea, music occupies a strange position in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system as the world’s uncanny double. The will is that mythical, noumenal (quasi-)force that is the in-itself of all things from physical forces like electricity and gravity to human desires and affects all of which are imperfect copies of Platonic Ideas. The latter are pure objectifications of the will, but they are not the will itself; the will is essentially in-different to Ideas just as it is indifferent to both humans and nature, that is to say both different from and indifferent to these things even as the will is objectified in them. The will as such is the in-human force of human striving, human ‘will’: ‘the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever’ in an interminable process that condemns human beings to continual dissatisfaction, suffering and ultimately death – the will wills its own death in human form in its own way. The will becomes a force in humanity and nature through becoming objectified (that is, objectifying itself) in Vorstellung: chains of ideas, concepts, presentations and representations, of which the ‘human’ is one among others. The world consists purely in ideas and representations that circulate, as Eugene Thacker suggests, a void, an effect of the will’s own self-negation, a ‘“nothing”, a gulf at the heart of the world as Vorstellung’ (HG: 188).

Music is heterogeneous to all of this, even as it repeats it, with a difference. Music is not Vorstellung; it is not an Idea, a concept or representation. It is, however, some form of objectification of the will, a copy of the will, but a copy that is so close it is able to express not phenomena or nature, but ‘only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself’ (338). Since this is exactly what the will does, vis-à-vis phenomena, music is an exact copy of the will. It is the double of the will and the same. As Schopenhauer also shows, music acts on the human subject in the same way as the will, exerting powerful effects directly ‘on the inmost nature of man’ in a way inaccessible to the other arts, reason and even mathematics which are bound up in the Vorstellung of ideas and concepts (329, 336). Music bears on, indeed articulates an unconscious knowledge of the ‘inner nature of the world’ which is beyond rational comprehension and verbal expression but may be expressed in musical composition: ‘the composer reveals the inner nature of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand; as a person under the influence of mesmerism tells of things which he has no conception when he wakes’ (336). Notwithstanding all these ‘figures of speech’, language has no place here: knowledge of the inner nature of the world consists in wordless articulations of sound beyond even mathematical formulation – and Schopenhauer is adamant about this, music is not merely exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [an exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting]. Music is thus not an aesthetic object whose formal consistency is guaranteed by mathematics, although Schopenhauer elsewhere hesitates about this, since it would be if music were to be regarded as a closed system. As a closed numerical system, music would not be able to ‘free itself from numbers without entirely ceasing to be music’ (331). This seems to be why Schopenhauer must regard music as an open system continuous with all the music of the world, all its buzzing and twittering, its sound and fury, from the birds and the bees to thunder and lightning: ‘we might just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will’ (340).

Music therefore for Schopenhauer offers a different relation to the world, to the ‘inner nature of the world’, than to the world as Vorstellung. This is because music is always double; it is both mimetic and anti-mimetic at the same time. On the one hand, since it is a copy of nothing but the will it is heterogeneous to all Vorstellung; it lies beyond all chains of signification, beyond all aesthetic and mathematical systems, and therefore beyond any possible discursive knowledge of the world. On the other, as a copying of the will in articulated sound, music sublimates and negates the will thereby producing and presenting the void within itself, the structural ex-nihilo out of which sprang the will in the first place, into which the will dissolves in its self-negation. It therefore establishes a position for itself outside of the will. How is this position exterior to both will and Vorstelling ‘known’ or experienced? Unconscious knowledge of this position is signalled by the experience of amusia relative to the world as ‘embodied music’ (340). The ‘void’ is signalled when the world as embodied music is experienced as a violent dissonance.

Appropriately, Schopenhauer does not discuss this in any other way than through recourse to his own experience. Helen Zimmern writing in 1876, 16 years after his death, comments on Schopenhauer’s acute sensitivity to the music of the world and its propensity to produce a degree of discordant agony that cuts him off from all ideas and representations. Describing his thought processes in terms of a hunt for ideas, Schopenhauer says,

Those ideas which I capture after many fruitless chases are generally the best. But if I am interrupted in one of these pursuits, especially if it be by the cry of an animal, which pierces between my thoughts, severing head from body, as by a headsman's axe, then I experience one of those pains to which we made ourselves liable when we descended into the same world as dogs, donkeys, and ducks.

The cry of an animal – Schopenhauer evokes, in the barking of dogs, the braying of donkeys and the quacking of ducks, the bucolic music of the countryside – literally severs his head from his body, placing him at the very limit of being in acephalic agony at complete variance with the world even as he enjoys the suffering of animals as his own. This radical disconnection, then, is also a profound connection with the ‘otherness’ of the animal in the inner experience of dissonant amusia.

In a famous comment in The World as Will and Idea on the higher capacity of suffering in complex beings relative to apparently simpler life forms, Schopenhauer notes that every time a man swats a fly, he implicitly ‘acknowledges that the fly suffers less from being killed than he suffers from being annoyed by it’ (see also Anders, Evolution of Evil : 195). Here, we see that the relation between man and animal is organized by an economy of suffering /jouissance, articulated by the locus of sound, in which the fly’s buzzing signifies a sovereign indifference that is ‘enjoyed’ at the expense of the philosopher. In Studies in Pessimism, Schopenhauer writes, ‘The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose’ (137). The killing of the fly acknowledges that it represents a good that is inaccessible to him. The satisfaction gained from killing it is supposed to compensate for the suffering brought by the fly’s buzzing presence. It is another way in which man’s suffering /jouissance is located in the earth and violently extracted from it in a struggle over goods and satisfactions. This economy is at the same time also an ecology; they are, at root, almost the same words (oikos + nomos or logos). While ecology may or may not condemn killing flies, it is itself nothing other than a promise to redistribute the world’s goods based on knowledge of the world as Vorstellung of good and bad goods, an allocation of resources in which scientific-ecological knowledge assumes the force of law.

But killing the fly fails to compensate for anything. On the contrary, the gap opened up between man and fly is incommensurable even as it pitches on the philosopher’s nose, thereby presenting an idea of audacious freedom and impertinent autonomy relative to human knowledge. In Schopenhauer’s amusia there is an unconscious apprehension of a profound dissonance, resonating long after the death of the fly, that resounds from a place heterogeneous to any possible economy or ecology of suffering. There is no possible compensation. Accordingly, it is only from such a position of ‘audacious’ freedom and ‘impertinent’ autonomy, recognised in the dissonant music of the fly, that speaking beings can begin to address the problem of their relation to the world.

BPM: 5. Baphomet

‘All the gods died of laughter to hear one among them proclaim himself unique!’ Pierre Klossowski, The Baphomet

The disembodied soul of Øysten Aarseth, exhaled in his last dying breath and born on the icy winter wind, howled through the window of an old house outside Oslo. Dead lay there, still dead, half of his head still pressed up against the wood panelling, his knife and shotgun by his side, the floor splattered with dried blood and brain matter. Suspended in time, Dead’s last exhaled breath picked off the remaining layers of blasted skull and scooped out the putrefying tissue to disclose another head made of gold. A metalhead.

Aarseth was returned to his final state, on the day of his fatal stabbing. As the new golden-headed Dead seemingly arose from the dead, Aarseth got down on his knees before the strange goatlike yet godly creature, ‘My saviour!’ he stammered. ‘Why do you call me saviour and kneel to me like a God’ said Dead, ‘I am not a creator who enslaves being to what he creates, what he creates to a single self, and this self to a single body. Øysten, the millions of selves that you oppress within yourself are dead and have resurrected millions of times in you, unbeknownst to your single self’.

‘Is it not myself that you have rescued from the knife of Vikernes?’
‘In the suspension of historical time, events echo throughout infinity and individuals eternally. But everything a breath has perpetrated through its body can remain without consequence once it has left its body, since we differ in no wise from the winter wind’.

At this point another chill entered the room as the already-dead breath of Varg Vikernes merged with the breath of his victim, finding himself much weaker than the latter as he quickly sought to separate. Greeted with no sense of moral atonement, Vikernes was struck by a violence of another order to the one he perpetrated: one of total indifference, the worst kind of violence, an indifference that left no trace.

Dead’s golden head glinted in the darkness as he explained that the Judgement of God had been infinitely suspended since He became consumed in flames. ‘Henceforth humankind has changed in substance: it can be no more damned than saved’. Divine Judgement has been overturned, indeed displaced. In this atemporal space memories of the past are revived as momentary states of intensity, a funeral fog of fallen souls which, without identity or propriety, are exchangeable from soul to soul. ‘Here is no peace made of human flesh’ said Dead and prepared himself to breeze through the leaves of the forest.

‘You’re leaving me? Stop’, Aarseth begged. ‘By what name may I invoke you?’
‘What does my name matter to you? In truth I tell you: the millions of brothers and sisters inside you, who have died for your high idea of yourself – Euronymous! – know my name well, and are reborn in it; no proper name exists for the hyperbolic breath that is my own, anymore than anyone’s high idea of himself can resist the vertigo of my great height; my forehead dominates the stars and my feet stir the abysses of the universe’.

‘Spell it for me, I beg you, so I will have invoked you but once!’
Dead began:
‘B-A...’
‘Ba ...? repeated Euronymous.
‘P-H-O ...’ continued Dead.
‘...pho...?’
‘M-E-T...’
‘... Met!...’

Baphomet, otherwise known as Prince of Modifications, opposed to the Christian principle that guarantees the identity of the soul and the unity of being. To quote Pierre Klossowski, ‘Basilieus philosophorum métallicorum: the sovereign of metallurgical philosophers, precursors of black metal theorists, that is, of the alchemical laboratories that were supposedly established in various chapters of the knights Templar’. ‘The Prince of Modifications overturns all identity and absorbs being into the principle of radical multiplicity, that is to say within the principle of blackness.

Dead’s death-rattle laughter clattered through the night and the antichrist scuttled out from behind his feet in the form of an anteater. Friedrich the anteater in a high-pitched German accent affirmed, 'When one god proclaimed himself unique, all the other gods died of laughter!' Reborn in the breath of this laughter the million godlike hands find themselves again with something holy to burn, as the black metal circle turns eternally in a clamour for being that unfolds a process of becoming as infinite non-self-identical multiplicity beyond all figures of unity or of the One. ‘Anything can happen’, said Dead, ‘in the infinite blackening of the universe’.

‘Be faithful to your oblivion!’

BPM 4: Metaloricum

‘It's hard to imagine that Theory can bring much to Black Metal ... Blackened Theory -- destructive, chaotic evil, inhuman -- is imaginable. Theoried Blackness is harder to imagine. Can the tools of Theory be tools for Blackness?’ Raw, Obsolete

‘Although I have been involved in the BM scene for many years myself and listen mostly to BM today, I refuse to recognise any (substantial) intellectual achievements of this movement, because there aren't any’. Andreas Bauer

Certainly it is vain for theory to aspire to the condition of black metal, just as it would be for theory to aspire to the condition of any music at all even though, maybe, it achieves it all the time. Such an aspiration is familiar from Western philosophy generally, at least since Romanticism, wherein music is attributed with meaning and significance beyond language, an attribution precisely correlated to the degree to which music is also regarded as deficient, purely imaginary, devoid of theory, vehicle of base emotions ... etc. What devilish alchemy is this that turns base material into sonic gold only for it to turn to shit as the goat glances in the mirror? Oh black Narcissus, the exquisite horror of self-reflection! Black metal has no meaning, of course – but then neither does any music – even as it opens up, in the non-sense, the excess of meaning that it evokes; the domain of non-knowledge.

Black metal theory is forged through the process of its ‘tools’ being placed in the icy furnace of blackened affinities and affections, giving itself over to the power of modification to which BM is itself an effect, heterogeneous no doubt, but one that opens onto the same Night. Let us say that black metal theory cannot know – can never know – its object: the black metal that rings out in the impenetrable darkness of its so-called intellectual emptiness. Like an object sovereign in its exteriority, an object that is precisely not a thing – a thing for us – such an object would be God; that is to say the God that BM invokes in order to banish Him, the God that sits, perpetually exchanging places with Satan, at the mediating position between the possible and the impossible.

‘I myself am in a world I recognize as profoundly inaccessible to me’ (Bataille). ‘Faded am I, behind a wall of consciousness / Still feeling a different World / Surrounding Me’ (Darkthrone). Black metal, for some, for a few, provides the locus of this in-accessibility, provides the experience of non-knowledge that communicates ecstasy, that is to say places someone at the limit of being in a radical questioning of being itself. This questioning occurs in and as an inchoate experience that nevertheless provides the (groundless) ground of self-reflection in a speculation that reflects, interminably, on the im-possibility of indefinite and limitless being.


From the ground, frozen yet fulminating in the accursed seeds cast away by a thousand years of Christian frostiness, Northern Protestantism, the castrated hedonism dedicated to servicing the Goods, comes, in seven chapters, the
Kathaarian Life Code of Non-Knowledge (Darkthrone avec Bataille)

1. ‘The Triumph of chaos - Has Guided our Path / we Circle the holy Sinai’. Black metal blackening thought blackening metal blackening theory ... Like the circularity of the spectral drive that invokes God simply in order to exorcise Him from the vast nocturnal landscape that his death discloses. Black metal theory is circular; circular theory is the only plausible theory. ‘To be of one’s time is quite simply to be a stooge’ (Bat. SN: 107), the exploited dupe of slavish exigencies.
2. Circular theory must begin, which is to say continue, not from a proposition but from the blackness that precedes it, just as it culminates, which is to say begins, in the blackened knowledge that is non-knowledge. ‘A strong light – the only Night’.
3. Black metal glints in sparks mixed with Coyote eyes and resonates in shortened cycles which black metal theory can only describe, knowledge fired across the desertified landscape; instances of the nonknowledge of the moment.
4. ‘Face of the goat in the mirror’: the horror of self-reflexive nonrecognition discloses the black metal Baphomet, ‘Baphomet in steel’, the prince of modifications: ‘I entered the soul of the snake’, the one, no doubt, that consumed itself in a blaze of icy fire.
5. The dis-identification of Satan and the death of God, of the erotic and the laughable, the playful and the stupid, the poetic and the amusical, with the unknown is the key to all theoretical difficulties. Recognizing its worthlessness, its good-for-nothingness, theoretical knowledge returns with the dream of making its own God, a Paragon Belial, the sum and sublimation of all earthly insufficiencies. And yet ...
6. The substitution of absolute dissatisfaction, the invisible force of an abyssic hatred, for relative insufficiencies results in the passage from insubordination to sovereignty in a blasphemous cyclone of infernal in-difference, stirring in the metalorical furnace ...
7. The final nature of dissatisfaction is the truth of awakening:
For this Eternal Winter
A New God Ruled the Sky
The Million Hands Of Joy
Have something holy to Burn
A new God is invoked but only for the joy of again consuming Him in flames, for igniting the divine in-existence in a blaze in the Northern sky.