#negarestani

...overwhelming with a range of distortions from inauthenticity and corrupted authorship to structural holes (configurative bugs) and subterranean structures of hidden writing; xenopoetics does not necessarily insinuate adventurous modes of expression of prose.' Reading about misauthorhsip and inauthenticity, I am compelled to write on the left margin of a page of the manuscript, 'Am I not the most generous parent who feeds her children with her own meat?'...trying to match my handwriting

If, in middle-eastern tradition, gods deliberately allow themselves to be killed left and right by enemies, humans, or themselves without any prudence as to their future and eventual extinction, it is because they find more significance and benefit in their own corpes –as a concrete object of communication and tangibility among humans- than in the abstractness of their divinity. At last, as corpes, they can copulate and contaminate.

Negarestani recognizes the just alignment of Bataille's notion of the Solar Economy with Freud's speculative thesis concerning the nature of organic life: According to 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle,' the preservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessive energy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified surface or crust — 'a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli' — that protects it from its exorbitant source of energy. Thus, the survival and the individuality of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic, or cultural, is based on the repression of an originary trauma in which it encountered, in all its naked power, the source of energy that would also be its death. Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them.

If ex nihilo is cruelty because it suggests that something distinguishes itself against the indeterminable void through relentless determination and at all costs, then the idea of ontology or the science of being is the very philosophy of cruelty. Now if being something or to be bespeaks of a fundamental determination, then it also bespeaks of a fundamental cruelty. From here we are directed to a radical conclusion which sheds a dramatic light on the ethics of being: ontology is the science of cruelty precisely because it is the science of being – a monstrous determination against the indeterminable.

Behind the depiction of the sublime, Urbanomic’s collaborative interpretations uncover a ‘complicity with anonymous materials’. Rather than readdressing the subjective experience of the sublime, it is understood as the mark of an intrusion into human culture of a weird ‘outside’. This real presses upon human consciousness, forcing thought to behold its own contingency in ever more precise and appalling ways. Where the romantic conception continues to express conflicting tendencies of the organism—the will to inundation and the resistance against incorporation—a speculative-realist conception encompasses the production of these drives as one contingent reality amongst others.