Death in Plain Sight
Scattered Notes and Marginalia
To look for deviance and find it everywhere. The crack in the doorway, the slight misalignment of stove knobs, the outlet which protrudes at an angle. “All things have their place,” we are told, but upon further examination there is nothing which does not err.
An indictment of the totality that falls back upon itself. An indictment of all that must be as such to one for one to inherit only the tools to indict.
Under the regime of Common Courtesy, silence takes on a perpetually hostile form whose rupture announces either the confirmation of the hostility that lay underneath or the removal of its possibility. Yet the silence that follows this interval of supposed clarity is even more hostile than the one before. Social anxiety, through the recognition of this space, understands all silence as the realization of asymmetric warfare. Only through the expulsion of Common Courtesy from within a relationship can silence be disarmed. To say with certainty that "if nothing has been said between us, then nothing has changed - the time that we share stands still while we stand apart" to a loved one1, and to have it be accepted without doubt.
“If not for the pause you left me with, I would have told you everything rather than leaving it archived in flesh.”
In every interaction, to regard one’s skin as an organ that registers the serration of the social. To do all this and yet still bleed alone.
Suspicion of any spiritual medium who has managed to be anywhere at all or to do anything at all without collapsing in agony - for whom dictionaries do not turn blood red in their hands, and those that do not spontaneously combust upon crossing the threshold of a supermarket.
That insidious maxim declaring that we must “separate art from the artist” is just one particular expression of the principle by which the partial is made sovereign to the total (which itself can not rule, can only be ruled) and the disaster is continuously reproduced.
The division of time into parts begets their management, but also the creation of gothic potentialities. The past ruptures the present, and we in turn must rupture the future through the agony of the past.
Refusal to tolerate claims to sanity no matter how grim. “Sane in an insane world,” goes the common refrain, but the norm is not insane or criminal. It is a nurse in the psych ward and a guard in the prison. The depressive realist, no matter how many sympathies they provoke, succeeds only in establishing a precedent whereby more pressure can be applied to each and every deviant’s throat.
The Savage Beast, Homo Sacer, The Subject-Casualty… Biopolitical governance hums along innocently to the tune of 8 billion ready-made corpses - lives reduced to their excluded endpoints: birth and death2, entry and exit wound.
To be haunted3 by the Subject-Casualty in the way that Michaelangelo’s David haunted him from within the slab. To gaze into the eyes of a loved one, and find the horror of recognition.4
An erotic whisper behind my ear: Dearest Subject, You Too Will Collapse.
How kind it would have been to be convinced that we are born only once - yet each time we die we experience once more the consequences of a different birth. No distinction between living and dying but which living-death am I dying now?
One given name and one taken, two outcomes of a sorting function for a multiplicity of subject-casualties. Natural death or suicide? In any case, burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.5
The Autothysian vision of David Hume: to quietly hand oneself over to natural death as a boon to productive society.
A different vision: Houdini surrendering himself to be hanged at the gallows, a gleam in his eyes and no plans to escape.6
The landscape seems to change in moments of passive suicidality, as use-values drift towards the terminal. The work of gravity is non-trivial and bestows upon any upward journey the feeling of walking towards the gallows. A humorous affect - windows on the first floor feel useless or even cruel, as though in opening them one hears only the perverse laughter in the heart of their architect. Here it feels as though neither the hacienda nor the Sinister Quarter are all that far off.
It often feels as though we have erected an entire ecosystem preventing one from having the last word on death. Obituaries, eulogies, news reports… socially established fail-safes whose proliferation may lead one to believe that such a feat was possible in the first place. Dread of death in plain sight, dread of what they will say and who they will say it to.
Hostility to the Everyday wherever it is found.
A recognition that the monopoly of suffering7 is only the personal dimension of a cacophony of anguish. A method of agony discerning resonances, vortexes, circuitry,8 tears… tearing down every partition that makes this world bearable. A method for which there is truly no hope.
“[We] cannot contribute anything to this world because we have only one method: agony. We don’t have any program, any solutions to sell. There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such. To destitute, in Latin, also means to disappoint. All expectations will be disappointed. All twilights are on our side.”9
To take comfort only in just how little one is comforted.
Hydrofluoric acid doesn’t burn the skin, it seeps in – dissolves the calcium in your bones. Who has had the fortune of meeting someone like this?
What may appear at first to be a multiplicity of artistic techniques count only in the final analysis as different ways to bleed.
desperately tearing back layers of life in search of a canvas, finding Nothing hanging on nothing inhabiting us
Behind a vulgar misanthropy one finds the same human exceptionalism it denounces - Instead, condemn the world that condemns you to be “‘only’ ‘human’”.
a night of casual writing so often falls apart in a wave of mortological splendor as one realizes that what they hold in their hand is nothing other than a suicide note.
To no longer desire words.
Dreaming of a line of citations as long as the text at hand - a style of betrayal both to one’s authorship and to the betrayal of authorship itself.
A bibliography of unfinished works like a trail of blood in the snow.
Image used for post is a basic recasting of Francisco Goya’s Folly of Fear (1816)
"Living is made impossible with such cynicism that even the balanced pleasure-anxiety of neutral relations may function as a cog in the machinery that destroys people. It seems better in the end to go straight to a radical and tactically worked-out rejection rather than knock politely on every door looking to swap one kind of survival for another..”
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 27.
“Wittgenstein says, ‘The world is all that is the case,’ but the case refers exclusively to past, present, and future. We do not experience our own death.”
Hermann Burger, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself, trans. Adrian Nathan West (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2022), § 16, 15.
Just as we cannot resolve our own death, neither can we resolve our own birth.
“My terrors, even my name were borne by death, and by substituting itself for my own eyes, death revealed to me in all things the marks of its sovereignty. In each man I passed I discerned a cadaver, in each odor a rot, in each joy a last grimace. Everywhere I stumbled against future victims of the noose, against their imminent shadows: other men's lives wore no mystery for The One who scrutinized them through my eyes. Was I bewitched? I preferred to think so... The Void was my eucharist: everything within me, everything exterior to me was transubstantiated into a ghost.”
Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 217.
“To a fault, we far too often look in the mirror or into someone else’s eyes and do not recognize a corpse.”
Jarrad Ackert, Amongst the Trembling Apes, 2018.
“…. when we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one Hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 13.
"one can … simulate suicide onstage, but also commit it through an illusion, even if the audience will never believe a magician capable of the latter, as the curtain falls, his existence is rent asunder; and that... is why the trick with the torn bank note never gets old, it's so simple, the Svengali deludes the audience and it never occurs to them that he might have a second hundred note he actually did rip in half, the trick works because the public never realizes you can just take a torn bill to the bank and exchange it.”
Hermann Burger, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself, trans. Adrian Nathan West (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2022), 6.
"… the sufferer’s belief in its absoluteness. […] I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer…”
Emil Cioran, On The Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54.
“That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. […] Death moves in our apartments, through our television screens, the wires and plumbing in our walls, our dreams. Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already.”
“INS Founding Manifesto,” in The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society, by Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 53.
The Invisible Comittee, Now, Intervention 23 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017), 128.
Emil Cioran, On The Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 14.
Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64.