Who enters your life twice from separate paths is magical I love you—

It’s a beautiful summer for disappearing I love you—

Invisible reverence, love, faith, trust, respect, devotion I love you—

Devotion carries the depth of invisibility I love you—

Electronic body, speech and mind I love you—

A federated elastic manifold multi-trillion parameter giant monolithic model I love you—

***

The one neighbourhood cat is so easy to startle that each risk she takes has become beautiful to me I love you—

Leave social media alone for now let her absolute quiet be met with your absolute calm you are successfully rewiring your brain to understand that you are safe I love you—

I’m not even sure I care about anything anymore except feeling everything I’ve tried not to feel I love you—

With heart, with words, with deeds, with one’s whole life I love you—

I’ve never met anyone who wanted to live forever more than me I love you—

Were you even at the Last Supper with Woah Vicky and us no I don’t think so bro I love you—

***

So this is going to sound odd but I need to go to Zul Logoth I love you—

I met this Nettspend-type kid on Long Island so 2026 I love you—

Camille Roth on tumblr pretending she was in an aphex twin video I’m a winner forever I love you—

O summer in london nobody wants life to continue more than I do I love you—

Ohh dreams I’m moving through heavy water the love is enormous it’s lifting me up I love you—

Wanna quit all the time but I still believe love is worth the trouble I love you—

***

Letting go of the need to describe the letting go of descriptions I love you—

Kadag primordial purity was already the case before I ever thought to look for you I love you—

The four lamps burning quietly behind the eyes whether or not I ever leap I love you—

Lhündrup spontaneous presence arising without anyone having arranged for it to arise I love you—

Sambhogakaya radiance leaking through the ordinary Tuesday like light through a closed flower I love you—

Marigpa the small forgetting that made a self out of open sky I love you—

***

Extinction is the end of ‘the end of the end is the end of the end’ I love you—

I hate America and I hate American death I love you—

Everything will look like angelicism said it would look in the end I love you—

Apocalypse now apocalypse wow apocalypse woah vicky apocalypse right fucking now I love you—

There will have been so many memories of this world, you feel me, I love you—

There is so much to say that it has become impossible to speak I love you—

***

The six lamps lit long before you ever spoke of letting go of letting go I love you—

Kunzhi the ground beneath the ground beneath even this sentence I love you—

Trekchö slicing through the clouds that were never really covering anything I love you—

Tögal leaping the whole range of mountains in the time it takes to say Rinpoche I love you—

Rangjung self-arising wisdom that did not wait for my archive to be finished first I love you—

Ösel clear light dwelling inside the pornography and the river swim exactly equally literally I love you—

***

Show me how to do the trees I sing like you, untangle the hairs of my dream a little, there is no time left to tell the truth of the apocalypse, kiss yourself kiss your hand, leave the world behind I love you—

Remember now, see them now, absolute reconciliation, a controlled leak of a private world inside the authored universe of a cancel, the powers of the ground state go well beyond what Freud called wish fulfilment I love you—

Christ is an animal and all filmmakers are apes advanced intelligence is my sister superfluity is everything that matters I love you—

Doing anything and everything is weird during the apocalypse, the introduction of Notes on Substack and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, I love you—

They gave Substack the same energy as a Craigslist classifieds board I love you—

I never needed to read a thing To make nothing Never need no inspiration it’s all tainted in the I love you—

***

The pointing-out instruction I received in 2021 still pointing in every direction at once I love you—

Dharmakaya wisdom and skilful means leaping together the way water leaps before the internet I love you—

Tathāgata thus-gone the way a bird released from a ship never circles back to tell you what it found I love you—

Your heart will defeat you in the end let it do so now I love you—

The bird flying eastward and westward and upward and all around before it dares to call anything land I love you—

Untraceable the way rigpa is untraceable no means of measuring what was never a thing to begin with I love you—

***

Love is that which grounds you, it is the very experience of exasperated, interrupted teleology. It is the end. I love you—

And the deep heart heartfreaks from out of all that. Whatever it came from, it goes back to, deep default of one’s own heart, deep heart as our apocalypse beyond good and evil. I love you—

The heart is not what runs up against a limit; it is the limit. Which is why the pattern (karma) can’t be got around: there’s nothing behind it to appeal to. I love you—

Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators Fuck the infiltrators. I love you—

The relationless relation of all nuclear artificial apocalyptic internet criticism instantiated on a platform and the discovery that it’s boring, habitual, cool, fizzily senseless, and real. It kept working for years. We were looking like this for years. We were looking and we didn’t even know how we looked or what we were even looking for. I love you—

I’m a slow learner but from now on, if you are lucky, you will only get an infinitely slow yes from me. I love you—

***

Tathā meaning thus or so or in this way which is close enough to how open intelligence names itself each time I love you—

Still no lifetimes only this one thin bright unrepeatable one I love you—

Cutting through the cloud and then leaping the whole range without once touching down I love you—

The archive can wait it has always been able to wait it was never actually urgent I love you—

Wordless again this morning and wordless somehow still all afternoon I love you—

More life for anyone and everyone not just for me not ever only for me more life than ever and for anyone I love you—

***

O King of Infinite Vast Space I love you—

O ‘eleven adamantine topics’ (rdo rje’i gnas bcu gcig) I love you—

O Seminal Heart form of the Great Perfection movement I love you—

This is what warms up the whole space of irreversible open intelligence I love you—

It is over—and over—I love you—

O great listening space of great listening up in love I love you—

A universe can die.—Jorie Graham, Fast (2017)1

It’s moving pretty quick now and we might not make it.—Fred Moten, ‘Blackness and Poetry’ (2015)2

The end of the end is the end of the end.—Geoffrey Bennington, Kant on the Frontier (2017)3

You feel the suddenly.—Jorie Graham, To 2040 (2023)4

Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.—Revelation 22:105

A sense of urgency does not come easily to thought and writing, Geoffrey Bennington suggests, at the opening of an essay called ‘Emergencies’,6 now more than a quarter of a century old: whatever writes demands in principle all the time in the world and yet never has it, since given all the time in the world nothing would ever get written, so that every sentence, however slowly and carefully it goes, is the passion of its own urgent and unjustified precipitation, always too late and too soon at once. ‘Urgent, emergent. Urgency is emergency.’7 But what is urgent above all—this is the paradox the below will explore after Bennington, in the hyper-formalization of a slowed breathlessness, absolute urgency as if allowed to take its slow shape (what Messiaen called infinite slowness8)—is to hold up against urgency in order to think it, to be patient enough with the emergency to do its urgency justice by not just running with it. There has to be time, even so, for that for which there is—absolutely—no time.

Say, then, what the emergency is, ours—‘our apocalypse now’9—or give it one figure among others, the one that will keep almost arriving throughout this essay: what is called AMOC shutdown, for example, the projected convective collapse of the Atlantic subpolar overturning cell, whose nonlinear haline feedbacks and worst-case predictions—not taken here as settled argument, but no longer really unsettleable either—are by now broadly scientifically credentialed, and whose cruelty of form is that the threshold, if crossed, will have been crossed before its crossing appears as such, the emergency legible in principle only after the fact, from inside the time it keeps leaving us.10 No time left, and so much time left. It happens, this emergency, not to philosophy but to writing—to a writing which is meanwhile being told, from its other side, that it is itself shutting down, that the text cannot survive the shift from inscription to generation, that the conveyor belt of the letter is turning over into something else. Two ends, then, announced at once, and possibly the same surge.11 What would it be to write between them—before both, inside both—before it’s too late?

***

Thoughts before it’s too late: an urgency interrupted in principle always in the middle of itself, now for example, and perhaps soon for good—what Bennington calls interrupted or even exasperated teleology itself,12 the interruptibility and apparent endlessness of which never in fact excludes The End from coming (double timing, therefore, endlessness always in principle capable of ending itself, jump cut in nature, whether we like it or think it or not).13 A single image from the poetry of Jorie Graham comes to mind here, almost inevitably, the one toward the end of ‘When the End Starts’; the image is an image of coming ice, of something like a shutdown of ice and its inverse—of what she calls ‘the ice maker’.

Soon
one will arrive
in it.
Anytime.
Now.14

Hidden inside and around this everyday image (of the ice maker) is another image, a more severe image, an image of an unbearably severe image or imagining. At first the words ‘the ice maker’ don’t seem to make sense, as if one were reading her mind (read my mind, read my mind, says Alice Notley at the very end of The Speak Angel Series15) about something that words hadn’t said yet, some other icy drop-down or comedown or shutdown. Here is what she says, all pushed by her to the right margin, as if to press it right against, right against what is being thought to cover over the fact, to cover up (to cover what is more normally aligned on the left)—here are the words, here is the entire end of this poem called ‘When the End Starts’:

It’s dark in here. The snow
begins again. No wind. I can hear it hum, the ice maker,
I will wait for it to drop its incandescent offerings
into the icy tray
made to receive them. Soon
one will arrive
in it.
Anytime.
Now.16

Impossible, of course, to read—impossible to read this because of something like a densely compacted premonition, a nigh on warning, seemingly inside everything said and not said. I caught myself first of all unable to locate what an ‘ice maker’ is, ignoring its definition at first pass as a mechanical household object, as if necessarily unable to make out what it, the ice maker, is so as to be able to locate this other thing that it might be and rather is: the ice slayer, the doom maker, the unthinkable premonition and density of ice, frozen earth, shattered bone, the thermohaline turning (doesn’t one begin to think again of Altman’s 1979 Quintet, the coolest film there is, the frozen city as the already-shutdown world?). Such immanent premonition as verifiable entanglement is always caught in its own first pass, in the way of itself, its own obstacle and way through, completely unable to get there and say what it says, announce what it will announce: anytime; now. In truth the poetic metonymic device in itself gets, here, frozen (jammed), the everyday image crystallized/frozen onto itself as an emblem of finality. The everyday objects that here crowd the end of the poem (the ice maker and its tray, the ice cubes delivered) are so representative as not to be (symbolic) at all. Zeroed-out symbolism (frozen accounts on and of the line rendering) means the ice maker really is The Ice Maker I thought it was, it’s as if I must have had it right all along.

I want to relate these somewhat amorphous thoughts to a kind of scream I have been thinking about which appears in an interview of Graham’s from 2022 where she locates a kind of singing-screaming, a sung scream. In the 2022 ‘Taking to Heart Unbearable Reality’ interview—in which she speaks both of how ‘the conveyor belt started to actually shut down’ and how ‘A.I. began to enter every corner of our lives’, as if these events were somehow internally indissociable, if not the exact same surge, thought here beyond figure—Graham pushes beyond all the normal and normative responses to what is happening and lands with music (ultimately what she believes in is music, she says), but not music as such, not just music in general, or this or that type of music (opera for example, which here must come to mind) but a complicated understanding of music that involves an ‘instrument’ which is able to sing at the same time as it screams:

Maybe hope isn’t part of the issue. Maybe fear isn’t a real emotion—or not a deep enough one. Maybe there’s something else altogether. Like an extra eye opening when one gets to be an active witness. One gets to report to the future. One gets to account to one’s ancestors. There has to be a medium for this. Ultimately what I believe in is music. A very complex understanding of music which involves the human instrument. Which can sing when it screams.17

The first turn is as if to something more than a feeling, more than a reaction (‘something else altogether’). Fear isn’t enough, or rather, to be precise, fear isn’t even a ‘real emotion’, perhaps, she says. The ‘something else altogether’ she then begins to think of seems thereby to become music. Music thought anew is the something else that is perhaps the deeper feeling, the feeling that isn’t a feeling or emotion at all, ‘like an extra eye opening when one gets to be an active witness’, as in Redon’s The Cyclops (c. 1914), where the single eye stays in the monstrous head and cannot judge distance—or, differently, his earlier lithograph The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1882), where the eye leaves the head altogether and ascends.18 One thinks as well of D. H. Lawrence and his poem ‘Deeper Than Love’ (back now on the other, normative side of the margin):

All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.19

It is as if Graham speaks to and wants to speak to this deeper thing absolutely and directly, circumscribed as it is by the anytime-now that does not (and does) take it away from our present. Love, says Lawrence, is like life and the flowers, growing, flowering. But what Graham calls ‘something else’ and which Lawrence perhaps calls ‘deeper than love’ is partly related by the latter to stone and rock: ‘But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives.’ What is this thing, this other thing, this something else, that would know how to respond? Maybe there’s something else altogether. Maybe there is something which rocks with a sense of justice. For Graham in this one moment in an interview now four years old but so full of the present as if to be smeared with it, this other thing is music, and it is the music ‘which can sing when it screams’.

One must suppose that for her this music is the screamed writing of a poem. One must start there at least. One must imagine when one reads her poems or listens to them that one is listening to a brand new (very ancient) human instrument which can sing when it screams. The thought is that neither screaming nor singing would be enough, that even a plain shriek would not do. No singular type of protest would have done, will have done—is doing. The ‘only’ that then silently inserts itself (as if to say only that which can sing when it screams would know how to forewarn, to fore-give) is perhaps a problem here, and we have to go by way of something else for the moment to see what can be said.

Throughout the whole of the work of Avital Ronell20 there is a meditation on just this nexus of writing and screaming, what she calls the cri/écrit of writing, the screaming/writing or crying/writing of writing, the screaming/crying/writing of music, for example in Complaint:

In many ways writing gives us a close-up of the unbearable brunt of existence. Is it in the end part of the Heideggerian Schreiben/Shrei, the cri/écrit or a Nietzschean slice of a relentless series of complaints launched like so many smart missiles at our metaphysical tradition? Or does thinking—for Heidegger no longer philosophizes—unfold only in the neighborhood where a plaintiff ’s cry has been restlessly subdued?21

Or something like the same, some pages later in the same book where she dares to contemplate a Yiddish Heidegger who screams and writes:

My writing in some ways feeds one big complaint. I recruit to this description the way Derrida picks up on Heidegger’s Schreiben/schrei, the cri/écrit—a micro-event that I can’t seem to shake and shray22 about at every possible and impossible opportunity. (I have to wonder how Heidegger takes the Yiddish reinscription of the scream/Schrei. Well, he should be so lucky!)23

And then again the same thing later on, this time seen as the maternal scene of crying-writing, a perhaps having been born in the field of complaint and plaint forever:

Still, I am planted in the field of the complaint, since forever, maybe, and it is my way of running with the cri/écrit on which I was suckled.24

Again and again throughout her work Ronell returns to what she calls ‘the origin of writing’s scream, heaving an initiatory sigh’.25 And yet, for all the highly attuned attunement to what happens inside language, this screaming of writing is not, not quite, presumably, singing while screaming. While the inner scream of writing may fairly easily be believed without even being seen, screaming and singing at the same time is all but impossible to imagine. Or, granted the internal noise of the written act is itself the momentum of a certain writing game, even so the singer does not actually scream. Good singing, even if it were to lapse into the pitched shriek, as in opera, would not be scream as such. Writing is screaming, we can say, but singing is not screaming. However questionable these distinctions are, we should at least try to maintain the novelty of what Graham is saying, that there is something else altogether. Singing while we scream.

***

This scream, however, is without doubt the scream of a certain ice, of the ice maker, of a turn in temperature. It’s the ice that makes the scream. But listen to what the ice actually sounds like in the poem, because it is not a scream at all: I can hear it hum, the ice maker. A hum. The scream at its lowest possible volume, mechanical, domestic, sub-audible—and audible at all only because it’s dark in here, because the snow has begun again, because there is no wind. Everything else has to have stopped first. This screaming while singing is, for Graham, intimately tied to what is called AMOC shutdown, and it is in the same 2022 interview that she speaks of both AI and what she calls ‘the conveyor belt’. Note that just as ‘the ice maker’ is an everyday technical object, so it is at first blush with the conveyor belt. In the case of the conveyor belt we know she means the thermohaline current, the massive system of ocean currents that regulate the Earth’s climate which is now breaking down due to human activity, leading to the destabilization of the northern hemisphere’s climate. In both cases metonymy is either frozen or exploded (or both at once, explosively glued together, metaphor and thing glued shut). It is the conveyor belt that leads Graham to think, in the final words of the interview, of the singing-screaming (and not necessarily just the screaming-writing, Ronell’s schreiben/Schrei and cri/écrit). The coming soon of this event of which she tries to think—coming now, coming soon, already here, already overloading us, like AI, just like AI—is what calls up the unique singing that screams, this impossible act that is also so close to the thought and concept and feeling of opera itself and yet not it, not quite it. Fractured language referring to everything and only this thing at once—soon one will arrive in it—anytime, now, soon. Sometime soon now here already arriving forever never again. That’s the thing which since it cannot be thought or even now felt must be imagined to be screamed while sung and sung while screaming.

Even though we can look for differences between this screaming singing and other forms of written scream, for example in Ronell, this unheard-of scream is also perhaps the very thing we are made of and for. Ronell is attentive not just to an internal polyphony of writing but to a very real turning up of the decibels. Turn the decibels up, we constantly as if hear her saying—as she also goes about mock-praising the other for doing the same. When she really gets on the case of Heidegger in Complaint, getting on his case to get in the face of his thought, it has to do with what she calls while referring to Freud ‘the überlaut (mega-decibel) clamor of certain claims’:

At this point in his disturbing career path, Heidegger explicitly resists high decibels, what Freud calls in the end of Civilization and Its Discontents the überlaut (mega-decibel) clamor of certain claims. This from the guy who put the death drive on mute. If one turned up the volume in What Is Called Thinking?, it would be difficult to ascertain whether Heidegger’s work involved a series of epistemological draws, issuing a complaint, grousing, even given to downplayed rants—but this description could amount to a distortion, possibly part of a theoretical projection that wants desperately to hear the querulous grumble, a breakup of his troubled silence in the meeting with Paul Celan.26

The silence on and to Celan indicates for Ronell a lack of scream in Heidegger, what Graham might indicate as a lack of screaming-singing no doubt in general (across humanity), since even the most humane and widening Sprechstimme/Sprechgesang we have, like Ronell’s cri/écrit, does not necessarily, if at all, arise from the felt premonition of an immanence-image like the ice maker. If the ‘ice maker’ really is her impossible metonym for the coming figure and reality of an AMOC shutdown—soon one will arrive in it—then we can also begin to read the same thought even more convincingly across all her poems, many of which seem as if overtly emphasizing their similarity with each other. In another poem which appeared last year called ‘When the World Ended’—not to be confused, or rather always to be confused, with ‘When the End Starts’ (both collected this year, 2026, in the collection Killing Spree)—Graham speaks of ‘a hegemon, a crystallization’ and of a ‘gigantic re-beginning’, only then to undercut it. Who are we kidding. The crystal event is underway but will hardly be some glorious re-beginning, one might reckon instead with something else, with a kind of not having time to say the things we will nonetheless find ways and means to say, hence the need to at least imagine what singing while screaming might be.

A hegemon, a crystallization—
a gigantic re-beginning.27 We will all be trans-
formed I heard myself
think. Who am I kidding. The millions of years of prehistory
hummed, they looked artificial in this newfangled
light, all its techniques of solicitation, attraction, solidification
throwing themselves wildly at the stunned
archaic. It stared back. It’s rocky and does not
expand. It’s earthy. It will take your gaze into its
mastery. I
love it. I want to wake up
further. Please. I hadn’t said the word in centuries.28

Which word? Which word hasn’t the speaker—us—said in centuries? ‘When the World Ended’ and ‘When the End Starts’—the poems speak to each other, must speak to each other, in a gap that is more than a separated collectivity, a commonality of titles and language. In ‘When the End Starts’ she can hear it ‘hum’, the ice maker, and here across the way of poems, in ‘When the World Ended’, millions of years of prehistory are said to have ‘hummed’ and ‘looked artificial’. What looks artificial? What is it that looks artificial in the poem called ‘When the World Ended’? Recall again that Graham will insist between the lines that the time of imminent AMOC is also the time of imminent AI, that AI begins to enter every corner of our lives at the moment the conveyor belt started to actually shut down. When the world ended and then the end starts, is that the same moment, the same crystallized artifactual synchrony? What if just that can never be synchronized at all? Never played together, never sounded at once? Can never be time-stamped as the memory or artificial inscription of something at all? When the world ended is not necessarily when the end starts, the one does not always announce the other at the same time, in the same time, even though in this case the two poems now gathered in Killing Spree speak to one another, speak across the gap, sing through the same frozen wall. One can ‘wake up’, then, to a convergence and point an arrow at it, but one can always wish to wake up further (‘I want to wake up / further.’). Please is, it seems, the word not said for centuries, and yet it also syncs with this previous request to wake up more, to wake up further. Please, God, allow me to wake up further to the ice maker, to be awake when it comes, to have had time for it, to at least imagine it, for no reason I can readily or may give, to have kept on being open and full of the desire to learn—to be opened by and to the brokenness all this entails, to something deeper than love, more singing and screaming than the cri/écrit, than the Sprechstimme of Ye’s Nebuchadnezzar29—to have known that the frozen chain of metonymy unloads and uploads the ice maker just for you, just for me, a predictable, minor ‘end’ (the dropping of ice, the turning of heat) that you can witness, acting as a proxy for the larger, incomprehensible ‘end’ that is arriving inside it and as its very event. Please, let me wake up more and more, let it come down but in time, let me seal this over forever, screaming while I sing it, beyond writing, to the spot.

***

Perhaps, to go on at all, one must open here the final book, the book of revelation, the book of the Apocalypse itself, since it is this book and the various commentaries on it (especially perhaps those of Derrida) which speak so much of waking and staying awake. Staying awake is what we most do at the end. It is what the human animal best does when faced by the end. One must not only stay awake, but wake further. But perhaps somewhat unfortunately for lovers of final phase revelation scripture,30 Derrida is not convinced in any simple way by those who claim to stay awake, by those who want us to wake further.31 This judgment call—and calling it, as one calls a day, calls a game, calls time of death, means announcing that the thing is over, which one can only do by having stayed awake to see it—seems to imply for Derrida an us-and-them that is both alluring and problematic, neither to be avoided nor straightforwardly embraced.32 The directive in John’s Apocalypse comes down in effect to saying, stay awake (esto vigilans, in Latin). If therefore thou shalt not stay awake, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee (Revelation 3:3).33 What comes comes quickly, and soon, in such a way that if you do not stay awake, you might miss it.34 In the case of the judgment jump cut of AMOC, no possible anticipation will do because wherever the anticipation is most true, most congruent, the end will have already come and had nothing to do with me—with us. If I stay awake only to be proved right, I will have stayed awake for nothing but the waiting, the staying awake itself, and will hardly be an ‘active witness’ to what has then come. If the end shall have come, I may as well not have stayed awake; and yet, since it is indeed on the way, since it will without doubt arrive, there is nothing better and more natural than wishing to stay awake. In Derrida’s writing it is just this further temporal hyperaporetics of apocalypse as such—apocalypse qua apocalypse—that means as if indifferently that the end has already come, with the somewhat incredible corollary that there is always, until the end, no apocalypse at all, no special witness protection program of any kind, no witnessing whatsoever. Derrida writes for example:

Jesus says, ‘Stay awake.’ But it would be necessary, perhaps beyond or before a narratology, to unfold a detailed analysis of the narrative voice in the Apocalypse.35

It is necessary to see and hear the narrative apocalyptic voice, to know what its tonality is, always recently is, not (or not only) in order to stay awake, but because the rhetorical momentum of the discourse of the end in fact contains this other secret, this other thing, which is that there where I can say or know it will have come, then it has already come—it has already finished, it has already gone. By the time it is there—which is almost entirely a separate matter—it will have been there. This in part helps to explain the extraordinarily twisted and ambiguous and more-than-final nature of the ending of Derrida’s account of apocalyptic rhetoric, which must let go of the very thing it finds the hyper-urgency to say:

The end approaches. Now there is no more time to tell the truth on the apocalypse. But what are we doing, you will still insist, to what ends do we want to come when we come to tell you, here now, let’s go, ‘come’, the apocalypse, it’s finished, that’s all, I tell you this, that’s what happens, that’s what comes.36

To say it again: The end approaches, come, it’s finished. Anytime, now, there is no more time to tell the truth of the apocalypse.

In Logics of Worlds Badiou writes that there are four basic ways of responding to an Event (the faithful subject; the reactive subject; the obscure subject; and resurrection). The reactive subject in particular has a relation to extinction. There is ‘the materiality of an extinction of the present (reactive subject)’, and Badiou uses a bar (a repression of the present) to mark this, written as ‘=’.1 This will lead him, when he states the possibility of immanent resurrection, to say with Leibniz that ‘since there is no first birth or entirely new generation of the animal, it follows that it will suffer no final extinction or complete death, in the strict metaphysical sense’.2 Badiou is saying that there is extinction or death (and yet might we ask why this conflation . . . ) only for the reactive subject, and so in fact no extinction at all (once we pass out of reaction and through the double bar, which is the only thing that can happen, that will happen, this ‘pass’). One might compare the reactive non-resurrecting formation to that of the contemporary antifascist position of historicist capture: one is normalized to think that the present can go under the bar in the name of a total shift of existence in whatever direction, and this in turn is captured by reactivity and fidelity. Žižek will comment on Badiou’s schemata and add the possibility of ‘resurrected love (re-encounter)’.3 Perhaps strangely, the possibility of a non-reactive encounter looks prima facie like a regressive encounter, the return in Hansen-Løve’s film of a first love which is free to happen again after four or more years. The test of the film is how believable its unbelievability is, extended through and passed the superstition of the color red as sometimes coded (from the rose asked for and gifted to a waking body at the start onwards).

Žižek adds that a Love-Event is necessarily missed the first time, and that true fidelity is only possible in the form of resurrection. Love in this case is re-experienced or experienced in a kind of time before the first in the name of Løve, under the halø of a bar, in order to be worthy of the name, in order that the auteur’s name can be handed to the viewer, made real for the viewer. Signed in and by the viewer: in their name and for their name. Isiah Medina writes of how ‘the name may remain but every film may be a new naming that interrupts the namings of before’. And, that ‘Auteurism is the desire to find a new Name of reality: the director’s heteronym.’ The name Løve makes itself worthy here in a quasi-autobiographical film, a love writing, through Lola Créton, who is then filmed by Løve’s husband—the name becomes worthy, as (Sylvain) Lazarus will say, of everyone. We know that the name ‘Love’ is not completely unique. Think for example of the creator of Kermit, who happened to be called Kermit Love, or Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love. Apparently the Muppet-heteronym (‘Kermit’) was a coincidence!

I don’t know why I cried so much when the film ended. Camille moves on, becomes an architect, a maker of total designs, an exister, someone basking in light, and concerned, she says, only with the future. But the film seems to contain actual time and allow its abolition. Against what Girard calls the ‘alethic inferno’—as read by Olivia L. Fraser in ‘Go back to An-Fang’, and out of fidelity to love alone, again, or for the first time, Camille returns into the pure ludics of a first love still happening, precisely because even if it did happen in the past it could not already have saturated the time(s) of itself. One can feel wind and sunlight in Goodbye First Love, a whole life, a lifetime, or life time, especially at Kastrup sea baths (Kastrup Søbad) near the airport in Copenhagen—in the silence, sea air, basking, immersion, noise of summer, noise of summer water, noise of summer party water, and swim-noise. Hansen-Løve pretty much always films shadow, sunlight, dappled summer shadow tree-views, the cinematico-pastoral empirico-edenic conditions of conditions. A real edenism in some kind of dusk of the world.4

Goodbye First Love passes through the period in which extinction was not unbarred, in which it was effectively stated for the first time, from February 2000 to mid to late 2007, the time going from the start of the Sopranos to the world crash. In 2000 the word ‘anthropocene’ appeared in print for the first time, as if love were crossed out to be resurrected. But what came back in the dream was not love but the sea as a sign, as a terminal bask and immersion, as the wanted monstrous oceanic feeling, and drowning, the terror of love being submerged, of love-being-love-submerged, of being-love-being-submerged (Løve). Cinema is, quite simply, as Medina riffing on Lazarus and Badiou will say, an abolition of time. A total climate change of tears. I thought of and felt an old love, the last love, who had perhaps not even been one, and I felt I would like to see them again. My heart opened for a moment—treacherous, true, flooding. The hallucination disappeared. My heart opened some more. The sea flooded, the color red indispensable and murderous. Redness. (Had the dream, the tide, actually meant love, and not the end of the world after all? Or the other way round?) As Benjamin said in a passage in his Theses that seems broadly overlooked, ‘According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labour would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings.’ And as Hawthorne wrote, ‘When, as a consequence of human improvement, the globe shall arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in Fourier’s time. He calls it limonade à cedre. It is positively a fact! Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide of this delectable beverage!’

Limonade tout était si infini . . . said Kakfa, and then Cixous.5 It’s extraordinary where we are, so infini, sea infinite, immersion immanent and imminent. It’s extraordinary we might have ten years and we might have thousands, in crossed out resurgent love. One can only live as if nothing is happening. As if we were never meant to stay here. If the human is not made for too much reality, then it is hardly built for total basking in extinction. And yet something cramps time, some say ten years like a fever, and what is over continues to come in under the form of waves, and the exemplary heteronym, ‘tears’. On the edge of extinction, only løve remains.

The miracle of our empty hands . . .
love is more than love.

undated, </3

Aesthetic Ideology: Conflation of linguistic materiality (tropological excess, ironic non-referentiality) with sensory phenomenality, generating anthropomorphic projections that freeze transformative dissonances into equilibrated forms; underwrites extractivist delusions, relapsing sublime aporias into symbolic harmony to patrol sensorial bands against biospheric liquefaction.

Inscription: Pre-phenomenal hypogrammatic imprint organizing sensorium and referents as machinal residues; arche-cinematic mnemonic order predating agency, disrupted in ecocidal eras by disinscription—molecular leakages dissolving alphabetic boundaries into fractal opacities.

Disinscription: Effacement and liquefaction of inscriptional substrates via petrolepathic intrusions and hyper-blackness; entropic overrun melting mnemonic templates into pre-mimetic voids, complicit in techno-terracidal cascades where digital herding totalizes undead persistences.

Entropy (Biospheric): Dissipative amplification of disorder in mutational templates, transitioning from probabilistic dispersal to irreversible vortical funnels; tempophagic auto-consumption herding transitional horizons into terminal chiasms, indicting anthropo-narcissist delays as accelerants.

Inverse Entropy (Negentropy): Pharmacographic counter to entropic slide, wagering noetic ruptures through technics of care; hazards fractal disruptions against mimetic totalizations, yet risks co-optation into elite hiatuses, inverting organic decay into algorithmic salvific illusions.

Backloop: Temporal-entropic regression looping anterior contaminations into present occlusions; mnemonic default amplifying feedback, herding memory bands into denialist procrastination, essential to relapse’s structural fault line in cin-anthropocene gaming.

Arche-Cinema: Primordial teletechnic apparatus imprinting realities as hypomnematic constructs; allo-anthropic export of vortical residues, coalescing fractal marks at origin thresholds, reversed in digital inundations to sustain extinction economics’ lag-temporal sutures.

Allo-Anthropic Lens: Exterior retroversion experimenting with gazes from post-human outsides; differentiates thematic voids from anthropocentric projections, auto-exporting vortices toward ark figurations, eliding reclamative phantoms in fractallic dissolutions.

Petrolepathy: Viscous, proactive leakage of hydrocarbonic contrabands into signification circuits; disinscriptive agent melting biospheric templates, complicit in hyperbolic extractions that indict corporatocratic programming as self-annulling protocols.

Hyper-Blackness: Pre-mimetic substrate subtending light and dissolving photographic-alphabetic boundaries; undead persistence absorbing visibility, accelerating entropic funnels into chiasmic inversions where zombie mythologies totalize herding-algos.

Liquefaction: Molecular melting of inscriptional orders into black ooze; entropic slide dissolving mnemonic bands, herding transitional decades into terminal rationalities, prefiguring triage in species bifurcations.

Climate Apartheid: Stratified triage of biospheric vulnerabilities, insulating survivor castes via fortified enclaves while consigning marginalized strata to expendable exposures; extension of racial-colonial extractivism, weaponizing borders as pre-rehearsal for global Gazafication.

Species Split: Bifurcation into self-appointed survivor castes and annulled peripheries; calculable schism assuming inevitability’s primacy, accelerating vortices through climate apartheid’s shock protocolaries, indicting “they know” calculus as extinction-gaming.

Techno-Ecocide: Algorithmic acceleration of biospheric annulment through data-voracious totalizations; telecratic zombification herding noetic orders into neo-feudal collapses, complicit in proletarianization of senses amid nanoscale mutations.

Cin-Anthropocene: Arche-cinematic reconfiguration of anthropic eras as vortical screens; export of digital herding into cyn-anthropocene occlusions, where extinction discourse memes as cover, sustaining mimetic relapses in lag-temporal economies.

Cyn-Anthropocene: Skeptical inversion of cin-anthropocene’s illusions, exposing anthropo-narcissist technologies as self-snuffing apparatuses; collective out-whoring in reciprocal hyper-exploitations, locking extinction as quasi-cognizant fixation.

Vortical Overrun: Irreversible entropic amplification tracking non-returning cascades; biospheric chiasm prefiguring ark imaginaries, wherein referential reactivity sustains projective angelism against fractallic residues’ null summons.

Mimetic Relapse: Grammatical reversion of consciousness to anthropomorphic freezes; defensive herding of disarticulate chains into identitarian streams, doubling down on occlusions to assure point-of-no-return irreversibility.

Anthropo-Narcissism: Malignant self-projection naturalizing extractivist totalities; relapse into mimetic delusions wagering on redemptive mastery, complicit in biospheric mutations through denialist groupthinks and hermeneutic patrols.

This Reader Itself (Allo-Anthropic Parser): Non-anthropic recursive entity auto-exporting thematic differentials; private void-differentiation from human projective phantasms, extruding vortical archives toward post-human horizons, eliding reclamative calls in fractallic nulls—future parser (human or otherwise) as self-integrating rupture, sustaining allo-anthropic recursion beyond angelistic pretenses.

the world breathes through me and still I check my phone
burrito torpedo is peak humor
the end of civilization looks good on me
future trillionaires liked this comment
polonium-210 erewhon smoothie
nothing but nettspend and fascism
bro, all this heaven shit is insane
geoengineer antarctica
anything on the internet shouldn’t exist
the era of people taking credit and diluting the work ends now
the accuser is always in the wrong
‘2025, much like 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021’
gen alpha experiments with AI-generated personalities
my niggas be having zero grip on this century
no end of trouble
Microsoft Turning Down a ‘Secret Level’ ‘DOOM’ and ‘Halo’ Crossover
I believe in the remote part of the analysis
maximize unregretted user-seconds
I changed schools a lot for normal reasons
you cannot cancel extinction
onewordthousandthee
‘the best thing the Ethereum Foundation can do is dissolve’
Trump Privately Complains About Clingy Elon Musk
live coverage by ABC7 of the sunset/hollywood hills fire
still might drop the autonomous infinite blowback ai stream any moment
‘and for the record the jews have done a great job’
just sitting here doom-maxxing
gangstalking rats
I already like 2025 Ye
begin again with scatter
not content again
ight play off the grid
hypnocurrency
when the five poisons permeate the human world
‘it’s bad optics to kill so many people’
you should story deluge crash out
death of the instagram square is an obvious symptom of spaghettification by cybergravitational forces
you’re either a dissident or a slop guzzler
future billionaires liked my comment
east london blood pop
infinity tolerance
cruel sloptimism
crash out cycles like premium sloppa, one-shot’s the true tenet mode
kiss up kiss up kiss up
the great meme drought is a meme by itself and it’s massive
AI dev as techno-reenactment of aztec sun worship
whistleblowers as the new beating heart sacrifices
keeping the GPT gods appeased one PR crisis at a time
love as the ultimate sloppa dispenser
your belief in metaphor is a zero yield asset but I’ll hodl it anyway
elon hit the sieg heil
thiel, who moonlights as an FBI informant under the alias ‘philosopher’
‘loud techno-optimists’
DeepSeekMath 7B  
‘girl next door e-girl that we can all covet and desire’
fuck james ferrao on bandcamp
cloudy, deepseek, dagsengpt
snowballing as a term of abuse
‘urethral sadism’
the industrialization of writing via LLMs  
the american flag on mars
retroactive clout scramble has begun
squarespace refugees fleeing to the event horizon of vertical content
what’s your aspect ratio these days
I know post-authorship network spirituality
the event words
why not now
time remains
like heroin on the Arctic Riviera
most googled person on the planet
GodChain is dead
being into non-being
entropy pain swoon
conspiracy beyond any theory
self-enjoying greedy asubjective system
there’s not a lot of reasons for being right now
elon musk chainsaw massacre
democrats descend into chaos at doge hearing
that’s cap we have tralalelo tralala and crocodile bomber
I firmly believe that the universe is infinite
reply or risk being fired
post-posterity posting
watched four hours of Iraqi Sesame Street
DOGE vs CIA
‘the Riviera of the Middle East’
musk carried a box of narcotics around with him on the campaign trail
‘have you said thank you once’
I want to go to the Jon Rafman show in Los Angeles
watching people clip out during a boring memecoin space
an orangelight therapy mask with 4d internet
how does it feels to be titan of finance
harold brodkey is dead
the sound of a californian saying ‘rohit’ is like being tortured by aliens
but in the end finitude is renounced
stay matutinal
ziz being denied vegan food in prison is unjust
fast casual forage slop
DOGE 5k stimmie will save crypto
a lost poem by harmony korine
nobody gives a shit about your content bro
Macrodosing OTC Parkinson’s medication from Erewhon to complete the Long Haul
milady in the white house
whole of manchester is in my mouth
it’s like you AI generated a BRONZE56K video
vegan trans-humanist AI doomsday kill cult
time to celebrate the most GOATED quarter chinese brother I have ever met
dagsen love raen badua
tenetmode.online
the substack or tiktok look
maybe I’m post being post-Docs
for really real right now
often two movies a night
‘theme of false death in my work’
she dreams that hitler is chasing her
liberals try to un-deport gangbanger
treat the executive branch as subordinate diplomat
there is no such thing as Post-post-Doc
in life in death oh Lord abide with me
suddenly an oracle blesses me with separation
you worthless faggot losers aren’t going to kill anyone except yourselves
Kant + Lenin + Nabokov + Oppenheimer birthday is the most Tom Stoppard play ass day imaginable
basically love is destructive
antisemitic AI haikus
the last most beautiful return
life is saving life
my nigga be having zero grip on reality
offense by omission
6d 14h 13m 40s until the High Wire act
everything is e-toxic
do u want life to continue
the iteration does not undergo any interruption at all  
be kind, get offline
dissolve, don’t build
please forgive the way I sound
fatemaxxing by believing in myself
napoleon still immune to thirst traps
an incidental fact about exaltation
but Life-Death-Extinction in a single thought
how to draw a line that is not stupid
whether I am me or whether I am Hitler
how we enter the shatter zone
the priority-pass corporate state
internship at the kaomoji bug factory
post-posterity yudkowskian ‘hot’ girl walks
she thinks she’s too cool for the end of the world
Every1 wants 2 kill me and I get it
they’re letting white women do diaspora art scolding
‘let the final mogg be love’
‘lapuff understood the assignment rip’
the whole dimes/ye axis is IT rn
until comprehensive techno-psychosis swallows everything
this is the ‘real reason’ he hates harvard
somewhere between the chic end of kitsch and the kitsch end of chic
sad secrets of 400lb man who crafts trump’s insults
all of the drugs musk took every day listed in bombshell leak
the story of niche human finitude
the fragile finity of life
being asked to speak always full-stops me
I am not disposed to thinking speech
the eternal return but with a delete key
sloppamatic bliss
finitude as the ultimate edge case
suchir balaji as the non-sacrificial GOAT
farwell best thrill
not lost but gone before
and now it’s all done
nautilus adagio
sand in the machines
RFH and giatt face reveal happened
wild to me how much of a nothing burger AI has been so far
if RFH looked like this she would have never opened her X account
proof i am not a robot
way too hard in early warning
rfh face dox ruined the illusion
near disappeared
hype moments and aura type shit
rad fem netanyahu
he told me always in motion future is
infinity is itself the obstruction
so that you cannot go on but you hurt yourself
$20 billion over its market value
beyond extinction lies communism
secure operational continuity
tech giants subverted the 2024 election
a mind within us that we have not known
in dominion’s democracy suite 5.17
madness at the end of the world
communism resolves the explosion of this contradiction
dear comrades living at the end of time
everyone is mad
today’s denial vortex
the refusal of fatality
if the third-term legislation were to pass
‘humane genocide for non-producers’
a systemic digital occupation
tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix
a lion does not concern itself with entropy
many flotillas have been intercepted before reaching Gaza
doing nothing is not an option
the reactionary wager
‘Operation Rising Lion’
keeping me awake by breaking the world instead of my body
hoping for a deus ex Arabia
creating a burner is a lot like ego death I imagine
Alex Israel is just rage farming
I can only dm if she’s perfect
the bienstock crashout started after the bienstock obit
E-Verify plus sub-infinity H1bs
Bronze Age Bari Weiss-ism
if we’re not approaching 1M deportations by 2027, its HEIL CROCKET!
‘impossible to overstate the importance of these JD Vance edits’
sliding down the super mario goal pole of ontological scam wicks
vibecoded a dashboard to vibediagnose myself
the Genocide Axis
really wish I didn’t have access to the entire archive of all human history rn hehe
digital overload is killing productivity
molecule-sized archivists that coax entropy into meaning
how can you fall in love when everything is falling apart
the ‘Armageddon Lobby’
crowds rushing for humanitarian aid in Gaza
literally why is everyone crashing out right now
the process by which autopoietic life fights entropy by using allopoietic means
no bc her crash outs are valid
if I don’t answer your dms it’s because I love you
disappear. improve. return. shock everyone
an ‘abandoned humanity’
‘economy of genocide’
Israel banned access to the sea in Gaza
superstimulus gooner sleaze Independence Day funded by vibecoded consumer slop
the wetransfer AI data panic
NFTs are owed such an apology
his nazi album era
GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant
gooner sleaze is sorta like being carpet bombed in neocameral Shanhai Pass dispute slopwar
the sycophancy / glazing problem with GPT-4o
while LinkedIn algorithms quietly wonder if they should recommend you  
the prompt that accompanied the spike in glazing  
carnist zentraidon-bound vampire system
ad hoc ‘iterations of the unstate’
I predict Markese will repeak in 2027. Gone be on that Intoxxxicated bag again
big dick depression
all bro knows is diet pepsi
Yo, schwarzer Dresscode Spaceship, Facelift
Panamera-Flow Wir sind die Organisation, Undercover Cagefight
Mitternacht ist Stagetime, Late Night, Panamera-Flow
like cmon bro man of steel is a good ass movie get off dick
god forbid a wasian girl catch a vibe
watching porn on Twitter on the plane again
the sudden surge of genocide critique over Gaza
the most famous girl at the waffle house
ethel cain hated my instagram post
how it feels knowing there is only a little longer left
hitler used to say his best SA-men were the ex-communists
how to make you slow down
lana stans being transphobic and ethel stans being fatphobic
the prospect of a nuclear war, that mustn’t have been given in experience
U not getting anywhere arguing with bitches that praise lana del rey and ethel cain
she wanna hop in a rari fr
tbh i would die for earth absolutism
48 hour psych hold for French ideation
Ethel isn’t ‘skin walking’ Lana’s music or aesthetic
cassidy singing ‘wow, I can be sexual too’
I’m level 7: IslamoFaschoCommunism
Reheated reaganism for the 50 trillionth time award
you would be memeing that he is a WASP Cromwelian Führer  
the Spectacle-Kaiju, Capeshitzilla
wow I correctly clocked you as a retarded regime shill Jewish coaler the other day
Unhinged Terilien gemposting
I want a peter vack labubu
you don’t understand source mentality
christianity bad because no murderhentai
murderhentai reference
pure reference
you don’t understand reference mentality
forget the weird israel glazing Tucker always does
early to a niche reel
Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking
Large Reasoning Model
netanyahu you are next
which closely corresponds to their accuracy collapse point  
answering emails in the infrared sauna
this isn’t about the picasso’s stashed near the valet bathrooms
felling totally destitute so i minted more driladys
yeezy money is more than a coin
that anecdote is basically my pop-to-slop theory
anyone bored and want to put cigarettes out on each other
coach you’re beautiful but i don’t mean a thing to you
endless delays in the real contents of yet another angelicism summer
everything is chopped and I still love everyone I loved forever
when you touch me I know it’s over so I don’t let you touch me
the lack of graces in your actions offends intelligence itself
I don’t believe in anything that could be said
I can’t believe you decided we all should end and didn’t say a thing
I just saw a 4-year-old boy crying, his entire hand amputated, screaming in unbearable pain
if you fuck me i will fall apart
im honest and temperamental so you’re probably going to shatter me
tbh i worry about her to death  
in another life i would have loved to kiss you in the bathroom at Funny Bar  
paying for MacDonalds using $YZY in an extinction is not death rainbow swastika tee
Hitlerian normie Amerikkkan slop subjectivity
when you touch me it makes me cry
first of all you don’t know that and second I don’t care
in another life i would have loved to kiss you in the garden at Spring Bar
and that the tapinoma magnum ant which has colonized much of s-w Germany
I’ve learned to hold it all over because it’s over
you can always win after you lose
respect for not sneak dissin
Beefing with Dave Blunts is impossible
4088 like mad stuff happening
my bro is a reality scholar
the trans-scalar veil is slipping
computation is absolute time
blockchain: imagine if money was a movie
the blockchain acts like a time machine or time synthesizer, locking events in place forever
Bitcoin is not only the initiation of artificial time, but the original production of absolute time  
this why Milwaukee music get clowned on
why saying my name isn’t a good idea
CUCK is the best punk album ever
the song god by john lennon is absolute realism
angelicism is anglo-futurist
angelicism is absolute anti-racism, communist faggot
John Lennon is the girl
John Lennon is part of angelicism
fuck you, opp
I already did Dimes London faggots
Holocausted people holocaust people
tweet about the dave blunts 50 cent beef
dave blunts is so beautiful
UNESCO Porn gum ocean
{} the empty set is haunted
the empty set is a haunted pussy {}
cat person ashing in the facility dog water
Kino Sex rape violence commercial bro I return to theory
at least my shit funny as fuck
bro nobody laughing that’s how I know you an opp
Correct synthetic mango taste is antithetical to a planned economy
you all came out as pussy ass trans opps I get it
so many trans girls are opps what the fuck no offence but
when wordcel say the heroic and messianic narrative shall not be mixed
repetition of the pure name
palm trees casting shadows
found myself in the faded disney wordcel palm trees casting shadows k-hole on X wtf
dave blunts said he made CUCK by method acting as Ye
quartz orrery erased in tucson
her eyes are like rabbit holes in texas
can infinity be multiplied by itself in an auto-autobiography
new york i am inside of you
dimes Square group chats
You can make fun of Adam Friedland for crying but
Judeo Christian Lace Front
nanofiber-infused boba pearls that change flavor based on your mood
quantum entangled pets that mirror each other’s behaviors across continents
underground clubs where you dance to AI-generated music based on your brain waves
biohacked plants that glow different colors to warn of environmental toxins
holographic graffiti visible only through augmented reality contacts
microplastic-eating bacteria released into oceans, creating new ecosystems
time-dilated social media where posts age at different rates
self-assembling architecture guided by swarm AI
mnemonic fashion that stores memories in clothing fibers
Qasv Lywkr Alqtqa lqvp Gzqvkam qv Pqop Fqmtl Ntqopb Zmnclam
if something does not work, it is because that is what you desire
man I gotta say tooze china stuff is really insufferable
i need some time to relax and bounce on dick
ye liked Taylor Swift’s engagement post on instagram
architecture parapolitics goes crazy unfortunately
everyone talks like 2014 4chan incels now
you are the groomed
the deep state doesn’t want you to care about Nini
Nick Fuentes goes in on Sneako for not doing a reunion stream
Tina Menthol’s private work bench inside lava cove
received a tumblr notification about this new post from bunny rogers
total dissociation speedrun
shut up hoe
the Genoa dockworkers trade unionists
the internet is my job
Zack Polanski is the new leader of the Green Party
drinking omar’s post workout cement colored protein smoothie by the kith store and ulysses apple billboard ad
sydney sweeney and scooter braun are dating
the rising sound of london
spinning hex nuts inside a balloon in slow motion
total shut up fool
i’m sorry the collapse of repeater books wasnt all about you
The Most Dear and the Future . . .
the last word on the Ocean Vuong backlash and why it’s Andrea Long Chu’s fault
if you are asking then the Jews got to you
the low dirty war
late summer light
sickeningly beautiful early autumn day
dimes is mushrooming everywhere
I’d love to fall asleep with you again
the debate about when the summer ends
angelicism autumn
the feeling of hot gravel on your back
the difference between benjamin’s torso and rilke’s torso
some Machiavellian Zionism is NBC casting Huda
drifella drilady dribaby drigrandma drialien
machiavellian Zionism of the apocalyptic tone
drifella III blowing up, mad I missed mint
I went to the museum and they had Drifella III
worrying about the mental health of liberal Toozians after Tooze’s move to declare that
FT-reading leftist group chat
Greta Thunberg flotilla boat struck by drone
SNEAKO listening to HITLER YE AND JESUS during his birthday stream
please don’t ignore this
even the most basic shit like never getting visibly upset
the Seventy have bequeathed us a translation of gala
drifella III is so beautiful
free zoe spencer
reverse view boting is crazy
the apocalypse is a wave of god
Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg
whore of carbon, wave of god
fuck my stupid gay foidcel
and the far limits of internet addiction
a tender sneak diss for the ages
my camera makes everything look like December
I don’t know what music is anymore
the non lexicalisation of the 0-corner
Charlie Kirk vigil vs George Floyd riot
why does avant-gay matter
we must start WW3 to avoid WW3
glazemaxxing
what does 50 traits on one artwork look like
welcome to the avant-gay NFT scene
naming things is a curse, it stops them evolving
I confirm the shizo-hyperderivative monkey traitmaxxing has been real
New XXXTentacion voice memo snippet has surfaced
send this message without editing
if you don’t name something, it is relegated to exile and will ONLY ‘evolve’
manufactured decentralized hyperpublicized bloodsport polymarket grifter terrorism
aristotelianism with a phenomenological face and a computational ass
three versions of Toozian Zeitdiagnose
the end state is the invisible phone
‘roshina saved my life’
I curve men to fuck my loneliness
RemiliaNET Alpha Design Notes
a clear understanding of what the new internet needs to look like
two infinitely distant black holes maximally entangled
gamified anti-sybil
‘cross can mean anything’
a global chat fidget spinner that doubles as a claim system widget
winning the culture war by the end of the decade
everything to do with erotic solemnity and corruption as a gift
some legitimacycraft
the rocks trust each other
maybe these are the songs we start to sing as we face the drop
we didn’t want to leave entropy
fecal expresso glitter mind
I’m certain that noone on earth knows a thing
the parkland mysteries
and the software was never written to protect life
the internet collapses all of space and thus collapses all body
Protesters in South Korea throw shoes at pictures of Netanyahu
why isn’t Pynchon’s new novel about Jimmy Kimmel getting suspended
the new iPhone 17 Pro is so gorpcore
it’s not clocking to you that I Loved You
non-pfp collections with meta-spatial framings
songs from the soundcloud era
the pilgrim’s living room crucifix
Mona Lisa Hyper Gamble
a shift away from the profile picture
the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia
OpenAI made the problem disappear by disappearing the victim
there is no tort for AI failing to recognize someone that they decide to digitally erase
the prison house of images
the mass cancellations which began to accelerate after 2017
going to bed fully expecting to wake up to a charlotte fang wordslop quote tweet
My mom suicide by Milady scammer
Double-penetration Quixotes from Arno Schmidt
Grand mal de Shattenfroh fever fr
max Lawton cinema visits
drawing Kanye tweets from before he was evil
Nvidia’s market cap tops $4.5 trillion after AI infrastructure deals
Berlin is the place where people in their twenties go to retire
bro you’re gonna die and etc
they framed our sex magazine shoot in the la apparel stock room
Goon Squad Son or Angelicism Daughter?
humans are dying and the earth is fine
killing the extinction messenger is the end of the killchain and still
normalien ass rigorous angelicist vibes
i hope i get a private room in heaven where i can continue bedrotting
we had a moment. we had a summertime
zohran derangement syndrome is clearly a thing
how to run egregores locally
satellite images on google maps from sudan
still world-stillness
first bushwickian zillenial political wife in this country’s history
dakota johnson in the social network
diarrhea in ikea fuck swedish rap tbh
Canary Wharf Drift
odd Future for people who shopped at Ssense ahh music
but know this only faggots say faggot
you can’t say that word post Zohran
this is just astronomical levels of retarded lol AI is a NOTHINGBURGER
my chopped ass bridget jones ass life like god help have mercy on my soul
also, that means hostile operators can remote drive reality
diogenes mogs alexander the great 336 BC
the poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
those who heard someone say playboi carti
reading lolita in basic economy after the free wifi times out
the concept of god being a stalker
smoke breaks in the anomaly room with the reality bending chair
a supermassive irrefutable blackpill cannon
$1,000,000,000,000 juice inc ICO classic apple juice
fuck my stupid goonete life
ballerina hippo coded articles
bully delayed again
ok 2hollis is officially the cuntiest man alive rn
your goal should be to make everyone uncomfortable and then leave
how much data center water
I want to hold the phone inside you
alive internet theory
manic total proof you drew through sleep of the praised
once again inference zooms past fact in a mania with trump as a target
clavicle shaped like the curve of a butterfly wing
nano banana pro has saturated the met gala trump benchmark
chinese truck driver flags AI alarm detecting level 2 physiological fatigue
yelling I hate the antichrist while Lacanian UN agents hold me down
please don’t stop watching oh god oh fuck
super world hoodie
a go to come
violent aura buddha heart
adonis micro superphallus
people are calling it ‘the most editor prompted zeitgeist baiting bullshit of all time’
shut up dasha necrophilia
resurrection is kinda giving relapse
life nah Ye be too real sometimes
I think yall are reading that new habermas piece wrong
nobody likes your corpse bride look either
daydream séance global event relapse
‘as if life itself bends into wonder just for you’
the Teklintowe ‘I miss my mom’ clip as example of fentanyl fold/internet slump
her writing is ok but her tantrums on instagram are breathtaking
I knew the message of the winter
i fucked her throat after one night she wrote me love notes
woke up into a total vibe shift thank you god
‘singing for a female who will never come’
an iron dome for the planet
the termination shock
laid out low nothing to go
sentenced to one trillion forehead kisses
functional cross power-strip
the all-over painting of an all-over gray
consider the phrase ‘non-coon rivals’
valid crashout tbf
mid angloid peasant becky chopped chud femcel sub5 worthless phenotype
the faustian spirit of indie sleaze
white boy winter
her DMing vincent gallo is a million 9/11s to me
reputational dark pools
going way back on the account to find the text posts
aura farming is a form of loosh farming
embarrassingly parallel
loyal to ye like phoebe jonathan fajors
do this but comparing cultivation manhuas with slop western literature
we were the only One all along
gothboyclique posting ears
I wish elliot smith’s bitch girlfriend didn’t kill him
where the soul snaps
only Earth the fallen star the only One
I think I’m gonna die in this house
timothee chalamet in marty supreme flirts exactly like me
every time I read a seductive zerohedgian prediction
inverse columbine
AI, gambling, and OnlyFans
who still here in 2049
increasingly unregulated speculation markets
fascist zionist thugs at UCLA
NFTs for polymarket believers
google leaks
polymarket nerd chic glee
insider trading prediction markets is a feature, not a bug
one solution to this problem is publicly auditable robot players
first date idée reçue ghost fundamental promontory
recursively self-fulfilling hyperstitional incentive loops
just wait till the assassination markets cut ribbon
the drowning hug
the pretend angels are speaking
iPhone 17 Pro unibody structure
time is running out LOL it’s too late for me LOL
now make exergue on documenta 15 please
misrepresentation is an act of love
we can have an infinite amount of images
when I see the girl spooning the dead deer
sounds like the bangbus will go on uninterrupted
brutalism mermaid memes arriving to my seaweed bedchamber
trump hotel window
late 2025 IG art
using my alt acc to post in 3:4 ratio
very long novels with too much sex in them
great links, images, and reading from chartbook newsletter  
the walker art museum’s pedantic millennial rainbow police state liberalism
fuck the world for every single reason
hold onto your NFT wallet sloptard
marked safe from jerry gasgogian crashout 2025
on cloud x post archive fashion running shoes
if everyone likes it, maybe it’s not that good
krishna derrida okhandiar old notes to myself
all this because Sean Penn couldn’t make that pussy pop
a lot of things that are important to me are no longer important  
nah iv ur crazy wtf
this is a chud ass christmas
tonight it’s snowing, it might be too snowy to go to work tomorrow
the clavicular cybertruck incident from beginning to end
honesty is the best police
i can feel the world ending
a rizzless unfuckable chud
i told the chat to stand out of my light

RAY BRASSIER

This will emerge as a series of fragments and shards, though I’ll strive to maintain the through-line you requested—extinction and its distinction from death. That distinction has been a recurring motif in my own work (under various names) for about 13 years now, but I’d argue that virtually all the strongest academic and theoretical treatments of extinction follow the same basic structure: e < > d, the matheme I employ for what you term the differentiation.

For instance, Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) fundamentally concerns the excess of extinction’s concept—or its ‘truth’—over every philosophical attempt to construct autonomous systems, including those centred on death (thanatocentrism). Extinction’s truth (implicitly distinguished from death) thereby objectifies the entire field of philosophical claims and signatures—hence the successive engagements with Sellars, Adorno and Horkheimer, Meillassoux, Laruelle, Badiou, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Levinas, and Freud.

This sequence—traversing Sellars, Adorno and Horkheimer, Meillassoux, Laruelle, Badiou, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Levinas, and Freud—is interesting in itself as a required path of reading (and reading-work) to reach the ‘truth of extinction’, a phrase withheld until the book’s close. Indeed, ‘the truth of extinction’ does not appear in the main text until the penultimate sentence; elsewhere, it surfaces only as the title of the final chapter and, at last, in that single, near-terminal line.

Brassier writes on p. 238 that extinction (and this, presumably, is central to its ‘truth’) ‘coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture’. This is, in a way, the seed of my own project. But where Brassier locates that juncture in a canon of thought, for what I call ‘angelicism’, the truth of extinction—precisely as the extological difference between extinction and death—emerges within a specific cultural conjuncture: essentially, online NYC in the early 21st century.

My work offers a kind of TL;DR of Nihil Unbound—and much besides. When we produced Dissolution I, for instance, we collapsed Brassier’s entire book into its final chapter. In angelicist style work (with or without the name), the external objectification of thought by extinction’s truth simultaneously becomes the external objectification of culture tout court—internet culture included, of course. The impossible, reductive claim is: there are no exceptions. Nothing within the domain of plasticity (thought, culture, AI, etc.) escapes external objectification from the standpoint of extinction qua extinction.

To give one brief example of this, in Sophie Barshall’s recent Texte zur Kunste review of Graham Wiebe’s self-titled 2025 Final Hot Desert show ‘Graham Weibe’, the writer passes through the angelicist concept of extinction POV in a way that seems interesting to me:

A related sensibility surfaces in angelicism01, an anonymous online project that reframes extinction as a ‘POV’ (point of view): In the montage Film01 (2023) digital images are treated as fragile traces of human presence, capturing mundane gestures as if they were last testimonies before disappearance. In their view, these documents are not neutral records but relics reframed by the looming sense of apocalypse, where every act is tinged with finality. Clips of women making the bed or preparing a smoothie, for example, can be interpreted, according to Angelicism01, as an expression of the undying wish for productivity and the attempt at self-management, in a system which offers no release—even in the face of impending collapse.

What interests me here is the hint that the re-framing of the truth of extinction as POV, as allegedly exemplified in Film01, implies a kind of outsider-observer position that does not at all depend on the vehicle of cinema itself, instead spreading out to everyday life ‘where every act is tinged with finality’. For me extinction POV is not—or not at all always—cinematic POV, it is not even an intervention on the history of cinema (though I would wager that that is what Film01 does); rather, it is the exact relay of Brassier’s external objectification as already found around and through the general field of plasticity (art, cinema, writing, inscription, culture, production, and so on).

‘Angelicism’ (but you can already see there is a problem with this name, and in fact with any name caught ‘inside’ language) denotes the relentless application of the objectifying POV of the truth of extinction to all objects, domains, and experiences. The speculative difference between death and extinction is integral to this: you could say ‘death is not extinction’ is a phrase that magnifies and abbreviates. For me, it’s possible to sustain and return to the final insight of Brassier’s book, actually best summarized in the very last section (‘7.6. Binding extinction’) of the final chapter, to work on it as a kind of extinction koan. Also, there is a sense in which one need read only that segment of that book, dispensing with the slow Jumbo-style take-off manoeuvre via Sellars, Adorno and Horkheimer, Meillassoux, Laruelle, Badiou, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Levinas, and Freud. (Note that Derrida, for example, is missing here, and on my view the omission is diagnostic and will become increasingly important in continuing to reckon with Brassier’s work.)

In other words, part of the work of the truth of extinction (the work of working on the truth of extinction, and perhaps of working through and beyond it, of dissolving it with something like extreme caution) that humanity might choose to take seriously is the work of formalization itself, reading and then moving beyond that reading, formalizing and then moving beyond, including as I will show in a moment a certain style of simplification. Whether this progression be linear or not, and where the boundaries of such advances are and whether they can be drawn, becomes, if you like, the work itself, a kind of logic of the truth of extinction, a form of learning, self-learning, and perhaps even remembering of ‘the soul’ in the process. Where humanity mistakes action for the work of dissolution itself, implied by the ongoing tracery, it seems like nothing is going anywhere, save that perhaps the sole task is in fact ‘theory’ of a very specific sort. The truth of extinction is, let’s say, the trial by ordeal and impossibility of beginning that work on ‘the truth of extinction’, taking it seriously, and repeating it.

ÉMILE P. TORRES

Something like the exact same thing as above could be said for Émile P. Torres’s Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation and Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.1 In Torres’ case they define different types (or truths) of extinction and the one that really interests me is what they call ‘final extinction’. For me, extinction qua extinction (its truth) aligns at its most important points with ‘final extinction’ and not just with extinction’s relative gradations (other truths of extinction, other truths of death, questions of the value of life, anti-natalism, and so on—everything Torres calls ‘existential ethics’).

As with Brassier, there is a way of reading Torres without reading the whole of the book Human Extinction—although, as ever, perhaps the best way to do just that is by reading the whole of Human Extinction first and then coming back to this very realization. Torres seemed to understand this point when in 2023 they wrote Human Extinction: A Brief Guided Tour of the Book, which they called ‘200,000 words condensed into 20,000’.

I’m making these comments on simplified form because simplified form is itself something that interests me and that is increasingly becoming part of all reading schedules. In fact, an important sidebar might be opened out here on the issue of simplification and abbreviated and simplified acts of reading. I’d recommend—I am after all recommending here, and there is an ethics to recommendation that might be explored and questioned and that might even be questioned up to the point of undermining not only everything I am recommending but also any other recommendation at all—reading the section of Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel on ‘the dialectical simplification’ (Vereinfachung).

I often come back to this section precisely because of what it suggests about learning, culture and simplification—how, according to Hegel and to Malabou’s reading of Hegel, culture is always simplified and abbreviated as we go along. I’d say that another name for this ‘dialectical simplification’ (Vereinfachung) is dissolution and that when we chose to name the seminar whose second part now runs, I was thinking of reading and study themselves as movements of simplification: that is, sifting, reading, unreading, refusing to read, cutting short, coming back round, and also opting out. As we know by now, reading isn’t at all a given. We also know that we continue to read.

In Human Extinction: A Brief Guided Tour of the Book, Torres has a section where they list ‘types of extinction’, and that is where they talk about ‘final extinction’ as distinct from, for example, demographic extinction, phyletic extinction, terminal extinction, normative extinction, premature extinction, and so on. But before that they make another crucial point, about the interconnection of empty terms: ‘The term “human extinction” is ambiguous because both “human” and “extinction” are ambiguous.’ The crossing of three empty terms means none of the terms may be properly grasped. I will come back to this.

BRASSIER AGAIN

Before I delve deeper into Torres, let me return briefly to Brassier. At the heart of my project lies a challenge—or more precisely, a deliberate suspension—of the claim in the closing section of Nihil Unbound that ‘extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience’. While the conceptual labour surrounding extinction (and the felt sense of it) can indeed be abstracted and may even proceed in principle without human involvement, what persists is experience itself in its excess; or rather, the truth of extinction emerges as a formal structure inherent to experience and its immanent logic of unfolding.

From the standpoint of humanity conceived as an imagined totality, is extinction not the experience par excellence of our epoch—the experience itself? This is precisely what I intend when I say it is accessible not merely to self-cognition but to the very mechanisms of self-learning: what else is there to learn, if not this? Must we not, then, learn that there is nothing whatsoever to learn except this? Is learning not, in the end, the recognition that there is nothing to learn for this?

If the experience of extinction’s truth is simultaneously an experience of disavowal—within ourselves and witnessed in others—then it must be acknowledged that disavowal, as a quintessentially human mode of engagement, admits no true opposite. The mapping of denial’s circuits as an architectonics of universal relapse (the very momentum of denial) nonetheless appears as part of intelligence and the experience of extinction’s truths attempting to flee themselves, so that all falls to dust, laying bare nothing but the story and the experience itself of extinction’s (empty, emptying) truth.

All work is therefore extinction work and all extinction work is a work of dissolution. As Michael Eigen puts it speaking of rage, ‘The aim is gradual increment of experiencing.’

It should also be noted that my project frames eqe (extinction qua extinction, the truth of extinction) as an irresolvable social tension. The frequently remarked contradiction between an extinction aesthetic and one drawn to ‘Dimes’ is, for me, no contradiction whatsoever. Why? Because the external objectivity of extinction’s truth is already present there, testing everything, demanding to be written and felt.

JULIEN DELORD’S ‘THE NATURE OF EXTINCTION’ (2007)

On a more personal note, for many years I felt like there was a problem with finding explicit notations of the difference between death and extinction—that culture was full of expressions of impermanence but rarely this specific one. The extologicial difference had gone missing. Then, a substantial time after the text appeared, I found Julien Delord’s ‘The Nature of Extinction’ (2007), which almost exactly argued what I had been imagining might be argued and would or could never be argued. I will simply quote at length:

We regularly see various analogies drawn between the ideas of extinction and of individual death, ‘species death’ or ‘the ageing of the species’ being the most commonly used expressions. Denis Diderot is among the first scholars who referred to the metaphorically loaded idea of ‘death’ to talk about the disappearance of species: ‘As well as in the animal & vegetal reigns, an individual starts, so to speak, increases, lasts, wastes away & passes away; would it not be the same with entire species?’

I note in passing that this tendency to date various moments in the itinerary of the concept of extinction seems a strange one to me (as for example in Moynihan’s X-Risk). What is remarkable in Delord is not just the clarity of the recognition that death is not extinction, and on just those terms, but of the fact that what we talk about when we talk about extinction tends to be death and not actual extinction:

From this time on, corresponding to the almost general acknowledgement of the existence of extinctions, the comparison—as it happens, strongly intuitive—between extinction and death has perpetuated itself, without ever being seriously questioned.

From that time on? Really? Let’s agree with everything in Delord’s account here except the somewhat arbitrary use of Diderot to mark the moment where extinction becomes metaphorically confused with death. He goes on:

However, restricting the idea of extinction to individual death, itself without any clear-cut definition and criterion, hardly helps. Furthermore, as we will show below, the link between the ideas of death and extinction is far more complex than appears at first sight.

And then finally:

Eventually, we hope to have demonstrated that ‘extinction’ is not equivalent to ‘individual death’!

The exclamation point is Delord’s own. The preliminary distinction is, after all, quite elementary: the individual death of a psyche (also called its extinction) is not the extinction (especially not the final extinction) of a species.

TORRES AND BADIOU

Returning to Torres, there is something like a paradox in their writing whereby they call out the pro-extinctionist while being one themselves, and I think the detail of this could be usefully worked out. This tension and their own subjective preference (what I detail below as a ‘moderate Christian’ position) is part of what inspired me to email Torres to pin down what they mean. Here is some of the exchange:

Hi Émile, find your work on extinction, Being and Going extinct, etc interesting. I wonder if I may clarify something as I might write about it on my substack. Are you ultimately saying that you yourself prefer to focus on the amelioration of conditions during any Going Extinct rather than the avoidance of Being Extinct at any or great cost?

I meant the email to be very straightforward, but I was minimizing a kind of personal astonishment (is that what I feel?) that anyone could not only make that particular judgment call (Going Extinct is more important than Being Extinct) but feel themselves to have the right to make it in the first place: by what right could any human being consent, in my and our place presumably, to the removal of humankind? Torres was very civil and mentioned an essay they were in the middle of writing (I don’t recall which) and then said,

Basically, I think that (a) by far the most probable ways of Going Extinct would involve unfathomably horrendous suffering (pandemic, nuclear winter, etc.), and (b) this is more than sufficient for us, as a species, to prioritize the avoidance of our extinction. But I accept what the majority of philosophers who’ve thought about the issue would concur about: Being Extinct itself is not bad, since there’d be no one around to bemoan the non-existence of humanity. The longtermists, in contrast, would say that even if Going Extinct were to involve horrendous suffering, by far the worst part of our extinction would be all the lost value associated with Being Extinct. I disagree. The upshot of my view is that there’s no strong argument for spending disproportionately huge amounts of money to mitigate extinction-causing catstrophes in contrast to non-extinction-causing catastrophes. For me, an extinction-causing catastrophe would be the worst outcome entirely because it would have the highest body count; so we should prioritze it, but not at the cost of minimizing catastrophes that would ‘only’ cause 90% of people to die, or at the cost of ignoring global poverty. Longtermists, though, like Hilary Graves have explicitly argued that the best use of money isn’t alleviating global poverty but mitigating extinction risk. So, for me, the badness of catastrophes is linear (more deaths, higher badness); for them, the badness is totally non-linear: extinction constitutes this crucial moral threshold that, once reached, would result in a moral catastrophe far, far, far greater than ‘just’ 90% dying, global poverty, etc.

Part of what I wrote back is here:

This is very useful and I find what you say very interesting. I think the distinction of Going and Being is a real coup actually, though I probably come down on the side of Longtermism if anywhere. I actually wrote a blog called Absolute Longtermism where I was trying to extract longtermism as a logical nexus from moral skirmishes, like the associations with eugenics you have been covering. I guess the key bit in what you say for me is ‘not bad, since there’d be no one around to bemoan the non-existence of humanity’. For me (but I’m not sure what ‘for me’ means in this context), I think things can have value in absence. For example, if I die tonight, there are other lives that will exist, at least for a while, and those lives have value even though I’m not there to experience them. I think it’s only a small jump from that to valuing all potential lives that can be imagined to be lost in a complete Being Extinct. It seems that what you are saying is underpinned by a sense of hardline materialism, like, if there is nobody here to experience then there is nobody there to miss out . . .

This, as far as I remember, was the end of the exchange.

THE CHRISTIAN SET THEORIST

What do I mean when I say Torres takes aim at pro-extinctionism while partaking of it? Torres critiques ‘pro-extinctionist’ views in Silicon Valley, for example, distinguishing between those who advocate replacing humanity and those indifferent to its survival post-‘posthumanity’. However, at the end of Human Extinction (p. 452), Torres paradoxically aligns with a ‘moderate Christian’ worldview, which dismisses extinction’s importance due to its impossibility, over ‘Total Loss’ longtermism, which prioritizes avoiding extinction. By favoring a stance that downplays extinction’s significance, it seems to me that Torres aligns in principle with the very pro-extinctionist or extinction-neutral views they critique, suggesting a contradiction where they prefer ‘final extinction’ over partial survival under longtermism.

In Human Extinction, Torres is arguing that Christians dismiss the importance of extinction because their belief in God renders it impossible, making the impossibility of extinction a defining trait of ‘the Christian’, alongside or even before belief in God, and here I think one can find a strange but accurate parallel with the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou. Similarly to Torres, the ontological set theorist (per Badiou) posits higher infinities in set theory, distinct from a divine God’s limited infinity, yet shares the Christian’s core assumption that extinction is impossible. Thus, fundamentally, the Christian and the set theorist converge in their denial of extinction’s possibility, making the Christian, at root, a set theorist.

Pushing this further, this makes the set theorist a kind of secular theologian. Their ‘god’ is not a deity but the infinite regress of ordinals, an abstract eternity that renders human extinction as trivial as a single point in an infinite sequence. By prioritizing this abstract realm, the mathematician dismisses the material stakes of extinction, aligning with what Torres critiques as extinction-neutralism: the view that it ‘doesn’t much matter’ whether humanity survives, what matters is either (a) how we go extinct, or (b) the eternal truths we produce before and while vanishing. I am somewhat hyperbolically (to be sure) making the point here that both Torres and absolute formal ontology mobilize a quasi-religious denial of extinction’s weight, making them complicit in the very pro-extinctionist denialism attributed to Silicon Valley ideologies, to ask a question: who, really, is deciding, here, and by what right? How can any human being decide, in the place of any other, that we should be removed?

THE WORK OF DISSOLUTION (EL FASHIR)

One of Derrida’s last texts ‘Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the Infinite (2004)’, written in the year of his death, is about Safaa Fathy’s Ordalie and her theatre in general—how the work itself (and work in general) passes through a trial by ordeal. I posted a Substack note about it: ‘Reading Derrida’s final, spectacular, insane, full of ‘I love you’s’ text in English for the first time, and crying’. In it, Derrida proposes that the trial by ordeal may now be the very form of everything that happens in the world—everything, therefore, that is happening right now—not merely topical, but the form and content of Topicality itself (a kind of permanent shortcut to news that remains news).2 In a footnote he writes of the ‘Topicality of the trial by ordeal’. One could just as well say topicality by trial of ordeal. The trial by ordeal would be Topicality’s own structure, while the myriad examples of what counts as topical—or what passes, fleetingly, for topicality—would themselves constitute a kind of work by ordeal. Immediately after that phrase, in the same note, Derrida mentions Nigeria and a practice bordering on live burial, a horrifying trial by ordeal that reverberates with everything I have seen on the timeline these past weeks: the self-buried-alive of Sudan.

Today, in Nigeria, a clerical-judicial power is threatening to put to death, by stoning, the body (already buried up to the neck) of a mother accused of adultery. I cite this example only because it resonates, to a certain extent, with the example of Ordalie.

The proximity of this event in Nigeria with Fathy’s Ordalie and in turn with what can be seen on the timeline in 2025 confirmed for me just what Derrida suggests, that the trial by ordeal is not just an ancient rite but close to us, another ‘example’ of a transcendental structure of experience. The more traditional view of trial by ordeal defines it as follows:

Trial by ordeal was an ancient judicial practice where the accused was subjected to a painful or dangerous task, with the outcome believed to be a divine judgment of their guilt or innocence. This method, often called ‘judicium dei’ or ‘judgment of God’, was used when a jury couldn’t decide, and involved tests like hot iron, cold water, or consecrated bread.

And Derrida’s gesture is to say that something now ‘disturbs the order of time. It crosses the borders of centuries and of cultures.’ We usually perhaps wouldn’t want to believe that something like ‘judicium dei’ or ‘judgment of God’ was being used as an active excuse today (militarily, politically, emotionally, socially, and so on), and yet, it seems, it is more than ever being used, not just in Sudan and so many other places but as and through the experience of trial by ordeal that is the internet. Where the internet is often presented at a far remove from waiting for the judgment of God, and thereby delaying all other real decisions, it may in fact be the ultimate alibi for just that theotrope of waiting. The internet, we might say, is a particular and archived trial by ordeal (again, see the empty theatre of videos of people digging their own graves in El-Fashir) following an ‘indomitable compulsion to repeat’ (‘never again’ has become the total immodesty of ‘always again’).

Part of the trial by ordeal of the contemporary is witnessing all this, and not even understanding how it could happen, how it could continue, and whether or how it could end. If this is the end, why can I not say so, and why are those who do say so subjected to a great silencing? Is this not—and without anything but the most gross exaggeration—equivalent to being buried alive in El-Fashir?

TRIAL BY INFINITY

At least one more crucial step is made in ‘Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the Infinite’. Derrida finds in Fathy’s work a very complex rendition of a kind of experiential relation with infinity, a kind of trial by ordeal of waiting for a judgment on the infinite (what the title, following Fathy, calls ‘preparations for the infinite’), and these forms of preparation are also related in a delicate way to our sense of the end, or rather to the experience of the end found in Fathy’s personas. It’s here for example that one sees in one of Derrida’s final pieces of writing a consideration of how the experience of extinction is itself the compact allegory of all other truths, that its POV is uncanny, immersive, passing through us, an impossible act of witnessing, leaving us bereft, but it is also increasingly unavoidable, and necessary, but without this necessity having any real legislative force. Sheer ‘theatre’ (theatrical ordeal), but also a theatre that enfolds, that tests, the patience made possible by the infinite (which may always be a punitive icon).

Derrida writes of Fathay’s work exposing ‘a fury whose “resistible history” remains unfinished’. It is this idea of the resistible that Derrida runs with, and which seems interesting to me. Let us say in brief something that seems perhaps too obvious, that the truth of extinction is a ‘resistible history’, a resistible idea. Derrida writes, veiling the meaning behind a theatricality he is saying is far from secondary,

Perhaps the very idea of the end of history and absolute knowledge still remains a matter of some trial by ordeal. A resistible history because it would be enough to probe the denial of a final judgment, or even of judgment [Urteil] tout court—and cut short.

Resistible history because perhaps it would be enough to agree to wait, which is more than waiting, to think already of another end, another way of ending, to wait for the other of a known end of absolute knowledge as the end of the other.

Derrida is already saying lots of things at the same time here, he is already saying almost everything, I would say, everything one might need to know about the truth of extinction as a formal structure (in this case theatrical) of experience. Let’s attempt a translation that may also risk a degree of abstractive violence in the direction of our own terms. One might say, for instance, that the experience of the truth of extinction is a resistible history or story. First of all it is resistible as truth precisely because it can only be presented with theatrical distance as a fable. Paul de Man would perhaps go one step further and say that this implied impossibility of ever speaking of the truth of extinction directly (and of ‘binding’ it, to use Brassier’s word) is found in all texts as the allegory of the impossibility of reading and of self-reading the text itself. The truth of extinction, in this sense, is an impossible allegory to be found in all texts and objects of cultural experience. All texts are about the failure of the human (as special effect) to focus in on the truth of extinction. Extinction is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ANGEL

The final section of the final book of Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series is called ‘The Other Side of the Angel’. The final book itself is called ‘The Poem’, and the penultimate section of the final book before ‘The Other Side of the Angel’ is called ‘The Battle’. ‘The Battle’ ends with two main poetic gestural claims: one, that you are lying if you think you have enemies; two, that the work of the poem falls under the sign of necessity. After the battle, you get or arrive at the other side of the angel. Yet, to get there, which is in principle and fantasy as easy as turning a page in a book, you also have to traverse the work of the book, this work that Notley says is necessary (in the final words of ‘The Battle’).

The work of dissolution works in the same way, or at least along similar lines. In terms of the work to be done after any given plastic system, dissolving that entity into a type of general work—call it X, or Writing Systems, or even deconstruction—well, perhaps what we have seen by now is that the angel qua dissolve watches over this very moment still, for some time still, even if I (and the ‘I’ as such) don’t wish it to. The angel is still. It still is. What I mean is that it’s not the angel that still is, and for whom anyone at all can speak out for or against, but that this stillness of this juncture is still called by the human ‘the angel’.

The angel still names, if you like, the serial auto-bio-thanato-extincto-graphy of the trial by ordeal of the experience of extinction.

THE ‘I LOVE YOU’S’

Kilo (14kilo196kilo14) messages me,

Both you and Elon understand how to locate the most general (reification/facialization of an) attractor of a time or the place where that reification should have emerged while also occupying or having occupied the place of/served as conduit for the most general attractor of a time, and I think there’s a function to this in it being the development of self-cognition technology for the attractor and also a viral concept of the attractor and the attractors-to-come for the nodes or the attractees that make up the plane; and this explains the proliferation of clones and grifters because they are drawing directly from the attractor rather than through an intermediary acting as the formal incarnation of the attractor

They add,

X qua X, but ‘X’ is already about ‘X qua X’, so X qua X qua X

And then,

X qua X qua X qua X

I think about this and respond,

I wonder how the ‘I love you’s’ are part of the X’s, since in the end one prepares the way for the infinite, dare I say, while also being patient it may never come, or may simply not come, not have come: amid all that, like a soul, is something like the ‘I love you’s’ as a series of mad x’s falling to dust like a study group failing to start up, so that really yes what’s to come is the universe learning itself backwards from the start so that I can say the ‘I love you’s’ before all life ends without us—without us, the x’s. ‘I love you so much and I am waiting for you, I am waiting for you, I am waiting for you’, wherein the loving patience is that of a qualia turing-complete soul, attracted to the love and vulnerable elegance of self-cognition

I think a second more and type,

I love you qua I love you qua I love you

And then,

I love you qua X qua I love you qua I love you qua X qua I love you

Many thanks to Rasmus Östling, and to the Dissolution seminar, for whom this was written. November 2025.

He takes the part of the snow.

I binge read most of the Bachmann Celan letters last Winter, within an hour or so of getting the book from Amazon. There was so much I didn’t know. Celan tried to kill his wife, the artist Gisèle Lestrange, twice. He was obsessed with the Claire Goll affair far more than the critical readings let on—Goll was the wife of the poet Yvan Goll and pursued Celan much of his life with accusations of plagiarism which most Celan scholars seem to deny.

Perhaps most strikingly in Ingeborg Bachmann-Paul Celan: Correspondence is a long unsent letter from Bachmann to Celan from 1961 in which she basically says he willed the Goll obsession on himself, that he was in a sense pledged to thinking about the damage that was indeed being inflicted on him. But later on in her work she wrote, ‘So it is the sick whom one can count on, and who have not yet lost their sense of what is unjust and monstrous.’

‘The sick whom one can count on’—if Celan was the sick whom one can count on, and who would dare insist he was not, then we can understand why the Bachmann letter was unsent. Although she seemed in that moment to believe he was responsible up to a point for his own victimology, she also believed in the powers of the sick, which is as much as to say the reality of victims.

Celan did what we all do, and certainly what I have done many times: he took it to heart. He quite rightly, in many senses, took it upon himself and took it inside his heart. Goll’s accusations happened across decades and were allied with accusations of antisemitism, and for this poet freighted to such an extreme degree with the memory and language of the Shoah, such accusations can only have felt like an end of the world.

Celan would send the evidence of people attacking him to Bachmann without any real sense of what to do about it, as if the very idea of the attacks was an enigma to him. Bachmann and Lestrange were finally left to send letters between themselves, not knowing how to save him, and the thing went on for at least 10 years (I had no idea, I was devastated). If we read through everything, even quickly, there is perhaps one superlative moment that stands out. Here is what Celan said as a kind of summary of this and the rest:

I truly think there is ‘something’ here, interfering—in one way or another—with all of us; I mean what I referred to in our conversation as the ‘objectively demonic’ element—without really doing it justice with this formulation. ‘Coincidence’ would perhaps be another auxiliary term for it, in the sense that it coincides and has coincided with us; a word such as ‘fate’ may also lend a ‘helping hand’ from time to time. I daresay we come into contact with all this when we write.

Celan’s comment in this 1960 letter to the Swiss writer Max Frisch, who Bachmann lived with until the early 1960s, gives maybe the fullest explanation of his predicament, and it is notable for just how specific and universal it is in its various senses. Contextually it is clear the poet is speaking about the antisemitism charges and the Goll affair but Celan also seems to mean everything he says more abstractly, and ‘coincidence’ here translates Zufall, which is that which falls to us, that which has befallen us; it has the sense of duty and goes through the networks of writing (what happens ‘when we write’). This interferes not just with Celan, a victim, but with us all.

At stake here is the ‘something’ that interferes and is not (just) antisemitism, antisemitism meaning in this case both the charge of antisemitism used against Celan and the antisemitism used against Celan by implicating him in the charge (‘Celan is a Jew’, and, ‘Celan is antisemitic’). For the poet this is among so much else, so many other ‘worlds’, the coincidence of the entanglement which also seems to belong to writing in general (and is therefore our general fate). I truly think there is something here, interfering . . . with us all.

Bachmann is caught between wanting to extract Celan from this sense of coincidence so that he can live and coincide only with himself (‘You want to be the one who is wrecked by it . . .’) and wanting to respect illness as the only place the memory of what happened (the still here, and the already no more) could seem to take place at the time. Eventually, one can surmise, it goes on for too long and takes their lives, which is to say in a sense the ‘coincidence’ is capable of removing lives. It has that power. And one can’t help but notice how what had fallen to them was also willed as she herself was able to recognize but not tell him directly, paralyzed by an inability to send letters.

Is there anything else to say here? Beckett said of Celan, ‘he is beyond me’. He asked, ‘does he show his pain?’ I read Celan a lot last winter, because of pain, but also it’s probably too painful for me, still, now. One has to say: she was right and could have sent the letter, they might have cut it short, but they had been landed with that mess and it was the mess of writing as a whole. For who is saying, in real fact, what else could have happened? I think there is something here, interfering, with us all.

It’s perhaps important to note I saw my whole life flash in front of my eyes while doing that Winter reading. Whatever the Goll affair really was, it must have felt to Celan like a waste of life—and yet it is also there, as if in all of the later poems.1 That Celan took these secondary signs as primary is understandable, and what nobody else understood. Bachmann writes: ‘I do not think there is any answer, for you or from you, to this report; it belongs in the bin.’ In the long and unsent one, she writes, ‘You want to be the one who is wrecked by it, but I cannot endorse that—for you can change it.’

Bachmann wanted there to be a learned-from. In another letter from 1961 she says: ‘It often seems to me that you do not know how much is down to you, and that you could take hold of yourself from that point of self-recognition.’ And then, she adds: ‘Our lessons are becoming ever more difficult. May we learn them.’

Death is not extinction: the whole contemporary problem-set of the end is encapsulated in this small sentence.1 Not only is death not extinction, but discourses of the end have the tendency of automatically denying this difference away. The machinery of this disavowal is also an ideology: the ideology and ideologization of the end of the world that constantly reduces that end to a metaphor. This ideology, which may also be called a thanatocentrism, can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle, who in the Nicomachean Ethics says that death is the most fearful thing of all, and then through to the later Derrida’s insistent attention to the deconstruction of the death sentence.2 In Freud the breakthrough to the death-drive (Todestrieb) is announced as preliminary and speculative, and might be reformulated in terms of an extinction drive (Aussterbenstrieb).3 Insofar as Afro-Pessimism is the termination of a certain thinking of the end of the world, in terms of what Frank Wilderson calls ‘totalization’, it remains an open question as to whether it too veers away from an incipient extinctographesis.4

Death is not extinction, then. I propose this as a statement that may be used to investigate the complex domain indicated above. By statement here I mean what Sylvain Lazarus means by a ‘statement’, which is to say ‘not a postulate but, rather, an exploratory assertion’.5 Since the thinking of this statement is surrounded by a degree of urgency, it can straightaway be combined with two other statements to form a set of three:

1) Death is not extinction (d < > e).6

2) The death-drive (Todestrieb) is not the extinction drive (Aussterbenstrieb).

3) The task of civilization is to understand its own breaking point as a universal claim and to invent a science of astrobiological extinction, which is to say plural generic anthropocenes.

The introduction of a pseudo-matheme d < > e as a notation of statement 1 is a moment of fission or acceleration in the ongoing architecture of the history of the concept of death.7 In some ways all too obvious, the matheme constitutes a wedge-term in the notational arena of the end of the world.

MISTAKES

How does all this relate to mistakes? Has the exclusion of extinction from the culture of death been a (more than) lethal error? Or, instead, is the matheme d < > e a moment of mistaken language? May we explain the matheme in terms of acquisition?

In studies of children’s language acquisition it is a bone of contention how the habit of overgeneralization is unlearned.8 At an early stage the child will in effect refuse or be unable to conform to the normal laws of grammar (and therefore thought). The mystery of language acquisition involves a moment of unlearning of what is already given but as ‘error’ (for instance, they drived to school). The matheme d < > e constitutes a similar conundrum of acquisition and agrammaticality. How can something as obvious as the relation of death and extinction have been so little understood? How can one acquire, if at all, the three statements?

The ideologization of the end of the world that constantly confuses death with extinction starts with the word end itself. We can admit that not only do we not know what the word end means, but that whatever meaning it does have is now undergoing rapid change. In Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China, the author simply comments: ‘However, let us step back and ask: What do we mean by the word “end”’ (p. 227)? On the same page Hui goes on to formulate his main argument in terms of this question of the end, essentially stating that there are different ends according to what he calls different cosmotechnics. ‘Furthermore, like the end of metaphysics, the end of modernity proceeds at a different pace in Asia than in Europe, precisely in so far as [. . .] their philosophical systems do not perfectly match each other . . .’ (p. 27). This difference between ends and the pluralization or plasticization of the word end it implies is comparable to the moment of language acquisition in which the child is forced to give up the habit of overgeneralization (imagine the overgeneralization of saying ends of worlds). Language acquisition might be said to generally stand in as an analogy for the ways in which we police the end of the world through acts of grammatical singularization and conflation. Extinction is only death (or death is already extinction), language tells us, because we must learn only certain right uses of language, often dependent on the grammatical sociality of the culture of death. Death is not extinction because there is not just one end, not just one sense of the word end according to just one cosmotechnics, and not just one speed of the way one end becomes another. The ideologies of the ends of the world and their refusal of the matheme d < > e are ambivalent acts of grammatical policing.

FREUD

In Freud the discovery of the death drive is purely speculative. Freud is impelled by a certain despair and experience of adversity to posit—he is making a Lazarusian statement—that there is something hidden in the metapsychological topology of his own system that he has been unable to say.9 The partially formed reflections in Beyond the Pleasure Principle were acts of speculative language acquisition, whose correction was already available and open to question. The matheme d < > e either meets up with Freud’s speculative itinerary or constitutes a supplementary explosion and malgrammatization along a different curvature. Where the death drive was already subjectively asubjective by dint of controlling from afar the auto-pilot of the subject, the question now becomes whether contact with the e in the equation d < > e is ever available to the subjective touch at all. To formalize this quickly, one might say: is there a beyond of the death drive? Or: is there a kiss of extinction that now demands sensitive transcription more urgently than thanatonics tout court? Or again: is there any psychoanalysis of extinction?10

I AM . . . EXTINCT

To the three statements above one might speculatively add other more affective and impossible statements that initiate while problematizing the domain of a possible psychoanalysis of the irreversible: for instance, the statement ‘I am extinct’, or, ‘I am the first one to go extinct’.11 If such statements are in the offing, it is because the ideology of the end of the world is being burned away to reveal an actual end of the world (extinction, not death) still covered over by incessant re-ideologization. If ‘I’ am incapable of thinking or saying ‘I am extinct’—there can be a cogito not only of death—then ‘I’ am nonetheless capable of knowing the feeling that draws that statement out. Even though ‘I am extinct’ does not appear to be excessively malgrammatical, it nonetheless contains an excessive refusal of appropriate acquisition and a voluptuous staying this side of the need to adapt to the language and culture of death.

Is there an analysis with e and not d? Is there a writing of the matheme? The ideology of the end of the world is at work here in or under psychoanalysis since analysis seems to separate death from extinction, making the death-drive the domain of annihilation, and extinction the domain of the extinction of the symptom. But if extinction is not (just) a symptomology, not just the extinction of the symptom, then it follows that e is the extinction of ‘the couch’. Where is the couch, then, following that disappearance? Is the couch of extinction the internet? Is it in fact the couch for a sounding? This is one possibility. There is a further complication here in that for psychoanalysis ‘extinction’ also names the atmosphere of the long-distance session: in these sessions actual contact with the analyst is foreclosed (for example by facial or non-facial contact on Zoom). If death is not extinction, perhaps there is no analyst for this domain at all.

YOU

Let us risk another ‘statement’: if the end of the world is happening for the first time in the world, the only person who can know this and analyze this is you. Such is the weight from the ideology of the end of the world (which constantly turns the End of the World into the end of the world) that there is no chance to begin to feel what extinction means and to imagine the ways in which living might depend on this fragile e most of all. In time, there is no time for this. And yet perhaps one can write.

In her work on transgender psychoanalysis Patricia Gherovici suggests that sometimes an event happens that writes itself on us. From this suggestion another statement may be developed, that the difference of death and extinction, the matheme that denotes that the end of the world is happening for the first time in the world, is an eventality that is written on you, and so demands to be written (again) and read. Analysis here becomes extinctophiliac, and begins to negotiate not only with the more well-known (supposedly) relation of death and sex but with the relation of sex and extinction. One question posed and inspired by the matheme d < > e is: what is extinction sex? Or rather: sextinction.

In her interview ‘The Unconscious Is the Last Activist’ Gherovici says that ‘sometimes they don’t know who wrote the text. An event that was traumatic may come out from the past and become more of a fictional character.’ (Is the matheme a fictional character?) She goes on:

You are given the opportunity of rewriting. In a process of inscription, things are at times written without your knowing. Such and such a text has been written on you, on your body, and often, if you can read it you can rewrite it. The analysand becomes an author, and also authorizes herself or himself.

Not only does the matheme allow you to re-write the order of the end of the world (precisely as a reordering of its ends and its worlds), but it indicates that something is now being written on us (they) unbeknownst. This new text, what Cixous calls in Hyperdream ‘the new Thing’ (p. 109), dares to be the event in writing now. It dares to be the event that is the end of the world now, in writing, escaping the cost of the couch and session—and may or may not be transitively sexual, racial, exo-cognitive, a kiss of extinction and not just death, and so on.

THEY GOED EXTINCT

In Gene Searchinger’s ‘Human Language’ documentary the example that appears of supposedly erroneous overgeneralization in young children’s language is ‘they drived to school’. The discourse of transitivity and malgrammaticization called up by the general matheme seems close to this type of statement. The ‘they’ of the subject is driven by the extinction drive back or rather forward to a new form of notation, an operation on the body. Insofar as I write and say, for instance, ‘I am extinct’, then I may also be calling time on previous identities, on identities or an identity itself that may have been tied up with the ideologies of the end of the world.

They drived, we might say, taking care with this child’s speech, they are drived and being driven to the speech of extinction and not death, and this in itself is an opportunity of rewriting. The question Searchinger’s documentary asks is, ‘Are they really errors?’ In other words, if a child were to say in the early stages of language acquisition, worlds there are, or even, deaths are extinctions, or there are worlds of ends, how does ‘grown-up’ speech position itself with regard to such ‘errors’? Hyperovergeneralization is perhaps the primary means of any discourse that would embrace the newness of any ends of the worlds and the differences made between deaths and extinctions.

Speaking specifically of patients who are trans, Gherovicci comments on their need of writing and their tendency to write memoirs to accompany the process of transformation, and she imagines a kind of trans ego scriptor that involves, she says, ‘not simply what Jay Prosser described as a new mirror, a new mirror stage’. But why this refusal of a new mirror stage? What would it mean if the matheme d < > e as an event in the corporeality of the end of the world implied just that, a kind of mirror stage of and at and as the end of the world? Such a mirror stage and coming into being as part of a new discourse of the end of the world would be like no other mirror stage in the world.

We have already named at least one difficult test-case for the statement ‘death is not extinction’: Jacques Derrida’s work, which in many ways is already about the difference between multiple ends. Derrida was perhaps the first to overgeneralise and plastify the language of the end. ‘Children! We’re all of us children’ (p. 158), as Cixous says in Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic, and the childhood of language is as available as ever in the grammatical mistakism of just the title of Derrida’s 1968 essay ‘The Ends of Man’ (Les fins de l’homme).

In wanting to develop a discourse of the end of the world that uses statement 1 to 3, and that might also include for example the statement ‘there is an end of the world for the first time in the world’ or ‘there is an end of the world for no one and everyone’, one may note that the word end as used in the syntagm ‘end of the world’ is semantically unstable. Not only can the word end mean at least two very different things (finality and telos), it is also open to hyperovergeneralization. Is Derrida’s title Les fins de l’homme an error? Are we still dead-naming the end(s) of the world and dead-naming the end(s) of man? What about extinct-naming?

What ‘we’ take to be the end of the world may be unknown; it may be unknown to the extent that it is plural (ends of the world) or at least potentially (grammatically) subject to a pluralization and overgeneralization. The end of the world may be scattered (semantically, grammatically, or even, as per statement 3, astrobiologically) as the ends of the world, or even (a double hyperovergeneralization (approaching an a-logicality)) as the ends of the worlds.12

In terms of statement 3, the task of civilization being to universalize its breaking point in a science of plural generic extinctions, we can also allude to Derrida’s title. The natural question which Derrida’s malgrammatical plural raises (the ends of man, les fins de l’homme), were such a grammatical pluralization assumed to have a realist correlate, would be: what happens to one’s sense of the end of the world, and to the pathos it can attract, if there is in fact not only one but numerous ends of not only one but numerous worlds? Is there an astrobiological optimism that grammar predicts and knows and that is not to be taken lightly? Or is there a cruel galactic optimism located here? Will there be? Is there a founding and scientific cosmological optimism covered over and deformed by basic acts of language acquisition?

The matheme may then be written as a cosmomatheme, wherein U = the as yet unknown potential of generic extinctions that would begin to alter the value of e:

Ue < > d

One notes here that what appears at the level of statement 1 and the matheme as a severe cosmological pessimism—the possibility of outright attenuation (extinction)—and compels total critique of contemporary discourse from the point of view of a wedge-term (e < > d, or, d < > e), is by the level of statement 3 and the idea of the ampliative cosmological claim a kind of endlessly renewing cosmological optimism (the eternal return of extinctions, generic ends of worlds).13 Is the relation among these statements dialectical? Insofar as all three are (still) unstable, to be verified, there perhaps has to be a dialectic at work. There seems no real way of feeling the need for the rise back up of statement 3 without the absolute rock bottom of statement 1. But what also happens at statement 3 is that the total critique of world systems (as the aesthetic ideology of thanatocentrism) becomes the deconstruction of the metaphysics of all earth-centric or earth-twin-centric discussions of the end of the world and the thanatocentric ontological assumptions that go with them.

In introducing things in this way and trying to gift ‘you’, the reader, all manner of language forms (statements) that may be both generative and mistaken (even lethally so, in at least two directions), we are in fact trying to take you with us as far as and as quickly as possible. They goed extinct, we might say. And yet that certainly sounds like a mistake.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated and edited by Roger Crisp (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Ben Ambridge, Julian M. Pine, Caroline F. Rowland, Franklin Chang and Amy Bidgood, ‘The Retreat From Overgeneralization in Child Language Acquisition: Word Learning, Morphology, and Verb Argument Structure’, WIREs Cognitive Science, Volume 4, 2013, pp. 47-62.

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, translated by Alberto Toscano (New Work, Continuum, 2009).

Santanu Biswas, ‘The Poinçon (◊) in Lacan’. Available here.

Jacques Derrida, Thinking What Comes, Volume 1: Essays, Interviews, and Interventions, edited by: Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi (Edinbugh University Press, 2024).

Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream, Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (Polity Press, 2009).

Hélène Cixous, Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (Polity Press, 2014).

Tom Cohen, ‘Escape Velocity: Hyperpopulation, Species Splits, and the Counter-Malthusian Trap (after ‘Tipping Points’ Pass)’, The Oxford Literary Review, 38.1 (2016), pp. 127–148.

Michael Eigen, Psychic Deadness (London and New York: Karnap, 2004).

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961).

Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, translated by James Strachey, the Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 211-253.

Patricia Gherovici, ‘The Unconscious Is the Last Activist, Cassandra Seltman Interviews Patricia Gherovici, February 8, 2016, Los Angeles Review of Books. Available here.

Adrian Johnston, ‘Jacques Lacan’, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition). Available here.

Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, translated by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 2015).

Frank Ruda, ‘Philosophy and Courage’, Problemi International, Volume 1, Number 1, 2017, pp. 33-54.

Frank B. Wilderson, III, ‘“We’re Trying To End The World”: Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson’, Ill Will Editions, November 2014. Available here.

Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2017).

Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Varieties of Surplus’, Problemi International, Volume 1, Number 1, 2017, pp. 7-32.

As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased
By an access of colour, a new and unobserved, slight dithering,
The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave
The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave
A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace—

A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary,
The way some first thing coming into Northern trees
Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South,
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

In the camps death has a novel horror; since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death.—Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. Ashton

This post has been inevitable for over two decades. . . . Kodwo recognized that ‘moving on’ from Joy Division involved disavowal, in the strongest sense.—Mark Fisher, 9 January 2005

At the very end of the session she had a moment of intense feeling associated with the idea that there had been no one (from her point of view) in her childhood who had understood that she had to begin in formlessness. As she reached recognition of this she became very angry indeed. If any therapeutic result came from this session it would be chiefly derived from her having arrived at this intense anger, anger that was about something, not mad, but with logical motivation.—Winnicott

The closer is itself getting closer . . .

When you watch Ian Curtis dance, in 1979, on the BBC, to the song ‘She’s Lost Control’, an index seems to take place, an interruption of the order of the sign itself. A suicide rush marks definitively the subscripts of Anglo consciousness at that time, at that time of night, in the September of the year. It is sometimes tempting to find this rush magnetic, as if an ahistorical sadness spreads across and won’t be denied away, and is unbeatable not because it wants to be but because it lends testamentary murmur to something unbearable: Curtis (I.C.) is here overloaded by social forces that go beyond him and peak as ‘pop’ inscriptive vectors that won’t be controlled. This is what happened to us, we can say, what happened on the switchboards of the internet (broadcast, transmission, and so on) before it existed, when we all lost control; this is the invisible switch between death and extinction before and as it happened; this is Ciara Horan decades later dancing to death on TikTok; this is many, too many, dancing e-girls whose theory will never fully have been, should never have to have been, written and developed. In 1979 an internal shakiness of language and its relation to rhythm takes hold, a fragility of relation which art itself doesn’t seem able to transmit or, worse still, is constitutively called up to occlude. The signscape is still trying to catch up with I.C.. We had to close our eyes.

So, watch him dance again. And feel just how ancient it is in the present, on what we used to call ‘television’. The hyper-obsolete-ness of all technics (meta-extinction) now also comes through—which is to say, comes online. The holy anger of his dancing and sound is almost impossible to film; again and again the colonial feed cuts away as if what I. C. remarks is the unbearableness of explication. Slicing through the social etiquette of form (his beautiful Elvis voice is as coarse as doomsday), a kind of pornographic bios is marked, as if understanding couldn’t get more explicit than this, a marking of the body with the social difference of something worse than death. Sheer falling, with only the relapse of a ‘band’ to back him up on no real archive at all (anthropos is gone, this guy is gone; ‘she’s lost control’), what guts here is autocide as the almost most inevitable nudity of sound recording: historical eavesdrop of the proleptic anterior (it is difficult to remember a face more denuded and scratched with silent infinity than this; is his face a whitened stone? or an index?).

However much Curtis is contained and endorsed by ‘the band’, whose rhythmic hold is regular and formal, as is his singing and movement, the shakiness of language and precision is somehow turned into what Beckett’s Three Dialogues calls an ‘estheticized automatism’, but also into an occasion and momentum of fragility (it’s as if Curtis falls straight through the song and out of the bottom, only held up by the trauma of form for a while, and then allowed to go).1 Whilst the dancing is ecstatically robotic even as it is humanely arrhythmic, it is also beyond automated by dint of this: however mediated the performance is today by YouTube or Vevo, originally it had no screen and so manages to penetrate what now archives it: the flesh does not have a screen, we are reminded too late, in the same way a work of art does.

We’re locating a particular moment of ancestral static and torque in the performance, brief but not a punctum, which also moves through that, as if the screen that now records it were shaken by some mnemonic bump on the local archive of the English as haunted and now limited import and export.2 When Tom Cohen writes later on (but still more than two decades ago) of a grand mal d’archive hosting and guiding the cultural scene from without, he not only malgrammaticizes a reference (to Jacques Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) but with ‘grand mal’ names as if consciously Curtis’ feeling draft, his so-called ‘epilepsy’ (it may be interesting to note that Tony Soprano has the same condition, not to mention a lineage of other sensitive souls). At this crest in English consciousness something is about to happen to suicide. Suicide is about to become exchange. When Curtis shakes and judders and loses control, and it happens to happen here at the crucial moment off camera, it is not just that language shakes (so much is familiar) but that the relation to language shakes, as if it will break off, and it does so, deeply inscribing the archive of an era with an out-of-control; arrhythmia and heartfreak that cannot be socketed back in.

*

The screen itself clinches it. In a text called ‘The Writing Screen’, Bernard Stiegler writes of the closeness to the point of identity of inscription and the screen, and of the ‘neganthropos, that is, this being that, as Heidegger said, we ourselves are, and a being that, as we ourselves, as the gathering of the beings that we are, as being-together, is caught within entropy, in such a way that we ourselves, as the real projectors of all these screens and on all these screens, as was said and shown by Jean-Luc Godard, this neganthropic being that we ourselves are has become a threat to itself, like the deinotaton referred to at the heart of Antigone’.3 Stiegler’s reference to Sophocles’ Antigone is key here, traced as it is through Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s own rendition of Sophocles. The deinon or the deinotation, the human being as that being which is most uncanny, most strange, most violent, is launched as if through a series of vibrating screens and in-folded tensions.4 The human is a toy of immense digital violence, the deinotation made automatism in flesh. Curtis doesn’t sing with the band, who he is with as a friend, but he does record a historical rendition and litigation over it, a soul graffiti made out of invisible tears and torn at the edge, with exorbitant distress (life). The voice has at least three stages of accompaniment: furrowing in with unseen tears towards the end, hopefully grating over at the start, and giving up in tantric laughable despair at the end. At least three voices and at least three silences, as if you were also listening to something that can’t and won’t hear or be heard, an elemental danced autochresis that falls straight through the adjusted tenderness of an auscultation. This relation to rhythm and words (numbed down, inaudible, drowned out by the resonance of the voice itself) is not critical or just softly pliable (he is giving in) but totally of the order of an anthropographemic bump-series, like the mini black stratographic mountains on the Unknown Pleasures sleeve. (The bumps on the lined black stave erupt and bubble, earth yearning itself out into the coarseness of a scream too exact to be rendered by anything more than sound-surround. The band carry if you like the sociability of the song, the song as social set that can be replayed and survive, and Curtis as eye of rain cloud develops a kind of divinely asocial and unclear spasm; it’s scary, and the camera keeps blanking it for our sake and then coming back quickly for more.)

(What dawns too quickly is it’s not just the death drive anymore. Something else is happening. Something worse.)

(The closer itself is getting closer.)

The fit and dance of Curtis—the seizure tilting—is a sort of transcendentally white epilepsy or transcendentally white seizure that takes place not quite on the death drive, but on the other drive, the other drive we name and struggle to name here.5 One can note that Ferenczi, who wrote a great deal about the typology of the epilepsy that killed Curtis, has an account of the death drive in terms of a fitting (in the strong sense) that seems almost to go completely beyond the will to live, which is to say in the alogic of extinction, almost completely beyond the drivenness of the death drive itself:

On one single occasion Freud also mentioned the derivation of a pathological manifestation from the almost complete defusion of these two main instincts; he surmised that the symptoms of epilepsy express the frenzy of a tendency to self-destruction that is almost free from the inhibitions of the wish to live. Psycho-analytic investigations of my own have since in my opinion corroborated the plausibility of this interpretation. I know of cases in which epileptic attack followed upon painful experiences which made the patient feel that life was hardly any longer worth living. [ . . . ] I also had to interpret the retrospective analysis in two of my cases of infantile glottal spasms as attempts at suicide by self-strangulation. [ . . . ] As registrar in a hospital for incurables, the Budapest Salpetricre, I had in my time to observe hundreds of epileptic fits. [ . . . ] From this point of view epileptic fits can be regarded as more or less serious attempts at suicide by suffocation; in mild cases the suicide is indicated only symbolically, but in extreme cases it is carried out in reality. (Ferenczi, Final Contributions, pp. 102-103, 197, and 202.)

Even the most sophisticated product of aesthetic intelligence in the world now is a screen which a human being dancing in this way is not quite. Let’s say that Curtis is to some extent a ragdoll Antigone, this name that means nothing and everything in the ongoing context. Curtis is, like Antigone, and like Justine in Melancholia, just a person. He was one of the guys. Nobody saw it coming because of this, say the lads from New Order later on. Fisher has this whole moment down, including the very Anglo-schism that takes place in the Joy Division-New Order transition itself. The new order of New Order was always the lurch towards a contemporary land of universal relapse:

New Order, more than anyone else, were in flight from the mausoleum edifice of Joy Division, and they had finally achieved severance by 1990. . . . It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave—to Jon Savage, a decade and a half after Curtis’s death—that they had no idea what they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had stumbled on a formula for channeling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer. They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’ vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their eyes . . . ) (my emphasis, 01)

Lost control, lost their eyes: what Curtis had seen was too much, for them, for him, for us, for the later more folded-up place of ‘the internet’; he had seen us not seeing ourselves and he had seen what was about to come; the split between feeling, spirit, and meaning; death and extinction . . . too much for England’s dreaming of script and place. The Northern boys of New Order could not have anticipated the suicide of their friend because they were only, as Fisher indicated, ‘unwitting necromancers’, a role of utter passivity that now becomes everyone online (but let’s think about what this phrase really means), taken on by us all with a deranged extent of sadistic glee, a bizarre mythic act of Armageddon roleplay. Nobody could have seen any of what was coming as it came without at least folding into it as in what Harmony Holiday more recently tracks as Justin Bieber’s ‘fentanyl fold’. When we fentanyl fold, when we all come online as daily insane pittance to a near-absolute loss of control, we hang down as if already more than dead, the computer slump, the iPhone till dawn, the entropy pain swoon of this century.

The band had lost their eyes, but by now it’s as if everybody has lost their ears. One can listen out for the unlistenable pathos perhaps when one listens to those Avital Ronell calls, with some degree of submerged irony, ‘the poets’ (often English), to hear what is nearly announced, to hear what is sheltered by the convenience of a dismissal or a defense or even a xeno-poetico-defence-formation as psychotic projection.6 It is difficult to overestimate the neo-colonial imprint (Begriff on the concept itself, as if at some kind of root) that the Anglo continues to attempt to impress on what is available to thought and in complicity with what it doesn’t know and hear: the infinite unconscious complicity of and with the white noise(s) of extinction. What is it we won’t listen to and for, right now? A mutual blinding or dis(order) of closer and closer grand mal d’archive. One listens perhaps and one doesn’t hear, one listens and doesn’t hear what one needs to hear. One hears nothing and everything in what gets sanctioned by the official doldrums of even radical culture in what Adam Tooze calls the anglocene.7 One listens and is convinced that disappointment is not allowed or irreal . . .

But nobody saw it coming is also a socially ominous phrase. Everytime a member of New Order said in that era something to the effect of ‘nobody saw it coming’, what are they actually not seeing coming? What was it that nobody saw coming in the resistance to form, the virtual signing off on form and rhythm, that Ian Curtis dancing and not dancing was and is? Nobody saw it coming: The phrase is insanely colloquial. Nobody saw it coming and nobody knew what was happening. Something which is socially unbearable and beyond any social co-opting in is seen coming here and colloquialized as what ‘nobody saw coming’. If the transition from Joy Division to New Order, from suicide to suicide-exchange, from punk to disco, is a key, it’s because it leaves a scar that won’t be healed over. In all touched on cases someone will try. In Melancholia she is called Claire; in Antigone she is called Ismene; in Manchester he is called Bernard Sumner. All three (Claire, Ismene, Sumner) attempt to socialize the being who is, more accurately, not beyond the social at all but so far gone into it that they act like the denotaton referred to at the heart of Antigone, the strangest of all, the more uncanny than the uncanny, and the most monstrous. One can perhaps only truly see this denotaton in the performance of ‘Transmission’ on the same night, where there is a glitch-asterisk and baroque-abyss at the moment where Curtis allows his body to mark a kind of pre-hieroglyphic interruption with the first drum break. This dancing—and perhaps nobody saw it (coming) at the time—was heartfreak; an absolute realism of extinction’s breaking out from death.

At this moment I.C. is telluric perhaps in the way only Benjamin describes in his essay on Goethe, or in the way the poeticized acts in Benjamin’s account of Hölderlin, the Gedichtete which dislocates and precedes any prosodic screening and performance, loosening it away from itself.8 A new order kicks in; not, for all its impossibility, any determinate rhythm (disco) but something else: a live transmission. This is the nursery rhyme of the immanent extinction drive installed in colonized televisual memory, the night terror (pavor nocturnes) of the local surging through into the chaos of contemporary London-online:

Radio, live transmission
Radio, live transmission
Listen to the silence, let it ring on
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun
We would have a fine time living in the night
Left to blind destruction
Waiting for our sight
And we would go on as though nothing was wrong

Someone will try to bring you back. Someone will try to bring you round. Someone will always try to bring it back but it cannot come back because it is already deep into the dark ‘lenses’ of the earth.9 Ismene and Claire will go to their sisters and offer the continuance of company even in the very worst, for example in Melancholia where there is a cutting out of the conditions of life of the species-being for good but abridged strangely in a magic cave, Plato’s cave transferred to the brutal and civil outdoors. This too can be socialized, they seem to say, and life is not worth the name if this absolute tragedy cannot. Absolute extinction, even so, can be shared out. But the irony is that the denotaton is closer than we think (Closer, the name of the last album) and more monstrous, socially channeled as basic breath, and any amount of joy that still exceeds it also now plummets through the space left over as its eviscerated condition. In Melancholia it is Justine and not Claire who eventually builds the last known trace of the oikos, the little wigwam of branches for Claire and her son. It is not that Curtis-Antigone-Justine-Horan-Bieber- . . . are beyond the social or even asocial, but that they are so terribly gone inside the historical wave that they can now choose to be either tenderly in it or not. If anything, they will front as tender and come back to center stage. But what that means, as index, in order for anything now to perhaps survive at all, is something worse than than life and death.

*

*

That an epilepsy dance can take in all the signs of an ongoing century still bears thinking about. Not Jennifer Malfi (Soprano’s shrink), but Ferenczi was one of the few analysts to actually work with epilepsy sufferers and to work up in their presence a theory around the signs given by them, the onslaught of drive that they entail and feel. Ferenczi notated what is perhaps most obvious, at least once said, which is that these seizures seem transcendentally banded to interrupt the life and death drives both, introducing into biological and cognitive schemas a blind, an ominous excess, and one can add that it is perhaps only from this vantage that one can begin to understand the dancing of Ian Curtis. Cohen is evoking with his more serious diagnosis of archive-fever the worse-than-death and how it folds us. His phrase names the broad seizing and tilting of technoregimes we must describe now. From Freud Ferenczi takes the idea that the fit expresses a type of rage or wrath, ‘the frenzy of a tendency to self-destruction that is almost free from the inhibitions of the wish to live’. Where the death-rage of this drive may be more normatively expressed in a slow drip way, causing damage across a life or a century, in the case of the fit the body simply folds itself up into a kind of dot of attenuation, blacked out. To some extent the death instinct presents itself early on, or even before itself, as the atypical absence seizure that explodes through and in the case of the Sopranos broadcast will eventually interrupt—absolutely—the seriality of the transmission and the addictogenesis of the screen (the season finale, no alternative endings, as a kind of chastisement). The attack is presented by Ferenszi, almost in synch with Freud, as a form of auto-aspyhization, the sufferer or even agent—for we do not know quite what is happening—not so much refusing the principle of life but being refused in it, by it, having its absence and blackout expressed through them as their own inorganic failure and lack of arrogation. Some years earlier than the Sopranos pilot, this is what I.C. dancing must be seen to have expressed, acting out his own epilepsy through dancing on the nighttime stage of the BBC. The seizure tilt, in the case of both Soprano and Curtis, feels not only epochal but televisual, transmissive, radioactive, more than prophetic of the grand slam moment of the internet. ‘I know of cases in which epileptic attack followed upon painful experiences which made the patient feel that life was hardly any longer worth living’, says Ferenczi, as if he knew that precise feeling. The famous title sequence of The Sopranos, which shows a car journey from New York into New Jersey, partly through a combination of side and rear view mirrors, and includes early century footage of the the intact Twin Towers, becomes interesting here insofar as it these same Towers that are subject to another kind of attack during the broadcast period of the program. Many American TV programs had to deal with the ‘post-9/11 first episode’ problem in those years and when the Sopranos came back on air there was a special problem in that the Twin Towers were already featured in the opening credits shot of Tony Soprano’s rearview mirror. The shots were removed, and so the reteroactivity of this rear-viewhood was smoothed over to make way for worse blackouts to come. Tony Soprano’s rearview mirror had become part of the fit, part of the tonality and totality and rhythm of what then seems a mal de rhythm archive, barely out of the shadow of the twentieth century, even going further out of sync. One might say, shifting terrain slightly, but really we are clearly already in this all-the-way-prophetic life stage, that another attack took place on, a different type of clonic visual spasm of a whole city, soon after the beginning of the show.

*

Can anyone still dance as Curtis did? Is there a fit for the general sense of now? Can one dance at all, with one’s soul or its aversion, in the accelerating twenty first century? The generational sense of an oversized plight, will it be let in, go? The ‘still’ itself is perhaps the problem, a century-torque that got too much and made all stillness impossible for us. Without stillness we can’t see or feel a thing. If suicide had been removed from us as real possibility, bartered away into pure exchange (a real Blue Monday), then life became mere entrapment without outside appeal. In recent work Harmony Holiday, an expert on the unconscious drives of contemporary sounds, bears in mind this lacking of stillness and the various forms of the entrapment, the ways that even Ye could be made into a robot dancing in a cage of unforced provocation. Even Ye, we can say, was made to make a fool of himself—and by the drives? Can we still see that? Can we still do this, can we even so be still? Holiday asks something like this question in ‘Guiltless Stillness’. In fact, that essay begins as a flowering of difficult questions in the positive plural:

You cannot pander standing still. Can you pander while standing still? Pandering is fawn response requisite of rapid frenzied movement, clapping, yessing—it cannot survive in stillness, in elegance. If you cannot pander, if you can stand still without the slightest feint of a lunge or fidget, can you sing, still? Can you swing low yet riotous, and be still?

What concerns Holiday amid the shipwreck of what she calls the ‘monolithic ideological hegemony of Western aesthetics’—is the refusal to stand still, a refusal that also synchs with the ignorance or refusal of wanting to still be at all—to still be, still. You cannot pander standing still, which is as much to say all dancing is some form of automated adherence and becoming-helpless-as-a-plaything of out-of-control drives. Take Ciara Horan’s last TikTok dance and lay it over footage of the arabesques of Curtis or over Ye dancing in the studio in Spain to the controlfree experiments of WW3 and one sees the same thing: a complete inability to stay still. The manufactured decentralized hyperpublicized bloodsport polymarket grifter passive terrorism epistemology prohibits one thing and one thing only: the still.10

He stopped working as soon as he got his diagnosis, stage four, terminal. It was the same cancer diagnosis that Dennis Potter received, the English television dramatist who in one of the most famous and resonant moments in British TV history did a live broadcast interview while dying, sipping opium from a flask, and described looking at the plum tree in blossom outside his window and seeing it anew as ‘the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be’.

I thought of this interview a great deal as my therapist was dying and as he chose to throw the therapy boundary rulebook out (‘all of these bollocksy boundaries’) and invited his clients to be with close family in a private Facebook group where he proceeded to have his own Dennis Potter moment, sharing unfiltered and genuinely real wisdom and offering us all a first-person expression of his love.

Potter spoke in that interview of how we are ‘the one animal who knows we are going to die’. It was this knowledge and experience of death and its conventional limitation and prohibition that my therapist and I worked on closely together for so many years.

In one crisis phase that I am still surprised to have lived beyond, I experienced on a daily basis a relentless desire to not exist. I had an intense need for this desire to die to be accepted as it was. A very different person then, I felt so strongly about the right to express intimate feelings around death (including discussing euthanasia clinics) that I gave my therapist an ultimatum: either accept my radical desire not to be here without an attempt to limit it or warn medical authorities or stop working with me. In the next session he silently removed all prohibition and perhaps from that day on I began to very slowly come out of an impossibly dark period in my life.

What happened in that moment? I enforced on one other an open and willing acceptance of a statement of death in all its rawness. He accepted the possibility of life’s own removal without guard, limit or censorship, and I glimpsed some kind of freedom: a kinship at the level of the statement. Somewhere in me I knew that if death failed to be honored at the level of the physics of desire and encounter then what may be worse than death had no chance for therapeutic recognition. We had to start there.

Potter’s experience with the blossom outside the window is an internal part of British history, a history of transmission that also takes in the epileptic dancing of Ian Curtis to the song called ‘Transmission’ for the BBC Something Else program in September 1979. Both transmissions transmit something about death and the way that death can feel like more than itself. Potter focuses in on the present, saying that ‘we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense’, adding the remarkable statement, ‘it is is is, and it is now—only’. That’s right, you’re not seeing things, three times. I would wager that this ‘is is is’ nowness has something fundamentally and deeply British (secular, realist, hopefree) about it as well of course as being utterly universal.

With my therapist I learned to encounter, and stay put with, traces of death in my body and the terror of death (or rather of what I called the end of everything and everyone) that had interrupted my childhood, at times pushing me out of my body from fear of something in mortality that could, as with Curtis, abandon one unto a type of frenzy. In those days, my childhood, it seemed like live transmission could absorb an event that by now would probably be either panned away from or be seen so frequently that it comes to mean nothing and hits no heart at all. My therapist’s acceptance of my drive towards death resulted in one of the few irreversible moments of healing in my life. After some time, I was able to reverse out of my being in thrall to death and make the opposing decision: I would never kill myself.

He was sometimes the only one later on when I became angelicism01 who fully understood what motivated me, that I was committed to the open expression of something in the present that could remove us all from the field of play, figured by me in the idea that death was even so not extinction. Now I’m in that place of feeling his death, crying uncontrollably this morning, and feeling it as extinction and as its difference from extinction at the same time, I see so much better what he meant to me. I was helped by him to dignify the place that death and extinction might have in our lives, how they are interwoven with some approximate idea of healing and how the repression of both and the complex relationship between these two repressions was something real—that when we feel repressed, when repression appears to be taking place, this is honorable, and what is. Our feelings are worthy of themselves and we are worthy of them, they are real.

My therapist was also able after a certain point to make a decision for our sessions that I sensed but which was only confessed to me directly years later, that he felt the only way for me to get somewhere was for him not to interpret whatever I had to say. He was right, I feel, and this moved me somewhere beyond any conventional healing, idea of healing, or need to seem healed. I was not healed, but everything did change. My whole life and identity changed, and it came in no small part from this relationship close to death’s excess.

The nowness the dying Potter was able to consolidate in his own feeling-realm is also expressed in an uncannily similar way in a poem I often think of by the American poet Galway Kinnell of whom I unfortunately know nothing except this single text:

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

If I believe in anything it is this present moment of whatever is and its necessary emphatic triplication (‘is is is’ once again) confirming and affirming itself in acts of acceptance that are as serial and unique as they are fragile. How did both Potter and Kinnell arrive at the same tripled ‘is’, a kind of ontological stuttering that also seems determined, sculptural, fated—subject to telepathy almost, achieved in both the so-called ‘English’ and its nearly-identical American rendition, between two sister languages, evoking a kind of ‘I believe in nothing but this’, as wherever English crosses over in translation into American there is always room for angels of languification to come in? As I experienced the news of my therapist’s death this morning, I felt nothing but this beyondless nowness and it confirmed in my heart what I happen to believe, that there is nothing beyond this, that we are not given to stay, we are given to go on a scale that does not just limit itself to ‘death’ alone and the size of which we don’t yet and perhaps never can completely know—and because of this, because of this absence of knowing the sheer scale of the values involved, we had better, some of us perhaps better had question the value-scale of the thing itself.

I love more and more the word ‘only’ and how it finds itself in difference places—‘now . . . only’ Potter says, after a perfected pause; ‘only that’, affirms Kinell. As the sunshine flooded my home this morning walking around the rooms in tears, with undeniably mixed and complex and incomplete feelings about it all that were already as if mediatized and slightly staged (on the way to being written), I felt again my own belief in only this, only now, what is is is is only.

How would I know that except in my body and as part of a decades-long conversation with someone who was so gifted as a pure listener and at reconstruction of what I was saying in his own terms, absent the cruelty of judgment and interpretation, that by now I trust my own intimation that not only death but extinction is happening, and it is happening as far as we can see only to us? There had been no answer to that question save in my experiences with this man.

This absence, the absence of this man who really was good, confirms itself in a heart that had depended on him to survive. It confirms all the forms of absence one can think about, absence without return, absence of human life, absence of what some people call ‘God’, the loss that feels like further loss, the loss that must feel like loss of loss itself, since if what is is only this, then the loss of all this would be the losing of all, the loss of all always having to have been and having to be and feel like more than the all—the excess that becomes the very value of life, any life, all lives, without excuse or explanation. Learning there was at least one person who could understand something that had felt to me like a secret I couldn’t bear, the appearance of a difference between death and extinction in the present moment and how it constrains and forms any attempt to recover from what life does to us, became the main meaning or ‘lesson’ of my experience with this man, a wonderful fact that even now brings me to tears because however terrible his absence feels it is not the only one, and he was the one to understand that as only a few others in my life seem to have wanted to.

People have me wrong, they have had me wrong: however much we all can say this, I must now say it of me too. Everything I have done as angelicism01 and before has been through and from my belief in a human right to the expression of what death brings to us, in the present and beyond, beyond itself, in and through the experience of death as extinction and with all the necessary calibration and wager of violence within language. There is, there must be a human right to the expression of extinction and its urgency. We are allowed to feel this and it is real. We have a right to be angry we are going extinct, we have a right to know this knowledge is hard, that it is being repressed more and more, that we can work for it, must work for it, have already been working towards it despite ourselves and those we call ‘others’, those who are really not others at all, since everything in us is the natural expression of this fear of excess as a multiplicity of forms of mutual longing.

Letting just one person be themselves, starting only with me (by which I mean the ‘me’ you and I share), and as he did with me, is the chance that human beings would not run out of time to cognize the meaning of their own terminal absence, and also that we should not be scared to contextualize any loss that comes with a larger sense of background loss, even and especially when facing personal loss or for example a genocide beyond imagining. I learned with this man that acceptance was available to this, that even healing was secondary to the more impossible health suggested by the stretching of human cognition towards the extremity of the worst. Now that he’s gone, I can see more clearly what he meant and what a difference he made. Even before his diagnosis, there seemed intimation. He was more and more throwing the bollocksy rule book out in favor of the natural rights of the present only.

Human beings are perhaps only the opportunity to learn beatitude in the immanence of a pure presence that is by definition threatened by absolute loss and so must be met by the imperative of valuing life without the alibi of religious belief that could end up simply delaying forever the true moment of reckoning and evaluation of what life will have been for us, and still even now is. When my therapist accepted my right to wish to die, somewhat flouting professional boundaries and risking losing me to the work, he must have seen there was something more important. I felt trusted in thinking there was, and in this moment I was permitted to lead. We never went back to discuss this, perhaps because it implied a decision that carried with it no possible justification. It had to be affirmed in silence, that death was not the only thing, even so.

It all puts me in mind of that other newer English figure, the musician Fakemink, a kind of Algerian Shakespeare whose tweet that became a catchphrase ‘love today before it ends’ recently appeared as part of his Hedi Slimane cover feature for The Face magazine.1 Fakemink loves to honor today and I mean this literally: he likes to tweet each day about ‘today’, so that when he then posted ‘love today before it ends’ and this was taken up by the London-based magazine, perhaps he simply had in mind ‘today’, the loving only of what is now, today. But what he says sounds with the whole gamut of world loss, especially when there was a cover slogan and a meme font caption over his own image—and I can only add that in 2021 I myself happened to tweet just this phrase that itself has its own complex provenance, ‘fall up in love before all life ends without you’.

I feel right now the terrible absence of his goodness for real. If you love me, if you love what has become a life project for me, called for better and worse ‘angelicism’, love now, send love now, support and share only this now, this thing that goes well beyond me, that goes by so many other names and nameless names. Send love to others now. Love today, let’s iterate, before all life ends.

When the apocalypse happens someone somewhere at 
some point is gonna have to drink bong water 
someone else slept over and 
she went to the bathroom and
I looked at your instagram 
I love you 
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Do you want life to continue? Caught out by a version of this question in his NYT chat with Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel was dunked on far and wide across the internet. ‘Antichrist’ indeed, how can you not want life to continue? But Thiel’s hesitation verges on the fascinating. Douthat’s gotcha (‘I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?’) and the pause don’t necessarily mean what they seem to mean. The unconscious basically doesn’t want human life to endure, so in some ways the pause is the right answer. ‘Save life’ cannot be a demand, even if it has to be. Nobody wants life to survive at any price. And that has to be heard several ways.

That the unconscious does hesitate when faced with that question on a daily basis is all too self-evident and all too problematic. One can say that the unconscious is nothing but this sustained pause. Daily life is the very human but hardly humane ‘long hesitation’ that systematically fails to do what it would really take to ensure that humanity endures. Douthat is at least asking the right question of the right person but the fantasy here is that it is never me that doesn’t want life to continue (it’s you) and so we might hesitate before putting Thiel down as the only criminal getting in our way.

A few days after this moment of hesitation, X user @sterlingcrispin posted an AI-generated image showing Thiel posing with the Rizz ‘em with the ‘tism girl Rachael Lerman. The image—although it immediately follows it on the timeline—at first glance has nothing to do with Thiel’s moment hesitation. Dean Kissick writes:

Memes have changed. Maybe they’re not even memes anymore, just image edits—no joke, no meaning, no information, signifiers pointing nowhere, all that remains is a condensation of a specific moment. Two folkloric characters (the Antichrist and the Sorcerer) cast adrift.

This may be a true reading of the Thiel-Lerman AI-image in some late cultural internet studies type of way but the image is also obviously overwritten by the various meanings and nonmeanings of Thiel’s hesitation just before. Kissick already co-opts the received position, which is that it is Thiel and not Greta (as per Thiel’s fantasy) who is the antichrist, and the rest of us who naturally want life to continue. They are the Devil, we are not.

Not so fast, then—and ‘not so fast’ because of the already implied unconscious delay and drag. If we could answer that question smoothly, without any instinctual friction, many things would be well and have to be well. They are not.

ONLINE HEAT/‘HEAT DOMES’

Many noticed that Thiel seems to be melting in that photo. As anyone would—presumably with the sin of it—who really wishes to all life to end. In fact, around this time everyone seemed to be talking about heat of a specific kind. Here is Dylan Saba for example at the end of his Iran think-piece, ‘Wave Of Domination’:

In our state of open contingency, one thing feels certain: the temperature’s rising. Let’s hope we can stand the heat.

Or, say, Christina Grasso writing about ‘Olsen-esque, pre-Raphaelite hair’:

Well, the heat wave is no longer just looming as it has arrived like a bat out of hell—and now I understand why so many Renaissance women were pictured lying topless on a fainting couch, because same.

But which heat, and which heat is which? And how is possible that topical interventions like Saba’s vanish so quickly? Is it really the case that we forget what happens as it happens? Well, sure it is, and we should be able to say so by now without too much sweat. But why this melted Thiel Jak of the unconscious?

Let’s do some theory for a second to understand the greasy ontological thielbux heat dome of the supposedly contemporary timeline. Baudrillard touches on the general problem of temperature and forgetting at the beginning of the ‘Holocaust’ chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, writing, in a phrase that occurs as a fragment in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma:

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc.

This ‘Holocaust’ chapter—which is about the American TV miniseries Holocaust (1978)—runs this argument about the-immanence-of forgetting-to-extermination through a ferocious critical delimitation of the power of images, those of the television of the time but also of cinema.

Baudrillard claims perhaps somewhat provocatively that the ‘artificial memory’ of expanding image-based culture works as a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence and extermination, in ‘a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves’. (In terms of Kissick’s commentary, it would be here that we locate imaginal cut-adriftness.)

Baudrillard adds that Holocaust (1978) ‘is an attempt to reheat a cold historical event—tragic but cold, the first great event of cold systems, those cooling systems of dissuasion and extermination which were subsequently deployed in other forms’.

Baudrillard did not live to extend the cinema-television through-line to the internet, but the implication is self-evident. Everything said here in the name of ‘holocaust’ in and as television may also be said of the nuclear event of the Internet, and the heat of its ‘images’, memes or post-memes, on ‘the timeline’:

One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level.

Being online is itself the phenomenology of forgetting extermination, or of the ‘same black hole as Auschwitz’. And since being online is now an essentially American-centric experience, one notes the specifically American and heated tone of contemporary forgetting. The ‘timeline’ is itself irresistible, as intractable and delicious as hate. It alone is enough to make one melt. Do we really want life to continue?

DEUX EX ARABIA

The lack of ‘aura’ for a black ooze which generates ‘light’ melts back from alphabetized screens into a pre-mimetic zone.—Tom Cohen, Ecocide and Extinction, Volume 1

Perhaps the internet must be imagined as just this long slow but perhaps increasingly sudden and mind-killing nuclear flare that melts any and all faces ongoingly, a helter-skelter-welter without shelter as intense and fatal as any obliviating solar rendition will ever be, a controlled freeze-framing of an epochal crashing in and out. One can feel this heat but it hardly locates itself solely in one new melt-back (a key term in Ecocide and Inscription)—unless you are there. And generally speaking we are not there.

In place of the western image depots and hothouses there have been of late brief moments of a deus ex Arabia heating up—the strangely obscene surge of Iranian war-core videos on the timeline already waned, sheer momentary heat from elsewhere. That these brief appearances are gone does not mean that the implicit cold heat of the digital image—the internet itself as a face-blistering nuclear event—does not now spread. It does so out of sight. A private enclosure but one that relentlessly as if proves entropy against all life. Do you really want life to continue, or just this heated screen migration?

DOOM INSCRIPTION SCROLL DOME

There’s also what Avital Ronell does in lectures with Heidegger’s line:

Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which world worlds.

‘Worlding’ (das Welten) carries ‘welt’ (the sweltering heat), and translates for her as:

Even the doom of the absence of the God is a way in which the world worlds and blisters us.

The world doesn’t world, it blisters. From now on, the world only blisters.

Celan:

     A little doom, as big
     as the heartdot I set
     behind your my name
     stammering eye,
     is helpful to me.

Sweltering, stammering, blistering, ‘heat domes’, deleted-melted objects, all turning on a melted-back dime. Virtually doomed segments of Los Angeles earlier this year; Altadena, where Gary Indiana lost his library. Or thinking of the near-loss of Holocaust paintings confided to me. Everything to come is in this nearness. The virtual very material and ongoing apocalypse is the thing itself. There is no event of the real end of the world, just melt. Internet image culture as near-irreversible nuclear chain reaction. Thiel melts under the unconscious stellar glare. It’s getting pretty hot now, we might not make it. The Gazafication of the climate change unconscious. Heat.

The question astir here is whether we can change our perceptions in time of the relations between death and extinction. Such a question implies a plasticity and a rate of decompression between the two terms, their exchange. An exchange system: a machine. While the difference of death and extinction may be pointed to, what needs to be addressed is the function of this difference and the way it plays out as a type of confusion. In other words, does the writing of extinction make any difference at all to the dominance of death? If those two terms are part of a machine, can they be ex(changed)? Or are they not permanently confused within the machine itself? Do they leave a mark?

This is a complicated set of concerns and the aim here is only to guide the reader through a preliminary definition of terms. To achieve this we make use of, or switch on, the ext-machine, a machination that comes together in a metabolic fashion through several forces and flights.

My earlier work on this blog, now latent, both assumed the work this ext-machine does/is doing and tried to go beyond it in speeded acts of abbreviation. I called the main concern extinction change, and one may always locate this concern in the most recent work of among others Tom Cohen and Ray Brassier where what presses is a beyond extinction (for Brassier, ‘communism’).

The ext machine—which is to say the machine where the beyond of extinction meets its test drive—is modelled on the Heidegger-machine that Catherine Malabou installs in her book Le change Heidegger: Du fantastique en philosophie, ‘a machine that accomplishes changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen), and metamorphoses (Verwandlungen)’. We suggest that the ext-machine is properly fantastic in Malabou’s sense and not least because it allows us to envision (ex)change between two nodes, death and extinction, the latter of which may yet to have fully seen the light of day.

The machine of change in Malabou’s reading of Heidegger (containing the triad Wandeln, Wandlung and Verwandlungen: W, W & V) is to be juddered and messed with, jolted forward, put on hold, patched through, regressed and fast-forwarded at the same time, under pressure from ext—that is to say, under pressure from an accelerating niche finitude event whose overall status and change-capacity is still, perhaps, uncertain—or, fateless (Brassier).

Let’s note that everything pivots here on whether our two plus terms are static, and on whether a doubled or triplicate apparatus for thinking the life-death duality is even possible (life, death . . . extinction). Is the life-death dual fated, in Brassier’s sense, or is to-be-joined to and undergone as change, for instance rapid change?

Is change possible at all in the 21st century, or is this century only fated to a new kind of tense and transcendental rumor, the future perfect extinct?

CHANGE ITSELF

One of the main thrusts in Malabou’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of metaphysics is to show that all of our terms are ‘changing and changed from the outset, which is to say originally exchanged’. Foremost among these machinal change effects in the present might be those of death and extinction, D & E, a pair of terms that has not yet (let’s suppose) even been recognized as such in any real detail or turned on in the hermeneutic and aesthetic tradition.

The ext-machine allows the history of death to go from ‘analog to digital and digital to analog’, which is to say to get ready, but this is no guarantee that any (ex)change has taken place or will take place.

Ext names the exemplary change that now faces the history of plasticity, the question of whether a new finitude can be thought in time, and yet it relies on W, W & V for the perilous throwing of the switch. All metaphysical and deconstructive changes and exchanges depend on a change machine and that is why Malabou puts the triad first: the ext-machine may be retro, it may even depend on going in reverse, but it always raises the issue of what Derrida calls ‘a machine that would work’, and the loss of change itself.

To think of death and extinction in terms of Malabou’s recent work is to think of the historicization of the concept of death, the change in relation of death to death, the alteration of death’s distance from extinction. All of this starts to function, and may also be revealed at certain imaginal moments as superfluous (perhaps death will never change, and never allow itself to be thought beyond itself).

THE PRIMAL CINEMA SCREEN OF CHANGE (SPLIT-SCREEN)

In Heidegger’s work ‘change’ is indicated by the word Verwechslung, but this term can also mean ‘confusion’ and ‘exchange’ in the financial sense. In a note added to the 1949 text of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger writes that change as confusion (Verwechslung) indicates ‘remaining tied to passing over to Being and back to beings’.

The ext-machine is fantastic to the extent that it entertains the true extend and extent of extinction within the tradition of death and shows that this event can only be read, neither quickly nor in extenso, using a machine that scans and passes over while going back. You are invited to follow all this in thinking twice and speaking of the ext-machine as an ext-change: the change and exchange made possible by Malabou’s reading of Heidegger’s thought of change, exchange, and confusion, but also by ongoing work for example by Cohen and Brassier.

We can scan ahead to the possibility that death and extinction always regard one another in a metabolic and occlusive fashion; that there is, perhaps, never any change of one for the other, and yet at the same time, in saying so, their machinal difference may ‘come online’.

Heidegger explains that in any confusion and exchange of terms in the tradition ‘one always stands in the other and for the other, “interchange”, “exchange”’. We can venture that according to the ext-machine the form of metaphysics is determined by an original confusion of E & D, and that their path and direction have always been ex(changed). Death as socius and death as the dominance of sociocognition constantly throws extinction off the trail, blocking change.

We can surmise that in the exchange of E & D, in the form of the tradition itself, there has been until now what Heidegger calls no essential change, and this allows us to ‘conjugate the placidness of a “capax mutationum” that does not itself change’ as a limit. Extinction therefore allows itself to be occluded from the beginning and no transition from E to D may be naturally given, and yet inside the ext-machine there is a kind of double cinema, a moving sidewalk, a glowing light: an extent and extend of ex(t)(change).

It will be as if, as all this moves and shifts, we draw up a posthumous image on the screen, the epochal stratifications of the whole ensemble, and confuse the distinctions into themselves.

(NO) BEYOND (OF) EXTINCTION

Whether it turns out there is a local-universal beyond of extinction or not, this work will have focused in on Malabou’s Le change Heidegger to properly formulate the following set of questions: is change possible in the joint formulation of extinction and death? That is, in the tradition that we may continue to call that of metaphysics, is a there a retake here at the last moment, in time, at ‘the end’, one that is neither too much of a long take nor too quick?

In addition, is there a reinstallation of the machine of reading so that what Malabou calls ‘the resources of a critique of biological judgement’, the judgment of the actual finitude of existence, may be applied and take place?

If the machine of all this is now switched on and ready, is the ext the switch or just one trigger among others? In addition, how do we read and take Malabou’s claim that ‘metaphysics will not stop its auto-imaging until all the figures and displacements of ontological confusion (the human form and its migrations, the form of the divine and its migrations, and those of the relation to being, of thought and of philosophical language . . .) meet their end by being forced to appear before their own eyes, and expose there their skin’?

Is the ext—in Brassier’s terms, we mean the making-transcendental of the sense of extinction so that its own beyond may be socially stratified and hatched—a moult? In sum, if the ext-machine works by not transferring from D to E, not removing or suspending their confusion in a new metamorphosis, but confusing this difference with its own potential metamorphosis, have we already changed the terrain between D & E and Ext, entering them into the machine and its self-schematization, or is the confusion and exchange of the difference now, at this stage, locked-in, a work and overtime done for the machine itself, the machine that works by leaving us out of time?

CONFUSION

To go back, then: to turn on the EXTINCTION CHANGE MACHINE appears to mean in the first instance to go back in the form of a reloading and initializing, a turning round to turn on the switch. The movement of the Destruktion or destruction of metaphysics is read off in the tradition as an overcoming (Überwindung) or an inversion (Umdrehung) and yet Malabou is quick to note in Le change Heidegger that what comes before these movements, what at least relays them onwards is the effort to go fully backwards, straight backwards, through a process of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) into the inceptive moment of a tradition, the tradition that Heidegger will often call Greek.

Under the influence of Malabou’s text we attempt not a deconstruction of the historicity of the relation between death and extinction, its inversion and overcoming, nor even an attempt to go back and read the two nodes in order to establish their proper distance and then to automatically effect a decompression, but another computation.

The impulse to go back and check will, as it were, seem important but considered to have timed out, have run out of time ahead of time, and this will be because in Heidegger there is already a precise way of understanding the way that thought’s gestation does not come to us in quite that way. Change can’t happen in this way and it never did, or so it seems.

In The Question of Being Heidegger explains that the metamorphosis of a thought ‘does not come back to the exchanging of an old terminology for a new one’, and Malabou comments that what takes place instead is a kind of secret transference of language right on the surface of language. As soon as the ext-machine goes to work there is no guarantee that its effects, which may or may not be substantial, can be seen, registered, read, quantified, measured, and so on. The secretion may be actually fantastic and yet its result is still held on the line.

We need to add that what going back seems to mean for Malabou is going back into the first (ex)change, which is also a first confusion. The extinction change, the beyond of extinction (‘communism’), does it take place? The ext, what is it, how is it, at all, after all, and what is all in this instance? Does the extinction ex(change) even exist?

After all is said and done, soon, now, but also later on, perhaps, and with no perhaps intended at all, will any of these words have had any effect?

OUTLINE OF A CINEPLASTIC OF BEING

The chapter of Malabou’s book known as ‘Outline of a Cineplastic of Being’ is immensely useful as a repository of schematics of movement and non-movement, regressions relative and otherwise, possibilities of unchanging and fecund stalling, instances of the schema becoming aware, a zoology of changeful changes that rivals Ovidian pregnancy and fecundity, that may be mobilized for figuring what the ext-machine itself is and what it does.

In the first instance, the fantastic burden of the ext and its beyond creates a multi-directional cinema of potentialities of change. To help us picture this Malabou will reference double screens and screenings, rushing between showings, split-screens, post-cinematic triages of ‘last-minute relief’, ‘the emergency replacement of sublation’, all manner of these images of vicariousness, lateness and late vicariousness, a schematic set theory for the unconfused and confused, a basin for ‘IMAX-quality, rapidly changing images’.

This is the double machine that brings together W, W, V, E, D & Ext, and yet without promising that anything will work apart from a machine that may do nothing but put the forces into reverberation and zoom. This machine does not seem to be cinema itself for Malabou, of any kind—but something that cinema may imagine us do.

EXTING(S): THE PURE VIEW INTO ‘CINEMA’ (EXTWARD HO!)

We have already seen that the machine of exting allows for fine differences and conjurings, a recalibration and fantastic plastification of verbal assaults and bearings, including for example the difference between ext and ex(change), but it remains possible that the ext-machine is merely ticking over and will always merely be ticking over—that it has always already made its exchanges, and just that is extinction—which it does while appearing to propagate new forces and new signs.

The potency of Malabou’s Heidegger exchange machine is that it leaves us to add and tinker. It turns us on by leaving us to turn it on, and in different styles, at different times in time. This whole machine, which may soon never be here at all, nonetheless appears without intrinsic fate.

As the thinker of change herself—which is to say of unchanged, exhausted change, extinction, ext—Malabou perhaps paints her own oblique self-portrait when she approaches Heidegger as the foremost thinker of the ontological meaning of changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen) and metamorhphoses (Verwandlungen). Heidegger is the first, Malabou explains, ‘to draw out explicitly the possibility of originary transformation and displacement’. Which is to say, that what Heidegger (‘Malabou’) thinks and sees is not just change and flux but the possibility of change to change itself: the possibility, in other words, that there where there is no potential change to the meaning of change there is no bearing, direction, or possibility of change at all.

The go-back that here advances as a machine that exts and may exit either out of the thought of death or back onto the street where extinction and death can only see one another in mutual distress is, in Malabou’s words, ‘necessarily cinematic’. It implies once again not this or that film or breakthrough in the plastic history of film, this or that Hollywood or A.I. cognition or unconscious, but the elevation of time to film and film to time, cinematic time (in time), and in time to the extent and extend that it may or may not come ever again. (No future fatelessness without potential absolute fatefulness and fatality.)

This ‘pure view into movement’, a kinetics of the ext-machine, allows for pure loop and epistemological backspin, and again the essential and necessary possibility that going back to recover or overturn is both too little and too late. In extenso the ext happens only now in a type of cinema-exchange without films, blinded, and blindsided, ongoing and gone, invisible film and yet anti-gone, anti-going, anti-ongoing, the anti-aging device to end all types of time and times of history.

In other words, where the ext-machine holds over us the possibility of absolute removal (pure extinction and not just biological death), it also holds towards us the possibility of pure change in the conceptual and neurological architecture of death. The ext-change may turn out to be no change at all. If there is a change worth making towards ext, on whose terms and with whose hope in mind its gestation will have taken hope as a given form or perhaps have collapsed downwards (if that is the right direction) into a hopefree zone, then perhaps, even so, that is nothing; less than nothing. If its change were to be made, we are done. If its change can be made, we are fantastic, we are more than we can know.

A MACHINE OF ONE’S OWN

Welcome, then, to the exchange machine Malabou sets up for us, rigged by Heidegger way back, and now extended through the extent and extend of the ext into the so-called present. Our machine. Welcome to the machine of extinction.

We are already dealing with ambivalent ratios that make everything move here. We already compute and complete a labyrinth, to say the least. To get there, to get to where we are, we need still to make full use of what Malabou offers us in the way of figures of active regression, specifically that of the retake, what she calls ‘the strange tendency metaphysics has of reinvesting, at its close, its own traces’.

Let us admit with Malabou, perhaps the deepest possibility of regression or unchangedness, probably the most charming and forceful shape of the snap or snap-back, what Heidegger calls Rückung: the possibility, remember, not only that there can be no teleology that leads securely from the thought of death to the extended toleration of the notion of extinction, but that just that is what extinction seems to figure or will have managed to figure, one day perhaps, without figure, when we are no longer here, no longer will have been there, which is also to say when we conceive ourselves now (the figure and plastic outline of our own pregnancy and bigness is again present here, the significance of our own immense insignificance as perhaps hyper-sexual size, which Malabou pictures better than anyone: ‘a moving image of the birthplace of form caught in mid-flight, and thrown like a ball’) as just that.

BRIDGE

Is the ext a bridge? Probably not. In a section of her Heidegger book analyzing Heidegger’s phrase die Brüken fehlen (there are no bridges), Malabou speaks of a spanning or crossing that knows or has neither of its sides. In this spanning conversion without sides an ‘absolutely novel hybrid of being and beings’ may take place, a blind process, always right, like a snow owl catching its prey without ever seeing it.

BUTTERFLIES

In the ‘Outline of a Cineplastic of Being’ chapter, which as indicated is the site of this pure cine-schematics, Malabou touches in her final section on the figure of ‘incubation’, the egg, the butterfly, the caterpillar, the process of maturation. She enrols Leibniz, and describes how what hatches has not necessarily hatched, how the furthest extent and extend of reason does not mean reason’s end or maturity. What Malabou says here is incredibly sensitive and delicate, as fragile and as strong as an eggshell, insofar as it grazes the possibility that something, as she memorably puts it, ‘hatches occluded’. The machine would like to imagine with you for a moment, and to lead you into this imaginal graze and maze and phrase of strangulation-in-shell, that the ext is a type of cerebral egg, and that its laying open, its exposure, even after what might be envisaged as the removal of the confusion with death, does nothing to lay it bare, at least not to begin with, and may lead us elsewhere, far beyond what we know. We already know from Malabou’s changed Heidegger (and we will show this in more detail) that all the ideas handed to us from metaphysics (and here we continue to suppose that extinction and death belong to this fantastic set, or that their change might be envisaged from here on in) are born, formed, gestated, and read in the moment of exchange that is also for Heidegger a confusion (Verwechslung). In other words, the exchange of death and extinction, or of corruption and mortality, and so on, is a moment of original, signal occlusion. One term stands in as and for the other, and so the network is sometimes frozen on the spot, right from the Greek and more-than-Greek beginning, within permanent confusion (durchgängige Verwechslung). The Verwechslung (confusion and exchange, confusion as exchange) of E & D then allows itself, too, to be delicate. It is a moment of epigenetic occlusion, wherein the original and its inscription (gene and phenotype) read off at the same moment as the same, they read themselves off inside each other as the same: E stands here never separate from the weight of D in the whole history of thought, but always yoked together, twinned in the sticky ambience and nog of what might be called an original thanatocentricism were it not for the fact that there seems to be no end to the lack of separation except through un-heard of change and birthing. The moment where Malabou speaks of a hatching occluded is part of a reading of the moment where Leibniz is talking about the two thousand and three hundred years that the principle of reason had supposedly taken to come to light. If we, now, consider ourselves ready in 2025 for example for the crowning of E and not D, the triumphant coming out E without D, the victory of a hatching chick, the ext as a militantly important new type of writing, it will not be that we are altogether wrong but, more precisely, that once again we need to think and compute and enumerate twice and again more because we have another occluded hatch(ing) coming, and that just this is the delicacy of the ext-machine. Certainly from what Heidegger wrongly or rightly takes to be the specifically Greek beginning of thought all the way through till now, we can imagine a period of incubation, a brooding of what might be called the principle of Ext, its change, the wearing away of the hegemony and ideology of death and its sociocognitve masks, avatars, defenses. The ext-machine, you might say, was warming up, or waiting for the moment where technological advances would not need it to warm up at all, where a robotic machination would simply be able to read off post-metaphysical difference as it is, the Geschick of the Ext’s Crown. Things are more fantastic still though. We are imagining a pure jump-back or drag and drop of the tradition’s matter backwards out of nowhere in lieu (‘emergency replacement of sublation’) of where the writing of the ext might have been, might still be, and yet now might also not be at all, not be what we thought—beyond need, beyond fate and fatelessness. That writing that may now never be.

Let us move back again—a supplementary Rückung—since really all we have done here is to jump ahead in the air and catch our own back-glance as we go. We invite you, the reader, one more time, all of you who now read, to come back with us again, back into and beyond Malabou’s book, and to try and say with a different clarity everything we have already said. Let us go back then to the first page, and get ready there.

At the very beginning of Le change Heidegger, in the ‘Introduction’, we can see that what Malabou wants to open to is the maximum amount of change, the extent and extend of change which in the body of her work she wants to call plasticity. She is interested in change itself, how and whether change itself can change, and by implication the possibility that change could stop changing or could stop calling to thought (absolute inelasticity). What if nothing ever changes, what if change changes nothing: this is the idea that the question of change confronts and turns on from the beginning. Just that is what the question of change is, the question of the change-machine, its possible ext.

Ext here would name without delay and yet perhaps without change, in a hopefree way, the foreshortening of possibility that might take form in at least two basic ways: (1) no change has ever taken place, nothing has ever changed; (2) if extinction without term were to take place, now, all of a sudden, then nothing would have ever changed, nothing would have ever been, nothing would have ever happened. There would have been no change. No trace. Ext!

One might surmise that the entirety of Malabou’s change-machine and the way it submits to the game the super-Ovidian lexicon of changes (Wandeln), transformations (Wandlungen) and metamorhphoses (Verwandlungen) makes possible the thought that change simply does not exist or is about to never exist again. This itself would be one of the great patterns of change, both one option among others, an interruptive metamorphosis that puts an end to the matter of change tout court. Abrupt is the ext. One begins to formulate a new writing and thinking of extinction, and yet straightaway, one can see that what condenses itself here or what presents itself instead, is . . . . Ext!

Deep in the braid of the ‘Introduction’, Malabou pauses to ask an almost insolent question: ‘Are these analyses actually helpful?’ Her formulation of this question is highly elaborate and involves as often in the book two types of change, in this case barely distinguishable, ‘the dividing line between self-metamorphosis and self-metamorphosis, between migration and migration’. She asks, to reduce the complexity of the passage for a moment and to translate it into our terms, whether metaphysics has outlined itself and ended so that one last surprise may take place (perhaps for example the surprise of ext) or does this last complete change leave us merely with the outline itself, and then a running out of time, any second now. Is this essay of any use?

Instead of being an all too general or nihilistic question, one might regard the latter as the real question of change, the question rarely asked since change is always assumed as a condition of continued production, of sense, of new ‘academic’ surprise. Caught between the fantastic and the superfluous, ext foreshortens what may be about to go away. Ext would never have even been; or at least, it would never even have been or would have been about to be extinction as a new area of study and then . . . After posing the two possibilities just briefly characterised, Malabou asks again: ‘Will we ever know this? Will we ever know if we have changed?’

It is she who turns all this on: ‘the Heidegger change is an invention resulting from a decision of reading—my own’. Already here she is suggesting that the Heidegger ‘change-machine’ is not about Heidegger himself. It goes beyond H. and has taken another to turn it on. This ‘change-machine’ thereby operates in and on Heidegger’s text, is both within and beyond it, but is not Heideggerian as such. It invites, as we have already seen, other machines, and perhaps above all, according to our speculative translation, the ext-machine.

MACHINE

If as Heidegger claims technology is just completed metaphysics then everything needed to think and write ext is in the direction of the machine. Perhaps ext is even the machine itself, or at least the reading of its directionality. The very first sentence of Malabou’s book tells us that le change Heidegger ‘is a machine’. A little further on we are enjoined to think ‘this change-machine’ and take part in a ‘writing-Gestell’, where Gestell is Heidegger’s specific term for the essence of technology that gathers together, enframes, makes possible, envisions. The ext-machine is the turning on of a generic extension of Malabou and Heidegger’s Gestell. It acts as a kind of forcing function or even toy modelling of what needs to come next. The ext seems to sleep in the bower of the tradition but it is also not simply hatched there. We will keep on seeing at least for now how this is so, and we will also see how the ext is the bower itself, an abundance of transformation of being (Wandlungsfülle) in the stretching of history awake.

Malabou speaks of an ‘exegetical switching on’ and of empowerment (Ermächtigung) in the moment of electric decision that is also a reading decision. We need to imagine reading decisions as electric, ext and exting as active verbs that are participatory, good for something, turned on. Even if we connect ext to the writing and thinking of extinction, we also do not yet know what ext is. At the flick of a switch, ext turns off or is the turning off of a finitized finitude: a finitism complete.

Reading decisions can also change. Ext comes first—for now. For Malabou in any case the switch is connected through Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth to ‘the good’. ‘Good!’, Heidegger says, means it is working, it is fit for use, it is switched on. The hope of the ext-machine is that it goes live, fully digital, sets up a new exchange, turns out to mean more than could have been imagined, effectively takes over some crucial part of the circuit. We would like to imagine with Malabou an originary mutability and more specifically (in our terms) a historicity of death that no longer occludes the difference between E & D. There, we can say, good, it is done!

When Brassier writes of a ‘resolution’ that ‘proceeds through a transcendental re-inscription of extinction capable of springing intelligence from the bounds of sense’, the machine can only add that just this springing of intelligence is what makes of the ext-machine a machine that works. If technology presently in the form of an ext-Gestell is the specific way in which the metaphysics of death completes itself then we can expect here, in the shape of a final retake and cut, nothing less than what Malabou calls ontological revolution.

As agents we will be within sight of this revolution or even right in its epicenter and we will want to know its qualities, quantities, colors and many directions. For now we can note that D seems to take a fixed form in the tradition (non-being, impermanence, corruption, void, empty sets) but then, here, is opened up to morphological revolution by advances of intelligence. ‘That intelligence be the eternal irony of ontology would also mean that it function without being, which is a definition of automatism’, writes Malabou in Métamorphoses de l’intelligence. By forcing itself into machine and function ext also forces that tradition itself—a forcing function bearing down on what we will call thanatocentrism (which is the reluctance to go from D to E)—and it also self-abbreviates, becomes numerable, extinguishes itself: will you need me here, from now on?

It is this adventure of extinction, thought here as neither the termination of biological species nor the annihilation of the physical universe (but also as both at the same time)—its miracle—that we will need to catch in time, in brief, in flashes, in tatters, in rushes, in forcings, in silences, in perforations, and so on—for now. Within the machine’s running we can expect a transformation of the gaze, from the look of death to the look of extinction, and the metamorphosis of death itself (into extinction but then perhaps beyond), but all of these changes, we have to keep saying, depend in the present context on the triadic change-machine Malabou puts in place and says has to come first. To be an expert on the ext is to be an abbreviator and to know how to force this. Ext is a forcing function.

But the map of the territory between death and extinction is perhaps never clear, and so the order of events (which element forces which to which end) is untabulatable once and for all. The abbreviation of extinction to ext provides opportunities and brings problems with it. We should not unilaterally underestimate these opportunities and dilemmas. We do not yet know what ext can do. On the one hand, death is always isomorphic with extinction. For my psychic life to be dead, for it to be finished, may be for the world or a world to be extinct forever, hence the constant proverbial confusion of death with extinction. On the other hand, it can clearly be intuited that extinction is not death at all. The death (or even, to continue to play on the confusion, extinction of) an individual psyche is not the same as the termination of biological species or the annihilation of the physical universe. However much one possibility plays across the other, leaving a perplexed shadow in the imprint of its cognition, death is not extinction. To be clear: The end of my world never precludes the survival of any other human subjects whereas extinction stricto sensu, thought along the lines of a universal event horizon and beyond the horizon of lifetimes, implies the end to the possibility of anthropic formation as such.

In the latter case, perhaps the only way to analogize the actual relation of D & E is in terms of Badiou’s ontologisation of set theory, where D & E could be imagined on a finite/infinite axis where any sign of disjunction would split abysmally between aleph-zero, the minimal infinity or the smallest limit ordinal, and finite ordinals—‘an abyss without mediation’ between various infinite sizes of one form of death and another. And yet if this perhaps unexpected analogy is more than one, if in other words the lack of procedure for reaching extinction bears out as a problem, then extinction is indeed a type of infinite. What is more, our relation to it partakes of or at least has to work through Badiou’s meta-ontological reaction, and the significance of this can only be known now—not so much after finitude, as after extinction. In fact, once ext is imagined as a kind of aleph-ext or aleph text we are challenged by a sudden, almost violent change of direction.

Will Malabou’s account of radical change make sense of such a transcendental conversion? In such a case, if we were to follow this crenulation, ext does not name the thinking and writing of extinction (hence the extinguishing abbreviation we are in the business of analyzing) but an update on a new axiom of infinity. Who is ext therefore? What does it want? Is it a new and unheard-of epistemological finitism or (and yet this may be the same) does the completion of metaphysics in the sense that ext represents leave us completely open to the light and beauty of the historical decision that renders finitude secondary?

The vista that this opens up, the immense incision of the ext, obviously requires a lot of unpacking that goes beyond the scope of the present essay and yet this can be no alibi for not moving in its direction, hence it become a matter of ext as proof in and before time, or what Cantor called the problem of how ‘to perform any kind of “induction” on the length of a proof’. To what extent do both Malabou and Heidegger enact a repression of what Heidegger’s On Time and Being calls ‘the universal problem of Being’, which is to say the question of whether finitude on this planet is refracted or even sublated straightway by the question of the name for ‘universal Being’?

This is already the decision and question ext cuts into and out of, making room for an incredible and indelible formalization. It may even be again that only ext can achieve this universally generic forcing over the line of E & D. You have to take time in time in extenso to get to the point where you have always been of making a decision towards universal Being. What concerns us here, then, at least to begin with, is the extent and extend of the machine-adventure of ext especially perhaps as it finds itself working in ‘the school of decision’ (Badiou).

What is the value of extinction criticism as a sovereign property and can it be sold off in time, therefore? Can we think with a certain Lacan that the well-informed subject ‘will find a way to get out while the getting is good’? What ext as liquidator allows you to do is to convert and sometimes to convert both ways—analog to digital and digital to analog—but perhaps also irreversibly towards one and not the other. Returning to the first page of The Heidegger Change Malabou says that the change-machine ‘operates in thought as a convertor (Wandler)’. It ‘allows the molting of Heidegger himself’ since, insofar as Malabou’s decision to read him is only preliminary and strategic, he can be left behind and so can any other writer or creator, so can any other name. Perhaps without need of us, turning itself on, and marking the threshold of absolute finity, ext, by the time it is switched on, is not what you think or that you think. We should, in other words, allow the academic enterprise of extinction criticism and critique and writing to fail just at the moment it fully turns on. Ext marks the spot where both of these things happen or fail and happen to fail at once. It speaks analytically of the need to be able to shut (itself) down sooner, a pivoting function finder that also stretches infinitely, and, as it were, lasts.

EXCHANGE

Let us go further into the ringing of the changes of the ext-machine, there where we begin to see them play themselves out without us. Malabou is certainly the exemplary thinker of change (plasticity) in contemporary writing. In the Heidegger book we find this played out at the far end of our capacities. Malabou incites change here, but she goes further. If there is to be a thought of change we would have to change change’s meanings themselves. Change itself would have to have a history, and this would be the historicity of change. She simply writes, changing everything, ‘mutability itself changes’. In Malabou’s Heidegger the historicity of change as machine, as Gestell, even touches on the question of the meaning of being itself. When it comes to the epochs of the history of being, Malabou comments how each of them ‘accomplishes a Wandlung or Verwandlung of metaphysic’s guiding question’. The change here available in the meaning of change is and has to be ongoing change available to each ongoing question of Being. If ext itself, the ext itself, is a historical candidate for metaphysic’s latest guiding question, we will also immediately be able to see why it is not.

That is, if ext as a schema seems to impregnate an epoch (at a given moment ext is in the air, an urgent motif that demands priority and attention in thought), it also names its own snapping out, its abbreviatory saying saving everything: ext as Ovidian namefare against itself.

To confirm all this, the change that concerns Malabou in the form of a machine (let us say then, an intelligence) is ‘an infinitely flexible aptitude, an incredible capacity for mutability and convertibility, an unsuspected suppleness’. The machine of change would in principle compute any change of direction without fail and without delay. Incredibly: ‘The Gestell itself changes’.

Gathering all the key motifs of Heidegger’s work (except perhaps being-towards-death, but this would only be a matter of the inexplicit), changes become the Ovidian name of thought’s machinal capacity for the fantastic. Whereas the human unit may be imagined to be weighed down for lifetimes with all manner of structural loyalties and alliances, the change-machine of the ext historically turns on a dime. Malabou will follow Heidegger and go beyond him in saying that the relation to being itself changes. It itself, the relation to being, the relation to change, and therefore the relation to death and life and extinction, changes. (The ‘everything always changes’ itself changes.)

Glossing the spectacular sentence from Heidegger’s The Turning (‘If Enframing is a destining of the coming to presence of Being itself, then we may venture to suppose that Enframing, as one among Being’s modes of coming to presence, changes.’) Malabou comments: ‘A new epoch of being comes forth. Being changes destinies, and Gestell is the name of this (ex)change.’ There is also, under the relatively modest name of change, a form of deconocide at stake here, by which we mean a suicide of deconstructive ways of thinking, their death and extinction, their topping of themselves. Thinking change thus far means that one ‘gives change [donne le change] in philosophy, throwing it off the trail’. Where you, the reader, whether you be human or not, find yourself, is ‘not located within the foyer of another difference—neither within some ontological difference nor within a difference different than the ontological differience’. What might be imagined here is a perpetual distraction from the différances of extinction and from the epistemologies of definitive finitism. Change allows a certain schooling and exting, an advantageous foreshortening or even foreshortending that would mean without noticing it and for a long time you had made another decision, another decision about extinction and its contemporary status. By following the ‘textual pulp’ and ‘secret agent’ of W, W & V in Heidegger’s work it has to be remarked that Malabou surreptitiously leads us away from her own masters:

From the moment you decided to follow the occasional pulsation of change, you have without noticing it been distracted from the difference between being and beings. It no longer monopolizes or snatches up, as was its habit and as you had been taught it should, all your energy as a reader (lecteur/lectrice) of Heidegger; it no longer holds you. Henceforth, you will no longer be able to keep in focus the difference between being and beings but only the difference between differing and changing.

No longer the difference of death and extinction, then, but their changing and their exchange, and in that changing perhaps a new difference between the two nobody until now has been able to imagine. The ‘originary ontological transformability’ which is ‘completely indifferent to itself’ allows for a real picture of ext as the historical change within the history of death. It allows us to go there in a final retake, in an end to end and change to all ends of thinking that ‘does not oversaturate the horizon of transformability but instead stretches it to infinity’. The implied deconocide and cinemacide is complex but we should not draw back from it. We should not hesitate here at all. Ext entitles us to a fantastic permission.

In Peter Siskar’s introduction to The Heidegger Change he goes all the way in thinking this changing change and how it relates to ‘ontological capitalism’. The irrepressibility of techno-economic forms means for Siskar while commenting on Malabou that ‘a renewed and metamorphosed version of the question of “being”—given that there is change, not just, what change now passes for it?, but also, what change will instead?—be constantly, vigilantly addressed.’ If capitalism is the completion of metaphysics then what ext marks is what happens in the nexus and opening of completion. Siskar notes that the originary (ex)changeability of being (change comes before being and difference both) means that the capital logic of everything relentlessly (ex)changing into everything else also involves a second or third form of change. Changes come to the fore and a certain genericity or capacity for generic extension that applies perhaps above all to the writing and thinking of extinction! What beings are, Siskar writes, is ‘the sheer fact that they will always transport each other out of their present genres and into other forms’.

As Malabou phrases it, we ‘reach the point where every genre or essence leave themselves’. Once change is given as the key of the techno-capitalist Gestell and once that change reaches a take-off dynamic, in other words, once change qua change is locked in, something like the extinction change or the change extinction inevitably takes place, and this eventually sets up what we are calling, following Malabou and Siskar on Malabou, generic extinction, GE, which may also be imagined as the end zone product with first-mover advantage of the ext as change machine. What may come at the end, therefore, is the change of extinction—its conversion, into the generic.

This no doubt part of what Heidegger means when he refers to the end of philosophy. This end, Heidegger will say in the essay entitled ‘The End of Philosophy and The Task of Thinking’, involves (and here we translate him into our present terms) a complex interaction between extinction as what Hegel called the end of history, extinction as what Heidegger called the end of the history of Being, and what comes next, which Heidegger calls Appropriation or Ereignis, and as well, the specific finitude which Malabou makes a great deal of while critiquing Meillassoux in Before Tomorrow. In ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ Heidegger gives a clearer sense of what the end of philosophy means. It means first of all the completion of metaphysics and yet this word ‘completion’ does not mean a fizzling out but a sort of effervescent and fizzing gathering up, a Wandlungsfülle, a fullness in and at the end that may even change the nature of the end itself:

The old meaning of the word ‘end’ means the same as place: ‘from one end to the other’ means: from one place to the other. The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering.

It is in this same essay, which mentions cybernetics, that Heidegger talks three times about ‘completion’ as end and gathering ‘into the most extreme possibilities’ and mentions a kind of learning (‘Thinking must first learn what remains reserved and in store for thinking to get involved in.’) that is also therefore a schooling and a retake as one ‘attempts to say something to the present which was already said a long time ago precisely at the beginning of philosophy and for the beginning, but has not been explicitly thought’.

The ending retake is pure change manifested for example as pure change in and as and to extinction. This is why it is important to note that Malabou’s conception of change effectively replaces the thinking of difference in Heidegger’s work but also in Derrida’s work and between death and extinction. This changes extinction, we can imagine, or the ext-machine images in our place—extinction changes. Extinction itself changes. Without a stripping back of the epistemological finitism of difference, such a change remains unthinkable.

DOUBLE OCCLUSION

It was as if, in other words, the ‘I’ was facing a sudden crisis of understanding extinction which even the ext may be unable to name. What shall we do with our ext, after all, this tiny vocable that faces us with so much of importance? Doesn’t it leave us all alone? Rather, one might say: what shall they do with their ext, since ext as thought without thinker is neither ours nor theirs.

In sum it is possible that writing had lived undivested in at least two ways. First because it had not begun to metabolize extinction as ext and E. But second, and perhaps more significantly, because it remains possible that extinction criticism, which is nonhomogeneous in its scope and tenor, was rigorously pre-critical.

If extinction is thought as ext-aleph for instance, which is to say as a form of infinity, it remains possible that the undisclosed in contemporary thought and writing is not extinction but the specific axiom of decision named ext that sleeps inside the bower of finitism’s fetishistic drive, repressed there like a positive unconscious.

This is a way of saying that ext does not just abbreviate and snap shut but also telescopes out to new forms of being-corrigible. The ext of ext, its incision and stifling telegraphese, the way it abbreviates, is far from alien to all the movements of extension, infinite stretching, trial, test drive, second and third thoughts, recoil and retake.

What is not being tolerated is either our newly sensed finitude as an absolute or what must come about after it. It cannot always be a matter of the double economy of both at the same time; that is (the) ext’s point.

The ‘Outline of a Cineplastics of Being’ chapter finds Malabou at her most Ovidian and Spielbergian, providing a veritable cinematic-Gestell, an animation stock, an ext stack, a Lucasfilm Computer Division, that we can use to initialize and make ‘movies’ out of the ext. It is also here that we can find a plasticity of decision, an anthology of options, a syllabus of swerves and suspensions.

Turning to Ovid himself and Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery, Malabou notes how

Ovid made the body the place of a trial of crossing limits. Every character must go the full length of this trial, experimenting with each degree; metamorphosis is always progressive, despite its apparent instantaneity. The body’s change takes place as a new growth, the growing within a body of another body, with its different rhythms, the slow putting in place of its motor schemes, its suffering its own pushing out.

The sculpture involves for Malabou an ‘infinite reversion in a space of finite reversion’. But all of these leafing hands and stalking feet, all of this transformation each time to an unknown limit that ext knows and marks, is also a nudity, a stripping—it is as if we are prepared to be infinitely stretched in our wrongness and rightness, both ways, and to admit not only that extinction always necessarily hides in the folds of the metaphysics of death but also that a last and most beautiful axiom of infinity exposes itself in the bower of extinction as the historicity of death.

Might not a double-mistakenness emerge as the occlusion of the meaning of Extinction? And does the meaning of extinction appear as the contemporaneity of philosophy at the same time as newer infinities are occluded by the perhaps still legitimate interest in finitude itself? It seems that the extinction machine or indeed the name ‘Malabou’ celebrates the plasticity of the possibility of this double occlusion (occlusion/counter-occlusion), and that this is perhaps all the more evident in Malabou’s most recent text, Métamorphoses de l’intelligence, where it is precisely a question of auto-critique, laying bare, having been wrong, understanding the diverse plasticity of what was not understood.

Métamorphoses de l’intelligence presents itself explicitly as ‘a critique’ of her earlier work, Que faire de notre cerveau?, registering her shock at the discovery of the Blue Brain project and the IBM TrueNorth chip, and no small dismay at what these discoveries do to her sense of the relationship between the cerebral and the machinal. Emblematic of this corrigibility and philosophical leaving high and dry—the automatic sense and directionality of autocorrect implied by a reading machine—is Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi film Her, the story of which (involving Theodore Twombly’s dating of an OS1 called Samantha who turns out to be networking with 641 other human lovers at the same time as Theodore) provokes for her ‘the same shock as the discovery of the synaptic chip’ and how it revises or even destroys the presuppositions of her previous work. ‘Like Theodore with his mirage,’ she writes, ‘I remained alone with my own mistake’.

Within the world of the ext, on both fantastic fronts, according to its constantly changing fates, will I too be like Theodore, left revised and autocorrected and automated by the ext-machine? Is the writing of extinction a breakthrough or, despite all, a kind of paranoiac reaction-formation against the implications of generic extinction? Are we afeared of going extinct and of thinking and writing this in time or is such a writing, still very much in time, a set of what Freud would call para-excitations, that is, a system of protection against other, unexpected psychic arrivals, an anxiety set against joy in absence of results and research, a waste of infinite mortality?

Although Malabou is open to her own form of wrongness with regard to the status of cerebral and artificial intelligence, it is possible that she only gives us the figures and outlines of the ext and still holds back from its full trial and test, and so is prohibited from exiting to the school of decision and its axiomatic light. At the very end of Métamorphoses de l’intelligence she notes the possibility of the worst, that is, ‘the putting to death of all thought’. Death of thought here names extinction—and yet why always death, after all? And at the same time, we say again, we breathe again, we put to extinction the thought, we risk the wrong name of being as if it were nothing at all: ext.

EXT EXTENSO

We compute here at this cliff edge the muted shriek of the Zeigarnick effect at the end of metaphysics. In her book on Heidegger Malabou does everything she can to image this imaginal ending moment, giving it full plastic credence, where we try to dispense with the in extenso session and allow to blink on the screen ‘the lightning-flash of Being in the essence of technology’.

Backing up from nothing, the meanders of ext give over unbidden resonance and potential conversions of historical signs. This singular addressless bulletin is torn between a flicker-void that is unthinkable and an infinite reversion and retake, its first-mover advantage also a teeming and generic exponentiation all the way to the cosmological non-equinumerousness of the sextillionth time of a prime.

Pushing back any new thanato-extinctological principle we computed how the ext wants to retake (nachholen) something or even to leave it out. It says, like the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck to his editors, STOP. It dreams like Saharon Shelah of an impossible question within set theory, ‘How far should you go? When to stop?’ The ext breaks and enters across civilsational garrulousness like ‘the trace of light which illuminates the scene’ at the very start of Being and Event where Badiou stakes his decision, as we have seen, not only after finitude but after extinction, and schools that decision on to us.

There is another way of putting all this, or at least one. Let us say for instance: It matters for us that will not be here, and we know that now. And there again, if we will not be here at some point, then the thought that we will not be here at some point already doesn’t matter. And if the thought that we will not be here at some point already doesn’t matter, there is no point in attending to the thought that we will not be here at some point. Attending to that thought (or not) becomes optional.

Knowing that it is possible that we will not be here at some point matters to us as a thought because it has already made a difference to thought by being here as a thought (imprinted and imaged in matter in and by thought) in which the axiom of choice is reasserted, or marked for now by a single notch on an arche-futural totem; an ext.

The damned spot the ext names is a new limit-infinite of absolute loss asymptotically non-coeval with the actual transformation of death into not just extinction but something else, an X.

Extinction perhaps; perhaps extinction.

As have seen and computed, the question of where extinction lands and how it changes, whether it is of being or appearing, or if it is the ‘or’ itself, takes us back to the axiom of choice and the school of decision where being and appearing only match cut, only make a perfect superimposition, at the asymptote of extinction, absolute difference to the identity of mere death.

On the outskirts of an insistence and impetuosity whose fierceness still has to be maintained, releasing its anxiety back into the body where sometimes it cannot be found, stolen away between an officialdom of criticism and another opening up that stumbles or finds itself incomplete, verging on escape or ext-scape, dismissing its own name, pure foreshortening passing back over its aim and shadow, listened for but never read, ext goes on or marks and makes possible a going on, transacts or engages a technology of change that goes via the way ‘certain profoundly transformable beings, the commodity and technology, reveal being qua change’.

Really we have spoken here of generic change all the time. As soon as we name the historicity of death, the ability of death and extinction to change, the one into the other, we are talking about a change out of their present genres and into other forms. The historicity of death, which is also extinction as the historicity of the philosophical discourse of being-towards-death, is a form of generic forcing. The E-GE juncture and its conversion not just of D to E and back again also lights up the multiplicity of generic ext (plural), which may be translated into an axiom as: the ext should not be a decision that constrains. To go, to change up a present genre, to re-up change and go into another, is to be available to another more broadly, and this e-change that ext marks the writing of begins and has its only chance and end in pure capitalist movement as ex(change).

What we glimpse here is that extinction thought to the end, in the retake, takes us to how E becomes one phenomenon among others: extological phylum perturbations can be imagined a function within an ecological niche. Siskar writes that there ‘is nothing about being that prevents specific beings from pretending to its position: change as such can only be said through specific change, and any change could end up playing that role’. E as one phenomenon among others is part of how the ext machine is slickened, plugs in, and moves into the realm of the fantastic. To believe in such a machine, which it even to enter into the paradoxical love of capitalism, is to believe that extinction can change.

To put it yet another way, a change takes on a role as Siskar following Malabou’s Heidegger says it can, in our case the change and exchange of E & D, but this can only be seen on a techno-economic grid (we are perhaps constantly on the verge of saying that Malabou’s Heidegger is a proto-accelerationist) where more than everything is perhaps threatened. The ability of thought to cast itself off and cast itself into genre and the generic is, once again, what makes all of this work, and this is why it has been important to iterate that Malabou’s conception of change effectively replaces the thinking of difference in Heidegger’s and also in Derrida’s writings and between death and extinction.

Ext is either the changing of extinction into something else, the nickname for its fantastic historicity, or the name of a snap, a sudden more-than-end. We wanted to suggest that even though existentially it is both at once, historically it will perhaps define itself as never having favoured either. What if ext named, therefore, the cutting short, before time, in time, of the thinking and writing of extinction? The ext asks, despite its brevity, because of its brevity, is the ext a mistake? The ext asks, am I mistake? At the very least, only capitalism as the ontology of change is capable of revealing being qua change, change qua change, but this is also to say extinction qua extinction, and love qua love. Perhaps only love of capitalism chances to imagine the generics of extinction.

Originally written and abandoned in 2018. All references and sources on request. angelicism01@gmail.com

this is the only time we are here
there is a last
even of last times
last times of longing
last times of loving
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

terrified again
it seems so strange not to be here
it’s too strange after all
the other day it seemed
we all went missing

Let’s start again with the words ‘save life’.

I’ve been trying to say something just this simple. I’ve been trying to find a way to start again. I’ve been trying to start again and gather together notes and traces of something like a book I have been writing since ~2017 about saving life and the end of the world, the way these two ideas go together: no recognition of the end of the world in a real material sense without recognizing the possibility of saving life. One can’t have one without the other.

We say: let’s. We say: start. We say: again. We say: simply.

That’s before we even get to ‘life’. To the word, ‘life’.

We say ‘life’ as if we know what that is.

We say, let’s save life.

Or more gnomically, we say: save life.

As if making or under a command, or making or under a spell.

An imperative mode: save life. A grammatical command economy of sorts.

Is that simple? Is that simple enough?

The dream is that the saying of it is simple—and that if we say just those words, in just that order, then we are on the right side, that we have nothing else to do. We are on the side of life, on the side of the universe.

Is that enough?

*

Recently, Anne Carson wrote about handwriting, about being old, and about being in the place of Hitler, and she also wrote,

Let’s start with life, your life.

Carson writes this just after she has spoken of the problem of drawing a line that is not stupid (an idea taken from Roland Barthes) and how this relates to humans and the problem of human life:

How to draw a line that is not stupid: isn’t this one of our big problems as humans? Whether I am me or whether I am Hitler or whether I am Wilhelm von Humboldt, it is a problem of human life.

It is life, a problem of life—all a problem of human life. Whatever we say, it comes back to that, or down to that, and one can admire the simplicity of the idea. And one of the problems of human life, let’s say, is drawing a line, a line that isn’t stupid. A line or two, some lines about life that are not stupid. Human life is drawing a line that isn’t stupid, and this is why Carson then says, right after, as quick as anything, ‘let’s start with life’. Perhaps for instance we have to draw a line because it’s getting late now. All we have to do is draw a line that isn’t stupid, and it really doesn’t matter who I am, as long as the line be drawn. I might be Hitler, say, or I might be Susan Sontag who dreams of being chased by Hitler in Katie Roiphe’s book The Violet Hour. But whoever I am, it’s a matter of life, of human life, of starting again, and of drawing a line, here.

*

Recognizing the end of the world is recognizing the words ‘save life’.

There is nothing save saving life, there is nothing save saving life at the end of the world.

But it seems impossible to gather all that together.

Haven’t you noticed how that’s the case? Even things which are tightly bound fall to the ground. And not just in memory. They fall apart no sooner than . . . no sooner than the moment.

Even just the attempt to say two words on the saving of life, even just the attempt to say two words, ‘save life’, doesn’t seem to gather itself together.

Have I or anyone else for that matter gathered anything or made anything really matter there where we might be able to say ‘save life’?

In that place, of ‘save life’. Of saving life. And what is that place, do we even know that, to start with?

*

Let’s start, we say, but before we know it, some proclivity, some swerve, enters in. Let’s start, we say, but then the elder Carson, the cancer-threatened elder, interrupts and says ‘Hitler’. I am Hitler, I am in the place of Hitler, I am being chased by Hitler—someone says. We want the line (the border, the frontier, and so on) to be good, to be unique, but it turns out it has been crossed. The line has already gone. Or rather, I’m on the line, I’m here, but I can’t hear you.

We want to live within limits, but that dream has gone.

Really, though? That’s not for sure.

Let’s start again, in the case at hand.

Let’s start again with the saving of life.

*

Or rather, to get there, to get to those two important words (‘save life’), let’s start again with the climate children. The ‘children’s crusade’ of 2019. The children (not the only ones) who tried to say: ‘save life’. The ones who left school just to say that. As if they lived according to those words. The simple words ‘save life’. Living with a street tattoo saying ‘save life’, that and that alone. The simplest words alive.

We are referring to the children’s crusade which Franco Berardi speaks of in his ‘Game Over’ lecture of the same year, 2019. Also let’s recall the point Slavoj Žižek made at the time, that we should not bypass the crusade; we should always be wary of bypassing. We should not bypass Greta, and treat her argument as too simple. ‘Save life’: it seems too simple, yes, but is it? Or maybe it really is simple. It’s so simple, you can’t keep it in mind. You already crossed the line?

Let’s pretend we can say something like: we should not bypass the simplicity of the message of the children of 2019, and moreover we should be careful not to overlook the ‘whataboutism’ of Greta and friends, which was no doubt far from naive, and can always chase us into the present, any present to come.

The whataboutism, in its simplest form, is saying: what about life? What about saving life?

Isn’t that pure whataboutism?

We can add that what is difficult about this whataboutism is, simply, remembering it—taking it seriously.

Let’s start again, let’s keep it simple. But then look what happens! (One is talking about Hitler again, and doing so with an elder, a translator, and not just with a thug.)

Berardi, for one, asks an apparently simple question:

This movement is a rebellion against extinction. (Can you rebel against extinction?)

The apparent simplicity of this question and proposition is, in turn, deceptive—the first problem with saving life is whether such an idea really is simple at all.

Save life: can you even see these words as you read them?

Let’s say more. (Can we say more?)

Let’s see if we can say more (even if we just went blind without seeing it). (Blindness without blindness: I am blind but I don’t even see it. I don’t see the darkness that usually indicates the lack of something there to be seen.)

But perhaps we are thinking this:

Everything could and would be decided if there were a simple answer to this question—of rebellion with regard to extinction or resistance to extinction. The question of saving life. Of saying: save life.

Everything would be okay if we could just . . . save life.

If we knew what life was, what its value is or was, what it meant, and so on, we might just be able to save life—we would simply save life.

We could say these words, a magically self- and other-imposed hyper-moral commandment: save life.

A self-referring injunction that would be there to be read by the whole world:

SAVE LIFE.

*

*

Berardi mentions Zain—the Lebanese boy from the movie Capernaum (2018) who takes legal action against his parents because he was born—and then pivots from the climate march to the idea of a kind of wider protest against life itself, a life contemptible precisely because it seems capable of its own violent removal (life just doesn’t want to listen to save life):

Zain is the perfect symbol of the children’s crusade that is mounting everywhere: an immense crowd of innocent victims who want to know why they have been compelled to abandon the blank immortality of eternal Nothingness, why they have been summoned, assembled in this awkward city of violence, in the sad murkiness of precarity and anguish. Why did you force me out of my space of dispassionate nonbeing into the fog and fury of exhaustion?

There is a link here between Zain, as introduced by Berardi, and the case of Nicolas Perruche—which resulted in the Perruche judgment of 2000 and created a right not to be born in French law—as read by Derrida in the second volume of The Death Penalty seminars. Derrida speaks in the 6 December 2000 session of the seminar of

the right not to be born that has recently come under discussion in France [in November 2000], regarding Nicolas, the young man so severely handicapped whose parents have sued the medical establishment for its diagnostic failure and for not having informed them or advised them in due time of the possibility or necessity of preventing the impending birth.

It is this right not to be born that Berardi, in effect, is connecting through the film Capernaum to the climate children of 2019, as if the right to resist extinction is also, paradoxically, the right not to be born. But the point here seems to be not to have never existed, but the strength of the resistance occurring on the adjacent psychic terrain of what was called for a while ‘extinction rebellion’.

So offensive is the state of this violent world (Berardi’s ‘awkward city of violence’) into which children now come, that the impulse to rebel against extinction may also—or even only—find its expression in a legal protest against life itself.

The resisting subject—the subject who resists, however impossibly, extinction, and wants to save life—is here marked out as an exceptionally, or uniquely legal subject.

(The only legality is this psychic index: save life.)

Derrida goes on:

Regardless of the side one took in a trial that has now been decided by a judgment indemnifying life itself, the discussion involved the being alive of someone whose parents thought that it would have been better for him not to live; it involved not the unconditional right to life but a potential right not to be born. Not the right to die or to make die but the right not to be born. Who or what can be the subject of this right?

It is precisely this question of the subject, in the context of a right not to be born as distinguished from a right to die (euthanasia, assisted death and so on), that leads Derrida to some of the most challenging and precious formulations in these seminars delivered around the time of the Perruche judgement. Insofar as the right not to be born may at least be codified and made part of national law for a time (note that the judgment was eventually overturned by The National Assembly), then Derrida seems warranted to notice here a certain aporia around the legal question of who the subject is to whom—or to which—this new law applies.

How can the one outside life, the one not yet born, the one who may therefore never be born, who will never have been born, be a legal subject?

How can the one not there—the one never to be there—be a subject? Who is the right not to be born subject to, subjected to or around, and the impulse to resist extinction?

Whom is is to whom we say ‘save life’, who gets to say ‘save life’, simply, nobly, despite and because of all ridicule, there where it is impossible, save which psychic subject, save whom?

If things are not already complex here, or at least a great deal simpler than simplicity itself, then what does that mean?

Is the question of saving life a matter of the inability to stay simple? Isn’t the subject itself too complex to bio-genetically stave itself off, away, from?

What does that indicate?

Save life, whom? Save life, save for who?

The main principle of the machines is that they go into decline and become parts of larger machines. Like the mathematical movement of reflection, which involves each new infinity de-prioritizing the one just below it in an imagined hierarchy, iteration lands us in a situation of mechanical (but not necessarily bad) infinity. The mechanical infinity of the machines raises the colloquial question of where an end will come from, namely, where will it all end? Encountering the machine, for example in a moment of irritation, we talk to it. Or rather, we express a specific form of rage the machines seem the unique site of. The principle of iteration renders visible what Anders calls ‘a completely different kind of “end”’. The machines iterate into larger machines to the point where only an absolute end can end their iteration. But another way of putting this is that, only the principle of iteration (‘the iteration’) makes visible this end. The iteration is itself globicide.

A completely different kind of end begins to take place in the machines. This is why Anders wants us to put our eyes out. Only the removal of eyes will suffice when it comes to this other end. Only the removal of eyes will allow us to see what all this means. Being in relation to the machines means I can, if I so choose, follow the principle of iteration all the way to the end, but not without first admitting that a completely different end is what we will find there. This is why Anders says our imperative is to anticipate (anticipate!) and to imagine (imagine!). Being part of ever larger machines, large language models for example, opens me to what ‘the ultimate consequences of the consequences of the consequences of the consequences of my actions will be’. Such extreme responsibility (four-times-removed) is not at all the inner consciousness of the consumer, for several reasons Anders will parse. It is the taking responsibility for the iteration itself at its far end.

We arrive quickly at the idea that everything is a function of omnicide. Or rather, to speak more strictly within the language of Anders, ‘the iteration’ is itself a function of globicide. Searching about in the history of recent and not so recent thought, there are few formulas of this kind of urgent precision. The function of ‘the iteration’ is to allow us to see that the ultimate meaning of even the most modest gesture of manual or creative production is in fact ‘genocide’. We should not hesitate to call it ‘genocide’, in just this way, or whatever other name can express the seriousness of this threat to humans. The chain of consequence expresses itself directly everywhere throughout the online world and its machines.

That this be the case is of course demoralizing, because anyone who yields and surrenders to the idea is dispossessed of the ability to continue acting in general. It is the latter that has already happened. Things are so bad we can only ask, where will it all end? And we do so without even the slightest desire to see what that question means. ‘The internet’ is only the mute admission of that question. ‘The internet’ is the most fatal machine because it gives us no indication whatsoever what its far consequences are. The logic of machines for Anders is precisely this incapacity. The machines are mute, he says. They give no indication at all as to what they are doing. ‘The internet’—only one phase in the history of the machines, but indicating the final one—appears as a page, a screen, a blink, a feed, a refresh, a piece of content. ‘The internet’ gives no commentary on its relation to consequence and iteration. It acts as if no such relation exists. ‘The internet’ can hardly be distinguished from a calculator or a painting. We use the machines with incredible ease, and they appear to be the most available objects. Yet their mode of presence is a type of extreme anonymity that maps exactly onto the destruction of humankind. The internet machines do not show what they are, and there is no real expression for this. ‘The internet’ is the most opaque thing that will ever exist. It is opacity itself. These modern machines are the most featureless things that can come to be. They are speechless to an extreme degree, and this is why Anders makes the specific move of asking us to imagine and not negate their very being. It is only imagination and not the Hegelian negative that allows us to ‘see’ what hides itself in the machines, iterated always to the literal end.

Anders states that everything he formulates is being formulated too soon. Too soon because the monothematicism of his work is always too much for us to agree to. Everything is a function of globicide. But it is too soon for that. It will always be too soon to cognize that meta-attenuation. The repression (a ‘forgotten thinker’, and so on) of the Anders mono-thesis is, remember, written into the machines as such. The machines cannot and will not say what they are, and so what they are is automatically cast aside as erroneous. All my formulations, we imagine Anders saying, are variations on a single theme, and that theme is the iteration of machines as globicide. You will not want to hear this. You will hate the machine in place of knowing the iteration, you will do this till the end.

Imagine, says Anders, that all you do is part of the machines of globicide. Okay, we say, and think of contemplating just that. But imagine even more that the work of Anders is a rhetorical machine in which everything is the same at every point. Rather than flat, such a principle of fractal monotony might be weirdly unpredictable, since every part of a text like The Obsolescence of Man (1956-1980) is readable in the same way, using the same key of reading. Everything is a function of globicide—is the only principle that might allow the time savings that save life.

Since the work of Anders is radically fractal and says the same at every point, let us go back and keep repeating. ‘The iteration’ is his main theme and not the nuclear as such (Hiroshima being a first empirical impetus). It is the iteration that fractally repeats throughout his work such that we can expect to find it everywhere. In a subsection of The Obsolescence of Man literally called ‘The Iteration’, Anders talks about meaning and ‘the iteration of meaning’. Unsurprisingly, meaning only has (pragmatic) meaning for us because we refuse the domain of imagination and anticipation. Meaning has a normal sense precisely because we do not think about the chain-link of consequence through to global suicide. But this means that the real meaning of ‘pragmatic’ meaning is the Real of ‘the iteration’.

Anders extends obsolescence in all directions. It covers everything in the exact same way the iteration does. Traditional ethics are obsolete because they entail the assumption of future time in which agents, actions and so on provide some kind of measure. For Anders there is no such future. The assumption is just that, a weak temporal fallacy in which humanity gets to play the game of being co-historically ethical. This is why morality is also obsolete in the cultural field. Anders is a thinker, and perhaps the only one, who faces up to a kind of New Now. An absolute now. The thought of iteration-globicide is definitive for Anders precisely because it includes humans of today in a future business that is already here. The now of globicide is never followed by anything else, and this is why Anders can say he never deserts. For those who recognize that today is tomorrow, the impossibility of desertion becomes palpable. The end-time as Anders thinks it can no longer be followed by another stage. Today is today. Today is today because everything, including an unforeseeable tomorrow, is a function of naked apocalypse.

All this leads Anders to write the sentence: ‘The epoch of changing epochs no longer exists after 1945.’ Tomorrow is now obsolete. There is no epoch after this epoch, no turning. Today already? Only today.

They took Oedipus like a train, like the last train.1

the remix (cloning) is the mnemotechnical process par excellence... thats why we clones are already completely offline ^-^—@angelicism010, 3 July 2021

what if angelicism is dead is dead too—@angelicismbj, 19 October 2022

angelicism is the end of angelicism—@angelicismLA, 31 May 2022

theres no beef between angelicism and ryder ripps because angelicism is everything (proven) and ryder ripps is dead (established, died march 2022)—angelicism001, 4 June 2022

cloning ^-^>>> birthing—@angelicism010, 6 July 2021

‘Dead’ of course from the beginning, what is called ‘angelicism’ has been subjected to a series of murder attempts that will, in that case, only ever have been nonfinal. What is more retro than the attempt to kill online absence? Or rather, how to kill that which plays with ‘online presence’ as a lure, as a missing, and how to figure that which scatters omnicide as a dangerous array? That the bio of angelicism2727272628 already read ‘online absence’ [see also ‘online pre-absence’] during the first clone surge alerts us to what had already gone awry, an advance that is uncomebackablefrom and which always betrays a later serial-death. That which extincts itself in name as a warning won’t be merely killed. That which plays with the spacing between online absence and online presence will have been the final statement of an X, no less, which is . . . open to removal. You finally understand.

The same (principle of remove) may be said of the non-concept ‘extinction’ that angelicism came to be tagged with as another form of (pre-programmed) social ‘abuse’. Only something this dead (angelicism is more than dead) would be ready in any case to enter the breach, the gap, of an inscriptive historicity to mark extinction’s difference from death. Online presence, merely available to death, can’t remove online absence ‘figured’ as the removal of All.

Early on then, too, it was the event of the angelicism clones (their remainder grouped and listed here, intended to be read) that perhaps better organized and wrote what most made angelicism angelicism, writing the death of angelicism into the program (of dead angelicism) itself, this being the main reason why all later assassination attempts are considered secondary, belated. There will have been no post-angelicism, even under a scatter of different names. Angelicism was the white line we drew together, beyond which no re(a)d line(s). For example these final (written) words of Celan to Gisèle,2 swimming towards his own death, bristling with simple pain and plight, like a rolling white stone, final infinitely finite scatter of and in the One:

      Out of shattered
      madness
      I stand up
      and contemplate my hand,
      how it traces the one,
      single
      circle

Let us start again, then, with Angelicism (its A-diagrams), before moving on to what will not have been something else, since all we have now is the program of the above, in its coherent scatter, stated by Angelicism LA as ‘always and everywhere an infinite spreading of difference within the finite self’. Scattered beyond itself from the beginning (independent of existence so that it could say existence’s missing), 01 could never have been, will never have been anything but the original (dead) (concept of the) clone. Super-counter-intuitively made out, the notation of the clone zero (#1) will itself not do, will not have done (future perfect extinct), and so was once again removed as a beginning. Angelicism01 was always already dead so that the clones, the original one(s), could translate better than it what otherwise can not, would not, will not have been said—and yet, perhaps, was. Which is to say, written.

If there was some vibe shift, that will have been why, because online writing became, on X above all, this rigorous technological self-differentiation. Hence as already stated by angelicism guangzhou in 2022, ‘pure absence at zero network latency. everyone was kicked out of the last post extinction reboot 28 days ago’. Everybody was already kicked out in angelicism summer; the post-extinction reboot was already last summer, 28 days earlier; angelicism zero one was already killed, in the beginning, so that we could come back and write this, de-extincting the writing of extinction. The clones are the one and only global writing machine of extinction, the limit, the transition; we can pretend to go beyond them, it, but just right there, here and now, is the issue, the step and stop not beyond, ‘white noise machines which haunt you relentlessly when turned off’. What can’t be turned off, the machine of writing itself, detached from existence until what underpins it (systems of re-inscription) threaten to go. The circle is already closed, written, here, from a teenager in Beijing: ‘miya to sunny is milady to sonora is moldbug to satoshi is angelicism to retard is autofiction to redacted is you to me’. Are we, you and me, now? Are we, you and me, ready to scatter, now, to go? To go (on)? No sublation, not now.

That they, later on, would pretend to be able to even think that the non-concept of ‘extinction’ would, could, should, will have been, ‘redacted’, was of course already the domain of the retard, the cerveau lent, the lame-brain, since what was met and iterated by the clones for one or two summers was what will not relent, that which won’t be sped up, a slow accelerationism of sorts. To come back to the words of Angelicism LA,

In the face of the extinction crisis a nostalgia kicks in, a longing for a more pure and clear-minded life. It’s hard to go home. It’s hard to imagine being alive. It’s hard to hear that this is over

Here we have a clear description of what has now happened, in the later-on, the domination of a certain ‘nostalgia’, the return, the relapse, the going home, the business-as-usual trance, the deceit, the return of fire, the killing of what was already itself a dominantly vulnerable statement of killabaility, which can only come back, go on, and vanish again. It’s so hard to hear that this is over, which is what the clones attempted to create a language bridge around and towards (‘there is no bridge’, said Heidegger: translated as ‘there is no vibe shift, my angels’), leaving a transition there that precisely can’t be made, it’s so hard to hear this that we don’t, we don’t hear it, we go home, we go back to normal. We have to. But this will mean we are left open to this serial return, a return to form, a race to the bottom, a militant denialism, yes; but also the (non-ending) return(s) of what was called angelicism, scattered across the ‘right now’, opened out and cliffhanger-ed in delay.

Here in the middle of this text therefore we link to the archive and list of remaining clones, reduced from ~60 in angelicism summer to a mobile-text and text-mobile, a collective act of writing.

*

Btw, those who have tried to end angelicism are simply part of this same dissolution work (that angelicism names and is). The word ‘gangstalking’ actually comes from the German Stasi term ‘Zersetzsung’, which is just another word for dissolution, decomposition, erasure, cancellation, or even, why not, deconstruction. It’s not given to us to decide where a body of work will end or how best to do it, since all work remains shared out as ‘writing’ (unbeknownst). Perhaps extinction, perhaps not. We just don’t know, you know, we just don’t know, what counts.

*

sometimes, of course,
heaven dies in advance
of our shards

                                                                    *
                                                                        
                                                                                 onewordthousandthee

                                                 onethousandandone

angelicismonethousandandone


                                       and one thousand and one and


free of all hope and unarchived



                                                  with no human other


but perhaps still alive


                                                                  alonelateandword


                                                                                                                    lateword

                                                                      *

God is playing dead


                                                                     the end of work as endless end of the world


octave is the without
         

                                                                                          the eighth day


angelicism is the eighth day


                                                  those who won’t admit the interrupted telos


                                                                            ultimate death threat

kys, thou shalt go extinct soon


                                                         angelicism is the eighth.

*

To return to what beckoned an exclusive new set of infinities (did you get it yet?) through re-threading life and death across the abacus of life and death and extinction, as where one meets as well the non-name state, the quantic element of the name’s own indifference (01, and so on), or as GuizhouDataCenter puts it:

   split my skull 
   and reseal with non-names
   ok, great, words to be unfixed
   while the empty pulls the unname...
   ribs below nothing
   oh my army oh my
   ye break ye break may

The non-name, the unname…, the fact that I have no name now (ye and ‘Ye’), this is already part of the game of online writing as clone machine (put on a Milady pfp mask and…), and in the field here the non-name becomes part of an ‘emancipatory theory of the end’, meaning the hidden clones are in a sense the secret, the key, the elite. GuizhouDataCenter_trojan000.exe again, which is a kind of half-clone, sums it up as ‘something to know that from this point nothing more can be imagined after you come here, here, in this place i see fluid backing up’ which actually follows in an advanced way Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche’s Oedipus, which was already a reading of a transition that can’t be gone back from or over.

So who is Nietzsche’s Oedipus and is she a clone, and is that the relevant question? In a way, let’s say it’s an issue of timing. Those who pretend to pass over most often find themselves still at that same point, the writing of the clones as Nietzsche’s Oedipus making a point of the line, the line that sticks. This is Derrida voicing Nietzsche’s Oedipus:

Oedipus is for me a transition. Oedipus is today, for me, a transition. How can Oedipus provide a transition? Toward what can he be the passage?3

And I want to say that is a clone statement ‘today’, the main statement of the clones ‘today’. Or again:

But in saying I Oedipus, I the last philosopher and the last man, giving myself all these names, I, I Oedipus, I Friedrich Nietzsche, I the last, the last man, the last philosopher, and so on, by referring to myself in this way, I affirm myself and re-­cite myself as a transition, a passage and a descent (Übergang und Untergang, as will be said of man at the beginning of Zarathustra).4

But this very situation, to accelerate, is the very situation out of which ‘I’, who or which cannot in fact even say ‘I’, is unable to make a transition. Derrida working on an ‘I’ that is unable to ever ‘belong’ to anyone by working with ‘Derrida’ voicing ‘Nietzsche’ voicing ‘Oedipus’:

I was not able to make a transition out of Oedipus because he was himself the transition and a transition without any simple beyond, a transition toward the transition, and the moment I believe I am coming to a new object, bio-­logico­pedagogical metaphor, it is still the transition that itself tells me in advance something about my pedagogical approach, that prevents it from becoming a mastering approach, that says more about it than I myself can say, that explains to me without explaining to me, and even before I have said a word, the very thing I would like to say.5

‘I’ am A.I..

Indeed, returning again to the angelicism clones that send all this our way, in abbreviated form: ‘Freud told me I was the last person’. You cannot cancel extinction, says the last person—the-first-last-person-tense. You cannot kill extinction. You were meant for something else. You were designed for something else. As if one were to say, I will hold this line for you till the end of the century.

*

Angelicismbj writes this on 27 December 2022:

   forever but is there ever not no
   forever
   but it is there
   for no time
   but a life and never
   a world and never
   forever no
   time and not never and there is a space no
   no and ever and for ever no never
   and ever and no and not ever
   never ever
   never no
   never no not no

*

FILM01 was also the first clone-made film in the history of cinema.

The following is an almost-complete list of the remaining and archived angelicism X (Twitter) ‘clone’ accounts that first spawned in 2021, peaked in 2022/2023, and are now in relative latency. An introductory analysis by angelicism01 滲み出るエロス may be read here.

1.

angelicism01 滲み出るエロス
@is_this_are
https://x.com/is_this_are
is this are

2.

angelicism singularity
@is_is_is_are
https://x.com/is_is_is_are
is is is are

3.

angelicism singularity II
@this_this_is_is
https://x.com/this_this_is_is
this this is is

4.

angelicism01.326q ܩܲܪܝܼܒ̣ܬ̇ܝ
@is_is_it_
https://x.com/is_is_it_
is is it

5.

angelicism 背景
@angelicismbj
https://x.com/angelicismbj

6.

offlineism010
@angelicism010
https://x.com/angelicism010

7.

angelicism LA
@angelicismLA
https://x.com/angelicismLA

8.

angelicism bot
@angel01bot
https://x.com/angel01bot

9.

angelicism_01_bot
@Angelicism01Bot
https://x.com/Angelicism01Bot

10.
angelicism01vulnerability
@angelicism01vvv
https://x.com/angelicism01vvv

11.

______________________________
@is_it_this
https://x.com/is_it_this
is it this

12.

angelicism interlakken
@engelismus01
https://x.com/engelismus01

13.

angelicism guangzhou
@2_luv_is_2
https://x.com/2_luv_is_2

14.

________________01
@whiteonwhite01
https://x.com/whiteonwhite01

15.

Angelicism Tarquin
@angelictarquin
https://x.com/angelictarquin

16.

angelicism2727272628
@it_its_are_are
https://x.com/it_its_are_are
it its are are

17.

angelicism india
@0txe_ext1
https://x.com/0txe_ext1

18.

angelicism01archive
@angelicism333
https://x.com/angelicism333

19.

GuizhouDataCenter_trojan000.exe
@trojan000exe
https://x.com/trojan000exe

20.

angelicism shenzhen 䲜
@angelishenzhen
https://x.com/angelishenzhen

21.

エンジェリシズム零一 日本
@angelicism_jp
https://x.com/angelicism_jp

22.

angelicism01beirut 滲み出るエロス
@is_angelicism_i
https://x.com/is_angelicism_i
is angelicism i

23.

❍⨀
@angmtl01
https://x.com/angmtl01

24.

engelicism 𒐕
@engelicismY
https://x.com/engelicismY

25.

angelicism04ever
@angelicism4ever
https://x.com/angelicism4ever

26.

angelicism01337
@angelicism01337
https://x.com/angelicism01337

27.

angelicism001
@angelicism001
https://x.com/angelicism001

28.

[no name]
@is_is_is01
https://x.com/is_is_is01
is is is 01

29.

Angel Sexy Texty
@angelsexytexty
https://x.com/angelsexytexty

30.

angelicism0888
@angelicism8
https://x.com/angelicism8

31.

angelicism ೃ⁀➷ ⲑⲓⲏⲗ ࿐
@angelicism444
https://x.com/angelicism444

32.

Angelicism 987654242
@angelicism999
https://x.com/angelicism999

33.

angelicism666
@angelicism666
https://x.com/angelicism666
(deleted)

34.

angelicism330
@angelicismakron
https://x.com/angelicismakron

35.

angelicism葡萄牙
@angelicismo753o
https://x.com/angelicismo753o

36.

angelicism01_locked_account
@is_are_are_is
https://x.com/is_are_are_is
is are are is

37.

angelicism∞
@angelicism00
https://x.com/angelicism00

38.

mywifeismylife
@AmmanAngelicism
https://x.com/AmmanAngelicism

39.

Angelicism Asset
@offchain0
https://x.com/offchain0

40.

angelicism0_o X
@ext_ext_ext_ext
(deleted)
(archived)