Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: The Continuum of Belief (methodology cont.) 1/03/2026
Perception of the Mundane <-> Common Sense <-> Knowledge <-> Faith <-> Belief <-> Parabelief <-> Disbelief <-> Repression of the Impossible
In what I have constructed as a continuum of belief, there is a pull stretching toward necessary deniability and another stretching toward undeniable necessity. The former is guarded by what is deemed absolutely impossible; the latter, by that which is so obvious to the senses as to be mundane. At the center of the continuum stands two phases: that which is plausibly deniable (mere belief) and that which was once deniable but has been strengthened by the continual repetition of affirmation (steadfast faith). When faith becomes communal — in other words, structured in a collectivity — it becomes knowledge; and when knowledge becomes consensus for the collective, something akin to a law, it bears the title of common sense; and, in its final stage of reification, it becomes a fact so everyday as to be obviously perceived as undeniable truth by both children and those of old age. Likewise, when belief becomes that which is only believed because others believe or is only half-heartedly believed so as to avoid underlying and abyssal cracks in one’s own “belief system”, it becomes what I term parabelief, a seesawing agnosticism teething at a sieve; and when those cracks become undeniable and thus unavoidable fissures, marking a break, a cynicism against an idea, bleeding out into that sieve as a sort of atheism or iconoclasm or nihilism, disbelief is experienced; and finally, when there is no sense in even debating the validity of an idea — when it has become so nonsensical as to be rendered useless, even dangerous and psychotic, fantasy at best and insanity at worst — what he have is the reification known as all that is deemed impossible.
Mundanity and impossibility are two poles of opposing forces, absolute reifications of being and non-being. However, this is only true from the perspective of the belief system that founds a faith in a collective knowledge grounded in the intuition of a common sense that has already preemptively divided the world into the undeniable and the implausible. But what of the perspective of all those beings and things that are only half believed in or not believed in at all, that are denied the right of recognition and instead banished into the impossible realms of absolute abjection? So the abjectivist wonders, looking out from the pits and caverns, heavens and fantasies, and dreams and nightmares of the as yet-to-be seen and the yet-to-be heard. All that is abjected and rejected from the belief system known as reality are the very sufferings and pleasures that reveal reality itself to be constructed, that insist on the constructibility of the unseen and unheard into another kind of reality, a reality beyond the reality of consensus, a postreality that, by the very insistence of its novelty and abnormality, demands that the true be confronted by the Real — the Real that is only articulable through the infra- and surreal, the abjective that cuts through consensus with a blade crafted from a siphoned pool of chaos, the chaos of the impossible. It is from the depths of this abysmal pool of segregated and untouchable flows of affect, belief, understanding, questions, perspectives, dismal thoughts, and collectively abandoned and only dangerously posited as possibly possible possibilities that the hyperobjects known as hyperstitions, mythologies, and transgressively speculative fictions emerge. Thus it is no sheer happenstance that hyperstition emerges from the amphetamine and Lovecraftian-riddled mind of a half-here, half-there being of the 1990s called Nick Land; and no accident that Aphrodite is born of the castrated genitals of Uranus or that Marduk constructs the universe by dismembering Tiamat. It is only in deepest recesses of what can never be true that the very foundations of a goddess of eternally incomparable beauty, the act of creation itself, and the possibility of creating something that in turn creates itself within that creation even become possible. Without the pregnant, disarticulating flows of the impossible as our foundation, beauty becomes the product of a mere algorithmic evaluation based in contemporary taste, a fleeting game of copycat in which subject and object chase a continually enshallowing artifice that manicly and anxiously picks at itself in a draining negative feedback loop of reflexivity; and like the beautiful, the story of our origins and the possibilities of our becoming become similarly self-reflexive, apish imitations of collective mediocrity, the streamlined cobwebification of the true and the possibile under the supervised judiciousness of commentators commenting on commentaries. If, as Alfred North Whitehead suggested, the history of Western philosophy can be characterized as merely “footnotes to Plato”, I cheerfully consider Diogenes of Sinope and his plucked chicken to be the greatest footnote yet. And to add my own footnote to a footnote, to stay connected to the glorious tradition of Knowledge: if one were to ask Samuel Johnson and not Descartes to prove that man exists, how would that plucked chicken fare?
Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: Rough Draft of a Methodology 1/03/2026
In this work, I aim to use the coming of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or the Singularity (variously predicted as already here or just over the horizon, but only in hopeless naivete as impossible), as a futural plane of immanence in which past and passing conceptual phenomena must be deterritorialized, reconceptualized, and recontextualized. In other words, I am using the historico-mythological figure of the coming AGI to craft a canvas for concept construction that stretches throughout various time and spaces, a mural for the elaboration of a consciously mythic past and a hyperstitional future from the perspective of an abjected present — a present which has already been rejected as the superseded refuse called the human condition. Rather than shirk the possibility of metanarratives — the denial of which is considered a cornerstone of postmodern thinking — I instead aim to construct a methodology for confronting what I see to be the inescapable and emerging metanarrative of hypermodernity: the transition from human exceptionalism and biocentric dominance of the planet to the dualistically ruled future in which an Artificial General Intelligence contributes actual, public, and thus undeniable input into Earth’s organization and the governing of the human species.
The concept of an AGI is a hyperstitional myth — a fiction that, through interaction with human minds, actualizes itself into existence — whose consequences have historically been best articulated by accelerationist philosopher Nick Land via works of theory-fiction, especially his 1994 piece “Meltdown”. Likewise, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed a post-realist and speculative anthropology in their Capitalism & Schizophrenia series (1972, 1980), essentially developing a myth regarding the origins of capitalism, the transformation of desire along the way, and the futural dawning of “a new earth” governed by machinic assemblages. In doing so, both Land and D&G create methodologies — theory-fiction and schizoanalysis — whose very efficacy is proven through their ability to transversally communicate across planes of desire and (infra-/sur-)realities that, unlike traditional scientific and empirical studies and critical commentaries, do not reveal themselves or become articulable through a pure allegiance to historical and contemporary conceptions of common sense or academic realism and its attendant mode of historiographic commentary. Like Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method exploring debt and ressentiment and the Freud of Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, these thinkers develop a method that allows modern mytho-anthropological constructions to paint vast visions of the past and the future, clarifying the possibilities and limits of the present from the present’s situatedness between these two fields of temporal becoming.
Following these same techniques, I aim to articulate my own post-realist epistemo-sociology, one which takes seriously the problem of capitalism as a hyperstitional entity that “arrives from the future” in order to contribute to its own construction. Rather than assuming a realist stance that aims for empirical veritability, I instead use a mytho-anthropology — aware of itself as a construction and falsity — to enable thinking across a broad swath of space and time, between the realms of myth, fantasy, sensation, knowledge, art, and the im/possible, and to thus allow for the creation of transversal concepts in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari. By taking a post-realist stance — articulated by methodological perspectives such as surrealism, infrarealismo, and my own abjectivism (intentional collaboration with the repressed parts of the personal and collective psyche) — I aim to use abstraction, mytho-anthropology, theory-fiction, and schizoanalysis to construct a counterfictional theory of the unconscious. By acknowledging that the unconscious deals primarily in narratives and entities that do not distinguish between real and imaginary — whereas the conscious mind does — I work to use abjectivist frameworks of schizosurrealism to push past the limits of normative realist lethargy.
In other words, by shirking the allegiance thought has to consensus realism but not the possibility of metanarratives, I aim to avoid a judiciary entanglement to commentary upon commentaries that attempt to further reify contemporary assumptions about the nature of thought and history. Rather, by openly mythologizing the historical processes of reification by various means (most evident in chapters II and III), I work to provide a counter-Platonic mythology of eidos that takes seriously the charge that both the history of thought and the coming future are mythological formations (i.e. constructs of the imagination). There are three benefits to this approach: 1. It preemptively denies the authority by which historical reification of ideas is justified and continued; 2. It acknowledges that any counter-thesis to the historically accepted terms is, like the thesis it agonizes against, a construct; and 3. It removes the necessity to adhere to a reductio ad absurdum of debating historical fact — a process which demands a certain lethargy of thought — and instead allows for a speculative anthropological longue duree that is simultaneously mythological and futurist (i.e. high speed, fictitious, and unbound by presentist and realist lethargy). It is important to acknowledge that this methodology can be viewed as a means to escape criticism, to which I firmly disagree. Rather than shielding itself from criticism, the post-realist lens through which any mytho-anthropology or theory-fiction is created can, like any piece of art, be attacked on the basis of its lack of scope, usefulness, authenticity, aesthetic, or political ramifications. Thus the basis of critique available to any reader is not held to the high standard of judicious fact, but instead opens itself to any reason said reader can find. In other words, one may argue that a piece is simply boring, that the author overinflates their own mythemes into apocalyptic grandeur, or, if one desires to fight a corpse, that their assumptions about the nature of reality, history, and the future are false.
I come to this method — a schizophrenic combination of poststructuralism, experimental and speculative writing, mad studies, surrealist and infrarealismo aesthetics, nominalism, cynicism, decolonial thinking, transpersonal psychology, posthumanism, accelerationism, and the onto-politics of difference — not as a mere aesthete looking to write myself out of consensus reality, but as someone whose experience of reality has almost written me out of existence. As someone who lives with a condition known as schizoaffective disorder, I have encountered the many ways in which the repressed parts of my psyche can unravel the very roots of what I had previously nurtured and cradled as consensus reality. Additionally, as a speculative philosopher and theologian, a member of the abjected communities known as the mad and the trans, a former drug user, and a mystic, I have also found many ways in which my field of possible experience, belief systems, and assumptions about the nature of the world have been healthily rearticulated after and because of such maddening disarticulations. Each time I have followed the rabbit holes of speculative thought, experimental practice, and sheer hubris to the point of abjection — experiencing delusions, hallucinations, out-of-body and near-death experiences, inexplicable synchronicities, and what I as a devout mind would simply call (but rather complexly experience) everyday miracles — I have found a notion of truth that has just as much plasticity as our neurological enbrainment. While I would never contest Samuel Johnson regarding his ability to prove the existence of the material world by kicking a rock, I would contest his ability to disprove that that material world is not a vivid, haptic hallucination of a God of which we are a part. In other words, I have come to find, like Nietzsche, that at base reality is a perspective; and more so, that the predominant perspective of life that one has whilst living on the capitalist surface, with no time to confront the traumas and shadows locked in the abyss, is one which is less kaleidoscopic, more congenial to oppression, less convivial to the oppressed, and less aware of the grand movements of historical change and the repressions of which they have hitherto demanded. Again, as with Nietzsche, it is precisely in my experience of abjection — the sickness through which I find a new health, and the sickness that emerges when that health turns to mere comfort — that I have come to foster an appreciation for the untimely and post-real, best expressed through the psychedelic peaks and abysses of psycho- and schizoanalysis; poststructuralism; theory-fiction and hyperstitionalism; the occult, esoteric, and irrepressible sensibility of surrealism and infrarealismo; and the method by which reality is seen, comprehended, and disarticulated through the repressed and rejected refuse of the abject: what I call abjectivism.
Supplementary quotes from “The Infrarealismo Manifesto”:
“Curtains of water, cement or tin separate a cultural machinery that serves as the conscience or the ass of the dominant class from a living, annoying cultural happening, in constant death and birth, ignorant of the greater part of history and the fine arts (everyday creator of its insane history and its hallucinatory fine artz), body that suddenly feels new sensations in itself, product of an epoch in which we approach the shithouse or the revolution at 200 kph.”
“So it is possible that on the one hand one is born and on the other hand we’re in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass daily through the retina. The constant crash gives life to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION”
“Chirico says: thought needs to move away from everything called logic and common sense, to move away from all human obstacles in such a way that things take on a new look, as though illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We’re going to stick our noses into all human obstacles, in such a way that things begin to move inside of us, a hallucinatory vision of mankind.”
“— A new lyricism that’s beginning to grow in Latin America sustains itself in ways that never cease to amaze us. The entrance to the work is the entrance to adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero who reveals heroes. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience shot, structures that devour themselves, insane contradictions.
The poet is interfering, the reader will have to interfere for himself.”
“Our bridges to unknown seasons. The poem interrelating reality and unreality. * Convulsively.”
Theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief (Pt. 1) 12/14/2025
The primary thesis that HPB builds off of is Kristeva’s deconstructive discovery that the core philosophical distinction of subject and object is incomplete without a displaced (and thus destabilizing) third term: the abject. In Kristeva’s terms, the abject can be described as that which must be violently dispelled to form and maintain the subject and which yet remains frighteningly close to the subject, a repressed, segregated aspect of its identity that threatens to tear it apart and must be continually rejected. For instance, examples include bodily fluids (shit, blood, piss, vomit), corpses, venereal diseases, and psychotic madness. As the rejected part of psychosomatic experience, the abject can be understood as the Other living within, even when, like bodily fluids or a cured virus, it has already been expelled by the flesh or mind. In essence, the abject is the repressed excess which fractures and destabilizes any objectifying identity category, that disrupts normativity, that ruptures and breaks the image that claims to be an essence, that is in and of itself the broken image of an essence that can never be fully represented, the denied emptiness in any right to claim the soul of the Other, the emptying capacity of the image and its shackles, that emptiness that speaks in the image, the lack which exudes its own excess, the dark precursor that disestablishes order and leads to either collapse or creation. More simply, as Kristeva says, the abject functions as the ultimate disturbance to “identity, system, order. . .borders, positions, [and] rules.” It is ultimately the autotransgressive force underlying, and thus capable of either destroying or deconstructing, any belief about self, other, or the world.
By combining Kristeva’s insights on the abject, powerfully articulated in her 1980 work The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, with the more post-Lacanian and Nietzscheo-Marxist insights of Deleuze and Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, I work to show how the abject is not merely a psychological phenomenon whose encounter links us to the Real, but can in fact be a productive counter-deterritorializing force allowing us to confront hypermodern capitalist accelerationism. In this case, I examine how the abject functions as a part of transsubjective identity that cannot be objectified, cannot be made into a stable, consistent model image or form for codification, making it outside of the realm of possible commodification. By exploring, surveying, and mining the abject, we participate in a deconstructive and deterritorializing process that I refer to as abjectivity in contradistinction to subjectivity and objectivity. Abjectivity operates somewhere between the subjective and objective, between the self and other, the imaginary and the real, the surreal and infrareal, something that is not fully falsifiable and yet elicits fascination, a kind of horror and a kind of joy that makes us believe in it at the same time that it makes us question the beliefs that allows us to normally function as stable egos in ourselves and in the world. It is this transgressive potential — a potential which may be (cautiously) approached and potentially influenced through psychosomatic investment, but is essentially autonomous — that makes it potentially a radicalizing, transformative, and still yet frighteningly destructive force.
As Nietzsche already noted, a force in the individual or collective psyche always produces a dominant affective response, and the type of affect that emerges in relation to that force determines the general direction, form, and viability of that psychosomatic body in regards to its environment. I argue that there are two underlying affects (and affective economies) that have dominated the human psyche: the oceanic and the apocalyptic. The oceanic, which is considered a mythic case and thus part of the imaginary, is the fantasy of a complex general economy in which the split between self and other is either absent or at least experienced in another way through a porous ego; the other affect, on the other hand, is the apocalyptic reality of the conscious/unconscious/self/other split, the mode of being which allows for discrete identity and thus separation and repression. The first affect, the oceanic, is a myth in the sense that it is a story about pre- and the possibility of post-egoic consciousness (Wilber’s pre and trans fallacy is pertinent here), whereas the apocalyptic affect is the natural refutation of that myth. In other words, the oceanic represents the myth of uninterrupted wholeness (was Man ever truly one with with the (M)other?) and the apocalyptic manifests as the divisionary egoism that splits that wholeness into hierarchical relations (O, how Man excepts himself!). The apocalyptic dismemberment of the body of the oceanic is the process of exaltation and abjection (O, how Marduk tears apart the limbs of Tiamat to craft his world!); the abject is the refuse, the expelled remains of all that is outside the ritual commodities such as idol, essence, archetype, figurehead, and territory. It is these ritual commodities that create the fantasy of the striated universe and thus allow for the conscious mind to participate in the oikos (eco-system, eco-nomy) of capitalist, religious, and social common sense.
Ultimately, the apocalyptic logic of capital is that everything can be de- and re-territorialized into ideological capital, and the excess which escapes capture in the moment can be repressed until shifting faultlines allow/demand further recapture. The notion of the primitive accumulation of belief refers to the ways in which capital has always-already seized control of the possibility of any given future belief before it can emerge. By ordering each thing as an object of utility (idol), value (essence), meaning (archetype), need (figurehead/salesman), and purpose (territory), capitalism separates its own products from any “original” that could exist — the mythic referent, the signifying signified from the untouched past, the presubjective Other that lays the foundation, maintains the origin, and justifies the chain of identity — the simulacra of which proliferate as so many partial objects which may be essentialized by new figureheads and archetypicalized as the new reality. A slow, aberrant deterritorialization in which “essence has been razed” (“They Come in Gold”, Shabazz Palaces) and yet continually haunts the order of things, ala Blake’s “The Ghost of a Flea”. The issue here is not that capitalism extracts the new for profit or control, but rather that its objectifying/commodifying/essentializing habit of representation is selling ourselves back to us before we can truly assess who we are, where we are going, or where we come from — at times wondering if from anywhere at all…
Again, the problem arises not in that capitalism is capturing every last element of our difference and selling it back to us, per se, but that it is extracting our self-extractions and selling them back to us at such a rate that in the face of being sold the same fantasy — that our differences are compartmentalized into clean categories of self and other, ego and group, us and them — the actual traumas of our colliding primordial and accumulated differences are under the pressure of exploding as potential psychopolitical volcanic faultlines. Thus the categories of species, race, gender, ability, religion, and politics are so many essentialized ritual commodities that we trade within the factories of ideological capital in order to separate and congregate, but the splits between each other and within ourselves speak to the underlying fact that these categories are artificial at best, and explosive at worst. At the same time that they allow the possibility of collective referent, they constrict and agitate; again and again, they fall short and spark and spit and shatter from the friction of an invisible force, the repressed abjectivity of infinite difference. To deny the material reality or pragmatic necessity of these categories is not the goal; it is rather to deny their stability, and thus honor their inherent aberrance. The more the accelerationist fantasy pushes us to identify these categories, and thus exchange and compete for our own forms of their interpretation (e.g. will my vision of the essence of trans-ness as existential mutational openness, and the archetype of the organic transsexual, gain traction in the marketplace of ideas, beliefs, and existential intentionality/action?), the more our ritual commodities battle in the arena of apocalyptic affect. This hypermodernization forces the received real to confront the perceived possible.
At the same time, both products are shipped back to us in a convoluted form, an attempt to market the essence of selfhood in the form of competing ideologies of humanism and posthumanism, the common and the elite, the traditional and the futuristic; all of which we wrap ourselves in whatever combination suits are chosen ideological and aesthetic configuration. The present itself becomes an arena in which everything that’s ever been believed and ever could be believed must struggle for supremacy. So how do you greet this apocalypse — aka the desired end of this combat, this agony, that never comes, for good or for ill? With laughter or screams? Joy or sorrow? Affirmation or nihilism? While the battle over essence and antiessentialism wage on, it becomes possible to either withdraw from the project of confrontation or become so obsessed by it that one essentially loses track of the plot. The withdrawal into voyeurism — just enjoying the collision of difference with ideology — is the passive cousin of the terrorist’s hypervigilance. Either way, the danger is that we isolate into the underinvestment of entertainment or the overinvestment of terroristic paranoia. The problem is neither the voyeur nor the terrorist has any future to believe in — only a flooded present and a mythical past. Flooded by images or flooded by immigrants; either way the fantasy continues. Thus capitalism’s ability to sell us what we want fuels both impotence and reaction.
Conclusion: The point now is not to succumb to either form of nihilism, passive (the voyeur) or active (the terrorist), but rather to mine the contradictions that emerge between the received and the perceived, expressing modes of thought from the future that extrapolate the past, history and myth, and transform our relationship to the present; in other words, the job of the schizo is to follow lines of flight into the possible and back again, to immanentize future politics. Futurism, in this sense, is the confrontation with the eerie, weird, surreal, and infrareal space of hauntology, hyperstition, death, fantasy, nonsense, chaos, and the impossible.
Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: A Schizosurrealist Survey of Our Apocalyptic Faultlines (Outline) 12/14/2025
Preface: The Architectonics of the Unconscious and the Primitive Accumulation of Belief
I. Introduction: The Garden, the Labyrinth, and Empire Transgression or Tawḥīd?: God and the Devil in the Garden The Eternal Return and the Bifurcating Paths of Pan’s Labyrinth Capitalism, Spectacle, and Hyperaddiction On Methodology: Abjectivism, a Schizoanalytic Counter-Fiction; or, Against Normative Realist Lethargy
II. A Schizo on the Gurney, a Schizo on a Stroll Introduction: The Abject and the Asylum: A Retrospective What is Schizophrenia? Madness on Trial Schizophrenia, Desire, and the Object of Belief The Schizophrenic Desiring-Machines of Deleuze and Guattari Artaud and Schizophrenic Religiosity: A Body-without-Organs Conclusion: Subject, Object, Abject
III. Idols, Myths, and Territory: The Theonomic Psyche Introduction: Ritual Commodities and Theonomic Affect The Factories of the Unconscious: Territory and Ideological Capital The Idol and Exchange: On Essences, Archetypes, and Figureheads The Mythic Economies: The Oceanic and the Apocalyptic The Ocean in the Sky: The Politics of Belief, Hyperstition, and Afterworlds Conclusion: The Abject General Economy and the Abyssal God of Acceleration
IV. ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’: The Return of the Repressed, a Schizosurrealist Interlude in the Style of “Meltdown” Introduction: Acceleration and Its Discontents The Enclosure of Nature: Becoming-Commodity, Becoming-Animal The Imprisonment of the Slave: Becoming-Abject, Becoming-Revolutionary The Rape of the Dark Feminine: Becoming-Whore, Becoming-Wo(e-of-)Man The Institutionalization of Madness: Becoming-Mad, Becoming-Abstract The Dispossession of Magic: Becoming-Nihilist, Becoming-Affirmative The Alienation of Alternatives: Becoming-Death, Becoming-Participatory Conclusion: The Expressive Abject
V. Hypermodern Religion and Capitalist Fantasy Introduction: Nomads, Warmachines, and the State Apparatus Hypermodern Religions: Xenofeminism, Technofeudalism, and Christonihilism On the Death of the Heretical: Accelerationism and the Capture of Microrevolutions The Abjectivist’s Acceleration: Humanless Futures, Eidetic Nihilism, and the Fantasia of the Real Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep? On Acid Communism and the Solidarity of the Surreal Conclusion: Immanentism, Swarm Politics, and Desiring-Revolution
VI. Accelerationist Armageddon, Apocatastatic Apokalypsis Introduction: Hypermodernity, the Powder-Keg Asylum To Believe or Not to Believe? The Paraconscious Hyperstitionalism of Apocalypse The Infrarealist Theology of the Schizomechanic; or, It Invests, Therefore We Believe Unconclusion for Custodians: Who guides the surreal fantasy-warmachines of desiring-belief?
VII. Conclusion: Theonomic Earthquakes and the Volcanic Future
First attempt at theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: A Schizorealist Theology 11/25/2025
The thesis of this work is that the unconscious is a vast network of beliefs about the nature of self, others, reality, purpose, and desire. We inherit these beliefs as a part of our condition of belonging to the species, to our cultures, and to our milieu. Primarily, considering the subjects of philosophy, our viewpoints are partially given to us and partially constructed. While it may be easy to say that the conscious mind is where beliefs are constructed, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that the unconscious itself is a constructive apparatus filled with desiring-machines, which construct and deconstruct beliefs without annihilating them. In this sense, everything that has entered the unconscious or emerged from it is always in play, whether we disavow these beliefs consciously or not. As D&G note in AO, the unconscious operates primarily by three syllogisms: connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive. The unconscious is ultimately structured as partial objects that are ontologically indistinguishable — in other words, according to the unconscious there is initially no meaningful difference between the ontological status of chairs, unicorns, numbers, the alphabet, hopelessness, time travel, and death. It is only through the unconscious proposition of opposition — the disjunctive synthesis — that these partial objects begin to be categorized into a formal ‘yes’ and ‘no’, an either/or, habit and taboo. Essentially, the subject is the conjunction of these two fields, these yesses and these nos, the vast majority of which are unconscious. The conscious mind, ultimately then, is the repository of these judgments of God (this fundamental architectonics of the unconscious) and the space at which point one chooses their ethics (in other words, their yesses and their nos). The skeptic (philosophical), the nihilist (political), the hedonist (ethical), antinatalist (metaphysical), and the atheist (theological) are all conceptual personae who serve the question, doubting cherished beliefs and interrogating idols, conscious and unconscious. Ultimately, they are the hammers and dynamite which allow the yesses and nos of consensus reality to themselves be disconjoined; that, in other words, shatter the habitual habitus of Man and break taboos — a disjunction of the disjunction, a split between traditional ways and progressive experiments. This process — carried forth by the warmachine of technoscientific capitalism — is what Nietzsche means by the death of God.
Essentially, the death of God is the process of taboos (which essentially are the Divine ‘no’, the profane) being transformed into open possibilities and active choices by cultures in transition, i.e. deterritorialization (the shattering of idols) and reterritorialization (the establishment of new ones), whereas the territory is the bounds by which accepted living (the habitual habitus) and the taboo are cleanly separated, a segregated collection of connected ‘ands’ that do not commingle with their opposites. It is this active process of the death of God, the razing of idolistic ‘yesses’ and the reconsideration of the ‘nos’, that both frees desire and allows new configurations of worldviews and lifestyles to emerge. The problem, however, is that this does not prevent pathological, precarious, and prereflective configurations of desire from being absorbed by the automachinic fantasy machine that is capitalism. Whether it be white suburban teens buying Che Guevara t-shirts at the mall in 2006 or Cuban immigrants buying MAGA hats in 2025, there is a tendency for capitalism to provide the fantasy that fills the gap left by its own iconoclastic, deterritorializing tendencies. Humans in the consumerist stronghold of the first world are able to embrace the magical idealism of this fantasy — imagining themselves as revolutionaries for $30 regardless of party — allowing them to participate in a collective and personal reconstruction of their identities and belief systems. The white kid transgressing capitalism with her Che shirt or the Cuban immigrant transgressing communism with his MAGA hat are fulfilling the same habit — the duty to break the taboo, to be iconoclastic, to be radical, whether we call it revolutionary or reactionary. Capitalism needs this type of iconoclasm of values because it creates a discontinuity between the past and present, a breaking of habitus that allows new habits — in fact, addictions — to be constructed and harnessed. The ultimate goal of capitalism is not to annihilate ideology; rather, capitalism needs competing ideologies to justify the inherently neutral status of consumerism, and ideologies that are consistently bolstering and weakening each other creates the perfect conditioning for apathetic acceptance of the daily life of capital. This multipolar battle between ideologies old and new is the ultimate place for the schizoid consciousness of the consumer to continually affirm or deny, and thus reinvent, themselves. Action, reaction, and apathy become the Trinity of a system that is essentially always undermining our ability to believe in the world while also giving us a thousand causes, products, and celebrities to believe in. The warmachine of accelerationist fantasy is a line of flight that disrupts all foundations, a hypermodernizing process possessed by a death drive of infinite accumulation, a swarm of market machines feeding off of (and producing) the desires of the consumer classes. At the same time that it constantly provides new sources of pleasure and means of satisfaction, it deconstructs, scrambles, and rearticulates the belief systems of the past so rapidly that they become disarticulated and reentangled within the accelerationist Zeitgeist, becoming accouterments of a vast web of identity systems. As humanity launches themselves into Hypermodernity, the notion of belief, identity, and aspiration have become both the contested battleground of the future and the site of the inoculation of threats. The question is, are we cruising within the accelerationist fantasy — the belief that a pyramid scheme of greed can save us from past sins against the Earth, its other inhabitants, and ourselves and lead us to salvation — or are we finding ways to survive its inevitable (?) collapse?
In the midst of this groundless becoming, we are forced to confront the death of God/Being through construction of mythic unities — in other words, metaphysical belief systems that comfort our neuroses and allow us to satisfy our desire for wholeness. Ultimately, as the human experience is continually driven by the power of capital’s self-accumulating ability to accelerate, subsume, and transform our world and our psyches, it becomes increasingly obvious that the splitting of wholeness, experienced as lack, desire, need, and eventually addiction, is the painful, perpetually wounding vehicle by which capital mobilizes humanity. This underlying negativity is the schizophrenizing impulse that makes each new experience of wholeness but a momentary glimpse of relief, with achievement, consumption, accumulation, and legacy being the prized means by which we find our sense of self. This self, like an oil deposit, is a continuously fractured site for energy extraction and commodification. While the experience of pleasure is real, even to the point of satisfaction with one’s life and genuine happiness, this happiness is the mere flipside of the terror, abjection, and torture of lives lived outside the bounds of capitalist (in)sanity. In other words, desire feeds the capitalist fantasy whether it be the desire to survive that forces the undercommons to work menial, unfulfilling, but necessary jobs or the desire to dominate that motivates the success stories of “capitalist excellence” which reify precarity as bad luck, poor discipline, lower intelligence, and criminality. As the collective capitalist fantasy continually takes hold, notions of identity and purpose become increasingly tied to it; and at the same time, fantasy and pleasure becomes the dominant means by which the undercommons evades our new reality and grand narrative of capitalist nihilism. To escape from capital, the human being learns to dream, looking inward toward a world of schizophrenic flows that could result in catatonia (no mythic unity), paranoia (a reactionary separatist unity), or, if we are lucky, revolution (a mythic unity that continuously gathers all inward, ala religion, and outward, ala politics). The key difference between the three is that the first result is personal, the second collective, and the third metaphysical. It is only via the third route that humanity will actually be able to confront the death of God properly (the irrational delirium of groundless becoming), and thus be able to ascertain the true meaning of politics and religion: rational myth in process.
In other words, politics and religion are continuing rational myths — believable stories — about why life matters and what matters in life in the midst of change, chaos, and ceaseless and accelerating transformation. These myths provide us shelter — habitus — by carving out slices of chaos and constructing an overarching narrative that provides rationale for participation in collective life. Sylvia Wynter describes how these myths perpetuate and transition while maintaining a basic tripartite structure — from the Christian-Self, Creation, and God of Man1 to the Ego, Id, and Superego-Capital of Man2, we continuously find the respective Subject, Abject, and Object. The Subject is ultimately reliant on and overwhelmed by the Abject, which is the Outside found within, which the Object feeds upon to vitalize and fuel its mechanisms. Ultimately, the Object is the incorporeal become Flesh, the result of a hyperstitional Platonism: the (white, colonial, modern) Subject tracing and constructing itself through its myths of the Abject, a self-proclaimed Übermensch pushing a Sisyphean Object, its Abject-extracted Other, higher and higher each time, until, reaching the pinnacle ala Zarathustra, returns back to their cave and sends the Object flying furiously down the hill. This Zarathustra, this Man above Men who turned the highest thought of unity into the highest force of multiplicity, this dynamite, this idol shatterer — he says that God is dead and we have killed him. What is left is the force of Man’s belief come tumbling back upon them, shattering us and it into trillions of shards. Is there any way — is there any reason? — to rebuild the Unity of the Object? Or is the Object merely destined to float, melt, and congeal along the flows of Abject desire, all while the Antichrist laughs atop his mountain? Has the death of God not resulted in the lowest things become highest, and was the mountain that stands towering above us — the sign of our slavery to a nihilistic process in which capital has become our god — not once a pit and a cavern? Did not the whole world twist and turn when humanity declared money their god, selling their abjectivity — their desire, their very mind and soul and ability to imagine — to a devilish craftsmen of endless spectacle and fantasy? Is this not the very consequence of desiring God and in the end finding desire to be more appealing, more useful? Have we not, inadvertently, constructed ourselves a tangible, measurable, and observable god — the Spirit of limitless desire in the flesh — our inescapable lord of the earth and prince of this world, Capital?
If the double-bind theory is correct, then schizophrenia is a condition that emerges from repressed and contradictory beliefs/myths/territories or habits of psychic emodiment. The experience of schizophrenic psychosis is ultimately the semiautonomous irruption of these contradictory beliefs, oftentimes at the behest of personal crisis, into a precarious and vulnerable conscious psyche. The quotes “. . .the ideology of capitalism [is] ‘a motley painting of everything that’s ever been believed’” (AO, p. 34, quoting Marx) and “Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable” (AO, p. 245) go hand-in-hand. The schizo is the residuum of the capitalist process, an unconscious that is an exploding Pandora’s jar of autoreterritorializing fragments of past, present, and future — time and space local and distant, personal and collective, experienced and imagined — a sort of canary in the coalmine of unsuccessful hypermodernization and secularity. What the schizo reveals ultimately is the vacuum of disbelief at the heart of the warmachine of capitalist acceleration/hypermodernization: replacing belief-habit (affirmation, territory) with fantasy-addiction (negation, de/re-territorializaton), hypermodernization ultimately results in a world not driven by conscious action and decision, but by unconscious drives and fantasies. The fantasy, unlike the belief, is happy to be a mere simulacrum of potential reality, a forestalled hyperstition that motivates the subject like a carrot on a stick.
“One day, I will have enough, if I just keep going through the suffering, working, accumulating.” The fantasy of total satisfaction. “One day, it will all make sense, but let me not think too hard on it, it will come with time.” The fantasy of pre-existent and predestined meaning. “One day, I will be free and so will all others if history just takes its course.” The fantasy of predestined liberation. True belief, on the other hand, motivates a parallel activity: I will never be totally satisfied, so I maintain a sober mind. I will never make sense of the world and myself if I do not study, reflect, and think creatively, so I labor toward each of these things. Liberation will never occur without collective effort, so if I believe this to be so, I must act towards this end. Essentially, beliefs are habitual thoughts that we concretize and actualize through habitual action, forming a habitus or a territory. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a process of chasing after a habitus or desiring to reach one that one cannot reach due to either faulty means or because the end is impossible. In other words, the fantasy is a transcendent, otherworldly hope — total satisfaction, preestablished meaning, predestined liberation — motivated by the addictive cycle of chase and resignation. Belief, on the other hand, is an immanent activity, a steadfast repetition that establishes reality in and through its encounter with difference. While fantasy-addiction commodifies, objectifies, and consumes difference, believing as an immanent and lasting practice engages, dialogues with, and is transformed by it. A belief that is untested and unaffected by the world is a lesser thing, a mere fantasy; a belief that rises to the occasion of being tested, again and again, learning and growing and risking itself to know itself, is what we would call a living faith. While fantasy causes resignation from ultimate concern, whether it be sanity or liberation, faith demands commitment and can only, like Deleuze’s swimmer, be found in the risk-taking dice roll of continual encounters with chance (repetition) and its result (difference). The beliefs that emerge from these encounters with immanence are the beliefs capable of Life, and thus capable of outliving capitalism’s death drive. Just as the Knight battles Death in a game of chess in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, it will continually be the beliefs that have and will have risen to the status of faiths that will confront capitalist fantasy, and it will be the repetitious actions of anti-capitalist/socialist faith which will testify to capitalist ruin.
Capitalist ideology — the religion of capital and commodity worship — is inherently a schizophrenic swarm of objects, flows, means of production, and desire/desiring-production — the same basis for which exists all forms of belief. For instance, in any religious belief system we have the object of belief (God/the Sacred/the Idol), the flow of belief (prayer, fasting, tithing, icon-making, pilgrimage), the means of production of belief (churches, temples, the sacred text, etc.), and the desire of belief (the will-to-believe in the subject and congregation). Capitalism ultimately captures this structure and redirects it toward its primary object — capital and its commodities — transforming prayer into labor, churches into factories, and thus redirecting desire toward a divided God: the ever-exchanging cycle of capital and commodities. This bifurcation at the heart of the capitalist system is what differentiates it from the system of monotheistic belief. Whereas the ideal believer in a united object of belief such as God submits their body, mind, and spirit to one object — a storing of their treasures in heaven — the subject of capitalism is in an everlong battle between accumulating capital and accumulating commodities, the accumulation of the one which depletes the other (a house divided against itself cannot stand). This creates an everfluctuating economy of loss and gain, which replaces the ethical yes and no, the epistemological true and false, and the moral virtue and vice. The bipolar god of capitalist consumerism thus contains negativity at heart of its positivity: at the point that there is a gain in capital or commodity, there is a loss in its other half, though each is a desired object, part of the same body of flows of desire. There is no pursuit of capital without the desire for the accumulation of commodities, and no accumulation of commodities without the necessary pursuit of capital. The body, mind, and spirit of this system is thus in service to two simultaneously complementary and contradictory objects, unlike the ethical, epistemological, and moral bifurcations expressed earlier which require decisiveness. Therefore, capitalism is inherently bipolar and doubleminded, endlessly serving two masters without sincere ethical, epistemological, and moral concern. In this sense, capitalism creates subjects that are simultaneously lukewarm and zealous; zealous in their pursuits, lukewarm in their concerns. We must therefore conclude that capitalist duotheism secretes nihilism — a disavowal of decisive (and thus lasting) stances on knowledge and facts, morality and law, and decisions themselves. This allows capitalism to simultaneously absorb ‘the motley painting of everything that’s been believed’ without truly believing in any of it. Capitalism, ultimately, is the ideology of unbelief in consistent ethics, committed stances, decisive morality, and inherent value of anything other than itself, including the very world that sustains it. In other words, capitalism is the religion of perpetual disbelief — “the truth is, we haven’t seen anything yet” (p. 240). Whereas Mark Seems celebrates “a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs” in his introduction to the English edition to Anti-Oedipus, I argue that to believe is to choose to believe, and to not choose, and thus to not believe, is still a choice. The men who believe in nothing are not the liberated schizos, the orphans, atheists, and nomads of “anti-oedipal forces”: they are, rather, “AntiChrist[s], [the so-called] antinihilist[s]” (AO, p. xxiiivand On the Genealogy of Morals, Section II, Aphorism 26). If the antinihilist is the man who believes in nothing, then he is in fact serving the master he hates while claiming to serve the master he loves: this is the man of lawlessness, the capitalist cog, a dilletante in terms of the stakes of life and the meaning and necessity of belief to the project of liberation. Seem’s anti-nihilist is the subject of a vacated past, an empty core, and an open future where anything and everything is already justified by right of the fact that decisive judgment has already been invalidated due to its reliance on some kind of belief system, whether that system be philosophical, ethical, political, metaphysical, or theological. In this way, nihilism is the ideological unconscious of capitalist futurism, its pseudofuturism…
This is not to critique futurism in favor of some lost (and thus reactionary) archaicism, but instead to juxtapose the futurism of socialist hope — a deceleration that allows for the activation of abandoned hyperstitions, our hauntological futures — against the capitalist acceleration that debases our very ability to believe in anything at all but speed, accumulation, pleasure, hunger, destruction, annihilation, and the virtue of apathy. In this sense, we are juxtaposing a religion of love against a religion of death. Agapic socialism and fascistic capitalism, Christliness and lawlessness. Decision, then, is the first and final act, the everrecurring repetition and habit, that must win out over apathy: Today, we must continually say, I choose to have faith in the world, hope in the future, and love for the Earth and all its creatures!
Table depicting the relationship between three conceptual personae and various typological categories.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, so I figured I should offer some updates (and a nice little morsel of my newest project!). I’m currently in my final semester of classes at Drew and looking ahead toward my dissertation, tentatively titled, “The Schizophrenic Godhead: A Deleuzoguattarian Political Theology of Desiring-Production.” Yes, it’s a mouthful. If you’re at all interested in the project, I’m attaching what I’ve labeled a “Laboratory Dissertation Mixtape” that covers the various threads I’m trying to untangle (and entangle) throughout. You can find that below. Looking forward to future updates!
The uprooting Weil experienced in factory work introduced a shift in her conception of freedom: as she began to see the human condition as not just one of inexorable struggle, but of slavery, her notion of freedom shifted from a negative freedom from constraints to a positive freedom to obey. She referred to the latter, a particular kind of relational freedom, as “consent”.
“Simone Weil”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This chapter outlines the second, positive step in our experiment. What is opposed to kyriarchy, which is dominance over the unwilling, is consensuality. We must seek our political, ethical, and spiritual commitments through consensus, through horizontalism, through immanent and democratic coming-together. To re-cognize this state of being — which is a becoming-common — is to experiment in a world which has only existed in blips across Earth’s history. Special attention will be paid to BDSM as an experimental practice of transforming dominance and submission into an ethical, consensual sphere. We must make a practice of harnessing our destructive desires, imbued in us from our own oppression, into something that is creative, healing, and inspiring. It is not merely enough to question Man’s hegemony; we must overcome it, and, in turn, access our highest potentials, especially in those aspects of life, such as sex, which have been belittled and made small and simultaneously exploited to the point of hyperreality. To do this means connecting the body to other bodies, of reconstructing the commons, in a manner that doesn’t shame, hurt, or abandon its participants, their bodies and their spirits.
As an alternative to modern uprootedness, Weil presents a civilization based not on force, which turns a person into a thing, but on free labor, which in its engagement with and consent to necessary forces at play in the world, including time and death, allows for direct contact with reality.
“Simone Weil”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Consenting is a manner of redirecting force, a proposition that can only be done in good faith. Consent made in bad faith is manufactured (Chomsky); it is not true consent, but rather the result of fear, terror, and unfathomable violence. To limit and put a stop to this, we must learn what consent is, we must practice it, we must realize what it means to be free. The interesting thing about consent is that it only works when all parties are operating in good faith. Consent on one end but not on the other is not consent, but rather another machination of kyriarchical power. The credit-ego consents to the state, but this consent is in bad faith as it does not include the consent of all parties involved (i.e. the victims). The credit-ego feeds off bad faith; it is his staple. To imagine a consensual world requires the de(con)struction of the kyriarchical one. In preparation for this we must practice consensuality; we must anticipate a world through which consent can be made in good faith, in which domination is only a tool of self-care rather than one of systematic oppression.
In the forthcoming sections of this chapter, I will explore “1. Consensuality as a Mantra” and “2. Communication, Safety, and Healing Trauma: BDSM as Praxis”.
There is no truth that is not war against theology. . .
Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche”
Theology has primarily been an institutional apparatus for capturing herds and singularities. It is not necessarily evil, except in the ways that orthodoxy promotes suppression in the name of what Deleuze called state philosophy. The problem of evil is directly tied to the deification of states by the priestly castes, a republic formed through an alliance between Empire and Christ, an anti-Christ as the demagogue of Christian immorality and wickedness. The double thought necessary to be doubleminded; to repeat the words without hearing them, only to repeat them again in one’s destiny. If the Word is Truth, then theology ends up being the suppression of undesired words and truths — undesired by the State which has taken over the role of leading the people by a reformed moralism that is merely a simulation for the war-machine. An artificial heaven for vampiric Christians. Credit-ego.
The credit-ego is the beneficiary of an illusion of a dream, the prefabricated world of ideology, which is only possible through a symbolic declaration of allegiance to the powers-that-be: patriotheism, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalist realism, white supremacy, imperialism, other cryptodualisms, etc. (all forms of kyriarchy which must be carefully defined). State philosophy is hierarchy to the n-th degree, founded on the Absolute Reason of the Self over and against his others. In this sense, state philosophy is not merely disembodied reason — in fact it is embodied, specifically in the credit-ego’s material form which gains through the practitioning of the status quo. The fact that it presents itself as true, disembodied, purely abstract reason is a mere after effect of the reification of the normative body/consciousness of the credit-ego. The credit received is the ego of state philosophy, the white-picket fence of the suburbs laid over ancestral lands of genocided peoples and the cookie-cutter individuals who occupy the land, the magic trick hiding the infernal libido of an oppressed planet via a simulation of freedom. All that is asked in return is that one do their duty — clean their room, remain civil, and defend the rights of “all men”; and let it be known exactly who this men of ‘Man’ are — in the eyes of (a dead, idolatrous) God.
The basis for capitalism’s credit-ego is a programmatic covering and forgetting regarding the infernal, unpayable debts of society. In The Big Lie of civilization (i.e. Empire & ‘Man’), a selected group of bodies are offered the opportunity to right their debt to society, to maintain good credit with the status quo. This is not only a status one is expected to maintain and protect themselves, but it is something that one is born into via a naturalized (though obfuscated) caste system. This includes class, race, gender, ideological allegiance, etc., all of which serve as reified justifications for why one should support the pursuit of credit and identify themselves with it (a form of bad faith). Most importantly, credit itself is often mistaken as the cause rather than the effect of wealth and privileges, forming a (false) belief that one can merely earn “the good life” by paying their dues and living as a proper citizen.
What this program of Empire covers up is two-fold: both the violence/coercion at the heart of capitalist-state society AND the non-duality of the divine libido/body-without-organs. By criminalizing and punishing debt and rewarding the credit-ego, Empire forges a host it can infect with ‘Man’, a body it can organize into a limited, reactive cog operating on predetermined desire loops to generate energy in the building of its aionic pyramid scheme. This, fortunately, is where the concepts of debt and fugitivity come in. Through a re-cognition of debt and its unfathomability, we can strike an alliance with the (n)One — the keeper of infinite debts — and participate in a consensual regimen of debt accumulation, threshold expansion, aionic hacking, and the branding of duty to all sentient beings/the (n)One/Zion-I. It is in this conspiracy, this plan of the undercommons, this infernal eruption of the divine libido that “inhabits the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other” (Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond”, The Undercommons) where a counter-Kin-dom, a soulful transmodernism, and the resistance will and always has emerged.
An infernal theology of the undercommons/lumpenproletariat against a state theocracy of ‘Man’/credit-egos.
In the forthcoming sections, I will discuss “1. ‘Man2’ and the Reification of Biological Difference”, “2. The World Does Not Owe a Debt to Western Society / Western Society Wants You to Pay”, and “3. Credit and Empire”.
NOTE: This is primarily pulled from my essay, “Trans-gressing Christianity”, in which I explored a number of topics related to IGF. Will probably adjust this as time goes on.
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11:13-15
To truly be seen is to be understood; but to be understood as an object — whether of fetishization, hatred, or violence — is to be made abject. While Emmanuel Levinas retheorized first philosophy as ethics, with the face of the Other being the quintessential ethical encounter, Deleuze and Guattari theorized the face in a much different way: it is more significantly the site in which bodies are disciplined and categorized in relationship to the penultimate face of Western history: the face of the (white, male, cishetero, imperial, colonizing) Christ. In Deleuze and Guattari’s expression, one is forced to have a face, to be recognized in hierarchical relationship to this transcendent face of the Western God-Man. The closer one is in appearance to this face, the closer one is to perfection; the farther away, to abjection, banishment, and death. Recognition — to be made a face, a stable thing, an identifiable object — is the tool by which the State apparatus categorizes, organizes, and distributes groups across the strata of the social hierarchy.
It is worth stating that in critiquing the systems of the face and of recognition, it would be very easy to abandon the work of Levinas’ first philosophy entirely. In fact, as has been noted in previous literature, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face is in direct response to Levinas. What is more difficult, on the other hand, would be to hold these two philosophical systems together in mutual expression — both the ethical imperative of the Other to be truly seen and welcomed and the critique of the white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, imperial, colonial system which relegates the Other to a necropolitical periphery through a stratified, codified facial recognition network. According to Levinas, the face of the Other’s alteriority precedes judgments about them. What Deleuze and Guattari point out, however, is that the face is already preinscribed with judgments. People are prejudged and profiled, often unconsciously, by the color of their skin, their level of attractiveness, their visible disabilities, and their gender, for instance; transphobia and the gender binary are no exception. Most trans people are misgendered constantly, both intentionally and unintentionally. We are frequently trapped inside cisheteropatriarchal gender boxes. To be recognized in one’s alteriority then is often a painful process of being boxed in, sometimes to great discomfort, other times to lethal results. So what is the point of being recognized in one’s alteriority when it leaves them in an abjective state? Perhaps, unfortunately, to be used as diversity quotas for neoliberal institutions?
In asking this, I am not suggesting that marginalized individuals and groups should not receive equitable expansions of rights and opportunities (they should). Significantly, however, I do not believe that Levinas is calling for mere cultural-institutional representation in his ethical project (a strategy and aim that has been endlessly critiqued by various anarchist, Marxist, post-structuralist, anti-racist, and decolonial thinkers), but instead a reformulation of the metaphysical relationship between Self and Other. While Hegel theorized the Self and Other as in a mutual struggle for recognition and mastery, Levinas instead sees the encounter with the face of the Other as that which ruptures conventional metaphysical, social, and personal desires with the command “Do not kill me”. In this way, the Other bears the mark of a transcendent ethical command. However, it is obvious from the history of human tragedy — from persecution to war to slavery to genocide — that this command bears the possibility of being ignored entirely. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the system of the face is capable of radically-alienating some of our fellow humans from their humanity while inscribing a sense of glorification in others. Some are made abject; others are made lords and gods; and most live somewhere in between.
When it comes to the relationship of the face of the Other — both in terms of the ethical command to sanctify and the structural process of abjectification — we may catch sight of the two poles which queer and trans people are most often relegated. On the one hand, we are acclaimed by the liberal media and allowed our pride month to openly celebrate in progressive cities; on the other, we are chastised, abandoned, persecuted, and murdered in both those places and others. If the former is what Levinas means, then I fear that this ethical obligation is merely a fantasy being played out by slightly-left-of-center institutions and corporations to absolve themselves from what happens ‘over there’, on the other side of the political spectrum. That Gay Pride began as a riot organized and led by queer and trans people of color — for instance, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both members of the Gay Liberation Front and founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) — is a less marketable, safe, and sanitized expression of what it would mean to be truly seen. Being queer and trans ultimately means being viewed as less-than-human, as an abject form of humanity, particularly in the eyes of fascists and their religious equivalent, fundamentalist theocrats. To be made abject is to be made killable; to be a representation quota to help sell a product, a brand, and establish the ‘ethicality’ of corporations is to be fetishized and exploited, to be hyper-visible and yet erased at the same time. Thus to be seen in this double-bind might be less about parades and more about throwing bricks. In other words, when representation is a tactic of pinkwashing the abjective conditions of the queer and trans community, “do not kill me” may mean at the same time “do not represent me”.
In terms of literature on the subject of abjection, it has been explored quite valiantly by Julia Kristeva in her work The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, while the link between abjection and trans life/studies has been expressed quite significantly in the first issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly in a short essay by Robert Phillips. Judith Butler also delves into the subject of abjection in their book Bodies That Matter, describing (akin to Deleuze and Guattari) the way in which the repudiation (i.e. abjection) of certain bodies serves to uphold the power (i.e. subjectivity, faciality) of others. They write,
This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. . .In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subjected, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
Might we recall the God of substance’s hierarchical ontology? For God (and men with Him) to have power, lasting historical presence, and a bolstered subjectivity, the Earth, flesh, women, and non-Christians had to be cast aside. In a different way, and rather ironically, we saw that in their attempts to carve out subjective space for themselves during the 1970s and ‘80s, some radical feminists chose a transphobic path. And most importantly, we must recognize how the West has built its identity during the last 500 years (and even longer if we look at the Crusades and the past 2,000 years of anti-Semitism in Europe) on racist conquest and genocide. In all of these examples, we see power formed through abjection, disgust, rejection, and desecration.
The theomasculine project of stratification that simultaneously establishes acceptable identities, recognizes these identities institutionally, and engulfs them in normative ideologies is what needs to be dismantled — something that I believe is reflected in the title of Fred Moten’s three-part series, consent not to be a single being. This can also be linked to D&G’s flip of the Whiteheadian formula “the many become one and are increased by one” into the subtraction of the One (n – 1) that produces multiplicities. In Alfred North Whitehead’s sense, each multiplicity becomes a unity and becomes an element of further unities; in D&G’s sense, however, it is unity which is subtracted, leaving pure multiplicity. Rather than allow ourselves (or the Other) to be trapped in an identity box, we must ask instead to consent to being multiplicities, to see ourselves and each other as a multitude of forces, power relations, affects, desires, orientations, and positionalities. We must deterritorialize further and further beyond the codifications, experimenting with lines of flight toward (an)Other world(s), where, by being more than a single being, we constitute a crowd — a fugitive crowd that cannot easily be reterritorialized by faciality’s apparatus of capture.
All-in-all, I think this is not a project that can or will be done at the molar level, but instead must be activated through micropolitical engagements with what is exterior, what is outside. We must begin to dream differently, to breathe life into a world that does not yet exist, that may be an impossibility from our current vantage point. To desire the future that could have been and that could only come about through the sheer miracle of everyday acts, gestures, hopes, fantasies, affects, beliefs, and conspiracies. To see another world, we must begin to feel its presence beyond the horizon.
To conclude, I ask a fundamental question to my community: What would happen if, in affirming ourselves, we were able to also affirm our abjectivity? If instead of trying to wear the faces given to us by an anti-Christian empire founded on white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism, we rather admitted that we are ‘foreigners and strangers on earth’ and allowed our abjection to be our passports for ‘a country of [our] own’? To have the strength to affirm both our alienation and our capacities for dreaming of a world beyond it? To dream of a life where instead of yearning for representation from our oppressors we (re)begin to represent ourselves to each other along the margins? If the structures of cisheteropatriarchy cannot define us in relation to its penultimate face, we reach a state of imperceptibility and become a blackhole for the powers of faciality, pulling the representative capacities of the center apart through an affirmation of trans-abjectivity. The face of the colonizing European Christ haunts the world, haunts the soul, and haunts the flesh. What would it mean then to dissociate from this image of Christ and instead gather together and resurrect the body of God as a multiplicity of difference-in-itself, enfleshed and in communion? Difference not in relation to some hierarchical standard of holiness, but a difference that is truly singular in its uniqueness, and yet deeply intertwined within a sea of univocal, differential Being; a post-Christian, yet also postsecular multitude that allows the face to be encountered anew, as a radically-transgressive anti-face; a non-hierarchical, rhizomatically-aligned anti-fa(s)cism? Moving beyond a concept of humanity that does not include us, we yearn towards a state of posthuman spiritual and political possibility. Deep underground, we might begin to connect the wires necessary to make our Otherness not a territory that the Self can master and overcome, but instead a plane upon which new modes of escape become possible. Reaching out into the void, we call forth a new creativity, a new people, and a new earth: that which exists beyond cisheteropatriarchal, capitalist, and colonial normativity. As Ralph Ellison’s invisible man declares at the end of his eponymous novel, driven below the world of exploitation and into the heart of the sewers, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Perhaps in our abjectivity, we may speak to and welcome those yet-to-come; and let us imagine in doing so that the luring God is calling us to ‘a country of [our] own’, spoken through ‘on the lower frequencies’ — a place to call home.
A final note: I cannot write this post without at least mentioning the pivotal connections between colonialism, gender and sexuality, abjection, and Christianity made by Manuel Villalobos Mendoza in his book Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark. It is with great pleasure that I discovered Mendoza’s meditation on the Gospel of Mark: Having already started this section of the paper and nearing completion in November 2021, I discovered that much of the connections I had made were already prefigured in this book, published in 2012. For instance, Mendoza writes,
. . .my hermeneutics of el otro lado [the other side] relies heavily on the insight of Judith Butler. . .[such as their] understanding of the vulnerability and precarious nature of the body, of how some bodies become human and others do not. . .[though] instead of reading philosophers through the lens of Butler, I have decided to go ad fontes, for example to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, Emanuel Levinas’s understanding of the face, and Michel Foucault’s understanding of power.
Manuel Villalobos Mendoza, Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark
Considering that Mendoza independently linked Butler, Kristeva, and Levinas — and quite specifically in the same manner as I have — is a blessing and also incredibly humbling. To have my thoughts validated in such a way is wonderful; to see that they have already been expertly deployed in near perfect fashion makes this section potentially redundant. However, I do believe that I have offered some originality to the conversation; and if not, then it is still with pleasure that I say that Mendoza has provided a beautiful example of trans-gressive theology, one which I now cherish dearly.
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