Maniac Lullabies: Part I
Writing from the Middle East: poets, mystics, artists and exiles
During the Melbourne lockdown, one book that profoundly impacted me was Monaghegh’s Omnicide. I have so many vivid memories of the bizarre nature of life during that period, and it often haunts me as a reminder of another life. When I recall reading this book, images of alien landscapes: vacant streets, terrified eyes peering behind masks, creeping through backstreets at night after curfew, and consistently unsettling interactions with strangers pushed to their limits in isolation. I think about random instances of violence I experienced, and the army coming to our door one day to check if we were home. I remember stories of people getting fined for swimming at the beach or going for bushwalks. I remember having to forge a vaccine passport to get onto a construction site. I also recall anecdotal stories of people we knew who had severe reactions to being vaccinated, like a 14-year-old kid having a heart attack. All these memories I also associate with this incredibly powerful collection of writing, which truly arrived at the most opportune time.
During this time I also got a lot out of listening to the Urbanomic podcast, and this episode struck me: a conversation with Omnicide’s author Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Amy Ireland and Robin Mackay.
I asked for permission to transcribe this to turn into a zine to publish with Mont Publishing House.
This zine turned into a book.
This book then turned into nothing as the lockdown ended and we scrambled to get our heads back into reality.
This week I came across the following poem which made me revisit the project and publish it here:
“Drink your coffee, embrace the silence, do not take people seriously, do not take life upon yourself, do not exaggerate your emotions, and do not please anyone against your will.”
- Mahmoud Darwish
I’ll split it into a couple of parts as it is so long, enjoy this dense read.
DX, May ‘25
Maniac Lullabies
A conversation between Amy Ireland, Robin Mackay and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Transcribed by Daniel Stewart
Copy edit by Shaad D’Souza
Cover: Pouria Khojastehpay (550BC)
All other images: Greta Balog
On one night among many, a man sets ablaze a random building or village, and then dances. What persuaded this implausible design into incarnated possibility, to become the exclusive signature of his touch? Another convenes a militia or occult legion, donning long robes of self-deification. What folkloric principle or totemic theology could have drawn this otherwise unfathomable streak to the surface of his mind-body? A woman declares herself the enemy of certain archaic gods, and stabs her forearm upwards with sacred weapon in hand. What gives her warrant to pierce the skies? These questions must be answered, for everyone’s sake; they must be approached through a detailed practicum of mania then willed toward inflection, gestation, and incision.
Omnicide: The killing of everything. What kind of miniaturist enchantment would lead someone to end the world?
— Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In Delirium (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2019), 1.
INTRODUCTION
Maniac Lullabies features excerpts from the transcript of a conversation between Robin Mackay, Amy Ireland and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh. Mohaghegh’s brilliant book Omnicide is the subject. I originally heard this conversation on Mackay’s Urbanomic soundcloud, and was captivated by the cadence of Mohaghegh’s voice and the mutual determination of three thinkers with a good dynamic, a good rhythm.
The subjects of Omnicide are serious, they are sites of trauma, sites that can seduce thinking into the delicious despair of nihilism, and it is good that the conversation acknowledges and avoids these potential pitfalls, a tribute to the courage and heart of the book.
After a couple of listens to this sprawling, inspired conversation, I asked their permission to print a transcript for Mont.
The final pages feature succinct biographies on each of the ten writers featured in Omnicide and hint at further reading.
Delving into Omnicide, I felt certain topics were alluded to throughout the conversation and needed clarification. I asked Mohaghegh to expand on his description of the geography of Omnicide as being situated in “the so-called Middle East”, and wanted to hear more about his understanding of neurosis. These explanations follow.
DX
THE SO-CALLED MIDDLE EAST
The Middle East is an invented territory of the imperialist imagination (Middle East of where exactly?), when the corrupt mapmakers of the colonial enterprise decided to reduce multiple languages, cultural and sub-cultural realms, theo-mystical sects, artistic movements, and philosophical traditions (elaborated across thousands of years) to a single sphere of geopolitical interest. The fictive borders that formed this myth of a unitary Middle Eastern civilization can therefore only be effectively sabotaged by a re-envisioning of the illusion at its most extreme, captivating level. In essence, one lies right into the heart of the lie, if only to enhance the boundaries and mad complexity of the deception and thereby turn it from disenchantment (the catastrophe of history) toward enchantment (the delirium of the creative will). Thus the most incendiary poetic voices scattered across this chaotic and falsely-enclosed region are brought forward in my work to tear against the walls, to trespass beyond this age of instrumental violence and show modernity’s conquerors what ancient sorceries can do when given the chance. A summoning to shadow-games and masquerade, though of fatal consequence. The Middle East, then, becomes nothing less than a form of diabolical play for those of us who know how to turn the sands into a mirage like no other.
NEUROSIS
Neurosis is potentially the most devastating element of the psyche upon which the lethal pretense of the self has been built for millennia. The neurotic always has a desperate urgency to fill the potential void of purpose, meaning, and reality to this existence by fabricating some essential order for themselves (and often consummated through sadistic violence). The thought of our possible hollowness/futility, this house of cards or smoke-and-mirrors world, haunts them to the point of disastrous vengeance. More precisely, the neurotic personality taken to its extreme as individual pathology manifests itself in the rituals of the serial killer, whereas the neurotic personality taken to its extreme as collective pathology manifests itself in the genocidal campaigns of various political ideologies that always promise utopias while standing in rivers of blood. In effect, it is a drive for the absolute (for truth, structure, reason, origin, the answer, the ideal) that leads increasingly to anxiety and all-consuming paranoia—especially when they all one day realize that the only perfect world (free of instability, treachery, suffering) is a dead world. That is always when the neurotics who rule us find an excuse to bring back the firing squads and the killing fields.
MANIAC LULLABIES
Robin Mackay: Through the lens of ten of the most intense poets and writers of the Middle East and North Africa, Omnicide examines the myriad ways in which an obsession or manic focus can be transmuted into a radical impulse to destroy everything else in the known universe, everything that stands in the way of the object of the mania, even the manic subject itself.
The book is a kind of catalogue of manias extracted from the works of these poets, magnified and intensified by Mohaghegh’s exacting interpretive procedures. It opens with a table of manias, only a small fraction of which have been explored by the end of this volume. An absolutely unique piece of work which I spent much of the last year working on together with the author and becoming absorbed by its strange texture and its very musical style.
So, it was a pleasure to be joined by Jason who, among other things, is a fantastic raconteur, to discuss the motivations and influences behind the book and to ask him to expand on some of the implications of this work.
For the podcast we are also joined by Dr. Amy Ireland. You can find many of Amy’s writings online, including one on the Urbanomic website. She is also editor of the collection Aesthetics After Finitude, published by Repress, and she recently authored an amazing essay for the sleeve notes of Hecker’s Inspection II CD, just released by Editions Mego and Urbanomic. I’m also working on getting my hands on her recently completed PhD on xenopoetics, numogrammatology and intensity with a view to future publication.
As well as being a friend, a regular interlocutor and also a translator, she is currently working on translation of Francois J. Bonnet’s After Death to be published in Autumn 2020. Amy is also, along with Reza Negarestani, one of the people who first introduced me to Jason’s work, so it seemed appropriate to invite her along for the discussion too.
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh: The first thing that animated me was the challenge of deciphering how catastrophe becomes a form of elegance, if not the most elegant formulation of consciousness. In this sense, my first five books are each engaged with some overarching concept: chaos, violence, silence, extremity and disappearance. And so, with this book I was seeking a centrifuge that would coalesce these five thematic elements, almost simultaneously, into a single gesture, and ‘mania’ seemed to capture that combination rather powerfully, taking us across the rungs of a ladder from desire to annihilation.
But just at the outset, to clarify the book’s own definitional title: Omnicide for me, for the record, was not about a nihilistic surrender to extinction. It’s about precisely summoning the creative will to a certain threshold whereby it’s forced to devise something fascinating in the face of imminent despair. In this way, it’s a kind of perfect testing ground for the beauty of doomed thought. You ask what someone might dare dream when everything is collapsing around them. An attempt to conjure lightning, the lightning of radical originality within darkness and erasure. Again, ‘omnicide’ is not a passive fixation with destruction, but rather a gamble that certain ultimate registers of creative possibility are reached only at the threshold of universal collapse.
Somewhere in the book, I think, I call it “the visionary’s last gift.” The idea that there is some rare, for lack of a better word, sacred geometry of intensity or becoming attained only amid the final throes. Or the paradoxical discovery of an avant-garde that emerges only at the moment of scorched-earth events.
That’s what I’ve found with these figures: that they stare into a world that’s gone too far, beyond the point of no return, and the almost miraculous thing is that they do fashion something. In the total absence of a future, on borrowed time and in states of almost incomprehensible solitude and with no promised audience in the wake of pure futility, somehow in the desolation they decide to dance or recite or sculpt something; they show a heightened manifestation of their craft.
In the wake of ‘catastrophic’ actions initiated by some obscure figure (rebel, mystic, insurgent, felon, artist…), the ensuing social-discursive panic serves only to cloak the more pressing question of how they were ever capable of this thing—how not in the scandalized moral sense, but in the predestinarian sense of an accomplished inevitability: What words or impulses effectuated the vital task at hand?
We must therefore start by compiling an inventory of incandescent delusions—the personal derangements, myths, stories, and legends one must tell oneself in order to become a dangerous phenomenon (mania baseline). What would suffice is nothing less than a catalogue of insane reinventions of subjectivity in an always already insane world.
[…] And so, each [example of omnicide] provides us with an inhalation-exhalation reflex: more specifically, together they chart the ever-contorted yet viable channels between some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, intoxication, or astonishment) and the overarching instinct to engender oblivion beyond that universe (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). Such is the singular, imaginative link between madness and vengeance, a prospective explanation for the origins of both terrorism and poetry.
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 2, 8.
JBM: The literary figures that I chose, as you know they are ten writers from various locations in the so-called Middle East and North Africa. They share a few things, but most importantly in my mind, all of them have quietly sworn an oath to a challenge that was set forward by the ancients. Namely, they possess an acute knowledge of the fact that the earliest civilisations of the region—Babylonians, Sumerians, the Persians, the Egyptians (and this is a remarkable thing for me, that almost alongside the invention of poetic and cosmological writing, these civilisations) – give rise to another genre of writing, which is doomsday visions. Sometimes these were prophetic and embodied by strange gods or brutal natural forces, sometimes they were forms of nomadic storytelling and narration. But either way, it’s a millennia-old game to contemplate this question of what words belong to the last night of existence. And this is something that these authors carry right through the heart of modernity and beyond. So, despite the fact that there is a sanitised public perception of each of them, every single one of these authors in Omnicide has in some fugitive hour composed a line or a verse that has this apocalyptic sensibility.
So my job, then, was to hunt after those dangerous occasions and catch them in that split second of wrath or delirium where no one is noticing how far they are willing to take their talents. Sometimes it’s more subtle, for example, it’s kind of a whisper of condemned breath, like when Forough Farrokhzad says “and sometimes I weep for the garden,” and sometimes it’s more flagrant, like when Adonis, the great Syrian poet, says “and I tell my brothers: bring your axes”. But either way, whether it’s soft or jagged, the book discovers them in those faraway provinces where they stand at the cliff’s edge and unleash the burning, freezing, flooding, poisoning or disintegration of entire cities. And the way that I interpret that is that it is precisely how they measure their ability to become both enchanting and unstoppable. Writing in the Middle East is no joke — I always say that — and it often comes at severe cost, a cost that seems foreign to us in the Western world. So the wondrous figures on that list of ten, however eloquent, however stunning — and they are among the most iconic and revered voices of their lands — each one of them has experienced prison, torture, exile, famine, war, extreme poverty or persecution beyond belief, which means that each has walked with omnicide as a kind of existential reality at various moments.
Every poem or passage —and this is quite literal — that each author conceives has the ominous potential to be their last passage, which is why they are merciless in the way that they compose elegy after elegy, anthem after anthem: because they quite literally face unbearable circumstances and horizons.
So, another thing that I wanted to explore, which became an omnicidal principle — and I’ll end with this point — is how these figures and these strands of thought or experience are only capable of becoming the most cruel because they’ve also been the most vulnerable.
Selenomania (Obsession with the moon)
To rekindle the moon
I climbed to the roof
with agate stone and grass and mirror.
A cold scythe passed across the sky
that banned the flight of doves.
The pines said something in a whisper
and the night watchmen frantically drew swords
upon the birds
The moon
did not rise.
- Ahmad Shamlu
We encounter our seventh selenomaniac in the midst of an esoteric ritual, preparing certain occult ingredients for an invocation to recover lost moonlight. He carefully places these formal articles into a black satchel and smuggles them to the rooftop where some combination of potions, tonics, and sorcerer’s words will come together to reawaken a past lunar twinkling. However, it is also evident from the worried description above that we find ourselves in a deeply totalitarian interlude, an age of perpetual unglittering midnight masterminded by those who ‘banned the flight of doves’ and ‘drew swords upon the birds’, meaning that the selenomaniac’s rite represents an outlawed act (aligned with the old expunged ways).
[…] This is not the only time this poetic figure references drawing blades on the moon, for elsewhere he warns the reader to ‘[u]nfold your tent beside the night, but if the moon rises draw your sword from its sheath and set it beside you’. This type of maniacal thought reminds us of Xerxes the Great, Emperor of Persia and builder of the Hall of a Hundred Columns, who struck the Greek city-states with a convoy allegedly carrying a million soldiers (and led by an elite scale-armoured band of fighters known as the Immortals), but who, most tellingly in the present connection, commanded his generals after a storm to lash a strait three hundred times and cast chains into its waters as punishment for thwarting his efforts to cross it with his fleet. Thus the question is set before us: What is it exactly that occurs when one punishes an ocean channel with whips and manacles, or takes a steel weapon to the moon? Are the psychoanalysts right to pore over such dreams only to yield reductive interpretations of paranoia, or is there a grander cosmological tremor in play here, some magnificent determination known only to mad emperors and sorcerer poets, a megalomaniacal gesticulation that actually makes viable for a split second what was otherwise foolish? Must not the will, in its most daring hours, aspire toward this fabulous extent, closer to fairy tale than reality principle, blending extreme reservation (it might fail) with extreme arrogance (it might succeed), for which certain hidden procedures and blatant confrontations might sometimes wrest the most outlying phenomena into the closest quarters?
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 101, 103–4
Amy Ireland: This is making me think of a story you told me a couple years ago that just stayed with me — it was about Ahmad Shamlu writing lullabies in his prison cell. It stayed with me, [and] I’ve told it to countless people. I’ve also started thinking about a project on lullabies with a friend because it has haunted me so much. This kind of paradox of being absolutely deprived of agency, being maximally constrained in reality in a tiny cell — I’m not sure if it’s the same story, but I also remember you telling me about one of these poets being subjected to mock executions?
JBM: Absolutely.
AI: Was that Ahmad Shamlu as well?
JM: It was, indeed.
AI: Yeah. Oh man. So, within this kind of terror that was being enacted upon him by the guards, within that absolutely tiny space of free movement, the one thing that he found he was able to do was to compose these poems or works on his wall, and he chose the form of lullaby. Which is interesting, it has a really interesting history, the lullaby, as well. It’s a dark contract to deceive someone or send someone into the underworld. I think it’s kind of lost that element when we think about it in contemporary culture, it’s a sweet kind of thing, but it really has this dark underside and he uses this — following what I remember of the story — to wrest some modicum of freedom back by being productive, by producing something within this absolutely constrained world that he was forced to live in.
JBM: Even more miraculously, some of the guards became complicit unexpectedly in smuggling his work to the undergrounds. That’s a deranged inversion: it’s not that they suddenly believed in him or even stopped tormenting him. The sheer rage and sophistication of a figure who they would bleed and extract things from and cut into every night and he would somehow drag himself back from the torture chamber to his cell and almost literally write in blood on the walls and inscribe these verses that were mystifying to them. But the strategic and brilliant move that he makes out of necessity is precisely as you were saying, Amy, which is that before Shamlu enters prison the first time, of the three different occasions when he’s imprisoned, he’s never standard, he was never normal, but he’s partaking in metanarratives of political struggle and resistance, he’s a revolutionary, right? He’s a great rebel. So, in his work there are all these gargantuan archetypes of freedom and justice and the people. But that first night where they lock you in those dungeons down there, in that nowhere — and, you know, Iranian prisons are something of a different calibre and proportion than what we might be able to fathom. I mean, there’s no visitation, there’s no trials, there’s just the oblivion. You’re sent there to be lost forever. And Shamlu immediately decides that all of those epic anthems are not the correct genre anymore: the first time they lock those chains on you and you hear the iron bolts close and you’re in that damp corridor, you suddenly lose all the ability to articulate abstract, political metanarratives of society and the future and history. All of a sudden you become very sensorially and phenomenologically attuned to minute details like the fact that it’s cold there. And damp. And quiet. And you don’t have anything to sleep on. And the sound of screams and the sound of chains and the footsteps of the guards. And the only genre that’s able, as you rightly said, to encompass that kind of awe, that fresh awe that he was experiencing, was the darkness of the lullaby.
There is something else that I would just say about that, and I’ve never mentioned this before, neither in writing nor publicly…it’s also because the lullaby has a kind of whirlpool effect, just like the forest for the child in the fairy tale. It has a gravitational effect, and so the lullaby is the one genre that I can think of, as opposed to the novel or the short story or even poetry or philosophy, where there is no such thing as critical distance or intellectual objectivity. You have to join it. You have to enter the radical oblivion of the forest or the desert with them. You have to swallow inconsumable doses and stare at malformed apparitions of the mind, and you only survive by bringing your own excruciating techniques of imagination, so you have to become one of them. That’s what the author of the lullaby does and it’s almost tribal, like being among wolves. They instinctively recognise imposters and they’ll only tolerate someone of their own species.
AI: This perfectly connects to two things I was thinking when I brought up the lullaby. Talking about it as this contract where you send someone into the underworld made me think of the process that’s involved in writing these things. There is this almost Orphic problem of descending into the underworld…. One of your earlier books, I remember you telling me you became incredibly ill, and you said something to me in an email when we were talking earlier in the week that — I wrote it down — you described the book as “a work that sometimes cost too much and aged me irreversibly.” So, I wanted to ask you, in relation to the lullaby, this problem of being able to come back and also the stylistic point of immanence that you just touched upon. The fact that it’s not…Omnicide isn’t a critical study, there’s no distance between the object of interrogation, the method of interrogation and you, the interrogator. The object is mania, the method is manic, and the interrogator is staking their sanity on the project. So, I guess my question in relation to all that is: did you make it back intact?
JBM: God only knows what that even means these days. There’s irreparable damage that one does to oneself in the process, and I don’t say that with any sort of dramatic arrogance, I say that with the utter humility of someone who gets his back broken by the tasks at hand. This is something I’ve done for a long while. I just know how to endure it better. It’s not easy, it’s just that I pace myself and I know my levels better. So the work that you mentioned, where I ran myself into the ground physically, was Inflictions, which was about violence. It was my second book, and it was actually in service of a chapter that is called The Sharpening. My God, that one section is the by-product of years of attempting to attain a register of absolute coldness in writing. Something that really had ice in the veins, in each line, and that cut almost like metallic instruments. And the reason is that looming in the background of that chapter was an actual poem by a mesmerising figure who is not in Omnicide, an Assyrian Iraqi poet named Sargon Boulus who died just a few years ago. He composed this short, disturbing work called ‘The Knife Sharpener’, and it forced me to speculate on what it would mean on some bad night to actually stumble across this figure. Someone with their back turned to you, crouched over, carving a blade against stone over and again in a devastating repetition compulsion. I started to picture their calm relentlessness, their focus, this knife sharpener. Their brooding stare. Their silence. They have no reason to speak by then. The event of what is to come completely supersedes the need to articulate it. So, this single image of the knife sharpener required a process of writing and an atmosphere of writing that in turn embodied a kind of sharpening. I took endless stretches of time to build it, concentrating on the right tone, the right rhythm. It required immense precision above all else.
Robin and I talked endlessly about precision in Omnicide. It became the hallmark of this text. Actually, more than anything I’ve ever dealt with, madness requires a backbreaking level of precision to align the correct properties. Nothing is random in the best manifestations of lunacy. You read Artaud, you read the authors of Omnicide in their altered states. Everything burns the right way, everything tears the right way. It’s a perfect mosaic or labyrinth. They know exactly what they’re doing and it’s terrifying, but also an ecstatic boundary when you realise the sheer amount of control it requires to fracture consciousness and turn it outside of itself.
Cartogramania (Obsession with maps)
Meanwhile, I continued sailing along in my stone boat at ‘zero’ latitude and ‘zero’ longitude, while my compass, rather than pointing north, south, east or west, was pointing in the ‘fifth direction’—namely, straight down into the depths.
- Ghada Samman
We encounter our eighth cartogramaniac incorporating the figure of the mapmaker into that of the boatwoman, for whom borders are but burning streams pouring in the ‘fifth direction’ (inferno). Thus we revisit a strange literary-theological tradition of underworld maps, nether cartographies that always start from the absolute nexus (‘zero latitude and zero longitude’), aboard vessels built to sink (‘stone boat’), and which transpose outward horizons into vertical downward layers (‘straight down into the depths’).
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 199
RM: That maybe brings us to the question of the way you formulate Omnicide and the fact that, unlike your previous works, which were to some extent still disguised as traditional academic books, Omnicide puts to work a peculiarly strict protocol whereby for each mania you select ten passages from the poems and stories of these ten writers you’ve selected, and then you minutely examine, violently interpret, extrapolate and digress from those texts, yielding this series of poetic excursions, delicately differentiated insights into the same theme ten times over. What brought you to the realisation that you’d have to operate in a different way for this book?
JBM: First and foremost, you’re right that this is no longer encrypting or embedding subtle passages within a more conventional discourse. This is an overdose right out of the gates. It’s flagrant at that level. But the key to it is actually that beneath the smoke and mirrors and a lot of flagrancy is the particularity, which is most essential, which is what you’re alluding to. There had to be an almost molecular specificity in each treatment. Almost like designing a perfect little music box that plays and stops with each entry. One of the fatal flaws of psychoanalysis, for which I don’t hide either my awe or my vendetta in this work, was the moment when, in order to build a coherent school for itself, all the disparate madnesses that had been flung open suddenly had to be diagnosed into reductive symptomatologies and classifications. So, there was this mass simplification that I take as an unparalleled cowardice on the part of the early psychoanalysts. As much conviction and courage as they showed to go into those cellars of consciousness and excavate these strange forms, they then trembled before the very Pandora's Box that they had opened.
They trembled before the unbound and the infinite modalities of insanity. So my task was to restore this intricacy by following each one into its own separate domain and trying to show again the humility, almost, of a collector, who prizes acute differences rather than sameness. So, if I were flinging open the floodgates again, then the book would have to start from the gesture of a radical forgetting, or at least suspension of everything I had learned from philosophy and literature prior. That’s the sort of suspension of the academic tone that you mentioned, meaning that I could assume nothing and take nothing for granted when dealing with these masters, knowing that each one had their own arsenal of tricks and inflections. And I had to accept — I say this at the most basic level — the phenomenological humility, at first, of not trying to know, but just to watch. And then after watching for a while, I could move onward to encapsulate each variation in its own sophisticated domain.
AI: There’s this really great effect that becomes clear as you start to realise that this is what you’re pursuing, and it’s that each categorical incision that you make, each time you divide something up or specify something, this act of categorising, building taxonomies, division, actually undermines the whole role of categorisation in the first place. It becomes so wildly plague-like and proliferates so rapidly. But it was reminding me of the old geometrical method of exhaustion, that you can keep cutting further and further but you will never actually exhaust the area of your circle or whatever shape you’re trying to measure. And this is precisely because what you are dealing with — and this is something that Robin has written at length about, and is obviously something that comes to the fore in poststructuralist writers like Deleuze — you’re dealing with intensity, and intensity has this quality about it that’s infinitesimal. The more you divide it, the less traction you have on it, it keeps dividing.
RM: In fact, the infinitesimal is, in a sense, the emergence of mania into mathematics.
JBM: Absolutely.
AI: I guess one thing that this leads you to is that there isn’t any essence. The only way you can determine these things is by understanding them in relation to each other, not by excavating any kind of essence. So your philosophy of madness, or whatever you want to call it, is fully relational and totally functional and practical. I think, as you say several times, it is a practical inquiry — and never essentialist.
JBM: Absolutely. You know, I don’t want to make any direct parallel to any of the great works of Western philosophy that, of course, inform my thought, because one of my tricks is to simply leave them unnamed throughout. But obviously for me there was almost a very crucial war or dividing point in post-structuralism, following Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God which…we all know by extension the implications of that, you know, unchaining the earth from its sun, the loss of the centre and all of that. You have a split, a real demarcation between, let’s say, Derrida and Deleuze and their methodologies. One, the former, will then take that as a kind of — again, I know the deconstructionists will get kind of angry for this — an excuse to descend into textural esotericism that becomes these sort of apparitional riddles of the impossible and the unthinkable and the this and the that.
It becomes all about absence, it almost becomes this ghostly vacuous space where there is no blood — for me the fatal flaw of deconstruction is the lack of experiential quality to it. There’s the complete disappearance of sensation, and instead this kind of funereal atmosphere that’s in the texts, that are just entertained by their own supposed complexity. But with Deleuze it’s the exact opposite, it’s this call towards a sort of springboard of excess. He’s saying, ‘So, let’s play, let’s multiply.’ So that’s the first thing that I’d say if I had to connect it to that. But I would say this also: something that always fascinated me was, when you read esoteric medieval treatises — and I read great Arab and Persian writers from the medieval era as well — I love this paradox of very wild, bizarre, outlandish texts on alchemy, astrology, whatever, but they’re numerically orientated and organised with hyper-systematicity. Almost like avant-garde manifestos. You’re going to say we’re, we come from Mars, and that’s number seven, principal number seven. You know, there’s kind of almost a wonderful contradiction in that, and I like that vertigo of appearances, of saying something that is seemingly completely irrational or speculative. But it’s a different thing — and this is where I fault certain authors or certain movements — when you fall so in love with your own jargon, you become so infatuated with your own technicality, that you forget that you invented it. You forget that there’s a game-like element to it. A Thousand Plateaus never loses the intuitive knowledge of the fact that they are making this stuff up out of thin air, you know? And Freud loses that, unfortunately, along the way, but so do many authors today. They just become so enraptured with their new terminologies, their neologisms, their pseudoscientific explorations that I would just say, just go for it and say something bizarre. If you want to make a cosmological diagram and give it 17 different chambers of celestial whatever, don’t pretend that it’s legitimate. Don’t even bother to prove that point, that becomes a neurosis, that’s at the heart of it. And that’s what you read, the term nerd comes from neurosis etymologically. And there becomes a kind of nerdiness in some contemporary thought, but it goes back a long way in philosophy too, whereby they just become so invested that they’re trying too hard to prove that it’s real. And for me the game is lost when you’re trying to prove it.
*
RM: What came out very clearly for me was this lucid temporal constellation, between this sense of the old world, some kind of ancient inheritance of the Middle East. And Jason, you said “the so-called Middle East,” and maybe that’s something that we should talk about. But that’s certainly an undercurrent in the book, that there’s this kind of ancient inheritance which, as you said, includes this tradition of doomsday writing. Then, there is the modern: the experience of these poets who have lived through a different modernity, and who have gone through these acute existential trials. Then there’s the figure of the future, and the figure of a possibly foreclosed future, a possibly doomed future, and the question of how one can wrench something from that. That obviously then speaks to this duality between an exhausted, pessimistic view of the future as being a kind of postmodern grey haze, where everything is levelled and there’s nothing left to do, and this other possibility which you seem to suggest is found in Middle-Eastern writing, literature, and thought, which, by going to this extreme point, is able to wrench something back, and to produce some kind of polychromatic explosion out of what appears to Western eyes to be an exhausted doomed world about to fade out.
This temporal constellation seems to me absolutely crucial to the book: the ancient, the modern, and the potentially foreclosed future.
JBM: I would say this: first off, that the poet in ancient and medieval Arabian tribes and North African tribes was always considered a figure of possession. That’s why some linguists have a kind of conspiracy theory that the actual etymology of ‘genius’ comes from the Arabic world ‘jinn’, as in ‘genie’. Because it means that otherworldly forces are whispering in your ear. Tribes believed that their poets were ventriloquizing tongues from some beyond, some unearthly space. And that’s always remained the calling card of these poetic icons. But to do that, to be otherworldly when you’re quite literally writing, like Ghada Samman, the great Lebanese writer, in the midst of the civil war. Mahmoud Darwish is writing under bombardment, I mean literal bombs dropping on his rooftops. Hassan Blasim, a most talented Iraqi writer, one of the most talented short story writers in the world today, was a refugee escaping across border patrols and evading all kinds of detection from one European metropolis to another for years. And Shamlu, the political prisoner. And so, it’s amazing that they faced these heightened empirical pressures and at the same time summoned something that is beautifully irrelevant to them. And that’s one thing that I wanted to say, just in case people get this wrong: I often hear the term ‘genocidal maniac’ with respect to political atrocities of the twentieth century. Fascism, Stalinism, capitalism, all of this. I actually would like to disabuse people of the use of the term ‘mania’ to describe political ideology. Ideology is psychotic, no doubt. Society is psychotic, what we call ‘reality’ itself, but it has always been, since its very artificial inception. From the second we give names to things, it’s a desperately pathological affair. But those totalitarian delusions, which again, reek of neurosis, are not even in the same universe as the typologies of what we’re calling ‘madness’ or ‘mania’ in the book. My maniacs and their fictions are hypnotising creatures that harbour — I don’t want to call it an antidote or an escape, but they harbour a trapdoor that leads beyond all of these decrepit structures of today’s so-called reality, which seemingly grow more pathetic by the hour. So no, everyone might be delusional, but not everyone wills illusion. And this is something that has disappeared from Western philosophy, it’s become kind of a curse word and I don’t know why. Nietzsche went to such glorious trouble to concoct his notion of ‘the will’, a will that wasn’t trapped in the metaphysics of free will, all of the delusions of grandeur of free will. But which had something involuntary about it, something that was extremely powerful, his will to power. And then because of the totalitarian abuses of the twentieth century, that term becomes problematised into oblivion.
Well, it didn’t disappear from Middle-Eastern writing. The figures who populate Omnicide are of a very rare exclusive breed who, as Artaud would say, “chose madness as a sign of valour”. That’s Artaud’s great expression. They’re not repeating tired words to the same old cancerous scripts, they’re inventing their own breakaway spheres of time, space, sensation, desire. And so I don’t even want to call those socio-political forms that we see today, or even the cultural haze of the post-modern, I don’t even want to call them enemies of these poetic madmen and madwomen, since that would be giving them too much credit and would resemble some false dialectical relation. Yes, the poets are sometimes compelled into confrontation with these epochal realities, but their lives remain largely indifferent and irrelevant to what Kierkegaard rightly called the crowd’s untruth.