Maniac Lullabies: Part II
Writing from the Middle East: poets, mystics, artists and exiles
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
RM: Okay, let’s try and get nearer to why the question of this book is an important one and why perhaps it might be an important one right now. In the opening pages, when you first ask how mania can blossom into an omnicidal impulse, you immediately suggest that this question must be answered. You say this question “must be answered for everyone’s sake.” Then, in the closing of the introduction, you speak of the work that you do in this book as an imperative, which suggests, obviously, that the energy and the commitment that you put into this task means that this book is far from being some kind of trivial game. It seems to me that there’s a subtle sense which perhaps it’s possible to miss on a superficial reading, in which what seems at first sight a kind of fantastic, extreme, deviant work in fact can claim a direct contemporary relevance precisely because we are living in a world that’s fantastic, extreme and deviant. A world that’s ruled by maniacs and their fictions, in which, as you say in the introduction, “the right fable is enough to place all in jeopardy.” And to come back to Nietzsche and the question of will, it seems that Omnicide draws a line between mania and omnicide and a capacity for untruth, a capacity for willing untruth, and that seems to present a kind of selective trial in a Nietzschean sense: Can we pass the test? Do we have the strength of will to make untruths real? That seems to apply at the level of civilisations, the level of this duality of civilisations, as in an address to post-modernism or the post-truth age, you’re contrasting the twilight of Western modernity to some kind of different historical temporality, inhabited by the Middle East, by these poets and thinkers.
JBM: Absolutely. Everything you just articulated is perfect and accurate and highly sensitive. The only thing I would say, the only feature I would clarify, is that we can’t underestimate the fact that, on our side perhaps, in Western societies, we do face again sort of the imminent greyness of our nihilistic or cynical moment. Over there, people die. The Middle East is on fire, from Libya to Palestine to Iraq. This is not a political thing for me, this is the fact that my favourite figures, the ones who I align myself with across the globe, their sensitivities are under constant threat.
I remember the first time that I read political prisoners like Ahmad Shamlu, the great poet who…he comes back one night from being tortured and he’s staring at his arm and it’s bleeding on the ground, he’s looking at these red droplets, and he goes, ‘My God, all of this so some guy can walk around and call himself king.’ Now, that’s staggering and it’s a problematic that we still haven’t resolved, so what this work attempts to do, Robin, as you rightly say, is that it doesn’t entertain the idea that the cure to all of those epochal violences of today will come through discourse and dialogue and counter-ideologies. Instead, and I say it openly, Omnicide is a deeply manipulative work. But I have no ethical problem with manipulation whatsoever, as long as it serves intensity.
Shamans were manipulative, and they were essential to all kinds of tribal and social formations in the old world. But it’s not manipulation as a form of sadistic, authoritarian domination that tries to drain the lifeblood of others or to enslave them. It operates like all great trances: it attracts, lulls, positions, and it uses techniques of insinuation, seduction, encryption, whatever makes thought race and pound quicker, more cunningly, whatever makes more complex and unique patterns. And that’s a spell’s primary function as well. When it isn’t to kill, it’s to transform. So, no, it’s not a dialogue or argument, but rather the entering of a site that is a decided outlook hovering above and in every corner. In Middle Eastern poetics and literature, there’s always someone diabolical pulling the strings, playing puppet master. There are no accidents and nothing is incidental, every line is doing something highly specific at multiple levels in order to guarantee the success of the task at hand. So madness itself, if you look at schizophrenics, they don’t ask permission. Neither does fate or doom, which are the main players in my philosophical game here. So I follow suit: you execute the affect by any means necessary, whether through extreme clarity or deception, and the work itself tells you what you have to do at any given moment, how much you have to give or take to the reader to grant them passage across. But always with the intent to leave someone stronger for having endured it. This is a paradoxical thing. It’s kind of like the figure of the vampire, where they don’t ask consent to bite, [because] they have already made an ethical decision that’s linked to intensification. Their bite will enhance you, will accentuate abilities. You can levitate, you can fly, you can read minds, escape finitude and death. Why would they ask you if you want it? And almost because they know something, which is that human beings are so pitiful in their self-preservation instinct and in their fear that they probably will say no to the bite, even though it serves them at every existential level. And so what is your ethics at that point?
I’ve gone wholesale in this book into a kind of ethical stance of outright manipulation of the reader, of myself, of language, of thought, of the text that I use, and I do think that’s the only thing that can summon the kind of force that can somehow counteract all of the bombardments that we perceive and we experience in the everyday.
Kinetomania (obsession with continual movement)
You don’t live with the dead
They slide on the rolling rug
Of forgetfulness
Admire the movements of fatal augurs
Worked up on the ceiling in their golden slippers.
- Joyce Mansour
We encounter our fourth kinetomaniac through the following triangulations of subject, object, and space: (1) the dead; the barefoot; the rug; (2) the augur; the slippers; the ceiling. We can imagine, in the first instance, the paradoxical movement of the motionless as the deceased slip across silk fabrics into the lost depths of forgetting; and then in the second instance the spectacular movement of the seers, as their prophetic gazes allow them to tread across slate awnings and balconies (from the Persian bala-khaneh, meaning ‘upper house’). In either instance, we are compelled to revel alongside beings who motion either too high or too low […] in either case kinetomaniacal experience serves to turn axes of time and space upside-down, shifting across both deranged ends of the vertical spectrum: that of the entombed and that of the uplifted.
[…] Unlike our conventional terrestrial model of the diamond, mined from below after having been compressed over great tracts of time, in other planetary settings they form in areas of the upper atmosphere known as thunderstorm alleys (arising suddenly from inclement weather patterns), a product of lightning, methane, and graphite placed under extreme aerial pressure. Ultimately, these uncut hailstones end up littering the planetary surface, giving off endless crystal reflections, or they melt into a liquid carbon sea, thereby forcing our unclimbing eyes to accept the order of things annulled (once the extracted-upward, now the precipitating-downward). What theories might future civilizations espouse about the cataractal movement of such gem showers?
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 217, 219.
RM: You even speak openly in the book about the method as a form of magic, or spellbinding, and encourage the reader to see the question ‘How does one pass from mania to omnicide?’ as a practical, rather than moral, question. You talk about it as a question of “neo-magical practice.” One of the things that I was very struck by from the very start was the musicality of the writing. That you have these refrains which come back and repeat the openings of each section, and give the experience of reading this strong rhythm and a kind of hypnotic insistence. And then the deeper you get into the book, the more you discover more cryptic hidden motifs which emerge in completely disparate places. To what extent is that method related to specific practices of mysticism or ritual incantation, a kind of relaying of the auto-hypnosis of mania?
JBM: Absolutely, you read my hand perfectly at the strategic level. There are mystical currents, not at the level of belief but at the level of methodology. That’s what intrigues me always about mysticism: how to devise rituals. I mean, my grandfather was among the most pessimistic individuals you could ever encounter, brilliant and wise beyond belief but extremely sceptical. He would tell me stories of seeing Sufi mystics put blades through their bodies, burn themselves, and be able to sort of master the sensation, to not cry out in pain. And that always bewildered him, but it’s not otherworldly and it’s not supernatural, it’s entirely grounded in a form of empirical conditioning, which is always what magic was. Magic is not this fantasy realm of celestial properties, that’s theology. Magic was always… When you look at the almost alchemical qualities of witches’ brews, what’s in the cauldron? It’s always parts or tentacles or appendages of living creatures: a lock of hair or the leg of something or the blood of something else. If you read the medieval talismanic books of the great Arabian and Persian doctors, they’re doing the same thing. They’re not interested in esoteric debates about Gods in the cosmos in their infinite transcendence. They’re interested in, what happens if I pour lead into a frog’s skull? That’s an actual spell. Sort of.
The trickery behind it is that it doesn’t matter if it’s actually literally correct, it only matters that you believe it. Rather: it only matters that you act accordingly towards the world as if it’s happened. That changes the game entirely right there. We know this again from schizophrenics, who believe that they see things in star formations, that they perceive numerical patterns in different things. And then they proceed quite physically into the world in accordance with those matrices. So, yes, you’re absolutely right. Incantation, there’s a musicality, there’s a rhythmic process, which is the process of enveloping and engulfing that all trances are based in. This gradual swelling to the point that it becomes an exclusive perimeter or universe, it obliterates the knowledge of all other things. And I would say this: in fairy tales you often have a figure, sometimes musical, sometimes sonic, like the Pied Piper, who leads the children beyond the city, or the animals for that matter. They’re the ones who provide some type of distraction or diversion that gains you a possibility of escaping those oppressive borders. That’s the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, obviously. Always on the lookout for an excuse. And I say this very tangibly, that it can save one’s life at different times.
There’s a great figure named Darwish Khan who built a stone garden in Northern Persia. He was deaf and mute, never spoke, couldn’t hear, but he would dance in a delirious state all day long amongst these stone sculptures that he had created in the middle of the desert. No one knew what his intention was because he couldn’t articulate it, no one understood what he was hearing that would make him dance. But I love this figure, because he does this in the midst of the Islamic revolution of 1979, one of the most volatile and cataclysmic events in the history of a three-thousand-year-old nation, and he’s completely oblivious to that transpiring occasion. And if any of the sectarian factions had tried to lure him into aligning with their ideological games, he would have been too busy with his stone garden. He would have said, ‘Why would I bother to go to the city and march or protest or fight or bleed or sacrifice? I have my stones.’
So for me, having your little game on the side, your obsessive side game, is absolutely essential to not falling prey to all of these formations and formulations that are constantly trying to lure you in.
RM: You’re insisting that this is the case even when you’re imprisoned, tortured, when all of your degrees of freedom have been curtailed to such a radical extent, there’s still this possibility for hyperstitional escape?
JBM: It’s infinitely harder, I don’t underestimate the gravity or the pain that is required to actually convince yourself in those cages, in those locked spaces, because you want to believe that the empirical means the real. The toughest thing is to maintain that paradoxical recognition that this is happening, but it’s not authentic. Because it’s not motivated or originated in any type of authentic impulse whatsoever. Reality is the cover-up. The political is just a massive concealment of the public secret. The public secret is that we constructed this whole thing we call society and reality in order to kill time while time kills us. It’s a hiding place. That’s one of the few things that philosophers since the Enlightenment agree on. They’ll kill one another in an elevator if you ever put them together, but the one thing they agree on is that everybody is hiding from death. That we’re all shelving it, deferring it, taking whatever reality will serve up so as to completely elide the confrontation with our own mortality. This is the tough thing: to sustain the fact that this is happening, that you are dying, you are bleeding, but that it’s not authentic. It’s in fact precisely the attempt to disguise and camouflage and conceal maybe the only “authenticity,” which is the fact [that] you are on borrowed time here, and you don’t know why.
AI: These stories about Shamlu that you told the other year were really influential on me in terms of thinking about the ethical implications of this. I very much agree with this kind of notion of finding the one thing that you still have agency over, the one thing you can do in this space of non-freedom. But I just can’t deal with the word, the descriptor “authenticity” for that. In this paradigm of illusion, how do you decant the authentic reality from the illusions that have become real? I feel like it’s better defined as a sliver of productivity rather than falling into the trap of resentment.
JBM: Oh no, this is exactly my point, that there’s no authenticity on either side. Poetics or literature has not a shred of authenticity to it, in my opinion. It’s an invention, it’s a contraption, it’s an artifice—but that’s precisely what makes it worthwhile. I don’t want anything that proclaims authenticity or credibility, that’s precisely when you get into the mouth of the genocidal utopian delusions. It’s just counter-mythologies or counter-apparitions that are going against one another, but there is a way of crafting something, and I’ll use Nietzsche’s term of the untimely, which is important to me. I’ll give you an example: there’s a figure who actually should, by every right, be within Omnicide, but he’s not included, and that’s Shamlu’s master Nima Yooshij, who’s considered the father of Persian New Poetry. He’s an absolutely stunning figure. He comes from the Northern Territories, he’s not well-trained or well-versed in classical Persian poetry in the least, he speaks in a grave kind of tone. He actually was a shepherd who spent a lot of time in mountain chasms overlooking these stone formations, and his poetry sounds like that. He actually believed that he could summon winds and moons and clouds and things of that nature.
The important thing with him, he has a poem, a famous one, called ‘My House is a Cloud’, which sounds almost like some childlike thing, but it’s actually a very short apocalyptic passage, in which he talks about drowning the world from his cloud. He has this aerial perspective over a city, and before you enter the poem he’s already made the decision that he’s going to flood this city from above. But then, out of the corner of his eye, just as he’s about to unleash this torrent, he sees a flute player. And this flute player is entranced in the kind of circular melodies of his own playing. He’s spinning in a kind of weird choreography. And Nima says something absolutely striking: he says, “I let him pass.” So he takes time, before this apocalyptic instance, to allow this random flute player, who seems to have no part in the innocence or guilt of the city, he’s completely detached and disconnected in his own aesthetics. And he lets him pass as a state of exception from the event, he grants him a kind of neutral distance from things.
That neutrality is something that has been fashioned by actually very persecuted figures. I’ll just give you one last example, a very tangible one. When revolutionaries in Middle Eastern history get arrested and then released, they often unfortunately tell very traumatic stories of their suffering, of their injustice, of things like that, which only serves to authenticate the regimes. But my favourite response is actually what the mystics do. When the mystics have their houses of worship — which are actually just simple, they’re not temples, just simple homes — when they are raided and the elders are imprisoned, and the elders are eventually released, if a journalist goes up to them and says, ‘How do you feel that your houses of worship or gathering were disbanded?’ They say, ‘What houses of worship? There were no houses of worship, you’re mistaken. Nothing like that ever existed.’ And they walk away with a kind of smile. To me that is a very powerful gesture. That’s not repression, that is denying the satisfaction of authoritarian modalities at work, and their sadistic bloodlust. What do you do when someone won’t even acknowledge what you’ve done to them? But that takes a level of mastery, an absolute level of mastery that is part of the — if you want to call it political ethics, you can —political ethics of forgetting. And I always took it very seriously when Nietzsche warned, beware thinking that memory — which is what has become now the kind of cliché par excellence — that everything is memory. The memory of catastrophe, the memory of atrocity. And for God knows how many decades if not centuries, people on the colonial side always recognised that radical forgetting is actually the best methodology of overcoming.
AI: Yeah. In the story about Shamlu in his prison cell, there’s also a kind of warring of mythical forces. And his gesture, the writing of these lullabies, actually it seems to me — from my recollections of your telling of these stories — it turns out to be the stronger mythology that wins over the guards. Like you said earlier, they smuggle out his work, they cease torturing him. Because the myth of this one very frail, very limited person somehow overcomes the myth of the regime that’s instructing them to torture him. That’s what I see as the way of constructing freedom, it’s very minute. Like you said, you have to somehow have some kind of mastery over these modalities. It’s also totally counterintuitive, but sometimes it’s the only thing that offers any kind of glimpse of any sort of escape. And I love that because it’s so extreme.
JBM: Absolutely. There is another figure Nazim Hekmat, who is considered the forerunner of the Turkish poetic vanguard, I mean he’s a legend in Turkey. He spent, I’m going to get this wrong, but I want to say between 13 and 15 years in prison, in Turkish prison, in the twentieth century. And he has a poem that is rather brazenly titled, ‘Some Advice for Those who are Going to Spend Time in Prison’. To paraphrase it, it’s almost an instructional manual of existential survival. He tells you, don’t spend too much time thinking of islands or forests or mountains. Don’t dream good dreams, have bad dreams, because it keeps you honest there. All kinds of little devices that will get you by. But he says, “By all rights you should hang yourself by the neck there, but you will not do this. You will put your foot down and live, for no other reason than to spite the enemy.” And I take that with extreme gravity and respect for what he means, but the methodology to that is not courage, in the heroic archetypal sense, nor is it resistance in the revolutionary sense: it’s derangement. Derangement gets you through a place where you should otherwise condemn yourself.
RM: Is there any part of that instruction manual for existentially surviving prison that can also be transferred into a more general instruction manual for surviving life itself?
JBM: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, anybody who comes to me with some type of narcissistic psychological dilemma of ‘Who am I and what’s my purpose in the world?’ I never give advice because I can’t stand advice, but the only thing I give them as a direction is, I say, pick some extremely esoteric particular detail; the phenomenon of tidal wives, the history of sword making, praying-mantis style Kung Fu, surfing, something like that. Then go into the archives of the library and spend all night long just drowning in information. And this is an old mystical idea too, when you go to the Buddhist monastery and you [tell] them ‘I want to find enlightenment.’ They say ‘Great, there’s a room to your right with 7000 candles, light every candle.’ And you spend all day lighting every candle, relentless, and then you come out and say to the master, ‘I’ve done it, now what?’ He says, ’Now go blow out every candle.’ It’s this complete disassociation from the narcissistic grandiosity of existential purpose and existential meaning. You just become consumed in the lighting of candles. It actually should and can save your life. That’s what ritual at its most practical methodical level means. So that’s what I take poetics as, or philosophy, as a kind of ritualistic display that gets you out of entrapment for a while.
Colossomania (obsession with giants)
But in a flash we all understood the significance of what had happened. Some sniper had fired a shot at the rope and in doing so had demonstrated his prowess for everyone in the neighborhood to see. He’d said to us all: I’m capable of hitting any target, however tiny or delicate it may be. Every one of your hearts is within my range. I could put bullet holes through your arteries one by one. I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark. I can aim my bullets at any part of your bodies I choose.
- Ghada Samman
We encounter our eighth colossomaniac back in the throes of civil war, as the tenants of a sprawling city remain locked away in their apartments (Arabic hisar, meaning ‘siege’). Their collective helplessness is palpable; they are each barricaded within the four walls of a home-turned-prison, with no assured release in store; they face either eventual starvation or grenades shattering through windows. The city itself is continually trampled by marauding sects who keep close and constant surveillance, making every street an incendiary battle-in-waiting. And poised above the rooftops stands a unique colossal force: the sniper.
[…] The colossal is […] framed here as an occult endowment of both unmatched scope and precision, the peerlessness of a micro-focus culminating in a long record of perforated veins and sinew. This is what such a gifted inclination to piercing seems to tell us, and yet it is his next intrusive warning that stands out (‘I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark.’), for it suggests an ironic interplay of omniscience: the one who sees everything savours his ability to blind all others.
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 445, 447
AI: I’m thinking about this idea of the neo-magical that Robin brought up earlier — this notion of sorcery, spell-casting, binding, myth creating — as something that’s associated with practical immanence rather than symbolic transcendence or doctrine or something like that. At the start of the book when you’re talking about what you mean by the neo-magical you write “the prophetic without transcendence (for no higher power must intervene), the miraculous without belief (for no great leap of faith is required), the sacred without law (for no dogmatic structure can tame its ecstatic arc). Just the leanest mixtures of anomaly, revelation and disaster” (5). And something that I started to pay a lot of attention to, especially as I got up to some of the later parts of the book, like Section 20, the section that comprises monomania, isolomania, megalomania, catoptromania/eisoptromania, colossomania — the manias of aloneness, isolation, self, mirrors, and giants — started to make me think about how this practice, these manic practices, these immanent sorcerous practices, relate to the self. It seems to me — it’s very clear — that your whole project, and the description of these manic practices, tends towards a kind of dissolution or fragmentation of subjectivity. Which is not necessarily the first thing that you might think of when considering manias, especially if you’re thinking of them in terms of paranoid or neurotic modalities.
So, a few questions: Does this shift into a neo-magical or practical, immanent way of wielding mythology and illusion, the substitution of immanence for transcendence, or the old world-historical way of being, to use your earlier phrase — is it that that re-channels the expected consolidation of subjectivity into dissolution? And then, is this related to the way that you talk about the relation of the book to the history of psychoanalysis? I think you said in your talk at the Miguel Abreu gallery in New York when you were launching the book, that you viewed mania not as an interior phenomenon in the way folk-psychoanalysis has typically viewed it, but as an outside phenomenon, and it’s the manic object and the atmosphere that dictate everything. There’s this turning outwards of mania — as if it is channelled through this passage into annihilatory desire as well — that leads to the undoing of subjectivity. So when you think about megalomania, for example, the first thing you think about is condensation of selfhood or identity, but in your preface to that section you write of “steal[ing] psychoanalysis’s favourite plaything, the self, [in order to] inspire in it maniacal post-psychological modifications,” (311) and all of the following analyses emphasise these process of dissolution, fragmentation and exchange of places between the subject and its manic object of desire. And there’s this great line in one of the analyses where you write “manic aloneness is the place where one answers ‘no’ to the interior voice that wonders, ‘Are you who you are?’ In fact, to become monomaniacal is precisely never to be again what one is.” (320) So can you talk a little bit about your understanding of this relationship between mania and the manic subject, this sort of paradox between an expected coalescence or integrity of subjectivity, and processes of depersonalisation?
JBM: Absolutely. There’s a lot to unravel. The first thing is what you’re quoting from is a very delicate process that I think is crucial to mania, the turning of subjectivity into an outer object of fixation. So you’re chasing yourself. And I think this is actually what Nietzsche means when he says to become what you already are. If you read “The Stillest Hour” in Zarathustra, you notice that Nietzsche is speaking to himself from a kind of voice of futural realisation of himself. Subjectivity becomes this quasi-familiar quasi-foreign externality that is beckoning him or summoning him forward. But this actually works at the most tangible existential level.
If you ever read the accounts of Jesse James, the famous outlaw, for instance, you would strangely enough discover that when he would tell the story of some reprehensible violence that he’s committed — often the killing of an intimate figure, the killing of one of the members of their own gang, where his own gang would be horrified and bewildered by why he would do it — he would start to tell it like this: ‘Well, I went to his house and I started questioning him and I didn’t like his answers and he seemed to be shivering a lot, so I told him let’s take a ride on our horses. We went to the forest, then…then Jesse let him take a few steps ahead of him and Jesse pulled his gun.’ That slippage, that very subtle slippage into the third person, is what gives him a licence to do anything, a sort of licence for infinite action. You notice that’s at a destructive level, but at a creative level, this is precisely what happens in Ecce Homo when Nietzsche starts referring to Nietzsche, in this sort of monumental, dramatic, but performative way. It’s also when Artaud refers to Artaud. It becomes this magnifying presence, but not a form of interiority. It’s now something, an exterior magnification or incident that they’ve been able to fling out and then chase after.
AI: Like writing from the perspective of syphilis or schizophrenia?
JBM: Yeah, but even Kafka does it much more insidiously by just transitioning to the word ‘it’. When he transubstantiates ‘I’ into ‘It’ — it sits with you, it sits in a cabin in the woods — He means ‘I’, but ‘I’ has now entered a kind of anonymous ethereal plane of the mist of the forest, and that is devastatingly eerie and powerful. What I would say is that it overcomes this gesture of flinging or projecting subjectivity to a kind of exterior thing that you’re then interpreting, deciphering. It overcomes the Tower of Babel phenomenon that happens with modern psychology. The modern psyche was tragically compartmentalised into myriad levels all incommunicable with one another. What I mean by that is, it’s absolutely pathetic in my understanding that we are now capable of thinking things that we would never say, or saying things that we would never do, or doing things that we can’t think about. Do you follow? This is a pitiful fragmentation that has taken place, that is such an insult to the domain of animality, which precisely synchronises thought, sensation, desire, impulse, passion, need — everything working as a symmetrical mechanism. And here we are with all our doubts — you know, that’s why Lewis Carroll gives one of the most brilliant laws, the only law, at the outset of Alice in Wonderland. Otherwise it would be an unbalanced sphere of infinite possibility, but there’s this one governing law or rule to the game: “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” For me, that is not a truth principle, not an enunciation of truth. That is a precise definition of magicality.
Abracadabra, in ancient Aramaic, means “I create what I speak”. It’s not about the aesthetics of the line, how poetic, how beautiful, it’s not about the meaning of it, it’s ‘Does it work?’ Does the line of the spell work to effectuate or occasion the transformation that is supposed to take place? And that’s all that seems to matter. And that, to answer Amy and Robin’s questions from before with regard to subjectivity, that has a retroactive effect of completely dispelling the problematics of subjectivity. Which is why, when Alice starts saying what she means and meaning what she says, when she arrives at the threshold of the opium smoking caterpillar — who, by the way, is Persian, I love to give that shout out to my heritage there — and he asks her what seems like a grandiose existential question: ‘Who are you?’ But he doesn’t mean it in any grandiose sense. He’s just putting her to the test at that moment, and she stutters, in that great sense that Deleuze has in a piece called “He Stuttered”. She begins to stutter, which is actually the moment in which subjectivity is becoming an obsolete commodity in Wonderland. She can’t answer that question.
And the last thing I would say to that, and both of you may know this about me, is that one of my favourite, somewhat exoticized examples is the medieval assassins, particularly a figure named Hassan-i Sabbah. [He] was a brilliant Persian visionary but also a very lethal figure, who used to travel nomadically from one master to another for years, from Egypt to Baghdad to Persia, and then finally decided upon building a fortress, a kind of bastion in the mountain range Alamut in Northern Persia, where he stayed for, for thirty years, basically wreaking havoc upon the Persian empire and beyond but never leaving his place. He created the first group of assassins — you may remember this story — but essentially what happened was all these youths started gravitating to this legendary old man on the mountain who had created this fortress. He knew poetry, he knew mysticism, he knew philosophy, he knew theology, he knew music and dance, he was absolutely brilliant at multiple levels. And when they would enter, there he was — if it helps, he was also strikingly handsome and eloquent, they say — so there he is in these long white robes with this long white beard and they enter into this domain of the sage, and for days and nights he would entertain them with banquets and feasts, [and] he also had exotic animals that he had quite brilliantly and manipulatively brought from other places to mesmerise these young people. And then he would start slipping them hashish [in] their food and their drinks, and they would start to have quasi-hallucinatory experiences. And then eventually he would withdraw them and they would start to suffer withdrawal symptoms. They would start to sweat, they would start to tremble, and they would ask him what was going on. At [that] point, he would disclose it and say: ‘Now I have to tell you what this place is. You’ve entered paradise, and I am the prophet and guardian of paradise, but you’re falling from this heavenly sphere.’ And they’d say, ‘What do we have to do in order to regain entrance?’ And he would tell them: ‘You have to kill some people on my behalf.’ And then he would send them on sacred missions.
It’s amazing to know that, by day, he would teach them philosophy, poetry, music, astronomy, and then by night he would send them out on missions. And for the next ten years, this group of assassins becomes so notorious throughout the Persian empire, and they become such perfectionists at their craft, that they don’t even need to kill anymore. They become such an ominous shadow of the political sphere, that governors give up their thrones just by seeing the silver dagger in their palace or in their home, because they knew they were a target and that it was imminent destruction for them. What’s amazing too about this, a lot of people don’t know this, is that the etymology of the word assassin comes from the Persian hashishin, those who smoke hashish.
But what truly amazes me is when Marco Polo —a self-confessed liar at many levels — actually makes the trek up to meet the man on the mountain, up to Hassan’s fortress, and stays with him for several nights. He tells this story in a very obscure piece that’s not often included in his travelogues, it’s almost apocryphal, but he says: ‘There was one night I turned to the old man of the mountain and I said to him, can I ask you a question? And the old man said, you can ask me anything you wish.’ And Marco Polo said ‘Do you promise not to kill me?’ [To which Hassan] says, ‘You are my guest, don’t worry, nothing is going to happen to you.’ At which point Marco Polo leans in and, in a whisper, says ‘You know this is all a lie right? You still know this is just a mirage. You’re not actually a prophet, these disciples of yours are not actually on sacred missions, this is not paradise. You’ve just created this sort of amazing simulation at the top of the world.’ At which point — and I’ve told this story in many places — Hassan-i Sabbah stands up, he finds a black-robed disciple walking around and he says: ‘You over there, jump off the cliff of the mountain’s edge and you will fly.’ And Marco Polo recounts with terror the fact that this young man just bolts, without hesitation, without doubt, just bolts off the edge of the mountain and disappears into the night air. At which point Marco Polo is sitting there trembling in absolute horror, and the old man of the mountain Hassan-i Sabbah turns to him very serenely and says: ‘Now what does it matter if it’s truth or a lie, as long as I can get him to do that?’
This is the more sinister and also creative potentiality that Badiou would love to dream of as the event. This is not an abstract event, this is not an event that requires great philosophical deduction, this is a command. And the question is: Why is the command followed, against every so-called rational impulse in the universe that would stop him? And every psychological impulse towards self-preservation and survival that, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, should stop that young disciple from flying into the night air? But he gets the job done, and that is a very careful and complex procedure, to bring someone to that point. Now I’m not calling for the murderous intentionality of Hassan-i Sabbah, but I take precisely the logic of Carroll’s fairy tale, or Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming. Which is why, by the way, Nietzsche on numerous occasions, quotes Hassan-i Sabbah’s last words on his deathbed, his alleged last words, which are: all is illusion, thus all is permitted. A lot of people don’t know that [line] comes from the Persian assassins.
RM: We’ve talked about trance, about neo-magical practice, about the hypnotic nature of the writing in Omnicide. In terms of its modes of analysis, its interpretation and commentary, it seems Omnicide doesn’t obey any rules, it has no time for norms of discursive argumentation, and it consistently refuses to be consistent in the way it addresses the literary fragments that it seizes upon. It’s a form of writing that demands a lot of attention on the part of the reader because there are multiple forms of address happening within one paragraph even. Rather than being confronted with propositions or arguments, the reader is immersed in this continually shifting field of cross-cutting semantic forces as the interpretation of the text becomes over-interpretation, outlandish extrapolation, digression, divagation. So as we’ve already discussed, along with this sense of potentially endless concatenation (and…and…and…), this gives the text itself a performatively manic effect. But I think it is also conceptual writing, and I’ve spent a while trying to clarify for myself what kind of conceptual writing it is, how you are handling concepts, how concepts are produced in the context of this book. It seems to me that, rather than mobilising some kind of universal or general concepts which can be applied to all of these case studies that you present, it seems like each one of these miniature case studies gives rise to an overproduction of local concepts, or you could say minor concepts.
What’s interesting about these concepts to me is their impurity. They emerge with dirt, with shreds of viscera and grit, with the smell of bodies still clinging to them. They’re incompletely separated from the context from which they’re taken, there’s never a complete abstraction. And actually the idea of the witch’s cauldron, this culinary metaphor, would also be a good one: bringing in these heterogeneous elements and putting them all in the pot. And then, reading further, you begin to recognise, to become familiar with subterranean connections between them.
So what is this different mode of working with concepts? One that’s not subsumption, ascending to higher levels of abstraction, it’s not a dialectical argument, it’s none of the traditional modes of philosophising, and yet I feel it still has a relation to the practice of philosophy.
JBM: I would note also that even within the instance of the authors themselves, each author themselves, they are not beholden to the principal that they infused or they invented in the passage before that I was interpreting. So, at any given moment they’re perfectly willing to abandon their own sort of philosophical stances, depending on what new climate or atmosphere they find themselves in.
RM: Right, the idea of climates or what you’ve called elsewhere “moodscapes”, epistemic climates.
JBM: Heidegger, at the end of his life, had an inkling of this — that mood was perhaps the great unexplored conceptual territory of philosophy, and perhaps the most important. And that was his turn towards the poetic also. But Nietzsche already says it as well, in Ecce Homo, he says it in a way to massacre and make fun of and mock philosophy. He says that philosophy has ignored the most important idea that’s behind all thought: weather. And then he goes on to brag elsewhere that ‘While some have an evil eye, I have an evil ear. Like those dogs or other beasts who can hear storms coming from afar, I also have that capacity.’ It’s this almost childlike understanding that your thoughts do change if it’s raining or snowing or whether you’re in the desert or a jungle or a forest or a cave or an island. These climatological circumstances matter, for the types of colouring of thought that take place. What I would say is, if you take any of these figures, for all of their aphoristic diversity — and you can find this with Nietzsche as well, where he can entertain multiple styles, multiple genres, multiple modalities of thought, many of which contradict one another — why is it that, even so, you can always recognise that it’s Nietzsche or Shamlu from a mile away? No matter what they’re saying, no matter what direction or horizon of thought they’re catapulting themselves towards, you can always recognise a certain signature, a certain presence to them, that hangs like a very familiar cloud. Even if they’re amorphous, shapeshifting. And that’s a paradox that I wanted to explore as well. I’ve tested myself, you can take these ten authors, you can line up thousands of passages of each of them anonymously, without their names attached to them. And I would bet on myself being able to get a perfect score on who’s who. And that has to do with tone, that has to do with mood, that a certain way of dealing with the concept is a way of carrying yourself. Each one of them has their own way of carrying themselves. And this is why, to go against the Platonic privileging of depth, appearance becomes vitally important to me, at the level of what Nietzsche calls style.
Style is not just some flamboyant aesthetic property, it’s an existential way of how you’re going to look in the world. I always say this: there’s a certain rare breed of my favourite writers, the men and women who populate my thoughts and haunt them constantly — they always look the way they’re supposed to look. Artaud looks like Artaud is supposed to look, Bataille looks like Bataille is supposed to look, Kafka looks like Kafka, Beckett looks like Beckett, Clarice Lispector looks like Lispector. And that is not an accident, that’s not my projection. They turn their face into an apparatus of conveyance so that the so-called interior realm of thought becomes a skin or mask that they are constantly in the process of developing, and they exude it. So for me that is the notion of the concept.
I do like the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of the concept as a passcode or a password that steals you into certain territories, otherwise forbidden or otherwise unknown territories of thought. But then I like it even more as a kind of armour or disguise. Michel Serres has the beautiful notion of the blank domino or the skeleton key, as a kind of existential action or process. He says the reason why the skeleton key can open any door in the house is because of its radical blankness, its smoothness. It isn’t any one thing and so it can become everything. It’s a very simple principle, but it’s quite essential. And for me, mania is a treatment of philosophical concepts that follows that kind of notion: it invents a kind of disguise or a mask that serves the purpose of getting you through a terrain, often a difficult terrain. So that’s the utility of the concept at that level, and that’s why it has to constantly fracture and bifurcate and transmutate into other concepts. If you’re doing the job right and you’re not in a philosophical vacuum where you’re just sitting in a room contemplating stuff, you actually have to move in the world, then you have to allow the concept to continually advance, evolve, fall apart. Otherwise you’ll get owned, and broken.
AI: Something that I noted down was your reference, in the introduction, to your literary work as a martial art. In your other books, very explicitly, all the way back to The Chaotic Imagination, there’s this emphasis on tactics, on literary and conceptual tactics: tactics, not strategy. So I find this very interesting, this metaphor of being in a warlike situation, this need to survive long enough to get to the other side of a compromised territory. It’s a really compelling metaphor for writing.
JBM: I think that there has to be a consistency and continuity, that’s what Robin picks up on when he talks about an underlying continuity to the work, that sometimes you find in disparate places, you find threads connecting or forming spiderwebs. But simultaneously there also has to be an improvisational ability, which goes hand in hand with it.
Every great mystical martial artist or every great craftsman will tell you this, you spend almost a lifetime being able to master the forms, precisely so as to become formless one day. If they’re a good master, that’s their prescription, that’s the improvisational moment. Any great jazz teacher can tell you that as well. You know the scales, you know the notes, and then you depart from it at some point, and you improvise. But that improvisation is not the randomness or cheap chaos of just finding a saxophone on the side of the street and blowing noise through it. It’s the process of precisely, [finding] that willed forgetting, that willed oblivion, the omnicidal moment that marks the higher stages of creativity. It brings me back to that aphorism that it’s a straight line to the infinite, and that’s Nietzsche’s preoccupation with tightrope walking, which is a very crucial sort of balancing act that then gets you to the breakaway or the faraway or the radical outside of thought and of being.
RM: One last question to tackle possibly two misconstruals of what you’re doing in the book. I think you’ve done a great job of disabusing us of the idea that this is somehow a nihilistic book in any kind of simplistic, negative sense. There seem to me to be two possible remaining snares.
One would be to confuse the omnicidal impulse you’re exploring here with a romantic line of abolition that’s central to twentieth-century Western thought and almost, one could say, has been revealed to be the core of the destiny of the West. It seems to me that your proposal is that the literature, thought and the poetry of the Middle East is able to wield the impulse to extremity in a very different fashion.
And then on the other side, the other snare would be, not to put it too crudely, to somehow associate the question of the extreme with contemporary discourse on “extremism.” We could talk about the idea that Wahhabism is inherently disposed to the germination of the maniacal and omnicidal, what we’d refer to as fanaticism. And indeed that’s connected to some of the figures of the imaginary of the Middle East that you use in the book, for example the desert, and Reza Negastani has written on this in the past. So I think it would be interesting to hear how you steer away from both of these traps and how neither of those is precisely what’s going on in the book.
JBM: Firstly, to start out with your foreword to the book, you make a very quick but essential point: you raise a question of to what extent we should try and perceive some type of dire connection or relationality between the thought of figures like Nietzsche and Bataille and fascism. And I would say that there’s a parallel, in the same way that I would answer the question of how a figure like Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, or Adonis or Joyce Mansour any of those, contends with ideological and political vehicles, like those of Wahhabist or Islamic extremism.
I would say that the answers to those questions almost fall along the same axis, which is that there are false resemblances because they seem to be both playing at intense registers. But I would remind you that Nietzsche is one of the most vulnerable and masochistic thinkers that you could possibly imagine. And so for me, I don’t see even any parallelism to fascism and utopian racial self-exultation. In the same way, Mahmoud Darwish used to live among individuals he knew who would become suicide bombers. He has poems, by the way, that are devoted to that, devoted to a kind of dialogue with them. It’s a very careful one where what I note is that he fully understands them, he understands the origin and atrocity of their being and their ultimate nihilistic purpose, but he differentiates himself and he differentiates the poetic sphere entirely from the realm of the suicide bomber, even though he will write poetry to try and elucidate that phenomenon. I would say that we have to be very careful, because I precisely think these are the figures that have maintained a kind of exceptional immunity to precisely the political and social plagues of modernity that you’re alluding to. Even though it seems like they partake of the same currency sometimes, of violent fantasy or ideas of destruction. (But remember, once again, they’re the ones that are usually utopian.) Whereas the first people who fall under erasure in the apocalyptic poetry and philosophy that I try and clarify are the poets themselves. They’re the first to disappear, they don’t remain to rule over a dead world, which is the paranoiac fantasy of, let’s say, a Stalinist. If you let that pathological neurotic paranoia of the dictator loose ad infinitum, ultimately he will purge everyone, until there’s no one left on Earth but himself, to rule over a dead world, because the only truly perfect world, where there are no exceptions of suffering, inequality, injustice, treason, is a dead world. That is precisely, I don’t want to say diametrically opposite, but in many ways it is, to the vitalism and enlivening possibilities that these poetic figures are attempting to resurrect. So there’s that one thing.
The second is — I’m exactly with you — this is not some fantasy of transcendence [or] some aesthetic sort of transcendence that I’m trying to look after here. It’s almost impossible to do that in the so-called Middle East, in those regions. Every day you are surrounded by figures with machine guns, with governments that are flagrantly apparent in your everyday world, with the possibility of night raids on your apartment or confiscations of your work, or again, arrest. These things, they penetrate continually, so it’s not as if they don’t know what they’re up against or feel like they’ve found some other place. I take Nietzsche’s warning seriously. I’ve never seen anyone else quote this line and I think it’s the most devastating line that I could imagine: ‘There is only one world.’ And the other half of that equation is, there is only one world, and they own it.
So you have to be ultra-vigilant and wakeful. You can’t entertain that “No, I’m just in my own mind, I’m in my own imagination,” sort of artistic attitude. I can’t stand that kind of hipster Western delusion that I hear articulated sometimes that has pseudo-spiritual and new age trash associated with it, the kind of stupid younger brother of mysticism. I look at it and I say ‘No, these are forms of ultra-vigilance, because reality is already a house of cards built on apparitional forms.’ That’s the emperor’s new clothes. All it takes is the child’s utterance, saying the emperor is naked, and the whole thing collapses. A breath of air is enough to unmask the frailty of these socio-political forms that are lethal, that are genocidal, but nevertheless built on nothing but, again, diversions and self-delusions. So, willed illusion becomes a kind of weaponry or, as Amy says, a tactical arrangement against these modalities. And for this, just to quote one other Western philosopher who I think is quite important here, Baudrillard absolutely thinks the perfect crime, as he calls it, or rather the way of engaging the perfect crime of the murder of reality, is precisely by becoming a cipher, becoming increasingly enigmatic, increasingly chimerical, increasingly illusory. That’s his prescription on the perfect crime in a chapter called ‘Radical Thought’. He says: ‘Don’t decipher. Cipher. Become more unintelligible.’ And I think that for him, it’s a wonderful manifesto and prescription as he sketches the parameters of the Age of Simulation, these figures in Omnicide are the ones that actually devise the mechanisms and the performativities that get you from one place to another in a bad sense.
AI: This discussion is recapitulating, in a way, the conclusion of the book, which is a discussion of the end of the trajectory of the maniac. This vector that you draw from mania to annihilation that you call ‘manic fatality’, ultimately ending in the space of omnicide. There’s this idea that everyone, all of these maniacs, all of these manias, end up with some kind of vision of the destruction of the world, which also computes as a destruction of totality itself, or a symbolic destruction of the universal. But at the same time as enacting this vision — and in your conclusion to the book you list the different speeds at which the end of the world might take place, the different times in might take place, the different moods under which it might take place — there’s this kind of persistent perpetuation of the list, right up to the very last pages of the book. So there’s an impossibility of conclusion that’s contained within the ultimate notion of conclusion.
I like that paradox. It’s this interesting kind of connection of mania to fatality through an oppositional structure that operates not as a division, as most oppositional structures do, but as a link. This idea that the only way that you can think about the end of the world is to infinitely perpetuate the storytelling of the end. You talk about this notion of the “last storyteller,” of all storytellers wanting to tell the last story, at the same time as you’re performing the impossibility of the last story taking place.
JBM: Absolutely, you captured it perfectly. First of all, we know avant-garde movements throughout history that found liberation in the burning of their own works would set fire to their canvases, to their paintings, to their sculptures, to their texts, so as to guarantee another round. Annihilation here is not a one-time affair, it’s not the last annihilation, that’s why it’s not death. That’s why Socrates, I think, mistakes the task or imperative of philosophy as learning to die well. I think it’s actually learning to kill well. Learning how to die many times in that regard. Each one of them willed in different terms.
So this is something that we don’t need Socrates, or even avant-garde artists, to figure out. Children know this intuitively, in the most beautiful ways: the art of demolition. You’ll spend four hours with them in their toy room building a city out of blocks, and then they’ll stomp all over it and destroy it. And they do it joyfully, they do it with elation, and you’re sitting there frustrated at the loss of productive time, you think of it as waste, but they see it as the whole intent of the project to begin with. You only build sandcastles near the waves, precisely to see the disintegration. And often the child cries, even though they intentionally built them too close to the waters. That’s also the beauty and the tragedy of the mourning act that takes place. The ecstasy and radical sadness, or what Nietzsche calls ‘The drunken happiness of dying at midnight.’ It’s precisely what you’ve isolated here, which is that it’s only willed annihilation or earned annihilation, you have to perform annihilation at its outer registers, that guarantees you the right of return.
It’s only through the prism of annihilation that we find ourselves awarded with the ability to return.
RM: We seem to have traversed a span of subjects that does justice to the dizzying perplexity of this remarkable book. For me, it’s been incredibly elucidating, and I hope for readers of the book it will provide some extra material to help them navigate the work. The book is Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh.
Thanks very much Jason for joining me, and thanks Amy for joining too.
AI: Thanks, Robin.
JBM: It’s my pleasure to speak with both of you, and my sincere thanks to those of you out there reading it and also to the two of you above all else for honouring this work. Thank you, it means a great deal.
So it is that this archaeological inquiry into a certain fragile strand of thought positions us at a point where one departs from the world, and then takes the world down alongside oneself, in the name of the infinitesimal. The particular will forever menace the universal. The last conflagration spreads from the flares of a lone ember, or a match struck one night amid the metaphysical freefall of a lover (of staircases, mirrors, diagrams, clocks, ghosts, gold, etc.). Anything might serve to undo the everything, any seemingly innocent sliver of a wish that, having reached its highest elevation, then slides inexorably to the zero-degree where no one dwells—or the Someone who has become No One. For make no mistake, It lives here, feeds here, delights and dies here; It holds the ring of keys, and falls beneath their weight. Perhaps the maniac is the only true keeper of the promise.
—Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 13–14.
FURTHER READING
“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.”
Biographies on the poets, mystics, artists and exiles engaged for Omnicide:
Sadeq Hedayat
Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) was an Iranian writer, translator and critic. Born in Tehran, Hadayat moved to Paris to study engineering and was exposed to the pathogenic works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Hedayat devoted the rest of their short life to transmuting fascination with death and affection for Kafka through a close study of Iranian folk tales into brilliant writing of obsession and awe.
The Blind Owl (Grove Press, 1957)
Three Drops of Blood (Alma Books, 2013)
Reda Bensmaia
Reda Bensmaia (1944-present) is an academic and writer, born in Algeria, now based in America. A poet of exile, a critic of colonialism and fanaticism.
The Year of Passages (University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
Adonis
Adonis (1930-present) is a poet from Syria. One of the most revered poets of our time. Birds sing in awe of the magnitude of pages hosting Adonis’ contribution to literature, as author, editor, translator and critic.
The Pages of Day and Night (Northwestern University Press, 2000)
A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse University Press, 2004)
Joyse Mansour
Born in England, the Egyptian-French Joyse Mansour (1928-1986) was a figure of the French Surrealist movement who wrote a provocative, visceral poetry, a poetry of bodies and goddesses, death and desire.
Essential Poems and Writings (Black Widow Press, 2008)
Forogh Farrokhzad
Forogh Farrokhzad (1934-1967) was a controversial and provocative writer and film maker that pushed the boundaries of language and behaviour in a restrictive and patriarchal literary culture, a poet of protest and rebellion.
A Lonely Woman: Forogh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (Three Continents Press, 1987
Ibrahim al-Koni
Ibrahim al-Koni (1948-present) is a writer from Southern Libya who was raised in the company of desert mystics. Al-Koni learnt Arabic at the age of 12, studied Dostoevsky in Russia, and has since lived in Switzerland, producing a vast output of desert stories, desert poems, desert aphorisms and desert insights.
The Bleeding of the Stone (Interlink, 2002)
The Seven Veils of Seth (Garnet Publishing, 2008)
Ahmad Shamlu
The dissident poet, writer and journalist Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000), has had profound influence on the development of modern Persian literary culture.
Born Upon the Dark Spear (Contra Mundum Press, 2015)
Ghada Samman
Born in Syria, Ghada Samman (1942-present) is a journalist, novelist and feminist, writing extensively on civil war, on Beirut. Samman was censored in Lebanon and wrote of exile in Paris.
Beirut Nightmares (Quartet Books, 1976)
Mahmoud Darwish
The national poet of Palestine is Mahmoud Darwish (1948-2008), the author of the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Darwish wrote poetry of the homeland.
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (University of California Press, 2003)
Hassan Blasim
Hassan Blasim (1973-present) is a film director and writer. Born in Baghdad, Blassim made a film in 1998 called Wounded Camera about Saddam Hussein’s forced resettlement of Kurdish people. This movie attracted the attention of government informants, and Blassim left Iraq as a refugee, walking across Iran into Turkey and travelling illegally across Europe before being granted asylum in Finland. Blassim writes stories of war, trauma and persecution.
The Madman of Freedom Square (Carcanet Press, 2010)
Iraqi Christ (Comma Press, 2003)