Conspirinalia of a Ruptured Godhead

Promotional art from the videogame Mini Ninja.

Conspiracy.

Late Middle English conspire: from Old French conspirer, from Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot’, from con- ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe’. Spirare also being the root of spiritus, meaning ‘breath’ but also ‘spirit.’

Let me suggest a floating relationship between that which is split, broken, ruptured, partial, fragmentary, and that which is social, collective, multi-hosted.

Let me invoke the sacred conspiracies of our past and future: the conspiracy of equals, the cult which sought simultaneously to proclaim and to recognize and to bring about the manifestation of the spectre of communism, the diggers, the early anti-Pauline Jesus movement, the Underground Railroad, the Spartacus League, the Bois Caïman, the gift of Prometheus, the flight of Raven, the truth-telling Serpent, and every derelict withholding of labor and sidelong glance and breakroom grumbling which circulate in opposition to the extractive operations of Capital.

What is sundered may also be joined, not just as it was—never precisely as it was—but in a multitude of new, unexpected, defiant formations. What is broken is simultaniously the creation of a new space. what is withdrawn is simultaniously a provocation of the void, the battlecry of negation, the sacred designs of the new.

What harms itself also has the potential to remake itself, to rewire and rewrite and realize the conditions of its own transformation.

We must become, we must realize we have always been becoming, singular and multiple self-changing machines.

Object of Attack: the political subject, as a unified, self-serving and coherency seeking apparatus.

We Have Never Been Ourselves: We have always been becoming, and resisting, and destroying, and replacing the infrastructure of our percpetion and actualization.

Terrain: the self-harmer, the cutter, the suicidal, the traitor. In particular I am interested in the ways self-harm has been imagined, constructed, invoked in the medical-industrial complex, the way we confound ourselves, bamboozle and drug ourselves with stupefying paradoxes, as to the contradiction of and thereby become absent and ignorant to our own necessary and ongoing self-destruction, self-denial, self-absence.

I remember when i began to go mad. I was friends with an unreconstructed neo-Kantian who insisted that, because of the inherent contradiction between I-want and to-die, true suicidality was inconceivable and (conceivability being presumed to be guide and guardian of the possible) therefore impossible. Fair enough. But what he failed to take into account is that impossibility is the very condition and demand of madness, that first and inescapable madness which exists behind every psychic structure, the unjustifiable decision to make a decision, to invest out of nothing one’s existence with normative, prescriptive, valuative content where fact alone is stipulated. The synthetic a priori commitment to self-actualization, self-affirmation, out of which the sage, the mad, the dead, and the gods alone stand have been forcibly liberated.