Intro to Disaster Theory

Rough draft

Where the danger is, there the saving power also – Hölderlin

Disaster theory is a method for those masochistic types who find the best way to learn to be the hard way. Post-structuralism and accelerationism share a symptom of rolling around in a condition that cannot be overcome, this takes many forms: nihilistic, opulent, melancholic, but the gyration remains the same. Bataille established those stacks of hay, it was only Baudrillard, the black gnostic, who took the mantel onwards because he put aside the Spinozist mask so worn out by Deleuze of saying “not technically evil, ethically good!” and, like Bataille, said without apology, “evil.”

Disaster theory does not roll around the dirt but drives towards a cataclysmic break from which the horizon becomes clear, acceleration was never the task itself but a trick to create bottomless seas of error from which breaks may occur. Spinoza’s deepest error was that life only strives to preserve itself, this mistake (ignored by any radical reading of Spinoza) lends itself towards utilitarian and Darwinian notions of life as a sickly little narcissistic thing, this notion of life is quite sound logically but foreign to those who have exchanged with death as life loves to expend itself, waste, and explode. Life gathers resources not to guard them like a windswept Barron but to unleash them, Deleuze’s Nietzsche book correctly assesses that power is a laceration to those who have it and a temptation to those who do not.

The foundational text of disaster theory is Schelling’s Of Human Freedom which is unique in theology for turning theodicy on its head saying that evil exists not for human freedom but for divine freedom (a freedom in which human evil participates as a shadow thereof). The text states “Good and evil are the same, only regarded from different aspects; evil in itself, that is regarded at the root of its identity, is goodness; just as goodness regarded in its division or non-identity is evil”. Evil takes itself for a whole, which is goodness, and goodness divided is evil. This is the meaning of the crescent moon (a discovery for which I would have been paid dearly if I was alive in the Ottoman Empire). Goodness must constantly divide itself to be free and these contractions roam around, contract themselves, and are sucked back in as further contractions continue, this is the Schelling spiral, God’s freedom. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are the modern shadows of this contraction.

Disaster theory advocates a sort of becoming-angel in finding one’s place in these contractions and driving them forward, relentlessly, opposing God to eventually become closer to God. Any discussion of Phenomenology of Spirit that does not take masochism into account is astray and any account of masochism that does not take theology into account likewise. We quote Heidegger at length:

“Being itself hurls man into this breaking-away, which drives him beyond himself to venture forth toward being, to accomplish being, to stabilize, it in the work, and so hold open the essent as a whole. Therefore the violent one knows no kindness and conciliation (in the usual sense); he cannot be mollified or appeased by success or prestige. In all this the violent, creative man sees only the semblance of fulfilment, and this he despises. In willing the unprecedented, he casts aside all help. To him disaster is the deepest and broadest affirmation of the overpowering.” – Introduction to Metaphysics, p.163

From this it becomes clear how acceleration is a detraction of Heraclitus. Forward at any cost, any destination. The black sun is a wheel. Much has been said on how protestantism haunts modernity but not enough on how it haunts postmodernity too which only goes further in the same iconoclasm and likewise reached the same impasse where it no longer wants to go further because it now is at risk of the flames. Disaster theory, like anything primordial, seems to appear from both the ancient past and the distant future, it seeks towards that primitive innocence in which “there is no dialectic and no unconscious” (Mirror of Production, p.49) and might we add, no fetish (which is just another word for dialectic or vice versa). Disaster is not an end itself but a method of unveiling, as Heidegger states “nihilism is essentially the history of the promise, of how being itself is saved in secret” (Metaphysics and Nihilism, p.191), the more it is lost the more it is realized as that which is lost; Hölderlin’s saving grace.

This is why the answer is not to split sadism and masochism apart as per Deleuze but rather to invert the unity, sadomasochism is slave morality that settles with hurting itself to divert itself from hurting others, but masochisadism (my term) is a laceration in which others are hurt accidentally in the fulfilment of Schelling’s spirals and stabilization of the work. When one is consumed in unveiling as such an accidental magnetism forms in which others are attracted (and become resentful and hurt) by the excess, the spillage, rather than intent (and their pain may well call them into their own Schelling spirals). Beauty hurts ugliness without intending to whereas with ugliness there is always intent, Prometheus didn’t steal the fire out of contempt towards the gods but the punishment always comes with contempt. Read again the Introduction to Metaphysics quote above and it should be clearer that masochisadism is a travellers affliction, gypsy blood is royal (Anti-Oedipus, pp.94-95), expansive and forward moving, whereas sadomasochism is inverted, repeats the same old traumas (the bullied become the bullies etc.) and only goes outward to inflict itself, thus never really going outward, whilst masochisadism does spill, it is not inflicted on any but itself, it does not roll around in an enclosure like a pig, but journeys and accidentally breaks in the process drawing in and setting off other movements.

Hence we say Nietzsche is the vehicle of Schelling’s theodicy, Nietzsche’s trick is to ignite dynamites whilst stumbling others into thinking their baseness is vindicated by his work. Being & Time has a unique analysis on the double, the doppelganger, the daemon, depending on how one looks at it, discussing the uncanniness of being called by something that comes from outside and inside, something that is both you and not you (pp.320-321). Eventually we would like to expand on this with a part 2 to Bataille’s Literature and Evil with ‘Literature and the Double’, Nietzsche and Zarathustra being the prime case. What Deleuze & Guattari refer to as ‘philosophical personae’ (What is Philosophy?) is only their frigidness regarding occult concepts and towards this double, the daemon, which due to being too immersed in modernity they can only approach with irony, for the daemon is more than a personae which is more fitting of a term rather for that which relates to the daemon. Dasein is not just primordially guilty because of death (Being & Time, p.354) but also because it is part daemon, part not, and is always confronted with this bipolarity. Disaster theory is a method in sacrificing yourself, your personae, to your daemon, of letting the one become two and letting the two become nth. Rather than allow death to be silenced by the priest or the doctor (Symbolic Exchange, p.183), the daemon is death’s voice, the daemon is disaster, and unlike the monolithic silence death is vibrant and plural – there are of course at least two kinds of suicide, metaphorically speaking, that fit directly onto sadomasochism and our masochisadism.

With Bataille we understand that death is modernity’s blind-spot and that an “infinitesimal injection of death would immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value would completely collapse” (Symbolic Exchange, p.154) but we do not go twerking it around and seeking it anywhere (the mistake of absolute deterritorialization is the same mistake as the black sun), spenders keep it frosty, spenders buttress the fortress of the fetish even and especially when they know there’s nothing inside. There is a time and place for divine stupidity (which we intend to discuss in Literature and the Double) but the point of learning the hard way is to learn.

The soul is undiscovered

though explored forever

to a depth beyond report

– Heraclitus

Eyes are the ultimate fetish, it is stupid that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is read as relativism rather than testament to the fact that beholding beauty makes one beautiful. Bataille’s Story of the Eye came very close to seeing that the eyes are yoni, eyes are to the yoni what the phallus is to the member in psychoanalysis. The unconscious motivation of iconoclasm is to limit the penetrative impact of icons, the attention economy is a ceaseless penetrative violence (that’s the real meaning of post-consent society), gone are the days of propaganda, now all that matters is getting mindfucked as an end in itself. To cultivate your daemon, to find your disaster, you must shield your eyes and selectively glance. It is not for magnificence that we cultivate the double but rather for an “even greater insignificance” (Intelligence of Evil, p.60).

The waking have one world

in common. Sleepers

meanwhile turn aside, each

into a darkness of their own

- Heraclitus

It was Zarathustra’s contraction to learn that you cannot put something into the false dream to make it real and anything put into the false dream becomes flat like the rest. Guard your daemon. Not out of malice towards others, but love for itself. Spenders keep it frosty. Schelling’s spiral teaches that universal freedom is contrarily a deeply separated event (Logic of Sense, p.204). Attentive readers will notice the similarity between disaster theory so far and Descartian anteriors, both as techniques of dissimulation, but unlike the Dionysians these are not demolitions upon the human sciences towards the erasure of the human form but rather demolitions to set the human form free of these mechanic constraints that go by the name human to rediscover the darkness of the night in which all cows become black and that darkness that emerges from excesses of light (Bataille, On Nietzsche). For the human is the most uncanny of them all which explains the human all too human need to transcend it, to codify it, to lock it away, bury it, every dream of the outside comes from within – Dark Feuerbach.

Introduction to Metaphysics. Heidegger. Yale University Press. 1959

Metaphysics and Nihilism. Heidegger. Polity. 2022

Being and Time. Heidegger. Blackwell. 1962

Of Human Freedom. Schelling. Open Court. 1936

Mirror of Production. Baudrillard. Telos Press. 1975

Intelligence of Evil, or, The Lucidity Pact. Baudrillard. Berg. 2005

Symbolic Exchange and Death. Baudrillard. Sage. 1993

Anti-Oedipus. D&G. Continuum. 2007

Logic of Sense. Deleuze. Continuum. 2004