unyielding insularity takes itself to
the arena of its own closure, the quasi-incantatory expending of the ‘I’ towards the
crossroads of its own necessary undoing, an over-exhaustion of the Self to the point of its
irrelevance, its self-excising, its reflexive desolation. Moreover, annihilation would by right
represent the most volatile engagement with sacrifice by virtue of conjecturing a province of
consciousness that executes its own fragmentation, seizing upon the force of self-destruction
so as to renovate terminality not as a distanced and alien negativity but as an invariably
creative manifestation of the desire for ungoverned cessation/resurgence. In this sense, the
transition to the chaotic via annihilative subjectivity would also drastically reconfigure the
concept of finality, wrenching it away from its conventional standing as a ruinous juncture of
the mortal condition, an inevitable descent towards nothingness, and instead casting it into
the dynamic region of a becoming. Beholden to a performativity that extends beyond the
abstractions of idealism and transcendentalism, the unreality of annihilative subjectivity, in its
accelerated open-endedness, in its eternal ambiguity, can then convert itself into the very
hallmark of existential resistance, the site of an ultimate confrontation with the ordered, self
devastation now a battlefield upon which consciousness orchestrates its own erosion as an
act of cataclysmic transgression. In consideration of this combative stance, the assertion will
be advanced that such an unmediated experience of the end projects consciousness into an
unruly sphere of suspension whereby its own fading enjoins an irreparable blurring of the
demarcation between possibility and impossibility. From here, with the concept of the Self
now disenfranchised, the work will elaborate an involved analysis of ‘divine fatality’ as a
transformative happening through which subjectivity assumes a godlike disposition only
then to be consumed by the fury of that very state
– Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, extended abstract to The Chaosing: The Annihilation of Consciousness, Shadow-Becoming, and the Midnight of the Unreal, Columbia University, 2004
cf. Brad Brace’s island project
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