The Unrecyclable Ontology of Nihilism: Tiqqun’s “Annihilation of Nothingness,” Georges Bataille’s Conception of Death, and David McNally’s Living Dead by Alden Alden Wood For the Marxist cultural critic David McNally, the prolieration o cultural orms utilizing the character-trope character -trope o the zombie points to a deepseated social anxiety about the catastrophism undergirding the dominance o late-capi late-capitalism. talism. He argues that the figure o the zombie, or the living dead, aesthetically mirrors the death-like alienation rom one’s own existential experience o living within late-capitalism. Tus, the prolongation o “lie” beyond death is complicit in the pervasive prolieration o late-capitalist power dynamics, but it also paradoxically acts as the very ontological transormation transormation that precludes the dissolution o such domination. Te French philosopher Georges Bataille treats the notion o death as the undamental reality that acts as a delimiting orce exerting itsel upon lie. For Bataille, death is inherently restorative as it dissipates the existential interruption he posits is caused by lie. Te French autonomistautonomistMarxist journal iqqun iqqun argues that the only recourse to the totalizing domination o latecapitalism is to embrace the latent nihilism inherent in late-capitalist power dynamics as a
way to negate these very orces. In their essay “Silence and Beyond,” iqqun argues that since late-capitalism late-capi talism is already a social soci al space which is inhabited by the living dead, the only position o attack lef to anticapi anticapitalists talists is one which paradoxically attempts to negate the very nihilism inherent within late-capitalism itsel. By situating such an argument against McNally’s analysis o the living dead, and tempered by Bataille’s treatment o death, iqqun’s position here begins to appear as one that eschews prescriptive affirmations o non-capitalist alterities (arguing that there is no ontological or political outside to the dominance o late-capitalism) and instead argues that only the affirmative negativity o late-capitalism’s complete nihilistic destruction can usher in the very prerequisites or its transcendence. According to both McNally and iqqun, a definitive logic o nihilistic catastrophism has begun to emerge within the sociopolitical space o late-capitalism. It It is a space in which capitalist commodity exchange relations have effectively created a rhizomatic network o dominance
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across the entirety o the world in the twentyfirst century; so much so, that as iqqun claims, it is now the era o the “authoritarian commodity” or the completion o capitalism’s quest or “real subsumption.” For Marx, “real subsumption,” as opposed to “ormal subsumption,” constituted the historical moment in which there were no longer any pre-capitalist orms o production to be orcibly integrated into the capitalist schema.1 For iqqun, the era o the “authoritarian commodity” is that in which the commodity-etish, that metaphysical obuscation o exchange relations taking the place o authentic social relations, becomes normalized and totalized. It is within this sociopolitical space o catastrophism that the horizon o death ominously looms as the only possible outcome o the destructive impulses o late-capitalism. Paradoxically, death itsel becomes the final ontological obstacle, which late-capitalism attempts to overcome through the complete codification, delineation, and dominance o this last “othered” existential space. Tus, implicit within the rhetoric surrounding discourses o catastrophism is the coalescence o the two supposedly distinct spheres o lie and death. Tis coalescence reveals that lie within late-capitalism’s era o the “authoritarian commodity” is death itsel, and the individuals experiencing this existence as the “living dead” qualitatively lack any traces o authentic lie. In his essay, “Land o the Living Dead: Capitalism and the Catastrophes o Everyday Lie,” McNally argues that the “earliest modern images o the zombie are tied to figures o
mindless labor” (114). He goes on to claim that “this image carried a latent but powerul social criticism: the idea that in capitalist society the majority become nothing but bearers o undierentiated lie energies, dispensed in units o abstract time. Te raison d’être o zombies is the labor they perorm” (116). It is precisely this reduction o lived-experience to abstract labour potential, which inorms the figurative death o such individuals within late-capitalism. Tey are dead in so much as their living is qualitatively devoid o meaning beyond the production o exchange value, which is already metaphysically removed rom use value. McNally describes two dominant representations o the zombie that are explicitly tied to the development o neoliberalism—those o “crazed consumers and lieless laborers” (117). He argues that the older representations o the zombie, specifically those that trace their lineage rom Haitian lore by way o the Western Congo, did not involve the characteristics o cannibalism that have become all but ubiquitous in Western representations o the zombie. McNally traces this development to the rise o consumerculture in the 1960s, specifically in the United States, and argues that it is not until this historical context that zombies begin to mindlessly crave the flesh o the “living.” Tere is something inherently sel-negating in the ever increasing lust or the consumption o living flesh as embodied by the cannibalistic zombie trope o American/European cultural production, as consumption and scarcity differentiates it rom the “colonial” orm o the “lieless laborer” zom-
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bie trope that McNally argues is still prevalent in Arican cultural orms. Te cannibalistic “consumer” zombie encounters problems o scarcity, or it ostensibly ceases to exist itsel i it cannot consume living flesh. Tis problem o scarcity seems to mirror the ecological concerns o resource allocation, procurement, and sustainability so prevalent in late-capitalist discourses o catastrophe. Tus, in the same way that the logic o late-capitalism creates an irreconcilable schism between the realities o consumption in a finite physical world and the theoretical impulses which underlie late-capitalism’s quest or profit accumulation, so too does the cannibalistic “consumer” zombie embody the contradiction o its need to consume more living-flesh and the scarcity which begins to maniest as the direct result o such consumption. McNally hints at the inherent possibility within such cultural renderings o the zombie as a figure that evokes catastrophic anxieties. He argues that “the clash o the manic flesh-eater and the laboring-drone also hints at another startling zombie capacity: rebellion” (123). While his analysis o the emergence o the two types o zombie cultural orms, the cannibalistic consumer zombie o “developed” countries and the mindless-labourer slave zombie o “de veloping” countries is compelling, his depiction o “the truly subversive image o the zombie re volt” is prosaically emblematic o past utopian visions. He uses the image o zombie rebellion as a metaphor or the “everyday work o resistance,” arguing that “revolution grows out o ordinary, prosaic acts o organizing and resistance whose coalescence produces mass upheaval”
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(123). In critiquing the catastrophic opposition to his prescriptive perspective on the maniestation o revolutionary politics, McNally argues that the other “apocalyptic scenario, in which a complete collapse o social organization ushers in a tumultuous upheaval, is ultimately a mystical rather than political one” (124). Tis dismissal o the mystical, o the messianic, in a vour o a purely political rendering o revolt alls into the reductive trap o positing an affirmative counter-logic to capitalism within a social space which is already completely contained, delineated, and dominated by late-capitalism as a space which has no ontological outside. McNally ails to acknowledge that in the figurative-representational space o the zombie, the only act that can negate the cyclical violence o the zombie’s consumption (and by extension the logic o late-capitalism) is the sel-negation o the zombie by its own nihilistic consumption, which inevitably leads to absolute scarcity and the impossibility o its own continued sustenance. McNally’s approach is clearly concerned with the earlier stages o the zombie’s historicocultural development. Tus, his dichotomized and relatively undifferentiated conception o the zombie as a cultural orm overlooks the way in which many zombie representations are currently being depicted across many contemporary cross-cultural genres. Te zombie is undergoing a transition in which it is seemingly synthesizing its olkloric incarnation’s ability to exist indefinitely without the consumption o flesh with the popular Western incarnation’s insatiable desire or the living. Te result is a new zombie orm that no longer needs to consume
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flesh to sustain itsel, yet it continues in its attempts to consume the living. Tis problematizes both McNally’s scarcity-consumption argument and his calling or a “conscious” uprising o the living dead. McNally misconstrues Marx when he argues that “just as, to paraphrase Marx, the working class must negate its own alienated condition i it is to emancipate itsel, so zombie rebels must de-zombiy themselves and acquire consciousness and identity in the process o overturning their degraded state” (126). Te orm o the consumer-zombie already contains within itsel the inevitability o its own destruction, and urther, its own transcendence. It possesses this internal potentiality or sel-negation precisely because it encounters the very limits o scarcity and causes its own destruction through the mindless act o sustaining itsel— the death o the already-dead. Tus, taking this cultural orm and transposing it onto the dispossessed subjects o late-capitalist domination, it is not a question o how to “acquire consciousness and identity” but rather an anti-political, mystical embracing o the nothingness that is latent within the nihilistic contradictions at the core o late-capitalism. Tis destruction o the nihilism undergirding the contradictions o latecapitalist logic through the adoption o nihilism itsel as an ethical position is precisely the course that iqqun argues or in their essay “Silence and Beyond.” iqqun essentially agrees with McNally in the catastrophic analysis o late-capitalism, yet their respective recourses to such a bleak u-
ture could not be more divergent. Whereas McNally argues that the zombie/disenranchised/ proletariat subject o late-capitalism must “acquire consciousness and identity,” iqqun argues that this logic fits precisely within the confines o the biopolitical abric o late-capitalist domination. Borrowing rom Foucault’s work on biopower,2 iqqun argues that with the historical development o capitalism, the disciplinary practices o sovereign power where the “tyrannical enemy . . . draws its power rom its ability to shut people up” have given way to a orm o power (biopower) which expresses “its aptitude to make them talk [ . . . and as a result] has moved its center o gravity rom its mastery o the world itsel to its seizure o the world’s mode o disclosure” (70). Tus, McNally’s claim that in order to effectively challenge late-capitalism all one has to do is analyze its “mystified social relations [ . . . as a means to] disclose what they tell us about the genuinely monstrous, deadening, and zombiying processes to which wage-laborers are subjected in modern society” (127) ails to acknowledge that such modes o disclosure are already codified according to the very logic o late-capitalism itsel. iqqun argues that through the domination o biopower as the delimiting power dynamic concomitant with the rise o post-industrial late-capitalism, all attempts to speak to or disclose “truth” within it merely unction to serve latecapitalism’s primacy. iqqun is writing rom the temporal position o Francis Fukuyama’s “end o history,”3 a position contextualized by the ailures o so-
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cial-democratic reorm, the communist state, and the new lef—all impotently opposed to the supposed totalizing triumph o capitalism. It is within this quasi-atalism that iqqun argues that “even contestation [against capitalism] proves daily how incapable it has been o supporting itsel on that modernization’s uninterrupted avalanche o deeats” (70). iqqun argues that such antagonistic contestations have ailed precisely because anticapitalists have attempted to engage late-capitalism using its own modes o disclosure and recognition. Tey claim that the hypermediated discourse o late-capitalism “only recognizes as a truly existent opposition the opposition that is willing to speak; that is, to speak its language, and hence to subscribe to the alienation o the Common” (71). Here contestation takes on a meta-linguistic component, in that through biopower’s coercive institutional apparatuses, any attempts to contest without the language o political demands have been relegated to the impractical, insane, and anarchic. Yet, what iqqun elucidates at this theoretical juncture is the need to conront the metaphysical nothingness underneath the veneer o “real” late-capitalist social relations with a negating orm o nothingness that is conscious o itsel as such. For as they claim: the real hostility, the metaphysical hostility, which allows neither language nor the moment it will express itsel to be controlled, and which moreover preers silence to any speech, has been pushed back into the shadows o what does not appear and hence does not exist. (71)
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Tus, according to iqqun, the project or the antagonist aligned against capitalism becomes one that must simply be affirmative negation, without any prescriptive qualifiers positively arguing or something to replace capitalism (such as state socialism, alter-globalization, green or sustainable social-democratic welare states, etc). It becomes apparent then that iqqun believes “all ‘social struggles’ are ridiculous” (72), because “they are merely serving what they think they’re challenging” (71). Within such a perspective, a conscious and active nihilism begins to align itsel as, to borrow rom Engels, the negation o the negation.4 Here, an active nihilism conscious o its own potentiality to bring about the destruction o the passive nihilism latent within late-capitalism’s own contradictory nature begins to maniest. Te ormal distinction between active and passive nihilism is merely a question o intentionality. According to this argument, capitalism produces a passive nihilism within the orms it subsumes, as its very logic o control and domination is one that seemingly negates all potentiality or alternatives to capitalism. Active nihilism is thereore first the recognition o this passive nihilism latent within capitalism and the impossibility o escape, ollowed by an enacting o the program-less destruction o this very negation. iqqun writes: “Capitalism produces the conditions or its transcendence, not that transcendence itsel” (70). Tus paradoxically, iqqun at once embraces and eschews the collapsist rhetoric o late-capitalist catastrophism. Inherent within the late-capitalist contradiction
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between the theoretical impulse to maximize profit amidst the reality o finite resource scarcity is the production o the “conditions” or capitalism’s “transcendence.” Yet iqqun seems to be articulating that i such conditions are not met with a conscious ethical orce aware o its potential to hasten the destruction o capitalist relations, then the passive nihilism within latecapitalism will have run its course—resulting in something akin to a series o ecological, social, and political collapses. It is in this way then that iqqun claims that “among those we encounter, we appreciate nothing more than such cold resolution to ruining this world” (70). iqqun’s assumption o an active orm o nihilism within “Silence and Beyond” is paradoxically both an unwilled reaction to the totalizing encroachment o late-capitalist social relations as well as an ethical position which is consciously possessed. Because o this schizoidlike occupation o such an anti-political position, iqqun’s active negation o the metaphysical nature underlying late-capitalism as “the way or crossing the line, the way towards the exit rom nihilism [ . . . and the way] beyond it” (74) proves to be a position that takes on an inherently ontological and existential dimension akin to Georges Bataille’s conception o death. For Georges Bataille, there is a certain existential wholeness that exists outside o the limits that death imposes on lie. Bataille scholar Michael Richardson claims that Bataille’s sensibility is essentially tragic: he reused to accept any possibility o an escape rom the human condition. In the end we
are condemned to death, and to the annihilation o our being. Indeed, ar rom striving against this condition, he believed we should accept it. ragic it may be, but it remained the only truth o our existence. (202) At ace value this essentially pessimistic view o lie seems in stark opposition to the potentiality o transcendence that iqqun posits, yet upon closer juxtaposition both Bataille and iqqun are speaking to the way in which being must ultimately negate itsel. For Bataille, the ontological whole that exists apart rom lie, in death, is quite similar to iqqun’s messianic conception o the communism, which maniests in the active negation o capitalism in its entirety. For iqqun, communism is irreducibly rooted in the becoming-o-negation, the communality that emerges when the predicative identities, individual subjects, values, and moralities all beholden to the simulacra o late-capitalism are stripped away—leaving “only a total, existential hostility” (75). Tis destruction o predicative, simulated ontologies, “by removing them rom their temporal element, strips nude the truth o our times” (iqqun 73). Tis destruction, the active nihilism aligned against late-capitalist domination (passive nihilism), inorms the journal’s very namesake, as they claim: “In the Sabbatean tradition the moment o the general destruction o things was given the name iqqun. In that instant, each thing is repaired and removed rom the long chain o suffering it underwent in this world” (77). Tis is very similar to the way that Bataille views the emergence o cognizant lie as a finite interruption rom the
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pure continuity o infinite existence. Tus, death acts as both the moment o repairing the separation o lie rom death by reintegrating deadlie back into the infinite totality o death and as the totality o death itsel. For Bataille, death is at once a singular moment (an act) and a complete and infinite totality (state o being). In the same way then, iqqun’s advocacy or the active destruction o late-capitalism is the singular moment (the act) that repairs and reintegrates orms-o-lie into the complete and infinite totality o communism (state o being). Tis is a destruction o the vestiges o the sel en masse, done in a communal process o becoming-nothing-together. In “Silence and Beyond” iqqun uses Bataille’s work to elucidate what they deem as the importance o destroying the present state o things. Tey quote Bataille rom Teory of Religion: “All the subsistence existence and toil that permitted me to get there were suddenly destroyed, they emptied out infinitely like a river into the ocean o that one infinitesimal moment” (iqqun 77). Tus death, as the moment o the existential destruction o the sel as well as the moment o reintegration with that which is beyond the narrow confines o human lie, is a messianic bearer o truth—a tenuous position to hold in the midst o postmodernity. Bataille argues that “death actually discloses the imposture o reality, not only in that the absence o duration gives the lie to it, but above all because death is the great affirmer, the wonder-struck o lie . . . Death reveals lie in its plenitude and
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dissolves the real order” (OR 46-47). Tis dissolution o “the real order” through death finds its parallel in iqqun’s contention that “whoever has never experienced one o those hours o joyous or melancholic negativity cannot tell how close to destruction the infinite is” (77). Tus the act o destruction, o an active nihilism, hints at the possibility o transcending the alsity o the temporal present and the reintegration with the infinite. For iqqun late-capitalism and all o the affects bound up within its own displays o simulacra and biopower must be destroyed to be overcome, much in the same way that death or Bataille orms the basis o the reconnection with the existentially infinite. Bataille writes in Inner Experience that “it is by dying, without possible evasion, that I will perceive the rupture which constitutes my nature and in which I have transcended ‘what exists’ . . . Death is in one sense the common inevitable, but in another sense proound, inaccessible” (71-72). Tus, lie or Bataille is a “rupture” which separates and isolates, while death is a “rupture” which joins and repairs. Similarly or iqqun, reedom first comes rom the death-like finitude presupposed by existing within the confines o late-capitalist power dynamics and, secondly, rom attempting to destroy such an ontology. Tey claim that there are indeed those who are “applying nihilism to nihilism itsel,” yet “they still retain, rom their prior state, the eeling that they are living as i they were already dead; but rom this state o indifference concerning the raw act o
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being alive, they draw the ormula or the greatest possible sovereignty, a reedom which is incapable o trembling in the ace o anything anymore” (76). It is thus in this way that iqqun’s program is precisely the abandonment o the very idea o such positive programs, in avour o a revolt or insurrection that is undamentally negative, without demands, silent, and invisible. It is a conception o struggle firmly rooted in the metaphysical negation o everything in “this enemy world” (77). Trough articulating such a highly contentious theoretical position, iqqun acknowledges that such belies warrant placing “a high importance on the orm o the maniestations o negativity that invent a new active grammar o contestation” (72). Central to this “new active grammar” o negativity is an evasion o language’s imposition o meaning. iqqun argues that all previous social movements aligned against latecapitalism mistakenly attempted to speak to latecapitalist domination on its own terms, entering a discourse in which all o the language is already effectively controlled. Tey contend that “the greatest possible demands don’t allow themselves to be ormulated” (76), and in so doing they create an antagonistic position which, through its own inarticulation, evades the propensity o latecapitalist power dynamics to impose meaning and subsequently exert control over that which is being signified. iqqun claims that between the passive nihilism inherent in the contradictions o capitalism as first outlined by Marx himsel and the active nihilism which seeks to destroy all
that exists within the late-capitalist ontology is “the line. And that line is the unspeakable, which imposes silence” (76). Tis “line,” the demarcation between real/simulacra, lie/death, capitalism/communism, must be shrouded in silence, or that which actively negates all that exists must necessarily be complete and total absence, existence’s lack, the void that threatens to assert itsel and thus rejoins the interruption o lie, in Bataille’s terms, to the infinite nature o death. Tus, the lack o language and the signification or imposition o meaning that accompanies it maniests itsel as a negative ethical hostility, which is existentially “the unspeakable” (iqqun 75). iqqun’s argument or silence, a radical negation o all that exists without the prescriptive expression o utopian antasies, proves to be markedly different than the silence/voicelessness that typifies the cultural trope o the zombie. David McNally’s zombies are reduced to the living dead; they are stripped rom both language and existence. Tey are the mirrored metaphor o an ontology under late-capitalism which embodies the complete expenditure o human labour-power entirely or the production o exchange values. Ironically, the only creature capable o existing purely as limitless human labour-power is precisely the figure o the non-human. ransposing his metaphor o the zombie as the dispossessed worker/consumer o late-capitalism, McNally argues the zombie’s voicelessness and lack o language is an expression o its innate oppression. Tus or McNally, the zombie and, by figurative
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extension, the late-capitalist proletariat merely needs an “awakening to consciousness” to turn “the world upside down” (123). iqqun’s position is radically opposed to this view o silence, as they revel in the conscious silence o a nihilism aligned against late-capitalist domination. Tey argue that silence is an offensive position that does not allow “struggle” or “resistance” to enter into the very language and logic o late-capitalism. By consciously disavowing the propensity o resistance to latecapitalism to articulate its political, social, or economic demands, iqqun’s silent antagonism evades the trap o language and the imposition o meaning that accompanies it. It is precisely in this way that the rejection o demands and the resulting conscious silence appears very similar to Georges Bataille’s theoretical conception o death. For Bataille death acts as the transcendent moment in which the interruption o lie is finally reintegrated with the infinite. Tis paral-
lels iqqun’s own communist transcendence, as they claim that only a conscious nihilism can transcend the totality o late-capitalist relations. Tey write that “we cannot transcend nihilism without realizing it, nor realize it without transcending it. Crossing the line means the general destruction o things as such, or in other words the annihilation o nothingness” (77). Tereore, any sociopolitical model that exists alongside capitalism posturing as an “alternative” to it is still within capitalism’s totalizing realm o being. Only capitalism’s complete destruction can oment the beginnings o a post-capitalist alterity. o annihilate the nothingness is the realization o a metaphysical negation o a negation, and according to iqqun it is only through such an act o Bataillean “death” that communism can be realized.
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3
Reer to Section II o “Results o the Immediate Process o Production” included as an appendix in Marx’s Capital: Volume 1.
San Francisco State University
See Fukuyama’s Te End of History and the Last Man. 4
2
Reer to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France as collected in Security, erritory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 and Te Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979.
See Engels’s Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science.
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Works Cited Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience . rans. Leslie A. Boldt. Albany: State University of New York, 1988. Print. ---. Teory of Religion. rans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1992. Print. (cited intext as OR) Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science . rans. Austin Lewis. New York: International Publishers, 1966. Print. Foucault, Michel. Security, erritory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 19771978 . rans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2004. Print. ---. Te Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 . rans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.
Fukuyama, Francis. Te End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Print. Marx, Karl. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Capital: Volume 1. rans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Print. McNally, David. “Land of the Living Dead: Capitalism and the Catastrophes of Everyday Life.” Catastrophism: Te Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth. Ed. Sasha Lilley. Oakland: PM Press, 2012. 108-127. Print. Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille Essential Writings . London: Sage, 1998. Print. iqqun. “Silence and Beyond.” iqqun 1: Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party . Berkeley: LBC Books, 2011. 70-77. Print.
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