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from island to volcano

unyielding insularity takes itself tothe arena of its own closure, the quasi-incantatory expending of the ‘I’ towards thecrossroads of its own necessary undoing, an over-exhaustion of the Self to the point of itsirrelevance, its self-excising, its reflexive desolation. Moreover, annihilation would by rightrepresent the most volatile engagement with sacrifice by virtue of conjecturing a province ofconsciousness that executes its own fragmentation, seizing upon the force of self-destructionso as to renovate terminality not as a distanced and alien negativity but as an invariablycreative manifestation of the desire for ungoverned cessation/resurgence. In this sense, thetransition to the chaotic via annihilative subjectivity would also drastically reconfigure theconcept of finality, wrenching it away from its conventional standing as a ruinous juncture ofthe mortal condition, an inevitable descent towards nothingness, and instead casting it intothe dynamic region of a becoming. Beholden to a performativity that extends beyond theabstractions of idealism and transcendentalism, the unreality of annihilative subjectivity, in itsaccelerated open-endedness, in its eternal ambiguity, can then convert itself into the veryhallmark of existential resistance, the site of an ultimate confrontation with the ordered, self­devastation now a battlefield upon which consciousness orchestrates its own erosion as anact of cataclysmic transgression. In consideration of this combative stance, the assertion willbe advanced that such an unmediated experience of the end projects consciousness into anunruly sphere of suspension whereby its own fading enjoins an irreparable blurring of thedemarcation between possibility and impossibility. From here, with the concept of the Selfnow disenfranchised, the work will elaborate an involved analysis of ‘divine fatality’ as atransformative happening through which subjectivity assumes a godlike disposition onlythen 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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