In 1993, Nick Land writes: “It is probably relatively uncontroversial to conclude from all this that Derrida is not a werewolf.”
What is a werewolf?
In Spirit and Teeth, Nick Land, the cyber-philosopher of accelerationism, jungle music, amphetamines, as well as Mark Fisher’s teacher, describes werewolves as fierce, vulgar, and absolutely distanced “from all concern for decency or justice,” creatures who “are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension.” The philosophy of such a race of semi-humans and rat-poets — such as Georges Bataille, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Trakl, and Emil Cioran — is a precipitation towards zero, always-already downwards.
The poet-werewolf-rat-genius is a plague of the spirit. Its reproduction is epidemic, not ruled by any hermeneutic seriousness: the virulence of anti-academism.
According to Nick Land, at the time lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Jacques Derrida is yet another aristocratic professor of Philosophy who, like Martin Heidegger, did not understand anything of the plague of language that is Georg Trakl’s poetry. In Jacques Derrida, hell and apocalypse are always deferred to later. For, in the end, Jacques Derrida despises all that is dirty, cruel, or feral, all that is low or bestial. Derrida is not a representative of the inferior race which Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, wrote about in A Season in Hell. Too much time is taken in order to ask metaphysical questions with neither claws nor fangs. Too much spirit, not enough teeth.
“Deconstruction must give way to decomposition,” reads the introduction to Spirit and Teeth. Then, the spirit must sharpen its teeth.
*
Emil Cioran was a misanthrope, an essayist, and a lycanthrope. Cioran was not a philosopher, but the curse of Western thought. The thought of this hellish writer does not offer any system or paradigm. What theory and philosophy are good for is only failure and dejection. Words bite back and reproduce like a plague. Philosophy is dreadfully without any meaning; from this ruination, from the absolute failure of thought, there returns the other meaning of being.
In Spirit and Teeth, Nick Land writes: “To become a werewolf one must be bitten by another werewolf.” For Georg Trakl, it was Arthur Rimbaud. For Emil Cioran (who will make a ruthless and original critique of the latter) it was, so it would seem, Friedrich Nietzsche. Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, is yet to be bitten; Jacques Derrida is yet to become a werewolf.
The spirit starts to grow its fangs.
*
The difference between teeth and spirit, hell and heaven, is not so much an onto-theological difference, but one of pure intensity. Emil Cioran’s rotten corpse and Derrida’s spirit: ether and bile; light and vomit; spirit and fangs. Nothing more than a question of intensity.
The symbolic and the diabolic represent two such intensities. The symbolic is the return of being to presence, to the law of metaphysics, to the order of the Apollonian. The symbolic is what is sym- “together” and ballein “to throw.” Being thus returns to the light of the Sun, to the triumph of representation (even if the return is deferred ad infinitum). The diabolic, on the other hand, is the failure of being, the decomposition of the sign, the anarchy of a fire without light. The diabolic, from the Ancient Greek, dia- “through” and ballein “to throw,” is what is separate and remains so. The apocalypse of signification as such. The diabolic devours being in a hellish bath of fire; but such destruction is already nothing other than being itself.
Jacques Derrida, the philosopher of the symbolic and the return without end, and Emil Cioran, the philosopher of the diabolic, are together the spirit and teeth of being and language, Apollonian and xeno-Dionysian, the light of fire and the ashes that always burn from below with even greater intensity and heat.
Emil Cioran always bites Jacques Derrida. “To achieve his ends, the Devil, being dogmatically [and metaphysically] minded, sometimes employs the strategy of borrowing the procedures of skepticism,” writes Emil Cioran in an essay aptly titled “Is the Devil a Skeptic?” from The Fall Into Time. The diabolic already writes with Jacques Derrida’s left hand. “Nonetheless, though he knows it well, the Devil never enjoys doubt, indeed he fears it so much that we cannot be certain he actually wants to suggest it, to inflict it upon his victims.”
*
In the 8th century A.D., iconoclasts burned the sacred images, cut off the heads and hands of the idols, set buildings on fire. The iconoclast is a rat-saint; the ashes smear what was always lower, what was inferior and inhuman: the animals and the infernal beasts of mosaics and frescoes; multiple beings who were not already annihilated by fire, because they were unworthy of the devastation of being; the black and blue of the ashes, the negative of the flame.
The diabolic is already beyond being and representation. It is the revulsion and disgust of the spirit: what is always other. The stench of alterity; the diabolic saturates the air with sulphurous smoke. The diabolic is not an absence but, rather, the rejection of representation as such. Low materialism in every sense of the term.
The word spirit, that word which according to Nick Land is either a parody or another joke of being, is the same dirt that is left on the stone and the wall. The failure of nothingness, the grime of representation, the blackness of the shadow: the fall into what is other. The anti-vertigo of hell. But then the impossibility of dying, such spiritualism, is paradoxically more than death itself. It is the ruin that ends with Friedrich Nietzsche, the rat-Antichrist, but forever returns to torment language.
The spirit is devouring and devoured without end.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cioran, E. M. (1970). The Fall Into Time (Trans. R. Howard). Chicago: Quadrangle Books. (Original work published 1964).
Cioran, E. M. (1998). On the Heights of Despair (Trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston). Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1934).
Derrida, J. (2014). Cinders (Trans. N. Lukacher). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1987).
Derrida, J. (2010). Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question. (Trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby). Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1987).
Land, N. (1993). Spirit and Teeth. In D. Wood (Ed.), Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (pp. 41–55). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Rimbaud, A. (1945). A Season in Hell (Trans. L. Varèse). New York: New Directions. (Original work published 1873).
Wood, D. (1993). Responses and Responsibilities: An Introduction. In D. Wood (Ed.), Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (pp. 1–10). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
An early version of this article was published in the Italian magazine Charta Sporca.
Alessandro Sbordoni was born in Cagliari in 1995. He is the author of The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (2nd edition, Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023) and Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He lives in London and works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.
Blue Labyrinths 