Nicola Masciandaro

Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised. "Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft "Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda CONTENTS: Steven Shakespeare, "The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling's Underground." Erik Butler, "The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances." Scott Wilson, "BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum." Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, "Transcendental Black Metal." Nicola Masciandaro, "Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya." Joseph Russo, "Perpetue Putesco - Perpetually I Putrefy." Benjamin Noys, "'Remain True to the Earth!': Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal." Evan Calder Williams, "The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Brandon Stosuy, "Meaningful Leaning Mess." Aspasia Stephanou, "Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal." Anthony Sciscione, "'Goatsteps Behind My Steps . . .': Black Metal and Ritual Renewal." Eugene Thacker, "Three Questions on Demonology." Niall Scott, "Black Confessions and Absu-lution." DOCUMENTS: Lionel Maunz, Pineal Eye; Oyku Tekten, Symposium Photographs; Scott Wilson, "Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance"; Karlynn Holland, Sin Eater I-V; Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, Black Metal Commentary; Black Metal Theory Blog Comments; Letter from Andrew White; E.S.S.E, Murder Devour I. HTTP: //BLACKMETALTHEORY.BLOGSPOT.COM

Black Metal Theory Symposium 1

Hideous Gnosis

From Schism[2] Press "Taking advantage of the ‘closet screenplay’ format to emphasize the cinematic ritualistic structure of contemporary imaginaries, Nicola Masciandaro’s SACER is an extraordinary techno-mystical, meta-cult fiction about the recurrently sacrificial nature of life and art. Following a set of characters linked to the cult horror movie FORSAKEN—including members of an enigmatic secret society, actors, filmakers and scholars, some of them suffering the hallucinatory effects of a neuro-hacking, virtual-reality Baphomet—, SACER is an audacious narrative investigation of, as Bataille would say, the sacred as sacrifice and the genuine ecstasy as violently negative. Under the explicit influence of E. Elias Merighe’s Begotten and Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Masciandaro invokes Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Cioran, Bataille, Klossowski, and the Hindu mahavidya Chinnamasta to explore the links between ecstasy, sacrifice, death, re-birth, and the neuro-alchemy of demonic possession deeply embedded in our technologies of perception." Germán Sierra

SACER

Eugene Thacker

James Harris

Simon Critchley

Brad Baumgartner

Drew Daniel

Edia Connole

Charlie Blake

Assistant Professor of English Drew Daniel

Dominik Irtenkauf

Brooker Buckingham

Heather Masciandaro

Katherine Foyle

Dylan Trigg

Caoimhe Doyle

Daniel Barber

Jeremy Dyer

Teresa Gillespie

Niall Scott

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix

Gary Shipley

Oyku Tekten

Essays and artworks related to Mors Mystica, a black metal theory symposium on the theme of mystical death. "Only that person who says: 'My soul chooses hanging, and my bones death' can truly embrace this fire . . . for it is absolutely true that 'no one can see me and live.'" -- Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum CONTENTS Introduction: On "Heroes/Helden" Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro Following the Stench: Watain and Putrefaction Mysticism Drew Daniel Ablaze in the Bath of Fire Brad Baumgartner Mycelegium James Harris dying to find I was never there Teresa Gillespie On the Ecstasy of Annihilation: Notes towards a Demonic Supplement Charlie Blake Autonomy of Death, Nothing Like This Daniel Colucciello Barber "It's a suit! It's ME!": Hyper-Star and Hyper-Hero through Black Sabbath's Iron Man Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle The Tongue-Tied Mystic: Aaaarrrgghhh! Fuck Them! Fuck You! Gary J. Shipley These Flames Will Lick the Feet of God Heather Masciandaro Mystical Anarchism Simon Critchley Die Maske des Black Metals Dominik Irtenkauf Xenharmonic Black Metal: Radical Intervallics as Apophatic Ontotheology Brooker Buckingham The Perichoresis of Music, Art, and Philosophy Hunter Hunt-Hendrix On Darkness Itself Niall Scott Haemal Jeremy Dyer From Black Bile Eugene Thacker "This Place is a Tomb": Infinite Terror in Darkspace Dylan Trigg Seven Propositions On The Secret Kissing Of Black Metal: OSKVLVM Edia Connole Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne: On Inquisition's Esoteric Floating Tomb Nicola Masciandaro Symposium Photographs Oyku Tekten APPENDIX Bound to Metal (Interview with Edia Connole for Legacy) Dominik Irtenkauf Theoria e praxis del Black Metal (Interview by Fabio Selvafiorita for L'Intellettuale Dissidente) Nicola Masciandaro"

Black Metal Theory Symposium

Mors Mystica

Daniel Colucciello Barber

François Laruelle

Alexander Galloway

Aaron Metté

Dark Nights of the Universe

Eileen A. Joy

Myra Seaman

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an assortment, if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.Contents: Candace Barrington, "Dark Whiteness: Benjanim Brawley and Chaucer" -- Brantley L. Bryant & Alia, "Saturn's Darkness" -- Ruth Evans, "A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter" -- Gaelan Gilbert, "Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology" -- Leigh Harrison, "Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age" -- Nicola Masciandaro, "Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia" -- J. Allan Mitchell, "In the Event of the Franklin's Tale" -- Travis Neel & Andrew Richmond, "Black as the Crow" -- Hannah Priest, "Unravelling Constance" -- Lisa Schamess, "L'O de V: A Palimpsest" -- Myra Seaman, "Disconsolate Art" -- Karl Steel, "Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye" -- Elaine Treharne, "The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm" -- Bob Valasek, "The Light has Lifted: Pandare Trickster" -- Lisa Weston, "Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies" -- Thomas White, "The Dark Is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas." This assortment of dark morsels also features a prose-poem Preface by Gary Shipley.

An Assortment

Dark Chaucer

Ed Keller

Alexi Kukuljevic

Schism press brings you its first anthology, edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker. A collection of essays on beheading and cinema, with full color interior. Contents: Dominic Pettman, "What Came First, the Chicken or the Head?" - Eugene Thacker, "Thing and No-Thing" - Alexi Kukuljevic, "Suicide by Decapitation" - Alexander Galloway, "The Painted Peacock" - Evan Calder Williams, "Recapitation" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Decapitating Cinema" - Ed Keller, "Corpus Atomicus" - Gary J Shipley, "Remote Viewing." Photography by Leighton Pierce.

And They Were Two in One and One in Two

Anna Anna Klosowska

Revolutions: The turning movement through the images of this sonetto involves several eddying, (micro)cosmic motions. We begin already beyond the widest sphere, then penetrate it from this side via love's weeping in a motion that is virtually re-initiated from the heart in a kind of syntactic time-warp. Then comes the thought-sigh's arrival before the lady and its getting lost in the epicycles of honor and splendor and gazing. Then his subtle retelling of the gaze caused by a secondary motion of the heart that first moved it. Then the mystical understanding of the pensero's unintelligible speech through the apophatic anamnesis of the beloved's name. Finally, a gracious love-boast gently expanding towards those who have understanding of love.Con-sider our commentary a love-driven constellation, a double star (binary or optical?) gravitationally caught within these motions, like the subtle turnings of an ungraspable celestial tress.

A Dialogic Commentary on the Ultimate Sonetto of Dante's Vita Nuova

Beyond the Sphere

Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory is a collaborative collection of writings in black metal theory (BMT), an amorphous ‘metallectual’ movement initiated in 2009 with the symposium Hideous Gnosis. According to its earliest formulation, BMT seeks to creatively destroy the boundary between metal and theory, to make something new in the space of their shared negativity: ‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black metal theory. Theoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of symposia’. This volume gathers together previously published and new work on BMT focusing onmysticism, a domain of thought and experience with deep connections both to the black metal genre and to theory (theoria, vision, contemplation). More than a topic for BMT, the mystical is here explored in terms of the continuous intersection of black metal andtheory, the ‘floating tomb’ wherein metal is elevated into the intellectual and visionary experience that it already is.

Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory

Gary J Shipley

A collection of philosophical and critical essays on the television series True Detective. "Traditionally, the detective genre deals with the problem of epistemology - how to know something that one doesn't know. There are some things we cannot know, and some things we should not know. Sometimes clues just give way to more clues, and epistemic tedium rules the day. These essays reveal knowledge becoming an enigma to itself, revealing the brilliant futility of the epistemological project." - Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust of This Planet "The television event of the year - I would say many years - is without doubt True Detective. One deserving of forensic, unflinching, and unrelenting philosophical treatment." - Simon Critchley "The most intelligent series in TV history has opened strange crypts for explorers. This excellent essay collection reveals just how far the dark tunnels lead. Let it coax you from the comforts of death and fear, into detection of the guttering nightmare that is life, coldly seen." - Nick Land CONTENTS I. Black Stars Gary J. Shipley - Monster at the End: Pessimism's Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes Edia Connole - Contemplating the Crucifixion: Cohle and Divine Gloom Nicola Masciandaro - I Am Not Supposed To Be Here: Birth and Mystical Detection II. Separate From Itself Fintan Neylan - The Labour of the Pessimist: Detecting Expiration's Artifice Paul J. Ennis - The Atmospherics of Consciousness Ben Woodard - Nothing Grows in the Right Direction: Scaling the Life of the Negative III. There Was A Videotape Niall McCann - True Detective, Jean-Luc Godard and Our Image Culture: 'This May Well be Heaven, this Hell Smells the Same' Daniel Fitzpatrick - 'True Dick' . . . The Accelerated Acceptance and Premature Canonisation of True Detective IV. It's Just One Story Scott Wilson - The Nonsense of Detection: Truth Between Science and the Real Erin K. Stapleton - The Corpse is the Territory: The Body of Dora Kelly Lange in True Detective Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle - The Flat Devil Net: Mapping Quantum Narratives in True Detective Daniel Colucciello Barber - Affect Has No Story V. And Closure-No, No, No Dominic Fox - koyntly bigyled Charlie Blake, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, Gary J. Shipley - Bird Trap Edge to Edge Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle - The Chole Story

True Detection

Scott Wilson

Michael Edward Moore

Anna Klosowska

Volume 5 of the journal Glossator. Contents: What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece's Addresses - Eileen A. Joy Plato's Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Gary J. Shipley On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'amour en eclats [Shattered Love]" - Mathew Abbott The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore Tearsong: Valentine Visconti's Inverted Stoicism - Anna K osowska"

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

Analysing the literary representations of work, this text looks at how late medieval authors, influenced by the labour-related crises of the 14th century, sought to articulate the meaning of work in fresh and contrasting ways. It analyses the Middle English terms to show how words for work were related to status and class attitudes.

The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature

The Voice of the Hammer

“For the will desires not to be dark, and this very desire causes the darkness” (Jacob Boehme). Moving through the fundamental question of this paradox, this book offers a constellation of theoretical and critical essays that shed light on the darkness of the will: its obscurity to itself. Through indepth analysis of medieval and modern sources — Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Meher Baba — this volume interrogates the nature and meaning of the will, along seven modes: spontaneity, potentiality, sorrow, matter, vision, eros, and sacrifice. These multiple lines of inquiry are finally presented to coalesce around one fundamental point of agreement: the will says yes, yet only a will that knows how to say no to itself, entering the silence of its own darkness, will ever be free.

On the Darkness of Will

Nicola Masciandaro

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