Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Pawletts William
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On Decay and Other Synthetics
- Chapter 2 Stratagem of the Corpse
- Chapter 3 A Bleak Non-History of History
- Chapter 4 The Hyperactivity of Objects
- Chapter 5 The Unnamable Catastrophe
- Chapter 6 A Cure for Vertigo
- Chapter 7 Chance and the Temporality of Death
- Chapter 8 The Possibility of Nihilism
- Chapter 9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show
- Chapter 10 The Evil Death
- Chapter 11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak
- Chapter 12 Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe
- Appendix 1 Whiteout: Spatiotemporal Interstices, Necropresence and the Immortality of Now
- Appendix 2 Pure Dreaming: Radicalized and Vermiculated Thought, or Death as an Earworm
- Appendix 3 The Non-Existence of the Scream
- Index
Appendix 1 - Whiteout: Spatiotemporal Interstices, Necropresence and the Immortality of Now
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Pawletts William
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On Decay and Other Synthetics
- Chapter 2 Stratagem of the Corpse
- Chapter 3 A Bleak Non-History of History
- Chapter 4 The Hyperactivity of Objects
- Chapter 5 The Unnamable Catastrophe
- Chapter 6 A Cure for Vertigo
- Chapter 7 Chance and the Temporality of Death
- Chapter 8 The Possibility of Nihilism
- Chapter 9 Smell-O-Vision: The Murder Show
- Chapter 10 The Evil Death
- Chapter 11 False Confessions and the Madness of Death: Making Death Speak
- Chapter 12 Black Light: Nigredo and Catastrophe
- Appendix 1 Whiteout: Spatiotemporal Interstices, Necropresence and the Immortality of Now
- Appendix 2 Pure Dreaming: Radicalized and Vermiculated Thought, or Death as an Earworm
- Appendix 3 The Non-Existence of the Scream
- Index
Summary
Any endurable immortality would have to be one in which we did not figure (at least not as we are, or in some diluted form), or else would need to be experienced outside the passage of tense, or at the very least within a tensed series reduced from its triplicity to a self-replicating present, and through this latter the former, the depressive weight of the past and the anxiety of the future in absentia, with only the spatiotemporally boundless present left behind, its nothing becoming our nothing, its deathlessness becoming our site of uncreatured potentiality, our necropresence – or that state in which possibilities expand away from us like some infinite beauty we cannot see, reliant on not being seen, and we lose ourselves to be born like this, gazing translucent as if dead men wakeful in the forever of time's material decomposition. What brings us here is the thought and the enactment of stopping, so that once immobilized we view the swell via the very enervation that propelled us to inertia, for this ‘sensation of expansion toward nothingness present in melancholy has its roots in a weariness characteristic of all negative states’, a weariness that ‘separates man from the world’. And it is in such weariness that necropresence strays from life and the world without finding death, a compromised presence in which man finds a peace that kills him without killing him, a state achieved by first relinquishing the past we were in and the future we were moving towards, expanding the falsely contracted blip of the now, as time becomes space expanding outwards without end. ‘If we were here, we would be full of wonder’, but necropresence is the only here and it is now and everywhere and through its growth becoming nowhere (invisible) once again – and we can only be lost and only replete with wonder when at last we find ‘the still centre of the world that came to claim’ us, necrotizing those extraneous appendages we’d used to keep the world so close.
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- Information
- Stratagem of the CorpseDying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra, pp. 177 - 186Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020