Gary Shipley

Gary Shipley's On the Verge of Nothing moves according to a patient logic, asking us to consider what follows when we begin from pessimism, rather than arriving at it. Through Shipley's ciphers - Nietzsche, Pessoa, Lispector, contemporary performance art - pessimism is illuminated as at once unliveable and unconsolable, and yet unavoidable. Reading On the Verge of Nothing, the primordial philosophical question of "how to live" now takes on contours that are colder, more detached, and yet, somehow, deeply engaged. --Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation "Beginning insistently with the end of thought, this panegyric of the pointless offers a withering post-pessimistic ethics and aesthetics of diversionary tactics for life in the void. Territories traversed include dreams and delusions, the limits and purpose of self-consciousness, human animality, and the paradox of feeling-thinking. Gary J Shipley's lucid, often pitiless diagnoses; rigorous, informed, and tight arguments; bons mots and essential apercus - larded with a rich compost of quotation (Pessoa, Lispector, Cioran, Kafka, etc.) - pursue a relentless thrashing of thought, sketching both a Bartlett's and a Baedeker of our inevitable doom. These essays, aphorisms, fragments, and quotations have been shored not against but amidst ruin. Experimental, exploratory soundings and performances, a fantasia for the end of the world: this word horde is an essential drug for addicts of the impossible."-- Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille

On the Verge of Nothing

Mike Kleine

Tatiana Ryckman

Christina Tudor-Sideri

Garett Strickland

Mike Corrao

Rosie Snajdr

Arielle Tipa

Grant Maierhofer

A. S. Coomer

Germán Sierra

Candice Wuehle

Benjamin DeVos

James Nulick

David Leo Rice

Evan Isoline

James Tadd Adcox

Sean Kilpatrick

B. R. Yeager

Elisa Taber

Mónica Belevan

Judson Hamilton

Joshua Rothes

Ryan Napier

Joshua Young

Nathan Dragon

Andrew Wilt

Garett Dennert

Ali Raz

Vincent James Perrone

Kenny Mooney

Tyler Crumrine

Adam Tedesco

Jake Reber

A collectively written novel composed of 34 unique voices from the expanded field.

Collected Voices in the Expanded Field

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

Nicola Masciandaro

Daniel Barber

Jeremy Dyer

Teresa Gillespie

Niall Scott

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix

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

Scott Wilson

William Pawlett

Stuart Kendall

Vanessa Place

Karmen MacKendrick

Jacquelynn Baas

Martin Bladh

Karolina Urbaniak

Featuring the first English translation of Jean Bruno's "Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille" (1963), this edited collection brings together an internationally renowned and interdisciplinary group of scholars to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the inaugural issue of the French interwar avant-garde journal founded by Bataille, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie (June 24 1936). In so doing, it also broaches the "ferociously religious" esoteric activity of the eponymous secret society, as well as the "sacred sociology" of the Acéphale-affiliated Collège de Sociologie. The Acéphale conjuncture--everything written, acted, drawn or imagined around André Masson's excessively iconic figure of the headless man for the "secret society" and journal founded by Georges Bataille in the 1930s, and everything that proliferated among the loose community around Bataille in those years--continues to demand responses, and to insist on them. Connole and Shipley's volume isn't the last word, but proposes a heterogeneous plethora of words, in varying modes, in this direction. It is also a form of response to the event of Nietzsche, which Bataille and friends reiterated, creating an event of their own; in this vein, the volume refuses the division of life and thought and pushes the forms of "discursive hybridity" to excess. The volume is both erudite and visceral, it comprises historical and biographical knowledge, illuminating the Acéphale conjuncture through research and interpretative, intertextual connectivities, and it is raw, it lives with its material; it asks us to both respect and transgress the orthodox modes of "scholarly" endeavour, to see both as complementary and necessary, in alignment with Bataille's proposition that: "We need the system and the excess." --Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King's College London (UK), and author of After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community, and Roland Barthes and Film there is much poetry and laughter amid the poly-swarm-cephalic headlessness of this volume, along with irreverently astute scholarship and canny theological mything, all enjoyed in gloriously bad company [(masson, bataille, laure, klossowski, caillois, weil, blanchot, nietzsche and sade).] [read it and shit.] [read it and scream.] [read it and die.] --Fred Botting is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University (UK), award-winning author of numerous works on horror fiction, and co-editor, with Scott Wilson, of The Bataille Reader 85 years after the release of the first issue of Acéphale, and the birth of the eponymous secret society, this volume enters inside the sanctuary to invite us on a crazy, labyrinthine journey punctuated by five "stations" where--under the joint sign of Nietzsche and expenditure--thought ceases to be separated from passion and madness, and writing is transformed into a process of self-sacrifice, "acéphale-graphy." --Marina Galletti is Professor of French Literature at Università Roma Tre (Italy) and co-editor, with Alastair Brotchie, of The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology

Responses to the Nietzsche Event

Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century

30 Fake Beheadings imagines 30 unthinkable sequels to 30 sui generis movies. Drawing on decapitation theory and the post-cephalic nature of cinematic experience, it documents a viewer's repeated decollation as a way of documenting the invented films. But as the films themselves are also documenting the viewer, each is ultimately feeding on and inventing the other. However unique a human head, its coming off demands a sequel.

30 Fake Beheadings

"The Face Hole is at once a testimony and a dossier, a metaphysical mystery of discarded anatomies, a cavernous and patient document of Ballardian estrangement. Here Shipley's writing enters a kind of austerity - narrative stripped down to an elemental level, filled with the detritus of everyday life, flecks of flesh and nuanced glances, stray motives and oblique intentions, the most familiar of objects quietly vanishing - all of which induces in the reader a dread as vast as it is subtle. A welcome edition to Shipley's ongoing experiments with the limits of language and bodies." - Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet

The Face Hole

Kenji Siratori

An exercise in sensory overload from the minds of Kenji Siratori (Blood Electric, Acidhuman Project, Mind Virus, etc) and Gary J Shipley (Theoretical Animals) that pushes the limits of both human expression and that which can be assimilated in terms of socially-sanctioned pattern-recognition. Self-referring, auto-cannibalistic texts that hover and shimmer around the borders of the asemic, yet still retain a vivid relevance to the current post-human cultural landscape. A cyberpunk katabasis beyond Burroughs or Guyotat. With an Appendix by Reza Negarestani Published by Paraphilia Books

Necrology

Gary Shipley

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