To stare 10

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On the Revolutionary Earth1
A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism

Reza Negarestani
(written for Dark Materialism, Kingston University of London)


To reactionaries... 
(the everyday Copernican man)

The traumatic force catches up and, as it were, shakes the ego down from the high tree or the
tower. This is described as a frightening whirlwind, ending in the complete dissolution of
connexions and a terrible vertigo, until finally the ability, or even the attempt, to resist the force
is given up as hopeless, and the function of self-preservation declares itself bankrupt. This final
result may be described or represented as being partially dead. In one case such ‘being dead’
was represented in dreams and associations as maximal pulverization, leading to finally complete
de-materialization. The dematerialized dead component has the tendency to drag the not yet dead
parts to itself into non-existence, especially in dreams (particularly in nightmares). 
(Sandor Ferenczi)2

What follows is a perilous venture to pursue what Freud refers to as ‘an extreme line of thought’ whose
only vocation is to ‘disturb the peace of this world in still another way’.3 We begin to construct, step by
step, a territopic model of materialism in which the geophilosophical synthesis between the history of the
human-citizen, the history of the state and the contingent natural history of the earth is no longer traceable
to the somatic integrity of the earth or what can be identified as an axiomatically veritable interiority.
Instead, we argue, that the geophilosophical synthesis (of the modern man qua citizen) is conditioned by a
geocosmic concatenation of traumas or cuts in the axiomatic fabric of interiorities. Since there is no single
or isolated psychic trauma (all traumas are nested), there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma
and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas. Here,
trauma should be understood not as what is experienced but as a form of cut made by the real or the
absolute in its own unified order; a cut that brings about the possibility of a localized horizon and a
                                                
1
 This essay could never have been written were it not for the never-ending explosive supplies of Manabrata Guha,
Robin Mackay and Gabriel Catren.   
2
 Sandor Ferenczi, Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (Reprinted London: Karnac
Books, 1994), originally published in 1930, 222-223.
3
 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961), 31n.2, and
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 353.