This Wound of God: A Philosophy of Deathspell Omega

[@codexnecro]

Awesome. Was looking forward to this.

[@lucasmiguel4734]

Finally found some time to watch it. I expected a lot, and somehow you guys managed to surpass what I was thinking of.

[@absencespodcast]

That’s awesome, thank you. Put a good bit of work into this one

[@lololololo2803]

Bro, this video is a gem. A friend sent it to me and it's been the best 30 minutes of the week

[@absencespodcast]

Sick, glad to hear it!

[@brimerwelpippy4972]

Can't wait to watch this tonight.

[@absencespodcast]

Hope you enjoy! Let us know what you think

[@billnelson5279]

Killer, already ordered imhotep 12, love having the video too

[@absencespodcast]

Very cool, thanks for watching

[@Skiz0id]

FINALLY LETS GOO

[@morfindog508]

Banger

[@absencespodcast]

🤙

[@OurFreeReflections]

Nice

[@lucasmiguel4734]

What artwork is the one used in the thumbnail?

[@absencespodcast]

My own. I’m probably going to do some shirts with this design as well

[@lucasmiguel4734]

@@absencespodcast Dang man, you're very good at it. I'd certainly buy some merch with it

[@murwgebeukt]

Goltzius tho

[@Saif_Al_Dajjal]

Anyway this can be summed up for people who are not entrenched in philosophy and academia? This all sounded really intelligent but it was hard to grasp in a lot of areas.

[@absencespodcast]

Sure, it was definitely a dense episode. So, first thing to understand is that this essay, despite appearances to the contrary, was deeply personal for me. It marks my first attempt to reformulate the notion of the sacred and its relation to subjectivity for myself-two topics which have been deeply meaningful to me for a long time. I did this through DsO because they were probably the first artists to leave this profound an impression on my psyche, for better or for worse, and really challenged me to try to think in ways that were far different from how I was used to thinking (typical Anglo-American analytic philosophy). I don’t know why, that’s just how it happened. So, primarily, this is an essay about the sacred and subjectivity, with DsO as a vehicle for one way of thinking about it, which is not definitive for me. I think, following Bataille, that the sacred can be displaced conceptually and detached from notions of transcendence. The sacred can be thought not as a “realm” of Being (and thus strictly tied to a certain essentially hierarchical economy of existence), but can be located within the self-reflective consciousness of embodied, finte beings. When analyzing mystical experiences, there’s a consistency: the mystic feels united to Being or God and feels a profound effacement of individuality. Yet, and this is crucial for me, *they* experience this. It seems trivial, but I think this shows us something, which is that there’s always a finite POV attached to the sacred, and the POV of the mystic in the thrall of the experience is always separated, fundamentally, from becoming one with Being. In other words, there is in the experience of the sacred a necessary failure to become one with Being. Even if one were to die, death is a pure nothingness. It’s the embodied negation of the person who is herself nevertheless the subject of the experience that is essential to the experience of the sacred. It’s a logic of laceration. Language, State, religion and culture have this same reverberation at their core: the failure to be totalizing and complete, always shot through with antagonisms that facilitate becomings and are subject to the contingencies of the world. The subject, as a product of the natural and social world is thus shot through with antagonisms, and this incompleteness that marks human reality is also felt in the deepest of experiences, which includes the experience of the sacred. Bataille also equates the experience of God with that of total loneliness and abjection. It’s a point of death-without-death, a falling apart without going to pieces, no matter how deeply we wish to go to pieces and be one with the Absolute. Should we die in the process of this enacted negation of subjective being encountering the absolute, then we are no longer what we are, we are dead and no longer the finite, contingent subject having the experience *even if* there is an afterlife. The experience of laceration is the universal experience of irreducible particularity endemic to human consciousness. That experience is, again, structurally similar to the experience of incompleteness in every other area of human life and is thus accessible always. It’s the trace of death that constitutes human life, and this is what Freud began to theorize in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. As such, all notions we have that attempt to present some idea of a total unity of Being which we can be sure to know and communicate to others (such as the Good, God, etc) are themselves the product of finite experience, language, and so on and if you use the dialectical logic of (Zizek’s) Hegel (and, I would argue, even Bataille-as Hegel was far less a thinker of positive totality than Bataille thought him to be) you can begin to accurately represent the life of the concepts that structure our existence, and then use the same method to show how they always rely on their own negation, no matter the scale or importance of the notion. This isn’t to say “everything goes”, not at all, but it is to say that dialectics provides a universal acid for totalizing notions that try to show us that we must be subservient to transcendence. Non-knowledge follows, and the experience of the sacred becomes not an experience of being both connected to and abandoned by God, but rather connected to the universal situation of self-conscious beings, all of whom attempt to cover over their own lack in their own ways. To start down this path is to understand your particularity as a subject is actually the ground of your experience of the sacred, and that experience cannot be abstracted away, reified into another “realm”, and sold back to you as something that something or someone else can provide for you. It is irreducibly *your* experience, yet it is nevertheless accessible to all finite self-consciousnesses. Non-knowledge, then, is a path opened by following the trajectory of the sacred and dialectical logic, and this logic is functionally similar to the typical notion of Evil. So, in my eyes, it might be fair to say that offloading the sacred onto something else and calling Evil that which leads one to the “divinity within” which is self-reflexive cognition, is precisely what most human social artifacts do. And this is actually what is properly “evil”. But taking up the functional “Evil” of Bataille, Hegel, and the logic of laceration is a way out of this all-encompassing alienation that sits at the base of our psyche, constantly reappropriating the sacred towards ends outside of itself. Finally, I think DsO actually tries to show us this as well, so the essay is trying to show that these notions pervade their art, even if some of the artists involved (like Aspa) subscribe to ideologies that perpetuate the very logic the art itself serves to contest. I think this may be at the heart of their notion that chaos must be at the core of the matrix of their creative endavours-it’s a channeling of the antagonisms of the Concept and reality that mark the experience of the sacred. I wouldn’t work with NS people myself, and I won’t defend it, but I think I might get what they are doing. EDIT: Also worth noting is the fact that I was also trying to begin to give a philosophical foundation for Deathspell’s “metaphysical Satanism” through these concepts; trying to show what may have to be true to make sense of their “devil worship” and their statements both in their direct art, and their indirect artistic supplements (interviews) That was off the cuff so it’s not going to be great, but hopefully it made some semblance of sense

[@Saif_Al_Dajjal]

@@absencespodcast thank you for that. Its very interesting concepts. It kind of plays in line with Kabbalah judaism in which the idea of existence for humanity is the infinite being (G-d) experiencing its creation through the eyes and experiences of its finite creation. The confusion or i guess mystery is the agency or free will question of the creation in which carries the spark of the creator, ie how much agency the spark has within, the battle of the spirit soul vs the animal soul always at odds. It seams that Hegel’s idea was that once the creation awakens to its true self as the deity, one can manipulate the creation and physical realm to whatever it sees fit to complete the course of history. Bataille seems to come to the conclusion that the self realization is a process through extremes or moments that connect to the spirit like throws of death or sexual ecstasy, the moments the eyes roll back white and in these moments we are realized. Its all very dense and fascinating in itself while being daunting to explore in practice. What i like about DSO’s approach to melding its sonic art with Batailles philosophy is the spastic instrumentation that seems to mimic the convulsive, physical and physiological impulses of the mind and body. Its like the music illustrates the moments of connection to the divine in all its beauty, horror and ugliness. Thanks for this essay. Great work

[@absencespodcast]

Thanks so much! I appreciate the comments and questions. I agree with you about Kabbalah. You should check out Schelling. I believe his thinking is very Kabbalistic in nature. Takes some work but he’s very interesting. Zizek’s edition of “Ages of the World, or Weltalter” is a good place to start and his intro essay has a lot of resonance with our thoughts on DsO, even though Z himself is staunchly atheist.

[@moist_cabbage8472]

You’re welcome