Justin Read

University at Buffalo
Paradoxa
August 5, 2017

Speculative Non-Fiction and Post-Factual Latin America: The Non-Anthropomorphic and

Non-Identitarian Worlds of Vilém Flusser and Fabián Ludueña Romandini

1. Post-Allegorical

The hallmark of any type of speculative literature is its capacity for worlding. The

speculative world may be a better world than our own or far worse, but in either case its worlds

are typically reflections of our historical present. But what would happen if the reverse were true,

that the historical present itself resembled nothing so much as a speculative fiction? When the

technologies at our disposal already exceed futurist speculation, life not only appears to be

animate, but also verges on animation; or at least the distinction between an organic body and an

inorganic, holistic or holographic projection of a body (such as a toon or an avatar) are no longer

distinguishable. At the same time, all science at our disposal points to the ineluctable annihilation

of humanity at some point in the foreseeable future, including all of our social institutions,

political and economic systems, and culture. Indeed, it is this very culture that will cause the

annihilation. The only comparable die-off of humans in recorded history is that of indigenous

American populations in the first centuries after Iberian conquest, an apocalypse that precipitated

yet another in the form of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But there is no solace in having this

point of comparison, to let us know that the 22nd and 23rd centuries will be far worse than the 16th

and 17th.

In addition to the phenomenological aspects implicit in the term, speculative-literary

worlding may involve the invention of entirely new worlds, as is often the case in that large
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subset of speculative literature, science fiction. Yet worlding may also involve the historical

universe we inhabit as day-to-day existence. The primary “speculative” mode – that which links

a literary world to an actual world of everyday life – is allegory. The speculative text either

extrapolates elements from the everyday world, both exaggerating and critiquing them; or it

creates a world so vastly different from our own that one gains a critical appreciation of how the

“real” world has been constructed by comparison. In either case, speculative literature points to

the allegorical overlap to two or more worlds. And thus, the overarching purpose of the

speculative allegory is not merely to find a new world, but to attach it meaningfully to the world

we already inhabit, to act upon the reader’s (or spectator’s) world and open it to change.

Tellingly, the allegorical relation also operates vice versa, with speculative literature becoming

evermore realist with each passing day.

For the purposes of the present essay, my discussion here of speculative literature in

terms of worlding raises several questions that may not seem to be interrelated at first glance.

First, if the purpose of speculative literature is the creation of a “new world,” how does this fact

relate to the “New World,” i.e., to a specifically Latin American mode of speculative literature?

By what criteria do we judge speculative literature or any aestheticized text to be “Latin

American” in the first place? Fredric Jameson would have it that “Third-World” literatures are

invariably tied to nation-formation, or what he terms the “national allegory.” Perhaps he is

correct. But in the second place, if in its capacity for worlding, speculative literature manages to

project its speculations upon the world we inhabit, how would this world come to be known

beyond the limits of the projection per se? This second line of questioning is especially germane

to speculative fiction in particular: what would the opposite side of speculative fiction be, once

fictional discourse successfully transfects itself into what we experience as lived reality? Its
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opposite could not merely be “speculative fact” or “science factualism.” Once a world is

“worlded” by means of fiction, intermediated through its allegorical aesthetic, we would appear

to have moved into a realm beyond mere facts – into a “post-factual” world. This post-factual

world would be one in which things seem increasingly less immediate; one can no longer appeal

to “just the facts” as the clearest arbiter of reality given the palpable presence of fictions and

virtualities all about us. In this sense, it would be a world of increasingly more fantastical

creation.

In regards to the latter line of questions the temptation would be strong to appeal to

speculative realism as the “real-world” counterpart or opposite of speculative fiction. The term

speculative realism is highly imprecise, since in strives to incorporate various strains of recent

philosophical inquiry that dialogue with each other but are in no ways self-same. Nevertheless,

some of these strains may speak to this present discussion of a post-factual world. The central

claim of speculative realism (however defined) is stunningly simple: that the universe does

indeed exist beyond the human capacity to conceive of it. This may lead to a nihilistic, even if

optimistic, negation of humanism, as in the case of Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. Quentin

Meillassoux adopts a less negative position in After Finitude, holding that the “discourse” of

mathematics does not merely describe reality, but is reality; accordingly the world actually exists

beyond any (Kantian, or more generally phenomenological) correlation of thought and being.

Object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman (Guerrilla Metaphysics) essentially argue that

non-human entities also “world” in a fashion similar to the way humans anthropomorphize their

environment. Such quasi-animist claims dialogue neatly with Jane Bennett’s sense in Vibrant

Matter of “vital materialism,” that things in the world exert forces that must be taken into

account in public political life. Each of these thinkers may be named under the rubric of
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speculative realism though the differences between them may be vast. The present essay is not

the occasion to judge the relative merits of any of these philosophical positions, and perhaps I

will diverge from them later. For the moment, speculative realism holds open the possibility of

non-human worlds and inanimate discourses co-habiting the world of everyday human life – if

one will permit the term, of “co-worlding.”

However, to hold speculative realism and speculative fiction as complements of one

another would merely re-enact the Platonic exclusion of poetry from philosophy. Literary writers

can only take speculation so far, it would seem, until the ontologists need enter to generate real

knowledge of the material universe. The fiction may enter the material world poetically, but

perhaps one shouldn’t trust the poets to understand the consequences. This

complementarity/mutual exclusion would crash headlong into Latin American literature, where

the division between literature and philosophy has ever been tenuous and suspect at best. In other

words, there are historical relations between philosophy and literature, the “fictional” and the

“real,” from which Latin American writers can scarcely escape. Indeed, the inability to step

outside such historicity may define being Latin American. (Or is it “Latin American being”?)

There is no such thing as a “Latin America” outside of modern historical time, such that

efforts to instill regional, national, or local subjectivities or identities have proved incomplete or

even preposterous. In the eyes of Iberian invaders, and later the criollo elite through the 19th

century at least, the new American landscape was a desert that lacked “world.” Such attitudes are

nowhere more clearly expressed that Juan Bautista Alberdi’s Bases y puntos: “Como desierto, el

nuevo mundo tiene una acción retardataria y reaccionaria en el antiguo” [As a desert, the new

world has a retarding and reactionary action in the old] (Alberdi, 20). Alberdi later continues that

the indigenous of Argentina “no figura ni compone mundo en nuestra sociedad política y civil”
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[“do not figure nor do they compose world in our political and civil society] (Alberdi, 82;

emphasis added). The colonization of Latin America, which only intensified in the century after

independence, proceeded according to a belief that the Americas had not (yet) been “worlded,”

as evident in Alberdi’s words here. This therefore posed a metaphysical problem: how to

inculcate a “spirit” of social, cultural, and political belonging in a “desert that lacked world.”

This metaphysical problem, as a material issue, in turn implied a problem of writing. Particularly

after 1820, literary writing would be the means to instantiate national identity, to “world” the

“Geist” of the new national culture.

But this belief in writing immediately implied a hierarchization of cultural forms. Pre-

Iberian America could not “compose world,” the thinking went, because its cultures lacked

writing, or at least the “developed” form of phonetic Latinate script. On the other hand, all high-

literary writing was thought not only to be capable of worlding, but charged with the absolute

responsibility for worlding a new civilization. Yet given Latin America’s diminished position in

global order, its literatures would still be considered feeble imitations of their European

forebears. Likewise, serious philosophy in the region was not widely accepted as a possibility

until well into the 20th century. Global disregard for Latin American thought is in many ways

responsible for the rise of decoloniality following the path of Walter Mignolo and Aníbal

Quijano. To wit, that there is a “border gnosis” particularly attuned to one’s “locus of

enunciation,” such that systems of thought from the Global South are best served by eschewing

systems of thought from the Global North that colonized them. Of course, decolonial claims of

this nature merely “re-hierarchize” the hierarchy of orality to writing by valorizing locality and

speech over universality.

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In any case, the worlding of Latin America centers around a metaphysical lacuna – both

in the sense of constantly looking forward to a national “spirit” that may not exist, and in

diminished institutional spaces for critical inquiry given the region’s position in global order.

Consequently, this worlding has been a thoroughly historical process whose very historicity

threatens to negate the fundamental ahistoricity of its metaphysics. Latin American history

begins in many ways with the historical imposition of the Christian soul upon the landscape –

the saving of eternal (i.e., timeless) souls. This continued in the 19th and 20th century with the

imposition of citizenship (and exclusions thereof), the secularization of the soul within

historically defined territorial limits. Thus, Latin American writers may not pursue metaphysics

qua metaphysics without being accused of abnegating their (historically derived) “Latin

American-ness.”1

The problems of a Latin American speculative literature may be rephrased in the

following way: In “Latin American” and “speculative” we have two decidedly allegorical

modifiers of “literature”/“fiction” that may not pertain to the same allegory. Allegory, moreover,

is a rhetorical trope of duplicity, at cross-purposes with itself. This characterization of allegory

has been long studied, going back at least as far as Walter Benjamin’s early work a century ago

and continuing through Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the matter in the 1970s and 80s. The

problem is not merely that allegory involves a doubling of narrative: that the allegorical narrative

itself depends upon an (absent) external discourse for its structural fulfillment, whether that

externality be tenets of spiritual or metaphysical ideals or the history of a modern nation and its

1 Jorge Luis Borges certainly comes to mind in this regard. Indeed I am greatly indebted to

Kate Jenckes’ critique of Borges’ particular disruptions of national allegory for the current
section of the present essay. Her reading of Borges against Benjamin, Jameson, and Doris
Sommer in Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History
(SUNY Press, 2007) were especially illuminating.
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peoples. The more profound problem is that such discursive doubling and dependency renders

structural indecision. The intention of an allegorical narrative may be to correspond to its

external discursive “key,” in a way that substantiates that key as a reality that has been

fictionalized allegorically. But who are we to decide what is really real or really fictional?

De Manian deconstruction properly recognizes that the allegorical relation is not one

between real and fiction, but between two discourses that reflect each other. The Benjaminian

perspective further recognizes, first, that both discourses are ideological, such that it is a grave

(and deadly) error to confuse one of them with reality.2 Second, Benjaminian thought sees the

relation of discourses held in allegory as one of dialectical opposition and fissure. Exposing these

fissures to critique yields an image of the allegorical relation in and of itself as a kind of formal

“nothingness” holding the discourses together despite their mutual contradictions. This is a

dialectical image of the allegorical form as such, yet the form is not Platonic in the sense of an

“eternal” or timeless essence that precedes the materiality of either discourse. Rather, the

metaphysical “nothingness” is produced by the allegorical interplay of discourses a posteriori

and ex post facto. Another term for Benjamin’s “post-factual” formalism is therefore “historical

materialism.”

Benjamin (and de Man to an extent) provide us an “emergent” or “speculative”

allegorical form as a counter to an “essential” allegory. But this is not the only problem we have

placed before ourselves. Allegorical speculation is one question, and being Latin American is

another. Are Latin American nations essentially the continuation of “Occidental civilization” or

are they different from it? Latin American literature has long oriented itself to a speculative

future in which its own cultural difference will have finally arrived. The very notions of identity

2 Genocidal dictatorships, for instance, derive their power by confusing ideology and reality, to

the point of obliterating whole populations in order to prove it.

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defined by its “civilization” or “subjective sovereignty” are in and of themselves metaphysical

questions, but in Latin American they cannot help but be conditioned by particular historical

circumstances of the region. It is one thing to inscribe a definition of citizenship into a national

constitution based on metaphysical tenets of sovereign subjectivity. But all concerned must begin

with the premise that “Western” metaphysics were imported to the region at a date certain in the

16th century. According to the rules of this theoretical game, Latin American nations may claim

political and historical independence from their historical colonizers (including the US after

independence), but they cannot claim that participation of citizens in the nation is defined by a

singular metaphysics in continuity with colonization.

This contention between metaphysics and history is further problematized by the fact that

any conception of Latin American difference is not an essential, timeless identity. Difference has

been produced through historical contacts with Otherness. I need not rehearse the polarities of

these contact beyond listing European/Indigenous, white skin/dark skin, written/oral,

modern/tradition. The list could go on. The historical trajectory of Latin America is that of

repeated dis-encounters of distinct historical trajectories, a fact recognized by Antonio Cornejo

Polar under his concept of heterogeneity. The ends sought by Latin American nations have often

been to “resolve” these historical differences. If in the 19th century the resolution was to be found

through genocide (as in the case of Argentina for instance), by the 20th it was to be formulated by

“resolving” identity through mestizaje, transculturation, or state-sponsored torture. Engagements

of identity politics become very difficult in such circumstances, since one cannot resist a

dominant (criollo or Eurocentric) culture merely by asserting “difference” from it. To do so runs

the risk of re-asserting a foreign metaphysics of citizenship and subjectivity from the culture one

is resisting.
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To draw the argument back out, let us say that any discussion of “Latin American

speculative literature” may end up appealing to two distinct notions of speculation, especially

when that literature relates in one way or another to global climate change. One is the allegory of

regional difference, “People production,” which as just outlined cannot help but be particular and

historical. The other is the allegory of metaphysical “worlding” on a planetary scale, and in the

case of anthropogenic climate change of the effort to bring humanity together as a universal and

transhistorical species in order to avert imminent environmental catastrophe.

2. Post-Phenomenal

In order to explore these tensions more, I would like to turn to two works that are

extremely difficult to identify. Both have emerged from Latin America in some sense, but from

totally distinct geographical and historical trajectories. Neither interrogates Latin American

identity or difference, and neither works to “resolve” global climate change or really critique it

for that matter. Yet each in its own way interrogates the problem of “worlding” as it relates to

ecological constraints on humanism. Both are philosophical treatises, in other words, but neither

can be defined as a philosophical text solely. They are fact-based but not necessarily factual, and

certainly not realist. Both are decidedly post-factual in this regard, both are highly literary, but

are not literature as such. Rather, the only apt descriptor for them is vague and somewhat

vacuous: speculative non-fiction.

Vilém Flusser published his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis in Göttingen, Germany (Immatrix

Publications) in 1987. This “original” version was published in German, and would not be

translated into English until 2012 (University of Minnesota Press). But by this point an English

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis had already existed in print for more than year, produced under the
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supervision of the official Vilém Flusser Archive of the Universität der Künste Berlin. But this

“original” translation was not of the “original” German publication, but that of an unpublished

manuscript in the Archive “originally” written in Portuguese. The two translations therefore

carry subtly different titles. The second translation (which, remember, is really the “original”),

translated by Valentine A. Pakis, is listed as Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report

by the Institut de Recherche Paranaturaliste, and includes not only Flusser’s “original” treatise

but also a subsequent report (really a collection of anatomical sketches of vampyroteuths,

included in the original publication) by the Algerian-French zoosystematician and

technozoosemiotician Louis Bec.3 The first translation (which, remember, may or may not really

be “original”), translated by Rodrio Maltez Novaes, carries the title Vilém Flusser’s Brazilian

Vampryoteuthis Infernalis. The copyright page specifies that the text has been “Edited and

Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese,” and the volume also includes correspondence

between Flusser and two intellectuals from São Paulo, the poet Dora Ferreira da Silva and the

biologist Milton Vargas.

The previous paragraph as been written deliberately to engender confusion as to what

constitutes originality or authenticity. The one constant throughout my description is the name of

Vilém Flusser, but this fact will not make identification any easier. Flusser was not “essentially”

Brazilian, a fact he rather proudly asserted when he self-consciously began to re-fashion himself

as Brazilian. By that point Flusser had lost his native language, both by choice and by the

vagaries of historical chance. Originally born into the Jewish community of Prague in 1920,

Flusser’s native-born language was Czech and he never wrote in it professionally. He fled the

3 Both Flusser and Bec are listed as co-authors of the German translation, though Bec’s

portion was originally written in French. His areas of inquiry are inventions of Bec himself,
of course, who is something a scientific performance artist.
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First Czechoslovak Republic with his wife and her family in 1939 shortly after the Nazi invasion,

first briefly to London and then to Brazil in 1940.4 By the mid-1950s Flusser began his

intellectual career in earnest publishing his first books, academic articles, and journalism in

Portuguese. He continued to do so until 1973, at which point Brazil’s military dictatorship

became intolerable and Flusser relocated to France.

Thus, Flusser is almost sui generis in that he wrote and published in at least four

languages that were not his own: Portuguese, German, French, and English. To make matters

worse, it is not clear what the “original” language of his texts was since Flusser was in the habit

of writing multiple manuscripts of the same text simultaneously. Both Portuguese and German

versions of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis seem to have been written co-terminiously, with minor

variations between them.5 More correctly stated, we must admit that there is no “original”

language of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis unless we name that language as “translation” itself. This

would be wholly consistent with Flusser’s theories of global migration and language. He begins

his article “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness” with an autobiographical observation: “In

short, I am homeless, because there are so many homelands that make their home in me. This

fact of life is expressed daily in my work. I feel at home in at least four languages. I sense a

necessity and a certain amount of pressure to translate and retranslate everything that still needs

to be written” (Flusser 2002, 91). He then moves quickly to negate this “making their home in

me” as illusory: “Perhaps the term Heimat [a sense of home] is only native to German – the

terms, but not the experience? After all, I also have my doubts about the experience itself. Does

the Provençal farmer living in Robion experience his own historical, multi-stratified homeland

4 Flusser’s immediate family all perished in the Holocaust.
5 The Portuguese is slightly more expansive and interrogates phenomenological questions

of being (“Ser”); the phenomenology of the German version is more definitively

Heideggarian (or in fact, post-Heideggarian) in its discussion of Dasein.
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(whose archaeological structure has been put in place by late-Paleolithic, Neolithic, Ligurian,

Greek, Roman, Visigothic, Burgundian, Arabian, Frankish, Provençal, Italian, and French

ancestors) in the same manner that the traveling Brazilian farmworker experiences his terra or

the Israelis kibbuznik his Eretz Israel? During the lengthiest epoch of human existence, man has

dwelled in ‘a home,’ a house, but he has not possessed a ‘home’” (Flusser 2002, 92)

Not coincidentally at the end of the passage just cited Flusser invokes the two identity

categories (Brazilian, Jewish-Israeli) closest to his own being after his dislocation from his

original homeland. Yet he uses them as generalized tokens of cultural identity, utilized as

emptied hypotheticals juxtaposed against German language and culture. Strangely, this may be a

statement of Flusser’s most intimate, innermost being. In a section of his autobiography,

Bodenlos, entitled “Brazilian Language,” Flusser relates his identification with Brazilian culture.

He admits that his relationship to language and culture is rather odd: He was displaced from his

mother tongue and country, but he did not enter Brazil as a “transcendent” cosmopolitan with

any number of languages/cultures at his disposal, nor did he approach Brazil as a transcultural

border zone. Because he was a refugee, Flusser claims to have spent the first decade in São Paulo

floating “in limbo” (Flusser 2007, 3) After 10 years, Flusser made a conscious decision to

become Brazilian through Brazilian Portuguese “predominantly as rough material, challenging

me to work with and change it in a way so that this change may transform me and bring me into

contact with others” (Flusser 2007, 3) More significantly, Flusser decided to “bring himself into

contact with others” not through speech, but as a writer, essentially approaching the double-

meaning of “língua” [“tongue”, “language”] as a dialectic in which the language-system [langue]

overwrote the spoken word [parole]:

The dialectic marking any relationship between the subject that wants to inform matter
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and between matter that is to be informed positioned itself between me and the

Portuguese language. Epistemologically speaking, it meant that I endeavored to access

the essence of the language in order to change it only to find that I was substantially

changed myself. Emotionally speaking, it meant I began to love this language the more I

discovered its beauty and that I began to hate it the more it resisted change. And

existentially speaking, it meant that I began to live for this language, knowing all along

that the essence of any language lies in being a means, not an end in itself. To summarize

this dialectic: I tried to control the language only to be controlled by it, and I did that in

order to be changed by the language and to come close to others. In short, I began to

become a Brazilian writer. (Flusser 2007, 3)

Here we see the curious ways in which Flusser not only became a speaker of Portuguese, but also

a Brazilian after he had been “ungrounded” and “floated” down to the country. His engagement

with language is a struggle to overcome language in order to “inform matter,” only to learn that

language itself controls and informs him. To become Brazilian is here to exist in translation

between language systems, non-human matter, and one’s own affective interiority. Brazilian

language is translation itself, and the fact that Flusser wrote so much of his work in multiple

“tongues” at once more than suggests he never relinquished a sense of being Brazilian even after

he left the country.

In the case of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis such questions of translation and identity

evidence themselves in the production of the book, but they are almost utterly absent within the

text itself. Although it presents itself as philosophical treatise, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is in

fact a strange mix of science non-fiction and speculative fable. The title is the Latin name for the
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deep-sea creature commonly known as the vampire squid. The first chapter of the work in fact

delves into scientific taxonomy:

The Genus Octopus is represented by approximately 170 species, the Genus Homo is

represented by a single surviving species: we have annihilated all others. Some species of

octopi are snacks: Octopus vulgaris. Others can reach over 10 metres in diameter and are

fearsome: Octopus appolyon. Their formidable fangs, their pointy reversible teeth, their

powerful tentacles covered with suction organs and their ferocious gaze endow them with

a diabolical appearance. Other species are practically unknown: they inhabit the oceans’

depths an can grow to over 20 metres in diameter. Their cranial capacity can exceed ours

and they rarely come to the surface. Recently, three specimens of a quasi-unknown

species were fished out of the South China Sea: Vampyroteuthis infernalis.6 (Flusser

2011, 23)

At the very moment he introduces us to the vampire squid, however, Flusser repeatedly

recognizes the difficulty in classifying the beast: “The taxonomic classification of the species is

difficult. It is difficult for us to catch Vampyroteuthis in nets for fishing as well as those for

knowledge” (Flusser 2011, 23). Although it was originally classified as an octopus,

Vampyroteuthis as a species exhibits characteristics of both Octopoda and Teuthida (squids), the

latter order being encoded into its scientific name. Biological science by Flusser’s day had

already recognized vampire squids as something of a phylogenetic relic and created a new order

for it, Vampyromorphida, for which the species is the only living member. Thus, before we as

readers know it, Flusser has already bound Homo sapiens and Vampyroteuthis infernalis together

taxonomically, as the only known members of their respective orders.

6
For the purposes of this essay I will quote from the Brazilian-Portuguese version, bearing in
mind that some its inflections may not be present in the German, and vice versa.
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Indeed the purpose of Flusser’s treatise is to demonstrate the convergence of human and

vampyroteuthian worlds, but not by anthropomorphizing the vampire squid or allegorizing its

existence. “Convergence” is a key term at the outset of the argument, a concept Flusser takes in

its narrowly evolutionary meaning. The treatise is divided into three main sections surrounded by

a brief introduction and coda. The first of these three not only relates phylogenetic nomenclature

but also analyzes the anatomy and evolution of mollusks (cephalopods in particular). Although

cephalopods and hominids appear to us far removed on the evolutionary scale, Flusser notes that

they both derive historically from similar sources, namely protozoans that over the eons came to

develop into creatures with bilateral symmetry (“Vampyroteuthes and men are organisms, beings

with undeniable animal dignity. They are Bilateria, dialectically organized worms” (25)). Both

have a head to ingest the world and an anus to expel it (“They are eucoelomates with head and

anus, which therefore distinguish between ‘progress’ and ‘retreat’ (25)). And both have an

ectoderm (e.g., skin) in contact with the world, a mesoderm (e.g., nervous system) to sense the

world, and endoderm (internal organs) to digest the world, with a cavity (e.g., intenstines)

between the mesoderm and endoderm.

From these rudimentary organizations of cells, humans and vampire squids diverged. The

human body developed radially around its intestinal tract, while the squid body developed

radially around its nervous system. (The vampire squid’s brain is radial and rings the mouth.)

While humans came to separate their mouths from their anuses in order to experience the world

as upright walkers, cephalopods bent backwards and folded over themselves to become coiled

floaters. “Cephalopod,” of course, translates as “head-foot,” and this is the case: the “foot” of the

cephalopod came to fold over the head and devour it, placing the mouth/anus in the middle of the

body and extending a “mantle” over it that reach downward as tentacles. While humans are
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essentially “linear” creatures that reach their hands to the sky, vampyroteuths are “spiral” beings

that suck in the world from below. Nevertheless, Flusser notes certain convergences between

them, such as the eye. The structure of the cephalopodic eye is remarkably similar to that of

humans, even though they are unrelated evolutionarily. The vampire squid has myriad “teeth”

that run up its tentacles, encircle the mouth, and reach all the way into the esophagus. But these

are not fangs as we would conceive them, having little to do with our own dentate structure.

Nonetheless, Flusser finds such convergences significant in that they elicit a more precise

conceptualization of evolution itself: humans and vampire squids are opposites of one another,

not because they occupy opposite ends of an evolutionary line, but because they seem to orbit

one another, occasionally meeting in the circle of life where the mouth eats its own tail.

The “phagocytic” image I have just sketched becomes increasingly pronounced as

Flusser’s argument proceeds. Vampyroteuthic anatomy is a fact of their existence, but Flusser is

interested in the way this factual existence “worlds” the environment the creature inhabits. The

second and third main sections of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis – on the “Vampyroteuthic World”

and “Vampyroteuthic Culture” – become incrementally more fabulistic as Flusser treats the

vampire squid’s mind as the evolutionary equal (or even superior) of the human mind. Flusser

runs directly contrary to Heidegger’s contention that animals lack being-in-the-world because

they lack logos (speech, and therefore reason) and therefore cannot grasp concepts. Heidegger

writes, “It is not simply a question of qualitative otherness of the animal world as compared with

the human world… but rather whether the animal can apprehend something as something,

something as a being, at all” (Heidegger, 383-384). The German phenomenologist contends, that

is, that there is an abyss (Abgrund) between humans and animals even though both are zōon; but

this differentiation is, in fact, not ordered around the mouth (speech, logos) or brain (reason,
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logos), but really around the hand. Stuart Elden makes this anatomical distinction in Heidegger

explicit:

Animals, as presented here, do not react to other things, in their presence, as either ready-

to-hand or present-to-hand. Thus the lizard, for example, though it suns itself on the rock,

does not understand the rock as a rock. Thus animals are deficient in this way of

mediating their experience of the world, and are not Dasein. (Elden, 275)

The so-called deficiency swirls around the animal’s (in)ability to “apprehend” (etymologically,

“to grasp with the hand”) or “comprehend” (“to grasp together”) the objects around it.

For Flusser such differentiation is absurd. He cannot prove how the vampire squid

understands the world, of course, so his argument necessarily remains speculative. Yet this does

not imply that a conceptual abyss exists between humans and vampyroteuths. For one, the

“abyss” for the vampyroteuth is merely the world in which it dwells, with absolutely no regard

for the human. From the human perspective the lower depths of the ocean are uninhabitable and

therefore incomprehensible: “We see there a cold black hold under a crushing pressure, full of

fear and turmoil, inhabited by viscous and repugnant creatures that eat each other with pincers

and teeth. We see Hell” (Flusser 2011, 70). The opposite is the case for the vampyroteuth: “So

this is the vampyroteuthian environment, his habitat: the centre of the world. The great hole that

suck in all life. It is permanently vivified by the manna rain [of fertilizing plankton cadavers] that

falls constantly…. A garden that whispers, shines and dances. And a garden that is there for the

delight of Vampyroteuthis: so that he may enjoy its fruits as he sees fit. This is the abyss:

Paradise” (Flusser 2011, 69-70).

In this “Paradise,” the vampire squid cannot apprehend or comprehend anything, for the

obvious reason that the beast has no hands. As an upright walking creature, humans utilize their
 Read 18

hands to reach out and grab objects. This alters the manner in which human (as “subjects”)

intend objects phenomenologically, by bringing the objects they grasp closer or further from

view: “Objects that are brought close to the eyes by the hands are [for humans] ‘concrete’, while

objects that can be visualized but not reached are ‘theoretical’. Every evaluation, valuation and

measurement (therefore every ethic and aesthetic) is a result of the coordination between hands

and eyes” (Flusser 2011, 72) Without hands or natural light, vampyroteuths necessarily intend

objects in a distinct manner. First of all, the vampire squid’s skin is covered entirely with

chromatophores that emit light and color, such that rather than reflecting on objects external to it,

the vampyroteuth produces the objects it envisions. Rather than walk upright against the ground

(dialectically, analytically), the vampire squid floats downward and “synthesizes” its

environment by sucking it in. It extends its toothy tentacles into its world, but only to bring

objects back into its mouth. Vampyroteuthian phenomenology is therefore that of becoming one

with the world rather than experiencing the world as a division between phenomenon and

noumenon. The vampyroteuth intends objects by tasting and digesting them, thus forging its

world through impressionistic sensorial excitations: “The purpose of vampyroteuthian touch is

the other. He touches the darkness with the aim of directing his light rays at a particular region of

the world. He conceives of objects in order to make them appear” (Flusser 2011, 85).

For Flusser it makes perfect sense that in vampyroteuthic anatomy the mouth, the brain,

and the sexual organs are all concentrated around one another. Every single body-part of the

vampire squid is a raw nerve, a digestive organ, a sexual organ, and the mind. As Flusser writes,

“For Vampyroteuthis, sex is the foundation of the world of appearances and it impregnates all

appearances. Sex is public. Vampyroteuthian philosophy is, before all else, a critique of sex. His

Organon, the rules of his reflection, are the rules of sex. His language’s syntax, the play of
 Read 19

colours over his skin, is the logic of sex” (Flusser 2011, 85). In short, as Flusser states at various

points in his treatise, the vampire squid is a fundamentally orgasmic being; its Dasein is that of

constantly provoking orgasm rather than negating it through reason. “[H]uman culture seeks to

repress the consciousness of death through the production of objects, through sexual repression.

Vampyroteuthian culture seeks to repress the consciousness of death through sexual excitement,

and through the repression of suicidal and cannibalistic tendencies” (Flusser 2011, 94)

If one can accept that vampyroteuths are capable of having culture and art, one would

also have to accept that this culture is thoroughly subjective and narcissistic. Here we should be

clear that Flusser would define “culture,” both in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis and most

everywhere else in his extensive oeuvre, as the passing on of vital information so that it persists

after death, to “immortalize” life. “Art” for Flusser is the “informing” of objects with

information that can be conveyed historically, well past the demise of an individual entity. Yet

there are many ways to inform matter besides writing or sculpture. If evolution is essentially the

history of life, “The evolution towards mentality manifests itself, as does every vital evolution, in

a growth of organ complexity (in this case of the brain and nervous system). However, we must

not forget that such manifestation is merely ‘phenotypic’, that is, an observable manifestation in

organisms” (Flusser 2011, 49). But any biological phenotype is merely the outcome of

informational metabolism of the genetic information held within the cell. “The essential support

of evolution is not the organism, but the egg. It is the egg that contains the vital programme, and

it is the egg that is ‘immortal’. That is, the egg is transferred from organism to organism, leaving

behind dead organisms as vestiges on its way towards the evolution of its virtualities” (Flusser

2011, 49).
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Human art under these conditions is therefore the translation of phenotypical information

passed from the hand outward onto externalized objects. “Men seek to imprint acquired

information upon objects. Other men that pass by the informed objects will collect such

information, thereafter ‘objectified’” (Flusser 2011, 105). By contrast, vampyroteuthic culture is

utterly subjective rather than objective, so that the art of the vampire squid is the reproduction of

the self. This may occur by the emission of bioluminescent mucus that produces a shape that

“copies” the outline of the vampyroteuth’s body, particularly when threatened. But this “self-

portraiture” does not reveal the innermost “truth” of its being; rather, it is a decoy, a deception, a

screen behind which the vampire squid hides and flees. Vampyroteuthic “truth” is only

transmitted libidinally as deception. Vampyroteuths dialogue with each other and the world by

activating their chormataphores and drawing others to themselves – to eat them or copulate with

them or both. Their dialogue is oriented to the “violation” of the other. The vampyroteuth uses its

chromatophores to “transcode [its] experience into a ‘skin painting’. Such colouration never

before seen provokes the curiosity of another Vampyroteuthis. The sender uses the new

colouration to seduce the receiver and copulate with it” (Flusser 2011, 109). Through copulation,

information is passed genetically into the egg sac, which in the case of vampyroteuths is filled

with embryonic vampire squids that are all exact genetic copies of one another. Furthermore,

vampyroteuths are cannibals. After copulation, one eats the other. Once the eggs are born, they

baby vampyroteuths all strive to eat their “twins” until only one remains. Vampyroteuthian art is

therefore the act of activating libidinal drives – sexual and cannibal jouissance – so as to

engender genotypical replicas and eliminate genetic difference.

Flusser’s repeated attention to cannibalism allows the argument to come full circle. The

treatise stages an encounter with Otherness that is at once scientific and fantastical, rational and
 Read 21

implausible. Given the author’s overt ties to Brazil and Brazilian Portuguese, it is impossible not

to associate the mere mention of cannibalism with Brazilian Antropofagismo as invented in

Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropofagia” [“Cannibalist Manifesto”] and later championed

by the Concretist poets (Haroldo de Campos above all) and Tropicália (Hélio Oiticica and

Caetano Veloso come to mind). For the uninitiated, Cannibalism (as an aesthetic movement or

practice) sought to re-define Brazilian culture from the vantage of indigenous Tupi-Guaraní

spiritual practice, in order to forge a kind of cosmopolitanism that did not position Brazil on a

lower rung of civilization. To wit, rather than importing civilization from Europe and the

Northern Hemisphere, Brazilian culture would ingest foreign civilizations, digest them

transculturally, and throw up a new civilizational admixture which Brazil would then export back

out to the world. This associational link to Antropofagismo occurs even when reading the

“original” German text (or its translation), suggesting that Flusser has “trans-created” a

Brazilianized German thought and language wholly in line with Cannibalism.

However, the intention of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is not to link humans and

vampyroteuths allegorically. It cannot be claimed that the treatise allegorizes Brazilian cultural

history or its aesthetic movements. Rather, the volume marks an absolute abyss between the

human and the vampyroteuthian that cannot be bridged… except in the following way: Flusser’s

underlying intention is to substantiate a more acute conception of history than that which

currently exists. Elsewhere Flusser dubs this “post-history,” something which I am here calling

the “post-factual”: to wit, that history can no longer be reduced to writing history (the inscription

of phenotypical information on objects like clay tablets or paper). This “post-factual” view

obscures – or perhaps even erases – conceptual divisions between subject and object, natural

history and social history. The vampire squid is a barbaric, disgusting creature… to us humans.
 Read 22

Based on its imputed primitive savagery, we systematically deny Dasein or being-in-the-world to

vampyroteuths. If the subject-object relation is disrupted or confounded, however, we may

realize that the vampire squid transmits the history of its society and civilization (art and

philosophy above all) through its genetic code.

But genetic history (aka “evolution”) is one of divergences and convergences… and

emergencies. Historically, we share a common genetic history with vampyroteuths, and by the

last section of Flusser’s treatise (“The Emergence of the Vampyroteuthis”), it becomes clear that

the future of human history is the genetic re-emergence of vampyroteuthic civilization with

“mankind.” Humans have become so adept at imprinting information on objects that these

objects turn in over themselves and begin to encode information on human subjects. We would

now recognize this as internet-based Global Capitalism, but in the late 1980s Flusser calls this

“the second industrial revolution”:

…a new reformulation of production methods: information is no longer stored in tools

but in cybernetic programmes within apparatus that produce tools. Henceforth it is the

programmer (the analyst and developer of systems) and not the toolmaker that informs.

The apparatus will automatically imprint information upon tools, which in turn

automatically imprint the information upon countless objects. There emerges a tsunami of

cheaper and cheaper gadgets that are pitiful for being banal, ephemeral stereotypes,

carries of diluted information: “mass culture.” (Flusser 2011, 114)

I am no longer an artisan. Rather, I allow pre-programmed tools to operate on my behalf to

produce whatever it is I desire. This leaves me free time to begin replicating myself incessantly

through the pre-programmed tools, re-creating my self as multiple subjectivities available for

others to appreciate me as illuminated spectacle. This is what my multiple selves do every time I
 Read 23

modify my Facebook or Twitter profile, my Amazon reviews, my credit report, or publish an

academic article on speculative non-fiction. Or as Flusser would put it: “In this way, the society

of the immediate future shall be a society of information consumption, less and less interested in

the consumption of ‘goods’, of objects. The interest is diverted from economy to sociology.

Intersubjective society: a society of Vampyroteuthes” (Flusser 2011, 114). All of this with one

final caveat. Flusser does not intend vampyroteuths to serve as metaphors for humans; rather, he

is pointing to a material convergence of biological evolution made manifest as “social” history:

“Therefore, there cannot be a ‘human/Vampyroteuthis’ synthesis. The encounter of both, even if

carefully prepared, does not result in a spherical platonic being armed with eight extremities and

two faces that is the restoration of an original lost unity. Every encounter of both results in a

hybrid in which the Vampyroteuthis is released in man and the man in Vampyroteuthis. It is at

this monstrous spectacle that we stare every time that Vampyroteuthis emerges” (Flusser 2011,

122). The vampyroteuthic world will ooze through our pores, a more advanced form of

Anthropophagism than we may have thought possible.

3. Post-Metaphysical

Latin American being is defined by the historical encounter with Otherness. This history

has accompanied (perhaps even provoked) the advent and ultimate decline of humanism

globally. But this does not mean that the world “worlded” by Latin American history is

essentially human from its inception, nor does it necessitate a final solution to Otherness

resulting in the birth some new “platonic being.” This cannot be stated as a definitive fact, of

course, which is precisely the point made by Argentinean philosopher, Fabián Ludueña

Romandini.
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At the risk of being reductive, one can generally characterize Ludueña’s work as an

attempt to fashion a metaphysics for the post-human, post-historical, and, ironically, post-

metaphysical age we now inhabit. In what promises to be Ludueña’s masterwork, the multi-

volume La comunidad de los espectros, the philosopher reconstructs the historical trajectory by

which humans became political beings by means of “anthropotechnologies” – the

epistemological and metaphysical techniques whereby humans crafted their world as non-animal

(and therefore human). The first of its three volumes, Antropotecnia (2010), is not merely a

deconstruction of humanism, but seeks to move beyond deconstruction as such. In fashioning the

human, classical onto-theo-logy has not brought “Man” closer to God, but has brought Homo

sapiens into contact with “specters” (a term that cannot help but recall late Derridean thought).

That is to say, “modern” political order stemmed from a disciplined (and disciplining) effort to

separate a political world from nature, social history from natural history, the city from the

wilderness, and while these terms do not enter his work as such, civilization from barbarity.

Ludueña does not merely deconstruct these binaries and leave things at that, but rather examines

how the persistent application of technology (both material and conceptual) has eventually led to

the extinction of both the human and the animal. This does not at all mean that the world ends or

life with it, but that any distinction between an interior realm of humanity (subjective,

phenomenal, biopolitical) and an exterior realm of animality (objective, noumenal, zoological,

vita nuta) has been obliterated by the very technologies that generated the divisions in the first

place. What is left is a singular realm to which Ludueña refers (in English) as the Outside, and

the second volume of La comunidad de los espectros, entitled Principios de espectrología

(2016), schematizes the philosophical principles for living and dying through this “non-

anthropic” world.
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Here it should be noted that although Ludueña publishes almost exclusively in Buenos

Aires, there is nothing in his work to date that suggests any interest in theorizing Latin American

being-in-the-world, much less Argentinean identity politics. He operates within a history of

philosophy that may be viewed by contemporary Latin Americanists as “reactionary” and

“Eurocentric” even though his theory is anything but. His knowledge of early Christian theology,

Medieval philosophy, and German Idealism (not to mention French post-structuralism) is

encyclopedic, and indeed his style of writing verges on anachronistic – a striking admixture of

Derridean play and antiquated philology that is often difficult for a reader to place. It is

necessary to underscore as well that Ludueña does not appear to be personally invested as a

scholar in any of the schools-of-thought in which he operates, up to and including

deconstruction. His is the philosophy of what occurs now that the history of philosophy has come

to an end, and Hegel’s Absolute Spirit has quite obviously failed to self-actualize.

The general thrust of Ludueña’s thought is crystallized in a slender volume published in

2014 that is not “about” philosophy at all, but rather North American speculative fiction. Only

some 95 small pages long, H.P. Lovecraft: La disyunción en el Ser is the only of Ludueña’s

books to date to have been translated into English [H.P. Lovecraft: The Disjunction in Being].7 In

it Ludueña critiques the work of the U.S.-American speculative horror writer against the

background of the end of philosophical history and the imminent extinction of Homo sapiens due

to climate change. Let us be clear that it does not matter if this post-history or future history is

actually true, so long as it serves as a springboard for the post-metaphysician’s speculations.

His choice of Lovecraft as an object of inquiry is hardly random. On one hand,

Lovecraft’s work has engendered a cult of fans and fanatics, many of who consider his

7
Citations from the work will be drawn from this translation.
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speculative fiction neither speculative nor fictional, but rather sacred esoteric apocrypha. On the

other hand, something of a cottage industry has developed in academic scholarship in utilizing

Lovecraft in the context of ecocritical theory. The starting point for this may have been Michel

Houllebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie from 1991. Donna Haraway’s

recent Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) cannot help but reference

Lovecraft in utilizing Chthulu as its central metaphor. Haraway seeks to forge a geopolitics to

resist climate change through human kinship with the “critters” in the oozy biomass that covers

the surface of the globe, a kind of primordial sludge she identifies as “chthonic”: “I imagine

chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very

unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo”

(Haraway, 2). In invoking the “Chthulucene” to name the contemporary era, however, she self-

consciously invokes Lovecraft by negation: it brings to mind the giant and ferocious squid-

headed humanoid monster for which Lovecraft is most identified, yet also claims that “These

real and possible timespaces [of the Chthulucene] are not named after SF writer H. P.

Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference)” (Haraway,

101).8 Taking a different approach, Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy

(2012) engages in a frankly bizarre concordance Lovecraft’s entire oeuvre, mining a plethora of

Lovecraftian quoations that appear to support to Harman’s brand of object-oriented ontology.

Lovecraft also weighs heavily, if not always overtly, on Ben Woodard’s rather smart On an

Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013), a work that, unlike the other “post-

humanist” works just mentioned, does not appear to enlist theory for human intellectual or

political ends.

8
Lovecraft was overtly and repugnantly sexist and racist. So were most of the authors we study.
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Notably, none of these works mention Ludueña, or Flusser for that matter. The

geopolitics of critical thought are still in effect on that front, keeping Latin American scholarship

off the radar of their northern colleagues of whom the Latin Americans (however defined) tend

to be exceedingly well versed in return. Ludueña begins his exploration of Lovecraft with an

“Overture” containing stunning claims. Although he will study Lovecraft’s literary Obra, he will

not approach it from the perspective of literary scholarship, especially that which proceeds from

a dedication to “authorial authenticity.” Lovecraft, it should be noted, is among the least

authentic authors one can imagine. In his brief life he left a stunning array of stories, poems,

philosophical fragments, letters, drafts, many of which were never published and some of which

were “completed” or otherwise modified by other authors. During his lifetime, Lovecraft

published in “low-class” pulp publications, and after his lifetime the quality of his writing was

harshly diminished even by those critics who appreciated the content of his thought.

If Ludueña does not approach Lovecraft as a literary critic, however, he certainly does

not approach him as a philosopher. “In other words, unlike Harman my aim is not to use

Lovecraft as the literary illustration of a philosophical system (for example, that of object-

oriented philosophy). On the contrary, I think that Lovecraft, like all literature, is irreducible to

philosophy and can never be its expression. The inverse is equally true” (Ludueña, 12).

Lovecraft does not provide us with an allegory of contemporary philosophy, and the reasons for

this are more profound than mere disagreement with the likes of Harman. The heart of the matter

is that philosophy is dead, deliberately so since “philosophy is the only anthropotechnology that,

after existing for thousands of years, has had the courage or the insolent audacity (as the reader

prefers) of positing its own annihilation as a real possibility…” (Ludueña, 9). All (Occidental)

philosophy, that is, orients itself not only to death (c.f., Heidegger’s Dasein) but also to the final
 Read 28

historical moment when Absolute Objectivity will render philosophy useless: “Man” will have

attained transparent Truth in his Logos just like God. Moreover, philosophy has, since the days

of the Socratic dialogues, fashioned itself as a conversation between the philosopher and his [sic]

school of pupils. These schools systematically and necessarily cut themselves off from the rest of

society in order meditate upon the human condition with the greatest degree of objectivity. “The

topology of the philosophical school is irreducible to any social form, past or to come; its

geometry escapes everything the human species has thought and lived as forms of associality”

(Ludueña, 11). Simply put, philosophy is a society of anti-social recluses who divorce

themselves from the rest of society, and notably, these asocial schools no longer exist.

Philosophy per se carries on as an empty shell of itself in universities and academic publications.

The fact that there is a cult of sorts surrounding Lovecraft is therefore telling, since

Ludueña may be suggesting Lovecraft’s fans and fanatics to be a subterranean, esoteric

philosophical school persisting just out of sight of philosophy proper. This would make

Lovecraft the last true philosopher to have ever lived. But to his credit Ludueña will not treat

Lovecraft’s literature as exemplary of any particular philosophy or theory. Rather, “Lovecraft’s

literature describes or traces the horizon against which all current philosophizing must test itself

if it aspires to remain in the existence of thought. That is why I will not take up Lovecraft’s

writings as a way of understanding… but rather the opposite: I will consider them as the most

conspicuous attempt to define the uncomfortable space in which any thinking must ultimately try

and place itself” (Ludueña 2014, 12-13; emphasis in original). This is an uncomfortable space,

indeed, since “Lovecraft is the vessel of an arche-mythology which is, at the same time, a post-

mythology: the mythology that comes after the death of the last human myth” (Ludueña 2014,

16). The demise of the last human myth may be caused by the demise of humanity itself:
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“Lovecraft’s truly rare accomplishment was to throw the distraught minds of his time and of

future generations into the nightmare of life in a universe in which humanity no longer has a

place or a meaning. The time of the new Mythos is, precisely, non-anthropomorphic, and its

force cannot be silenced once it has been invoked” (Ludueña 2014, 17). In other words, the

school of Lovecraftian thought is, in fact, a death-cult.

But rather than examine the sociology of (human) cults, Ludueña interrogates the

Lovecraftian “Mythos” from three distinct, non-anthropic vantages: political geology, oneiric

geometry, and individuation.9 From this schematic description of the argument we would seem

to glimpse a progression from noumenal “reality” (geology), to phenomenal worlding (dreams),

to a subjectivity (individuation) conjoining phenomenon and noumenon. But there is absolutely

nothing Cartesian or Kantian about Ludueña’s endeavor. In the “political geology” of

Lovecraft’s mythical universe, humans are not the only creatures equipped to be-in-the-world

(Dasein); indeed they are the most insignificant of the intelligent Races. The earth is but one

arena within an infinite universe in which Great Races (non-human monsters) conduct their civil

wars across multiple dimensions of time and space. The existence of humans is merely

accidental and incidental to them and the rest of the universe. In the typical Lovecraft tale, a

human may stumble across an esoteric incantation or ritual that unwittingly unleashes a horrific

monster hell-bent on destruction and death; or the human may be possessed by a monster seeking

to unleash itself through magic. These monstrous, mythological beings may have been dormant

underneath a polar ice cap or inhabitants of a subterranean city, but once they rise to the surface

of the planet they obey no human law – in fact they obey no law but that of their own power.

Thus, pace Carl Schmitt’s dictum that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, the

9
Three rather strange terms, that is. They will be clarified in the discussion to follow.
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subterranean Great Races show that “sovereignty is a concept that cannot be circumscribed

within human space” (Ludueña 2014, 35). Humans are just accidental tourists on one level of

geological strata upon which they are vulnerable to and condemned by powerful decisions of

Others. “From this point of view, all human power is temporarily delegated until the powerful

cosmic races [poderosas razas cósmicas] once again assume control and carry out the final

leveling of the planet” (Ludueña 2014, 35).

In this section of the argument, Ludueña upends our received notions of the relation

between myth/spirit and history. As I myself have written elsewhere (Read 2016), for instance,

the human claim to political sovereignty over territory and history is usually rooted in an Ur-

myth such as the tale of Noah in Genesis; removing these myths from consideration, as is done in

Esteban Echeverría’s parody “El Matadero,” obliterates the division between human force and

natural force by which human sovereignty was “originally” constituted. In Ludueña’s take on

Lovecraft, humanity’s belief in its own power is preceded by the Mythos of the “Great Cosmic

Races,”10 but the Mythos will also reassert itself after humans invite their own destruction.

History will incite the continuation of metaphysics after history has ended. This is the sense of

the doubled arche-mythology and post-mythology cited earlier.

Ludueña further details how Lovecraft accessed his notions of “subterranean cosmic

power” from 19th century Theosophists, notably William Scott-Elliott and Helena Blavatsky. The

whole point of Theosophy, of course, was to call upon spirits, gods, and lost races from

mythological places (e.g., Lemuria, Atlantis, Agartha, the Book of Enoch) and not only show that

10
Although not explicitly cited, it is impossible not associate Ludueña’s usage of “cosmic races”
with José Vasconcelos’ 1925 La raza cósmica, a key work of Mexican and Latin American
thought that argued for ethnic-cultural mestizaje as the positive end of history and civilization.
Whether used wittingly or not, the mere mention of “cosmic race” in Ludueña is ironically the
precise opposite of a positivistic, teleological historicism.
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these myths were historically real but that their power could still be harnessed through esoteric

science. Ludueña also specifies, however, that Lovecraft diverged sharply from his sources:

“That Lovecraft obtained these sources from Theosophy does not in the least imply that his

interpretation remained within the bounds imposed by the source material. Quite to the contrary.

Not only did the theosophical approach have a ‘spiritualist’ tendency alien to Lovecraft’s

universe, but it was also oriented around a fundamentally anthropic desideratum: in Theosophy

all the cosmic forces, all the Races, all the stellar beings are placed in the service of

anthropogenesis and its explication. In other words, in Theosophy the cosmogony is a form of

intelligent design destined to fuse itself, point for point, with anthropology. Nothing could be

further from the Lovecraftian perspective” (Ludueña 2014, 30-31). We regularly assume that

myths of great extra-human forces are sources for the unfolding of humanity’s political history,

just as metaphysics provides the eternal spiritual forms by which the physical universe extends

itself in space-time. This has the effect of subjugating nature (natural force, mythological power)

to anthropology (humanity’s own comprehension of its place in the world). For Lovecraft, the

Great Cosmic Races could care less about humanity. Although humans only see them as

supernatural forces, the Cosmic Races are political beings that will dominate humanity and

sentence it to death according to their own systems of laws. They precede humanity and will

outlive it.

The mythical here is co-terminous with the historical, and both are infinite, thus placing

the inherent finitude of the human in jeopardy. This viewpoint yields what must assuredly be the

central propositions of Ludueña’s entire argument:

1) Power is intrinsically exogenous to human nature; its exercise by humanity is merely

prosthetic; 2) power is an ontologically diluted local modeling of the natural powers of

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the cosmos; 3) humanity’s ability to exercise power is only ontologically possible because

of its inclusion in the cosmos and not as the result of an endogenous property; 4) a

microphysics of power is inconceivable if it is not articulated with a macrophysics of

power, understood as the unfolding of (in-)human dwelling in the abysses of an infinite

universe. (Ludueña 2014, 36)

This final point, on the “micro-” and “macrophysics” of power is best explained in the second

section of Ludueña’s argument, on dreams. In psychoanalysis dreams are assumed to express the

subject’s subconscious. For Freud dreams form part of the story the subject’s innermost drives

wish to tell her/himself, and thus can be interpreted with the analyst to bring balance to the

subject’s psyche. In Jung the archetypes manifested in dreams are not as individuated as they are

in Freud, but rather pertain to the psychic structures of all humanity as a species. In either case

the oneiric state presents as a “microphysics” expressing the broader “macrophysics” of human

power – the engine of sorts driving the human mind. This is, of course, a viewpoint rejected by

Lovecraft, for whom “the archectype is completely independent of any human formulation” and

“the deepest ground of human dream is completely non-human (and is often anti-human,

radically hostile) and is populated by factual proofs of the cosmic and paleobiological history of

the Earth, and beyond that, of the universe” (Ludueña 2014, 39; emphasis in original).

The tentacle-headed Chthulu enters into people’s dreams and manipulates the dream in

order to control them. Through dreams he communicates to his human cult of priests to instruct

them how to gain dominion over the Earth and unleash mayhem and murder among humans.

Ludueña considers this a political form of communication, therefore, rather than merely a

psychological one. Chthulu establishes what the philosopher calls an oneirarchy based in

“oneiric extraterritoriality,” and this is a common trait of the other Great Cosmic Races of
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Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Dreams are a platform upon which different intelligent beings encounter

each other and attempt to assert power over each other, even if that assertion results in

ungovernable anarchy. The Great Cosmic Races obey a different system of laws than humans,

that is, whereby psychic structures and astrophysical laws are indistinct. This means that

Lovecraft’s monsters appeal to an “abyssal mathematicity,” in order to open “trans-dimensional

regions” of the universe where “the laws of relativity can also be suspended and multi-

dimensionalities become conceivable, some of them without time” (Ludueña 2014, 42-43).

In short, this means that the human dream is inhabited by multiple intelligent entities

across multiple dimensions of space-time simultaneously, most of which abrogate the laws of

time and space. Ultimately, this fact results from a conception of subjectivity that is radically

Other. Even when the humanist view of subject-formation verges on madness (e.g., Lacanian

cathection around a Real object of desire; Deleuzian schizoanalysis), subjectivity is conceived in

terms of unity – that which joins together body and mind, the interior realm of the human and the

exterior realm of nature; that which unites different citizens under the power of a common

government; that which permits individuation (finitude) through a universal structure of

becoming a self-conscious being-in-the-world (Dasein). Lovecraftian subjectivity will have

nothing of unity. This subject has emerged from cosmic history as a geometric point in the fabric

of the multi-verse. And this point is amiss: the subject emerges as a dislocation in time and space

that operates in the disjunctures between multiple dimensions that crack open and fissure.

The disjunctive subject is “in-corporeal.” In other words, “Lovecraft did not conceive the

existence of a subject that would owe its position to a determinate biological substrate which

would be its origin” (Ludueña 2014, 53). This means, on the one hand, that sexuality and sexual

difference are irrelevant to subject-formation. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in
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“retained sexuality in its anthropic concept of the psyche as a remainder that, even in

mathematizing and literalizing writings, is the mark of the signifier-letter-subject on the body”

(Ludueña 2014, 57). Lovecraft rejects sexuality in his writing, but perhaps this is not because he

is repressed or sex-phobic. If subjectivity is not joined to the body, but rather dis-joined from it,

then sexual difference, sexual reproduction, and even sexual enjoyment are superfluous to the

subject. This is because, on the other hand, the subject is not one who can have desires… or

intentions. The subject is not one who “composes world” by intending objects around it. This

subject is not one at all, because it cannot emerge as a finitude. Subject merely denotes a shifting

position in an infinite universe that is occasioned upon by multiple cosmic beings accidentally. A

subject “is not a body. Nor does it possess or inhabit a body; it would be better said to position

itself in a body that, by definition, is improper to it even in its momentary appropriation”

(Ludueña 2014, 52).

Does the subject speak? The answer for Lovecraft is a resounding negative. Others speak

through it at once, may possess and dispossess it, or even have it destroy itself. As a position or

disjuncture rather than a body, it therefore stands to reason that this subject – which is in fact a

mythological and metaphysical invention – may survive after the history of humankind comes to

an end and the species has been extinguished.

4. Post-Subject

The Lovecraftian subject is therefore decidedly utterly un-vampyroteuthic in its

asexuality. Yet both emerge into the human through molecular divisions within material bodies.

As a matter of fact, either disjunctive view of subjectivity is patently absurd. But if we are

willing to see past the fact – to enter a post-factual world as a matter after-the-fact – the
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disjunctive post-subject is coherently logical. For the humanist the universe is devoid of

intelligence. God may have created the world but He has absented himself from it, at least

physically if He exists at all. The non-terrestrial zones of Earth are not inhabited by conscious

beings, and the extra-terrestrial zones of the universe have shown us no signs of intelligent life.

Yet all these humanist beliefs in human being require strict borders between inside and outside,

self and other. The skin is the limit between one subject and its desired or intended object. The

city-limit or national border distinguishes the social from the natural. Humanity is therefore a

singularity of individuated singularities who are the only beings in the universe who are “full” of

being. Even then, they seek to surpass the universal limit to live after death and become one with

the divine Being. By contrast, the depths of Flusser’s oceans are teeming with intelligent life.

And the Lovecraftian Mythos explored by Ludueña is an infinite multi-verse and an infinitely

rich horror vacui infinitely filled by any and all imaginable dimensions of intelligibility. There is

no inside or outside here, just the endless Outside. Thus there is no self and other, just endless

Othernesses.

The history of Latin America began with the misencounter (desencuentro) with

otherness, which immediately brought to mind the metaphysical limits between the human and

the not-quite-human, the civilized and the barbaric, the historical and the pre-historical, the

literate and the oral, the modern and the traditional. Each side had their own unique perspective

on what these polarities meant, but nevertheless their identities as individuals and as peoples

derived from them. And over the 20th century, the hope amongst Latin Americanist scholars was

that the polarities would eventually be overcome – through mestizaje, through transculturation as

a concept, or through the instantiation of decolonized economic, geopolitical, and

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epistemological orders-of-things. Only in these ways would Latin America finally become

properly Latin American.

But rather than reiterate the metaphysical-dialectical binaries upon which Latin American

history emerges, what kind of metaphysics results from history after-the-fact? What if history

does not allegorize a formal metaphysics of identity, and stories do not allegorize that history?

This is what we have explored in this essay. When historical borders are dissolved, we can

speculate on a world that is – as a matter of (non-fictional) fact – tentacular. The self does not

speak or misspeak to some Other, or confuse itself with some object petit a Otherness. For

Flusser a material abyss exists between human and vampire squid, and yet at the same time (and

place) the vampire squid begins to co-world the human body, so that humans at once become

both teuthid and all-too-human, in the material unfolding of genetic processes. For Ludueña,

human being is a disjunctive crack through which multiple beings-in-the-world emerge and

speak at the same time. The self is both self and other, and not integrally so: never an “I myself”

but always a “they themselves.” They speak within and without a living body and will continue

to do so after humankind will have perished. The subject of the cosmic race is always-already

“cosmopolitan,” but this cosmopolitanism is only thinkable in an utterly “outrageous cosmos”

(Ludueña 2014, 63).

These thoughts could only have been imagined by renouncing one’s identity as a human

and a Latin American. And who else could have imagined such things other than a Latin

American?

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