Biocosmic Memory of the Elements

““Cosmism”—too often accepted as a framework within which, under the rubric of a “common task,” differences are effaced, neutralized, or, at best, reconciled—comprises at least two diametrically opposed lines: lines that circumscribe no common figure and mark out no common ground”

“These are lines of struggle that cannot be reduced to a common geometry because one of them is directed against generalization as such”

“There are at least two kinds of Cosmism”

“One is overly retentive, bound by the ascetic morality of due, fraternal, museum-like, saddled with familial duty toward dead fathers, whose right to resurrection is guaranteed by the sons”

“then there is the other: wholly given over to the imagination, wanton in the outlaw ethos of permissiveness, wayward and amicable, experimental, sporting with the forces entwined in the instinct for immortality, shouting forth its cause”

“One is the Cosmism of “common cause” (Nikolai Fedorov); the other is the anarchic Biocosmism of “my cause” (Meine Sache: that Max Stirner’s influence swelled the sails of Aleksandr Svyatogor’s and Aleksandr Yaroslavsky’s “Biocosmist ships” is hardly a secret)”

“Where shall we look for our comrades? In the forest. Who are they? The elemental forces. How to come to terms with them—and how to let them speak freely?”

“Through revolution: “quiet” at first, then armed with a rifle and a battle cry”

“Biocosmism starts out as a search for one’s comrades among the elemental forces and their meshwork—crystals, volcanoes, plants, animals, planets, stars—echoing one another and casting off their bonds in the vast expanse of the revolution”

“What is Biocosmism? What is its mute premise? Plunged into the Biocosmic forest, we encounter strange meshwork”

“The adjective biocosmique appears four times in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: thrice referring to “biocosmic memory” and once to “biocosmic research,” thus expanding the purview of Biocosmism, as conceived by Svyatogor (language, style, poesis, rhythm, wit, sense, meaning, spirit, consciousness, society and social movements, organism, heart, technology [ships, wind turbines], artistic work…)”

“The discussion of “biocosmic memory” makes reference to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, while “biocosmic research” is mentioned in connection with the work of the psychoanalyst and bioenergeticist Wilhelm Reich, specifically his The Function of the Orgasm, thus expanding the ranks of comrades and the meaning of Biocosmism itself”

“Nietzsche, the arch-enemy of Nikolai Fedorov, was attentively read and admired by Aleksandr Svyatogor and Aleksandr Yaroslavsky”

“Genealogy of Morals, transposed into a geology in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, was written in just twenty days: a truly vulcanic output”

“Through the geological work of ascetic domestication, the earth actually becomes an effigy molded from the ashes of ancestors—a corpse demanding repayment of debt from the living, stricken with spiritual dyspepsia and an atrophied capacity for forgetting”

“earth itself is complicit in this, given that is elemental force consists in enclosing, limiting, distributing, registering (here we are back in the pages of Anti-Oedipus, where the full body of the earth is described as “the element of the disjunctive synthesis and its reproduction.”)”

“precisely the conflict described in the Genealogy of Morals through the evolution of the animal, which starts out remembering how to forget and ends up forgetting how it is done, proclaiming this forgetting to be memory and so becoming complicit in this derailment”

“the triumph of the earth, which emerges victorious in the clash of the elements, and its transformation into a cemetery”

“What is lacking from the triumphant, too earthly earth, finally equal to itself, enclosed in a carapace, is fresh air, breath”

“It lacks a pinch of Biocosmic revolutionism”

“The Biocosmic heresy, on the contrary, decries not the difference between faces, but the schism between faces and shapeshifting —between the earth, entombing the elements within faces and turning faces into the facing of objects, and the earth of ferment and shapeshifting, leading backward—from objects and faces—toward the liberated elemental forces”

“Biocosmism, however, does not entail a loss of face: “the Biocosmic face is smiling, cheerful, possessed of an absolute laughter,” writes Svyatogor, adding, “one must feel the beast within oneself.””

“The camouflage of a smiling biocosmic face conceals a volcanic forest: underground ferment, roots of trees, animals’ paths and lairs, the “warm commingling of forest tales and dreams.””

“My path! You lead me to the deathless beyond—me, a son of the Earth and the blue stars. I am a cosmic wanderer.”

“What are Svyatogor’s biocosmic ships? Perhaps they are faces, whose means of locomotion is shapeshifting? In that case, biocosmic content, traversing space aboard these ships, is the erupting earth itself, the elemental force—the unregistered and unregistrable passenger”