Dehumanism, Anti-Philosophy, Road Trip.

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'Eat the old lady'

Dehumanise me

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'Eat the old lady' was a choice I made in the 2017 survival horror video game Darkwood (Acid Wizard Studio). The game takes place in the titular Darkwood, a supernatural forest which has suddenly appeared in what—deduced through context clues—is likely the Polish Republic somewhere in the 1980s. The player controls a character trying to escape said forest, meeting its exotic characters, scrounging for supplies, and surviving dangerous nights by barricading various shelters. At some point a character the player befriends asks them to save her disappeared child. Wandering the Darkwood, the player hears a tune similar to the song sung by her other two children, and follows it into a large mushroom grove populated by people made out of fungi. The lost child sits captured behind a large metal door deep in the infested village, guarded by a sweet smelling, immobile, knitting old lady, who asks the player to deal with some bandits in exchange for the child. Throughout the journey it has been hinted that these fungus people ate the local mushrooms, the spores spreading, feeding, and replacing their flesh until they were part of the network. Below various dialogue options, the choice 'Eat the old lady' sits deliciously. Immersed in the violence of the Darkwood, killing to survive, meeting wolves, moving precariously through supernatural monsters, I asked myself: 'Why do this quest for her?’ and said, as a joke: 'Dehumanise me,' pressing the button to eat her.

'Dehumanise me.' One of the major themes of Darkwood is corruption. Different characters have given in to the forest, having become some kind of symbiotic part of it: a man mutating into a homicidal cannibalistic wolf-man; a village whose inhabitants have turned into living, human shaped trees; or the aforementioned fungal colony. To the player, 'escape' and 'morality' are framed to be the only options for holding on to their humanity. The goal of the game is to escape the horror and return to human society, where everything is 'normal.' The player is constantly faced with moral dilemmas that focus on negatively judging the villagers and animals that have become a direct part of the Darkwood. Act—classically—ethically, or they become like the 'monsters' the characters they meet have mutated into. These people and animals are wrong, different, disgusting. Unchristian, uncivilised, unhuman. As I was moving through this world, making choices, befriending some characters and ruining the lives of others, I started to question what I so desperately wanted to return to. How great is my current life, really? Not to mention 1980s Poland? 

Meanwhile, the goal of the forest itself—though it can hardly be anthropomorphised as such—appears to be to make everything part of it. The moral corruption the player is attempting to escape flows from a distinctly human perspective. The man turned wolf hunts and consumes as an animal would. The human shaped trees appear passive as trees do, while having complex social relations underground. The fungal colony spreads as fungi do, symbiotically living off everything it finds. It summons the question: why did I want to be out of the forest so badly? The friendly, giant snail-person that the player meets in the Darkwood seemed quite safe. Why not join the 'corrupted' villagers? Why does the player want to remain human?

The category of 'human' is not by definition frustrating. Categories are the product of a peculiar cosmos. Concepts are pragmatically, culturally, socially produced in order to isolate a singularity and make it communicable. Infinity squeezed into the capacity to be mobile. 'Humanity' constitutes our map of existence; 'human' desires are our playing field; acting 'human' is our economy of repetitions. However, presenting these cosmoi as unchanging or something to remain 'pure' is what can make us clinical, static, and passive. 'Human,' to most traditional philosophers, is a set of traits, norms, and values, given to us at birth to never be changed, and those who manage to be different are labelled as psychotic, diseased, corrupted. Even the anarchists and the critical theorists talk about the universal 'human' desires of eating, drinking, breeding, and living. Darkwood is no different. The game ends with the triumphant burning of the eldritch-unknowable creature at the centre of the Darkwood with a flamethrower: the large, indescribable, rhizomatic alien monster burnt at the stake by the brave Christian, scientific, humanist video game player. 

I do not deny science. Pragmatically, empirically, it is likely that our genetic code contains hormone mechanisms that make living, eating, breeding, socialising, and being warm 'feel pleasurable'—to the neurologically average at least. However, we are organisms in a mental, social, and environmental ecology. Machines in a cosmos. A tripartite of ecologies, which produce and are produced by our habits—our repetitions, our affective economies. Human ecology is not a promised land, back to which we can escape. It is colonialism, authoritarianism, capitalism, sexism, and racism. 'Human' is not what we are underneath all the horrible stuff, being human is our paradigm which contains the horrible stuff. 'Humans' are individualistic dividuals; climate greenwashers; apathetic genociders. 'Human,' since the Enlightenment, has been nothing but a push towards a direction of maximum exploitation, maximum consumption, and maximum profit.

So it stuck in my head. 'Dehumanise me.' Human ecology produces a core environment of oppression and harm. I will not arrogantly proclaim I am not part of this world. I am extraordinarily human. I sit here with my human laptop, probably entangled with slavery. My vegetarian majesty eats a lot of beans, probably produced where a rainforest used to be. I write at my local energy wasting human library—I am not kidding, I think it’s 25 degrees celsius here. Everyday I kill to survive, I meet Hobbesian wolves, and move precariously through supranatural eldritch monsters—who can define Capitalism anyway? 

Perhaps it is time to try to withdraw from the 'human.' Imagine something different, maybe even a different genetic code or a different organism to contain our vague idea of consciousness. I don’t know. Either way, if I am ever to be faced with the choice to eat a spore-infected fungal elderly woman, part of a mycelium network I cannot imagine, I will joke, say 'dehumanise me,' and eat the old lady.

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Theory of the Solitary Sailor

Withdrawal and Anti-Philosophy

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I close my eyes and imagine what it is like to be alone at sea. While my father spent his whole life on ships, I am nothing but a concrete port baby. Like a true child of the city, I look up 'background boat sounds' on YouTube and lie down on my bed, a cotton rectangle taking up 30% of the brick rectangle in which I live. My father did not know how to sail, nor did he ever own a boat. He maintained the engines powering massive tankers of commodity transportation. He was the alienated worker of the harbour, neither the upper-middle class hobby sailor, nor the working class fisherman. He spent his entire life working on ships, but was rarely at sea or experiencing the fruits of his labour. We took planes to Singapore, Panama, and Hong Kong. In darkness and with simulated audio it is easy to romanticise escaping my life. A tiny-house commune with my friends; an invisible, secret floor in a university building containing black market academia; #vanlife. However, like my father, I am stuck at shore. What escape is there for someone who only climbs aboard massive cargo ships owned by others? What escape is there for those who repair engines so things can be transported to others? What escape is there for someone being trained to produce abstract knowledge to be exploited by others?

With these eyes I experienced Theory of the Solitary Sailor by Gilles Grelet. What greater withdrawal is there than a literal escape to the ocean by boat, rarely stepping foot back on land? This essay will explore Grelet’s positive ideas on anti-philosophy and put them next to politics of withdrawal. How are they similar and different? How can we use anti-philosophy as a tool in our practical toolbelt of political action? Will this essay end with me stealing a boat and sailing off into the sunset?

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Anti-philosophy and Withdrawal

Theory of the Solitary Sailor is half a book of method, and half an autobiography. Since 2010, French academic Gilles Grelet has withdrawn from teaching at university and has lived at sea on his boat, the Théorème (Mackay 2). A solitary disentanglement from the world towards a radical becoming. The book describes a theorrorism of the solitary sailor—theorrorism meaning the method, body, or organon of theory. In other words, a way of drawing something out of chaos, endowing it with the status and function of an axiom (Grelet 12). It is direction, action, embodiment, and force. Theory inseparable from a life lived. 

In Chaosmosis, Guattari describes philosophy as singularised chaos. The creation of concepts—chaoids—producing a singular cosmos, in danger of becoming a static part of the clinic (112-113). Grelet describes it similarly as “the historical eternalisation of the world machined by sufficient s(p)ecularity.” (77) Anti-philosophy originates from Grelet’s teacher, François Laruelle, who describes philosophy as a regime of mixture, as philosophy shapes the world and the world shapes philosophy. As such, philosophy only serves to reify, repeat, and reiterate on hegemonic gestures and operations of thought (Mackay 4). In other words, philosophy is nothing but concepts and 'revolutions' which never depart from an orthodox center/paradigm (Mackay 6).

Anti-philosophy, then, is an unentangled mode of thought irreducible to philosophy (Laurelle 24). It posits, automatically, without assuming or declaring anything of its contents. It is the joy of movement and becoming without normativity. Grelet describes it as such: “Anti-philosophy is not another philosophy, ...but radical independence from philosophy, that is to say sovereign traversal of all philosophy. For humans there is only melancholy without cause and without limit, and the pain of being in the world—except that there is the joy that their traversal procures.” (Grelet 78) He goes on to describe the human as a rebellion against the world. He poses a bifurcation between the s(p)ecular—philosophical, self-compounding world-thought—and the radical—the ungraspable human root extracted from the regime of the worldly (13). Through practice as a process of subjectivation—for Grelet the repetitive life of a sailor—the radical joyfully grasps at the root of the world and tears themself away from it through axiomatic revolt with no (planned) programme or intervention. As such, anti-philosophy is a 'radical angelism'—i.e. producing a subject with a  non-interventionairy, non-extractive relation to the world—materially giving power to tear itself away from the worldly and undo its vampiric character and reproduction. The radical and the anti-philosophical are gnostic—being in the world, but not of it—and only passing through, not intervening, not extracting. Gnosis, here, is a 'path' or a 'way' which cannot be explicitly taught, but which may be revealed to a reader and thus initiate an angelic radical process of subjectivation.

After this angelic gnosis, Grelet underlines the necessity of something liveable (MacKay 10). Anti-philosophy is easily critiqued for being frozen in the melancholic abyss it creates, leaving nothing but a void after the human is torn away from the worldly. It needs a 'grace' by which some traction is gained on to reality without succumbing to the 'worldly real.' This traction, which Grelet calls an ‘institution,’ is a minimal point of intersection for the rebel to have some precarious footing in the world, without relapsing into it. A mediator between the world and the void. To open oneself to such an institution, without returning to philosophy, an anti-physicality and anti-erotics is needed. For Grelet this is an organon of sailing, ritual, and waiting, producing a monotony where everything is equally important (71). The habits of laundry, of cleaning, of rope cutting as a force against the world. A process of attack through the joy of the embodiment of unavoidable habits to keep oneself afloat. This active, ritualised, and methodological waiting is a subversion of the world by the human. An undermining of politics and philosophy, without an assigned set of desires—erotics—or physical being. For Grelet, life on the sea makes a world of the void, without ever making it worldly (23).

Angelic processes of subjectivation and an institution are not enough. Grelet lastly suggests a Place: a point where the land ends, stretching out into the sea, which he calls a finisterre (55). A Place as a minimal constant, which keeps minimal contact with the world (Mackay 12). These Places are a passive limit. In other words, they are part of the machinery of the world, which easily falls into philosophy. However, a boat is, for Grelet, a mobile finisterre (55). A Place where one can be independent from sovereign shorelines, where one never solidifies. Somewhere where one can be in the world without being part of it. 

Using the angelic gnosis, an institution, and a mobile finisterre, Grelet tells us the story of his positive anti-philosophy as the ‘heret(h)ics of navigation,’ favouring the complexities and joy of the sailor, to the simplicity of worldly life. Anti-philosophy rejects the speculation-based secularisation of any kind of cosmos, instead embracing the abyss, while never succumbing to melancholic nothingness.

The goal, then, of anti-philosophy is to inhabit this mobile finisterre and to habituate oneself—embracing the process of becoming accustomed to your own habits—in order to equip oneself with the organon of the end of the world (Grelet 77). No theory without subjectivation, and no subjectivation without action (Mackay 13). To lean on the abyss constantly, without stopping movement to become worldly. Grelet advises us: 

Do not start from the world, even from its nullity as nihilism does, in order to detach yourself from the world. Inscribe the consistency of rebellion in the very void itself, in the very radical inconsistency to which the human holds, lose yourself in it—for otherwise the world will always have won by serving as a support for that which refuses it. And the abyss, it grows by devouring itself. (Grelet 75) 

Withdrawal might even be the wrong word for this, as it is a radical refusal to use the world, even as a starting point. Anti-philosophy is to experience the joy of waiting and being, regularising it like the feeling of gravity. A compromise between pragmatic politics and the abyssal blackness of the sea by making this void habitable.

Grelet diverges from intuition by categorising politics as passiveness. Politics to him is always the world, which unavoidably is the 'triad of labour market, human resources, and employability that lies at the heart of the metaphysics of management' (Grelet 74). With this expression Grelet appears to be trying to achieve not a withdrawal to a different chaoid, but a total rejection of any ecology, except his own subjective living. Politics, to Grelet, is a philosophy, always giving things their place, assigning being, and the order of things (31). It is a prosthetic, meaning it gives humanity hands to fill the void and give meaning to chaos (Grelet 28). His anti-philosophy needs an anti-politics where one does not eternalize the world, instead remaining silent in the process of the void of the sea. Anti-philosophy precedes the formula and does not give tools for meaning-making. It is anti-prosthetic. There is only the Place in the abyss of the sea, which one constantly moves with without settling.

Grelet's anti-philosophical retreat to sea is opposed to the idea that withdrawal is an active political move. That is to say, withdrawal displaces the worldly concepts used, while no longer struggling for recognition (Hesselberth & De Bloois 2). Withdrawal as a political movement is a means to “renounce in order to reconnect and reconstruct” (Hesselberth & De Bloois 3). Furthermore, the scholar Gerald Moore argues that politics exists in “the continual creation and recreation of a shared aesthetic basis, one that is dependent on the technologies that organize and structure society”; in an aesthetic basis which is constantly reinvented (162). In the same interview, French philosopher Bernard Stiegler responds that every new technological shock causes a regression from which a new pharmakon emerges—i.e. the production of a remedy, in this context a new aesthetic basis to counteract the shock of technological change (166). A withdrawal as a political movement can be seen as the production of such a basis, combating eternalization. Grelet’s anti-philosophy instead embodies the 'automated oblivion' Moore & Stiegler (176) warn of as a positive. Continual creation and recreation, to Grelet, is not in the constant philosophical reimagination of a shared aesthetic basis as politics of withdrawal suggests, but in the made habitable abyss of the sea. For the anti-philosopher, change resides in a complete withdrawal of any attempt to territorialize, as all philosophy is per definition a limitation.

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Conclusion

Theory of the Solitary Sailor ends on a comma (‘,’). Grelet’s theoretical autobiography is part of his method – his axiom – of living and embodying his anti-philosophy. It is part of his disentanglement, slowly reducing what is on his finisterre, slowly adding more abyss while making sure it remains livable. He inhabits his own hypothesis. He wrote this book, because breaking the silence by writing is what he did. In his angelic gnosis, he broke the silence by writing, because in habitualizing himself, that is what he did. The work never asks us to live like he does; he is merely describing his own life, and why he has become the solitary sailor.

Grelet’s method of withdrawal from historical eternalisation into his radical angelism, by inhabiting and embodying a mobile finisterre, and his definition of an institution, is a fantastic experiment in motion. By becoming the habits of the sailor, he attempts to escape from the “real.” It is imagination, a process of subjectivation, and rebellious denial in action. It is an embodiment of becoming, instead of only conceptualising a theory or a philosophy. It renounces, but it does not try to reconnect and reconstruct—other than the book itself existing, though he also calls it barely a book: an anti-book (Grelet 80). There is no attempt to understand himself better in order to then return with new insight. It is a method to focus on the joy of living with only the void and what is necessary to do.

Does that make the Theory of the Solitary Sailor passive? Grelet seeks a human life capable of renouncing historical tradition, without falling prey to cosmopolitanism, by way of regularity and habit. It focuses on living instead of imagining normativity. It is the anti-political praxis of just existing. It is a rebellion against the idea of permanence, to the degree of renouncing philosophy itself. It is not political, yet still active. If anti-philosophy is right, and all mixture of philosophy and the world repeats ad nauseum the Capitalist, vectoralist, neoliberal—whatever—reality we live in, and if renouncing this reality means death, then Grelet’s theorrorism is a way to both withdraw from this cosmos, and carve out a habitable spot in the abyss.

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The Northern Lights

A Road Trip

“[...] the problem raised by the fact that revolutionary intentions may be inverted is a problem that can itself only accede to the transcendental regime (understood as the interrogative work whereby something can be analysed in terms of its a priori conditions of possibility) if it is displaced, i.e. if it no longer concerns this inversion as such, but rather the fact that this inversion appears as problematic in the eyes of opinion (in short: if the problem itself becomes its own object).” (Lardreau 90)

Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes depression as “the vision of the abyss represented by the absence of meaning” (124-8). However, this abyss is not without meaning; it is without imagination. This is the current meaning; a vision of meaninglessness. What is left for the revolutionaries? Capitalism destroyed all hope for alternatives by swallowing the exchange-value machine for what feels like all different forms of life, thought, and imagination. After being aware of going through this miraculating machine for 20 years I am burnt out. A fatigue which makes production impossible. Isolated, unconfrontational, depersonalised (Chabot 9-10). I don’t know who I am, or what I want, or where I stand. I have no opinions. I no longer produce meaning or form. I am chaos without concepts, unable to imagine lines of flight. I feel unable to become anything else than I am; passive. Yet, I also have the branded desire to not embrace this melancholy, but to help others. The intersection of chaos with an imprinted need to be imaginative (Han). Awareness of the eternal lack of control clashing with the habitualised need for it. A hatred for the world, with no institution. Abyss.

When I shared this, rather melodramatically, with my friends—Steve, Steph, and Stefan—we decided something had to be done. Four atomizing, dividing, degenerating students producing-products, who want to move against this endless abyssal truth and future of nothing but abstract labour for others, by withdrawing. Let’s go on our own anti-philosophical journey! Let’s use the road trip as the subjectivation necessary to move from theory to becoming. 

It’s June 2022 and in October 2022 we’ll go see the Northern Lights—October works because there is not enough snow to obscure vision, but it is cold enough for the Aurora Borealis to appear. A break from stress, from people, from academic papers. A multiple-week-long, 6572 kilometer—3192 to, 3380 back—journey to see something beautiful, nothing else. An escape, a withdrawal, a realignment of our desires to pure aesthetic bliss, not to academia, vectoralists, or economists. A moment of re-singularisation; a re-constitution of our capacity to be creative; a romantic, grand reset enabling chaos reforged into desire worth feeling. 

So this was the plan: Steve, Steph, Stefan and I need to purchase a car, small and old enough to not be expensive, but large enough that four people can sleep in it without hating each other before we hit the Swedish border. Budget: well, not more than 1500 euro, as that is all that can be desperately scrounged together by unemployed knowledge miners—this assumes the car can be sold when it lands back in the Netherlands, like a loyal horse set out to pasture, preferably on the ranch of someone who is willing to pay 1500 euro to put it there. Then: snow tires. Norway and Sweden have snow, an utterly rare, historical, and alien substance only falling once a year this far south. Another 125 euro—per tire—but we’re doing it for a dream.

We go north through Germany—spending three nights in Hamburg getting to know its counter-culture. Capitalist subsumption is a shitty concept. The strongest party pooper there is. All revolutions written off as just waiting to be absorbed by this vague, terrible, and inescapable ball game of “Capital.” Let’s instead just say “static.” It’s what we have all been saying anyway, right? Unmoving, staying in one place, passiveness. Capitalism was once a revolution too, but the problem is that it stops the next one from happening. It has absorbed the tools to be extraordinarily tenacious. Grelet and anti-philosophy claim any concept is static. “Human” is static. Endlessly circling the same ideas and reiterating on them. One quickly falls into a safe, pragmatic partial withdrawal where “some stuff can be better!” or an abyss of total destruction of everything including oneself. Steve fights for Palestinian rights and believes he can make a difference, but what difference in a static struggle like that can be anything but a subsumption? A new nation state? Their own law? Equality under neoliberalism? A static culture to be proud of? An anti-philosopher would say we have seen all these worldly games before. I want to disagree, as every step towards something more beautiful is a step I support, but I find it extremely difficult. Like I said, I don’t get invited to parties.

On the ferry to Copenhagen, Denmark, I think about dehumanising. Do I imagine a post-human alternative? Do I sink in the not-human abyss? Do I find an institution that is merely functional, but not eternal? What, at this point, can actually be disconnected from human ecologies? There are no alternatives without their own problematic aspects—anarchists, (post)autonomists, socialists, primitive-traditionalists. Perhaps Gilles Grelet’s bifurcation is incorrect. The radical is not human, but the world is human. Philosophy, Politics, Erotics, are human. Being human is another compromise. Eventually I have to face a decision: compromise or the abyss. Reiterate on the human or dehumanise. But how? Without supernatural fungal help? Steph would rather remain passive and not think too much about all this. Perhaps, passiveness is her way to make the abyss habitable.

A bridge to Mälmo, Sweden. Then Stockholm, followed by the journey north. Steve, Steph, Stefan, and I decide we’ll do it. Let’s disentangle. The car as a mobile finisterre. Our institution of living; finding food; cleaning our clothes; fighting a bear or two (does Sweden have bears?); finding a place to stay for the night. We’ll stop to look at every idyllic forest view, make snowmen, and meet weirdos in hostels who will remain friends forever. There is a cool ice hotel in Kiruna, Sweden, and we’ll go see it. As we go north we see the increasingly overwhelming void of white snow, white skies, and white trees. Stefan wonders what’s so different about the grey ocean. Maybe we just have to find our own functional connection to the human that makes us part of it, but not human. A parasite to the philosophy of human. A slow disentanglement which might take the rest of our lives. Solipsistic, selfish, boring, but perhaps full of joy. Stefan laments he prefers summer to winter. More colourful.

After hitting the Norwegian border, we are distant from civilization and make our way to the Nördkapp, the northernmost point of Europe, where we will see the beauty of a rare, hard to explain, but fascinating phenomenon of our planet. Badiou called anti-philosophy a unilateral dualism (17). It produces a near transcendental idea of the pre-human. The idea that we can fully escape what we are socially produced to be. That there is such a thing outside these processes of social production. Grelet gets out of this through his minimal point of the institution and mobile finisterre. He claims one can be in the world without being part of it. My intuition agrees with Badiou. The institution sounds like a pragmatic compromise. As we look at the northern lights I think: “What’s the other option?” I am ruining my realigning road trip by thinking too much, aren’t I? Being too human. 

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Conclusion

Of course, we never actually drove to Norway. What makes Theory of the Solitary Sailor beautiful to me is that Grelet actually goes out and does something. Whether or not you agree with him that unassimilable subjectivation is possible through habit — or at all — Grelet lives his philosophy. 

Me on the other hand? Steve is always too busy. Steph was unable to finish the deadlines necessary to get a month free of education labour. Stefan was so utterly mentally broken before the journey itself could start that it would have been dangerous to go. I find myself stuck in passivity and stress. Lethargic malaise is the name of the game, and nothing has as much power to keep one on shore as the oppression of being “busy.” The idea that burnout has the potential to bring about metamorphosis appears false to me, nothing but an idealistic romantic notion. I didn’t even mention the privilege of having the capital to withdraw into anti-philosophy. Or perhaps, that means I simply didn’t try hard enough? Ironically, it means that these days you can even do withdrawal wrong. I am exhausted by imagination itself.

Non-constructive thoughts are a wild beast. No matter how many of these papers I write. No matter how many books I read. No matter how many protests I attend. The intrusive hopelessness remains. In this moment of reflection I should not merely blame the system of integrated world capital. A system I produce, as much as it produces me. With a human truth I produce, as much as it produces me. Am I being an illogical depressed little victim? Should I just get over it? Marx is right; it is always theoretical introspection in combination with engagement in social issues (Hall, 19). Maybe that’s why the university has broken me? Too much thinking, not enough hanging out.

Pragmatic compromise or embracing the abyss? Wait a minute, aren’t false binaries bad? I’d like to apologise to any reader for having to go through my burnout. Let us end on a positive note. Something I learned writing this. I need to find my coastline. Preferably mobile, but if I settle on pragmatically improving a static one that is fine, too. Pragmatic movement. Always imperfect. Always to argue about. Always to loot knowledge and connections from.  The one thing I do know is that the abyss exclusively is not very productive. Raise your glass, then. To another night of sitting in circles complaining about how oppressed we are. As long as it is a circle that eventually gets up and throws a few molotovs.

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