There Is No Death: A Sketch Towards Entrancement

So that you’ll see that I am not me, that one’s body is not one’s own, that the things that make us and the forces which put them together are passing fancies.

—Severo Sarduy, Cobra

When you fall and transform into a guinea fowl, as the novices in Yoruba ritual initiations do, you are carried across the beginnings and endings of the South Atlantic. Shipwrecks and enchaînements, but also ceremonies have survived the crossing, through bodies painted like the sacrificed guinea fowl that welcome God’s breezes when the trance unfurls. The breath of another time possesses you. Consciousness dispossesses you, becoming a rarefied coexistence with another time of rapture. The time of the drums playing louder. The bells of the priestess becoming your head, calling for the defacement of identities, the shattering of straight paths—until the bird and the God-ancestor are entangled in the fabric of your mind’s thread. In trance, birds don’t exist. Flight, falterings, flutters of flocks—come, go, and leave like music through your ears.

All the creatures of the world leap at you, revealing a timeless conspiracy theory where you and humanity are tethered and fractured. It is impossible to distinguish yourself from the production of the world of ancestors coming to live in the hands that are dripping guinea-fowl white spots across the mosaic of your skin. And your pores whisper again: birds don’t exist, birds don’t exist, while it winds like a spiraling storm within you, turning your body into a spaceship.

This storm of formless accents distorts and rejoices within, manufacturing in you a familiar alien. You become an observer of your own thoughts, an archive of what you are not. Your own suspicion burgeons around the impossibility of sovereignty in the defacement of signs. “The observer of the medial surface waits for the medium to become the message, for the carrier to become the sign.”1 These signs are irretrievable—no imago Dei, creation everywhere—time born out of joint. Guinea fowl are birds of passage; they pass from white dots to murky plumage, in the rhythm of stars birthed from darkness like light entering the half-shut eyelids of the body that falls in trance. I want to sketch a guinea fowl as a galaxy, hearing stars chant through its beak like spirits speaking through a medium’s lips.

In 1959, Ernst Jünger too gazed upon birds of passage gliding across the sky. The German philosopher strained amid Heidegger’s legacy and a world in turmoil saw them as prophets of the time, fugitives fleeing apocalypse. The image of the migrating birds, early victims of climate and environmental catastrophe, heralded humanity’s post-historical condition, which he compared to a projectile racing through space, perpetually accelerating.2 Jünger asked repeatedly who initiated this catastrophe and who could bring it to a halt.

Jünger believed he stood at the zenith of historical promise in a world where technology had fortified the power of the pretentious lords of nature and earth. Yet, he felt a disquieting movement beyond control, lurking behind the time wall. The trajectory of humanity threatened collapse even within the mechanized repetition and the Gestell of technological existence. This terror transformed into prayer, as Jünger mused:

If we lock a man in a tower with no light and he crawls there along the wall, he will be persuaded that he is moving endlessly. But he will not be persuaded that he is happy. Always, and indestructible until death, vibrated in him the presentiment of something else, of an infinitely greater thing, of a flood of light which frees him, calms him, even though he never saw the sun, never heard its name.3

Humans gaze at their fate like birds of passage, yearning for a last flight to a home and time they can no longer recognize, if it ever existed at all.

Luigi Mayer, Chapel of Mount Calvary, 1810. License: Public Domain.

Jünger acknowledges, however, that “rupture points are discovery points.”4 This is what he attempts to explore in his 1959 book An der Zeitmauer (At the Time Wall). Amidst a crisis of history and sovereignty, Jünger proposes a fusion of the cyclical model of temporality rooted in the natural rhythms of seasons, planting, and harvesting with the linear trajectory of history, its promise of Golgotha, Aufheben, progress, and individuation. His model is astrology, which, although departing from a closed system, is not bound to it. Astrology begins with the repetition of archetypes but retains a sense of historicity and individuality. It recaptures the individual fate that can be “guessed, feared, smelled,” yet not “calculated or measured.”5

In Jünger’s astrological synthesis, history and post-history intertwine in the figure of the spiral, where “development advances and returns, albeit at different levels.”6 Lines are drawn in circles that repeat yet expand, moving in the haptic realms of star maps, where one can grasp and perhaps rescue the destiny of the projectile racing through the homogenous space of doomsday.

Spiral the apocalypse, delay it within the curved arms of the galaxy that flows in and out of its lines and sparkles. Roger Caillois warns us: “The spiral form fulfills two fundamental laws of the universe: symmetry and growth; it combines order with expansion. It is almost inevitable that animals, plants, and stars should all be bound by these laws.”7 To say that the spiral is order and expansion is to say that it aligns form and chaos, the lines that extend while echoing their previous circles and never forgetting their return. This is what allows Brazilian performance scholar Leda Maria Martins to suggest that “ancestrality is cleaved by a curved, recurring, ringed time; a spiraling time that returns, reestablishes, and transforms, affecting everything.”8 Time rejoins, time rejoices, time restarts, swirling in the in-betweenness of ancestry and promise, displacing the curse of a golden age that was never there and an end that never reaches daybreak. The spiral is the form through which one becomes past-future and future-past in the embrace of the unstable now being traced.

Painting by Feliciano Pimentel Lana. ​

Yet how can one ignore the tens of thousands of ruins and remnants amid this spiraling? Corpses, chainsaws, fires, pesticides, fight, fight, fight, these are the tools forged by the opposable thumb in a desperate effort to remain irreconcilable with the many times outside oneself, to close the circle with the violence of a line. To persist as oneself in fable and phantasmagoria: three millennia of subjects, objects, machines, culture, nature, sovereignty, and bare life grouped into binaries and opposites of existence and nonexistence, humans and migrant birds. The anthropological engines that declare that everything belongs in a certain place, that declare guinea fowl to be beasts and not me; I am not the galaxy.

A mixed flock of hawks hunting in and around a bushfire. Photo: Mark Marathon. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Agamben states in his autopsy of the anthropological machine, The Open: Man and Animal (2002), that “Homo sapiens … is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human.”9 The centrality of this machine, and its primary effect, is that it can never truly recognize what is human, only recognize nothingness, absence, and openness traced in separateness. Humans fill this openness—or wound—with opposition to the inhuman and the animal. As Agamben elaborates on the operation of the anthropological machine, “Man suspends his animality and, in this way, opens a free and empty zone in which life is captured and abandoned.”10 But to Agamben this suspended animality has a particular trait that contrasts it to the open and nothingness where, he says, human beings dwell.

In his analysis, the animal “does not see the open, because even at the moment it rushes toward the sun with the greatest abandon, it is blind to it; the lark can never disconceal the sun as a being, nor can it comport itself in any way toward the sun’s concealedness.”11 This critical passage contrasts the animal that rushes blindly into the sun with humans who have the possibility of avoiding absorption into their environment by staying in the openness, by remaining separate and therefore capable of “disconcealing.” This distinction between animal absorption and the human possibility of suspending it is what allows Agamben to echo Heidegger in equating animal behavior—its captivation by stimuli—with the mystical experience of trance:

Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as that which simultaneously opposes and binds in secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge. And it is perhaps to make a tacit, ironic allusion to this relationship that Heidegger feels the need at a certain point to illustrate animal captivation with one of the oldest symbols of the unio mystica, the moth that is burned by the flame which attracts it and yet obstinately remains unknown to the end.12

Humans suspend their animality because animals are captivated by their environment and cannot own themselves. Trance is thus framed as the compulsion of a naive somnambulist moth. Trance belongs to animality and its absorption in its environment, the sin of abandoning self-mastery akin to Aesop’s fable of the philosopher Thales, who, mesmerized by the stars and forgetting his surroundings, tumbles into a pit. Trance escapes humanity, its openness, disconcealment, and solitude, where phenomenology wishes to dwell and construct the presence of Being through mineness.

Antonio Canova, Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, Reveals to Thales the Secrets of the Skies, 1799. License: Public Domain.

It is no coincidence that immediately after his lengthy introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger grapples with elaborating his concept of “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit): “That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being is, in each case, mine.”13 While these preliminary remarks may sound innocuous, they lay the foundation for Heidegger’s work on Dasein’s mineness as central to ontological difference. Dasein’s questioning of Being, the manner in which to be is always a question to humans, reflects a sense of ownership that humans have over themselves, given by their separation from their environment. Being is Dasein’s property; oneself is one’s own property and therefore one always questions being, much like a person who, no matter how familiar their own face is, still finds themself pausing before a mirror, reassessing, questioning what they see.

This makes clear why Heidegger begins his philosophy by contemplating death—not as a final instant, but as that which characterizes the very way humans can appropriate their existence. In dying, one discovers how one’s being ultimately belongs only to oneself, as death is not shareable; it is always my death and allows for a definitive break with one’s environment and time. Death becomes the threshold to escape the “they,” the noise of the outside with its dying animals, worlds, and sacrificed guinea fowl.

Yet Heidegger’s mineness is interrupted by the voice of a mysterious friend: “Hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its own most potentiality-for-Being-as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it.”14 This is a puzzling quote from Being and Time to the extent that it reveals an invasion into Heidegger’s self-owning Dasein. If the authenticity of Dasein is to own itself—insofar as humans must become their own time, their own individual relationship with their mortality—how can there be an “authentic” inside friend who is other than oneself? How to understand the coexistence of this moment where, within Heidegger’s schema, a trace of the outside persists and a friend’s voice is still carried within?

We might retrace philosophy’s footsteps to Socrates’s daimon, which guides him through life in Athens and ultimately leads him to his judgment and execution.15 In the Symposium, the daimon interprets and bridges the divine and the mortal, relaying prayers and sacrifices from men to gods, and vice versa. It “binds the all to itself.”16 The presence of the daimon within is further developed in Plato’s Timaeus: “We say that God has given to each a daimon which inhabits the summit of the body, to lift up what is heavenly in us to heaven, away from the earth, being as we are heavenly creatures, not earthly ones.”17

In the figure of the daimon—this guiding spirit—the frontier between humans, guinea fowl, and galaxies is bridged and everything lifts. Although the daimon may appear ungraspable within Greek philosophy, this lift and bind becomes tangible when the daimon feels so close, so warm, as the eyes close and the body spins, enlarging, possessing, and dispossessing through images and voices that return and populate the human body in the way that French anthropologist Roger Batiste describes the entrancement of the Africa-Brazilian religion of Candomblé:

They are no longer seamstresses, cooks, washerwomen who whirl to the sound of drums on Bahia’s nights; here is Omolú (God of healing) covered with straw, Xangô (God of thunder) dressed in red and white, Yemanjá (Goddess of the sea) combing her seaweed hair. The faces have metamorphosed into masks, losing the wrinkles of labor and the burdens of everyday life; the stigmas of existence all but vanished. Warrior Ogun (God of Iron) glows with the fire of anger, Oxum (Goddess of fertility) becomes a wheel of carnal lust. For a moment, Africa merges with Brazil; the ocean is abolished, and the time of enslavement is erased.18

Confusing and merging matter and self, you and the human who tumbles into guinea fowl and soars through galaxies. Are we not sketching a barzakh, the intermediary realm described by the Islamic philosopher Ibn al-Arabi, a space that straddles Being and nothingness? This barzakh is a delicate outline, for beyond the stark borders of mineness and otherness, truth and untruth, it is defined as “something that separates two other things, yet combines the attributes of both.”19 It embodies the simultaneity of yes and no, echoing Ibn al-Arabi’s response to Ibn Rushd: “Between the yes and the no, spirits take flight from their matter, and heads are severed from their bodies.”20

Trance lurks in the lapses of yes and no. It takes the form of the barzakh—a simultaneity of truth and the trickster. It proposes a demiurgic aesthetic in the sense that cosmos becomes craftsmanship, not fixation but making and unmaking, in which the accumulation of artifice calls upon the impossibility of deciding what is fact or fiction, what is medium and spirit. In this, the other world of creation swallows this world and entrances it in the absence of property and mineness, in the crossing of space and time, being and beings, as a continuous flux of fragments and participations.

It is this confluence that anthropologist Carlos Fausto illuminates in his expansive ethnography of Amazonian rituals and aesthetics. In Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia, Fausto contrasts the “exact correspondence between pictorial representation and its referent” typical of the Christian paradigm of imago Dei with the Amerindian visual regime, where the problem and ambition are not verisimilitude, the imitation of the human form, or the unity of the image.21 On the contrary, its generative impulse is to figure transformation, imagining the transformational flux characteristic of other-than-human beings. It thus involves creating the most complex and paradoxical images possible, images with multiple referents, recursively nested, oscillating between figure and ground. This is the aesthetics of the trickster and deceit, built on the firm soil of ambiguity and instability, not truth.

Painting of Jeseok, a village patron god of Naewat-dang shrine, likely 15th century License: Public Domain.

For these cultures that Fausto analyzes, “there is no unitary subject with which to begin or end.”22 The very conditions of subjectification necessitate a swirl of instability, flux, fragmentation, and becoming. Thus, in this sketch, the words and spirals of guinea fowl and galaxies are symbiotic with the tree trunks decorated by the native peoples of Xingu, their surfaces graced with Vulture King plumes and painted with genipap during the Quarup ritual, summoning their dead back to life in the weeping wood. Trees and the dead resonate back like the tune of the mbira of Zimbabwe, an instrument that awakens spirits by sounding like all instruments played at once, shattering the unity of ear and sound. It is akin to the “simple style, with forms boldly delineated in a realistic yet charmingly cartoonish manner,” with which anonymous Korean painters channel the visions of the mansin shamans, “coenabling extensions of the gods’ ability to act in the here and now” and metabolizing artifice into life.23

These entranced aesthetics matter more than ever when it comes to contemporary despair. If they can be taken as mere fetishes of enchantment, ready to be preyed upon and subsumed into the rhizomatic ideologies of all late capitalism, they point to a manner of reappropriating a “mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified.”24 If Western modernity culminates in the inhabiting of the blurred lines between perception and reality, if the time has come to be a conspiracy theorist amid violent wish-fulfillment and manipulation, then it is essential to not only grasp these processes but to reclaim and reappropriate the means of production of the trickster.

The trickster belongs in this genealogy of lapses, in between yes and no, in the demiurgic alchemy that reveals that we can transform absorption into atmosphere, tautology into spiraling, property into radical sharing. It is possible to think of form as a rhythm that oscillates between self and its dissolution, the impossible and its actualization; it is possible to fly beyond occupied and occupant and all the violences of captivity. Trance is the possibility of transmuting the way we think of our media environment, “not as a scene of captivity but of captivation.”25

Captivity can be summarized as the interplay between occupier and occupied. The violence of the former against the latter is not only visible in the actual appalling horrors of political oppression and domination, the tragedies of colonialism and imperialism, but in the very representation that there is a mineness to begin with. The belief in mineness is the belief that someone can exist in owning and holding captive while another can exist to be owned and be held captive. This belief transforms spirals into occupied properties and converts entanglements into scarcity.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx asserts that “private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we possess it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly consumed, worn, inhabited, etc.—in short, when it is used by us.”26 He counters this with the understanding that reality is never appropriated privately; it is woven socially through the senses, interlinked with a larger collective fabric, “just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear.”27 The object’s meaning for us extends only as far as our senses can reach, and these sense perceptions are constructed socially in the same way that different music produces different ears.

Marx further contends that “the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”28 Since senses are shaped socially, since different aesthetics produce different bodies, they reveal that the basis and legitimization of all private property—the individual’s body—can never truly be one’s own.

John Locke famously defended private property based on the idea that one’s body is one’s property, declaring, “Though the Earth and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.”29 It is this very idea, crafted in the fervor of the Enlightenment, that continues to legitimize the ongoing logic of occupier and occupied. Mine body, mine death, mine hand, mine land, mineness everywhere that multiples in the likeness of a never-ending real estate empire—from ghost empires to digital platforms, always built upon the ruins of an occupied that this mineness destroys.

Yet as Marx elucidates, senses, and therefore the body they reveal, exist within a metamorphic and historical web, a space in which they are both formed and form. They are always simultaneously mine and other, caught in the liminal space of yes and no. Even when one remains unaware, the music is there, expanding and ordering the beginning and ending of oneself in entrancement.

Feather of a guineafowl. Photo: Theo Crazzolara. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Trance is no mere sleight of hand, no illusion conjured by the smoke and mirrors of superstructures; its séance is merely an attunement to what has been held dissonant. It reveals and brings back the same polyphonic fabric where guinea fowl, galaxies, and humans lose and find themselves in gazes and movements, in an absolute movement of divergence and confluence. A spiral of barzakhs and daimons, liminal forms and figures whereupon the magma of unity cools in confusing and confounding waves rushing to the shore.

To discover a guinea fowl in the South Atlantic is to trace its silhouette against the cosmos, where light and shadow entwine, shimmering in the Yoruba myth that survived so many displacements by holding to its own metamorphosis in which the paint of the white dots changed, but the capacity to invent a blackbird adorned by demiurgic human hands was not lost. The capacity to share time in a body-mosaic of collective invention that death cannot touch.30

The guinea fowl opens across all times, traveling through infinite spaces, emptying and filling itself with many nows of tomorrow and yesterday. It is a vessel and a chart in the unfathomable darkness of the present. On its wings are the stars of galaxies, the lights of UFOs, pores of a shared body stripped of death. Its wings hold what was lost and shattered, resisting the line or the closure in a curve. In this curve, time doesn’t arrive solely as doom; it can take the form of a spiraled prayer, a music-mosaic, a dispersed fragment reaching for the wind, the waves, the prompt ears that still don’t exist to hear—trance, trance, trance.