The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character; it’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years; it interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when you turn to the present [...] I feel that what one needs is a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a whole stream of random events is taking place.

Consciousness, like memory and habit, is always a reflection on - which is to say, after - the unconscious processes which produce it. The attempt by a subject to grasp the moment will only ever produce a Mis-en abyme of auto-monitoring neurosis (always too late): the postmodern bad infinity of self-consciousness, crippling activity whilst not achieving transparency.

In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two removes.

It sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I would not be prepared to say that he is the same person. I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet who was seized with sickness, and although he recovered, he remained so unconscious of his past life that he did not believe that the stories and tragedies he had written were his own.

Private persons are [...] simulacra.

Mind is an idea of the body

For Gothic Materialism, body horror is not something with which the body is afflicted merely contingently - it is not, for instance, a question of the penetration of a biotically-sealed interiority by invaders that may or may not strike - but something inherent to the body at all times and in all its operations. Body horror= cybernetic realism. Cronenberg: “One of our touchstones for reality is our bodies. And yet they[...] are by definition ephemeral.”[60] Wiener: “Our tissues changes as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day through excreta[...] We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that repeat themselves.” (HUHB 96) From the point of view of a “residual” subject, then, body horror is a horror of the body’s terrifying mutability, its sheer meat materiality . As Deleuze observes when writing on Bacon, the body is always that which is escaping the subject: “It is not me who tries to escape my body, it is the body which tries to escape through itself.”[61] But it is also a horror the body registers itself , when “[b]eneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.” (AO 9)

a post-mortem despotism, the despot become anus and vampire: ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’

As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity.