Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium

Urbanomic/Sequence Press

by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation. What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance--to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure..

A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania...), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting).

A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Poetry

600 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2019

About the author

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. He is the author or editor of The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010), Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (2015).

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, the boldness of techno-enabled late-capitalism as now the austere professor's work has to bear down the barrel of my delitantte opinions and predilections, how delicious.

To begin, this book is not in a genre, nor would it fit into any in any meaningful way, it is a hypercube cypher for the world (Nabokov's garbled glass looking at one another seems to come to mind) that swims entirely in metaphor and nearly drowns. It is a philosophy expressed systematically through poetic prose. It lingers on the tongue and licks of more (100 manias remaining unexamined by Herr Professor).

The book's content is both exquisite and mind bendingly faithful to the task at hand, emanating a balm of creativity so deep from a evergreen of systematic rigor, earning this book more than my endorsement, but my emphatic praise. It succeeds in the way all literary analyses fail. It is a book not about books, but a part of the whole mass of paper accumulated throughout history, lodged between its ribs like cartilage.

In short - read it.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The mania of telling the last story concludes this tome. Omnicide isn't what I imagined. I expected a Burton's Anatomy of the contemporary Middle East. That didn't happen. The author extinguishes that particular flame with a thousand cuts. He cites ten regional authors and does so deliberately and in a serial manner, each time through the prism of a different mania. These themes are explored, mind you, but almost hurriedly. He notes the same impulses lead to both poetry and terrorism and then abandons the thread, almost for fear of contagion. There were times when the cited passages were sufficiently transportive, there were also times when the author linked these fragments to something sinister but somehow I wanted Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials and had to manage with wisps and chuckles.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as I think it ought to be read: ravenously, after a period of sleeplessness and instability, and in just a few sittings.

The only way I can think to describe this is to say that it's as if Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" were rewritten to laud those delirious fixations that drive us on towards compulsions to wreck the world.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Omnicide sets out to diagram the interesting speculative opportunities that are latent in the notion of a systematic, cruel, deliberate and all-consuming negation without remainder. But already with this description one seemingly reaches an impasse: is not the thought of utter annihilation a performative contradiction? How can thought possibly 'think' the thought of end of all thoughts as such? This brings us to a perhaps terrifying realization that whoever or whatever is thinking the end of thought cannot be thought itself. No, the organon of extinction is something else entirely--it is the 'x' to which thought is necessarily entwined, and that to which thought must surrender in the final instance. It is precisely the unthought that thinks (and the unwill that wills) which is indexed in the form of manic dispositions. A thousand and one of them, each an anarchic laceration on thought and liable to be mobilized for strategic purposes, unbound from the [psycho]analyst's couch. Mania convolutes interiority and exteriority (338) and turns thought outside-in. Above all, the author insists that mania can be willed, even to stage a pure exit. What a mistake to have ever dismissed the "omnipotence of thought".

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. Sort of free association. I've really never read anything like this. It was a lot to take in and I feel like it illuminated so many pathways that it was somewhat dizzying.

[Adrian Hindes · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive exercise of delirious literary free association. Mohaghegh explores various different *-mania, starting with augomania (light), and ending with colossomania (giants), each via a short treatise on ten different fictional excerpts from a carefully chosen set of middle eastern authors. Each miniature essay is essentially a flurry of literary, psychogenic, archetypal and philosophical analysis, yet the flavour and style of these are more profoundly evocative than the excerpts they supposedly dissect, in many cases.

The thematic line connecting each exploration is "omnicide", the killing of everything and how single-minded focus on anything invariably leads to such an inclination. The text, structured in a quasi-encyclopedic fashion, becomes a kind of indexical torrent, a miasma of hyper-intellectual psychosis as each paragraph connects to the next by means of fever-dreamed insights, yet each part rounds out yet another limb of the phantasmagoric elephant. I'm not sure what, if anything I ultimately understood from Omnicide, but the experience was nevertheless worth it.

[KV · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think another book like this one exists. A catalogue of manias written by another kind of obsessive maniac. Reading through it feels like a fever dream-100 degree temperatures and delirious engagements with the real world as your body attempts to hold itself together. The obsessive amounts of detail and unfictionialization as Mohaghegh traces these quotes is hit head-on with an almost psychotic sense of urgency, as if the world will end if these things are not catalogued and written down. In this lies my one problem with this book-sometimes the most interesting threads are cut short to get onto the next thing. Though I imagine that this was partially by design, keeping you on the edge of your seat, and dragging you into its manic vortex.
There are 100 manias left uncatalogued in this book. I know that Omnicide II already exists, and I eagerly anticipate being able to jump into that one, and see how JBM finishes this undertaking.

(Note: I would say that this book is closer to a 4.5 than a 4, but not greater than a 4.5-hence the rating of a 4/5).

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much to love here: a juicy anti-psychoanalytic thread, the coyly doled thesis on fatality-mania, the 130 philosophical strip teases, the lyricism, rampant neologizing and clever re-description of the everyday. All this said, I wouldn't describe the work as complete, or satisfying, or convincing...but all this is most certainly by design. User experience will vary.

[Adam Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is the true end of all things found in the desert?

[efenibot · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Frankie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, indexical, taxonomic. But ultimately I didn’t take that much away, and skim-read whole sections. Definitely going to try to read Joyce Mansour

[valeria · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda lost track at some point of this book

[S.G. Mallett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The text I read all other texts against.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A special type of book that can be appreciated by anyone who enjoys analysis of obsession, narrative archetypes, and the unique nature of rare passages written in desperate scenarios.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire the writing style and its storytelling device. Manic, indexical, pathological, hyperstition. Sometimes I lost in the context, but sometimes I can find a mirage, a fatamorgana.

[Adam Holm · Rating 5 out of 5]

What to even say about this? One of the best books I’ve ever read.