Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception

by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

An infernal catalogue of manic visionaries, inspired by the poetry of the Middle East.In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom, deception, and the game, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle-East, Omnicide II introduces us to a new cast of manic visionaries, from the Selemaniac to the Crystallomaniac, the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac. In his relentless cataloguing of the myriad figures and portents of omnicidal doom, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest creative incandescence is only kindled in the shadow of certain doom. Amid war cries and lullabies, mages, wolves and pelicans, sabres and crystals, drones and soul-stealers, in settings ranging from the opium den to the Qatari luxury hotels, with his unique style and methodology, his dizzying breadth of references, and his implacable will to follow the most deranging lines of thought and evoke the most startling images, Mohaghegh draws the reader into territories disturbing and unfamiliar, atmospheres delicate and grotesque, moods morbid yet life-affirming, in a book that evokes fever and exudes dead calm. The utterly absorbing music of this writing both lulls and disquiets—a contemporary Necronomicon, an inexhaustible treasury of recipes for disaster, catastrophe, ruination and destruction, all in the name of the most intense creation.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

413 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication January 6, 2026

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

[hence · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wish i had wrote this. it's simultaneously the most beautiful prose ever and a philosophy that has been made for me. great references for further reading in philosophy, poetry, short stories and novels. i cannot express how much this book meant to me. incredible, incredible, incredible

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fun book, kind of a dark anti-DSM. Less postcolonial/academic and more riffy than the first volume. 103 distinct manias are cataloged.

“One of our omnicidal study’s underlying contentions is that perpetual loyalty to so-called everyday reality is itself just an ideological romanticism and fetishism of a certain lunacy which calls itself normality. No, the serious existential claim here is that certain vital instinctual processes are better exercised by madness (or more particularly mania) than by the stereotypical orders of sanity.”

Some of the best material consists of brief evocative typological lists, such as a few pages on Games of Intentional Loss, which include affective loss, strategic loss, artistry, glory, bribery, nihilism, conspiracy, playing multiple hands, the long game, and disguised loss.

Mania is central to whatever spirit may be said to exist exist outside of ideological systems—the imposers of which “we might even conceivably forgive…their constant violence if not for the two unforgivable sins of all sadisms: (1) that they have no style; (2) that they take no pleasure in their work.”