[C] Conium or conatus. Hemlock does not exist, because hemlock exists in the fixity of its sign, and every sign remains a crystallization of the Real that yet ceaselessly escapes itself, and that ceaselessly escapes from the reason that governs its sign. Hemlock does not exist, because hemlock exists as a poison, and as such it exists only through the social hybridization, closed on its murderous function, of its capacity of ex-sistence (from the Latin ex-sistens, standing out of oneself), that is to say its power to make existence exist outside itself, in its full alienation. It is its function that prevents it from existing by the denial of its negative ontology, and that distinguishes it, for example, from the anthriscus sylvestris, also closed to its function, but this time to its fodder function. However, nature knows no function other than that of restricting the Real to a simulated function, since nature itself does not exist outside the sociality that defines it. Nature is a simulacrum that is based on the invention of the concept of birth, so that along with the distinctions it forms emerge the function of simulating the Real and the compartmentalization of mutation to this single function. Human being produces nature to produce the function of their nature: the restrictive prevention of the power of ex-sistence. Hemlock thus exists only in a fixation of its function such as langue—a restrictive systemic perception of language—imposes it in the mortifying necessity of its sign. Hemlock is in its evolutionary process, which can come to produce alkaloids, not to serve a function of prevention, but to persist in its Being. In contrast to the function of hemlock, the alkaloid of conium maculatum, more commonly called poison hemlock, does not sum up its mode of Being, it is a power of ex-sistence, it is the conatus that preserves the contingencies of its future mutations, outside of any function. It is so for all things, including for the langue that designates hemlock as for the one that designates black hole: langue is always the simulacrum that, because of its conatus, denies to what surrounds it its own conatus, and in such a way limits its possibility to mutate in its Being, and to persist in its mutation and in the interaction of the mutations that make Being a Becoming.

[C] Isomorphism of simulacrum. Hemlock has the form of its function. Poison is isomorphic to the intention that designates it in the Real—the same is true in the distinction that makes, within the framework of modernity, homo sapiens a citizen through the ontologization of their working function. Subject is no longer a submission to the unsurpassable physics, a sub-jectus of the sole physis, this becoming totality of the Real, but a pretext for the syntagmatic renewal of a political control—all government governs by a syntagmatic empire on the Real. Variation of the syntactic typology, variation of the subject-verb-object order: variation of the murder of Becoming. The real insubordination is the contentment of the only submission to physics, it is a way towards the non-governability. Subject becomes object, object becomes subject, and the verb disappears in its intransitivity. Ontology is masked by the ontologization of function, and the designation of murder always precedes murder. The substance of hemlock that carries its function, the conine, this alkaloid with fatal toxicity for human beings, comes from the Greek kônáô (to spin), itself going back to the term kônos (a cone), just like hemlock’s leaves: the Real is told from its form. Etymology indicates here the reversal that should command us to revolutionize subject: that of a function that follows the form, of a vertigo that is conical, that is a gravitational spin. The subject has in this way an intransitive relation to the Real, since it fits closely its form which unceasingly grows. Object no longer has the form of its subject, but subject has the form of its object, in the indistinction that unites them.

[C] To in-ex-sist. Poison is the totality of the hemlock’s substance, what its function commands to it, as working is the totality of the citizen’s substance. Poison exists by its capacity to withdraw from existence the contingency of its way to persist in Being. It does not exist in the mutant power of its Becoming, but is summed up in the fixity of its function as negative existence. Past the crystallization of poison in a negative existence that its function imposes to it, the negativity of existence overflows the functional knowledge that encloses it. The negative existence can become the model of an existence that is no longer satisfied with itself, of an existence that is really ex-sistence, that really tries to go out of what it is, to impose onto Being its extension. The negative existence is an insistence on mutation, on its persistence, that is to say an in-sistence to ex-sistence by the perpetual return on the self that the mutant Becoming imposes. Thus, poison is not evil by what it withdraws to existence: poison, in its just measure, is the sign which reveals the power of the mutations of existence in the transforming correlation between the outside and the inside of existence—the subject of existence being never outside of itself, since outside is a continuity of the contingency of its interiority.

[C] Potio, ivi, itum, ire (potis). Whatever its dose, support of its meaning as shown by the ambiguity of the Greek term pharmakon—meaning both poison and its remedy—poison produces a negation of existence. It subjects existence to a contingency of the way of standing outside oneself. Human being who ingests poison would thus become a ¬human, according to the signs of logic (negation being an operator expressed by the symbol ¬). Negation is not understood as the term of what is affirmed, but as an alternative mode of Being of the persistence in the Being. Non-being, in its own way, persists in Being by the contingency of its occurrence. Negation is not a disappearance, it is a process of transformation. The negation of subject does not involve the subject in its nothingness, but in its in-existence, this way of dissipating itself in the space that it occupies to newly populate this space. The negation of subject alters the persistence of subject by making it other. The ¬human is not the non-human: they are the alien of the fixities that the regime of knowledge imposes on their mode of Being. The alien is the hope of the human being liberated from the limits of their logic, of their logos, of their strict prehension of the space of their Being. The alien is a process in a process: it indicates the metalogical way. The alien is the subjectivation of a perpetual alienation, and in the metalogism that commands this one, by the liquidation of causality, we use to disuse the symbol ¬ to say that any negation is precisely a process, the dynamic at the heart of any alienation: a mode of Being, by means of its overtaking, that goes towards Being, by always failing, but in this way by becoming.

[C] To be or not to be subject to the verb to be. If the ¬human is the alien, the ¬alien should be the human, but the ¬alien remains a persistence of the mutation that moves away from what human being has defined of themself. The alienation of the alien does not go to the recovered human, it produces a shift against any stagnation of the alien in its Being: the alien of the alien refuses the syntagmatic domination of its Being. They want to be without the verb to be, without a subject that would be subjected to a grammar of the Real, and this by the poison, that is to say, as the etymon potio signifies it, by the power of mutation. The poison which makes the alien of the alien is only a power subjected to the only contingency of the physical Becoming of space. The alien of the alien is the otherness that inhabits the unknown of a parallax to the otherness of the other.

[C] Revolutionary return to Being or the deviance of what commands to be. In the logical appearance of negation, the ¬(¬alien) would return to the alien: it would pose a return to Being. This one is however part of an escape of the act of being, which is understood as a negation for Being to be. It is an eternal return to Being, but a failed eternal return—failed since it collapses to mutating indefinitely. The ¬(¬alien) is a revolution of the alien. It is not satisfied with a return to Being, but with a revolution to Being, such as a gravitational continuity which inscribes the spinning—conical spinning, spinning resulting from a conatus in the form of conine—not in an eternal return of the fixity of the same, but in an eternal return of the mutation of the same. Revolution is the only return to Being that does not lead to a governmentality of the fixities of Being. The ¬(¬alien) does not return to the first state of its mutation, it denies any arche of the phenomenon of mutation, and prolongs it in the recursivity of it. By a negation of negation which does not deny itself, but which prolongs itself in the discovery of the unspeakableness of space with which it dialecticizes, the ¬(¬alien) affirms the mutant permanence of the alien. The ¬(¬alien) is a mode of Being beyond the verb to be: it is the metalogism that accepts the infinitude of the Real in front of the linguistic finitude of a logos limited to its anthropomorphism. The ¬(¬alien) suggests—a logos beyond logos is needed—a metalogos whose overcoming would take into account its relative historicity. The ¬(¬alien), against all anthropomorphism, affirms a metamorphism, up to the criticism of langue which dares to emit the idea of a recursivity of its mutant Becoming—criticism and self-criticism of Becoming to the point of its sign.

[C] Negative acceleration. The ¬(¬alien) is carried away by the acceleration of its alienation, and this alienation, which is in itself a dynamic of negation, cannot know, even in the case of a negation of negation, its cancellation, since its own dynamic is a tension that goes towards mutation, towards the mutation of mutation. The alienation that we would consider as an ¬alienation, even as a ¬(¬alienation), would be nothing other than a perception of the recursive mutation that animates each place of the Real, namely each singularity of the space united by the commonality of its Becoming, of its mutant Becoming. Any negation leads to a negation of negation. In that, the operation of a ¬(¬alienation) brings to light the mechanics of the sign—especially an empty sign, since the signifier of mutation is already situated beyond the fixity of its signified—that unveils the necessity of unveiling, just like the monster is always the monstration of the intention that designates it as a monster. An ¬(¬alienation) is a stimulation to the perception of the acceleration that takes place in any process of alienation, it exalts to be as Becoming, as mutant Becoming, and to become as negation of Being.

[C] Nature as poison for poison as nature. Nature is a consequence of the strict understanding that human being has of itself. It is necessary, in order to safeguard what human being designates as nature, to destroy not the operation of designation, but human being as the cause that produces signs. The destination is thus not an antinature, but an impossibility of its sign, since any sign is understood in the fixity of what conveys both its designation and the reception of this designation. It is necessary that the sign of nature becomes its own poison, so that nature can relieve itself of the separation that it presupposes with the subject that designates it, and thereby mutate in the own mutation of the space that it occupies, in the confusion of subject and object that Becoming imposes.

[N] Politics of poison: n(eg)ation. The alien of nation separates alienation from itself. It tells the other to tell the fear of becoming the other. It tells the other to tell its affirmation to be in a fixed purity of its Being, that the other would threaten by its power of mutation. It tells the other to tell the self of nation, the fixity of a simulacrum of Being and its imposition on a territory as an anaesthetic facing the omnipresent mutations of Being—some even speak of nation as organic nation, forgetting the mutant capacity of any organism that never limits itself by its mutation to a given territory. Nation is understood in such a way as a social consequence of the act of telling nature, that is to say of the act of telling the separation opposite what seems external to a sclerotic culture of Being. Nation is the political organization of a subject’s disgust in front of its mutations, which denies its Being as Becoming. It is always the withdrawal of the subject towards its own fear of the negation of its moment in Being. Nation tries in this way to create a durable coherence around a point of space, by telling the permanence of this space, without taking into account that the only permanence is that of mutation, and that this point of space mutates in the interactive dilatation of space. To preserve our persistence in Being, against all fixity of Being—against all governmentality—it is then necessary for us to look for the inhuman in human being, its negative organization, its negative politics, a politics of the poison: the ¬(¬nation) of the ¬(¬alien). In order to do this, the alienation of nation must first be envisaged in order to annihilate the nation of false alienations, false because it remains at the political stage of the rejection of the other and not of the negation of its own Being. A ¬nation thus emerges as the nihilistic fruit of a negative community that affirms the non-governable substance of subject, since nothing can be established between it and its submission to physics. In a second phase, that of the production of poison as a recursivity of revolution, in other words of a permanent revolution that would mutate in a continuous turning in on itself: like a star that spins round and round, but that spins round and round in a space that expands, the ¬nation could become the ¬(¬nation)—it could become the consciousness of a negative community that would unceasingly form and deform the commonality of its reticular subject and would inscribe this reticular subject politically in what mutation is as negation. Thus, the place of revolution, in spite of the permanence of revolution, is never identical to Being, but the difference of Becoming. Being is Non-being, and the ¬(¬alien) forms the non-being-poison as the overcoming of Being, as Becoming.

[H] Plato, Phaedo: “What else, Socrates, said Crito, but what the man who is to give you the poison has been telling me for some time, that I should warn you to talk as little as possible. People get heated when they talk, he says, and one should not be heated when taking the poison, as those who do must sometimes drink it two or three times.” —What is poison before it is grinded? Before it is reduced to a distortion of its substance? In The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, no look goes to the cup, which, before carrying a function of death, carries the death of the plant separated from human being. A single glance, in the background of the representation, all into its anabasis, goes neither to denial nor to Socrates—in itself is it not the same thing?—a single glance which watches the watcher: it is the question of what is situated beyond what we get from ourselves.

[H] Nnedi R. B. Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix: “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” —Reality is always artificial—this is what we might answer to the question, “If it’s reality, how can it possibly be artificial?”, that Pat Cadigan lets flutter in Tea from an Empty Cup,—reality is the artifact of langue that masks the Real by its capacity to shape a sign in front of what is as a permanent mutation, in order to freeze Being in the crystal of its cell, but every cell is always inscribed, past its sign, in the shifting that the potentiality of its permanent mutation imposes on it.

[H] Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture: “Most of the birds that the Campas hunt are themselves embodiments of good spirits. Their slaughter is only an illusion [simulacre in the french edition]; after the hunter has asked the bird for its clothing, out of compassion for him it deliberately presents its carnal envelope to his arrows, at the same time preserving its immaterial interiority, which is immediately reincarnated in an identical body or else resumes its invisible human appearance.” —Under the pretext of its sacrificial egocentrism, is not the Socratic gesture, which comes to neglect the Being of conium maculatum, a condemnation of the reason to a discriminatory partitioning of the existents between what is strictly subject and what is strictly object?

[H] Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature: “The pronouns embedded in sentences about contestations for what may count as nature are themselves political tools, expressing hopes, fears, and contradictory histories. Grammar is politics by other means. What narrative possibilities might lie in monstrous linguistic figures for relations with ‘nature’ for ecofeminist work?” —Any langue is a monster, which by its capacity to tell denies what it designates by placing over it the opaque veil of its syntagmatic empire. The Real is always located in an escape from the naturalness that langue tries to prescribe to it in order to confine not what the Real is, but what langue wants from its verb to be. It is not so much langue that encloses the world, but it is the will to inscribe itself only in the space of its syntax.

[H] Q Hayashida, Dorohedoro, Spell 1: Caiman: “There’s a guy in here! In his mouth! Urk! Squeee. Shup. Wh… Who’s there?” —The human’s mouth is the alien’s home. The human’s langue—in french, langue means both tongue and langue, in a confusion that signifies the biological boundaries of the human’s language—it examines the world like the reptile’s tongue, from the matrix scar where is ingested what represents itself before it even presents itself to the human’s langue. It deforms the mask that covers the face and produces the social illusion of the face by its communicational mechanics—the communication is itself the scar of the impossibility to place the relation of subject and object in a confusion that should impose their overcoming. It illuminates any torsion to mask the shadows that escape as much from what is told as from what is designated, but it is beyond the langue that the face-without-face is situated, the relative identity of the metamorphic form that human being refuses.

[H] Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza: “When a poison decomposes my body, it is because a natural law determines the parts of my body in contact with the poison to take on a new relation which combines with that of the toxic body. Nothing in this is evil from Nature’s viewpoint. To the extent that the poison is determined by a law to have an effect, that effect is not an evil, since it consists of a relation which itself combines with that of the poison.” —How can poison be on the side of evil, since poison, like evil, taken in the fixity of its function, remains a simulacrum of logos, which seeks to blur the intention that commands the invention of its function? Poison is never evil; it is the gesture of considering a plant in its sole function that is bad.

[H] Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy: “The pharmakon would be a substance—with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy—if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.” —What can be a substance of the negation of substance, if not a mutation of logos itself?

[H] Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology: “But Aufhebung is another term for speculative experience, for the experience of difference or negation, of relative identity, of a contradiction between consciousness’ definition of itself and its real existence which is miscognized and re-cognized at the same time.” —Every moment of the Real has a relative identity that is constructed from a speculation of what this moment in the Real is not. This slight parallax of reason, which does not turn negation into an opposition, since negation is inscribed in what is, and thus in what mutates, engages a self-referential dynamic. This dynamic cannot be satisfied with what reason is in its moment—driving dissatisfaction thanks to the consideration of what reason is not.

[H] Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: “The crux of the matter is that this movement through double negation characterizes the transcendence of each stage of alienation as well as the whole ‘Science of the Experience of Consciousness,’ not excluding the Absolute, though the goal has been reached and a new unity of opposites achieved. If there is finally to be ‘a release,’ a plunge into freedom, it can come only through the overcoming of internal opposition. Each new unity of opposites reveals that the opposition is within.” —Every opposition has the power to produce a new opposition, and, in this dialectical continuity of the Real, the negative force that inclines towards this new opposition becomes the motor of Becoming itself. From this follows an ethics of the perpetual and driving alienation of the subject, seized in its confusion with the object that it designates. The alienation is not understood there, in the current psychological or even Marxist sense, of a dispossession of the self, as an exteriorization turned towards the self, unable to operate there, but as a self that is conscious of its capacity of mutation and which envisages itself harmoniously in the vectorial power which orders all thing to become. Alienation must not be centripetal, but centrifugal. In this sense, the alienation of the subject can be an ethics of Becoming, and its sharing a politics of Becoming on the scale of a group, that is to say a cosmic communism.

[H] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Stranger: “For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.” —The Becoming of the alien is the prevention of its representation, the refusal of all that designates it in a fixity of its Being.

[H] John Carpenter, The Thing: “This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation.” —Man is the warmest place to hide, since Man is the host of their own representation. They tell the world to designate the subject who tells it. Through langue, human being is always the alien of themself, and their world the imitation of the Real where they hide.

[H] Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness: “‘Teach me your mindspeech,’ I said, trying to speak easily and with no rancor, ‘your language that has no lies in it. Teach me that, and then ask me why I did what I’ve done.’” —What is a communication without language if not the dissolution of the separation of subject and object, in a liberating confusion which tells the complexity of an information transforming unceasingly, past the idea of causality, and tended by the sole metamorphic acceleration of what is in Being? The space becomes an interactive web where can be felt the commonality of its ontological dynamics. A communication without language makes it possible to establish the permanence of a transforming exchange of information, feeding on the entropy which rules it in order to make from the interactions of what is in Being a tension directed towards the permanent deviation of the telling-being of Being and to let there happen a contingency of Being beyond what its designation presupposes.

[H] Julia Ducournau, Titane: “—Push. Push harder. Look at me. Look at me! You’ll be okay. I’m here. Push hard, Adrien. —My name’s Alexia. —Okay… Push hard, Alexia. Push! —How is it? —Alexia… Alexia! I’m here. Stay with me. Alexia? I’m here. Agony of Alexia. Scream of a baby covered in oil and metal. —I am here… I am here.” —Machine must not be designated by the rancid dualism of religiosities, but by the interactive union of all that mutates. It must be felt past the uncertain gesture of designation, as an evolving continuity of the human form beyond the animality of its langue. Machine transports the acceleration that has the power to liberate human being from the immutability that they place on each of their representations, and this through what they represent to themself, from the rigidity of their langue, as unspeakableness. Machine opens in front of the human form a Becoming of harmony thanks to a mutant contingency of Being returned to the matter which carries its intelligence—not the bodily matter taken in the permanence of its representation, but the bodily matter of which the common Becoming of all that surrounds it awaits only its metamorphosis.

[H] Junji Itō, Uzumaki, vol. 1: “She’s being consumed by the spiral that appeared on her body!” —The Becoming of what is is a crumbling of the moment of what is. Being is always a negation of Being, because all that is continuously becomes through the mutation of Being. Thus, the impermanence of Being is situated precisely in the permanence of its mutant Becoming.

[H] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman: “The planetary opens onto the cosmic in an immanent materialist dimension. My argument is that, again, this change of perspective is rich in alternatives for a renewal of subjectivity. What would a geo-centred subject look like?” —What would a cosmic subject look like, having destroyed the knowledge that allows it to think from the thought of center? What would correspond to the gesture that would destroy the geocentric discourse—a geologism that preserves while masking it a vertical epistemological structure—in order to affirm a cosmologism, where every moment of the Real would be a growth with contingent acceleration and would thus make of the Real a properly acentric space? To what would a posthuman dedicate themself if they are really situated after the langue that constitutes them and that allows them to maintain a center to their speech? Laboria Cuboniks, to us xenomorphs, reminds us: “If nature is unjust, change nature!” And why not destroy it? And destroy with it the whole idea of birth? Mutation does not arise from its own birth: it becomes in the strangeness of the Becoming.

[H] Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Saga of The Swamp Thing: “[Those plants] eat him… and they become infected by a powerful consciousness that does not realize it is no longer alive! Imagine that cloudy, confused intelligence, possibly with only the vaguest notion of self, trying to make sense of its new environment… Gradually shaping the plant cells that it now inhabits into a shape that it’s more comfortable with.” —Hubris would not be a becoming-plant that makes the plant a destination of mutation, but a gaze that relates the plant to the immutability of what human being represents of itself. Human being creates a nature that must resemble it, and it thus places the revenge against what it is not in the representation of a nature that it shapes.

[H] Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle: “And I walked on, while they shrieked and shouted and the woman stood on the porch and laughed. Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? / Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me. Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires.” —Poison must lead to a politics of the ceaseless reconstitution of normality from the strangeness of what it wants to be in langue that makes the social phenomenon. Mutation must be inscribed in each moment of the Real as a political necessity of the destruction of its finitude, as the search of the accident that opens onto the infinity of its contingency to be otherwise, beyond all that can designate it.