We begin here, with a passage, which, in its condition in and of passage, reflects and refracts us through its fugual reverie: “The mirror covers the entire surface of the wall … Instead of his own image, it throws back at him an entangled mass of bodies, twisted and intertwined like the gnarled branches of a baobab. The figures are warped, their faces hideously blurred, grimacing, and seemingly attached to the wrong bodies. They strike him as familiar and strange at the same time … The mirror speaks: ‘Nothing in the world terrifies you so much as death.

So why are you complaining about these flashes of eternity I am offering you?’” (Boubacar Boris Diop, Doomi Golo—The Hidden Notebooks). My comments here originate, or, more precisely, emanate, from a body of work which arrives and is arrived at by way of nonarrival, in the interstitial immersion in moments of black-and-blue, in the bruised and brushing swell of an individual musing. Amiri Baraka said, back when, to “find the self, then kill it,” and it is this provocation that I want to acknowledge and elaborate on today. When we image the mirror, in this scene from Doomi Golo, which I read as both a circambulatory fiction and philosophical array, what might it mean that, instead of the gazer’s “own image,” what is unveiled is a portrait of entanglement, of a corpus infinitum, with all the beautiful violence that implies? What is this twisted mass, the blurred anima, this gnarl? I’m interested, through the imaginative viscerality this anafoundational picturesqueness makes available, in the disseminative and desedimentive friction of “grimacing faces” and “wrong bodies.” This is to say, more so, that the celebration of an individual genesis, accompanied musically by the arrant pain of this fictional suicide, is what I am perennially drawn to: this is the instantiation of a dissemblance, a constant presence in something both like and other than absence. Thinking, here, if we can still “think,” is to be in flight from, in furtive denouncement of, the Cartesian caricature of “cogito ergo sum.” What is this absence of being only in unbounded presence if not a substantive nothingness, a cryptogrammatic zero-degree of flesh and bone? We have “to consider what nothing is, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in and as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation. That’s the mobility of place, the fugitive field of unowning, in and from which we ask, paraontologically, by way of but also against and underneath the ontological terms at our disposal: What is nothingness? What is thingliness? What is blackness? What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what [we] might call a life in common?” (Fred Moten, “Chromatic Saturation” in The Universal Machine).