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The invasion is one of ghosts, or a type of
gas, perhaps escaping from the corroding
hull of the crashed spaceship, turning town
residents, first, into a „species of blan-
kness“d - itself reminiscent of Ödön von
Horvath½s description, in
ugend "hne
Gott
1937®, of a „Zeitalter der Fische“ -
and finally, at the end of their process of
„becoming“, into transparent, tentacular
beings, communicating with each other
speechlessly, networked, as they are, into a
hive mind. Never mind, for now, that
King½s Gothic is defined by a monstrous fe-
mininity - the book is, in many ways, about
abject, rampant fertility or over-producti-
on, which itself also relates to writing, a
common concern in his work - because
what brought it to mind in recent weeks
was its setting in a series of unbreathable
spaces.
Haven lies as if under a dome, and on the
day Hilly makes his kid brother David dis-
appear, it is hot, humidÆ his audience sits
there, sun-stunned, before leaving early,
uncaring. It is, however, Altair-4, the place
where David disappears to, that I½ve never
forgotten in the years since I first read the
book - I initially kept re-reading the same
one, IT 1986®, almost compulsively - and
which keeps suggesting itself now, though
it has done so intermittently since the sum-
mer: storage planet, its name taken from
the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, King des-
cribes it as a dead world, grey, weird, inimi-
cal, and almost totally airless. To only have
felt the hostility of my surroundings recent-
ly itself smacks of privilege: politics as life
surrounded, with reference to Stefano Har-
ney and Fred Moten½s The Undercommons
2013®, politics as attack on the commons,
politics as toxic to socialityÆ that, I½ve
known all along, without - and still not -
being exposed nakedly, to its work of de-
ath.
Harney and Moten talk about airlessness,
too, the „dirty thinness of this atmosphere“
in which it½d be „evil and uncool to have a
place in the sun“Æ theirs is an understan-
ding of all politics everywhere as exclusion
and „anti-politically romantic“, they write
that their work is not about repair but
about effecting a breakage with the world
of walls, the world of objects, where there
are only relations between things, because
the social has congealed: it is commodities,
as Marx writes, that are citizens in this
worldÆ they are the forms that keep cycling
on, while living forms reify. Anti-politics,
so Harney and Moten, is the desire to be in
that break, as space of possibilities, and,
from there, to not know what is to come, or
where to go, because desire, afterwards,
will, must, be different. Politics, then, as
being made to disappear to Altair-4, or as
the process by which to turn the whole
world, here, into Altair-4, and to therefore
refuse it, to refuse, even, wholly, that there
might be a place in the sun, when all that
we should be able to see, if we kept our eyes
peeled, would be the death-patterns traced
on bodies no longer occluded, but returned
to us.
King½s book ends with David, warm and
solid, returned to Hilly, who himself wakes
from a coma: most of the rest of the town is
either dead or has been captured by the go-
vernment, are interned in camps, environ-
ment-controlled, where they½ll die: politics
surrounded, still. King½s ending, brothers
reunited, might be sentimental, but I won-
der whether we can nonetheless depart
from its obvious sentimentality and norma-
tivity in order to think about the restoration
of a living intimacy formed to the body of
the detainee, to the body of the other. As
such, the situation at the end of King½s no-
vel q whose limitations vis-D-vis otherness,
of which femininity is one, are very clear -
functions purely as a vehicle to think about
love, for abandoned bodies, for those nega-
ted here, those that disappear here, on Al-
tair-4. The book itself, after all, served lar-
gely as a starting point to think about atmo-
spheric conditions, about what Michel
Foucault calls biopolitics, the right to „ma-
ke live and let die“, forming the basic mo-
dus operandi of the modern state, about
the impossibility to breathe, about gagging
on the rhetoric that½s flung at us, about the
desire to be in the world, but the inability to
simply, justly, live in this one, and so to set
about realizing another one.
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Photo: o·yright: FaQienne ollignon