1.
Angelicism neither demands submission nor predicts certain extinction. What angelicism does is this: it analyses the possibility of certain extinction—which is now one—and presents possible impacts on the sphere of plasticity and beauty. The problem with the question of submission is that if you refuse it in advance, you are already not free. Angelicism simply says: what would it be like if you had to submit, to save all human life. Would you?
2.
Angelicism is not interested in being promoted. It is interested in its plastic elaborations around extinction being taken seriously—which is to say, can they resonate? It argues that extinction doesn’t just affect the making of art (thematically), it radically invalidates it. But at the same time, extinction-induced art is beauty accelerationism. Only absolute beauty can bring forgiveness and revenge as forestalled limit-changes.
3.
The culture game argument (play the game, compromise) is supposed to be valid till extinction, but that does not mean it applies. It’s like when Hegel said art was over. He said it hundreds of years ago but can only have meant it de jure, not de facto. Art didn’t end when Hegel said it ended, but it did transcendentally. That art still exists in Berlin or New York or whatever also simply means it doesn’t apply. Angelicism is more than radical because it even says: art can be really beautiful, even amazing and new, but it is still empty. So we are down to very fine distinctions. And the exception becomes almost impossible. The description of that impossibility is angelicism—going under only that name, perfect for now.
4.
Anti-racism is a completely inadequate response to all forms of universal racism. We are saying there is a certain type of cultural complaining, shared across races, that wastes time and rules on remote. If culture doesn’t recognise it has ended, it just makes these endless allowances, and these allowances become forms of time-wasting, distraction and acted out grievance.
5.
As it happens, young girls love angelicism. Angelicism works with girls. Most of its seventy or so clones are young girls. The spiritual producer of film01 is a Palestinian girl. Our allegorical fashion designer is a trans girl. Our muse is a twin flame girl. It didn’t choose this. It’s just that young girls are fluid enough to get it.
6.
Right now crypto is being reduced to what it already was: a prototyping schedule for the federal reserve, which has always had more money than any number of SBFs. Again, opposition is hardly the point. It suffices to note that Bitcoin is appended to an organization, and that an organization has its moments of inscription. Even six trillion in crypto would not allow the infinite paradoxes of hardcore longtermism to be resolved against the grain of harsh finitude.
7.
Longtermism and the controversies around longtermism are not new and almost trivial. Longtermism is just a name for infinite ethics and for thinking about the question ‘how many centuries do you think we have down the line?’. And yet the first thing longtermism does in its popular forms is fail to think about the nearterm threat to conditions of existence needed to think longtermism itself.
8.
Everything can be translated into the language of infinity, even the very worst. Finitude is abstainable. It is the best feeling knowing you are wrong, that you can make an error, and revise, like in Descartes where it’s a negative proof of infinity. To say time is a myth is very powerful. Extinction may be about to be absolute but the absolute is not about to be extinct. The beautiful would be that even if beside us the extinct is going to take over, the absolute is still yet to go. The absolute does not go.
9.
Cinema should just be people walking around and talking, like a Plato dialogue. Cinema should just be people walking around and talking about the world. Cinema should just be people walking around and talking about the end of the world, and about what happens between a world and the world. It’s going pretty fast now, we might not make it. Let’s go.
ON ANGELICISM
extinction needs to be disentangled from the regime. deNGO the absolute