“All is illusion, thus all is permitted.” One has to come to some terms with that which appears to be Reality. The acknowledgement must begin with the current state of affairs. What is Reality if not a network of interchangeable symbolic meanings, a culture of signs and metanarratives, all of which one way or the other conjoint not with the mode of production but with the stream of production. But don’t we have enough of this outdated jargon already? A Deception Manifesto is a self-deteriorating function which crumbles itself alongside the Reality it shreds into fragments. The critical question though remains intact, how can one think about Reality when the very coordinates of cognition are themselves given by Reality?
I. Axiom of Artificiality Let us then just abandon those coordinates at once and embark upon our quest in the desert of Reality, at the Sifr of Reality, at Unreality. In the desert of Reality with no landmarks, with no sense of orientation and with no cardinal-direction system to navigate one is destined to artifice her own means of movement, to craft her Mirage. Every nomad knows that mobility is the key of survival in the desert. Thus the first axiom of Deception as opposed to Reality is the opposition of Artificiality versus Authenticity. The ancient hostility of Reality against Deception stems actually from this very opposing properties of both. This very hostile attitude of Reality attributes certain features to it; namely rigidness (sustainable systems, structures, dialectics), depth (metaphysics and semantics) and centralism (indefinite definitions). Respectively on the other side of spectrum, Deception adopts a set of strategic measurements; such as fluidity (Lies of intentional self-delusion), subterraneanism (secrecy, camouflage, sectarianism) and eccentricity (conspiracy, madness, simulation). Note that there are no reactionary tendency associated with Deception, rather hostility and resentment (in a genealogical sense) are the initiatives of Reaction as such. There are indeed dialectical and causal relationship between Reality and Deception, but only in one direction, that is the latter provokes (seduces) the former to reconstruct itself, with other words Deception restrains Reality within its dialectical games. Slowly a method of Deception manifests itself: “To lie our way into the lie”, Sifr of Reality turns into Cipher (secret message) thus “one must tell a story from the nothingness, and thereby make descriptive/phenomenological choices”.
II. Axiom of Desperation But there is nothing more resilient than the state of affairs, it always returns. We are at the age of accelerated disintegration. Death as the ultimate outside is becoming more relevant today as ever before, even more relevant than the time of great world wars since the notions such as Nation or Mode-of-production are as well subjected to the process of disintegration, death is now a planetary matter. By no means this is an outcry of unity for emancipation, we are still in the realms of Reality. We ourselves as agents of Reality are undergoing decadence and putrefaction, as if the arcane notions of bad omen and misfortune are also smuggled back with Reality. The Liar – as the agent of Deception – begins her quest at a state of Desperation (banishment, exile, disappearance). Thus the Liar renders Deception as Destiny (DaD´) as oppose to Death as Destiny (DaD). The Liar is the one playing backgammon with the angel of death. Thus the Liar crafts her mask as a necrophiliac spectre of unreality, traversing between nightmare and mirage, discrediting modalities of the Reality/Simulacrum, obscuring the rigidness of all the givens and denouncing Authenticity. The Liar is a visionary of the shadows, the addict of fantasy and the perpetuator of hallucination, an ephemeral chimaera of Intensification, Velocity and Excess. Thus the second axiom of Deception is Desperation.
III. Axiom of The Inhuman “All is illusion, thus all is permitted.” So enunciated the old man of the mountain. “All” implies the ultimate deception of the statement itself, for “All” declares a constant war on purity, common sense and man’s vain attempt for closure and acquaintance. Thus eternally alien. “All” supersedes the vastness of void and transgresses the borders of without. Thus eternally exotic. “All” dissects the man’s categorical differentiations, threatens his stability and safety. Thus eternally diabolic. Therefore as the final axiom of Deception, the Liar wears the cloak of Inhuman (alien as The Seducer, exotic as The Storyteller and diabolic as The Heretic). All being said, Deception as Destiny (DaD´) manifests in thousands forms and sub-concepts and thus provides specific conditions for different worlds. It varies from a Self-destruction beyond the borders of Self to The Puppet-Master as a God whilst creating an Abyss of suspension, from Radical Indifference of The Assassin to the Unveiling of an Illusion as the way to manifest an Illusion. About the author: Damon Bonari is a fiction writer. He currently researches about chaotic imagination from Lovecraft and Ligotti to Hedayat and Farokhzad. His literary experimentation includes topics such as mysticism, occultism, demonology, sci-fi and supernatural horror. During the day he works as a process engineer in the energy section and at nights as a writer working on his novel.
