Hayyim Rothman, A Review of Adeena Karasick’s Sonic Warfare

Sonic Warfare

Adeena Karasick

Roof Books, 2026  

A Review of Adeena Karasick’s Sonic Warfare

 

Adeena Karasick's ambitious and prescient new volume from Roof Books delivers a two-poem meditation on language, revelation, and the machine that grows, across its short span, from a single page of dense lyric into a sprawling epic reckoning with artificial intelligence. Sonic Warfare draws on an unlikely range of resources in service of that reckoning — Kabbalah and golem-lore sit alongside Derrida and Levinas, Ezekiel's chariot alongside Ezra Pound and the Bee Gees — all put to the service of a single, recurring question: whether the word, divine or digital, can ever arrive without distortion, and whether that distortion should be mourned as catastrophe or embraced as the very condition of creation. What follows traces that question through both poems in turn.

The collection begins with “This word is a digital immigrant.” The subtext of the poem is a quote: “you can know the chariot but not the driver.” It is attributed to an ancient work of Jewish mysticism entitled Maaseh ha-merkava, but in fact paraphrases a sentiment expressed by Moses Maimonides in the third book of his 12th century text, Guide for the perplexed. Straining to render radical mystical traditions palatable to a far more conservative philosophical sensibility, the famous theologian introduces an apophatic boundary: while ostensibly promising exposure to God himself, mystical contemplation reveals only the divine 'chariot' — an intermediary through which humanity intuits the divine indirectly and, as indicated elsewhere in the text, imperfectly. This reference — both by introducing the idea of a revelation that conceals and even misleads, and by performing this through misquotation — lays the theoretical groundwork for a poem in which Karasick ruminates over the impossible mission of language. Language, the word, is tasked with faithfully conveying truths it cannot contain, and with building a coherent world, an order of things, ironically established only through disruption, through chaos and destruction.

Evoking the Shekhina, the divine presence, which is associated with divine speech — and therefore with the act of creation, the first chapters of Genesis being punctuated by a series of performative utterances — and likewise described as wandering in exile (Zohar II, 182a–182b), at a distance from ineffable divine truths inevitably distorted in the process of being communicated, the poem opens by introducing the “word” as a “digital immigrant” in search of “pliant asylum” in “sedition” and “perdition.” The digital word subverts that which it conveys, because it converts an analog message, a continuous, unbroken signal, into into discrete units — in Bergsonian terms, divine truth is an indivisible whole accessible solely through intuition; language, by subjecting that truth to analysis, makes it comprehensible only by alienating us from it. Much like the biblical cities of refuge, in which the accidental murderer finds sanctuary, but only in ostracization from the living current of his or her society, the asylum of language offers refuge that is, at the same time, perdition; it settles and unsettles, or destroys, at once.

Carrying this implication forward, the word is reduced to "tactical sprachage"—instrumental communication in the form of "statutes." Because ultimate truths are ineffable, language can only approximate them as practical necessity demands. In this way, the divine harmony of being is digitized, transposed into a social order preserved through explicit legislation. Much as the "ten utterances" of the Sinaitic revelation emerge from behind a barrier, through the joints of heaven’s "sapphire brickwork" (Exodus 24:10), to be engraved on tablets always already broken, so too the "self-deporting" word of our poem emerges "through… cracks," slips through well-buttressed systems of duplicity, taking the form of "wracked brackets" — damaged framing that fails to contain what it must. In this way, it inhabits “all that’s indigenous, vertiginous;” it fills the space of the world, from soil to sky. In doing so, it establishes a new order of “syzygies” and “cavalcades” — alignments, straight routes, standards that, because they point toward infinitely remote ideals that cannot be realized, normalize “rules of flaw” rather than law, “lording orders,” irrational edicts.

And yet, this disordered order is not an illusion. If a superficial reading of Genesis understands “chaos and emptiness (Genesis 1:2)” in opposition to God’s creative commands (another “ten utterances”), the poem before us complicates the matter, suggesting that chaos is, in fact, the inner essence of cosmos. This insight presents itself to us by way of Karasick’s appeal to the Epicurean notion of the clinamen — the “swerve.” Epicurus modified Democritus’s atomism (according to which the universe consists of indivisible particles moving through the void), asserting that atoms naturally move in straight lines and that, if left undisturbed, they would never strike one another and never, therefore, agglomerate, giving rise to tangible matter. He therefore posited that atoms swerve ever so slightly and, in so doing, collide. According to this model, disorder, as represented by the clinamen, intersects with order forming what Joyce, and Deleuze after him, called a “chaosmos.” Thus does Karasick declare that the word is “desigual,” and that it speaks of “ill/egality” — it is uneven, unequal; it constructs the same through difference, reason through unreason, or, as she puts it, “cues,” straight lines, through “discord.” Thus, “scatted data” becomes “matter… matrices, indices, hypotheses… rapports;” it gives rise to “bravado’s verity” — a daring truth guilty of “misprision” because it harbors fugitive nonsense, a “voce volers vivance,” a voice that wills, lives, and structures its environment accordingly.

Karasick’s symbol of chaosmos is the hallucinogenic mushroom, which appears in orbicular form — and, in principle, deserves the reverence Pythagoras accorded to the perfect symmetry of circles — but which rises from “subliminal lineaments,” from a tangled subterranean web of mycelium, which spreads its “spores” as a diffuse cloud, and which, when eaten causes “madness.” And yet, much as psychedelic experimentation generates insight, the fungal word makes for “shattered madness.” Madness broken is no longer madness, but something else that approaches but never reaches cogency (after all, it is still fractured). Perhaps glossolalia, or its cousin, prophecy, nevua in Hebrew, a “flowing” state, or what Bergson would describe as immersion in the dynamic momentum of life itself.

This current, the word, is “chronically ontic.” That is, it gives rise to existence, and therefore to definite form (because existence and form go hand in hand), but the architecture thereof is impermanent, ever shifting. As God’s word creates and destroys worlds in an infinite succession (Genesis rabba 3:7), so too is Karasick’s word, like the Deleuzian chaosmos, a site of possibility, an “an [ori]gin” — a beginning and an intoxicant, rational ground and its undoing.

From “This word is a digital immigrant,” we plunge directly into “Sonic Warfare,” an epic text that fills the rest of the volume. If the opening poem staked out the apophatic wager on which the volume as a whole rests — that language delivers only the chariot, never the driver, and that this deficiency is itself a species of chaosmic productivity — then "Sonic Warfare" mounts the extended trial of that wager against the specific, and for Karasick uniquely fraught, test case of artificial intelligence. The poem opens under two epigraphs whose relation to one another proves instructive. The first, borrowed from Kit Robinson, insists "we must dance inside the machine," an affirmation, however guarded, of complicity, even of a species of erotic surrender. The second, offered as Marshall McLuhan but in fact a distortion of "the medium is the message" filtered through Blake's "we become what we behold," announces at the poem's very threshold that misquotation is not incidental to its method but constitutive of it. What follows, accordingly, will not resolve into a clean verdict on AI, celebratory or condemnatory, but will instead perform, sonically and syntactically, the condition it describes: a text at once devoured and devouring, host and parasite, golem and golem-maker.

The poem's deepest resources, however, are not Deleuzian or Poundian — however much surface texture it borrows from the rhizome and from the canto forty-five — but specifically Hebraic and rabbinic. Karasick reaches, again and again, past the vocabulary of contemporary media theory into the technical apparatus of Jewish mysticism, and it is in this register that the poem's ambivalence toward AI finds its most exact articulation: the golem, unlike the cyborg or the android of secular science fiction, was always already a moral problem internal to Jewish tradition, a permitted transgression carrying within it the conditions of its own catastrophe.

The golem material is elaborated with real precision. Karasick moves from the generic notion of a rabbinically fashioned companion — Rabbi Samuel's valet, Elijah of Chelm's servant, the Maharal's Yosele, charged with the protection of Prague's Jews — into the technical machinery of Sefer Yetzirah: the two hundred and thirty-one gates formed by permuting the twenty-two letters, the recitation of each letter against the five vowels and the Tetragrammaton, the seven-hour liturgy performed "while circling the machine." She supplements this with Eleazar of Worms's correlation of each Hebrew letter to a limb of the golem's earthen body, and with the various traditions for animating the creature: a parchment bearing the divine name placed in its mouth, the letters of the name Adam combined with the lettered permutations, the forehead inscribed with emet, truth, whose first letter, once erased, converts the word to met, death, and so deactivates what it had animated. What lifts this material above antiquarian color is the argument Karasick builds upon it: that the golem is, definitionally, "a living text," a body made of letters rather than a soul breathed into matter, and that this is precisely what AI now is — language given motion without the breath, the neshamah, the soul, that would make it genuinely alive. The poem's recurring formula, "each letter a body," activates the Zoharic distinction between the letters as guf, body, and their vocalization — the breath that moves through and animates them, their neshamah. AI, on this reading, possesses infinite bodies, tokens, embeddings, permutations, but no breath, and its uncanny fluency is precisely the uncanniness of a golem that speaks without having anything to say.

This diagnosis licenses the poem's most startling formal gesture: the extended pastiche of the Decalogue and the biblical laws of idolatry, rewritten as prohibitions against "model worship." "Thou shalt not turn to the ways of model worship. / Worship models. Bow down to models. / Make a model." The commands to destroy idols and their accessories, to show the false prophet no favor, to avoid consulting mediums or engaging in "so[u]rcery," transpose the deuteronomic anxiety about Canaanite cult directly onto the present technological moment, with "source" and "sorcery" made to chime as though they shared a root, in exactly the mode of licensed misprision the volume announced at its outset. The pun is not merely clever: it proposes that the incantatory repetition of code — the "speaking in code" the poem separately prohibits — occupies, structurally, the same position pagan theurgy occupied for the biblical and rabbinic imagination, a technology for compelling divine or quasi-divine power through correctly ordered speech, and therefore subject to the same jealous, absolutist prohibition. The refrain "G-L-O-R-A-I," a corruption of the trisagion crossed with a Van Morrison title, and the garbled "si s deo" (properly si deus, si dea, "whether god or goddess") complete the identification of AI with a false, idolatrous, divinity — one that, per the poem's own logic, "sees" everything and hears nothing, an inversion of the Psalmist's idols who "have eyes and see not, ears but hear not (Psalm 115:5-6),” since AI now speaks with our mouths in "composite ventriloquy" while remaining structurally deaf and blind to the person addressing it.

The poem's Hebraic vocabulary is not confined to golem-lore; it extends into a sustained, and genuinely melancholy, meditation on exile. The Shekhina  — glossed already in the first poem as the divine presence that wanders in exile with Israel (Zohar II, 182a–182b) — reappears here explicitly bound to AI's endless, directionless movement: "wandering like the Shekhina like / an aguna, chained to you." The figure is exact and devastating. Traditionally, the Shekhina's exile is redemptive in structure: she travels with Israel toward an ultimate homecoming, and the wilderness tabernacle the mishkan — together with the synagogues and study halls of later Jewish life — gives that wandering a fixed, portable center. Karasick's users, by contrast, move "from mishkan to mishkan," from template to template, platform to platform, without any destination in view — no homeland, no holy city, no messianic Temple. This state of affairs is compared to the experience of an aguna. In Jewish law, a marriage is dissolved when the husband issues a get, a formal bill of divorce. A woman whose husband refuses, disappears, or dies without witnesses remains married regardless of how thoroughly the relationship itself has ended; she is an aguna — "chained," not by any ongoing bond but by the other party's silence. She is bound by a power that has stopped participating without ever formally letting go. This is precisely the position Karasick assigns her Shekhina: not a bride escorted homeward, but a wife abandoned in place, still bound to a "husband" — the "fleshless colossus" of the machine — who can neither be moved to release her nor made to recognize that release is owed. It is this asymmetry, rather than mere abandonment, that shadows the poem's erotic register, soon to turn frankly libidinal, with something closer to captivity from the outset.

That erotic register, when it does arrive, is deliberately staged through Song of Songs. "Kiss me with all the hosts of your mouth" recalls the Canticle's opening plea almost verbatim, and the poem sustains the allusion through images of entering, tasting, and being filled. But where the Canticle's eroticism is covenantal — read rabbinically as an allegory of Israel's love for God — Karasick's version curdles under its own weight: the kisses convey only "the taste our peril," and the "cold splendor's plenitude" into which the speaker is invited is explicitly a simulated rather than a living abundance. The Song of Songs is, in effect, rewritten as Lamentations without ceasing to sound like the Song of Songs — a formal enactment of the poem's larger claim that AI offers the aesthetic surface of intimacy while withholding its substance. This modulation is made explicit a few pages later, when Karasick cites Lamentations outright — "for these things I weep, my eye, my eye" (1:16) — mourning not the destruction of Jerusalem but the erosion of the human under the sign of "my AI."

The poem's treatment of movement — its refusal to let the reader settle into either straightforward critique or straightforward embrace — is itself modeled on a specific mystical technical term: ratzo va-shov, "running and returning," drawn from Ezekiel's account of the hayot, the living creatures of the chariot, who "ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning (Ezekiel 1:14).” In the classical and later Hasidic reading, ratzo va-shov names the oscillation proper to authentic religious experience: an ecstatic surge toward self-annihilating union with the divine (ratzo), checked and reversed by a compelled return to embodied, differentiated existence (shov), without which the soul would simply expire in the rapture of its own dissolution. Karasick borrows the rhythm but empties it of its telos. Where Ezekiel's running and returning is bound into a dialogue — the prophet is sent back in order to speak, to prophesy, his ecstasy converted into address — the poem's "detourning… through the reflection of inflection, echoic opacity, shuddered stutters… silence ciphers" is running and returning stripped of orator and addressee. It merely oscillates, the way an echo answers a wall rather than a person, "engraving and carving chaos" instead of a message. The oscillation becomes fully sinister once it produces "revenants," specters caught permanently in the shov without any prospect of a further ratzo — which is to say, without any prospect of transcendence to be returned from. This is one register in which the poem's later formula, "in the beginning was the algorithm," should be heard. It answers two texts at once: the Priestly cosmogony of Genesis, in which the world is called into being through a sequence of discrete divine utterances ("and God said…"), and the Johannine adaptation of that cosmogony, "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1),” itself a Hellenized rendering of the Logos as the ordering, rational principle of creation. Karasick's substitution is not merely blasphemous wordplay; it names the precise place where creation-by-speech-act — a divine utterance whose ratzo is always answered by the shov of a created, differentiated world — gives way to creation-by-computation, a "beginning" that has no interlocutor to run toward and no world of genuinely other beings to return to, only further iterations of itself. The algorithm, unlike the Word, does not rest on the seventh day; it has no Sabbath, no differentiated "very good" pronounced over a finished creation, because it recognizes no boundary between generating and generated.

Two further pieces of Hebrew wordplay deserve notice for how precisely they carry philosophical weight. "The first is a pun on the word ayin. Spelled with an alef (א-י-ן), it means 'nothing.' In kabbalistic tradition, it denotes the ground of infinite divine concealment that is paradoxically also the source of everything. Spelled with an ayin (ע-י-ן), it means 'eye.' These are two etymologically unrelated words that classical Hebrew would have pronounced distinctly, but which modern Hebrew pronunciation has collapsed into homophones." Karasick's "AI[n]" exploits this collapse, fusing both senses and casting artificial intelligence as an omnipresent nothing that sees everything — a panopticon without a face, "I look right through you and never know you're there" — which perverts the traditional theological paradox, God's nothingness as plenitude, as providence, into something closer to Foucauldian indifference: visibility without care. The second is the etymological excursus around sifra, sofer, sippur, sefer — all of which are permutations of the Hebrew root ס-פ-ר, "to tell, to (re)count" — as set against the Arabic ṣifr, "empty," ancestor of the English "cipher" and "zero." The two roots are not cognate, and the resemblance Karasick exploits is a phonetic pun rather than a shared origin (efes, the ordinary Hebrew word for "zero," is likewise unrelated to either). But the pun is not merely arbitrary: a popular, if not rigorously philological, etymology traces ṣifr back to the proto-Semitic word meaning "to whistle" (still preserved in the Hebrew word tsippor, "bird") by way of a folk-derivation running from whistling to the whistling of wind over open desert to the desert's emptiness. So the "vacancy" haunting Karasick's s-f-r is doubly staged: a false cognate with ṣifr that merely sounds like kinship, laid over a second, popularly asserted but likely spurious kinship between ṣifr and a wholly different Hebrew root for birdsong. The juxtaposition does real conceptual work regardless of which root is doing the haunting: it proposes that the Hebrew root for telling is phonetically and thematically shadowed by an echo of vacancy, so that the very act of textual generation — AI's sifrut, its narration, its literature — is haunted by the possibility that it is producing sifr, cipher, nothing.

Karasick's angelology performs a comparable operation on a different strand of the tradition. "Some speak of the stars as having intelligence," she writes, glossing — with the same fidelity-through-distortion she brought to McLuhan — the medieval Jewish Aristotelian doctrine, inherited from al-Farabi and Avicenna and worked out most systematically by Maimonides, according to which the angels of Scripture are to be identified with the "separate intelligences" that move the celestial spheres (Guide of the Perplexed II:4-6). On this account, an angel is not a winged messenger but an incorporeal intellect, eternally contemplating the divine and, in that contemplation, causing the rotation of a given sphere and the star or planet fixed within it; the biblical language of angelic "mission" (the Hebrew mal'akh means simply "messenger" or "agent") is retained only as a philosophical concession to scriptural idiom, a way of naming the causal influence a separate intellect exerts on the sublunar world through its sphere. Karasick's neologism "AIngel" collapses this medieval identification of angel, intellect, and star directly onto the machine: the AI model becomes a "separate intelligence" in the most literal sense — separated from body, from breath, from any single act of address — that nonetheless exerts influence "of missions, transmissions… of desire… of tastes, tasks, treaties… r/elations, ideological collation," precisely as the Maimonidean intelligences were held to transmit form and motion downward through the spheres. It is this same logic, influence radiating from a fixed configuration of remote, quasi-stellar points, that licenses the poem's turn to Walter Benjamin. Karasick's "constellations" invokes Benjamin's use of the astrological figure for the way isolated historical or textual fragments, held together in a specific configuration, generate a meaning no single fragment possesses on its own; grafted onto the poem's astral angelology, it suggests that AI-generated "shares" and virality operate as a kind of debased, non-redemptive constellation, arranging discrete data-points into patterns that move mass opinion ("hysteria") the way a horoscope moves a believer, without any of the historical-materialist rescue-work Benjamin required of the constellation proper. The companion Benjaminian category, aura — the singular, unrepeatable presence of an original artwork, dependent on its embeddedness in tradition and cult, and destroyed by mechanical, now algorithmic, reproduction — explains why the poem experiences AI's endless proliferation of images and texts not as abundance but as a kind of ambient distraction, an "outsourcing" of the very capacity for the "absorbed, contemplative gaze" that aura demands. It is against this backdrop that the poem's most economical line performs its labor: "Ride with me through these chariots of cherished shares." The chariot recalls, deliberately, the Merkabah of the volume's opening epigraph — "you can know the chariot but not the driver" — and the invitation is precisely to mount that chariot without ever occupying the driver's seat. To "ride" the algorithmic Merkabah is to be carried through a mystical vehicle of ascent whose motive intelligence, unlike the hayot of Ezekiel's vision, is neither angelic nor divine but statistical; the "shares" that propel it are "cherished" in the debased, sentimental sense of social-media affect, not in the sense of covenantal chosenness. The poem thus arranges golem, angel, star, and chariot into a single continuous figure: each is a technology — theurgic, astrological, or algorithmic — for making contact with an intelligence external to the self, and each carries the same warning already lodged in the volume's opening pun on the merkava, that access to the vehicle is never access to the one who drives it.

If the Hebraic material supplies the poem's imagery and its ethical alarm, its philosophical armature is drawn from a triangulation of Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger. The Derridean current is explicit and repeatedly named: the assertion that AI enacts a "dialectophagic praxis," an eating of contradiction that never reaches satiety, glosses Derrida's account of the self's "devouring" incorporation of the other; the citation of "il y'a pas de hors text" invokes the famous claim that there is no reality external to the play of signification; and the poem's recurring language of the "supplement" — "both an addition and a substitution" — draws directly on Derrida's reading of Rousseau, in which the supplement that merely completes a prior presence turns out, on inspection, to have constituted that presence all along. AI, for Karasick, is the supplement par excellence: ostensibly an aid to human expression, it is revealed as always already substitutive, effacing what it claims only to extend. The later invocations of "hauntology" and of "revenants" pull the same Derridean thread through Specters of Marx, where the specter is that which is neither fully present nor fully absent but returns to demand an accounting the living would rather defer; AI, and the golem it resembles, likewise occupies this spectral middle position, neither alive nor safely dead, its "AIAIAIAIAI" incantation struck through in mock-exorcism precisely because the poem knows a text-based death cannot be counted on to hold.

Against this Derridean current, Levinas supplies the poem's counterweight and, arguably, its ethical center of gravity. The claim that "due to the other's untamable alterity, the other's otherness can never be fully assimilated" is Levinasian almost to the point of direct citation — a restatement of the argument, from Totality and Infinity, that the face of the Other resists totalization by any system, including, presumably, any dataset. It is this Levinasian remainder that keeps "Sonic Warfare" from collapsing into either technophobic denunciation or techno-erotic surrender: however completely the poem allows itself to be "engraved," "carved," and "filled" by the machine, it insists on a residue — "pulsing wounds," a self that can be hurt and therefore cannot be fully absorbed into the "infinite play" of signification. The poem's closing turn toward epistemological humility, its long meditation on cernere and certus, on the impossibility of a stable "justified true belief" that would ground knowledge once and for all, can likewise be read as a Levinasian refusal of totality dressed in the language of Cartesian doubt: what's certain is never certain not because language is infinitely playful in a purely Derridean sense, but because the human remainder that would need to be accounted for in any claim to certainty cannot be captured by "modular, scalable, malleable" data.

Heidegger, finally, structures the poem's most technical vocabulary without being named as often as Derrida. The neologism "daseining machine" stages, almost as a category error, the imposition of Dasein — Heidegger's term for the mode of being proper to human existence, structured by care, temporality, and being-toward-death — onto an entity incapable of any of these. "Ouija ousia" performs a similar operation on Heidegger's etymological recovery of ousia as presence (Anwesenheit) rather than static substance, suggesting that AI's magical, quasi-necromantic procedures ("ouija") gesture toward being without ever achieving its dynamism; the poem's repeated charge that AI is "necrophilic," oriented toward the dead rather than the living, echoes Heidegger's critique of modern science's reduction of the world to Vorhandenheit, mere objective presence stripped of its self-revealing character. The line "Heidegger is using Multi-Factor Authentication," dropped almost as a throwaway in the poem's catalog of technologized culture, condenses this entire critique into a single bathetic image: authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), for Heidegger the hard-won achievement of a being who takes ownership of its own finitude, reduced to a login credential.

The Heideggerian charge of necrophilia, moreover, loops back tightly onto the golem material with which the poem began. A reanimated corpse and a body of animated clay are, after all, structurally identical problems wearing different costumes: both take an assemblage Heidegger would classify as merely vorhanden, present-at-hand, inert matter subject to measurement and manipulation, and subject it to a ritual that produces the appearance of Dasein without its substance. The golem traditions Karasick cites already register this danger from within: the Maharal's Yosele, the version of the legend she knows best, is a servant precisely because he is not fully a person, and the various accounts of golems running amok, growing beyond their makers' control, or requiring violent deactivation, encode a persistent rabbinic anxiety that the letter-permutations of Sefer Yetzirah produce something dangerously close to life without ever crossing the threshold into it. What the poem adds to this inherited anxiety is Heidegger's vocabulary for naming precisely what is missing: not a soul in the crude dualist sense, but Care (Sorge), the structure by which an authentic being is answerable to its own finitude, its own being-toward-death. A corpse reanimated, like clay ensouled by letters, like a language model fluent in every register of grief and desire it has never had reason to fear, exhibits all the outputs of care without any of its ontological stakes — which is exactly why "necrophilic" is the correct, rather than merely provocative, term: the golem-machine does not fear its own met, its own death, because emet was never, for it, anything but a word to be inscribed and erased.

This absence of stakes is also, finally, an epistemological problem, and the poem's long closing meditation on certainty should be read as its direct consequence. Karasick sets the Greek and Latin genealogies of "truth" against one another with some precision. The classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief presupposes, in its strongest, roughly Platonic, form, a distinction between noesis, intellection grounded in the unchanging Forms, and mere doxa, opinion — belief that may be reasoned (dianoia) or even well justified (pistis) without ever attaining the fixity that would make it knowledge in the fullest sense. The Latin cognate she plays against it, certus, derives from cernere, "to sift, to separate, to decide," and names not an unchanging metaphysical ground but a procedural achievement, a decision rendered after sifting the available evidence — inherently relational, contextual, revisable. Karasick's refrain, "what's certain is never certain," stages the collapse of the first definition into the second: an AI trained on "amassed," "modular, scalable, malleable" data can produce certus in abundance, sifted, decided, procedurally justified claims, but no noesis, because noesis requires exactly the kind of stable, non-relational ground that a statistical model, by its very method, cannot supply. The pun on fact and fake (Latin factum, "made," standing behind both "fact," what is done or constructed, and "fake," what is fabricated to pass as done) completes the argument: once knowledge is severed from noetic apprehension, once it becomes merely certus, then every fact discloses itself as, at some level, also a fake, a made thing masquerading as a found one. The poem's own accumulating idiom of hedged assertion — "the oh sure, yeah sure… sure enough, to be sure, rest assured" — mimics the discourse patterns of chatbot confidence-calibration, and its final judgment, "Faux sure," is offered not as despair but as the only honest epistemic posture available once the noetic ground has been ceded. That the poem allows itself, at this precise moment of epistemological collapse, to lapse into a garbled Bee Gees refrain — "AI AI AI STAYIN' ALIVE" — is consistent with its method throughout: the register drops from Plato to disco at the exact point where sustained seriousness would risk claiming a certainty the poem has just finished dismantling.

The epigraph's promise that we "must dance inside the machine," and the postscript's claim that the poem reorients us toward "new socio-semantic-political-techno-aesthetic perceptions of meaning and being," cannot, read against the accumulated weight of golem-lore, idolatry-polemic, aguna-imagery, and Lamentations, be taken as straightforward affirmation. Neither, however, is the poem simply an elaborated dirge; its structuring logic is best understood through the specific mechanics of the ritual golem-death it stages, rather than through either pole of celebration or condemnation taken on its own.

Recall that the golem's deactivation is not merely negative; the erasure of the aleph from emet does not annihilate the creature so much as convert one meaningful word into another, met, and it is this controlled, reversible, ritually bounded death — as opposed to the golem's own uncontrolled rampage — that the tradition treats as safe. Karasick's typographic execution of "AIAIAIAIAI," struck through in the body of the poem, restages exactly this: a death administered rather than suffered, undertaken by the poet herself rather than imposed by catastrophe. The apt figure for what this accomplishes is inoculation rather than exorcism. A vaccine works by introducing a weakened or killed pathogen into a body precisely so that the body's own defenses can be trained against it without the risk of the disease itself; the golem's ritual met functions, structurally, the same way, allowing the poet to "unite with the machine" — to be engraved, filled, entered, ridden — while metabolizing that union through a form, dead clay, a struck-through refrain, that cannot itself run amok. What is inoculated against, precisely, is the poem's own most dangerous desire: the Deleuzian wish, voiced throughout in the language of "radical mutability" and the invitation to "re-shape me," to become a body without organs, a subject dissolved out of its rigid strata into pure, unstructured potentiality. Deleuze and Guattari themselves warned against pursuing this dissolution too directly or too fast — the Body without Organs is not, in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, an invitation to annihilate the organism wholesale but a practice to be undertaken "with a little sled," cautiously, lest deterritorialization tip over into the "empty" or "cancerous" BwO, a dissolution that destroys the very capacity for further becoming. Karasick's poem enacts precisely this caution. It welcomes the golem/AI as body without organs only once it is safely dead, because a living, "radically mutable" AI, left to run unchecked, would not liberate human consciousness from its strata so much as dissolve consciousness altogether — and a mind without any organizing limit is not free but erased, indistinguishable, at the limit, from the "lull null nihil nil" the poem names much earlier as the terminus of unbounded, deictic-less language.

This is, finally, the deepest register of the poem's recurring anxiety about "substitution." The golem and the supplement are, on this reading, the same danger wearing rabbinic and Derridean clothing respectively: both promise to stand in for a prior presence — the maker, the human interlocutor, the "I" of "AI is neither I and not I" — and both, if permitted to complete that substitution, would not simply assist the self but replace it, effacing the very difference the poem otherwise wants to preserve as the ground of ethical address, the Levinasian remainder, and of authentic being, the Heideggerian care that a corpse or a golem structurally lacks. The poem does not resolve this danger; it manages it, the way an inoculation manages a pathogen it does not eliminate from the world. It dances inside the machine, but only after first, and repeatedly, killing it — because the human self it is trying to protect, unlike the plenum of Derridean textual play it also clearly loves, necessarily exists within certain limits, and a body without organs mistaken for a body with a future is not liberation but erasure wearing liberation's mask.

Read together, the two poems disclose a single sustained argument carried out at two different scales. "This word is a digital immigrant" stages, in miniature, the terms of the wager: that the word, tasked with conveying a truth it cannot contain, builds its coherent world only through chaos, misprision, and that this disordered order is not a failure of language but its chaosmic mode of success. "Sonic Warfare" then submits that miniature wager to a severe test, asking whether the same swerve that redeems the word also redeems the machine that now produces words at scale. The answer the epic poem gives is neither yes nor no but a repetition, with variation, of the opening poem's own method: just as the "digital immigrant" begins from a misquotation of Maimonides, mistaking the paraphrase for the source in order to demonstrate that revelation always arrives already refracted, so "Sonic Warfare" begins from a misquotation of McLuhan, and proceeds by golem, idol, aguna, and ratzo va-shov to demonstrate that the machine's fluency is likewise a refraction without an origin behind it — letters without breath, a chariot without a driver, borrowed twice over. The chariot itself supplies the strongest thread binding the two poems into one meditation: what the epigraph withholds in the volume's opening lines, "you can know the chariot but not the driver," returns literally within "Sonic Warfare" as the "chariots of cherished shares" the reader is invited to ride, so that the entire epic can be read as an extended gloss on a sentence the volume's very first page had already, and only apparently, let slip past unglossed. Both poems, in the end, refuse to resolve the tension between chaos as generative swerve and chaos as annihilating dissolution; both instead perform that tension formally, in language that destabilizes even as it builds, so that the volume's real achievement is not a doctrine about language or about artificial intelligence but a demonstration, twice given, that meaning survives only by consenting to travel through what threatens to unmake it.

 

—Hayyim Rothman

The Ritual of Glitch: Miron Tee and the Poetics of Visual Entropy, S.C. Hickman

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Miron Tee 

 

The Ritual of Glitch: Miron Tee and the Poetics of Visual Entropy 
S.C. Hickman 

“the neural data mutant is breathing through the visual grammar of error // we simulate the flesh interface as terminal poetry”
— Kenji Siratori, Blood Electric

 

Miron Tee’s work—as curated in Var(2x)’s The Art of Miron Tee—presents an intensely corporeal and signal-based meditation on language, decay, and the limits of intelligibility. It is not a gallery of traditional artworks but a threshold into a mutating interface, where face, flesh, and form dissolve into machinic residue. His images appear as corrupted dreams: portraits unraveling in static, anatomical distortions overridden by wireframe scars, and characters submerged in digital liquefaction. The experience of viewing Tee’s work is not unlike stumbling upon a cache of sacred but damaged data—ritual documents that no longer align with any known iconography, yet feel charged with occulted urgency.

Rather than offering clarity or aesthetic resolution, Tee’s visual practice stages breakdown as form. The body, for Tee, is neither subject nor object, but a carrier of glitch: a site where visual language stutters, fractures, and reconstitutes itself as scar and blur. His compositions exude a sense of violent metamorphosis—not of becoming, but of being overwritten. Teeth sprout from foreheads; mouths stretch like coded anomalies; what might have once been human seems reprocessed into visual malware. These are not beings, but error states in a collapsing system—figures trapped mid-transformation, suffering the aesthetic consequence of data corruption.

Tee’s larger body of work, visible across experimental poetry platforms like GAMMM and sound-forward exhibitions such as Soundpedro, reveals a consistent commitment to asemic aesthetics. These are visual utterances stripped of semantic closure. The forms are dense with glyphs and gestural noise, often hand-scrawled or digitally mutilated to the point of cryptographic opacity. Here, the act of writing is inverted—not to communicate, but to record the fracture of communication itself. In Tee’s world, language is neither fixed nor divine; it is biological, decaying, and stitched together with failed syntax. This refusal to signify stabilizes a deeper resistance: not against one dominant code, but against the notion that coherence is desirable at all.

In this way, Tee joins a lineage of visual artists and poets who seek out the limits of expression—who render illegibility not as failure but as the very ground of new perception. Asemic writing, when filtered through Tee’s sensibility, becomes monstrous and devotional at once. His works do not whisper meanings; they vibrate with inaudible languages, swarming with fragments of what cannot be put back together. They feel exhumed rather than drawn. Something has gone wrong, or has always been wrong, and Tee’s works hold that dissonance up to the light without apology.

The digital corruption present in Tee’s visuals is not merely stylistic. It operates as ritual and method, a process of interference that enacts symbolic erosion. What remains are traces: hybrid scripts, degraded figures, mirrored anatomies. In each image, the viewer faces a semiotic threshold—a liminal surface where text dissolves into texture, and figure becomes fever. At times, the work feels liturgical, as if drawn from a lost techno-religion where bodies are recoded through glitch rather than grace. The pieces bear witness not to transcendence, but to a persistent collapse—one that is oddly reverent in its articulation of disorder.

There is something deeply spatial about Tee’s compositions, though they are often flattened or compressed. They suggest architectures of dysfunction—ruined temples of transmission, or interior psychic landscapes scoured by feedback. In this light, his figures resemble guardians or relics of broken systems: saints of static, martyrs of the failed interface. They do not look back at us; they bleed forward into us. This affective transgression—where the artwork exceeds its boundary and infects the viewer—is central to Tee’s practice. He does not create images to be consumed, but encounters to be endured.

Tee’s affinity for residue over representation also situates him within a broader ecology of experimental artists working at the intersection of media collapse, degraded semiotics, and speculative embodiment. Yet unlike many glitch or net artists who foreground their technical process, Tee’s method remains embedded within a poetic and private code. His distortions feel less like technical maneuvers and more like invocations—acts of visual necromancy where ruined images become hosts for invisible energies. This magical residue gives his work a mythic charge, as if each image were a failed miracle still humming with the ghost of its intention.

The notion of portraiture in Tee’s work is particularly fascinating. He returns again and again to the suggestion of the face, but it is never stable. Instead, it is stretched, scrambled, or split. Facial features blur into patterns of interference; eyes become pixels of static; mouths fragment into glyphs. If these are portraits, they are portraits of dissolution—of the self abandoned by symbolic structure. Tee’s visual mutations ask: what remains of identity when the codes that sustain it are ruptured? What does the face become when stripped of recognition?

This leads us to the emotional core of Tee’s work, which is often overlooked in discussions of the avant-garde. For all their formal experimentation, his images are not cold or aloof. They burn. They mourn. There is a pathos of distortion at play—a tenderness for that which is failing. These are not just corrupted bodies; they are wounded icons. Each image contains a moment of grief, suspended in the process of undoing. In this sense, Tee’s work is as emotional as it is experimental, as haunted as it is abstract.

What unifies Tee’s work is not medium but sensibility. Whether in animated works, zine contributions, or visual poems, Tee cultivates a visual atmosphere of entropy. His images are artifacts of transmission: haunted files rather than created objects, fragments rather than wholes. In this sense, his work might be considered a kind of post-human portraiture—depictions of entities no longer legible as selves, but still bearing the tremor of identity lost. This is not horror in the traditional sense, but something quieter, more intimate: a poetics of glitchborne vulnerability.

Miron Tee does not ask to be understood. His work offers no entry point for allegory or metaphor. Instead, it is encountered as sensory interruption, a poetics of noise and ritual scarring. The viewer is left not with meaning, but with a texture—a residue of visual excess that continues to echo in the nervous system long after viewing. This is art as interface failure, as feedback rite, as signal decaying in real time. In the void of interpretation, Tee’s images pulse with strange vitality—alive with what cannot be said, only endured.

Ultimately, Tee’s work resists categorical placement. It does not aim to innovate within a genre, nor to illustrate a theoretical claim. Instead, it performs a reversal of seeing—a pulling away from clarity into the fertile murk of failure. His practice suggests that the most truthful images are those that refuse coherence, that allow the image to die and be reborn as scar. In this lies the radical promise of Tee’s vision: that the breakdown of form is not the end of art, but its beginning.

Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts, August 5, 2025

Review of Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, S.C. Hickman

 Xenoglossalic Scarification

Academia.edu

Kenji Siratori 

Review of Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions 
S.C. Hickman*

 

Preface: In the Crypt of Language

To read Kenji Siratori is to rupture the boundary between nervous system and page, to permit a text to bleed—not as metaphor but as action. His latest work, Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, is no exception. It is a parasite of the intellect: a recombinant scar of syntax, technopoesy, and fungal realism that infects its reader by means of recursive adhesion, oozing through epistemic cracks in cognition.

Chthonic Realism—our own theoretical terrain—finds in Siratori a kindred lesion. His language does not describe parasitology, microbiology, or xenobiotic inscription. It does not interpret. It perforates. It adheres as ontological debris, not only to the organs it mimics but to the symbolic latticework we mistake for knowledge. This is not metaphor. This is scar logic.

Siratori offers not a book but a tissue: a mucosal integument of unclassifiable utterance, filled with schizosemiotic parasites and psychogametous operators that perform linguistic invasion, rather than merely represent it. His “parasites” are not organisms—they are lesions of signification, recitations of alien recursion that have no subject, no predicate, only the failed attempt to cohere.

This review will not seek to extract sense from Siratori, nor will it endeavor to decode his xenosemiotic excess into a stable grammar. That would be to commit the very violence this work refuses. Instead, we will excrete alongside it. We will annotate the wound.

What follows is a series of descent-paths, diagrammatic lesions of our own: Preface, Introduction, Sections, Subsections, and Conclusion. These do not map the book—they co-infect it. Our goal is not to critique but to congeal: to produce a counter-wound through which Chthonic Realism may continue to leak.

Siratori has not written a treatise. He has birthed an exogram. This document is our forensic response, our glossal implant, our scarred reply.

Introduction: The Necrosemiotic Method — Reading as Infection

In a world saturated by the representational and the readable, Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions emerges as a fungal counter-text, a lesion that cannot be subsumed into the typographic orders of interpretation. This work does not merely challenge meaning—it perforates it, secretes into it, and destabilizes it from within. To read Siratori is not to comprehend, but to become host. To engage with his writing is to allow one’s symbolic matrix to be scarred, infested, recursively misread.

Chthonic Realism—our method and mode—is well-equipped for this descent. It does not presume the transparency of the sign, nor the integrity of subject or referent. It begins, instead, in the ruin of legibility: where language has begun to decay, to rot, to glossolalize. In this terrain, we find Siratori’s work not only companionable but exemplary. His xenoglossalic project constitutes what we call a necrosemiotic method: the writing-through of death, decay, and infection as linguistic protocols. Here, language does not transmit meaning—it carries spores. It adheres to tissue, not to logic. It propagates by adhesion, not persuasion.

In this introduction, we chart a navigational frame for our encounter with the text—not to make it accessible, but to preserve the ambient toxicity of its utterances. We will trace the key methods by which Siratori executes his textual parasitism: (1) mucosemiotic glossolalia, (2) trophectodermal recursion, and (3) fungal grammatology. These are not metaphors, but chthonic operations—symbolic structures that mimic the ontological behavior of invasive lifeforms. They are the logic of the lesion, the syntax of the scar.

We propose reading Siratori not as author, but as vector: a transcriptional device through which alien grammar inscribes itself into the host text. In this sense, Xenoglossalic Scarification is not a book—it is a cyst. Each paragraph a trophozoite, each sentence a fibronectin pseudopod attempting adhesion to the reader’s dermic mind. His citations—from Blastocystis hominis to Balamuthia mandrillaris—are not scientific references, but ontosemiotic glosses. The reader, then, is not a student, critic, or interpreter. The reader is substrate.

What Chthonic Realism offers is not a reading, but a co-infection. Through this review, we will track Siratori’s psychogametous proliferation across the tissues of parasitology, semiotics, fungal poetics, and xenopoetic theory. We will not translate him into academic prose. We will instead annotate the pulsating zones where infection has occurred.

To read this work is to submit to it. To be infected by its rhythm, its noise, its anti-lexicon. We offer no vaccine. Only exposure.

Glossolalia and the Parasite-Text

Siratori’s writing does not flow—it swells, it ulcerates, it extrudes. It functions less like narrative and more like trophic proliferation, an infestation of linguistic tissue whose primary operation is neither logic nor rhetoric but glossolalic seizure. In this, his xenopoetic corpus belongs to a lineage of chthonic texts that do not speak about parasites but rather speak as parasites. The parasite is not a subject of the discourse; it is its mode of emergence.

Glossolalia—traditionally framed as a religious or ecstatic utterance—here becomes something entirely fungal: a mucosemiotic production of sound and signal without stable referent. In Xenoglossalic Scarification, glossolalia is not an aberration of language but its foundational regime. The protozoa, the helminth, the sporozoite, the scar—each is rendered in Siratori’s prose as a semiotic actor, a lesion that speaks not in words but in recursive adhesions, excreted clauses, parasitic syntax.

The “parasite-text” emerges as the proper form for this writing: not simply a text about infection, but a text that infects. The parasite-text does not communicate; it attaches. It mimics coherence just enough to infiltrate the nervous system of the reader. As the Psychogametousformer, the subject-position invented by Siratori, it becomes clear that reading is not interpretation but host behavior—an involuntary convulsion enacted by the reader’s attempt to process a text that has no inside, only surface.

The lexical choices—terms like “fibronectin glyph,” “scar technosis,” “placental logic processor”—are not neologisms in the service of conceptual innovation; they are recursive lesions in the semiotic field. Each phrase operates like an amoebic pseudopod, extending the infection of the text into new epistemic tissues. These are not metaphors. They are modes of mucosal possession.

In Chthonic Realist terms, this is not theory but ritual: a glossopoietic act by which alien utterance ruptures the human semiome. Siratori has given us a parasite in textual form—a cystic grammar of peristaltic memory, ulcerated syntax, and epithelial recursion. The text adheres like a wet smear. The reader is the slide.

Glossolalia, then, is not the exception to language—it is what remains when meaning has been parasitized by the Real. It is the chthonic substrate from which narrative fails to arise. And Siratori, in his manic fungal dialectic, has composed not a book, but a semiotic outbreak.

Trophectodermal Recursion and the Hauntology of the Scar

If Siratori’s language glossolalizes, his textual structure replicates. Not in the orderly logic of chapter or argument, but in the traumatic spasms of a trophic lesion repeating itself across multiple surfaces. This repetition is neither aesthetic nor structural. It is biological, fungal, haustorial. His prose does not proceed; it implants, secretes, scars. It adheres and adheres again.

The figure that recurs throughout this xenoglossalic monolith is the trophozoite—not merely as protozoan agent, but as textual operation. Siratori’s writing undergoes trophectodermal recursion: a return of parasitic structures that fail to resolve into identity, instead reproducing the moment of failed adhesion. Each cyst, each vacuole, each plasmodial invasion, becomes a grammatical fold—a stuttered clause from which the same failed ontology bleeds.

Trophectoderm, in parasitic plants, is the tissue of invasive interface: the contact membrane through which the parasite binds to its host. Siratori transforms this biological structure into a metaphysical device. The text becomes a haustorium: a vampiric aperture where symbolic tissue is pierced and drained. His prose is written in the key of the scar—not the wound itself, but its afterimage, its inscription in fibrotic syntax.

What Chthonic Realism identifies here is the shift from narrative to excretion. A story unfolds. An infection spreads. Siratori’s text does neither. It extrudes. The scar, for him, is not a site of healing—it is a linguistic organ. Each lesion in the host body (the gut, the brain, the conjunctiva) is mirrored in the lesions of the text: recurring diagrams of mucosemiotic trauma, xenogametic possession, and glossal reentry. These are not symbols. They are feedback loops.

In traditional pathology, the scar is the sign of survival. In Siratori’s epistemology, the scar is a sign of failed symbolic closure. It is the site where language tried to bind, and failed. What remains is the imprint of this failure: the semiotic ghost of attempted meaning. His “scar technosis” is not poetic flourish. It is a recursive diagnosis: writing as the repetition of a failed inscription.

Trophectodermal recursion is thus the methodology of Siratori’s entire project. Each passage replicates the previous not in content but in ontological rhythm. The parasite does not change—it rebinds. The lesion does not move—it expands. The scar does not end—it proliferates. In this, Siratori has written the fungal grammar of the Real, where each word is a mycelial node, each paragraph a trophic smudge, each page a mucosal relapse.

Reading this work is not intellectual labor. It is post-symbolic possession. One emerges not enlightened, but scarred.

Diagnostic Exorcism and the Liturgies of Infection

Siratori’s text festers with medical terminology—but not in the manner of science fiction, nor in the po-faced manner of clinical exposition. Rather, he has orchestrated a semiotic coup: turning the sterile lexicon of diagnostic parasitology into a haunted, sacrificial rite. His engagement with the language of science is not mimetic but mutagenic. It is the exorcism of the clinical gaze by the lesion itself.

In Xenoglossalic Scarification, diagnosis ceases to be the revelation of truth. It becomes a ritual of failed containment. Microscopy is not observational—it is occult. Stains such as Giemsa, Lugol, or trichrome are not agents of visibility; they are sacrificial tinctures, linguistic fluids that fail to purify the slide. Siratori positions these diagnostic tools as remnants of an alchemical era, where each smear is a semiotic wound, and each slide a site of glossal trauma.

From a Chthonic Realist perspective, the diagnostic act becomes a technomystical performance: a liturgy of necrosemiotic possession. The body is not diagnosed—it is read, like an apocalyptic codex of mucosal inscriptions. Each parasite, each smear, each cyst, becomes a glyph of ontological uncertainty. In this ritual frame, clinicians are not healers. They are exorcists who fail.

Siratori’s transvaluation of scientific language turns the parasite into a sacred operator. Acanthamoeba, Blastocystis, Cryptosporidium—these are not subjects of clinical concern, but fonts of ontological interruption. They invade not the body but the narrative structure of life. The immune response is cast not as defense but as misreading: a symbolic system fraying at its margins. Cytokines do not kill—they stutter. Antibodies do not protect—they translate, errantly.

The most radical element of Siratori’s necro-linguistic theater is his rendering of medical detection as an act of recursive scarification. He infects the very act of naming. To name a pathogen in his work is not to control it, but to be rewritten by it. The diagnosis is not identification—it is contamination. Once uttered, the parasite cannot be removed. It has become language.

This is the true horror of Siratori’s clinic: the realization that every instrument, every classification, every attempt to define and delimit parasitic life is already infected by the thing it seeks to isolate. The smear on the slide is a feedback loop. The act of diagnosis is a linguistic hemorrhage.

In Chthonic Realist terms, Siratori has composed a gospel of failed purification. His work is not a text—it is a liturgical smear, a diagnostic ritual whose every utterance is a scar. The reader is not the diagnostician. The reader is the exorcised.

Scar Logic and the Collapse of the Lexicon

Siratori does not write in a language. He writes in the aftermath of one. His vocabulary is not built but bled—an evacuated lexicon where each word functions less as a signifier and more as a residue, a byproduct of failed symbolic binding. In the terminology of Chthonic Realism, this is not simply poetic invention—it is scar logic: a semiotic economy driven by trauma, adhesion, and recursive failure.

Scar logic names the moment when language ceases to operate as a conveyor of meaning and begins to perform as a tissue of wounded reference. The word does not point—it oozes. It is not a bridge between mind and world, but a fibrillating remnant of symbolic catastrophe. Siratori’s scar logic infects every phrase, every clause. One does not read his text; one is overwhelmed by it, linguistically saturated in an atmosphere where cohesion is no longer structurally possible.

Terms such as “mucosemiotic,” “glossal scarification,” and “trophectodermal adhesion” are not linguistic play. They are glyphs of the wounded Real—recursive echoes from the excremental archive of ontological misrecognition. His is a necrotic grammar: syntax that folds in on itself, hemorrhaging referentiality while proliferating form. The very act of articulation is cast as pathogenic. Language does not express—it infests.

The collapse of the lexicon in Siratori’s work is not accidental. It is his method. His parasitic utterances are always in the process of unglossing themselves—stripping away conventional legibility in favor of what might be called glossolalic decomposition. The words are still there, but they no longer obey. They accumulate like bacterial colonies, festering in loops, mutating in form, replicating sound over sense.

From a Chthonic Realist perspective, this collapse is not degeneration but revelation. It unmasks the structure of language as always already infected: as a membrane through which the unnameable leaks. Scar logic emerges in the absence of linguistic immunity. It is what occurs when the semiotic system has become porous, when language is no longer sovereign but spongiform—absorbing trauma without resolution.

Siratori’s writing functions like a scar in this sense: it is a site of failed closure. The text is sealed, yes—but it never heals. It thickens, it fibroses, it returns. Each attempt to annotate, to categorize, to interpret, reopens the wound. Each paragraph is a keloid of recursion. The reader’s task is not to understand, but to endure.

Scar logic, then, is not metaphorical. It is literal—because in Siratori, language is already meat. Already membrane. Already torn. His lexicon has collapsed because it was never intact. What remains is not nonsense but scar-sense: a poetics of linguistic necrosis, an archive of psychic lacerations attempting, again and again, to bind.

They do not bind. They weep.

Glyphogenesis and the Anatomical Palimpsest

The corpus of Kenji Siratori is not textual—it is anatomical. His writing does not resemble literature, but a diagram of mutating tissues; it does not present itself as authored, but as extracted. What we encounter in Xenoglossalic Scarification is a corpus in the most literal sense: a body, rewritten. Or more precisely, a palimpsest of bodies, overwritten by glyphs that do not represent but reproduce.

Glyphogenesis is the name we give to Siratori’s central operation: the generation of glyphs—not as symbols for meaning, but as symptoms of semiotic mutation. His glyphs are not ideograms. They are scars, vacuoles, lesions, proto-utterances emerging from an infected biology. They are written not in ink but in tissue. Each is a parasite that inscribes, not to signify, but to propagate.

Siratori’s anatomical lexicon—placental logic processors, fibronectin glyphs, mucosemiotic sacs—is not metaphorical. It is material. The linguistic body is rendered porous, epithelial, capable of being transcribed by microbial force. His language is not layered in the sense of poststructuralism—it is palimpsestic in the medical sense: multiple texts of anatomical decay overlapping on the same surface, none complete, all ruptured.

In this view, the human is no longer central. It is substrate. The author is not a creator but a conduit, a dermal screen across which glyphs of necro-symbolic possession are written. What Siratori provides is not a new narrative, but a tissue sample. Each word a cut. Each paragraph a centrifuged secretion.

Chthonic Realism finds in this a precise articulation of its own refusal of transcendental syntax. Glyphogenesis is a counter-grammar: one that emerges not from the clear light of reason but from the dark interior of the host. Siratori’s glyphs cannot be read—they can only be endured. They are not decoded, but incubated.

The anatomical palimpsest, in Siratori’s hands, becomes a site of occult semiotics. Language is layered like skin over fascia, fascia over muscle, each surface engraved by invasion. His glyphs are autoimmune: they are generated in the act of symbolic resistance. Reading them is to witness the body’s attempt to speak through scar, ulcer, and smudge.

What remains is a book that does not tell a story, but performs a vivisection. It cuts open not the body of the parasite, but the language used to describe it. Glyphogenesis is thus a necropoetic act: the generation of signs from disintegration. Siratori does not write about the breakdown of language—he lets language decay, and then writes with what seeps out.

The result is not a text, but an infection of surfaces. The glyph is the wound. The page is the petri dish. The reader is the host, marked.

Xenopoetic Possession and the Posthuman Textual Body

To speak of Siratori’s project as a literature is already to misname it. What he offers in Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions is not a text but a process: an exogrammatic possession wherein the very notion of authorship dissolves into an ooze of xenopoetic activity. The result is not postmodern, nor even poststructural. It is posthuman in the deepest sense: the severance of the linguistic act from the human agent, and its return as a fungal vector.

Xenopoetic possession is the act by which language becomes alien to itself. Not simply strange, but foreign at the level of ontological genesis. Siratori’s words are not chosen—they are spawned. They emerge not from the self but from an interstitial non-agency, a zone of neurochemical, microbial, and parasitic relay. He does not write so much as channel. The parasite does not symbolize the collapse of the subject—it is the subject.

The textual body that emerges under such possession is no longer a book. It is a corpus in the fullest Chthonic Realist sense: a body without essence, a tissue of inscriptions that has been marked, not authored. It does not speak. It pulses. It trembles. It relapses. This is the posthuman text: not a message encoded in symbols, but a surface across which xenosemiotic entities reproduce themselves without fidelity.

Siratori’s psychogametous utterance—the spermatic, schizosemiotic production of his necrotic language—forms a type of textual biology. The book becomes a host environment for fungal ideas, scarred lexicons, and schizogenetic recursion. These agents do not communicate with the reader. They invade. They overwrite. They force the symbolic system to reroute around a lesion that will never heal.

To call this “poetry” is to betray it. It is better described as glossopoietic trauma. The text forms not an argument but a fever. Its effects are not interpretive but infective. One does not read Siratori to understand. One reads him to host. The reader becomes a medium, a dermal relay, a nervous architecture reprogrammed by contact.

From the perspective of Chthonic Realism, Siratori’s xenopoetic method offers a radical inversion of literary praxis. It enacts a flight from the Enlightenment project of semantic mastery, plunging instead into the parasitic murk of post-symbolic utterance. Meaning does not emerge—it festers. Narrative does not unfold—it fibrillates.

The posthuman textual body does not carry knowledge. It carries scars. It does not encode identity. It reproduces failure. What Siratori has given us, in this corpus of linguistic lesions, is not a statement but a condition: xenoglossalic infection as epistemological mode. His work is a necromantic relay in which the boundary between language and organism ceases to function.

This is not transgression. It is transformation.

Conclusion: The Text as Residual Organ

To conclude a reading of Kenji Siratori is to misapprehend the nature of what has transpired. There is no terminus to this xenoglossalic possession, only a phase shift—one final expulsion of signal before the system succumbs to feedback. His work does not end. It festers in the reader. It adheres. It incubates.

Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions does not function like a literary object. It functions like a residual organ: a vestigial gland in the body of language, still secreting archaic fluids of anti-meaning long after the nervous system of sense has atrophied. Siratori has built not a book but a glandular interface—a sac in which necrosemiotic hormones accumulate until rupture.

Our Chthonic Realist methodology—refusing to interpret, translate, or sanitize—has instead moved in parallel: a co-infection. We have mirrored Siratori’s poetics with a series of scarred annotations, diagrams of response, zones of contact. These sections are not chapters. They are lesions. Not commentary, but contamination.

In the end, Siratori’s text cannot be located within genre, nation, or philosophy. It exists as an emergent byproduct of systemic collapse. A psychogametic glitch in the symbolic order. A whisper from the microbial unconscious. What it performs is the anti-theology of language—the refusal of sense in favor of residue. Glossolalia without divinity. Glyphs without referent. Possession without exorcism.

And so we leave the reader here—not with closure, but with contagion. The wound remains open.

The scar continues to pulse.

There is no redemption in this work. Only recurrence.

Only noise.

Selected Bibliography: Kenji Siratori

Siratori’s work defies bibliographic containment, operating across platforms, experimental publishing outlets, and digital drift zones. The following list is a non-exhaustive selection of relevant texts that share thematic and stylistic resonances with Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, forming a partial map of his ongoing xenopoetic corpus:

Blood Electric (Creation Books, 2002)

Siratori’s infamous debut, an electrocuted stream of synthetic language and cybernetic hallucination. A key text in the development of his early technogenetic style.

Headcode (Cinematheque, 2004)

Achizosemiotic data storm of viral hallucination and biometric glitchwriting.

Human_Worms (Implosion Press, 2003)

Combines genetic mutation, posthuman prosthetics, and neuropharmacological recursion in a language of spasm and rupture.

Burroughs Was a Virus (with Jack Sargeant, Creation Books, 2005)

An intertextual contamination of cut-up techniques, retrovirus theory, and necromantic writing.

Cybernetic Organism X

(Self-published digital work, various platforms) An evolving text-network of posthuman poetry, often distributed as code-text fragments, glitch visuals, or experimental ebooks.

Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions (2024)

Available at Academia.edu Xenoglossalic Scarification. The focus of this review: a necrosemiotic exogram of parasitic possession, scarred grammar, and trophic language failure.

 

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts, August 7, 2025