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Chorost - Aleph Project - The Lethal Text
Chorost - Aleph Project - The Lethal Text
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The lethal text
Writing under
erasure
Mesopotamian
myth
The Gilgamesh
legend
The namshub of
Enki
The Tower of Babel
story
The song of the
Sirens
Plato's metaphor of
the cave
"man's insanity is
heaven's sense"
The Ultimate
Melody
Macroscope
The Origin of
Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind
Snow Crash
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philosophos
The lethal text
Quite simply, the lethal text is a text that, when read, renders the reader
incapable of reading. It destroys the reader's mind. It induces a crippling
insanity. Only those who have read a lethal text know what it says...but they are
in no position to share their knowledge.
What does the lethal text say? By definition, no one can know and remain
capable of telling it. But perhaps it is a logical paradox. The human mind has a
kind of protective shield against paradoxes: it gets confused and gives up,
instead of attempting to resolve them. They can stop "running the program" set
up by a paradox. But the lethal text somehow penetrates this shield, presenting a
paradox the mind cannot stop trying to resolve.
Which is why the lethal text is (probably) not possible: the mind is not a
computer. The mind can deflect paradox by ceasing to think about it.
Derrida has probably come closer than anyone else to articulating a lethal text.
His texts use language to describe language's limitations. A paradox! But
Derrida cannot truly complete the paradox; he can only point to it in a
metaphorical way. For example, he borrows Heidegger's technique of writing
under erasure. But his texts can at best destroy themselves, whereas the lethal
text destroys the reader.
Are readers' minds truly destroyed? Or are they elevated to a higher plane, like
the escapees of Plato's cave, so that man's insanity is heaven's sense?
Lethal texts appear in a number of sciencefiction novels. In Piers Anthony's
Macroscope (1968), an alien message is picked up which destroys the mind of
anyone intelligent enough to understand it. In Neal Stephenson's more recent
Snow Crash (1994), the lethal text is transmitted via a computer virus, and is
most threatening to hackers, whose neural pathways are most vulnerable to it.
Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991) uses almost exactly the same plot device. It is also
present in Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Ultimate Melody (1956) and The
Mysterious Card. It appears in a somewhat different form in the Star Trek
episode Is There No Truth in Beauty? (1968).
The lethal text appears, of course, in the Sirens' song of the Odyssey. It also
plays a role in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Bible, God's face is treated as if it
was a lethal text (Exodus 19:21 & 33:20.)
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