34.2 | Review: Omnicide

By Vincenzo di Mino

J. B. Mohaghegh’s Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Deliriums is an anthology of lyrical and narrative productions of Middle Eastern origin, giving expression to the different manias that lodge in the subjective psyche. The set of these obsessions, for the author, tend to define a desire that is both destructive and self-destructive, which is directed towards the social environment as much as towards the subject himself. The purpose of the book, in fact, is the recovery of this negative and nihilistic matter as a founding element of alternative desires, a means to imagine other worlds. The originality of Mohaghegh’s work is precisely the construction of this dark catalogue of voices and gestures that describe nihilism as an antagonistic force, as a force that, tending towards a Lost Cause, can overwhelm the misery of present existence.