This essay uses a historical and dialectical critique of the ontological opposition between Humanity and Nature developed by Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and Accumulation of Capital (2015) to examine “abstract horror” in Latin American new weird fiction.1 This paper honors but goes beyond the world-ecological emphasis on the Cartesian division between corporeal substance and thinking substance, by paying attention to cultural works that produce different ways of imagining the Nature/Humanity division.The first section provides a theoretical framework that examines the role of “real abstractions” and fiction writing in establishing and sustaining the ontological division between Nature and Humanity. It argues that commodity fetishism holds the key for understanding the split between a Nature as a noumenal world-in-itself and a Humanity as the phenomenal world-for-us. The second and third sections examine two novels that are part of a recent trend of weird fictionin Latin America in which “abstract horror” manifests as a blend of literary fiction and philosophical speculation that introduces new ontological and aesthetic divisions between nature and humanity.

These two novels are Mugre Rosa (2020) by Fernanda Trías and Guitarra Negra (2019) by Ramiro Sanchiz, which are great examples of the recent revival of speculative fiction in Hispanic literature. On one hand, Mugre rosa (2020) by Fernanda Trías, dwells on the affect of horror at how both capitalism and capitalogenic climate change transform everything into an insubstantial matter, a “pink scum” that is the byproduct of commodity fetishism. On the other hand, the theory-fiction of Guitarra negra (2019) by Ramiro Sanchiz, introduces a new division between a humanized nature domesticated by capitalism and a nature in-itself, an insubstantial void outside humanity that ends up being identical to capitalism itself. By creating a character who practices theoretical-fiction that explicitly addresses ontological problems, Guitarra negraallows us to see that the fiction about the nature of capitalism is the same as the one capitalism believes about itself. I claim that these novels do not produce a vision of nature exploited by capitalism in terms of an external substantial and separate matter, but one of an insubstantial, and formless, matter that ultimately ends up becoming capitalism itself. An analysis of these texts’ approach to capitalism’s relation to nature tells us something about how capitalism thinks about itself in the current ecological crisis associated with what Moore calls the “end of cheap nature.”

Importantly, my reading of “weird” theory-fiction ends up transforming the world-ecological view of Cartesian dualism as the philosophical template behind the commodification of nature. Abstract horror’s nihilistic pessimism obliges us to rethink the philosophical template of capitalist ecology as a dialectic of process and performance in which fictional cultural objects play a central role. The philosophical platform of capitalism is no longer the one mobilized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with its early modern dualisms of matter and form or extended and thinking substance. In the present haunted by mass extinction and the end of cheap nature, the ideological platform of capitalism is an ontologizing of the death drive that naturalizes capitalism itself.

A Critique of the Ontological Division between Nature and Society

Moore’s is a synthetic project that ties together the historical/colonial origins of capitalism in the sixteenth century and the ideological/ontological division between humanity and nature as an intrinsic part of the value-creating process and of capital accumulation. Moore’s world-ecology is also an attempt to supersede “Green Arithmetic,” which Moore defines as “the idea that our histories may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature.”2 The dualism of humanity and society is “part of the problem” and presupposes two pure abstractions, which are “Society without nature,” and “Nature without humans.”3 The ontological division between Nature/Society taken for granted in the Capitalocene was crucial for the rise of capitalism for many reasons. First, it is central to capitalism’s attempt to conceive nature as something external, manipulable, and calculable. Second, it is deeply associated with colonialism because it is inseparable from the distinction between humans that are part of nature and those who are part of civilization. Third, it parallels the global division between unpaid and paid labor, since it allows capitalism to treat the web of life as a free gift, ready to be plundered and appropriated without paying for it. As a result, the ontological division between humanity and nature (not the division between the ontological and the ontic!) is the crucial philosophical question inseparable from the capitalogenic material conditions of the ecological crisis today.4 In Moore’s words, “the birth of Nature, which implied and necessitated the birth of Society, both dripping with blood and dirt, is the necessary ontological counterpoint to the separation of the producers from the means of production.”5In Moore’s account, the philosophical template that served as the ideological justification of this division was Cartesian dualism, which introduced an exclusionary division between material substance and thinking substance that subordinates the former to the latter.

The world-ecology critique of the division of nature and humanity is tied to the notion of real abstraction developed by Alfred Sohn-Rethel.6 Sohn-Rethel argues that the key to speculative-conceptual abstraction is the real, that is, materially, spatially, and historically situated practices of commodity exchange. Material exchange as practiced within society assumes that exchange value is separate and that use value can be measured and is homogenous.7 Moore’s conceptualization of the Nature/Humanity division is based in Sohn-Rethel’s account of the human/nature split. For Sohn-Rethel, the idea that there is such thing out there called “Nature” completely external to humanity is produced by commodity fetishism. Commodity exchange “creates the division of society and nature which emerges with commodity production and outdates the anthropomorphic blending characteristic of the communal forms of society preceding commodity production.”8 In sum, the split between humanity and nature derives from commodity fetishism itself: the belief in a division between a false, changing, transient world-for us and a true, permanently present world of true essences of a world-in-itself or without-us is the byproduct of commodity exchange where mutable and changing things are compared to a third fixed and immutable measure that is assumed remain identical to itself.

While Moore mobilizes a notion of abstraction as separation because he is interested in the history of appropriation of nature, Sohn-Rethel also directs our attention to abstraction as equalization to explain the genesis of a permanent and ideal world entirely different from nature: “A coin, therefore , is a thing which conforms to the postulates of the exchange abstraction and is supposed, among other things, to consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature.”9 Sohn-Rethel criticizes the fetishist independence of the intellect of the Kantian subject by offering a historical materialist reading of the categories of pure understanding. Although he does not declare this in an explicit way, it is possible to infer that the sphere of the Kantian noumenal, which is the inaccessiblesubstantial Thing-in-itself as completely separate from any sensorial phenomenal attributes, alsoemerges out of the material practice of exchange. It emerges as expelled from the realm of the human into an outside, a transcendent realm. Nature becomes an abstract amorphous changing thing without properties and money an immutable substance that creates itself. The idea of an inaccessible transcendent substance beyond the sensible as an ontological presupposition is an important component of the weird fiction that I will examine in this article. By highlighting the centrality of commodity exchange in the genesis of real abstractions, I extend Moore’s critique of Cartesian ontology to the fiction of a noumenal substance independent of the phenomenal sphere in weird fiction and abstract horror.10

I think that it is valuable to pay attention to new emerging ideological, ontological and aesthetic formations that are related to the crisis of capitalism. If ontology derives from capitalism but there is no ontological essence of capitalism itself, we can make more room for other ontologies, ideologies, or fictional systems capable of accounting for the nature-humanity separation.One way to track these emergent formations is by seeing that Moore’s Cartesian dualism has taken different forms historically. There are different historical instantiations of dualisms that are not exactly the same as the dualism strictly associated to the historical figure of “Rene Descartes,” which consists of presupposing the existence of two separate and discrete entities, one material and the other mental. What I have in mind is a non-linear yet historical sequence that goes from the real abstractions of scholastic metaphysical instrumentalism, through Kantian-Hegelian transcendental extractivism, to the “abstract horror” of weird fiction and speculative philosophy.11 For instance, there is an instrumentalist scholasticism, in which the dualism between matter and form is put at the service of justifying the conquest and colonization of the new world, dividing between an active and determining form/purpose and a passive and indeterminate matter/means, while identifying the common good and civilization with the first and the indigenous people who provided labor with the second.12 Another example of these dualisms is the transcendental extractivism described by Marcus Driscoll, according to which, a transcendental and superior European interiority (or World Spirit) maps a non-European exteriority (nature) to justify the transformation of Japan and China into peripheries of US and British capitalism under an emerging formation of white supremacy, a phenomenon Driscoll calls Climate Caucasianism.13

The last piece of the puzzle of these preliminary sketches of a history of the roles that dualisms of Nature and Humanity play in capitalist expansion is weird abstract horror as a literary practice which is intertwined with the philosophical school called speculative realism. Weird fiction and speculative realism have a very close mutually supportive relationship that shares the centrality of speculation, understood as the act of stipulating a reality independent of experience in an attempt to escape the prison-house of langue. The return of speculation cannot be separated from the incapacity of poststructuralism and culturalism in response to the anxieties of capitalogenic climate change and the financial collapse of 2008. Before explaining how weird fiction can contribute to a world-ecological critique of ontology, let us say a few words about speculative realism. The speculative realist movement joins diverse thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Iain Hamilton who are united by the common goal to attack what Meillassoux calls “correlationism,” which “consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”14 Although speculative realism looks for a reality independent of human structures in an attempt to transcend anthropocentric humanism, Nick Land, who was also a precursor of the speculative realist movement and leader of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, ends up identifying the noumenal reality independent of humanity with capitalism itself, as will become evident in the final section of this article.15

Katherina Kolozova provides us with interesting clues about the dualisms behind speculative philosophy in general when she identifies the self-valorizing movement of capital MCM' with speculative philosophy itself, which takes as given the division between matter and mind: “Capitalist materialism is about an absolute mastery of the mind over the material, it presupposes the hierarchy between matter and mind where the latter is superior to the former.”16 Capitalism-as-philosophy consists of a “speculative postulation” that imposes itself upon “unruly reality”17 that pretends toreplace material, sensuous and practical life with abstractions, one of them being a naturalized version of nature: “The ‘out there’ that is presumably material is always already ‘nature.’”18 This nature “out there” that is devalued in advance and sacrificed in the name of meaning and the “real needs” of the self-generating power of value. If Sohn-Rethel emphasizes the process of homogenization and Moore stresses the moment of separation in the historical genesis of capitalism’s abstractions, Kolozova alerts us to how abstractions replace the material real with value: “The materialism of contemporary capitalist society is deprived of a sense of realness, since the real is replaced by operations of abstraction which is made of the meanings that we have assigned to the real and materiality.”19 This process of derealization and the replacement of the material by abstractions will, sooner or later, hit the wall of the limit of natural resources, as Jason Moore argues in his theorization of the “tendency of the ecological surplus to fall.”20 In a moment, we’ll have the opportunity to observe this process of replacement in texts that blur the boundaries between philosophy and literature, in our examples of weird fiction.

Having established that ontology’s divisions derive from exchange operations and that these operations introduce divisions at the service of the primitive accumulation of nature, I can say that it is beneficial to supplement world-ecology with the study of literary fiction. I call these fictions “fictional abstractions” to designate two overlapping dimensions: first, the fictions’ association with capitalist abstractions (ontological division of Nature and Humanity, matter and form, the noumenal and the phenomenal), and second, the specific expressions of these fictions within an assembled corpus of images and texts (abstract horror and weird fiction). In the sense of homogenizing, separating, subordinating, and replacing, all abstraction operations are also exercises in fictionalization, in the way that they involve distortions and illusions, such as commodity fetishism and the market or capital. Fetishizing consists of acting according to a fiction or belief, such as the existence of an inherent, immutable, eternal, and permanent property such as value, the market, or capital. The point of the critique of real abstractions is to show that they are not actual entities but fictions, even though they are fictions inscribed in the fabric of reality and rule reality. In this sense, fiction and abstraction are not two separate things. It is not that abstraction produces fiction or fiction produces abstraction. Both are producers and products of each other and part of larger metabolic processes. In sum, paraphrasing Moore, ontological fictions are a way of organizing nature.21 The thesis of this paper is that the theoretical fiction I call weird nature can provide a new perspective on contemporary Latin American capitalist ecology. This theoretical fiction foregrounds the operations of abstraction such as separation, subordination, and homogenizationreformulating the ontological dualism of nature and humanity and shows us how contemporary Latin American capitalist ecology depends on the replacement of the web of life with a full-blown naturalization of capital’s impersonal compulsion to self-reproduce.

Abstraction and Horror and Amorphous Cheap Nature in Mugre rosa

In order to explore the notion of weird fiction in literature, I will analyze two novels,Guitarra negra(2019) by Ramiro Sanchiz andMugre rosa (2020)by Fernanda Trías. These two works are part of a larger contemporary literary movement, weird fiction, that mixes horror and science fiction. This movement draws on the weird fiction genre fostered by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales.The two novels analyzed in this essay are part of the recent weird literature trend in Latin America, a phenomena presented in a special issue of the journalOrillas that explores this literary movement’s theoretical and philosophical genealogy, co-edited by Gabriele Bizarri and Ramiro Sanchiz himself.22 There, Bizarri, Sanchiz, and the rest of the contributors argue that what separates the weird from the gothic or the fantastic is the preeminence ofweirding, a process by means of which a disproportionately large non-human agency takes over the human, generating a peculiar atmosphere associated with an encounter with the Outside.23 This form of fictionemphasizes atmosphere over plot and always generates a sense of impending doom that produces an estrangement from reality accompanied by a sort of cognitive dissonance caused by the intervention of outside, unknown forces that disrupt any fixed natural order.24 This notion of the weird as a fear of the unknown is linked to Lovecraft’s emphasis on “cosmic horror” as the affect triggered by a radical Outside that is elusive, absurd, and indifferent to human needs. Weird fiction is a search for a “real externality” that is not merely “empirical” but “transcendentally”25 exterior to humanity very much like an abstract and separated “world-without-humans.” This externality is not a Cartesian substance in the strict sense, but closer to the above mentioned inaccessiblesubstantial Thing-in-itself as completely separate from any sensorial phenomenal attributes, a real abstraction that hasemerged out of the material practice of exchange.

My Sohn-Rethel/Moore informed reading of the role of nature in weird fiction positions weird fiction at the end of a long history of extractive and colonial capitalist ecology that not only presupposes but produces nature as amorphous and separate nature. Although these twenty-first century novels do not directly thematize the centrality of the Latin American colonial experience, far from breaking with the colonial past, they stage an intensification of the extractive paradigm that has its origins in the 16th century. As I mentioned before, the ontological and epistemological project of Latin American coloniality consisted in transforming both nature and natives into a devalorized passive matter, a mere means to the end of the accumulation of precious metals.26 The centrality of the concept of raw material, which has its roots in this colonial ontological abstraction, becomes an aesthetic object of fascination and estrangement typical of the weird.

In the novels that I will analyze, the aesthetic fascination with the ontological status of materiality points in the direction of a deepening of extractive coloniality. However, in them, the imperial presupposition that nature and natives are a passive matter that must be subordinated to an active form is transformed into something different. Weird fiction shows how capitalism transforms humans and non-humans into an amorphous matter, a Thing that produces fascination and horror. Furthermore, the colonization of amorphous matter by the form of value culminates in the replacement of nature by dead value. Ultimately, the coloniality of value produces the extinction of life. The general tone of these novels is pessimistic as they describe a process that is inherently nihilistic and consists of a process of abstraction that is inseparable from the capitalist deterritorialization that enmeshes Latin America within anonymous global relations. However, by showing how contemporary capitalism and commodity fetishism evacuates any commitment to bodily matter and labor, the novels I will analyze put the aesthetic force of weird alienation at the service of showing that the true horror of the present is capitalism’s suicidal ecology.

The weird atmosphere triggered by the intrusion of a radical Outside is part of the narrative background of Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa (Pink scum), a novel that won numerous awards such as the Bartolomé Hidalgo and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prizes. I argue that Mugre rosa depicts the effects of capitalogenic climate change and capitalist production in terms of a violent process of reduction of everything to a threatening, amorphous, and insubstantial pink slime that swallows both human and non-human beings. The plot unfolds in a city like Montevideo during a plague or pandemic quite similar to the one we are currently experiencing. Although its origin appears to be almost unknown, the reader can easily identify it with an anthropogenic ecological disaster associated with climate change wherein non-human elements are not only affected, they are also the main protagonists. An unbearable humidity appears in the form of a fog produced by a pestilential “red wind,” which affects human beings by drying out their skin and peeling it off, leading to death. These red winds come from “outside,” affecting not only humans but also other non-human actants. Fish and birds disappear, and the human population exudes anger and fear, as bewilderment and uncertainty reigns. An authoritarian state protects the rich, who emigrate to the countryside, producing a sort of ecological apartheid. The neoliberal capitalist economy falls apart, and hunger spreads. The only functional institution that remains is a sausage factory that is an extractive machine that processes chicken and carcasses of cattle. These dead meats are processed with ammonia and other chemicals and are sold as pâtés in tubes and as sausages and hams packaged in square wrappers called “mugre rosa” (pink scum).

In the following excerpt the narrator describes the process of production of this cheap foodstuff highlighting both the horrific fascination with and the revulsion at the production process:

A veces me llevaba a recorrer la fábrica y hasta hoy recuerdo el olor rancio a gelatina de carne y a tierra enmohecida. Le llamaban mugre rosa y olía a sangre coagulada y al líquido que Delfa usaba para lavar el baño. También Delfa olía así, sus dedos, que restregaban el mono de don Ornar con jabón antibacterial, quitaban los cordones de los zapatos de tela para lavarlos con Jane y los colgaban en la terraza, donde el sol los terminaría de blanquear.

[Sometimes he gave me a tour of the factory and to this day I remember the dank smell of meat gelatin and moldy soil. They called it pink scum and it smelled like coagulated blood and like the product that Delfa used to clean the restroom. Delfa also smelled like this, her fingers, that rubbed anti-bacterial soap all over don Omar’s monkey, that removed the shoelaces from canvas shoes to wash them with Jane soap and then hung them on the balcony, where the sun would finish whitening them]27

This cheap food is horrific and expresses the weirdness, the alienation, and separation of the production process.28 The smell of the gelatin mixes with that of the soil, coagulated blood, and a cleaning product. The smell is the smell of a composite of artifact and nature and also the smell of an amorphous body, a body literally desubstantiated and sanitized. The product of this value-creating process is just pure materiality deprived of any quality and reducible to an exchange value abstraction. The horrific and weird component of this quite banal scene consists in a shift of perspectives that highlights the process of production of a commodity that involves using antibacterial cleaning products to separate life from its own conditions of production. The transference of the homogeneous, ideal, metaphysical character of exchange value (Sohn-Rethel) — the very act of treating nature as if it was deprived of active qualities — transforms bodies into an amorphous material endowed with new qualities that produce horror and revulsion.

The narrator continues: “Claro que la mugre rosa tenía un nombre técnico. Todo lo inconveniente tiene un nombre técnico, insípido, incoloro e inodoro. Pero yo prefería decirle así.” [Of course, the pink scum had a technical name. Every inconvenient thing has a name that is technical, insipid, colorless and odorless. But I preferred to call it that way.]29 The technical name of the “pink scum” has the opposite characteristics of the product. It is a name without odor, without any of the sensuous, undesirable features of the thing in question. Naming has the same function as the cleaning products, which is to separate the object/commodity from all its sensuous features. This naming parallels the process of abstraction/extraction in taking advantage of dead waste itself:

Simplemente otra forma de aprovechamiento. Una máquina que calentaba las carcasas de los animales a altísima temperatura y las centrifugaba hasta extraer los restos de carne magra de las partes más sucias del animal. No había por qué desperdiciar nada.

[Just another way of profiting from it. A machine that heated the animals’ carcasses at a very high temperature and that centrifuged them to extract from then the remaining lean meat from the dirtiest parts of the animal. There was no reason to waste anything]30

The process of production is described as a process of abstraction/extraction using extreme temperatures to maximize profit (aprovechamiento) from the wasteful and dirtiest parts of the dead animals. The last stage of the process of progressive separation of matter from its living agency is the act of disinfecting meat. The novel depicts this stage with gory details:

Fuera de cámara, en los confines de las bateas de acero, la carne centrifugada, mezcla de desechos, tripa y todo lo que había ido quedando de los cortes finos, pasaría a la unidad de desinfección. El hombre de corbata señaló las mangueras que rociarían la carne con amoníaco. Dijo: seguridad. Dijo: bioingeniería. Dijo: superbacteria. El amoníaco eliminaba las bacterias y ayudaba a aglutinar lo que, por impulso del desecho, se resistía a aglutinarse.

[Off-camera, in the depths of the steel cauldrons, the centrifuged meat, a mix of refuse, tripe, and all that was left from the finer cuts, would go on to the disinfection unit. The man in a tie pointed to the hoses that would spray the meat with ammonia. He said: safety. He said: bioengineering. He said: superbacteria. Ammonia eliminated bacteria and helped agglutinate what, due to an impulse typical of that which has been discarded, refused to agglutinate] 31

Nothing goes to waste and everything is disinfected, and yet disinfection is only just a stage in the process of production of cheap meat as abstract commodity. The sensation of weirdness here comes from the impulse of the dead viscera in resisting to agglutinate, the persistence of an undead life that opposes value production. The horror is double: the “impulse” of dead animals haunts value and value is the horror that haunts the material process of production itself.32 However, the true horror of turning useless waste into exchange value is not evident until abstraction reaches the sphere of circulation.

At one point, the factory is depicted as the only productive or life-giving agency left sustaining human life with its slimy, amorphous, shapeless product:

La gente hacía cola en los supermercados y en las estaciones de servicio. No quedaba agua, no quedaban pastillas purificaderas; las góndolas de los supermercados desabastecidas, excepto por los vasitos de Carnemás apilados en las gigantescas heladeras. Ahora verían lo que se siente. El olor eternamente impregnado en la nariz, la textura arenosa erosionando la lengua. Carnemás era el producto estrella de la nueva procesadora, y los de adentro lo evitaban siempre que fuera posible. El alimento soñado: veinte gramos de proteína por porción, en un minúsculo vasito de plástico. La nueva fábrica se abría como una gran boca para escupir esa mugre rosa, los vasitos resbalaban por la lengua transportadora y caían, hermosos y bien diseñados, sobre nuestra falda. Todos odiábamos la nueva fábrica, pero dependíamos de ella, y por eso le debíamos agradecimiento.

[People lined up in supermarkets and gas stations. There was no water left, there were no purifying tablets left; supermarket shelves were empty, except for the cups of Carnemás [Moremeat] piled up in gigantic refrigerators. Now they would find out how it feels. The odor eternally impregnated in the nose, the sandy texture eroding the tongue, Carnemás was the star product of the new factory, and those who were inside avoided it as much as possible. This was a dream food: twenty grams of protein in each portion, in a minuscule plastic cup. The new factory opened like a large mouth to spit out this pink grime; the cups slid from the vehicle tongue and fell, beautiful and well designed, into our lap. We all hated the new factory but we depended on it and, for that reason, we ought be grateful for it]33

While the previous excerpts describe the process of production, this one describes the process of circulation in the marketplace. Let us recall that for Sohn-Rethel real abstraction did not consist so much in the division of the world into two substances (as in Moore) but in the transfer of the sphere of exchange to nature, and that this transfer produced the separation between a substantial world and an insubstantial one. The real horror of the novel appears in the sphere of circulation where value remains the same and nature appears as a passive and amorphous abstraction. The cheap nature produced by capital here is not the Cartesian extended corporeal substance that is the object of capitalist plunder in Moore. It is an insubstantial material that contrasts with the immutable and eternal essential reality of value personified in a factory that gives away cheap nature. “Carnemás” is a cheap commodity designed for the surplus populations created by a climate apartheid that isolates macronutrients such as protein in the same way that the state separates those who can live from those who must die. The factory produces this pinkish bodily fluid in the same way that the red winds produce skinned human bodies. The boundaries between the human and the non-human are blown-away transforming everybody into “pink scum.”

Both the skinless victims of the capitalogenic red winds and the “pink scum” are nothing but the result of an extractive economy that commodifies animal flesh by stripping it of its qualities and turning it into a formless, slimy, and shapeless abstract horror. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator states: “¿Y quién te dice que los desechos no seamos nosotros?”34 [What if we are the ones who are the garbage?] Both the outside non-human forces, such as the red winds, and the human institutions such as the state, the free market, and the factory produce the same effect, a pinkish, amorphous thing. The process of cheapening the commodity and the process of peeling skin off is the consequence of the same process of abstraction that treats material things as if they could be separated from sensuous qualities and transformed into amorphous raw material. In the novel, both humans and non-humans are subjected to a process that appears to come from outside like the red winds themselves.

The process of “weirding” nature is inseparable from the uncovering of the process of production of cheapness itself and the fantasies, fictions, and abstractions that sustain it. The specific real abstraction produced by Mugre Rosais that of an insubstantial amorphous material. In the novel, capitalism transforms both humans and non-humans into a pink scum, which is abstract because it consists of treating both humans and non-humans as ifthey were separate from their qualities, agencies, and specific sensual characteristics and reduced to one single homogenous quality which is pink meat itself. The point is not that fiction is valuable because it shows us the pernicious effects of capitalism or the meat industry, but because it helps us imagine the process of abstraction itself, whether we understand it as speculative philosophy (Kolozova) or dualistic ontology (Moore). Fiction produces horror through a parallactic change of perspectives by means of which a sensory quality like pink ends up permeating the whole in a process of continuous expansion that is strictly abstract: all qualities are exchanged for a single quality, pink, transforming the web of life into an insubstantial amorphous matter. In sum, the horror of an amorphous insubstantial matter that results from the division between an active form of value and a passive material as the guiding fiction of capital is nothing but the horror of commodity fetishism itself. In the next section, we will see how Guitarra Negra goes a step further by transforming amorphous matter that is simultaneously an external source and a result of capitalism into the capitalist drive itself.

Abstract Horror and Noumenal Capitalism in Guitarra negra

Ramiro Sanchiz’s Guitarra negrais part of a larger series of texts he calls the “Proyecto Stahl” (Stahl project), a mega-opus that consists of a series of narrations that explore the infinite variations of multiple possible universes. He defines it as a work-in-progress that brings together short stories, novels, essays, and “theory-fiction” in one macro-novel whose protagonist is Federico Stahl. Federico Stahl is a “non-character,” an empty referent of a rigid designator that repeats itself throughout multiple variations across different possible narrative universes. Guitarra negrais a book that does many different things at the same time. As the title indicates, it is a commentary on the title of an LP recorded by Alfredo Zitarrosa and released in 1977. It is also a dense work of theoretical fiction attributed to one Federico Stahl who, in the alternative universe of the novel, shares many traits with the British philosopher Nick Land. In the alternative universe of Guitarra negra,Federico Stahl, a sort of Nick Land of the periphery, has gone missing and his students try to unsuccessfully reconstruct his scattered notes, among which we find a commentary on Zitarrosa’s album.

Federico Stahl’s notes also include a series of commentaries on Uruguayan environment and culture, where he proposes a philosophical system that is similar to Nick Land’s.35 Nick Land is a British philosopher, the so-called father of accelerationism and leader of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s. Land used Lovecraftian mythology to launch an accelerationist critique of humanist anthropocentrism by mobilizing the concepts of “hyperstition” and “abstract horror” to refer to mythologies or concepts that have the performative capacity to become more real than reality.Land is also famous for the way his anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, hyper-neoliberal, and reactionary ideas are implicated behind the neo-reactionary movement called “Dark Enlightenment.”36 Land is also a pioneer among a group of contemporary philosophers like Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker, who are associated with the “speculative turn” in contemporary continental philosophy, a turn which increasingly engages with horror fiction as a way to critique correlationism and anthropocentrism.37 Defenders and sympathizers of Land argue that he is the proponent of a compelling materialist critique of anthropocentrism called anti-humanism. In this section, I will show how, by creating a Nick Land of the periphery, Guitarra negraidentifies Lovecraft’s noumenal reality with capitalism itself, allowing us to see how this ontological fiction about capitalism isalso the fiction that capitalism creates about itself.

Among the many subtexts of Guitarra negra, we find Eugene Thacker’s reading of the history of philosophy as horror fiction and Nick Land’s theorization of abstract horror. In his work, Thacker identifies the notion of a noumenal amorphous and threatening exteriority as the object that is common to both Lovecraft’s weird fiction and the world-without-humans envisioned by cosmic pessimism.38 While Thacker’s version of Lovecraft’s noumenal abstraction produces horror because it is unknown, Land directly equates the noumenal with matter and death: “One must first unleash the noumenon from its determination as problematic object in order to glimpse that between matter and death there is both a certain identity and an intricate relation.”39 This noumenal death appears in Land as Schopenhauer’s “will to nothing” and can only be grasped as “abstract horror” and pure fiction.In Land, death is the embodiment of time and pure entropy, that which cannot be resisted.40 For Land, fiction and abstraction are two sides of the same coin, they are ways of dealing with what is not (yet) but is always-already-extinct, the unknown and unknowable thing in itself. Since fiction is what isnot, and the unknown Outside can only be experienced in a negative way, fiction is the perfect vehicle for abstract horror. A Sohn-Rethel/Moore reading of the ontological division of Humanity and Nature helps us see how Land ontologizes the human-nature division elevating fiction to an ontological status and thus hypostasizes the Outside, turning it into a transcendent principle.In my understanding, a Sohn-Rethel/Moore interpretation of the ontological division between the noumenal world-without-humans and the phenomenal must question such ontologization as another form of metaphysical extractivism that treats nature as if it were deprived of sensuous qualities, agency, or actual movement. An examination ofGuitarra negrawill help me unfold the new forms of this split once we bring the sphere of extractive abstraction into the picture.

The following paragraphs are part of Stahl’s reflections on the natural environment of Uruguay, in the frame of speculative realism:

Federico Stahl parte de una distinción elemental entre el mundo-para-nosotros (es decir, el ordenado en nuestro conocimiento y replegado sobre una taxonomía basada en dicotomías del tipo biología/geología, vivo/inanimado, orgánico/mineral, natural/artificial, humano/animal) y un concebible mundo-sin-nosotros, al que es tentador aproximar a la “cosa-en-sí” kantiana, aunque el realismo (o “materialismo fisicalista”) de Federico Stahl pretende esquivar lo que Quentin Meillassoux llamó “el círculo de la correlación.”

[Federico Stahl begins with an elemental distinction between the world-for-us (that is, the world that is ordered in our knowledge and supported by a taxonomy based on dichotomies such as biology/geology, alive/inanimate, organic/mineral, natural/artificial, human/animal) and a conceivable world-without-us, that one could be tempted to liken to the Kantian “thing-in-itself,” even though Federico Stahl’s realism (or “physicalist materialism”) seeks to skirt what Quentin Meillassoux referred to as “the circle of correlation.”]41

Stahl’s philosophy, which he names “physicalist materialism” falls squarely within speculative realism, that is, as a critique of correlation that emphasizes the centrality of the Kantian noumenal sphere. Stahl’s point of departure, the noumenal-phenomenal division and all the ontological binaries that come with it (biology/geology, alive/inanimate, organic/mineral, natural/artificial, human/animal)is, as I showed previously, a real abstraction introduced by the transference of the sphere of exchange to conceptual thinking. Although Stahl seems to follow the speculative realist program that identifies the noumenal realm of a world without humans with capitalism, he also opens a space for a sort of social constructionism that negotiates the boundaries between what is given and what is constructed:

Cuando se plantea a la naturaleza en el contexto de un orden del mundo, a partir de la diferencia, en el vasto escenario del mundo-para-nosotros, entre aquello que ha sido construidoo manufacturadoen el proceso de la civilización, y aquello que es dado,que no ha sido hechoy es por tanto una parte de esa “naturaleza” que simplemente está allí como la contraparte otra del nosotros humano, se sigue que esa “naturaleza” es de algún modo falsa o espuria, en tanto existe como una figura más en un orden del mundo, una construcción cultural, simbólica. En términos de dominios, Federico Stahl habla del macrodominio, ohm (“orden humano del mundo”), que contiene a su vez los dominios C y n (“civilización” y “naturaleza”, respectivamente), dejando a la N mayúscula (la “verdadera naturaleza,” en algunos textos) como el Afuera radical o un macrodominio aparte de (y ajeno a) ohm. Entonces, n minúscula equivale a “la naturaleza como nos la representamos en oposición a lo humano, pero dentrodel orden humano del mundo.”

[When nature is posited in the context of an order the world, taking as a starting point the difference, on the vast stage of the world-for-us, between that which has been constructed or manufactured in the process of civilization, and that which is given, which has not been made and is therefore a part of this “nature” that is simply there as the “other” counterpart of the human us, it happens that this “nature” is somehow false or spurious, as it exists as one more figure in an order of the world, as a cultural and symbolic construction. To put it in terms of domains, Federico Stahl refers to the macro-domain, the how (“human order of the world”—ohm in the original), which contains both the C and n domains (“civilization” and “nature” respectively), leaving the capital N (the “true nature,” in some texts) as the radical Outside or a macro-domain separate from (and foreign to) the how. The small n is therefore equivalent to “nature as we represent it in opposition to that which is human, but withinthe human order of the world.”]42

Here, the text simultaneously blurs and complicates the ontological division between Humanity and Nature. It blurs it because the distinction between the human and the non-human becomes internal to the human. And it complicates it because for Stahl (and Land) the true division is between nature as a noumenal radical Outside and the rest of human beings. The division between what is given and what is constructed is not the last word when it comes to Stahl’s speculative turn, however. On one hand, the opposition between humans and nature is internal to humanity. On the other hand, this new ontological split is turned into a split between a humanized or civilized nature and the radical Outside that is completely beyond humanity.

In this way, Stahl posits a difference between nature as givenand nature as constructed or manufactured, but this difference is still a difference internal to humanity. True Nature as a radical Outside is no longer the passive material that needs to be molded by humans. Iberian metaphysical instrumentalism cannot account for this division and neither can Moore’s substantial division between extended and thinking substance. This Nature with capital letters or radical Outside is not only opposed to humanity but is beyond humanity and accessible only negatively through fiction. It is “weird nature,” completely indifferent to human projects: Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” that both Land and Stahl identify with capitalism itself. The new real abstraction being developed here is an ontological division between natureand Nature, a division that makes the opposition between what is given and what is constructed completely irrelevant:

La naturaleza según National Geographicno es la verdadera naturaleza”, precisa Federico Stahl, “para empezar porque está allí ocupando un lugar en un sistema que le es ajeno; es la naturaleza del antropocentrismo, aquello que resulta de la abyección de todo aquello que entendemos como humano y nuestro,pero, a su vez, un abyecto con el que debemos sostener una relación”. A partir de la idea de “relación”, entonces, esa “abyección” primaria debe pensarse como una circulación: por un lado, la naturaleza es todo aquello que expulsamos en tanto inhumano (es decir el ámbito de la geología y el ámbito de la biología: la vida bacterial, arquea y eucariota una vez llevada a cabo la sustracción del nosotros),pero, por otro, es también aquello que hacemos ingresara tal dominio bajo la categoría de la materia prima. Esa naturaleza, según Federico Stahl, es “producida” entonces por ese doble proceso: “entendemos lo natural según qué provecho podemos sacarle en términos reales/económicos y en términos simbólicos.

[“Nature according to National Geographicisn’t the real nature,” adds Federico Stahl, “first, because it is there, in a place in a system that is foreign to it; it is the nature posited by anthropocentrism, the result of the abjection of all that we understand as human and as ours, which is also an “abject” with which we must maintain a relation.” It is from the idea of “relation,” therefore, that this primary “abjection” must be thought of as a circulation: on the one hand, nature is all that which we expel as it is in-human (that is, the realm of geology and that of biology: bacterial, archaea y eukaryote life once the subtraction of the we/us has been completed), but, on the other hand, it is also that which we bring into this domain within the category of raw material. This nature is therefore, for Federico Stahl, “produced” by this dual process: “we understand that which is natural in function of how we can profit from it in real/economical terms and in symbolic terms.”]43

In this paragraph we can see how, for Stahl, anthropocentric and humanized nature (National Geographic’s nature) is the non-human abstract residue that results from the gradual subsumption of the real nature, the radical Outside, into the economic socio-symbolic world-for-us. It is nothing but the picture-for-us that remains once we subtract ourselves from the picture. On the other hand, humans seem to not be part of either the radical Outside or the false “National Geographic” view of nature, a move that reinstates the ontological division between Humanity and Nature. In other words, despite the attempts to elude the Kantian division between the world-in-itself and the world-for-us, the division between Nature and “National Geographic nature” reproduces the antinomy between the physicality of nature (pure matter following physical laws) and the subjective appearance of humanity (pure form imposed on humanity). Like in Land, nature here is devalorized, pure meat, mere living entities destined to abstract extinction. Moreover, the nature in the human domain is described as being produced, which is an important detail, because it basically replicates the logic of the positing presuppositions of capital. Capital acts as if it produced reality. The value form acts as if it created material nature itself. Value is retroactively actualized and performatively enacted through a complete devalorization of its own material conditions.

What we have seen so far is how Stahl’s speculative realism introduces a form of abstraction that brings about a shift within the Capitalocene: attention shifts from the process of the transformation of nature into a raw material to the ontological division between Nature as radical Outside and nature as extractive material. I’ve shown how the difference between Nature and Humanity is a real abstraction that introduces the violent division bewteen a noumenal world in itself (nature without humans) and a world for us (humanized nature). Here we can see how the difference between a radical Outside and human and non-human beings is also the result of a transference of the practice of exchange into conceptual thought. However, we can also see in Stahl how it is capitalism that engenders the fiction of an abstract outside that culminates in the ontologization and naturalization of an absolute difference between capitalism as ultimate reality and the rest of human and non-human beings. Fiction is the means by which the ultimate fiction of capital is naturalized, its dream of replacing all reality.

Although both weird fiction and world-ecology place a great deal of importance on the asymmetrical primacy of the non-human over the human, speculative fiction ontologizes this relation while world-ecology historicizes it. In the most rigid forms of “abstract horror” there is no place for the complex metabolism of humanity and nature: instead of flows of humanity in nature and flows of nature in humanity we have a split between the old transcendent noumenal beyond and human experience. In sum, the more capitalism pretends to produce nature by extracting raw material, the more it engenders a residual specter of a completely external and desubstantialized Outside, pure nothing and pure death.

If humans are not part of weird nature as radical Outside, what is the ontological status of this weird nature other than its physicality? In Guitarra negrawe read:

El petróleo (la negrura), después de todo, es quemado (el blanqueo) para avanzar en la conversión de la biósfera en tecnósfera, del mismo modo que la religión basal y las potencias de lo ctónico han de asociarse a un “retorno de la naturaleza”. Pero este retorno es también una de las consecuencias del colapso, porque una vez obliterado el orden humano del mundo lo que “regresa” es la N mayúscula, la verdadera naturaleza. Nada de lo humano sobrevive al futuro, sea porque nos precipitamos a lo alien y lo weird, sea porque el capitalismo terminó de hacernos pedazos, sea porque la tensión biósfera tecnósfera activa mecanismos de catástrofe ambiental en frenesí.

[Petroleum (blackness) is, after all, burned (whitening) to make progress in converting the biosphere into technosphere, just as basal religion and the powers of the chtonic shall come to be associated with a “return of nature.” But this return is also one of the consequences of the collapse, because once the human order of the world has been obliterated, what “returns” is the capital N, true nature. None of that which is human will survive the future, either because we are hurtling toward that which is alien and that which is weird, or because capitalism has finally fully torn us to pieces, or because the tension between biosphere and technosphere activates frenzied mechanisms of environmental catastrophe.]44

Although the division between nature and humanity persists, the dualism of Outside and inside is no longer Cartesian (i.e., the Outside cannot be an object of plunder) but more complex. First, Stahl sustains that the destruction associated to burning crude oil is inseparable from the transformation of biosphere into Technosphere. Second, he associates this transformation with the “return of Nature.” The words in italics indicate that the “return of Nature” is a consequenceof human extinction brought about by capitalism and the ecological collapse. Stahl is borrowing heavily from Nick Land who thinks that capitalist deterritorialization and compulsive repetition (death drive) are also two sides of the same process.45 In other words, like Land, Stahl is associating directly the return of Nature, the world-without-us, with human extinction caused by capitalism. The real abstraction that absolutely externalizes nature into Nature is inseparable from the elevation of capitalism itself to the status of the noumenal “Thing-in itself.”46 Once capitalism is ontologized, nothing is outside it, and Nature is nothing but the process of producing and consuming itself like the Ouroboros symbol of infinity or a Borromean knot. It is the pure return of death, which is incompatible with human beings. Here weird Nature (to keep with Stahl’s usage) takes the form of pure, empty form of death and destruction that excludes humanity in a misanthropic subtraction precisely becausethe pure immanence of capitalism is all there is. Weird Nature is the pure undead physicality of capitalism’s self-consumption, the other side of capitalism in a Moebius strip. In Stahl, there is nothing outside this loop of capitalism positing its own presuppositions, nothing but an empty form of physicality.

In this division between nature and Nature, however, the capitalist death drive comes to replace Nature itself. In this way, both Stahl and Land’s critique of anthropocentric ontology ends up ontologizing capitalism itself and generating a new ideology of capitalism based in this ontologization of its thanatic compulsion. Herein, the radical Outside is not conceived of as a resource to subordinate and exploit, but rather is identified with the subjective agency of capital itself as automatic subject, the empty interiority of a process of destruction. The process by means of which capitalism decides what is real and valuable and what is not ends up retroactively devaluating and desubstantiating matter to the point where only the only real thing that remains is the speculative dance of capital’s self-valorization. In Stahl and Land, the philosophical platform of capitalism is no longer Iberian metaphysical instrumentalism, nor Cartesian dualism, nor transcendental extra-activism. In the present marked by mass extinction and the end of cheap nature, we can see in their work the creation of a new ideological platform for capitalism which is an ontologization of the death drive that naturalizes capitalism itself.

Although the general tone of these novels is pessimistic, they provide us with a map of a conception of nature that emerges from the end of cheap nature. In spite of producing a “weird affect” (so apt to aestheticizing climate change), these novels are not speaking from the perspective of the classic weird of H.P. Lovecraft or the New Weird.47 Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff argue that Caribbean New Weird fiction appropriates and inverts Lovecraft’s inclination to identify disposable nature and racialized workers with noumenal horror by showing that capitalism itself “is the true source of horror, the extinguisher of life of all kinds.”48Instead, Mugre rosa depicts capitalogenic climate change and capitalist production as a machinery of reducing everything to an insubstantial pink slime that swallows both human and non-human beings. By imagining Stahl as a peripheric Land who writes theoretical-fiction that explicitly addresses ontological problems, Guitarra negra goes a step further and identifies Lovecraft’s noumenal reality with capitalism itself, allowing us to see how this ontological fiction about capitalism isalso the fiction that capitalism creates about itself. My point is precisely that becauseabstract horror takes nihilism to the extreme, while introducing new ontological divisions between humanity and nature, extinction and capitalist noumena, it becomes a valuable tool for diagnosing new ongoing speculative practices that cause extinction by reducing nature to a cheap amorphous resource. For this reason, weird fiction makes visible the cutting edge of deterritorialization at the new commodity frontiers: the threat of extinction triggered by the Capitalocene that exhausts its own conditions of reproduction. In other words, these Latin American novels depict not only the horror of a world-in-itself or a world-without-us that comes from the outside, but also the horror of value fetishism, the act of retroactive abstraction that deprives nature of all its concrete features to transform it into a devalorized slimy substance that comes back to haunt us.

1. My thanks for ongoing conversations with Santiago Acosta, Paige R. Andersson, Victoria Saramago, and Brian Whitener reflected in the following pages. I want to give special thanks to Brian Whitener for his constant patience when reading all the versions of this paper.
2. Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History,and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason Moore (Oakland, CA: Kairos PM, 2016) 99.
3. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature” 99.
4. It is important not to confuse Heidegger’s ontic and ontological difference, the division between beings and Being, with Moore’s questioning of the ontological division between Humanity and Nature because Moore deontologizes ontology by deriving the division from historical and dialectical modes of production and exchange.
5. “The Rise of Cheap Nature” 99.
6. See AlfredSohn-Rethel,Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanity’s Press, 1978).
7. See Alberto Toscano,“The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism20.2 (2008): 273-287. Recent interest in “real abstraction” has been accompanied by a plethora of scholarly production on this concept. SeeAntonio Oliva, Ángel Oliva, and Iván Novara, eds., Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
8. Sohn-Rethel,Intellectual and Manual Labour71.
9. Intellectual and Manual Labour59.
10. It is important to keep in mind that real abstractions are themselves part of larger metabolic processes. I follow Kohei Saito and Thomas Nail who place the triple metabolism of nature/nature, nature/humanity and humanity/humanity as the material kinetic conditions of the production of abstract value. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New Delhi: Dev Publishers & Distributors, 2018), and Nail, Marx In Motion.For a scientific non-metaphysical account of the continuum of humanity and naturesee Karen Barad,Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, second printing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
11. This is, of course, one possible line of thought, but there are other historical ontologies that play different goals in the process of continuous recreation of the commodity frontiers.
12. See Orlando Bentancor,The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), and Jason W. Moore,“Climate, Class & the Great Frontier: From Primitive Accumulation to the Great Implosion,” unpublished paper, World-Ecology Research Group, Binghamton University, 2021.
13. Mark Driscoll sustains that there Kant and Hegel provided the philosophical template for an extra-active attitude of white superiority over non-white people and natural resources. Mark Driscoll, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
14. See Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2009) 5.
15. Nick Land taught two of the four members of the speculative realist movement, Ray Brassier and Ian Hamilton Grant. There is a connection between abstract horror fiction and speculative realism based on the works of Eugene Thacker and Nick Land who theorized the link between ontology and H.P Lovecraft’s fiction.
16. Katerina Kolozova, Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015)66.
17. Kolozova, Toward a Radical Metaphysics 61.
18. Toward a Radical Metaphysics 61.
19. Toward a Radical Metaphysics34.
20. Jason W. Moore. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London; Brooklyn: Verso, 2015) 91. Let us clarify that Moore’s more subtle historical sensibility understands these limits not as absolute but as historically coproduced between capitalism as a social formation and extra-human agents.
21. In Moore’s words: “Capitalism is a way of organizing nature” Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London; Brooklyn: Verso, 2015) 78. Moore proposes a way to overcome the separation between Nature and Humanity in terms of double internality: nature flows into humanity and humanity flows into nature. I understand that this procedure is not in itself a fiction or a real abstraction, but rather a chiasmus that attempts to capture a larger metabolic process by which human beings confront nature as a force of nature. Although it is not in itself a fiction, there is a place for fiction in this chiasmatic structure and it is marked by the preposition “in”. The fictions, distortions of reality are an inherent part of reality in the same way that the flows of humanity are an inherent part of nature and vice versa.
22. For an introduction to the genre, see Ramiro Sanchiz and Gabriele Bizzarri, “‘New Weird from the New World’: escrituras de la rareza en América latina (1990-2020). Introducción,” Orillas: rivista d’ispanistica ٩ (٢٠٢٠) ١-١٤. Among the authors credited by Sanchiz with bringing new blood to the old weird horrorism, Sanchiz finds Mariana Enríquez, Liliana Colanzi, Samanta Schweblin, Alberto Chimal, Pablo Dobrinin, Teresa Mira, Solange Rodríguez Pappe, Mónica Ojeda, and Luis Carlos Barragán. Adding to Sanchiz’s list we findPasadizo a lo extraño: Antología de New Weird iberoamericana published by Exegesis in 2019, andPaisajes experimentales: Antología de Nueva Ficción Extraña, published by Indómita Luz Editorial in 2020.
23. SeeMark Fisher,The Weird and the Eerie (London, Repeater, 2017).
24. See H.P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature: Revised and Enlarged, annotated edition (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012).
25. See Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie.
26. See Orlando Bentancor,The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
27. Fernanda Trías, Mugre rosa (Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2021) 49.
28. For Moore’s definition of cheap food as “more calories” in “less labor time” see Capitalism in the Web of Life.241. For the role of negative value and the role of food in the totality of the contradictions of neoliberal agriculture see “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology” Critical Historical Studies, (2015) 1-43.
29. Trías, Mugre rosa 49.
30. Mugre rosa 49.
31. Mugre rosa 50-51, my emphasis.
32. For the role of the meat-industry in the creation of antibiotic resistance as one of the factors in the emergence of negative value when nature cannot be captured for free see Capitalism in the Web of Life285.
33. Mugre rosa 113.
34. Mugre rosa 14.
35. Let us add that Ramiro Sanchiz has also translated Nick Land to Spanish and also has written various texts on abstract horror For Sanchiz’s translations of Nick Land into Spanish, see Nick Land and Ramiro Sanchiz,Fanged Noumena (Barcelona: Holobionte Ediciones, 2019), and Nick Land and Ramiro Sanchiz,Teleoplexia (Barcelona: Holobionte Ediciones, 2021).
36. For the most detailed analysis of the entanglement between Nick Land’s anti-humanism and the neo-reactionary movement see Roger Burrows, “Urban Futures and the Dark Enlightenment: a Brief Guide for the Perplexed” in Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives,(London, UK; Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, 2019) 245-258.
37. See note 14.
38. See Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015).
39. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London; New York: Routledge, 2002) 78.
40. Nick Land, “Manifesto for an Abstract Literature,” Chasm (Time Spiral Press, 2015).
41. Ramiro Sanchiz,Guitarra negra: Alfredo Zitarrosa (Montevideo: Estuario Editora, 2020) 32.
42. Sanchiz,Guitarra negra33. All emphasis in this and the rest of the quotations are in the original.
43. Guitarra negra33-34.
44. Guitarra negra 115.
45. For Land’s identification of the noumenal with capitalist death drive see “A Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism” in Nick Land, Robin Mackay, and Ray Brassier, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011).
46. Sanchiz’s own ontology and aesthetic project is way more complex than Federico Stahl’s. In the “Posdata” to the latest reedition of this novel Trashpunk, I argue that Sanchiz’s blend of cyberpunk and horror does not separate between a noumenal and a phenomenal realm because it folds the phenomenal back into the noumenal, dissolving the ontological division in a radical non-anthropocentric and non-human materialism. See Bentancor, Orlando, “Posdata,” Trashpunk(Montevideo, Mig 21 Editora, 2021) 155-159.
47. While in the Old Weird the “weirdness” is an adjective that qualifies an external and indifferent Thing from outside this world, the New Weird is an attempt to embrace the monster that comes from outer space and include, accept it within an ethics of finitude. See Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy, “Introduction: Old and new weird,” Genre ٤٩.٢ (٢٠١٦): 117-134.
48. Deckard, Sharae, and Kerstin Oloff. “The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015).” Humanities ٩.٣ (٢٠٢٠): ١٢.