A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

attack. Nietzsche writes of the blood and gristle that underwrite all civilization; Bataille writes
of the palaces of culture that overlay and attempt to displace spaces of execution and abattoirs;
Foucault writes of the fundamental dishonesty and hypocrisy of the movement from the auto-dafé
to the regime of the panopticon. 300
The implicit and sometimes explicit utopian argument that runs through these writings is
one that privileges the base (most particularly in the writings of Bataille). It is an argument that
suggests that the movement toward transcendence is a downward one—that one must pass back
through animality to shed one’s humanity. It is the desire for this collective shedding of skins,
this wish to save humanity from itself by destroying it that most centrally expresses the
alchemical admixture of love and hatred that defines the long and arduous disassembly of
humanity. In the context of abduction, this disassembly begins in terror and trauma, which in
turn brings us to the realm of psychoanalysis.
THE RETURN OF THE REAL
Classical Freudian psychoanalysis strives to gain access to that which is most hidden (a telos
which clearly relates to the central goals of occultism). It is that to which we are most blind that
most shapes who we are, according to this tradition. Experiences that fundamentally shape the
psyche are repressed and thus hidden away from sight. It is through this very “hidden-ness” that
the repressed gains its power to shape the psyche in uncontrollable ways. The goal of
psychoanalysis is to bring the repressed to light, thus dissipating it through bringing it to
conscious understanding. Taking a key term from Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of
psychoanalysis, the analytic process functions to territorialize the elements of psychic life that
300 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989); Georges Bataille, “Slaughterhouse”
in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Georges Bataille (London: Atlas Press, 1996); Foucault 1995.
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