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Grant - Demonology of the New Earth
Iain Hamilton Grant's The Demonology of the New Earth treats becoming, geology, and the new earth as demonic process rather than reconciled terrain.
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Core idea
The page argues that the new earth is not a utopian destination but an active, malevolent, and unfinished process. Demonic becoming names an earth that exceeds human planning.
Deleuze and Guattari, Professor Challenger, and demonic process are braided together so that schizoanalysis and geology become inseparable.
That matters because the page gives geotrauma one of its richest formulations of the earth as active, artificial, and hostile to reterritorialization.
How to read this text
Read the opening set-piece closely; it already states the page's main temporal and geological stakes.
Track how the new earth is distinguished from consoling ideas of future world-making. That distinction is decisive.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 7
Thus, how much more artificial can becomings become (‘perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough…’ (1984:239)), and what degree of artificiality pertains to the thousand realized plateaus of the new earth?
Definition · paragraph 7
Rather than the positive and negative that organize and extensitize the process, selecting territorialities, the demonology of the new earth follows the autopositive voyages in intensity and the total stases (zero intensity) of a ‘properly machinic death drive’ (1973:477) through a molecular ice age freezing the machines in orbit around anorganic abstracts.
Definition · paragraph 5
Splitting the schizogenic atom, some take A Thousand Plateaus’ construction of the new earth to be the realization of the positive task of schizoanalysis announced at the end of the Anti-Oedipus, making it, according to one analysis, ‘less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative’,2 thus binding the ‘terrible curettage’, the ‘malevolent activity’ of
Definition · paragraph 6
Iain Hamilton Grant 94 the desiring-machines (1984:381) to negativity, in the manner of judges and Marxists, sentencing them to hard, critical = corrective labour. Was ‘the Anti- Oedipus above all an insurgent counter-psychoanalytic war machine’ (Villiani 1985: 338), whose militarist labours were exhausted in scorching the earth as a propaedeutic to plateau-constructivism (New Earth, Year Zero)?
Stakes · paragraph 2
‘At the Mountains of Madness’ The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming Iain Hamilton Grant
Appears in sections
Geotrauma and the Outside Primary section
Molten earth, Barker, the inhuman Outside, and the archive's geological imagination.