Knots

Compared to other life forms, knots display a concerning lack of interest in disguising the conditions of their undoing. Disaster is their trajectory. A totalizing and worldly allergy to integrity and permanence in time (without ulterior, otherworldly motives) that always leads to a series of asymmetrical exchanges: rewind and destination, discipline and supervision, precariousness and security, explicit and prudish, letting loose and holding together. Their bodily counterparts can be easily spotted: fabrics, subjection and subjectification, tangled hair, lapsus, crossed fingers, the folding of protein, DNA, crossroads, intercourses, crossed eyes, a barely choreographed eternal return (you know that image of the snake channeling the dog inside of itself and biting its own tail? something similar to that). The “true” knot is a topology without allegiance to its host, a machinic hermeticism that treats matter as an interchangeable substrate. Rope, the hair, the chain — only the soft tissue of its embodiment. Its loops are not “forms” but encrypted instructions. The knot does not so much exist as it executes itself, performing a series of operations whose end-state is already written into their inception. Each (knot) stages a micro-extinction event, where the end is not a catastrophe but a banal unbinding into other forms. Considered under this half-gnostic, half-winterly light, the knot is not the solution but a fleeting condensation of a problem that is older than life and will outlast it — the problem of how to hold together what will inevitably come apart. Edited extracts of a text by Davide Andreatta