Among the literary remains of the scholar and philosopher Dagoberto Alemán Oviedo (1901-1950) one may find an unfinished poem titled ‘Caduceus.’ The poetic fragment serves as a just summary of Alemán Oviedo’s radical philosophy, namely the proposition that our cosmos is the unsuspecting prey of a larger parasitic world. The poem reads in part:
The staff entwined is the thing of myth
and yet it represents a most toxic derealization,
a notion enwound by twinned slithering snakes,
one molting and feasting, the other
appendage of the first.
Step into this madness
dear reader,
hold on to my caduceus as
we wait
for inverted gnosis …
Here we can penetrate the chrysalis of the philosopher’s foundational themes: the radicalization of Platonism, his embeddedness in the gnostic tradition, the recuperation of madness as initiation and secret wisdom, and the image of twins as the structuring element of the universe: one a feeder, the other—us— victims of this unjust parasitism. In a word, Alemán Oviedo’s philosophy is “an attempt to scale up Darwinism to cosmic proportions.”
Born in the Mexican-American border to a family of poor farmers, Alemán Oviedo trained as a literary scholar at Dartmouth in the 1920s. As he worked on a dissertation on gnosis and hermeneutics, he began to develop an unsettling semiotic hypothesis: occurrences in this world could be legible as signs from a world right next to our own. He posited the existence of “a much more advanced and hyper-Darwinian cosmos,” which fed on our pain and misfortune, a biological relation he called ‘cosmic parasitism.’ In this he exceeded the allegorical constructs of the early Gnostics and the Christian mystics, since for him the sign/signature relation was the shadow of a literal realm of opacities—an actual relation marked by the vulgar, by an illegible technological unconscious, and most troublingly, by semiotic inversions.
The image of the caduceus returns again and again in Alemán Oviedo’s early writings, published in books like A Theory of Semiotic Inversions (1933), and Signs and Signification in the Anomalous Universe (1939). His thought quickly entered a new phase: the unseen world had evolved fascistically, thousands, perhaps millions of years ago. They had developed technology to such an extent, he hypothesized, “that they could build an adjacent reality just like our own—an area for their amusement and nourishment, since the fed on the lack and void of this world.” To treat humans as equals would be physically revolting to the fascist interlopers from this parallel reality, and they would arrive here in their avatars to breed dissension, chaos, perversion, and warfare. Their own language would be encrypted in our own, and most troublingly, our gullibility would serve as a crucial ingredient in their semiotic feasting. This translated into the reason why he thought madness was divine, or a biotechnology from an even more tragic future: “only the insane can fathom the reality of the diabolical parasite in the collapse of all meaning and being: inverted transcendence, violent post-cognition—madness as gift from the future.”
His training in literary studies is present throughout the development of the philosopher’s theories. For Alemán Oviedo, for instance, there is nothing more radical than turning allegory inside out: to go through the reversion of symbolization in order to finally reach “the anagogical inversions of non-metaphor—the return of the literal as the obscenity of actual flesh.” These theses are further expounded in Alemán Oviedo’s magnum opus: The Cosmic Parasite and the Coming War (1945). Here the philosopher proposes that future humans, “having heeded [his] conclusions and assimilated the ecstatic [his word for neurodivergent] gene, are now engaged in a time war with the parallel world.” If the image of the caduceus had been chosen as the symbol of an inescapable destiny, in this later book it serves as the image of a struggle between opposite realms. And if Hegel had proposed that world history reaches its apex in his philosophy, Alemán Oviedo proposes something more radical: it is in his theses that cosmic history—as a tragic deception in the structure of time—is finally unveiled.
It is also in this book that the philosopher explains his controversial defense of insanity as a biotechnology. “If semiosis has been hacked by the parallel world,” he writes, “it is only by breaking down signification that any form of retaliation can take place.” Madness was a biological mutation brought about by natural selection in the midst of an untenable parasitic infection. Madness was a way for beings in this world to register the unseen. A perilous gift that, perhaps not surprisingly, was shunned by most humans who could not see the shadows in the cave. As an example he discusses the symptom known as “delusions of reference,” where the ecstatic subject can catch a glimpse of “signs incoming from the adjacent world.”
Shunned or ignored by the academic establishment, in the decades immediately after WWII Alemán Oviedo retreated to Mexican border towns, earning a meager living teaching in local high schools. His investigations continued unabated, however, and would go on to publish at least seven more books, three of which are poetic musings, one a collection of aphorisms, and the remaining three philosophical texts which serve as his last commentary on the theory of semiotic inversions.
His aphoristic work—Treachery as Creative Act (1948)—is both a compendium and elaboration of his foundational ideas. A sampling of these terse statements is both disturbing and revealing:
Our baroque pearl was stolen from us by the thieves of the sun.
There are two bodies stitched, like the double king, in the borders of each world.
Sunrise is the shadow of our subjugation.
We have been colonized without our knowledge; our language: our fetters.
Cosmic colonialism is the highest form of servitude.
We are lepers in our unknowingness.
The most fertile mind is that which can see, through the veil, the hidden language of opacities in this world.
Tromp l’oeil: more literal than metaphorical.
Non-metaphor is the eclipse of signification.
It is not surprising that Alemán Oviedo eventually reached for the aphorism as form, since his theory of signification depends in large part on “suggestibility as the beginning of wisdom.” These terse yet seductive aphorisms are thus constructed in order to create “the great doubt” which he thought was necessary as a rite of passage into the world of semiotic inversions. As one of the earliest commentators of his work—Walter Betancourt—writes in Anomalous Thought in the Americas (1987), as Alemán Oviedo’s thinking veered into more radical territories, his interest in fractured literary forms increased. It is not surprising that Treachery As Creative Act contains an epigraph by the master of suggestibility, William Blake. In a phrase which could be used as a definition of semiotic inversions, Blake explains how he sees the sun, using a rhetorical question:
When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.
Blake’s phraseology suggests a kind of dialectics of seeing which ends not in a kind of blind empiricism, but in a divine semiosis produced by an inversion of vision, signification, and belief.
Alemán Oviedo’s last phase is thus decidedly more literary, though it is in works dating from this period, among them The God Under the Tower, from 1949 and Hyperconurbation from 1950, where he paints the clearest, most frightening yet awe-inspiring image of the cosmos. He calls the cosmos a vast orgy, a multi-level bacchanal, and an obscene jungle. Emphasizing Darwinian profusion as the organizing principle of reality, he sees humans as gullible insects in a vast tract of copulation, vulgarity, and ecstatic matter throbbing at the infinite variety of being in the universe. Humans think that they have escaped the cruel primordial kernel of evolution by building supposedly protective civilizational structures, but this is a delusion. The biological terror lives on cosmically, above and beyond the human, in ways we cannot see but which both sustain us and turn us into the food sources of occluded beings—elder creatures in the age of the cosmos.
There is one crucial image which stays with anyone who engages with Alemán Oviedo’s work seriously. “Picture then the cosmos as a vast disordered baroque hyperconurbation,” he writes, “filled and encrusted with hustlers, prostitutes, murderers, dope-fiends and voyeurs; with demonstrations of imaginative gnosis, a vast orgiastic bacchanal of hoodlums, sorcerers, sado-masochistic beings and cosmonautic jugglers: the universe as brothel and bazaar….”