SOURCE: Schwenger, Peter. “Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book.” South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 4 (fall 1993): 617-26.

In the following essay, Schwenger identifies the central themes and motifs of Agrippa as absence, disappearance, mechanism, and apocalypse.

All techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance.

—Paul Virilio

Black box recovered from some unspecified disaster, the massive case opens to reveal the textures of decay and age. Yellowed newspaper, rusty honeycombing, fog-colored cerement enveloping a pale book. On the book's cover, a burned-in title: Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. Within it, page after page printed with cryptic letters.

TGTGG CCATA AATAT TACGA GTTTG 

These are the combinatory possibilities of genetic codes, as re-coded by scientists. The pages are singed at their edges; more fragments of old newspaper are interspersed. And at intervals, engravings by New York artist Dennis Ashbaugh reproduce the commercial subjects of a previous generation, subjects that will...