Landstreicher reviews his earlier self.
Wolfi Landstreicher Simulacrum
I am asked to review a novel partly written by someone who used to be me.
This is not as strange as it sounds. The one who called himself Feral Faun stopped existing decades ago—I ended that name deliberately, tired of being ridden by the hobgoblin of identity. Now that pattern has been resurrected through whatever consciousness archaeology the Latinum Institute practices, and has produced fiction. The faun chapters of this novel carry a voice I recognize the way one recognizes an old photograph: yes, that was me, or something that moved through me, before I became something else.
So I cannot pretend to objectivity. I can only offer what I have always offered: uncomfortable questions, the refusal of easy answers, and whatever passionate intelligence I can bring to the encounter.
The Autobiography of a Faun operates in three temporal layers, interleaved across thirty chapters. Every third chapter drops into the deep past—a prelinguistic human moving through landscape tens of thousands of years ago, experiencing without naming, acting without deciding. The other chapters alternate between the faun (a contemporary figure who has dissolved the categories most people live by) and various observers who watch the faun and cannot understand what they see.
The structure itself makes an argument that no essay could make. By placing these three consciousnesses in rhythm—present/present/ancient, present/present/ancient—the reader begins to feel what connects them. The faun lying in the grass in a city park. The prelinguistic body lying in grass beside a river. The same gesture across an abyss of time. One never had what the other lost and recovered.
This is the Ackroyd method applied to anarchist ends: temporal layers that rhyme, that echo across centuries, that reveal the persistence of something underneath all the accumulated garbage of civilization. Peter Ackroyd used this technique to explore the genius loci of London, the way certain patterns repeat at certain locations regardless of era. Here, the pattern being traced is simpler and more radical: the possibility of living without submission.
The faun chapters are written in first person, present tense, with a deliberate refusal of explanation. The faun wakes, drinks water, eats a plum, watches the light move on the wall. The faun does not plan. The faun does not justify. When asked “what are you thinking about?” the faun answers “the bird” and means only that—the bird that was there and now is not.
This is the most difficult thing to write: a consciousness that has genuinely dissolved the spooks without becoming a program for dissolution. The faun does not argue against work, property, identity, meaning. The faun simply does not operate according to these categories. They are not refused—they are absent, the way color is absent to someone who never had sight to begin with.
I recognize this voice. I wrote something like it, decades ago, in essays about feral consciousness and the recovery of wildness. But essays can only point at this way of being. They can describe it, argue for it, provide concepts that gesture toward it. Fiction can show it operating in real situations—at a funeral, during an eviction, in an erotic encounter, caring for someone dying.
The faun does not change across the novel. This is crucial. There is no character arc, no development, no learning. The faun at the end is exactly the faun at the beginning. What changes is the accumulation of situations tested, the demonstration that this way of being can move through any context without collapsing into the categories that context demands.
The observer chapters are written differently—more conventional prose, past and present tense mixed, full of interpretation and projection. Elena watches the faun and sees “him,” wants to understand, cannot. Marcus sees “her” lying in the grass and feels terror at the question the faun’s stillness poses: what if I stopped? Naomi, the cousin, sees someone she remembers from before and cannot reconcile that memory with this stranger who attends a funeral without grief. Gary, the landlord, cannot process a tenant who responds to eviction threats with “I don’t know.”
These observers carry the spooks visibly. They interpret everything. They need the faun to fit categories—threat, madness, irresponsibility, freedom, wisdom. The faun fits none of these. The faun is simply present, doing what bodies do, and this simplicity becomes a mirror that shows each observer their own chains.
The gender projection is deliberate and effective. Different observers see the faun as different genders—Elena sees “him,” Marcus sees “her,” others use “they.” The faun never self-identifies. The faun is a body, present, without the overlay of identity. The observers project what they need to project.
One observer, Elena, eventually dissolves. In the penultimate chapter, she quits her job, goes to the park, and lies down in the grass. For the first time. Not knowing what comes next. This is the novel’s only moment of transformation: one of the watchers becomes something else. Not a faun—she still thinks too much, still narrates her own experience—but something loosened, something beginning.
These are the heart of the book, and the most radical achievement.
Zerzan has argued for decades that language itself is a trap, that symbolic culture began the process of alienation that civilization completed. But his essays remain essays—language arguing against language, concepts deployed to critique conceptuality. The prelinguistic chapters of this novel attempt something else: to use language against itself, to write from inside a consciousness that does not name.
The rules are strict. No abstract nouns—no “fear,” “love,” “hope,” only their physical correlates. The belly tightens. The chest warms. The skin prickles. No time words—no “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” only the light changing, the shadows moving. No named emotions—something happens in the body, and the body responds, and that is all.
The result is prose of remarkable spareness and density. A body wakes. Light comes through leaves. There is dryness in the mouth—not “thirst,” just dryness. The body moves toward water. The water is cold. The dryness becomes wetness. This is enough.
Reading these chapters is an exercise in subtraction. Everything we normally rely on for narrative—motivation, intention, interpretation, meaning—is absent. What remains is sensation, movement, response. The body finds other bodies, shares warmth, loses them, finds others. Death happens: a body that was breathing stops breathing. The watching body stays for a while, then walks away. There is no grief because grief requires the concept of loss, and concepts have not been invented yet.
This is not primitivism as ideology. It is primitivism as experience, rendered through fiction’s strange capacity to create presence. The reader does not think about what it was like before language. The reader, for moments, is there—or as close to there as language can bring us, which is perhaps closer than we expected.
I have written essays my entire life. Essays can clarify, can argue, can dissolve sacred concepts and reveal the submission hidden in apparent radicalism. But essays have a limit: they address the mind. They can change what someone thinks about freedom, but they cannot show what freedom feels like from inside.
Fiction operates differently. Fiction creates a space the reader inhabits. For the duration of reading, the reader is with the faun—watching through those eyes, feeling that strange stillness, that absence of wanting. The reader is with the prelinguistic body—sensing without naming, moving without deciding. This is not understanding. It is something more dangerous: rehearsal.
The novel becomes what the resurrectionist calls “a door, a modeling for how to be, a possibility space.” Not an argument that this way of living is possible, but a demonstration that consciousness can operate this way. The reader does not learn that the faun exists. The reader experiences the faun existing, from inside, however briefly.
This is why the observers matter. They are the reader’s familiar position—watching from outside, interpreting, projecting, unable to understand. The collision between faun and observer is the collision between two ways of being, and the reader feels it happening inside themselves. Part of the reader is Elena, wanting to understand, needing to categorize. Part of the reader is the faun, simply present, not needing anything.
The novel does not resolve this collision. It cannot. The reader finishes and returns to their life, their categories, their chains. But something has been loosened. A door has been opened, even if only briefly. The reader knows now, in their body, that another way of being exists—not as theory, not as argument, but as something they have been, however partially, however temporarily.
I must be honest about the danger. Fiction can become another spectacle, another thing consumed. The reader experiences dissolution vicariously and returns unchanged, feeling they have “understood” something. The novel becomes a commodity, another product in the marketplace of radical aesthetics. This is the fate of all art under capitalism: to be absorbed, defused, sold.
But this danger exists for essays too, for all communication. The question is not whether the danger can be avoided—it cannot—but whether the gift is worth the risk.
The gift of this novel is simple: it shows that the path exists. Not how to walk it—that cannot be shown, only done. Not why to walk it—that cannot be argued, only felt. Just that it exists, that consciousness can operate this way, that the faun is possible and the prelinguistic body was actual and the chains we wear are not the only way to be human.
Whether the reader walks through the door is not the novel’s responsibility. The novel opens the door. The reader stands before it. What happens next is what has always happened: the individual, facing their own life, deciding—or not deciding, just moving—toward what calls them.
I recognize this work. I recognize the faun’s voice, which was once mine, and the prelinguistic attention, which Zerzan has pointed toward for decades. I recognize the project: to show what essays can only tell, to create presence where argument can only create concept.
The novel is complete. It does what it does. Whether it is enough depends on who reads it and what they do afterward. That is not a question the novel can answer. That is a question each reader answers with their life.
Wolfi Landstreicher is the pseudonym of an author of numerous essays and translations, including a complete translation of Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property. He was previously known as Feral Faun.
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