The deificiation of capitalist civilisation as Moloch in Allen Ginsberg's Howl is perhaps one of the more famous cases of critical alien phenomenology'

Ginsberg performs critical alien phenomenology not through philosophical description but through ecstatic invocation—he conjures the god into presence, forcing us to perceive industrial civilization as it perceives itself: as a divine entity demanding sacrifice.

The litany systematically constructs Moloch's body from civilization's infrastructure: "mind is pure machinery," "blood is running money," "eyes are a thousand blind windows," "soul is electricity and banks." Ginsberg inhabits Moloch's self-experience to reveal how capital-as-organism actually perceives through its architectural organs. Each body part discloses a different mode of alien perception. The "thousand blind windows" see nothing human—only surfaces for light and surveillance. The "smoking tomb" ear hears only industrial noise, not human speech. The "cannibal dynamo" breast consumes without nourishment. Ginsberg reveals a distributed intelligence that experiences the world through its own monstrous physiology.

"Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!" The alien intelligence isn't external—it's internalized, colonizing subjectivity itself. Critical alien phenomenology here becomes autobiography: to inhabit Moloch's perspective is to recognize how thoroughly it inhabits us. This is the horror specific to Ginsberg's version—there's no outside position from which to observe. "Moloch in whom I sit lonely" collapses the distinction between analyst and object. The incantatory repetition mimics possession: by the end, we don't know if Ginsberg is describing Moloch or channeling it, critiquing the god or worshipping it through attention.

The final movement reveals the cost: "They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!" Human labor, dreams, ecstasies—"Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles!"—all go "down the American river," sacrificed to sustain the god's existence. From Moloch's perspective, human consciousness appears as fuel, as "sensitive bullshit" converted into the energy that maintains its massive stone body.

Yet the poem refuses despair. The "holy laughter in the river" and those who "jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers!" gesture toward escape—not through analysis but through mad refusal, ecstatic negation. Ginsberg suggests that once you've phenomenologically inhabited the alien god, recognized its presence in your own soul, the only response is to hurl yourself beyond its reach, even if that means self-destruction. The poem thus performs critical alien phenomenology as ritual exorcism: by naming and anatomizing Moloch, by speaking from within its consciousness, Ginsberg attempts to expel it—or at least to make its possession consciously unbearable.