“There was no longer any reality, only its caricature”

-Gottfried Benn

 

“We are the cause of the universe, its creation and its future destruction.”

-Baudelaire

 

It does not escape us that “‘metaphysical’- exactly like ‘abstract’ and even ‘thinking’- has

become a word before which everyone more or less takes flight as before a plague victim.”

(Hegel). And it is certainly with a shiver of wicked joy, and the worrying certitude that we’re

going right to the wound, that we bring back into the center what the triumphant frivolity of

our times believed it had forever repressed to the periphery. In so doing, we also have the

effrontery to claim that we’re not just giving in to some sophistical caprice, but to an

imperious necessity inscribed in history. Critical Metaphysics is not just one more piece of

blather about the way the world is going; nor is it just the latest piece of heady speculation

with some particular intelligence to it – it is the most real thing contained in our

times.  Critical Metaphysics is in everyone’s guts. Whatever we might protest about this, there

is no doubt that people will try to say we were the inventors of Critical Metaphysics, so as to

hide the fact that it existed already before finding its formulation, that it was

already everywhere, in the state of emptiness behind suffering, in the denial behind

entertainment, in the motives behind consumption, or, obviously, in anxiety.  It’s clearly a

part of all the sordid spinelessness, the incurable banality, and the repugnant insignificance of

the times called “modern” that it’s made metaphysics the apparently innocent leisure activity

of learned men in stiff suits, and that it’s reduced it to the sole exercise proper to insects like

that: a kind of platonic mandibulation. Merely by virtue of the fact that it is not reducible to

conceptual experience, Critical Metaphysics is the experience that fundamentally denies an

inept “modernity”, and, with open eyes, celebrates more each day the excesses of the

disaster.

Act the First: “When the false becomes true, truth itself is but a mirage. When nothingness

becomes reality, reality in turn falls into nothingness.”

(The inscriptions at either side of the entrance to the “Kingdom of Dreams and Immense

Illusion” in the Dream of the Red Chamber)

 

Western civilization is living on credit. It thought it could last forever, and get off without

paying the outstanding debt it owes for its lies.  But now it’s suffocating under their crushing

dead weight. Thus, before entering into more substantial considerations, we have to start by

clearing the air, and unburdening this world of a few of its illusions.  For example: the fact is

that modernity has never existed.  We’re not going to linger over indisputable facts. That the

term “modernity” now just evokes a bored irony, no matter the progressivist senility

accompanying it, and that it has finally appeared as what it always was -- just a verbal fetish

that the superstition of shitheads and simple spirits, ever since the supposed “Renaissance,”

have decorated the progressive rise of commodity relations to a state of social hegemony

with, in favor of interests we understand only all too well -- hardly merits any critical

explanation.  This is just another vulgar brutish use of labels, whose elucidation we’ll leave to

the priests of tomorrow’s historicism.  We’ve got far more serious things to deal with.  In fact,

in the same way as commodity relations never really existed as such, i.e., as commodity

relations, but only as relations between men mutilated into relations between things,

everything that is said to be, believed to be, or held up as being “modern” has never really

existed as modern. The essence of the economy, that transparent pseudonym with which

commodity modernity always tries to pass itself off as eternally obvious, has nothing

economic about it; and in fact, its foundation, which is also its program, can be expressed in

these rude terms: it is THE NEGATION OF METAPHYSICS -- that is, the negation of that the

transcendence of which is for humanity the effective cause of immanence; to put it in other

words, it is the negation of that which makes sense of the world, of the imperceptible

appearing within the perceptible. This fine project is wholly contained within the aberrant

but effective illusion that a complete separation between the physical and the metaphysical is

possible - a fallacy which most often takes form as the underlying reality behind the physical

reality, setting itself up as the model for all objectivity, and logically commanding a myriad of

local ruptures, between life and meaning, dreams and reason, individual and society, means

and ends, artist and bourgeois, intellectual work and physical labor, bosses and workers, etc. -

which are not, by and large, any less absurd - with all these concepts becoming abstract and

losing all their content outside of their living interaction with their opposites.  Now, since such

a separation is really impossible, that is, humanly impossible, and since the liquidation of

humanity has so far failed, nothing modern has ever existed as such. What is modern is not

real, what is real is not modern. Thus there is indeed a realization of this program, but as it

perfects itself at present we also see that it is just the opposite of what it thought it was, in a

word: the complete de-realization of the world. And the whole extent of the visible now carries

within it – with its vacillating character - the brutal proof that the realized negation of

metaphysics is in the end but the realization of a metaphysics of negation. The functionalism

and materialism inherent to commodity modernity have produced a void everywhere, but this

void corresponds to the primordial metaphysical experience: where there is no longer any

response that goes beyond mere being-there, which would permit a position within the latter

to be taken, anxiety surges forth, and the metaphysical character of the world blossoms in

plain sight for everyone. Never has the sentiment of foreignness been so pregnant as it is in

the face of the abstract productions of a world that had intended to bury it under the

immense, unquestionable opulence of its accumulated commodities. Places, clothes, words

and architecture, faces, acts, gazes and loves are nothing anymore but the terrible masks

invented by one and the same absence to put on in order to approach us.  Nothingness has

visibly taken up residence in the intimate depths of things and beings, and the smooth

surface of spectacular appearances is cracking everywhere as a result of its growth.

The physical sensation of its proximity is no longer the ultimate experience reserved for a few

mystical circles.  On the contrary it is the only sensation left to us by the capitalist world, the

only sensation still intact, and indeed increased tenfold, as all the others are slated to

disappear.  It also happens to have been precisely the one it had explicitly proposed to

eliminate.  All the products of this society- whether the hollow conceptuality of the Young-Girl,

contemporary urbanism, or techno- are things that the spirit has gone out of, things that have

outlived all their meaning and all their reason for being. These are all just interchangeable

symbols that replace each other moving about on one plane; it’s not that these symbols

signify nothing, as the kindly morons of postmodernism like to think – indeed they

signify Nothingness itself.  All the things of this world live on in a perceptible state of exile.

They are the victims of a faint and constant loss of being. Indeed, this modernity, which

claims to be free of mystery and thought it had liquidated metaphysics, has instead realized

it. It has produced a décor comprised purely of phenomena, of pure beings-there that are

nothing beyond the simple fact that they are there, in their empty positivity, and which

ceaselessly push humanity to feel “the marvel of marvels: that being-there is”

(Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?). In this ultramodern hall of ice, marble, and steel we’ve

wandered into, a slight relaxation of our cerebral constriction suffices for us to be brutally

confronted with seeing all that exists slip away and be inverted into a simultaneously

oppressive and floating presence where nothing remains. Thus we get the experience of Total

Otherness even in the most common of circumstances, even in newly renovated bakeries.

Before us is spread a world that can no longer hold our gaze, a world that can no longer look

us in the eye.  Anxiety is on guard duty at every street corner.  Now this disastrous

experience, wherein we are violently expelled from all that exists, is the experience of

transcendence and of the irremediable negativity contained in us. In that experience is the

whole of the asphyxiating “reality” that all the great machinery of social deception works to

make us take for granted, that suddenly and in so cowardly a way collapses, into the vast

chasm of its nullity. This experience is the birth of metaphysics, where metaphysics appears

precisely as metaphysics, where the world appears as the world.  But the metaphysics that

arises again there is not the same metaphysics that people had hunted down and banished,

because it returns as the truth and negation of what had defeated the old metaphysics: as

a conquering force, as critical Metaphysics.  Because the project of capitalist modernity is

nothing, its realization is but the spreading desertification of everything that exists.  And we

are here to ravage that desert.

 Enthroned on its rickety stilts in the middle of the mounting catastrophes, commodity

domination no longer feels at home in the singular state of things that it itself nonetheless

produced, every detail of which contradicts it more. And by domination we mean specifically

the symbolically mediated relation of complicity between the dominators and the dominated;

so for us there is a little doubt that “the torturer and the tortured are one, that the former is

fooling himself believing he’s not himself tortured, and the latter believing he’s not

participating in the crime”: go sit at the back of the class, Bourdieu! To convince ourselves of

this, we can merely take a close look at the steps taken by our contemporaries, who are

reminiscent of a band of deserters running after themselves, spurred on by their own

metaphysical disquiet. It’s a full time job now for Blooms to get themselves out of the

fundamental experience of nothingness, which destroys all simple faith in this world. The

mockery of things threatens to overwhelm his consciousness at any given moment.  To not

know the forgetting of Being, the retreat of which closes in on us in every metropolitan slum,

every vagina, and every gas station, now requires a daily ingestion of almost lethal doses of

Prozac, news, and Viagra. But all these temporary fixes don’t suppress the anxiety, they just

mask it, and banish it to an obscurity that only spurs on its silent growth. And in the end, in

order to sell their lies and disease, women’s magazines all the same end up having to

convince their readers that “the truth is good for your health,” cosmetics multinationals are

decide to put things like “metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology” on their packaging, TF1 sets

up the “quest for meaning”, as a profitable principle for its upcoming programming, and

Starck, that enlightened counterfeiter, gives La Redoute information about its competitors a

few years in advance by putting together for it a “catalogue of non-products for use by non-

consumers.”  It’s hard to imagine how so totally at a loss domination must have been

internally to get to such a state. In these conditions, critical thought must stop waiting for a

mass revolutionary subject to constitute itself to show how imminent social upheaval is. It

must rather learn to see this in the formidable explosion of the social demand for

entertainment/distraction in recent times. That kind of a phenomenon is a sign that the

pressure of essential questions which were for so long left unanswered, so profitably, has

crossed the line into the intolerable. Because, if people distract themselves so furiously, it

must be that they’re getting their minds off something, and this something must be becoming

an very obsessing presence. “If man were happy, he would be all the happier the less

distracted/entertained he was.” (Pascal).

 

Let’s suppose that the object that spreads such a significant terror everywhere,

which people can deny the effective action of only so long as it is unnamed, is Critical

Metaphysics- and this is a definition, perhaps the clearest and most comprehensible one we’ll

give ourselves. The harmless sociologists are naturally not gifted with the proper endowments

to comprehend what this is about, no more than is that handful of poor aesthetes, who in vain

indignation denounce the misery of the times from the lofty heights of their profession as

writers, and who see its mere consumption as its consummation. We would never dream to

protest against the extent of the disaster, but its meaning. The generalized fear of getting old,

the charming anorexia of women, the official takeover of all life, the sexual apocalypse, the

industrial management of entertainment, the triumph of the Young-Girl, the appearance of

unprecedented and monstrous pathologies, the paranoid isolation of egos, the explosion of

acts of gratuitous violence, the fanatical and universal affirmation of a supermarket

hedonism, make an elegant litany for paroxysts of all kinds. The trained eye sees nothing in

all this to lend credit to some eternal victory of the commodity and its empire of confusion;

rather it sees the intensity of the generalized state of patient expectation, a messianic waiting

for the catastrophe, for themoment of truth which will finally put an end to the unreality of a

world of lies. On this point as on many others, it is not superfluous to be Sabbatean.

 

From the perspective we’ve taken, the resolute plunge of the masses into immanence, and

their uninterrupted flight into insignificance- all things that could make us lose hope for the

human race- cease to appear as positive phenomena containing their truth within themselves,

and come to be seen as purely negative movements, accompanying our forced exile from of

the sphere of meaning, wholly colonized by the Spectacle, from all the figures and forms in

which one is permitted to appear, and which expropriate from us the meaning of our acts, and

our acts themselves. But this escape is no longer enough, and it must sell off in individual

packages the void left by Critical Metaphysics. The New Age, for example, corresponds to its

infinitesimal dilution and the burlesque travesty by which commodity society attempts to

immunize itself against it. The fact of generalized separation (between the perceptible and

superperceptible as well as between humans), the project of restoring the unity of the world,

the insistence on the category of totality, the primacy of the mind, and intimate knowledge of

human pain combine themselves there, in a calculated fashion, as a new commodity, as new

technologies. Buddhism also belongs to the mass of hygienic spiritualities that domination

must put to work to save positivism and individualism in whatever form it can, so as to go on

a little longer still in its nihilism. In any case people resort even to taking up the moth-eaten

banner of religions, and everyone knows what a useful complement these can be to the reign

of all miseries down here on earth - it goes without saying that when a weekly magazine of

bigots in sneakers ingenuously worries in covering whether “Will the 21st century be

religious?” one must read instead: “Will the 21st century manage to repress Critical

Metaphysics?”; all the “new needs” that late capitalism flatters itself that it can satisfy, all the

hysterical agitation of its employees, and even the expansion of consumer relations into the

whole of human life -- all that good news that it believes it can give itself that its triumph will

be a lasting one thus only show the profundity of its failure, of suffering, and of anxiety. And it

is this immense suffering that inhabits so many gazes and hardens so many things, that it

must always race breathlessly to put to work by degrading into needs the fundamental

tension of human beings towards the sovereign realization of their virtualities, a tension that

grows in proportion to the distance of their separation from them. But their evasion gets

exhausted and its underlying effectiveness quickly wanes. Consumerism can longer manage

to wipe away the excess of held-back tears. Thus it must put into place selection apparatuses

that are ever more ruinous and drastic, so as to exclude from the gear-works of domination

those who were unable to destroy any propensity towards humanity in themselves. No one

who effectively participates in this society is supposed to fail to know just what it might cost

for them to let their true pain be seen in public. But in spite of these machinations suffering

nonetheless continues to grow in the forbidden night of intimacy, where it stubbornly gropes

for a way to pour out. And since the Spectacle can’t prevent it to manifest itself forever, it

must ever more often give in and allow it to come out, but only while misrepresenting its

expression, by assigning one of its empty objects to the world’s mourning, one of those royal

mummies it alone holds the secret recipe for the preparation of. But suffering isn’t satisfied

with such doppelgangers. And so it waits patiently, almost as if lying in wait, for a brutal

interruption in the regular course of the horror, where human beings would own up to

themselves with an unlimited relief: “We miss everything unspeakably. We’re dying of

nostalgia for Being.” (Bloy, Gladiators and Pig-Keepers).

 

It should now certainly be clear to the reader that we are not in any way the inventors of

Critical Metaphysics: all we had to do was open our eyes a bit to see that it is plain on the

very surface of our times, sketched out in the hollow imprint it’s left. Critical Metaphysics

manifests itself to anyone that decides to live with their eyes open, which only requires a

particular stubbornness that people usually just pass off as madness. Because Critical

Metaphysics is rage to such degree of accumulation that it becomes a viewpoint.  But such a

viewpoint, one that has recovered from all the beguilements of modernity, does not know the

world as distinct from itself. It sees that in their typical forms materialism and idealism have

had their day, that “the infinite is as indispensable to man as the planet he lives on”

(Dostoevski), and that even where people seems to be flourishing in the most satisfied

immanence, consciousness is still present, as an inaudible feeling of decay, asbad conscience.

The Kojevian hypothesis of an “end of History” where man would remain “alive as an animal

in accord with his given Nature and Being,” where “the post-historical animals of the

species Homo Sapiens (who [would live] in abundance and total security) [would be]content in

virtue of their artistic, playful, and erotic activity, since by definition they [would be content in

it],” and where discursive knowledge of the world and the self would disappear, has proved to

be the Spectacle’s utopia, but has revealed itself to be unrealizable as such.  There is

manifestly no access to the animal condition anywhere for human beings. Naked life is still

a form of life for them. The unfortunate “modern man” – we’ll let the oxymoron slide – who

had such a virulent need to liberate himself of the burden of freedom, is now starting to

perceive that this is impossible, that he cannot renounce his humanity without renouncing life

itself, that an animalized man is still not an animal. Everything, at the end of this era, leads

one to believe that man can only survive in an environment that has meaning to it. Nothing

shows the extent to which the possibilities that mankind contains themselves tend towards

mankind’s realization as does the effort our contemporaries put into distracting themselves

from them. Even people’s crimes are dictated by their desire to find an outlet for their

capacities. Thus, thinking is not a duty of man, but his essential necessity, the non-fulfillment

of which is suffering -- that is, a contradiction between his possibilities and his existence.

Human beings physically wilt when they negate their metaphysical dimension. At the same

time, appears clearly that alienation is not a state that mankind has definitively been plunged

into, but the incessant activity that people must engage in to remain alienated. The absence

of consciousness is but the continual repression of consciousness. Insignificance still has

meaning. The complete forgetting of the metaphysical character of all existence is certainly a

catastrophe, but it is a metaphysical catastrophe. And the same affirmation, even though it’s

thirty years old, still reigns in the domain of thought. “Contemporary analytic philosophy is

out to exorcize such ‘myths’ or metaphysical ‘ghosts’ as Mind, Consciousness, Will, Soul, Self,

by dissolving the intent of these concepts into statements on particular identifiable

operations, performances, powers, dispositions, propensities, skills, etc.  The result shows, in

a strange way, the impotence of the destruction- the ghost continues to haunt.” (Marcuse,

One-dimensional Man).  Metaphysics is the specter that has haunted western man over the

past five centuries, as he’s been trying to drown himself in immanence and has failed to do

so.

Act the Second: “The Truth must be said and the world must be shattered by it.” (Fichte).

 

Even so, the act of acknowledging the forgetting of Being, and thus escaping nihilism, can’t

be taken for granted and couldn’t have a rational foundation; it is a question of ethical

decision. And it’s not abstractly, but concretely ethical: because in the world of the

authoritarian commodity, where the renunciation of thought is the first condition for “fitting in

socially,” consciousness is immediately an act, and an act for which the typical punishment is

that people will starve you out, whether directly or indirectly, by the gracious service of those

you depend on. Now that all the repressive courtrooms where ethics were alienated into

morality have fallen to pieces, it has finally become clear what ‘ethics’ means, in all their

original radicalness, which designates it as the unity of the morals of human beings and their

consciousness of them, and as such the absolute enemy of this world. This could be explained

in more decisive terms as follows: you’re either fighting for the Spectacle, or for the Imaginary

Party; there’s nothing in between. All those who could accommodate themselves to a society

that accommodates itself so well to inhumanity, all those for whom it already sits well to give

the alms of their indifference to their own suffering and that of their peers, all those who

speak of disaster as if it were simply another new market with promising prospects - are not

our brothers. Rather we would find their deaths highly desirable. And we’d certainly not blame

them for not devoting themselves to Critical Metaphysics, which, as a mere discourse, could

constitute a particular social object to decide to take up, but for refusing to see the truth in it,

which, being everywhere, is beyond any particular decision. No alibi holds up in the face of

such blindness; a metaphysical aptitude is the most common thing in the world: “you don’t

need to be a shoemaker to know whether a shoe is going to fit you” (Hegel); in the present

conditions, refusing to exercise this aptitude constitutes a permanent crime. And this crime,

the denial of the metaphysical character of what exists, has enjoyed such a lasting and

generalized complicity that it has become revolutionary merely to formulate the a priori

principles on which all human experience is based. And here we must recount them; our times

should be ashamed of the fact that we have to.

 

1.  Like a disease is obviously not merely the sum of its symptoms, the world is manifestly not

the sum of its objects, of “the case at hand,” nor of its phenomena, but rather it is a

characteristic of humanity itself. The world exists as a world only for mankind. Conversely,

there is noworld-less humanity; Bloom’s situation is a transitional abstraction. Each person

finds himself always already projected into a world which he experiences as a dynamic

totality, and he necessarily goes out into it with a prior understanding of it, however

rudimentary it may be. His mere preservation requires that.

 

2.The world is a metaphysics, that is: the way it presents itself first of all, its supposed

objective neutrality, its simple material structure, are already part of a certain metaphysical

interpretation that constitutes it. The world is always the product of a mode of disclosure that

brings things out into presence. Things like the “perceptible” only exist for man relative to

man’s superperceptible interpretation of what exists. Obviously, this interpretation does not

exist separately; it cannot be found outside of the world, since it itself is what configures the

world. Everything visible rests on the invisibility of this representation, which is at the root of

that which lets itself be seen, which conceals even in its disclosure. The essence of the visible

is thus not something visible. This mode of disclosure, imperceptible as it may be, is far more

concrete than all the colorful abstractions that people would like to pass off as “reality.”  The

given is always the posed, its being comes from an original affirmation of the Mind: “the world

is my representation.”  At their bottom, that is to say in their emergence, humanity and the

world coincide.

 

3.The perceptible and the superperceptible are fundamentally the same, but in a different

way. Forgetting one of these two terms and hypostatizing the other renders both of them

abstract: “to dispose of the superperceptible is also to suppress the purely sensible and thus

the difference between the two.” (Heidegger).

 

4.Primitive human intuition is but the intuition for representation and imagination.  What’s

called perceptible immediacy comes only after that. “Men start by seeing things only such as

they appear to them and not such as they are; by seeing not the things themselves but the

idea they have of them.” (Feuerbach, Philosophy of the Future). The ideology of the

“concrete,” which in its different versions fetishizes the “real, the “authentic,” the “everyday,”

the “little nothings,” the “natural” and other “slices of life,” is but the zero-point of

metaphysics, the general theory of this world -- its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in

popular form, its spiritual point of pride, its moral sanction, its ceremonial complement, and

its universal grounds for consolation and justification.

 

5. By all evidence, “man is a metaphysical animal” (Schopenhauer). By that it should not only

be understood that he is the being for whom the world makes sense even in its insignificance,

or whose disquiet does not let itself be appeased by anything finished, but quite eminently

that all his experience is woven in a fabric that does not exist. That’s why materialist systems

properly so-called, as well as absolute skepticism, have never been able by themselves to

have a very deep or a very lasting influence. Certainly, man can for long periods of time

refuse to consciously engage in metaphysics, and that’s most often how he deals with it, but

he cannot completely do without it. “Nothing is so portable, if one wants, as metaphysics […]

And what would be difficult, and even totally impossible, would be to fail to have – would be to

not have a metaphysics of one’s own, or at least some metaphysics… But it’s not just that not

everyone has the same one, which is only too obvious, but not everyone even has the same

kind of metaphysics, nor the same degree of metaphysics, nor a metaphysics of the same

nature, nor of the same quality.” (Peguy, Situations).

 

6. The metaphysical is not the simple negation of the physical; it is, symmetrically, also its

foundation and its dialectical transcendence. The prefix meta-, which means both “with” and

“beyond”, does not imply a disjunction, but an Aufhebung in the Hegelian sense. Hence

metaphysics is in no way something abstract, because it is the basis for all concreteness; it’s

what stands behind the physical and makes it possible. It “goes beyond nature to get at what

is hidden in it or behind it, but it considers this hidden element only as something appearing

in nature, not as something independent of all phenomena” (Schopenhauer). Metaphysics is

thus the simple fact that the mode of disclosure and the object disclosed in a primordial sense

remain “the same thing.”  Thus all together it is experience as experience, and is only

possible on the basis of a phenomenology of everyday life.

 

7. The successive defeats that mechanistic science has for a century ceaselessly mopped up

and repressed, both on the battlefront of infinitely great matters and on the battlefront of

infinitely small matters, have definitively condemned the project of establishing any

physicality without metaphysics. And once again, after so many foreseeable disasters, we

must acknowledge along with Schopenhauer that the physical explanation – which, as such,

though it refuses to see it, “needs a metaphysical explanation to give it the key to all its

presuppositions – […] clashes everywhere with a metaphysical explanation that suppresses it;

that is, one that takes away from it its explanatory character.” “The naturalists try hard to

show that all phenomena, even spiritual phenomena, are physical, and in this, they are right;

their error is that they don’t see that all physical things equally have a metaphysical side to

them.” And we read the following lines as a bitter prophecy: “The greater is the progress

made by physics, the greater it will make felt a need for a metaphysics. In effect, though on

the one hand, a more exact, more widespread, and more profound knowledge of nature

undermines and ends up overturning the metaphysical ideas ongoing up to then; on the other

hand it will serve to give a clearer and more complete perspective on the issue of

metaphysics itself, by removing it ever more severely away from its physical environment.”

 

8. Commodity metaphysics is not just one more metaphysics among others; it

is the metaphysics, that denies all metaphysics and above all denies itself as metaphysics. It

is also why it is, among all, the most null of metaphysics, the one that would sincerely like to

pass itself as simple physicality. Contradiction, that is, falsehood, is its most durable and

distinctive character, the one that affirms so categorically what is but pure negation. The

historical period of this metaphysics’ explanation, and its nullity, is one of nihilism. But this

explanation must itself be explained. Once and for all: there is no commodity world, there is

only a commodity perspective on the world.

 

9. Language is not a system of symbols, but the promise of a reconciliation between words

and things. “Its universals are the primary elements in experience; they are not so much

philosophical concepts as they are real qualities of the world as we confront it every day. …

Each substantial universal tends to express qualities that surpass all particular experience,

but which persist in the mind, not as fictions of the imagination or as logical possibilities, but

as the substance, the ‘matter’ our world is made of.” From this it follows that the operation by

which a concept designates a reality is simultaneously the negation and the realization of that

reality. “Thus the concept of beauty encompasses all the beauty not yet realized; the concept

of freedom all the freedoms that not yet attained.” (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man).

Universals have a normative character, which is why nihilism has declared war on them.

“The ens perfectissimum is at the same time the ens realissimum. The more a thing is

perfected, the more it really is.” (Lukacs, Soul and Form). What is excellent is more real,

more general than the mediocre, because it realizes its essence more fully: a specific concept

does indeed unify a specific variety, but it unifies it by aristocratizing it. Critical thought is

thought that brings about an exit from nihilism, starting from a profane transcendence of

language and the world. What is transcendental to critical thought is that the world exists,

and what is unspeakable is that there is a language there. There is an uncommon faculty of

conflagration to a consciousness that spends its time on the edges of such nothingness,

gazing into its abyss. Every time it finds that language to communicate itself, history will be

marked by it.  What’s essential is to concentrate our efforts in that direction. Language is both

what’s at stake and the stage that the decisive part of this will be played out on. “It will

always only be about knowing whether we can reconcile speech and life, and how.” (Brice

Parain, On Dialectics).

 

10. The basis for the “categorical imperative to overturn all the conditions in which man is a

humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, and contemptible being” (Marx) can only be a definition of

man as a metaphysical being; that is, a being open to the experience of meaning. Not even

Hans Jonas, that earthworm of intelligence, who will remain one as long as he exists, has

failed to recognize this: “Philosophically, metaphysics has fallen into disgrace in our days, but

we could not do without it -- so we’ll have to risk going into it anew. Because only

metaphysics is capable of telling us why man must exist, and thus does not have the right to

provoke his disappearance from the world or to permit it by simple negligence; and

also how man must be so as to honor and not betray the reason by virtue of which he must

exist. . .thus we have a renewed need for metaphysics, which must, with its vision, arm us

against blindness” (On the ontological foundations of a ethics of the future).

 

11. We mention in passing that reality is the unity of meaning and life.

 

12. All that is separated remembers that it was once unified, but the object of this memory is

in the future. “The mind is what finds itself, and thus what had gotten lost” (Hegel).

 

 

13. Human freedom has never consisted of being able to go, come, and pass the time as one

pleases- this is more suitable for animals, whichpeople thus say, very significantly, are “at

liberty” - but in giving oneself form, in realizing the figure one contains, or wants. Being

means keeping your word. All of human life is but a bet on transcendence.

People could, in the past, treat such pronouncements with the special and amused contempt

that philistines have always reserved for considerations apparently deprived of any

effectiveness. But meanwhile, the metamorphoses of domination have conferred upon them

an unpleasantly quotidian concreteness. The definitive and historic collapse of really existing

liberalism in 1914 cornered commodity society; revolutionary assaults were making manifest,

in all western countries, the incapacity of the economic perspective to fathom the whole of

man, and finally to ensure the abstract reproduction of its relations.  Thus in order to keep

the fiction of that liberalism feeling obvious, it had to colonize all the spheres of meaning, the

whole territory of appearances and finally, as well, the whole field of imaginary creation, at

first in a state of emergency and then methodically.  In a few words, it had to infest the whole

of the continent of metaphysics in order to ensure its hegemony over all of the earth.

Certainly, the simple fact that the very moment of its apogee, the 19th century, was

dominated not by harmony, but by an absolute, and absolutely false, hostility between the

figures of the Artist and the Bourgeois, was in itself sufficient proof of its impossibility, but it

took the great disasters that washed over the first decades of this century to fill its absurdity

with enough pain to actually make the whole edifice of civilization itself appear to shake.

Commodity domination then learned from those who were against it that it couldn’t content

itself anymore with seeing man simply as a worker, an inert factor in production, but that to

remain what it was, it was going to have to organize the whole of everything that stretched

outside the sphere of material production as well. However repugnant it may have seemed at

the time to it, it had to impose a brusque accelerando on society’s socialization process, and

lay hands on everything it had denied the existence of up to then, all that it had disdainfully

written off as “non-productive activity”, “private fantasy”, art and “metaphysics.”  In the

space of a few years, and at first without significant resistance, Publicity had entirely given

itself over to the arbitrary power of the spectacular protectorate - it is a general fact that the

undertaking of ancient offensives is rarely recognized when they make use of totally new

means. Since the commodity interpretation of the world had been revealed in acts to be

insane, people undertook to put itinto the very heart of all acts. Once commodity mysticism,

which formally and externally postulated the general equivalence of everything, and the

universal interchangeability of all, proved itself to be a pure negation, a morbid official

takeover, people resolved to make all thingsreally equivalent, and

beings inwardly exchangeable. Since the systematic liquidation of all that contained a hidden

transcendence in its immediacy (communities, ethos, values, language, history) put humanity

in a place where it was dangerously likely to make demands for freedom, people decided to

industrially produce cheap transcendences, and to hawk them priced like gold. We stand at

the other extreme of this long night of aberration. Because even as it was its failure that in

the past created the basis for the infinite extension of the world of the economy, the

contemporary accomplishment of this universal extension carries the announcement of its

upcoming collapse.

 

This critical realization process of the ever-impoverished commodity metaphysics has been

referred to variously as “Total Mobilization” by Junger, as the “Great Transformation” by

Polanyi, or the “Spectacle” by Debord. For the time being the lattermost concept remains

indisputably one of the war machines it pleases us to use, as a Figure that transversely

penetrates all the spheres of social activity -- one where the object revealed merges with its

mode of disclosure. Though the Figure can’t be deduced simply from its manifestations, since

it is at their very root, it could nonetheless be useful to take note at least of some of the most

superficial of them. So in the 1920s, advertising took it upon itself to inculcate the Blooms

with “a new philosophy of existence,” in the terms of its first ideologues, Walter Pitkin and

Edward Filene; to present to them the world of consumerism as “the world of acts” with the

declared intention of thwarting the communist offensive. The adjusted production of cultural

commodities and their massive circulation - the lightning deployment of the movie industry is

a good example of this – was responsible for tightening up the control over joyous behavior,

spreading lifestyles adapted to the new demands of capitalism, and above all spreading the

illusion of their viability. Urbanism was responsible for building a physical environment

commanded by the commodity Weltanschauung. The formidable development of the means

of communication and transportation in these years began concretely abolishing space and

time, which had put up such annoying resistance to the universal putting into equivalence of

all things. The mass media then initiated the process by which little by little they

concentrated together into an autonomous monopoly on the production of meaning. Then

they had to extend over the whole realm of the visible a particular mode of disclosure, the

essence of which is that it confers upon the ruling state of things an unshakeable objectivity,

and thus models on the scale of the whole human race a relationship with the world based on

a postulated approval of what exists.  It should also be noted that it was at that time that the

first literary mentions of the repressive function of the Young-Girl were made, by Proust,

Kraus, or Gombrowicz. It was among their contemporaries, after all, that there began to

appear in the productions of the mind the figure of Bloom, so recognizable in the work of

Valery, Kafka, Musil, Michaux or Heidegger.

 

This terminal phase of commodity modernity appears in a necessarily contradictory light,

because in its process it denies itself while realizing itself. On the one hand, at this stage each

of its advances contributes a little more to the destruction of its own foundation -- the

negation of metaphysics, in other words the strict disconnect between the perceptible and the

superperceptible. With the virtually infinite extension of the world of experience, “the

speculations…tend to obtain an increasingly realistic content; on technological grounds, the

metaphysical tends to become physical.” (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man). The separation of

the perceptible and the superperceptible is ever further undermined by the new productions

of industry. “the marvellous and the positive (contract) an astonishing alliance, the two old

enemies swearing to engage us in a race of unlimited transformations and surprises ...The

real no longer has a clear end. Place, time, and matter permit unanticipated liberties.

Precision breeds dreams. Dreams take body. . .The fabulous is today to be found in business.

The manufacture of marvel-making provides the livelihood of the thousands,” remarked

Valery in 1929, with all the disarming naivety of a time when the meaning of life had not yet

become just another consumer product in the shopping cart, just the most hackneyed sales

pitch. Even when the total realization of abstraction - in the mimetic behavior of hip youth, the

televised image, or the new city – makes obvious to everyone the clearly physical character of

metaphysics, Biopower, a differentiated moment of the Spectacle, shamefully admits

the political character - and there is a “metaphysical nugget present in all politics” (Carl

Schmitt, Political Theology) – of the rawest physicality, of “bare life.”  Underneath this

relationship is a process of reunification between the perceptible and the superperceptible,

meaning and life, the mode of disclosure and the object revealed; that implies commodity

society’s complete disavowal of its very basis, but at the same time such reunification only

operateson the terrain of their separation itself. It follows that this pseudo-reconciliation is not

a passage of each of these terms through each other and onto a superior level, but rather

their suppression pure and simple, which brings them together not as united, but as separate.

So much so, that on its flipside the Spectacle presents itself as the realization of commodity

metaphysics, as the realization of nothingness. The commodity here effectively becomes the

form in which all manifestations of life appear, the objective form itself both of object and

subject - love, for example, appears from now on as a regulated exchange of orgasms, favors,

sentiments, where each contracting party is ideally to benefit equally. The Spectacle is no

longer content to externally tie together processes independent of it by monetary mediations.

The commodity, that “superperceptible yet perceptible thing” (Marx), transforms into

something perceptible yet superperceptible. It imposes itselfin reality as the “universal

category of total social being” (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness). Little by little, its

“ghostly objectivity” comes to drape itself over all that exists. At this point, the commodity

interpretation of the world, the only content of which is the affirmation of the quantitative

replaceability of all things, that is to say the negation of all qualitative differences and all real

determinations, reveals itself to be the negation of the world. The principle according to which

“everything has a price” was certainly always the morbid refrain of nihilism before it became

the global hymn of the economy. Also, and this is an everyday experience that no one can

escape, putting this interpretation of the world into acts would consist exclusively in taking

away all the qualities of everything, purging every being of all particular meaning, and

reducing everything to the non-differentiated identity of general equivalence – in a word, to

nothing. There’s no more this or that; and singularity remains but an illusion. What appears

now no longer arrogates to itself any higher organic nature, but gives itself over with infinite

abandon to the simple fact of being, without being anything. Under the effect of this rising

disaster, the world has ended up starting to look like just a chaos of empty forms. All the

pronouncements made above, which people thought were safely cut off from having any

possible effectiveness, take form in the ensembles of a tangible, oppressive, and, to put it

plainly, diabolical reality. In the Spectacle, the metaphysical character of existence is taken as

a obvious, central fact: the world has become visibly metaphysical. Even the narrowest of

minds, whose custom it always was to hide in their comfortable sense of objectivity - whether

it’s rainy weather or nice out – can’t even be spoken of without immediately evoking the

decline of industrial society. There, the light has solidified, the incomprehensible mode of

disclosure that produces all being-there has become incarnate as such, that is to say

independent of all content, in a sprawling sector of social activity all its own. That which

makes things visible itself becomes visible there. Phenomena, by autonomizing themselves

from what they manifest, that is by manifesting no more than nothingness, immediately thus

appear as phenomena. The surroundings man exists in, the metropolis, itself proves to be a

mere “linguistic formation, a constituted framework comprised above all of objectivized

discourses, pre-established codes, materialized grammars.” (Virno, The Labyrinths of

Language). In the end, since “communicative action” is becoming the very material used in

productive activity, the reality of language falls among the number of things that can be

experienced in a mere leisurely way. In this sense, the Spectacle is the final figure of

metaphysics, where it objectivizes itself as such, becomes visible and shows itself to man as

material evidence for the fundamental alienation of the Common.  In these conditions, man’s

metaphysical dimension escapes him, confronts him and oppresses him. But just as well,

before man becomes completely and totally alienated he cannot concretely comprehend it, or

consequently hope to reappropriate it for himself. The darkest days give us the greatest hope,

precisely because they will come on the eve of victories.

 

“It would be ridiculous to reproach chewing gum for being an affront to metaphysics’ good

taste, but one could probably show that Wrigley’s profits and their Chicago palace were due

to its operation of a social function consisting in the reconciliation of men with their

impoverished conditions of existence and dissuading them from criticizing them.  It’s a

matter of explaining  that chewing gum, far from being harmful to metaphysics, is

itself metaphysical.”

(Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms)

As soon as the economy becomes flesh, it must perish like all living things. It falls under the

hard law of the mortal realm, and knows it. In the overthrow of all things, in the chasms that

we see opening up everywhere, we can already see the hints of its impending shipwreck.

Commodity domination has now embarked upon an endless, hopeless war to put up obstacles

to the necessity of this process. It’s no longer a question of whether it will die, but of when it

will die. Life within such an order, which has as its only ambition anymore just to last a little

bit longer, is distinguished by the extreme sadness attached to all its manifestations. Here,

the survival of commodity domination, which is but the prolongation of its death agony, is

hanging from a thin thread: it must ensure that the visible not be seen, and thus must carry

out an ever more brutal takeover of the totality.  It can only exercise its sovereignty under the

constant threat that people might make its metaphysical character explicit, and that it might

be recognized for what it is: it is a tyranny, and the most mediocre tyranny that ever was --

the tyranny of servitude. Everywhere, domination’s efforts to maintain a particular

interpretation of the world that when realized finds that it is itself subject to interpretation end

up more and more tending towards brute force. Certainly, the naturalization of the commodity

mode of disclosure required a constant dose of violence towards humans and things in the

past. It had to raze, intern, enslave, confine, brutalize or imprison in camps the whole mass of

phenomena that contradicted commodity nihilism. For the others, suffering teaches everyone

how to see them only from the point of view of reification, utility, and separation, and

generalized equivalence, over the whole course of their lives, in an uninterrupted manner. But

now a new configuration of hostilities is coming about. Commodity domination can no longer

limit itself to merely keeping its contradictions in a frozen state, getting alienation, corruption

and exile taken for granted by everyone, and repressing any aspirations Man might have to

Being. It must make its progress a forced march, though every step it takes towards its

perfection only brings it closer to the moment of its collapse. With Biopower, which, under the

cover of ameliorating, simplifying and extending “life,” “form,” or “health,” leads to the total

social control of behavior, it has played its last card: by supporting its whole weight on the

cardinal illusion of common sense, the immediacy of the body, it ended up destroying it. After

that, everything is ambiguous now. Bloom’s own body appears like a foreign jurisdiction that

he inhabits against his will. By buying its further survival at the price of putting the

metaphysical to work for it, commodity domination has robbed this terrain of its neutrality,

which alone guaranteed its victorious advancement: it made metaphysics into a material

force. Every bit of progress it makes must henceforth be responded to by a substantial

rebellion that will oppose its faith head on, and which will proclaim in one tone or another that

humanity “can only be revived by a metaphysical act of reawakening the spiritual element

that created or maintained it in its earlier or ideal existence” (Lukacs). And so the commodity

order, which is taking on water everywhere, will have to physically eliminate, one by one, all

extremism or sects, every independent metaphysical universe that may manifest itself, until

the unification and victory of the Imaginary Party. All the individuals that refuse to wallow in

its half-starved immanence, in the nothingness of entertainment, all those who are too slow to

renounce their own most human attributes, and in particular to renounce any concerns

beyond mere being-there, will be excluded, banished, and starved out. For the others, they

must be maintained in an ever more vicious fear. More than ever, “the holders of power live

haunted by the terrifying idea that not only some handful of loners, but entire masses might

one day free themselves of their fear: this would be their certain downfall. It’s also the real

reason for their rage in the face of any and all doctrines of transcendence. There’s a supreme

danger hidden there: that man might lose his fear. There are places on the earth where the

word ‘metaphysics’ itself is hunted down as a heresy.” (Junger, Crossing the Line). In this final

metamorphosis of the social war, where it’s no longer mere classes, but “metaphysical

castes” (Lukacs, On the Poverty of Mind) that enter into conflict with one another, it is

inevitable that men - first a few at a time, and then in their vast numbers - will gather

together with an explicit project: to POLITICIZE METAPHYSICS. From now on, those that do so

are signals of the coming insurrection of the Mind.

Act the Third: “It is necessary to take a position where destruction is not seen as the end

goal, but as the precursor.” (Junger, The Worker)

 

At the moment in the spectacle when commodity domination reveals its metaphysics, and

reveals itself to be metaphysical, its real past and present contestation comes back onto the

stage and reveals itself as such.  It is then that its relatedness to messianic movements,

millenarianisms, mysticisms, the heresies of the past or even with Christians before

Christianity appears.  All “modern” revolutionary thought settles before our very eyes into the

encounter between German Idealism and the concept of Tiqqun, which in the Lurianic

Kabbalah refers to a process – one of redemption, of the restoration of unity between

meaning and life, the repair of all things by the action of human beings. As for its supposed

“modernity,” that in the end it was but the repression of its fundamentally metaphysical

character. Thence the ambiguity of the work of a Marx or a Lukacs, for example. As a rule, the

Spectacle, where we saw the conceptual violence of idealism change

into real,even physical violence, repudiates as “idealist” this very aspect of the thinking of

those it didn’t manage to suppress soon enough.  That is a solid criteria to judge pseudo-

contestation’s consequent criticisms, which are always allied with this society in their

relentless evacuation of all the Unspeakable out of the politically expressible.  Such bastards

can unfailingly be recognized by their rage to understanding nothing, see nothing, and

understand nothing. As long as they live, anxiety, suffering, the experience of nothingness,

the feeling of foreignness to everything – as well as the innumerable manifestations of human

negativity - will be expelled from the gates of Publicity, either with a smile or with a team of

riot police. As long as they live, people will consider them null and void. The historic window

opening at present is the psychological moment that will bring to light the content of truth,

that is, the power of devastation, in all past and present critique. Since commodity domination

has come to fight openly on the metaphysical battlefield, its contestation will have to place

itself on that battlefield as well. This is a necessity which has as little in common with the

good will of militants as it does with the resolve of their cardboard theoreticians: it has to do

with the fact that this society needs that conflict in order to have something to employ all its

accumulated technological powers in. Once again we’re in a high-speed chase where we can’t

just be content to apply critique, but must begin by creating it. It’s about making

criticism possible, and nothing else. Thus, Critical Metaphysics isn’t just another object

jumping up on the world stage in all its definitive splendor; it is what elaborates itself and will

elaborate itself in the fight against the present order. Critical Metaphysics is the determined

negation of commodity domination.

 

Whether this negation manifests itself without betraying itself or whether its forces will be

hijacked once again to serve the calculated spread of disaster has nothing to do with

necessity; it depends on the melancholic decision made by a few free elements bound

together by their determination to make a practical use of their consciousness, in other

words, to sow in the world of the Spectacle a Terror that is the inverse of the terror that reigns

at present. However, the simple fact that, faced with a reality that has taken such a perfectly

systematic turn, it can no longer be contested in its details, leaves no room for ambiguity

about the terrible radicalness of our era. Critique has no choice but to seize things by the

roots; and the root of man is his metaphysical essence. So, when domination consists

in occupying Publicity, building a world of facts piece by piece, a system of conventions and a

mode of perception independent of any relations other than its own, its enemies recognize

one another in their double ambition to destroy the aura of familiarity in what still passes for

“reality” by revealing it to be a mere construct, and to set up symbolic spaces in the recesses

of the present semiocratic tyranny, autonomous from the state of public explanation and

foreign to it, but with as much a claim to universal validity as it has. We must everywhere

contradict People. And that’s what we’re working on, according to our own penchants, when

we reveal the Young-Girl as a political coercion apparatus, the economy as a ritual of black

magic, Bloom as a criminal saintliness, the Imaginary Party as the bearer of a hostility as

invisible as it is absolute, or the corner bakery as a supernatural apparition. It is above all

about bringing out, in everything people say, in everything people do, and in

everything peoplesee, its natural unreality factor. This world will cease to be so monstrous

when it ceases to be taken for granted. And so the whole of our theory is written in everyday

life, where it must obtain, still and forever, all the familiar things that is our duty to render

disturbing. Our maniacal interest for “miscellaneous events” could be related to this, because

in them is the habitual itself uprooting itself from normal habit, the varnish on which thus

suddenly fades away. The lucid and blind violence of a Kipland Kinkel or an Alain Oreiller is a

testimony what happens when one takes a lethal doses of the negative truth of man, that a

well-planned, everyday banality is invariably asphyxiating. Up to a certain point in this

offensive language comprises the field of battle; what we’re doing is burying mines all over it.

This isn’t an arbitrary choice; it’s based on the observation that domination, which

was forced to infest it, will never be at ease there. Though in certain aspects the economy’s

present effectiveness and its apparent durability are based on a free manipulation of signs,

and their operative reduction to signals, it is just as clear that the definitive success of this

reduction will be its death. So that domination can still handle them as its vehicles, the signs

must contain some meaning, that is to say a transcendence which in one way or another goes

beyond the present state of things and the threat of nullity. And there is a contradiction there,

an open wound, that if it were exploited malevolently enough could bring about the downfall

of domination. We’ll provide for that.

 

Critical Metaphysics, in many aspects, pursues and completes the steady undermining

successfully carried on by nihilism for five centuries. The consistency with which all simple

faith in reality found itself, piece by piece, to be first shaken, then damaged, and finally

destroyed, is not unfamiliar to it; it feels no regrets about helping that process. Critical

Metaphysics has no vocation for procuring a new and refined type of consolation for

humanity. Rather, its watchword is: GENERALIZE DISQUIET. Critical Metaphysics itself is this

disquiet, which can no longer be understood as a weakness, or as a vulnerability, but as the

origin of all strength.  It is not there to bring security to the weak in need of help, but to lead

them into battle. It is like a weapon; whoever seizes it can decide who it’s going to serve. In

each life that remains in contact with Being there is a devastating power; and people have no

idea just how intense that power can be. The struggle against the real, taken up before us by

so many others, is getting close to being won, but by the enemy. That’s why, on our wrong-

headed path, we consider the preliminary to everything the pulverization of the last palpable

structure for the apprehension of what exists: the quantitative abstract form of the

commodity, which “for the reified” has become “the form in which its own authentic

immediacy becomes manifest and – as reified consciousness- does not even attempt to

transcend it.  On the contrary, it is concerned to make it permanent by ‘scientifically

deepening’ the laws at work” (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness). Rendering the

wisdom of the world insane is indisputably part of our program, but that’s only the first step.

Critical Metaphysics, rather, is “the spiritual movement that takes nihilism as its terrain and

models itself on it, reflecting it into Being,” (Junger, Treatise of the Rebel), that necessary

force that intends to reverse commodity hegemony by revealing it to be metaphysical. Only

that act of reflecting reality and manifesting it as a mere interpretation, a construct, by

merely showing that the essence of nihilism is not at all nihilist, already

advances beyond nihilism. Everywhere it exposes its viewpoint, Critical Metaphysics marks

being-there with signs contrary to the dominant convention. All reality which it is brought to

bear upon brusquely changes its meaning, and its proportions are inverted: what had always

appeared to be a few mere remains on the margins of the Spectacle proves to be the most

real thing, what people had always thought of as the very world itself is rendered to its

miniscule misery, that which appears firmly established begins to totter, what seemed to be

of such airy consistency acquires a rock-hard presence. Thus Critical Metaphysics reveals the

insignificance to which all being-there is reduced in the Spectacle, that false unity of meaning

and life (false because it is abstract) - not as an insignificant fact, but as a political situation of

servitude, a concrete form of social oppression. In so doing, it puts this insignificance into

possession of a multiplied reality that nothing in this world can lay claim to.  But what it

pushes into presence, and makes audible and thus real, is really all the non-identity that had

been repressed to the feeble light of the infraspectacular world, everything that was neither

expressible nor admissible in the dominant mode of disclosure. By starting from nothingness,

Critical Metaphysics creates a truer, more compact, and looser fullness than the apparent

fullness of the Spectacle: the fullness of dereliction, the absoluteness of disaster. In revealing

to human suffering its political significance, it abolishes it as such and makes it the harbinger

of a superior state. This goes equally well for anxiety, where what exists itself goes beyond

what exists: once this experience is driven into the heart of Publicity, the finite as such falls

apart and comes back together as a sign of the infinite. But the transfiguration that Critical

Metaphysics is synonymous with operates first of all in man dispossessed of all that he’d

believed was his own, in Bloom, who thus recognizes the nothingness left for him to share in

as the only thing really of his own that he’s ever had: his indestructible metaphysical faculty.

The idea of the Imaginary Party, hence, gives form to that residue, to that remainder, to non-

coincidence, to everything that falls outside of the universal plane of the economy, forced

takeover, and Total Mobilization. Thus, Critical Metaphysics is the doctrine of transcendence

which alone permits a liberation from and annihilation of this world, draws up the prologue for

all future insurrections, and affirms itself as the determined negation of commodity

domination, and simultaneously it already contains, in its present manifestations, the positive

transcendence that goes beyond the zones of destruction. “Each man,” it says, “exercises a

certain intellectual activity, adopts a vision of the world, follows a conscious line of moral

conduct, and thus contributes to the defense and victory of a certain vision of the world.”

(Gramsci, Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture). Consequently Critical Metaphysics

will come to impose itself as an always more inflexible and virulent injunction to each Bloom

to become conscious of the worldview underlying his lifestyle, then, either rejecting or

appropriating it, to recognize his peers and adversaries, and thus, fundamentally, to awaken

to the world. We won’t grant anyone the leisure of failing to understand the importance of

their existence. Everything is bound to everything else. We will make people lose even

their taste for consumption. Critical Metaphysics is thus not content to consider everything

from the point of view of Tiqqun, in other words of the unity of the world, the final realization

of all things, the immanence of meaning in life; it produces that unity, this realization and this

immanence in its practical and exemplary character. It is itself part of the world of Tiqqun. In

its everyday existence, Critical Metaphysics is the perspective from which the Beautiful, the

Good and the True have already ceased to be contradictorily perceived. Because nihilism is

the “provisional loss of the opening where a certain interpretation of being-there constitutes

itself as interpretation” (Junger) and Critical Metaphysics presents itself as a general

injunction to determine oneself starting from the metaphysical character of the world, it

constitutes by its own trajectory the fulfillment and the transcendence of nihilism; that is, in

the words of Heidegger - that old swine - “The Appropriation of metaphysics,” “The

Appropriation of the forgetting of Being.”  In the first place it’s about distancing yourself from

the world as it is in representation; it “appears at first as a transcendence of metaphysics...

But what happens in the appropriation of metaphysics, and there alone, is rather that the

truth of metaphysics comes flooding back, the lasting truth of an apparently repudiated

metaphysics, which is nothing else but its henceforth reappropriated essence: its Dwelling.

What’s happening here is something different from a restoration of metaphysics,” (Heidegger,

Contribution to the Question of Being).

“On Saturday, she’d left work while saying to her colleagues, as if it were a joke: ‘I’m leaving

a little early today, I’m going to go throw myself into the Seine.’ The body of this resident of

Villeneuve-Le-Roi (Val-de-Marine), 45 years of age, was recovered from the river yesterday

morning by firemen.” (Libération, Monday November 30, 1998)

For the community of critical metaphysicians, there is now nothing more concrete than this

Appropriation and this Dwelling, even if they still provisionally present themselves in the form

of problems to solve, rather than as immediately given solutions. To whatever extent they can

within the constraints imposed on them by this society, they are doubtless now building,

somewhere in the crevices of the metropolises, a really – that is, collectively –

practiced ethos where “Metaphysics (is) part of the everyday practice of life” (Artaud). One

would be wrong to see this as a comfortable alternative to taking up arms and going on the

attack.  Contrary to what certain hasty leftists would have us believe, in the current

conditions, the immediate issue for revolutionary practice is not direct struggle against

commodity domination, since that unavoidably crumbles away, “and what crumbles away

may crumble away, but it cannot be destroyed.” (Kafka) Thus one must instead leave that old

whore to decompose insipidly, and prepare for the moment to come to deliver a fatal blow it

can’t recover from; this means uniting, by any means necessary, all the particular forces

currently confronting commodity hegemony -- in other words, building the Imaginary Party.

Solely because of the fact that “in a world of lies, lies cannot be eliminated by their opposite,

but only by a world of truth” (Kafka), those whose vocation is but to destroy have no choice

but to work for the formation, in the infra-spectacular space, of such “worlds of truth” if

nevertheless they intend to become something other than the sworn professionals of social

contestation.  Among the ruins, the positive elaboration of forms of life, community and

affectivity independent and superior to the icy waters of spectacular morals is an act of

sabotage where the power capable of defeating the imperium of abstraction acts without

appearing. It thus comprises the sine qua non condition for all effective contestation, because

unless they gather into mental families, those opposed to this society have zero chance of

survival. Nevertheless, nothing will be able to prevent the critical metaphysicians from

rallying to all agitation that explicitly attacks commodity domination, and fomenting some of

their own too. We will never give up disrupting the dreary ceremony of the world. But such

acts on our part will be falsely understood if without the understanding that they make sense

only in the broader construction of a lifestyle that war has a place in. The peaceful

coexistence of universal mutual ridicule, which makes our times such a strong emetic, is one

of those things we intend to bring to a bloody end. It is intolerable that truth and falsehood go

on living at peace with one another. The mutual compromise of so many viscerally

irreconcilable metaphysics, in the baroque pay-toilet of the Spectacle, is one of the means at

the enemy’s command for breaking down even the liveliest of minds.  Human beings will have

to agree to express their disagreements, trace out the clear borders between the different

metaphysical homelands, and thus put an end to the world of confusion, where no one can

recognize their brothers nor their enemies anymore. The interminable disputation of

theologians comprises a model for social life. The utopia of Tlön does not displease us. We

grant no laurels to the love of those who were never able to hate, nor to the peace of those

who have never done battle. Therefore, in daring to act in such a way as to make “the utopian

rejection of the conventional world objectivizes itself in a likewise existent reality, so that

polemical refusal actually becomes the central form of the work” (Lukacs, Theory of the

Novel), our search for chances to quarrel with those whose metaphysics are objectively

adverse to ours is no less important than is our quest to find our brothers dispersed in Exile.

The object of authentic community can only be the conscious construction of the Common

itself, that is to say the creation of the world, or, to be more exact, the creation of a world.

This is why critical metaphysicians are so particularly concerned with

composing, together, the true alphabet whose application gives meaning to things, beings,

and discourses; in other words with reconstituting a hidden order within reality, where what

exists would cease to drown them and at last present itself in the familiar form of figures,

rather than as faces, in Gombrowicz’ sense. It’s about elevating elective affinity up to the free

construction of a common mode of reality-disclosure. We must make our individual

perceptions and our moral sentiments a collective creation. Such is the task. But here we can

already feel - along with an objective feeling of evil - an inexorable shiver of vice, like one

gets when fucking a Young-Girl, or shopping in a supermarket. In each of our enemies, the

postmodernist, the Young-Girl, the sociologist, the manager, the bureaucrat, the artist or the

intellectual, all defects that can easily all come together in just one scumbag, we see only

their metaphysics. Our “power of voluntary hallucination” has gone beyond such a degree of

coherence to where now everything speaks to us of what we are doing – and that’s just what

our messianic era is all about: the re-absorption of the element of time in the element of

meaning. Those who believe they can build a new world without building a new language are

fooling themselves: the whole of this world is contained in its language. Ours does not hide its

imperialist vocations any more than any other does: all poetry, all thought, all imagination

that doesn’t manage to become effective, when that becomes possible, doesn’t even rise

above the pathetic rank of cutesy crap.  Roger Gilbert-Lecomte gives this observation an

expression we find perfectly suitable: “the birth of concrete thought (experimental

metaphysics), by drawing upon the vision in its artistic expression, will transform its

knowledge into power.” He has also remarked that “the experimental metaphysician bets on

his disequilibrium, which gives him various different perspectives on reality.” Quite true. A

world made of ideas is also a world at the mercy of ideas, as long as they rule arbitrarily. The

matter that absorbs us, in sum, is the realization of the concrete utopia of a world where each

of the great metaphysics, each of the great “languages of creation”, among which there can

be “no overtaking nor doubling” (Peguy) can finally and in the full sense of the

word inhabit the world, come into a kingdom of its own, and lose itself unrestrainedly in

inexhaustible holy wars, schisms, sects and heresies, where the immanence of meaning in life

will be rediscovered, where language will draw upon Being and Being language, where the

metaphysical will no longer be a discourse, but the fecund tissue of existence, where each

community will be another unique space within a reappropriated common, where man, giving

up disguising his insoluble relationship with the world with the stupid and crude lie of private

property, will truly open himself to the experience of anguish, ecstasy, and abandon. Life does

not delight in our consciousness of it and its form is still experienced as suffering; this shows

that we are living in times nearing their end. As for us, we announce a world where man will

espouse his destiny as the tragic play of his freedom. There is no life more properly human

than that. Doubtless the critical-metaphysicians carry in their unreason the outcome of the

disaster. And even if we must succumb to the powers that this world will have unleashed

against us, we will have at least presaged that happy time when there will be no more

metaphysics, because all men will be metaphysicians, living bearers of the Absolute.  Then

we’ll understand that up to now nothing’s happened.

Bloom Theory

tiqqun

Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form.  Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek

hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes.  He bent down to

her, his hands on his knees.

“Milk for the pussens,” he said.

“Mrkgnao!” the cat cried.

They call them stupid.  They understand what we say better than we understand them.   

James Joyce, Ulysses

At this hour of the night

The great watchmen are dead.

Doubtless THEY killed them.

The weak glow of their solitary stubbornness disturbed the party of sleep too much.  That, at

least, is what we think, we guess – we who’ve come so late – in light of the perplexity that

their name still stirs up at certain times.

Every living trace of what they did and were has been erased, it seems, by the maniacal

obstinacy of resentment.  In the end, all that’s left of them for this world is a handful of dead

images that it still haloes with the villainous satisfaction of having conquered those who were

better than it is.

So here we are, orphans of grandeur, marooned in a world of ice where no fires light the

horizon.  Our questions have to remain unanswered, the old ones assure us; then they say, all

the same: “there’s never been a blacker night for intelligence.” 

Who Are You Really?

The pretty, snow-blanketed countryside slips fast across the window.  It won’t be long now

until the trip between V. and R., which in the old days would’ve been a matter of weeks, will

be over.  For less than an hour, you’ve been the occupant of some seat or another in one of

the twenty identical cars of this high speed train, one of so many.  The regular - doubtless

optimal - arrangement of the seats spreads out in an abstract harmony of gentle neon.  The

train follows along its rails, and in this train car, so seamlessly in harmony with the idea of

order, it seems that human reality itself travels along invisible rails.  A clean and polite

indifference inhabits the space that separates you from the lady sitting in the seat next to

you.  Neither of you will have your trip disturbed by the superfluous need to even say a word,

much less strike up a conversation.  That would disturb your distraction, and, in the case of

your neighbor, her applied study of the feminine press (“how to sleep with a guy without him

knowing,” “soft flirting,” “gifts with meaning,” “is he a good lay?” “who are you REALLY?”

etc.).  And when her cell phone rings, the young woman doesn’t think it necessary to get up,

either: “hello? … listen, what do you mean you’re not there? … are you shitting me? … listen,

I’ve been stuck with the kids for the past three weekends, I work all week, and it’s already a

bitch finding time to live, man… no, no, no, I just can’t, that’s all… deal with it, it’s not my

problem… everyone’s gotta have their own social life; I’ve already wrecked mine enough…

how many times do I have to tell you: I’m going out with Jerry this weekend, and that’s all

there is to it… oh yeah, is that so?  With the kid putting me through his freak-outs all day,

sniveling about “where’s daddy?” … well come on, ‘cause you’re his father! … it’s out of the

question… I don’t give a fuck, you’re taking care of them this weekend… well too bad for her,

all you had to do was find a little more of a peacemaker… I’m warning you, if there’s no one

there, I’m leaving them with the doorman… well hell yes; I’m being completely

reasonable…  that’s all, then; ciao.”

The scene repeats itself in all its banality.  More – obviously – of the same.  It’s like a slap in

the face when it happens; it’s brutal at first - but we should’ve been preparing for it for years,

after all, considering how scrupulously we’ve worked to become perfect strangers to each

other: blank existences, indifferent presences, no depth.  At the same time, nothing in this

situation could be so easily acceptable to everyone if we weren’t absolutely intimate in this

foreignness.  So, that foreignness also had to become the figure of our relationship with

ourselves; and really, from all angles – we are Blooms.

If Bloom is also found in a certain book, it’s because all of us have already crossed paths with

him in the street, then, later, in ourselves.  This just confirms it.

One day you pay more attention than usual to the collective silence on a metro line, and are

overtaken by a deep shiver, a primal horror, coming out from behind the shared fakery of

contemporary morals and suddenly plain for all to see.

The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses, mass-man; that’s how

THEY represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes, as the

catastrophic child of the industrial era and the end of all enchantments.  But even there, no

matter the name, there’s still that shiver; THEY shiver before the infinite mystery of ordinary

man.  Each of us feels a pure force growing behind the theater of our qualities, hiding out

there; a pure force that we’re all supposed to ignore.

What’s left is the necessary anxiety we think we can appease by demanding of one another a

rigorous absence from each other’s selves, and an ignorance of a force which is common, but

is now unqualifiable, because it is anonymous. And the name of that anonymity is Bloom.

Kairos [the right moment]

In spite of the extreme confusion that reigns on its surface, and perhaps precisely because of

that, our era is by its nature messianic.  

What should be understood by this is that very old distinctions have now been effaced, and

that many thousand-year-old divisions have now in turn been divided.

Our era is reducing itself to one single, basic reality, and to amusement in that reality.  More

and more visibly, our contemporary non-societies - those imperative fictions - endlessly

populate themselves with pariahs and parvenus.  And the parvenus are themselves merely

pariahs that have betrayed their condition and would like to make it forgotten by all means --

but it always ends up biting them in the ass. One might also say, following another line of

demarcation, that there’s nothing left of these times but idlers and the disturbed, and that the

disturbed are in the end no more than idlers trying to cheat on their own essential

inaction.  Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life,” which seems to be so many

desperate people’s last reason to live, ever really distract them fully from the fundamental

emotional tone that inhabits them: boredom?

The reigning confusion is the result of the planetary deployment of all these false

paradoxes, under which our central truth nevertheless is born.  And this truth is that we are

tenants of an existence which is a kind of exile, in a world which is a desert, that we’ve

been thrown outinto this world with no mission to accomplish, with no place assigned us, and

no recognizable filiation – abandoned.  That we are at the same time so little and already too

much.  

True politics, ecstatic politics, begins there.  With a brutal and all-enveloping laugh.  With a

laugh that undoes the pathos oozing out of the so-called problems of “joblessness,”

“immigration,” “precariousness,” and “marginalization.”

There’s no social problem in unemployment, just the metaphysical fact of our own idleness.    

There’s no social problem in immigration, just the metaphysical fact of our own foreignness.

There’s no social problem in precariousness or marginalization, just this inexorable existential

reality that we’re all alone, dying of it alone in the face of death,

that we are all, for all eternity, finite beings.  

You decide what’s serious about that and what’s just social entertainment.

The era that opened in 1914, where the illusion of “modern times” completed its

decomposition while simultaneously metaphysics completed itsself-realization, saw the

ontological burst out into history in its pure state and on all levels.  Such tectonic upsurges of

truth appear in those rare moments where the lie of civilizations starts to crumble.  Our times

are part of a curious constellation, which includes the decline of the middle ages and the first

Gnostic centuries of our era.  The same Mood [Stimmung] expresses itself everywhere, with

the same radicalness: finiteness, perdition, separation.  “Modern times” and the Christian

west were born before that from such outbursts, as a reaction.  

This kinship keeps us from considering the emotional tone that dominated the twentieth

century as simple “malaise in civilization.”  And it’s not about subjective dispositions, nor

some capricious propensity towards despair or disapproval: no, this tone is, on the contrary,

the mostobvious one of our era, one that THEY work ceaselessly to repress, at every stage in

its advancement.

It’s not that men have - negatively - “lost their bearings”; it’s rather that they have positively

become Blooms.

BLOOM IS THE FINAL UPSURGE OF THE NATIVE.

From now on there’s nothing anywhere but Bloom and Bloom’s escape.

He saw no more future before him, and the past, in spite of all his efforts to consider it

explainable, resembled something incomprehensible. The justifications were scattered about

like crumbs, and the feeling of pleasure seemed more exhausted every day.  Travels and long

walks, which long ago gave him a mysterious joy, had become strangely odious to him.  […]

He was neither truly a man without a country, nor did he feel honestly and naturally at home

anywhere in the world.  He would have liked very much to have been an organ player, or a

beggar, or a cripple, so as to have some reason to ask for men’s pity and charity; but even

more ardently than that he wished to die.  He was not dead, and yet he was dead; he was not

poor to the point of having to beg, and yet was indeed a beggar, though he did not beg; even

now he still dressed elegantly, even now he still humbled himself before people like a

mechanical, annoying girl, uttered clichés and got upset about and horrified by them.  How

atrocious his own life appeared to him, his soul false, and his miserable body dead, the whole

world foreign, and the movements, things and events that surrounded him so empty.  

 Robert Walser, Short Essays

Stimmung [mood/tone]

Kafka’s characters are in a fundamental sense the same thing as Kafka’s world.

Understanding the figure of Bloom doesn’t just require renouncing the classical idea of the

subject, which is no big deal; it also requires abandoning the modern concept of objectivity.

The term “Bloom” doesn’t in some exotic way fill the need for a word in the current lexicon to

designate a new human type that has recently appeared on the surface of the planet that we

should defend ourselves from.

“Bloom,” rather, is the name of a certain Stimmung [mood], a fundamental tonality of being.

This Stimmung doesn’t come from the subject, like a kind of fog clouding perception, or from

the object, as a liquefied version of the Spirit of the World; rather it is the basis upon

which the subject and the object, the self and the world, could exist as such in the classical

age, i.e., as clearly distinct from one another.

Because it’s “how” every being is the way he or she is, this tonality is not something unstable,

fleeting, or simply subjective; rather it is precisely what gives consistency and possibility to

each being.  Bloom is the Stimmung in which and by which we understand each other at the

present time, without which these words would be no more than a succession of meaningless

phonemes.

Historically, Bloom is the name for an uncommon Stimmung: one that corresponds to the

moment the subject retreats from the world and the world from the subject, the moment

when the self and the real are suddenly suspended, and just might have been abolished.  For

that reason Bloom is the general stimmung where nothing but Stimmungs are apparent,

where the primacy of the stimmung over all other realities manifests itself as such.

Since it always impregnates beforehand all the conceptual instruments by which PEOPLE

might claim to understand it, the Stimmung cannot be understood, circumscribed, or analyzed

"objectively," no matter how much one might be able to feel it.  The best we can draw out of it

is the Figure that corresponds to it, in the sense where a Figure is a human power to configure

worlds.  What we're aiming at with this "theory" is therefore indeed a Stimmung, but we're

doing so by seizing upon a Figure.

Bloom also refers to the spectral, wandering, sovereignly vacant humanity that can no longer

rise to any other content besides that of the Stimmung that it ex-ists in, to that twilight being

for which there is no more real, no more I, only Stimmungs. 

Mundus Est Fabula [the world is a fiction]

Because Bloom is he who can no longer separate himself from the immediate context

containing him, his gaze is that of a man that does not identify.  Everything blurs under the

Bloom effect and is lost in the inconsequential wavering of objective relationships where life is

felt negatively, in indifference, impersonality, and the lack of quality.  

Bloom lives inside of Bloom.

Spread out all around us is a petrified world, a world of things where we ourselves, with our

"I," our gestures, and even our feelings figure in as things.  Nothing can belong to us as truly

our own in such a landscape of death.  We are more and more like exiles, never sure of

understanding what's happening all around.  

In spite of this gigantic relinquishment, in spite of the inexplicable suspended-animation that

now strikes everything that exists, the overall mechanism continues to function like it was

nothing, processing our isolation.

In this perpetually renovated empire of ruins, there's nowhere for us to take refuge, and we

don't even have the ability to desert it all by withdrawing into ourselves.  We've been

delivered up, without appeal, to a finiteness with no landmarks to orient us, totally exposed

across the whole surface of our being.    

Bloom is thus that man whom nothing can save from the triviality of the world.  A reasonable

mind might conclude: "Well, then, in fact, Bloom is alienated man."  But no, Bloom is man so

completely mixed up with his own alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate him

out from it.

Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we wander among

the abysses.  Our path, which could easily have come to an end yesterday or years back, has

no reason and no necessity outside of that of its own contingency.  It’s a wandering path, one

that carries us from the same to the same on the road of the Identical; and wherever we go

we carry within ourselves the desert that we're the hermits in.  And if some days we might

swear that we are the "whole universe," like Agrippa de Nettesheim did, or more ingenuously

that we are "all things, all men and all animals," like Cravan, it's just that all we see in

everything is the Nothing which we ourselves so totally are.

But that Nothingness is the absolutely real, in the light of which everything that exists

becomes somehow ghostly.  

 [fragrance]

Nothing's more impenetrable to Bloom than those men of the Ancien Regime who claim to

participate fully and immediately in life and have such a firm feeling of their present

incarnation, of their existence, and of its continuity.  For us, wherever we look, we never find

this solid, massive "I," this substance of our own that we are so generously given as soon as

we claim to exist.

In the same way as all harmonious moral philosophy which might have given consistency to

the illusion of an "authentic" self is now lacking, everything that could have made one believe

in the unambiguousness of life or in the formal positivity of the world has been scattered as

well.  In truth, our "sense of what's real" never ends up as more than a limited modality of

that "sense of the possible which is the faculty of thinking through all the things that might ‘as

well’ be and give no more importance to everything that is than one gives to what is not."

(Musil,The Man without Qualities).  Under commodity occupation the most concrete

truth about everything is the truth of its infinite replaceability.  

All the situations that we find ourselves engaged in bear, in their equivalence to one another,

the infinitely repeated stamp of an irrevocable "as if."  We collaborate in the maintenance of a

"society" as if we were not part of it; we conceive of the world as if we didn't ourselves occupy

a specific situation within it; and we continue to grow old as if we had to always remain

young.  In a word: we live as if we were already dead.

And that's certainly the most painful paradox of Bloom's existence: he can no longer hear the

voice of his living body, the speech of his physiology.  And this at the very moment that

PEOPLE want at every instant to make them mean something sexual.  

Whether Bloom's flesh is the body of a woman or of a man, or even a body with indiscernible

form, it is always the prisoner of the non-sensual sexualization it’s riddled with.  But this

sexualization, which is omnipresent and at the same time never really lived, is but the source

of a deaf and persistent suffering, like amputees feeling their phantom limbs.  From this

comes the essentially spectral character, the sinister aura of contemporary mass

pornography: it is never more than the presence of an absence.  In Bloom's world – a world

made fully semiotic – a phallus or a vagina are but symbols referring to something else, to a

reference that can no longer be found in a reality that never stops fading away. Bloom's flesh

is sad and has no mystery to it.

It's not sex that has to be re-invented: we're already living among the ruins of sexuality, and

our bodies themselves are but relics therein. Bloom cannot transform the gender roles that he

has inherited due to the shortcomings of traditional societies, frozen as he is in an

unstoppable pre-pubescent phase.  Both male Blooms and female Blooms thus go through the

same old tired dance, to the tune of the classic gender roles.  But their gestures fall

apart.  Their dance is awkward.  They stumble.  And it's painful to watch.  

A thing among things, Bloom keeps himself outside of it all with an abandonment identical to

that of his world.  He's alone in every kind of company, and naked in all circumstances.  That's

where he rests, in extenuated self-ignorance, away from his desires and the world, where life

rolls the rosary-beads of his absence day after day.  All lived content is indifferently

interchangeable for him, as he passes through it in a kind of existential tourism. 

We've unlearned joy like we've unlearned suffering; we've become emotional illiterates; we

only perceive diffracted echoes of feelings. Everything's worn out, in our late-in-coming eyes;

even unhappiness.  And that, in sum, is perhaps the real disaster: that nowhere do we find

support, doubt, or certainty.

Everything I do and think is but a Specimen of my possibilities.  Man is more general than his

life and acts.  More possibilities than I could ever imagine fit perfectly into the expected.  Mr.

Teste says: My possibilities never abandon me.

Valéry, Monsieur Teste [Mr. Head]

For a being who feels attached to life no more than by so tenuous a bond, freedom has such

an incomplete and yet final meaning that it can no longer be taken away from him: the

freedom to carry into his becoming a certain sense of the theatrical uselessness of

everything, a terminal manner of spectatorship on the world, even of being a spectator of

himself.  In the eternal Sunday of his existence, Bloom’s interests thus remain forever

emptied of any object, and that’s why Bloom is himself the man without

interest.  Here, disinterestedness, in the sense where we don’t manage to have any

importance in our own eyes, but also in the sense where the bourgeois category of interest

can no longer strictly account for any of our acts, is no longer an expression of individual

idealism, but a mass phenomenon.

Assuredly, man is something that’s been transcended.  

All those that loved their virtues have perished – at the hand of their virtues.

“Everyone is more foreign to himself than to anyone else.”

Bloom’s fundamental experience is that of his own transcendence of himself, but this

experience, in spite of how nice it sounds, is above all one of impotence, an experience of

absolute suffering.

Whatever high esteem we’d like to hold ourselves in, we are not subjects, finished products,

autarchic and sovereign even in our allegiances.

We evolve in a space that is entirely sectioned off and policed; a space occupied, on the on

hand, by the Spectacle, and on the other, by Biopower.  And what’s terrible about this

gridding, this occupation, is that the submission it demands of us is nothing that we could

rebel against with some definitive break-away gesture, but something that we can only deal

with strategically.

The regime of power that we live under in no way resembles that which could have run its

course under administrative monarchy, that expired concept which up until recently, that is,

even within biopolitical democracies, remained the only enemy recognized by revolutionary

movements: a simple restriction mechanism, a purely repressive mechanism of coercion. 

The contemporary form of domination, on the contrary, is essentially productive.

On the one hand it rules all the manifestations of our existence – the Spectacle; on the other,

it generates the conditions for it – Biopower.

The Spectacle is the kind of Power that wants you to talk, that wants you to be someone.

Biopower is benevolent power, full of a pastor’s concern for his flock; the kind of Power that

wants its subjects to be safe, that wants you to live.  Caught in the vise of a kind of control

that is simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, walled into a double constraint that

annihilates us by the same stroke with which it makes us exist, the majority of us take up a

kind of politics of disappearance: feigning an inner death and keeping our silence, like

captives before the Grand Inquisitor.  By subtracting all positivity and subtracting itself from

all positivity, these specters steal from a productive power the very thing it might have

exerted itself upon.  Their desire to not live is all that they have the strength to counterpose

to a power that intends to make them live.  In so doing, they remain in Bloom, and often end

up buried there.

So this is what Bloom means: that we don’t belong to ourselves, that this world

isn’t our world.  That it’s not just that it confronts us in its totality, but that even in the most

proximate details it is foreign to us.  This foreignness would be quite enjoyable if it could

imply an exteriority of principles between it and us.  Far from it.  Our foreignness to the world

consists in the fact that the stranger, the foreigner, is in us, in the fact that in the world of the

authoritarian commodity, we regularly become strangers to ourselves.  The circle of situations

where we’re forced to watch ourselves act, to contemplate the action of a “me” in which we

don’t recognize ourselves, now closes up on and besieges us, even in what bourgeois society

still calls our “intimacy.”  The Other possesses us; it is this dissociated body, a simple

peripheral artifact in the hands of Biopower; it is our raw desire to survive in the intolerable

network of miniscule subjugations, granulated pressures that fetter us to the quick; it is the

ensemble of self-interested contrivances, humiliations, pettiness; the ensemble of tactics that

we mustdeploy.  It is the whole objective machine that we sacrifice to inside ourselves.  

THE OTHER IS THE ECONOMY IN US.

Bloom also means that each person knows for himself that he is not himself.  Even if

momentarily, faced with such and such a person - and most frequently in anonymous

interactions - we might get an impression to the contrary, we still retain at bottom that feeling

that this is an inauthentic existence, an artificial life.  The internal presence of the Other takes

shape on every level of our consciousness: it’s a slight and constant loss of being, a

progressive drying-out, a little death doled out continually.  In spite of this, we persist in

assuming the external hypothesis of our identity with ourselves; we play the subject.  A

certain shame accompanies this shredding process and evolves with it.  So we try evasion; we

project ourselves ever more violently to the outside, towards wherever is as far away as

possible from this terrifying internal tension.  We feel the need to let nothing about it appear,

to glue ourselves to our social “identity,” to remain foreign to our foreignness: TO KEEP AN

AIR OF COMPOSURE before the field of ruins.

This lie is in our every gesture.

That’s the essential thing.

It’s no longer time to make literature out of the various combinations of disaster.

Up to now, too much has been written, and not enough thought about Bloom.

Ens Realissimum [the most real being]

The Ptolemean, when looking inside of himself, only found “two phenomena: sociology and

emptiness.”  And we must begin there: not from what we think we are – sociology – but  from

what we intimately feel ourselves to lack, because that’s the most real thing, the ens

realissimum.  Bloom doesn’t mean that we’re failed subjects compared to the classical subject

and its superb sufficiency; rather it revealsthat there is a principle of incompleteness at the

very basis of human existence, a radical insufficiency.  What we are is precisely this failure,

which can, if it so desires, choose to put on the mask of subjecthood.

What’s certain is that we’re nothing, nothing but the nothingness around which spins the

movement of our ideas, our experiences, our miseries, and our feelings.  What’s certain is

that we are the empty axis of this pit without walls, an axis that does not exist in and of itself,

but only because every circle has its center.  But this hopeless deficiency itself can be

understood as an ultimate positivity, which is expressed as follows:

I AM THE INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN WHAT I AM

AND WHAT I AM NOT.

Bloom is indeed such an intermediary, but he’s a passive one; he’s the witness to his own

desubjectivation, to his endless becoming-otherwise.  He conceals within him a primordial

differentiation: knowing that we are not what we are, and that none of our particular

attributes can really exhaust our potential.  

Incompleteness is the mode of being of everything that remains in contact with potential; the

form of existence of everything devoted tobecoming.

The Most Disturbing Guest

Because he is the emptiness in all substantial determinations, Bloom is indeed the most

disturbing guest within man, the one who goes from being a simple invitee to becoming the

master of the house.  Ever since he took up residence inside us, we’ve found ourselves

saddled with a purely sartorial being.  Whatever we undertake to try to buy back some

substantiality, it ends up only ever being just something contingent and inessential relative to

our selves.  Bloom is thus the name of a new, ageless nudity, the properly human nudity that

disappears under every attribute and nonetheless bears it, which precedes all form and

renders it possible.

Bloom is masked Nothingness.  That’s why it would be absurd to celebrate his appearance in

history as the birth of a particular human type: that there are such men without qualities is

not a certain quality of mankind; but on the contrary this is mankind as such, as mankind; the

final realization of a generic human essence which is precisely a deprivation of essence, pure

exposedness, pure availability: larva.

The bourgeois republic can flatter itself that it was the first historical expression of any

magnitude of this controlled ecstasy, and in the end the model for it.  In it, in an

unprecedented manner, the existence of man as a singular being finds itself formally separate

from man’s existence as a member of the community.  Thus, in the bourgeois republic, where

man is an acknowledged, veritable subject, he is abstracted from all qualities specific to him,

and is a figure with no reality to it, a “citizen”; and where in his own eyes, as in the eyes of

others, he passes for a real subject – in his everyday existence – he is a figure with no truth,

an “individual.”  The classical era has in a way established the principles whose application

has made man what we know him to be: the aggregation of a double nothingness: that of a

“consumer,” thatuntouchable, and that of a “citizen,” that pathetic abstraction of impotence.  

But the more the Spectacle and Biopower perfect each other, the more autonomy is obtained

by appearances and the basic conditions of our existence, the more their world detaches from

men and becomes foreign to them; and the more Bloom draws back into himself, deepening

and recognizing his interior sovereignty relative to objectivity.  And as he detaches ever more

painlessly from his social decisions and from his “identity,” he gets stronger as a pure force of

negation, beyond all effectiveness.

The condition of exile in the unrepresentable that men and their common world are in

coincides with the situation of existential clandestinitywhich befalls them in the Spectacle.

That condition is a manifestation of the absolute singularity of each social atom as the

absolutely anonymous, ordinary social atom, and its pure differentiation as pure nothingness.

It is assuredly true that, as the Spectacle never tires of repeating, Bloom is positively

nothing.  But as to what this “nothing” means, interpretations vary.

 - Having come to this point, all sane minds would conclude from all this that it would be

constitutionally impossible to come up with any kind of a “Theory of Bloom” and would leave

this path, as they should.  The cleverest will probably cough up some fallacious reasoning like

“Bloom is nothing; there’s nothing to be said about nothing, and therefore there is nothing to

be said about Bloom, QED” and will then surely regret having wasted their time on the

present writing to the neglect of their fascinating “scientific study of the French intellectual

world.”  For those of you who in spite of the obvious absurdity of our topic of discussion here

continue to read on, you should always keep in mind the necessarily vacillating character of

all discourse regarding Bloom.  Really dealing with the human positivity of pure nothingness

can only mean exposing the most perfect lack of qualities as itself being a quality, and

exposing the most radical insubstantiality as substance, even at the risk of ending up giving a

face to something that’s invisible.  Such a discourse, if it does not wish to betray its object,

must let its object emerge only so as to let it disappear once more the very next instant, and

so on ad infinitum. –

A Small Chronicle of Disaster

The I has a content that distinguishes it from itself, because it is either pure negativity or a

splitting movement; it is consciousness.  This content, in its differentiation, is also the I,

because it is the movement of self-suppression or that same pure negativity which is I.

- Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind

Although Bloom is the fundamental possibility that man never ceases to contain,

the real possibility of possibility, and has for that reason been described, felt out, and

practiced many times over the centuries – both by the Gnostics in the first centuries of our era

and by the heretics of the end of the Middle Ages (the brethren of the Free Spirit, the

kabbalists, or the Rhenan mystics), by Buddhists as much as by Coquillards [large bandit

groups of 1450s France] – Bloom nevertheless only appears as the dominant figure within the

historical process at the moment when metaphysics reaches its completion, that is, in the

Spectacle.

The generation that perceived the face of the Gorgon, squinting through the steely storm -

the generation of expressionism, futurism, constructivism, Dada, surrealism – was the first to

bear this terrible secret all together at once.  There it experienced some thing whose

radicalness and white-hot calcination could not find any suitable expression even in all the

vertigo of the 1920s. The whole history of the century can be interpreted on that basis as a

succession of reactions against what was perceived at that point and in which we still

remain. Because since 1914 it’s not that “civilizations” have come to know that “they are

mortal,” as PEOPLE have said: it is commodity civilization,as it has been spread from the West

to the rest of the world, that knows that it is moribund.

In reality it’s been more than a century – basically since our exposure to the fall-out plume of

symbolist radiation – that Mr. Bloom has been the near-exclusive “hero” of all literature, from

Jarry’s character Mr. Sengle to Michaux’s Mr. Plume, from Pessoa himself to the Man without

Qualities, from Bartleby to Kafka, of course forgetting Camus’-The-Stranger and the New

Novel, which we’ll leave to the undergrads.  Even though he was most precociously

approached by the young Lukacs, it was only in 1927, with the treatise Being and Time, that

Bloom, dressed in the transparent rags of Dasein, became the central non-subject of

philosophy – it’s legitimate, one way or another, to see vulgar French existentialism, which

had an impact that came much later and went much deeper than anyone could have

suspected by looking at how short a time it was in vogue, as the first thinking made

exclusively for the use of Blooms.

PEOPLE have been able to ignore for a long time now the massive evidence of Bloom in  all

these manifestations, writing it off as simply a literary phenomenon, as a purely

philosophical exaggeration.  For the rest, PEOPLE still train themselves to do so: it relaxes the

atmosphere. It’s just that, in passing, PEOPLE would like to forget what THEY

are politically the contemporaries of, to forget that Bloom first appeared in literature at the

very moment when literature as an institution was disrupted, and in philosophy at the

moment when it began to crumble as a system of truth.

In other words, when Valery wrote: “I felt, with a bitter and bizarre pleasure, the simplicity of

our statistical condition.  The quantity of individuals absorbed all my singularity, and I became

indistinct and indiscernible,”

he was not adding another suppelementary object to the venerable contemplation of

Aesthetics: he was expressing politically what it means to be just one more body in the

aggregate of a population managed by Biopower.

Uprooting

Every new stage in the development of commodity society requires the destruction of a

certain form of immediacy, the lucrative separation of what had been one and united into

a relationship.  It is this split that the commodity then takes over, mediates, and extracts

profit from, clarifying a little more each day the utopia of a world where every person will be,

in all things, exposed on the one market.  Marx admirably described the first phases of this

process, though only from a labor bureaucrat’s perspective, the perspective of Economy: “The

dissolution of all products and all activities into exchange value,” he wrote in Grundrisse,

“presupposes the decomposition of all frozen (historical) relationships of personal dependence

within production, as well as the universal subjugation of producers to one another. … The

universal dependence of individuals indifferent to each other constitutes their social

bond.  And this social bond is expressed in exchange value.” 

It would be perfectly absurd to consider the persistent devastation of all historical

attachments and of all organic communities as a short-term defect in commodity society, one

that it would only take the good will of men working for reform to deal with.  The uprooting of

all things, the separation into sterile fragments of each and every living totality and the

autonomization of those fragments within the circuits of value are precisely the essence of

the commodity, the alpha and omega of its movement.  The highly contagious nature of this

abstract logic takes on the form of a real “uprooting sickness” among men, which makes the

uprooted ones throw themselves into an activity that always tends to uproot those who are

still not uprooted or are so only partly, often by the most violent of methods; whoever has

been uprooted will uproot others.  Our era has the dubious prestige of having brought to its

apex the proliferating and multitudinous feverishness of this “destructive character.”

Somewhere Out of the World

“Be like passers-by!”

- Gospel of Thomas

Bloom appears inseparably as the product and the cause of the liquidation of all

substantial ethos as a result of the eruption of the commodity into all human

relationships.  He himself is thus the man without substantiality, the man who

has really become abstract, because he’s been effectively cut off from all milieus,

dispossessed of all belonging, and then thrown out to wander. We have come to know him as

such, as that undifferentiated being “that does not feel at home anywhere,” as that monad

who comes from no community at all in a world “that only gives birth to atoms”

(Hegel).  Naturally, to admit the universality of the pariah status, of our pariah status, would

mean admitting too many comfortable lies, both for those who claim to be part of this

“society” and for those who integrate themselves into it while claiming to criticize it.  The

famous doctrine of the “new-middle-classes” or alternatively of the “vast-middle-class” has

for the past half-century corresponded to the denial of our bloomitude, its total

perversion.  PEOPLE would thus like to try to reapproach the total dissolution of all social

classes in terms of social class.  Because Bloom is not only today’s neo-bourgeois, who has so

pathetically failed the confidence of his bourgeoisie; he is also today’s proletarian, who now

no longer even has the slightest vestiges of a proletariat behind him.  At the extreme limit, he

is the planetary petty-bourgeoisie, the orphan of a class that never even existed.

In fact, in the same way as the individual resulted from the decomposition of the community,

Bloom results from the decomposition of the individual, or, to put it plainly, that of

the fiction of the individual - the bourgeois individual has only ever existed on the freeways,

and there are still accidents there.  But we would be mistaken to see the human

radicalness that Bloom sketches out by seeing him merely in light of the traditional concept of

the “uprooted” person.  The suffering that all true attachments/commitments now expose one

to has taken on such excessive proportions that no one can even allow themselves to feel

any nostalgia for their origins.  In order to survive it’s been necessary to kill that off too.  And

so Bloom is, rather, the man without roots, the man who gets the feeling that he’s at home in

his exile, who has laid down his roots in the absence of a place, and for whom the idea of

uprooting doesn’t evoke any kind of banishment, but on the contrary an ordinary

situation.  It’s not the world that he’s lost, it’s his taste for the world that he’s had to leave

behind.

A totally new kind of poverty has swooped down upon men with the colossal development of

technology… What good is all our cultural heritage now if no experience ties us to it?   The

last century’s horrible mish-mash of styles and visions of the world showed only too clearly

where hypocrisy or abuse in such matters gets us in order for us not to consider it honorable

to own up to our misery.  So, then, let us confess it: this poverty of experience is not just the

poverty of private experiences, but a poverty of human experiences.  So is it a new kind of

barbarism? In effect.  And we declare it to be such in order to introduce a new concept, a

positive concept of barbarism.  Because where does a poverty of experience lead the savage

barbarian?  It brings him to begin at the beginning, to start over from the start, to pull himself

out of it with the little he has, to build with the little he has, and in so doing to look neither to

his right nor to his left… We have become poor.  We have sacrificed the heritage of humanity,

bit by bit, and often we have pawned it off for a hundredth of its value in order to receive in

return the petty coin of “what exists” … Humanity is preparing itself to survive culture if need

be.  And the essential thing is that it’s doing so while laughing about it.  It is highly possible

that here or there such laughter might have a really barbaric sound to it. That’s great.  So

couldn’t individuals thus give up, some time or another, a little bit of their humanity to the

masses, which would one day pay it back plus interest on capital and interest on the interest?

Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty

The Loss of Experience

As an observable Stimmung, as a specific affective tonality, Bloom is in touch with the

extreme abstraction of the conditions of existence that the Spectacle fleshes out.  The most

demented, and at the same time the most characteristic concretion of the

spectacular ethosremains - on a planetary scale - the metropolis.  That Bloom is essentially

the metropolitan man in no way implies that it might be possible by birth or by choice for him

to remove himself from that condition, because there is no outside of the metropolis: the

territories that its metastatic extension does not occupy are always polarized by it; that is,

they are determined in all their aspects by its absence.  

The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most

eloquent symptom of which is the formation in it of the very category of “experience” in the

restricted sense where one has “experiences” (sexual, sporting, professional, artistic,

sentimental, ludic, etc.).  Everything about Bloom flows from this loss, or is synonymous with

it.  Within the Spectacle, as they are within the metropolis, men never have the concrete

experience of events, but only of conventions, rules; a wholly symbolized, entirely constructed

second nature. There, what reigns is the radical split between the insignificance of everyday

life - called “private” life - where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a frozen sphere

called “public” which no one has access to.

But all this looks is starting to look more and more like ancient history.  The separation

between the Spectacle’s lifeless forms and the “formless life” of Bloom, with its

monochromatic boredom and silent thirst for nothingness, moves aside at numerous points to

make way for indistinguishability.  The loss of experience has finally attained to such a degree

of generality that it can in turn be interpreted as the primordial, original experience, as

the experience of experience as such; as a clear disposition, that is, towards Critical

Metaphysics.

The Metropolises of Separation

Metropolises are distinct from the other grand human formations first of all because the

greatest proximity, and usually the greatest promiscuity, coincide in them with the greatest

foreignness.  Never have men been gathered together in such great number, and never have

they been so totally separate from one another.

In the metropolis, man experiences his own negative condition, purely.  Finiteness, solitude,

and exposedness, which are the three fundamental coordinates of this condition, weave the

décor of each person’s existence in the big city.  Not a fixed décor, but a moving décor; the

amalgamated décors of the big city, due to which everyone has to endure the ice-cold stench

of its non-places.

The hip, plugged-in metropolis-dwellers here comprise a rather remarkable type of Bloom not

only in terms of intensity but also in the numerical extent of their legions: Bloom’s imperialist

fraction.  The hipster is the Bloom that offers himself up to the world as a tenable form of life,

and to do so constrains himself to a strict discipline of lies.  

The final consumer of existence, stricken by a definitive incredulousness concerning both

people and language, the hipster lives on the horizon of an endless experimentation on

himself.  He has circumscribed the volume of his being and has decided to never get out of it,

if not to ensure the self-promotion of his own sterility.

Thus, he has replaced the emptiness of experience with the experience of emptiness, while

waiting for the adventure he’s always ready for but never comes: he’s already written out all

the possible scenarios.  In a deceived ecstasy, the solitary crowd of hipsters, always-already

disapperared, always-already forgotten, pursue their wandering path like a raft full of

suicides, lost in a depressing ocean of images and abstractions.  And that crowd has nothing

to communicate, nothing but conventional formulas for absent enjoyment and a life with no

object within a furnished nothingness.

The metropolis appears, moreover, as the homeland of all freely selected mimetic rivalries,

the sorry but continuous celebration of the “fetishism of little differences.”  PEOPLE play out

all year-round a tragicomedy of separation: the more people are isolated, the more they

resemble one another; the more they resemble one another, the more they detest one

another; and the more they detest one another the more they isolate themselves.  And where

men can no longer recognize each other as the participants in building a common world,

everything only further catalyzes a chain reaction, a collective fission.

The teachings of the metropolis show, from different angles, the extent to which the loss of

experience and the loss of community are one and the same thing.  It must however be taken

into account, in spite of the nostalgia that a certain romanticism so enjoys cultivating even in

its enemies, that before our era there had not, and had never been, any community.  And

these are not two contradictory affirmations. Before Bloom, before “separation perfected,”

before the unreserved abandon that is ours-- before, then, the perfect devastation of all

substantial ethos, all “community” could be but a hummus of falsehoods – a false

“belonging,” to a class, a nation, a milieu – and a source of limitation: and anyway, if it were

otherwise it would not have been annihilated.  Only a radical alienation from the Common was

able to make the primordial Common burst forth in such a way that solitude, finiteness, and

exposedness - that is, the only true bond between people – could also appear as the

only possible bond between them.  What PEOPLE call a “community” today, while gazing out

upon the past, obviously shares in this primordial Common, but in a reversible way, because

it’s just second-hand.  And so it’s up to us to have for the first time an experience of real

community, a community based on the honest assumption of our separation, exposedness,

and finiteness.  

Following Bloom’s example, the metropolis simultaneously materializes the total loss of

community and the infinite possibility of regaining it.

The elucidation of the possibilities contained in our times depends exclusively on whether we

consider the Bloom figure.  Bloom’s eruption into history determines, for “our party,” the need

to completely rebuild our foundations, both in theory and practice.  All analysis and all action

that does not absolutely take Bloom into account will damn itself to eternalizing the present

exile, because Bloom, since he’s not an individuality, doesn’t let himself be characterized by

anything he says, does, or manifests.  Each moment is for him a moment of decision. He has

no stable attributes whatsoever.  No habits, no matter how far he pursues his repetition of

them, are susceptible to conferring any being upon him.  Nothing adheres to him, and he

doesn’t adhere to anything that may seem to be his, not even “society,” which would like to

support itself upon him.  To cast a light on these times, we must consider that there is on the

one hand the mass of Blooms and on the other the mass of acts.  All truth flows from this.

A Genealogy of Bloom-Consciousness

Bartleby is an office employee.

The diffusion of mass intellectual labor within the Spectacle, in which conventional knowledge

counts as exclusive competency, has an obvious relationship with the form of consciousness

that is proper to Bloom.  So much so that except in situations where abstract knowledge

dominates over all vital milieus, outside of the organized sleep of a world produced entirely as

a symbol, Bloom’s experience never attains the form of a lived continuum which he might add

onto himself; rather it just starts to look like a series of inassimilable shocks.

Thus he has had to create an organ to protect him against the uprooting that the currents and

discordances of his external milieu threaten him with: instead of reacting with his sensibilities

to this uprooting, Bloom reacts essentially with his intellect, and the intensification of

consciousness that the same cause produces ensures its psychic preponderance.  Thus the

reaction to these phenomena is buried in the least sensitive psychic organ, the one that is

most distant from the depths of being.  His pure consciousness is, then, the only thing that

Bloom manages to recognize as his own, but it is a consciousness that has become

autonomous from life, that no longer feeds it but merely observes it, and in its lapse, muzzles

itself.

Bloom cannot take part in the world in an inner way.  He only ever goes into it in exception to

himself.  That’s why he has such a singular disposition towards distraction, towards deja-vus,

towards clichés, and above all why he has such an atrophy of memory that confines him in an

eternal present; it’s also why he’s so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer

him abstract sensations – we should here mention speed and “sliding,” which are also

bloomesque enjoyments but this time only insofar as they are abstraction itself arising as

sensation.  

Everything that Bloom lives, does, and feels remains something external to him.  And when he

dies, he dies like a baby, like someone who’s never learned anything.  With Bloom, the

relations of consumption have extended themselves over the totality of existence, and over

the totality of what exists.  In Bloom’s case, commodity propaganda has so radically

triumphed that he effectively conceives of his world not as the fruit of a long history, but like a

primitive man conceives of the forest: as his natural surroundings.  A number of things

become clear about Bloom when he’s looked at from this angle.  Because Bloom is indeed a

primitive man, but he’s an abstract primitive.  It would be enough to summarize the

provisional state of the question in a formula: Bloom is the eternal adolescence of humanity.

The Replacement of the “Worker” Type by the Bloom Figure

The recent mutations in the modes of production within late capitalism have done much to

move things towards universal bloomification.  The period of the classical proletariat, which

ended at the dawn of the 1970s, itself made a proud contribution to this

bloomification.  Statute-regulated, hierarchical wage labor in effect slowly replaced all other

forms of social belonging, in particular replacing all the organic, traditional ways of life.  It was

also then that the dissociation of singular man and his social being began: all power being no

more than simply functionaltherein, that is, delegated anonymously, each “I” which

attempted to affirm itself never affirmed anything but its anonymity.  But although there was

in the classical wage system only power deprived of a subject and subjects deprived of power,

the possibility remained – because of the relative stability of employment and a certain

rigidity in the hierarchies – that the subjective totality of a large number of men could still be

mobilized.

After the 1970s, the relative guarantee of stable employment, which allowed commodity

society to impose itself as the replacement for a particular social formation – the traditional

order – whose primary virtue was this guarantee of stability, lost all necessity upon the

annihilation of its adversary.  So then a process of introducing greater flexibility into

production began, of giving the exploited an ever more precarious status; this is a situation

we are still in and which has even today still not attained to its final limit.  It has now been

almost three decades that the industrialized world has been in an autonomic involution phase

where the classical wage system is dismantling itself step by step, anddriving itself on the

basis of such dismantlement.  We have since then been watching the abolition of wage

society on the wage society’s own terrain, that is, within the domination-relations that it

commands.  “Work here ceases to carry out its function as a powerful substitute for the

objective ethical fabric, and no longer holds the place of the traditional forms of ethics, which

anyway have for a long time now been emptied out and dissolved.” (Paolo

Virno, Opportunism, Cynicism, and Terror).  All the intermediary screens between the

“atomized individual,” owner of no more than his “labor power,” and the market - where he

must sell it - have been liquidated to such an extent that now each person stands in total

isolation before the crushing autonomous social totality.  Nothing from then on could prevent

the so-called “post-fordist” forms of production from becoming generalized, and with them

flexibility, tense flow, mobility, “project based management” and “enhanced tasks” for

“polyvalent agents.”  Such an organization of labor, the efficiency of which rests on the

inconsistency, “autonomy,” and opportunism of the producers, has the merit of making

impossible any kind of identification on the part of men with their own social function; in other

words, it is highly Bloom-generative.

poor substantiality

Born of the acknowledgement of a general hostility towards wage labor that manifested itself

after 1968 in all industrialized nations, the present organization of production was devised to

work on the basis of that very hostility.  And so, while its flagship-commodities – cultural

commodities – are born of an activity which is foreign to the narrow-minded framework of

wage labor, getting it into a totally optimal state requires tricking everyone; that is, it rests

upon the indifference, the repulsion, even, that people feel towards their activity – Capital’s

present utopia is a society where the totality of surplus value comes from a generalized

“coping” phenomenon.  As you can see, it’s labor’s alienation itself that’s been put to work.

In this context, a mass marginality begins to take shape where “exclusion” is not, as PEOPLE

would have us believe, the short-term drop in status of a certain fraction of the population,

but the fundamental relationship that each person has with his own participation in social life,

and above all the one the producer has with what he produces.  Work has now ceased to be

bound up with man as something specific to him; it is now only perceived by Blooms as a

contingent form of the general social oppression.  Unemployment is but the visible concretion

of the foreignness of each person to their own existence in the world of the authoritarian

commodity.

Bloom thus also appears as the product of the quantitative and qualitative decomposition of

wage-labor society; Bloom is the humanity that corresponds to the mode of production of a

society that’s become definitively asocial, and one that none of its members feel in any way

connected to anymore.  The fate prepared for him, to have to adapt himself without respite to

an environment in constant upheaval, is also his apprenticeship in an exile in this world, which

he must nevertheless act like he’s participating in, in the absence of anybody really

participating in it at all.    

But beyond all his forced lies, he discovers himself little by little to be the man of non-

participation, as well as a creature of non-belonging.  

  

To whatever extent the crisis of industrial society heats up, the livid figure of Bloom peeks out

from under the titanic magnitudes of the Worker.

The World of the Authoritarian Commodity

“One drives the beasts out to pasture with whip lashes.”

- Heraclitus

For domination – and by this term we cannot properly understand anything other than the

symbolically mediated relations of complicitybetween the dominators and the dominated – in

proportion to the autonomy that the Blooms acquire relative to their assigned social positions,

there is a strategic need to extract ever more appropriations, and to constantly carry out

new subjugations.   

Maintaining the central mediation of everything by commodities thus demands that ever

larger sections of humanity’s being need to be brought under control.  From this perspective,

one cannot fail to note the extreme diligence with which the Spectacle has burdened Bloom

with the heavy duty of Being, the prompt solicitude with which it has taken charge of his

education, and of defining the complete panoply of conforming personalities – in sum, one

cannot fail to notice how it’s been able to extend its grip over the totality of what may be said

and seen, and the codes according to which all relationships and identities are to be

built.  The development of Biopower since the 18th century, a development whose qualitative

leap took place with the Total Mobilization of 1914, can only be understood strictly in light of

this.  The taking of control over men as living beings within biopolitical democracies, the

application of the social forces of integration even to bodies, the ever tighter management of

the conditions of our existence, comprise domination’s response to the disintegration of

individuality, to the erasure of the subject within Bloom.  Its response, in sum, to the fact that

it has lost its grip.  

The productive character of power as it circulates in the world of the authoritarian  commodity

can be illustrated, among other ways, by the manner in which the control of

behaviors operates therein: most often it is enough simply to master the organization of

public space, the arrangement of décor, the material organization of infrastructure so as to

maintain order; and to maintain order by the simple power of coercion that the anonymous

mass exerts over each of its elements, so as to make that mass respect the abstract norms in

force.  In a downtown street, a metro train aisle, or among a team of collaborators, the

perfection of the apparatus of surveillance resides precisely in the absence of any surveillance

watchmen.

Panoptical control is only all the more operative when it’s faceless.  In the final analysis, it

doesn’t care at all whether its subjects reject it or accept it, as long as they submit to

it outwardly.  

Militarization of Disaster, Concentration of Domination

Since 1914, commodity domination has only been able to respond to the enormity of its

disaster with the use of Total Mobilizations.  It intends, with the use of a state of exception -

sometimes manifest, sometimes latent, but always permanent - to contain the overflowing

flood of its inconsistencies.  

The first of these inconsistencies has to do with the fact that its development demands in the

same movement both the production of ever more extensive possibilities and the general

prohibition against making them real.  Commodity domination must thus simultaneously

produce both an overabundance of resources and the overabundance of terror necessary in

order that no one make use of them.  Bloom is the man of this terror, the one that spreads it

and the one that suffers through it: he is the collaborator.

The recent period, over the course of which brutal crises of control have claimed to put whole

sectors of what exists into step with a categorical imperative of transparency and traceability,

is marked by a rapid movement of the concentration of domination.

Only a minority of conformed subjectivities, from whom PEOPLE require a new fusion between

life and work, personality and function, are co-opted into the really vital positions, which

meanwhile have become ever fewer.  The formation of this Praetorian Guard of Capital, whose

elements are not interchangeable (contrary to the situation of the large mass of wage

workers), is part of this concentration of domination, which is inseparable from the

militarization of disaster.  As for the excess people, they essentially are set to work keeping

each other busy, reciprocally dispossessing one another of their idleness, which indeed takes

some real effort.  

At the moment of domination’s general restructuring, Bloom finds himself hunted down

everywhere and in everyone, since he is just as much the idle person as he is the foreigner or

the pariah.  That’s why he has to camouflage himself under so much artificiality,

because Bloom is the civil figure at the heart of the universal militarization of disaster.

Poor Substantiality

“All that you are, you are through me; everything that I am, I only am through you.”

Hitler

Bloom lives in a state of terror, above all in the terror of being recognized as Bloom.

Everything happens as if the mimetic hell we suffocate in was unanimously judged preferable

to our encountering ourselves.

Biopower organizes itself ever more visibly as a directed economy of subjectivations and

resubjectivations.

There is, thus, a certain inevitability about the feverish enthusiasm for the industrial

production of personality-kits, of disposable identities and other hysterical

temperaments.  Rather than really examining their central emptiness, the majority of people

recoil before the vertigo of a total absence of ownership, of a radical disinclination, and thus,

at root, they recoil before the yawning chasm of their freedom.  They prefer to be engulfed

ever more deeply in poor substantiality, towards which everything pushes them, after

all.  And so it must be expected that, hidden in some unequally latent depression they will

discover some buried root or other, some spontaneous belonging, some incombustible

quality. French, outcast, woman, artist, homosexual, Briton, citizen, fireman, Muslim,

Buddhist, or unemployed person – anything’s fine as long as it lets one moo out that

miraculous “I AM…” in some tone or another, eyes glazed over and gazing off into the infinite

distance.   

It doesn’t matter what empty and consumable particularity gets taken on, or what social role

is at hand, because it’s only all about warding off your own nothingness.  And since all organic

life fails in light of these pre-chewed forms, they never take long to quietly reenter the

general system of commodity exchange and commodity equivalence, which reflects and pilots

them. 

Poor substantiality thus means that PEOPLE have put all their substance on record within the

Spectacle and that the latter operates as the universal ethos of the celestial community of

spectators.  But a cruel ruse makes it so that in the end all this does is accelerate even more

the process of the collapse of all substantial forms of existence.  The man of poor

substantiality’s primary non-resolution inexorably spreads itself out underneath the waltz of

dead identities, where he always successively leads the dance.  What should mask a lack of

individuality not only fails to do so, it also increases the mutability of what could have lived off

it.  

Bloom triumphs above all in those who flee from him.

Bloom is the Positive Reality Pointed Towards by the Empire of Simulacra

It is vain to claim substantiality within the Spectacle.  Nothing in the final analysis is less

authentic or more suspect than “authenticity.” Anything that claims to have a name of its

own or claims to adhere to itself can only be usurpation or stupidity.

By imposing upon each living singularity the need to consider itself as specific - that is, from a

formal perspective, from a point of view outside of itself - the Spectacle tears it apart from

inside, and introduces an inequality, a difference into it.  It forces the I to consider itself as an

object, to reify itself, to understand itself as an Other.  Consciousness thus finds itself pulled

into a flight without respite, into a perpetual split stimulated by the imperative – for anyone

who refuses to let himself be won over by a lethal ‘peace’ – to detach itself from all

substance.  By applying to all the manifestations of life its tireless work of denomination,

which is thus a work of anxious reflexivity, the Spectacle wrenches the world out of its

immediacy with continual blasting.  In other words, it produces and reproduces Bloom:

the thug that knows he’s a thug is no longer a thug, he’s a Bloom playing the thug.

Many of the things that we call by names that are thousands of years old ceased to exist long

ago.  We don’t need neologisms to replace the old words: we should just replace them all with

“Bloom.”  For instance, there’s no such thing anymore as that supposedly substantial reality

that used to be called “the family.”  There aren’t even any more fathers, mothers, sons or

sisters; there’s nothing but Blooms playing family, Blooms playing dad, mom, son or

sister.  And these days one finds so few philosophers, artists, or writers: there’s hardly

anything but Blooms anymore in these extras’ roles, just Blooms producing cultural

commodities and striking the standard poses becoming of their position.  To top it off, even

farmers themselves have ended up by deciding that they’ll have to play “farmer.”  It just

seems like that would be more profitable.

It’s forbidden to us under the present regime of things to durably identify ourselves with any

specific content, only with the movement of tearing ourselves away from it.

Man is the indestructible being 

that can be infinitely destroyed.

Blanchot

The Indestructible is one; it is each man in full,

and all of us have it in common.  

It is the unchangeable cement 

that bonds men forever.

Kafka

Ah, this night of the world, 

this empty nothingness that contains 

everything in its abstract simplicity, 

this form of pure disquiet…

Hegel

Sua Cuique Persona [to each his own mask]

In the present reality, the question of who’s masked and who isn’t is moot.  It’s simply

grotesque to claim to establish oneself outside of the Spectacle, outside of a mode of

disclosure in which everything manifests itself in such a way that its appearance becomes

autonomous, that is, as a mask.  Its costume, as a costume, is the truth of Bloom; that

is, there’s nothing behind it, or rather – and this unveils much more casual horizons – behind

it is the great Nothing, which is a potential power.

That the mask comprises the general form of appearance within the universal comedy from

which only hypocrites still think they can escape doesn’t mean that there’s no more truth, just

that truth has become something quite subtle and biting.  

The figure of Bloom finds its highest and most contemptible expression in the “language of

flattery,” and in this ambiguity there’s no room for whimpering or rejoicing, just for fighting.  

“Here the Self sees its certainty of itself as such become the thing most emptied of essence; it

sees its pure personality become absolute impersonality.  The spirit of its gratitude is thus just

as much the sentiment of this profound abjection as it is that of the most profound

revolt.  Since the pure I sees itself outside itself, and all torn to shreds in this shredding of

everything that has any continuity and universality to it, what we call Law, Good, and Rights is

disintegrated in one fell swoop and falls into the abyss.”

 (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind)

The reign of travesty always just slightly precedes the final death of a given reign.  We’d do

wrong to take off domination’s mask, since it’s always known itself to be threatened by the

element of night, savagery, and impersonality that are introduced when masks are

worn.  What isevil about the Spectacle is rather that faces themselves are petrified until they

become like masks, and that a central authority sets itself up as the master of

metamorphoses.  

The living are those who are able to fathom the words of the maniac tremblingly proclaiming:

“Happy is he who in his disgust for empty, satisfied faces decides to cover himself with a

mask: he will be the first to rediscover the raging drunkenness of all that dances to its death

over the waterfall of time.”

“Alienation also means being alienated from alienation.”

Hegel

Historically speaking, it’s in the figure of Bloom that alienation from the Common attains to its

maximum degree of intensity.  It’s not so easy to imagine the extent to which the existence of

man as a singular being and his existence as a social being have in appearances had to

become foreign to one another in order that it become possible to speak of “social bonds,”

that is, to grasp man’s being-in-common as something objective, as something exterior to

him, and as something confronting him.

The true front lines pass right through the fine milieu of Blooms, and determine their schizoid

neutrality.  The militarization of disaster spreads out like a final warning, given to him so that

he will choose sides: he must either endorse in an unconditional manner whichever social

role,whichever servitude, or starve to death.  

We are dealing here with a kind of urgent measure taken quite ordinarily by regimes in

desperate straits; one that simply allows Bloom to be hidden, but not suppressed.

But, for the time being, that’s good enough.  The essential thing is that the eye that sees the

world in a different way than the Spectacle does can be sure that PEOPLE have never seen

any such thing this side of the Pyrenees – “what’s that you say? A what? A Bloom???” – and

that it’s just a metaphysician’s chimera; and thus that will make its critiques on that basis.  All

that matters is that bad faith can become a clear conscience, and that it can counterpose to

us its time-stamped improbabilities.  For the rest, how could that which PEOPLE have

essentially dispossessed of all appearance ever appear as such in the Spectacle?

It is Bloom’s fate to never be visible except to the extent that he participates in poor

substantiality, that is, only to the extent that he disowns himself as Bloom.

All the radicalness of the figure of Bloom is concentrated in the fact that the choice he finds

himself permanently faced with has on the one side the best and on the other side the worst,

with no transition zone between the two accessible to him.  He is the neutral core that casts a

light on the analogical relationship between the highest point and the lowest point.  His lack

of interest can comprise a great opening toagapê, or the desire to simply operate like a gear

in a technocratic extermination enterprise, for instance.  In the same way, an absence of

personality can prefigure the transcendence of the classical petrified personality, as well as

the terminal inconsistency of the metropolitanhipster.

There is the “me ne frego” [I don’t give a damn] of fascism, and there is the “me ne frego” of

the insurgent.  There is the banality of evil, and there is also the banality of good.  But in

circumstances of domination, Bloom’s banality always manifests itself as the banality of

evil. Thus, for the 20th century, Bloom would have been Eichmann much more than Elser (1);

as for Eichmann, Hannah Arendt tells us, “it was obvious to everyone that he was not a

‘monster,’” and that “one couldn’t help thinking that he was really a clown.”  It should be

mentioned in passing that there is no difference in their nature between Eichmann – who

identified purely and completely with his criminal function, and thehipster who, unable to

assume his fundamental non-belonging to the world, nor the consequences of an exile

situation, devotes himself to the frenetic consumption of the symbols of belonging that this

society sells so expensively.  But in a more general sense, everywhere PEOPLE talk about

“economy,” the banality of evil prospers.  And it is there peeking out from under the

allegiances of all kinds that men swear to “necessity,” “doin’ alright,” to the “that’s the way it

is” by way of “all work is honorable.”  

And it is there that the extreme reaches of unhappiness begin, when all commitments are

replaced by the commitment to surviving.  And commitment / attachment is thus stripped

naked.  With no object but itself.  Hell.

The Inner Man

The pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also form the illusion of pure interiority.

Bloom is that being who has taken up into himself the emptiness that surrounds him.

Hunted out of any place of his own, he himself has become a place.

Banished from the world, he has become a world.

It was not in vain that Paul, the Gnostics, and later on the Christian mystics drew a distinction

between the inner man and outer man, because in Bloom this separation has taken

place historically.

The marginal condition of those who, like Ruysbroeck the Admirable’s inner man, feel “more

inwardly inclined than outwardly inclined,” who live “anywhere at all, and among anyone at

all, in the depths of solitude… sheltered from multiplicity, sheltered from places, sheltered

from men,” has since then become the common condition.

However, it is a rare person who, having experienced it positively, has had the strength

to want it.  Pessoa:

“To create myself, I destroyed myself; I exteriorized myself so totally within myself that inside

myself I only exist outwardly.  I am the living stage over which various actors pass, playing

various theater pieces.”

But for the time being if Bloom resembles this inner man it’s most often only in a negative

manner.  The non-essential interior of his personality hardly contains more than the feeling

that he’s found himself to be pulled along on an endless fall towards an underlying dark and

all-enveloping space, as if he were ceaselessly jumping off into himself while

disintegrating.  Drop by drop, in uniform beads, his very being oozes, rushes away, and bleeds

out.  His interiority is less and less a space or a substance, and more and more

a threshold and its passage.  

And this is also what makes Bloom fundamentally a free spirit, because he is an empty spirit.

“Whoever would thus leave himself behind shall truly be returned to himself” 

Meister Eckhart

The ecstatic “essence” of Bloom is expressed as follows:

IN EVERYTHING THAT HE IS,

BLOOM IS OUTSIDE OF HIMSELF.

In the empire of Biopower and autonomous publicity – the tyranny of the impersonal, of what

PEOPLE say, do, or think – the ecstatic structure of human existence becomes manifest in the

form of a generalized schizoid state.  Each person now distinguishes between his “true self,”

something pure, detached from all objectifiable manifestations, and the system of his “false

self,” social, acted, constrained, inauthentic.  

In each of his determinations – in his body, in his “qualities,” in his gestures, in his language –

Bloom clearly feels that he is leaving himself behind, that he has left himself behind.  And

he contemplates that egress.  And he is that wandering among those attributes, in that

contemplation.

His becoming is a becoming-foreign.

Léon Bloy, in his time, compared the capitalist to the mystic; his The Blood of the

Poor dedicates a good number of pages to a rather free interpretation of the “fetishistic

character of the commodity”:

“This money, which is but the visible figure of the blood of Christ circulating through all his

limbs,” “far from loving it for its material enjoyment, which he deprives himself of, (the

greedy man) adores it in spirit and in truth, like the Saints adore the God that gives them their

duty of penitence and their martyrs’ glory.  He adores it for the sake of those who do not

adore it; he suffers in the place of those who do not wish to suffer for money.  The greedy are

mystics!  Everything they do is done in view of pleasing an invisible God whose visible and so

laboriously sought-after simulacrum showers them in tortures and ignominy.”

If the capitalist is similar to the mystic in his activity, Bloom is similar to the mystic in

his passivity.  And in fact, nothing resembles Bloom’s existential situation better than

the detachment of the mystics.  His reified consciousness effectuates upon it a definite

propensity towards contemplation, whereas his indifference corresponds to that “honorable

detachment (that is) none other than the fact that the mind remains immobile in the face of

all the vicissitudes of love and suffering, honor, shame, and outrage.”  Until paralysis sets in.

In the end, Bloom reminds one of Meister Eckhart’s God, a God that is defined as “he who has

no name, who is the negation of all names, and has never had a name,” like the pure

nothingness for whom all things are nothingness.

Under its perfection, Bloom’s alienation conceals a truly primordial alienation. 

CLOWN

One day.

One day, maybe soon.

One day I’ll pull up the anchor

that keeps my ship far from the high seas.

With that kind of courage 

one needs to have in order to be nothing and nothing but nothing,

I will let go of everything that had seemed to be so indissolubly close to me.

I’ll cut it off, I’ll overturn it,

I’l smash it, I’ll make it collapse.

Disgorging in one fell stroke my miserable prudishness, my miserable passwords and

sequences, ‘with them dropping like dominoes.’

Drained out of the abscess of having to be someone, I’ll drink of life-giving space once more…

…

With ridicule, by debasement (what is debasement?), bursts, emptiness, and with a total

dissipation-derision-purging, I will expel from myself the form in which I was believed to be so

attached, made up of, coordinated by, and well-matched to my entourage and my peers, so

worthy, my ever so worthy peers.

Reduced to a humility evoking catastrophe, a perfect leveling like after being intensely

frightened.

Brought back immeasurably to my true rank, the lowly rank that I don’t know what

idea/ambition made me abandon.

Annihilated in my haughtiness, my esteem, 

lost in a far away place

(or not even), with no name, no identity.

A CLOWN, tearing down in roaring laughter, guffaws, and grotesqueness 

the sense of my own importance that I had 

in spite of my seeing myself in such a clear light;

I will take the plunge,

with no stipend, into the underlying 

Infinity-mind open to all,

and myself open to a new

and incredible dewdrop 

because of my being null

and blank,

and laughable…

Henri Michaux, Paintings

Let Us Share Our Poverty, Not Our Misery!

For Meister Eckhart, the poor man is he who “wants nothing, knows nothing, and has

nothing.”

Eventually dispossessed and deprived of everything, mutely foreign to his world, and as

ignorant of himself as of what surrounds him, Bloom realizes, at the heart of the historical

process and in all its fullness, the truly metaphysical magnitude of the concept of poverty.  

Indeed, they needed every bit of the dense tackiness of an era where economy has served as

metaphysics in order to make an economic notion out of poverty (now that this era is coming

to an end, it becomes obvious once again that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but

misery, and that of those three, only poverty has any perfection about it.  Poverty means the

state of he who can make use of anything, having nothing specifically his own, and misery

means the state of he who cannot make use of anything, whether because he has too much,

or because he doesn’t have the time, or because he has no community).

Thus, everything that the idea of wealth has been able to carry through history, all the

bourgeois tranquility, all the domestic bliss, all the immanent familiarity with the readily

perceived reality here below, is something that Bloom can appreciate, out of nostalgia or

simulation, but that he cannot experience.  For him, happiness has become a very old idea,

and not only in Europe.  Together with all interest, and all ethos, the very possibility of

use value has been lost.  Bloom only understands the supernatural language of exchange

value.  He gazes upon the world with eyes that see nothing; nothing but the nothingness of

value.  His desires themselves are only roused towards absences, abstractions, not the least

of which is the YoungGirl’s ass (2).  Even when Bloom appears to want something, he never

ceases to not-want, since he wants emptily, since he wants emptiness.

That’s why wealth, in the world of the authoritarian commodity, has become something

grotesque and incomprehensible, merely a cluttered form of miserable poverty. 

Wealth is now merely something that possesses you; something PEOPLE restrain you with.  

Agapê [non-erotic, benevolent love]

…ja wohl, alles scheisse! [yes sir-ee! It’s all shit!] Your conscience is clean.  “We were right,

all you’ve got to do is take a look at them!” You are more mystified than anyone, and by us,

we who are taking you to the endpoint of your error.  Relax, we aren’t going to set you

straight; we’ll just take your outrageous remarks to their necessary conclusions.  We’ll let

ourselves go along with it even to the death, and you’ll see the vermin dying.  

We don’t need to wait for the liberation of bodies or count on them to be resurrected for us to

be right.  Our reasoning triumphs now, living and like waste.  It’s true that it isn’t plain to

see.  But we’re just as right as you are unlikely to understand anything about it, anything at

all. Not only do we have reason on our side, we are the right thinking that you’ve pushed into

a clandestine existence.  

And thus less than ever can we admire any of these apparent victories.  Understand this well:

you have transformed reason into conscience.  You have remade the unity of man.  You have

manufactured the most diehard conscience.  You can never again hope to manage to make us

simultaneously take your place and remain in our own skin, which would condemn

us.  Nobody here will ever become his own SS.

Robert Antelme, The Human Race

Bloom is the man in whom everything has been socialized, but socialized as private.  Nothing

is more exclusively common than what he calls his “individual happiness.”  Bloom is ordinary

and characterless even in his desire to stand out as a singular individual.  For Bloom, all

substantial differences between him and other men has been effectively abolished. All that

remains is a pure difference without content.  And everything, in the world of the

authoritarian commodity, aims to maintain this pure difference, which is pure separation.  And

so Bloom may still answer to a particular name, but that name no longer means anything.

All the misunderstandings regarding Bloom have to do with the depth of the gazes that people

allow themselves to stare at him with.  In any case, the award for blindness has to go to

the sociologists, who like Castoriadis talk about “a retreat into the private sphere” without

clarifying that this sphere itself has been entirely socialized.  At the other extreme we find

those who have let themselves go so far as even to go into Bloom.  And the stories they bring

back all resemble in one way or another the experience that the narrator of Monsieur

Teste had upon discovering what that character was like “at home”:  “I’ve never had a

greater impression of the ordinary.  It was an ordinary, characterless dwelling, similar at any

given point to the theorems, and perhaps just as useful.  My host’s existence took place

within the most general home, the most common of interiors.” Bloom is, indeed, the man that

exists in the “most common of interiors.”

It is only in those places and circumstances where the Spectacle’s effect is temporarily

suspended that the most intimate truth about Bloom comes out: that he is, at bottom,

in agapê.  Such a suspension arises in an exemplary manner in uprisings, but also at the

moment when we talk to a stranger in the streets of the metropolis, and in the final analysis

anywhere that people must recognize themselves, beyond all specifics, as simply people; as

separate beings, finite and exposed.  It is then not rare to see perfect strangers show us their

common humanity, by protecting us from some danger, by offering us their whole pack of

cigarettes instead of just the one cigarette we’d asked for, or by spending a quarter-hour

helping us find the address we’d been looking for when otherwise they are usually so stingy

with their time. Such phenomena are in no way explainable by an interpretation using the

classical ethnological terms of gift and counter-gift like a certain kind of bar-room sociality, on

the contrary, might indeed be.  No hierarchical rank is in play here.  There’s no glory being

sought after.  The only thing that can explain it is the ethics of infinite gift, which, in the

Christian tradition, and specifically the Franciscan, is known as agapê.  

Agapê is part of the existential situation of man that has informed commodity society in this,

its final age.  And that’s the state commodity society has left mankind in, by making it so

foreign to itself and its desires.  In spite of all indications to the contrary, and as disturbing as

it may be, this society is coming down with a serious kindness infection.

“Be Different – Be Yourself!”

(an underwear ad)

In many respects, commodity society can’t do without Bloom.  The return to effectiveness of

spectacular representations, known as “consumption,” is entirely conditioned by the mimetic

competition that Bloom’s inner nothingness impels him towards.  The tyrannical judgments of

the impersonal, of what “PEOPLE” will think, would remain just another item in a universal

mockery if “being” did not, in the Spectacle, mean “being different,” or at least making an

effort to.  So it’s not so much, as good old Simmel put it, that “a person’s personal, special

importance comes about through their having a certain impersonal trait,” but rather that the

special importance of impersonality would be impossible without a certain labor on the part of

individual persons.

Naturally what is reinforced with the originality that PEOPLE give to Bloom is never his

singularity, but the impersonal “PEOPLE”-ness itself, in other words, poor substantiality.  All

recognition within the Spectacle is but recognition of the Spectacle. 

Without Bloom, therefore, the commodity would be no more than a purely formal principle

deprived of all contact with becoming.

I Would Prefer Not To

I walked amongst them as a foreigner, but none of them saw that I was one.  I lived among

them as a spy, but none of them – not even me – suspected that I was one.  All of them took

me for one of their relatives: no one knew that there’d been a change-out when I was

born.  And so I was a peer of the others that in no way resembled them, the brother of each

and all but without being from any of their families.  

I came from vast lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself, but I never mentioned

these countries.  My footprints on the theater-floors and pavements were similar to theirs, but

my heart was far away, all the while beating quite near, the fictive master of an exiled,

foreign body…

No one really knew me underneath this mask of similarity, no one even knew that I was

wearing one because no one knew that there are masked beings here in this world.  No one

ever dreamed that there was always someone else standing beside me, which in the final

analysis was actually me.  I was always believed to be identical to myself.

Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disturbances

  

 

At the same time, one thing’s for sure – Bloom carries within himself the destruction of

commodity society.  In Bloom we find that same ambivalent character seen in all the realities

in which the transcendence of commodity society on its own terrain manifest itself.

In this dissolution, it is the foundations themselves, which have for a long time now been

deserted, rather than the great edifices of the superstructure that are the first to be

attacked.  The invisible precedes the visible, and the basis of the world changes

imperceptibly.

Bloom bears the end of the world within himself, but does not declare its abolition; he just

empties it of meaning and reduces it to the state of a left-over husk awaiting demolition.  In

this sense one might affirm that the metaphysical upheaval that Bloom is a synonym for is

already behind us, but that the bulk of its consequences is yet to come.

With Bloom, for whom all the self-intimacy that gave rise to private property is lacking, the

latter has lost all substance: what is really left that is truly proper to anyone, that is really

anyone’s own?  What is left, a fortiori, that is private, in the proper sense?  Private property

now subsists merely in an empirical manner, as a dead abstraction gliding along above a

reality that escapes it ever more visibly.

Bloom doesn’t contest the law, he lays it down.  And how could the law not have been

definitively outdated with the appearance of this being who is not a subject, whose acts bear

relation to no particular personalty at all, and whose behaviors are no more dependent on the

bourgeois categories of interest and motivation than they are on passion or responsibility?

Faced with Bloom, thus, the law loses all its competence to deliver justice – what could justice

mean to a totally indifferent being? – and it is only when PEOPLE leave it strictly to police

terror that it can be applied at all.  Because in the world of the always-similar, we stagnate

just as much in jail as we do at Club Med: life is everywhere identically absent.

That’s why it’s so important to domination for prisons to become places of prolonged torture,

and for that to be well known by everyone.

But it is the economy itself, and with it all notions of utility, credit, or instrumental rationality,

that Bloom has above all made a thing of the past.  That’s the reason for the well planned and

public constitution of a lumpen-proletariat in all the nations where late capitalism reigns: the

lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from abandoning his essential detachment by the

abrupt but frightening threat of hunger.  Because from the economic point of view, this “non-

practical man” (Musil) is a disastrously clumsy producer, and a totally irresponsible

consumer.  Even his egoism itself is in decline: it is an egoism without ego.

If Bloom hasn’t failed to devastate classical politics in its very principles, it’s in part only by

default (there can be no more imaginable establishment of equivalence between everything

within the universal than there can be senatorial elections among rats – each rat is an equal

and inalienable representative of his species, primus inter pares [first among equals]) but also

in part by excess, because Bloom moves spontaneously within the un-representable, which is

Bloomness itself.

So; what can we think, then, of the troubles that this ungrateful son causes the Spectacle,

from under which all characters and all roles slip out with a little murmur saying “I would

prefer not to?”

Tiqqun

“For the awakened ones, there is a world that is one and common to all, 

whereas for the sleepers each turns away from it towards their own.”

Heraclitus

Tiqqun goes to the root of things.  It is still only crossing through purgatory.  It carries out its

work methodically.  Tiqqun is the only possible outlook for revolution.  Not the revolution

that must be waited for, much less the revolution that we can prepare: but the revolution

that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a temporality operating

internally within history.

Tiqqun is not a determinable point in the future, with a validity period more or less short, even

if it is also that, but rather it is the “real movement that abolishes the existing state of

things.”

Tiqqun is always already there; that is, it is but the manifestation process of what exists,

which also entails the annulment of that which does not exist.

The fragile positivity of this world has to do precisely with the fact that it is nothing, nothing

but the suspension of Tiqqun.  This epochal suspension can now be felt everywhere.  And

there really isn’t anything else that can truly be felt at all anymore.

Bloom is a part of Tiqqun.  Precisely because he is the man of full-fledged nihilism, his fate is

either to make his escape from nihilism or perish. The intuition of the proletariat, for Marx,

aims at that, but its trajectory ends up warped before it reaches its target.  So we read, in The

German Ideology: “The productive forces are confronted by the great mass of individuals,

from whom these forces have been torn, and who, all the real substance of their lives having

been frustrated, have become abstract beings, but precisely for that reason are able to

establish relationships with one another as individuals.”

But it is precisely to the extent that he is not an individual that Bloom establishes relations

with his peers.  The individual carries within his deceptive integrity, in an atavistic manner,

the repression of communication, or the need for its artificiality.  The ecstatic opening of

mankind, and specifically of Bloom, that I that is a THEY, that THEY that is a I, is the very thing

that the fiction of the individual was invented to counter.

Bloom does not experience a particular finiteness or a specific separation; he experiences an

ontological finiteness and separation common to all men.  Furthermore, Bloom is only alone in

appearances, because he is not alone in his being alone; all men have that solitude in

common. He lives like a foreigner in his own country; non-existent and on the margins of

everything – but all Blooms inhabit together their fatherland: Exile.  All Blooms belong

indistinguishably to one and the same world, which is the world of forgetting – forgetting the

world.  And so, the Common is alienated, but only in appearances, because it is even more

alienated as the Common; the alienation of the Common only refers to the fact that what is

common to them appears to men as something particular, something of their own, something

private.

And this Common, issued from the alienation of the Common and formed by it, is none other

than the veritable and unique Common among mankind, its primordial alienation: finiteness,

solitude, exposedness.  Here the most intimate coincides with the most general, and the most

“private” is the most shared.

Did You See Yourself When You Were Drunk?

“They say he’s dead since he has no taste for earthly things.”

Meister Eckhart

As PEOPLE can easily see, all this sketches out a catastrophic possibility for commodity

domination, the realization of which it must ward off by all means: the possibility that Bloom

might come to want what he is and reappropriate his inappropriateness.  

This “society,” that is, the set of situations that it authorizes, fears nothing more than Bloom,

that “condemned man that has no business, no feelings, no attachments, no property, and

not even a name of his own.” (Nechayev).  It must be considered, even in the most miserable

of its details, as a formidable apparatus set up with the exclusive purpose of eternalizing the

Bloom Condition, which is a condition of suffering. In principle, entertainment is no more than

the politics devoted to such ends; eternalizing Bloom’s condition starts by distracting him

from it. Thence, as if in a cascade, come certain absolute necessities – the necessity of

containing all manifestations of the general suffering, which presupposes an ever more

absolute control over appearances, and the necessity of painting pretty makeup on the all-

too-visible effects of that suffering, to which the totally disproportionate inflation of Biopower

is the response.  Because at the confused point things have gotten to now,

the body represents, on a generic scale, the last performer of the irreducibility of human

beings to total alienation.  It’s through the body’s illnesses and dysfunction, and only through

them, that the demand for self-knowledge remains an immediate reality for each person. This

“society” would never have declared such an all-out war on Bloom’s suffering if it didn’t

constitute in itself and in all its aspects an intolerable attack on the empire of positivity; if it

didn’t go hand in hand with an immediate revocation of all the illusions of participation in its

flowery immanence.  

Maintaining in everyday life the use of representations and categories that long ago became

inoperative; periodically imposing the most ephemeral but renovated versions of the most

gappy asses’ bridges of bourgeois morality; maintaining, beyond the intense obviousness of

their falsehood and expiration, the sad illusions of “modernity”; such are just a few chapters

in the heavy labor that the perpetuation of this total separation among people requires.

The impersonal ‘THEY’ decides in advance on what is comprehensible, and what must be

rejected for its incomprehensibility.  Bloom and his ecstasy are incomprehensible; they must

be rejected.  His poverty is also reputed to be a pretty shady thing in alienated Publicity – it is

quite true that capitalism has done all it can to make poverty identical to misery at its heart,

the property of a given thing always being essentiallythe right to deprive others of its

use.  PEOPLE are even ready, in order to keep Bloom shameful of his poverty, to allow Bloom

to subjectivize himself in this shame.  The executive failure will thus, in the panoply of

fashionable writers, find a lot to identify with and be reassured by: yes, “abject man” is

indeed on its way towards becoming an honorable form of life.  Otherwise, he may turn

towards Buddhism, that nauseating, sordid, corny spirituality for oppressed wage workers,

which sees as already quite the excessive ambition the idea that it might teach its fascinated

and stupid faithful flock the art of wading in their own nullity. It is of absolutely primary

importance from domination’s perspective that we never recognize ourselves as having all

the traits of Bloom, that we appear to ourselves and each other as opaque, terrifying

objects.  At all costs Bloom must be given ideas, desires, and a subjectivity by the impersonal

force of PEOPLE.  THEY give him everything he needs so that he can remain that mute man in

whose mouth the Spectacle puts the words it wants to hear.  THEY aren’t even averse to

wielding Bloom against Bloom, turning his own impersonality against him, precisely by

personifying him, in “society,” “the people,” or even “the average joe.”

All this converges in a social sum that always puts an ever more exorbitant price on “being

yourself,” that is, it all converges in a strict assignment to a residence within one of the

identities recognized by autonomized Publicity. 

Parallel to this, the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation become more and more

violent and their control more and more measured to the millimeter.  And since this control

can’t operate other than in a strict economy of time, in a synchrony, Bloom is henceforth

regularly exhorted to be “proud” of this or that, proud of being homo or techno, second-

generation north African, black, or even a gang-member.  No matter what, Bloom absolutely

must be something, anything, rather than nothing.

Mene, Tekel, Peres. 

[your kingdom’s days are numbered; 

it has been weighed and found wanting; 

and it is divided.]

Adorno speculated, in his work Prisms, that “those men that no longer exist except through

others, being the absolute zöon politicon, may certainly lose their identity, but they would at

the same time escape their grip on self-preservation, which ensures the coherence of the

‘best of worlds,’ as well as that of the old world.  Total interchangeability would destroy the

substance of domination and show some promise for freedom.”

Meanwhile, the Spectacle has had all the time in the world to test out the truth of such

conjectures, but has at the same time victoriously applied itself to wrecking the fulfillment of

that incongruous promise of freedom.  Naturally, that wouldn’t work out too well without

taking a tougher stance, and the commodity world thus had to become ever more implacable

in the exercise of its dictatorship.

From “crises” to “recoveries,” from “recoveries” to depressions, life in the Spectacle has since

1914 never ceased to become ever more stifling.  A look of terror hangs on all gazes, even in

would-be popular celebrations.  The planetary watchword of “transparency” explains the

present context of permanent war against Bloom’s opacity, as well as the deferred character

of the existence that arises from it.  

As a first response to this situation we see appearing among Blooms not only a certain taste

for anonymity, but at the same time a certain defiance towards visibility, a hatred for things.

There’s a metaphysical hostility coming back again, a hostility towards that which exists, and

it threatens to burst at every moment and in every circumstance.

At the origin of this instability is a disorder, a disorder that comes from unused strength, from

a negativity that can’t eternally remain unemployed, on pain of physically destroying those

experiencing that negativity.

Most often, that negativity remains silent, though as a result of its being so bottled up it

constantly manifests itself in a hysterical formalization of all human relationships.  But here

already we are looking at the critical zone of totally disproportionate backlash against

repression.  An ever more compact mass of crimes, of strange acts comprising a “violence”

and destruction “with no apparent motive,” besieges the everyday life of biopolitical

democracies – in general, the Spectacle calls “violence” everything that it intends to handle

by force, everything that it would like to be able to wield all its arbitrary power against; and

this category only has any validity within the commodity mode of disclosure, which itself has

no validity, and which always hypostatizes the means relative to the ends, which here is all

activity itself, even to the detriment of its immanent significance.

Incapable of preventing them and even more incapable of understanding them, commodity

domination claims to be committed to not allowing any such attacks on the social control of

behavior.  So it broadcasts its habitual saber-rattling about video-surveillance and “zero

tolerance,” the repression of “uncivil behaviors” and of the “feeling of insecurity,” as if the

surveillers themselves didn’t need to be surveilled, as if the “feeling of insecurity” had not

been ontologically assigned to Bloom!  

A socialist cop, high up in the bureaucracy of some Japanese teachers’ union, expresses in the

following passage his disturbance about the little Blooms under him: “The phenomenon is all

the more concerning because the authors of these violent acts have often always been such

‘good kids.’  We used to get problem children; but today the kids don’t revolt, they just ditch

out of school.  And if we punish them, their reaction is totally disproportionate: they just

explode.” (Le Monde, Friday April 16th, 1998).  An infernal dialectic is at work here, one that

will tend to make such “explosions” become ever more frequent, fortuitous, and ferocious as

the massive and systematic character of the control necessary for their prevention is ever

more emphasized.  It is a rarely disputed fact: we know from experience that the violence of

explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.

In Bloom, domination, which thought it prudent to impose the economy as a morality so that

commerce could make men soft, predictable, and inoffensive – we’ve seen a number of

centuries’ worth of this now – sees its project flipping over into its opposite: to wit, it appears

that “homo economicus,” in his perfection, is also what makes the economy outdated; and he

makes it outdated as that which, having deprived him of all substance, has made

him perfectly unpredictable.

The man without content, has, in the final analysis, the hardest time of anyone trying to

contain himself.

The Unavowable Enemy

In which every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party.

Faced with this unknown enemy – in the sense that we can speak of an Unknown Soldier, that

is, a soldier that everyone knows to be unknown, singularized as an “anybody,” who has no

name, no face, no epic history of his own, who resembles nothing, but is present under his

camouflage everywhere in the order of possibilities – domination’s disquiet becomes more

and more clearly paranoid.  The dedication it has now undertaken to carrying out its

decimation, even in its own ranks and against all odds, appears to the detached viewer as

rather a comedic spectacle.  

There’s something objectively terrifying about the sad forty-year-old who, up to the moment

of the outbreak of total carnage, had been the most normal, the flattest, the most

insignificant of average men.  No one had ever heard him declare his hatred for the family,

work, or his petty-bourgeois suburb, up until that fine morning when he wakes up, takes a

shower, and eats his breakfast, with his wife, daughter and son still sleeping, and then loads

his hunting rifle and very discreetly blows all their brains out.  Confronted by his judges, or

even by torture, Bloom will remain silent about the motives of his crime.  Partly because

sovereignty doesn’t need to give reasons, but also because he senses that the worst atrocity

he could subject this “society” to would be to leave his act unexplained.

And thus has Bloom managed to insinuate into all minds the poisonous certainty that in each

and every man there is a sleeping enemy of civilization.  Quite apparently he has no other

purpose than to devastate this world – indeed, it’s his destiny, even – but he’ll never say

so. Because his strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce silence.

“Because what crime and madness objectivize

is the absence of a transcendental homeland.”

Lukacs, Theory of the Novel

To the extent that the desolate forms we are intended to be contained within tighten their

tyranny, some strikingly curious manifestations come about.

Runners-amok, for instance, adapt to existing in the very heart of the most advanced

societies, in unexpected forms, and take on new significance. 

In the territories administered by autonomous Publicity, such disintegration phenomena are

rare things that expose the true state of the world nakedly, the pure scandal of things.

And at the same time as they reveal the lines of force within the reign of apathy, they show

the dimensions of the possibilities we’re living in. That’s why – even in their very distance –

they are so familiar to us.

The traces of blood that they leave behind in their trail mark the last steps taken by a man

who made the mistake of wanting to escape alonefrom the grey terror in which he had been

detained at such high cost.  Our tendency to conceive of that is a measure of what life is left

in us.

The living are those who understand for themselves that at the moment when fear and

submission attain, in Bloom, to their ultimate figure as a fear and submission that

is absolute because it has no object, the liberation from that fear and that submission means

an equally absolute liberation from all fear and all submission.  Once he who had indistinctly

feared everything passes such a point, he can never fear anything again.  There is, beyond

the most far-flung wastelands of alienation, a zone of total clear and calm where man

becomes incapable of feeling any interest in his own life, nor even the slightest hint of

attachment to his place in the world.

All freedom, present or future, which departs in some way or other from that detachment,

from that serene calm/ataraxy, can hardly do any more than expound the principles of a

more modern servitude.

The Possessed of Nothingness

“I’m sorry. Like Shakespeare says, Good

wombs hath borne bad sons.” 

Eric Harris, Littleton, April 20th, 1999

There aren’t many ways out from under the universal crush.

We extend our arms but they don’t find anything to touch.  The world’s been distanced from

our grasp; PEOPLE put it outside our range.  Very few Blooms manage to resist the

disproportionate enormity of that pressure.

The omnipresence of the commodity’s occupation troops and the rigor of their ‘state

of  emergency’ condemn most projects of freedom to a short existence.  And so, everywhere

that order appears to have firmly set in, negativity prefers to turn against itself, as illness,

suffering, or frenzied servitude.  There are some invaluable cases, however, where isolated

beings take the initiative, without hope or strategy, to open a breach in the well-regulated,

smooth course of disaster.

In them, Bloom violently liberates himself from the patience that PEOPLE would like to make

him languish in forever.  And since the only instinct that can tame such a howling presence of

nothingness is that of destruction, the taste for the Totally Different takes on the appearance

of crime and is experienced in a passionate indifference where its author manages to hold

steady when confronted with it.

This manifests itself in the most spectacular way in the growing number of Blooms, big and

small, who, for lack of anything better, lust after the charm of the simplest surrealist act

(recall that “the simplest surrealist act consists in going out into the street, revolvers in hand,

and firing at random, as much as possible, into the crowd.  Whoever has not at least once had

the urge to finish off in this way the wretched little system of degradation and cretinization in

force belongs in that crowd himself, with his gut at bullet height.” (Breton).  Recall as well that

this inclination, like many other things, remained among the surrealists a mere theory without

practice, just like its contemporary practice is most often without theory).

These individual eruptions, which are doomed to proliferate among those who have still not

fallen into the deep sleep of cybernetics, are indeed desperate calls for desertion and

fraternity.  The freedom that they affirm is not that of a particular man assigning himself a

particular end, but the freedom of each, the freedom of the human race itself: a single man is

enough to declare that freedom has still not disappeared.

The Spectacle cannot metabolize characteristics bearing so many poisons.  It can report

them, but it can never strip them entirely of the unexplainable, the inexpressible, and the

terror at their core.  These are the Noble and Generous Acts of our times, a world-weary form

of propaganda by the deed, whose ideological mutism only increases its disturbing and

somberly metaphysical character.

Paradoxes of Sovereignty

“I am NOTHING”: this parody of an affirmation is the final word of sovereign subjectivity,

liberated from the influence that it would like to – or that it must – have on things… Because I

know that I am, at bottom, this subjective, content-free existence. 

Georges Bataille, Sovereignty

In the Spectacle, power is everywhere; that is, all relations are in the final analysis relations of

domination.  And because of this no one is sovereign in the Spectacle.  It is an objective world

where everyone must first subjugate themselves in order to subjugate others in turn.

To live in conformance with man’s fundamental aspiration to sovereignty is impossible in the

Spectacle except in one single instant: the instant of the act.  

He who isn’t just playing around with life has a need for acts, for gestures, so that his life can

become more real to him than a simple game which can be oriented in any given direction.  In

the world of the commodity, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things

merge and transform into one another, where everything is merely ambiguous, transitional,

ephemeral, and blended together, only acts cut through it all.  In the splendor of their

necessary brutality, they carve an unsolvable “after” into what had been “before,” which

PEOPLE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.  

A gesture/an act is an event.  It cuts open a wound in the chaos of the world, and installs at

the bottom of that wound its shards of unambiguity/univocity.  It is a matter of establishing so

profoundly in their difference things that have been judged as different that what separated

them out from each other can never have any possibility of being erased.  If there’s anything

in Bloom that thwarts domination, it is the fact that even dispossessed of everything, even in

all his nudity, man still has an uncontrollable metaphysical power of repudiation: the power to

kill others and to kill himself.  Death, every time it intervenes, rips a disgraceful hole in the

biopolitical tissue.  Total nihilism/nihilism fulfilled, which has really fulfilled nothing but the

dissolution of all otherness in a limitless circulatory immanence, always meets its defeat right

there: upon contact with death, life suddenly ceases to be taken for granted.  The duty to

make decisions which sanctions all properly human existence has always been in part tied to

the approach to that abyss.

On the eve of the day in March 1998 when he massacred four Bloom-students and a Bloom-

professor, little Mitchell Johnson declared to his incredulous schoolmates: “Tomorrow I will

decide who will live and who will die.”  This is as far from the Erostratus-ism of Pierre Riviere

as it is from fascist hysteria.  Nothing is more striking in the reports on the carnage brought

about by Kipland Kinkel or Alain Oreiller than their state of cold self-control and total vertical

detachment relative to the world.  “I’m no longer acting out of sentiment,” said Alain Oreiller

while executing his mother.  There’s something calmly suicidal in the affirmation of so

omnilateral a non-participation, indifference, and refusal to suffer.

Often the Spectacle uses this as a pretext to start talking about “gratuitous” acts – a generic

qualifier with which it hides the purposes it doesn’t want to understand, all the while making

use of them as a fantastic opportunity to reinject some life into one or the other of bourgeois

utilitarianism’s favorite false paradoxes -  as long as those acts aren’t lacking in hatred or

reason.  To prove this all one needs to do is watch the five video tapes that the “monsters of

Littleton” filmed in anticipation of their operation.  Their program appears in them quite

clearly: “We’re going to set off a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed.”  

Here hatred itself is undifferentiated, free of all personality.  Death enters into the universal in

the same way as it emerges from the universal, and it has no anger about it.

This isn’t about giving some revolutionary significance to such acts, and it’s hardly even about

treating them as exemplary.  It’s about understanding what they express the doom of, and

grasping onto them in order to plumb the depths of Bloom.  And whoever follows this path to

the end will see that Bloom is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is a nothing that is sovereign,

an emptiness with a pure potential. 

The contradiction between Bloom’s isolation, apathy, powerlessness, and insensitivity on the

one hand and on the other his dry and brutal need for sovereignty can only bring about more

of these acts, absurd and murderous as they may be, yet still necessary and true.  It’s all

about knowing how to deal with them in the right terms in the future: like [in

Mallarmé’s] Igitur, for instance: “One of the acts of the universe has been committed

there.  Nothing else but the breath remained, the end of speech and gesture united – blow out

the candle of being, by which everything has existed.  Proof.” 

The Era of Pure Guilt

Men don’t have the option of not fighting; the only choice they have is which side they’re

on.  Neutrality has nothing neutral about it; it is indeed the bloodiest side there is to take.  

Bloom, both when he’s the one that shoots the bullets and when he’s one that succumbs to

them, is certainly innocent.  After all, isn’t it true that Bloom is but dependence itself on the

central farce?  Did he choose to live in this world, whose perpetuation is the result of an

autonomous social totality that appears ever more extraterrestrial to him every day?  How

could he do otherwise, stray Lilliputian confronting the Leviathan of the commodity? All he

can do is speak the language of the spectacular occupier, eat from the hand of Biopower, and

participate in his own way in the production and reproduction of its horrors. 

This is how Bloom would like to be able to be understood: as a foreigner, as something

external to himself.  But in this defense, he only tacitly admits that he himself is that fraction

of himself that sees to it that the rest of his being will remain alienated.

It matters little that Bloom can’t be held responsible for any of his acts: he remains

nonetheless responsible for his own irresponsibility, which he is at every instant given the

opportunity to declare himself against. Since he has consented, negatively at least, to being

no more than the predicate of his own existence, he is an objective part of domination, and

his innocence is itself pure guilt.  

The man of total nihilism, the man of “what’s the point?” who cries on the shoulder of the

man of “what can I do about it?” is indeed quite mistaken to believe himself free of fault just

because he hasn’t done anything and because so many others are in the same situation he’s

in.

The Spectacle, in so regularly admitting that the murderer was “an ordinary man,” a “student

like any other,” is suggesting that the men of our times all participate equally in the

unappealable crime that our times really are.  But it refuses to recognize this as

a metaphysical fact: as the case of the gas-chamber operators in Auschwitz shows, the fear of

responsibility is not only stronger than conscience, it is in certain circumstances even stronger

than the fear of death.

In a world of slaves without masters, in a world of collaborators, in a world dominated by a

veritable tyranny of servitude, the simplest surrealist act is governed by none other than the

ancient duty of tyrannicide.  

Homo Sacer [sacred/accursed man]

“One day or another the bombs will drop, and people will finally believe what they’d always

refused to admit; that words have a metaphysical sense to them.”

Brice Parain, The Trouble with Choice

The possessed of nothingness begin by drawing the consequences from their Bloom

condition.  And thus they expose the dizzying vertigo of it: Bloom is sacer, in the sense of the

word used by Giorgio Agamben; that is, a creature that has no rights, who cannot be judged

or condemned by men, but who anyone may kill without being considered to have committed

a crime.  Bloom is sacer to the exact extent that he knows himself to be possessed by bare

life, to the extent that, like a Muselmann in the concentration camps, he is the simple witness

to his own becoming-inhuman.  

Insignificance and anyonymity, separation and foreignness - these are not the poetic

circumstances that the melancholic penchant of certain subjectivities may tend to exaggerate

them as: the scope of the existential situation they characterize – Bloom – is total, and it is

exceedingly political.

Anyone that has no community is sacer.

Being nothing, remaining outside all recognition, or presenting oneself as a pure, non-political

individuality, is enough to make any man at all a being whose disappearance is

uninscribable.  However inexhaustible the obituary eulogies may be – eternal regrets, etc. –

such a death is trivial, indifferent, and only concerns he who disappears; meaning, that is - in

keeping with good logic - nobody.  Analogous to his entirely private life, Bloom’s death is such

a non-event that anybody can eliminate him.  That’s why the expostulations of those who,

sobs in their voices, lament the fact that Kip Kinkel’s victims “didn’t deserve to die” are

inadmissible, because they didn’t deserve to live, either; they were outside the sphere of

deservingness.  To they extent that they found themselves in the hands of Biopower, they

were already the living dead, at the mercy of any sovereign decision-making, whether that of

the State or of a murderer.  Hannah Arendt:

“Being reduced to nothing anymore but a simple specimen of an animal species called

Mankind; this is what happens to those who’ve lost all distinct political qualities, and who

have become human beings and that alone… The loss of the Rights of Man takes place at the

moment when a person becomes just a human being in general – without profession,

citizenship, opinion, or any acts by which he identifies himself and specifies himself

– and appears as differentiated only in a general way, representing no more than his own and

absolutely unique individuality, which, in the absence of a common world where it might

express itself and upon which it might act, loses all meaning.” (Imperialism)

Bloom’s exile has a metaphysical status to it; that is, it is effective in all domains.  And that

metaphysical status expresses his real situation, in light of which his legal situation has no

truth to it.  The fact that he can be shot down like a dog by a stranger without the slightest

justification, or - parallel to that and conversely - that he is capable of murdering “innocents”

without the slightest remorse, is a reality that no jurisdiction whatsoever is capable of dealing

with.  Only weak and superstitious minds could give themselves up to believing that a verdict

of life in prison or some orderly trial could suffice to sweep those facts into the limbo of null

and void-ness.  At the most, domination is free to attest to the Bloom condition, for instance

by declaring an only slightly-disguised state of exception, as the United States did with its

1996 adoption of a so-called “anti-terrorist” law which allows the arrest of “suspects” on the

basis of secret information, without any count of indictment or any limit to its

duration.  There’s a certain physical risk to being metaphysically nil.  Doubtless it was in

anticipation of the truly glorious possibilities that such nullity was to give rise to that Unesco

adopted the oh-so highly consequential “Universal Declaration of Animal Rights” on October

15th, 1978, which stipulates in article 3: “1 – No animal should be subjected to mistreatment

or to acts of cruelty.  2 – If it is necessary to kill an animal, it should be carried out in a

manner that is instantaneous, painless, and does not cause it fear.  3 – Dead animals must be

treated with decency.”

“Tu non sei morta, ma se’ismarrita 

Anima nostra che si ti lamenti.”

[you are not dead, but merely lost, 

o ever-lamenting soul of ours.]

Dante, Convivio [Banquet]

That Bloom’s kindness still expresses itself here and there in acts of murder is a sign that the

dividing line is near but has not yet been crossed.

In zones governed by nihilism in its final stage, where the ends are still lacking though the

means abound, kindness is a mystical possession. There, the desire for an unconditional

freedom gives rise to singular formations, and gives words a value full of paradoxes.  Lukacs:

“Kindness is savage and pitiless, it is blind and daring, In the soul of a kind person all

psychological content is erased, all causes and effects.  Their soul is a blank slate upon which

fate writes its absurd commandments.  And said commandments are carried out blindly, in a

reckless and pitiless manner.  And that this impossibility becomes an act, that this blindness

becomes illumination, that this cruelty is transformed into kindness – that’s the real miracle,

that’s true grace.”  (On Mental Poverty)

But at the same time as these eruptions bear witness to an impossibility, they also, in their

proliferation, announce a speedup of the flow of time.  The universal disturbance, which tends

to subordinate itself under ever greater quantities of ever more minute activities, brings to a

glowing intensity in each man his need to make his choice.  Already those for whom this

necessity means annihilation speak of apocalypse, while the vast majority content themselves

with living under it all in the swampy pleasures of the last days.  

Only those who understand the meaning they themselves will give to the catastrophe will

remain calm and retain the precision of their movements.  

In the magnitude and the way in which a given mind gives itself over to panic, one can

recognize its station, the ranks it falls in.  And this is a mark that is valid not only ethically and

metaphysically but also in praxis, and in time.

Etcetera.

But the world that we’re born into is a world at war, all the dazzle of which comes from its

sharp division into friends and enemies.  Naming the front lines in that war is part of crossing

the line, but that’s not enough to really do it.  Only combat can really cross the line.  Not so

much because it gives rise to such grandeur, but more because it is the deepest experience

of community, the one that permanently mingles with annihilation and only measures itself in

extreme proximity to risk.  Living together in the heart of the desert, with the same resolution

to never reconcile ourselves with it; that’s the proof, that’s the light.

Etcetera.

…….

Theory is not 

about thought,

A certain quantity of coagulated, 

manufactured 

thought.

Theory

is a state,

a state of shock.

A Theory of Bloom,

Where Bloom is not the object of theory, where theory is but the most familiar activity,

the spontaneous penchant of an essentiallytheoretical creature,

of a Bloom.

Theory is WITHOUT END.

thence

the need

to PUT AN END TO IT,

decisively.

The weariness of speech

What’s the way out of Bloom?

The Assumption of Bloom,

for instance.

- You can only really liberate yourself from anything by reappropriating the thing you’re

liberating yourself from. – 

What does the assumption of Bloom mean?

Making use of the metaphysical situation defined by Bloom, the exercise of the self as

a prankster.

Not fighting against the dominant schizoid state, against our schizoid state, 

but starting from there, and making use of it as a pure power of subjectivation and

desubjectivation, as an aptitude for experimentation.  

Breaking with the old anxiety of “who am I really?” to the benefit of a real understanding of

my situation and the use of it that I could possibly make.

Not just surviving in the constant imminence of a miraculous departure, 

not forcing ourselves to believe in the jobs we do, the lies we tell,

but starting from there, to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee –

through Tiqqun for example – and silently coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage. 

To detach from our detachment through a conscious, strategic practice of self-splitting.

BREAKING WITH THE WORLD, FIRST OF ALL INWARDLY.

The Invisible Committee:

an openly secret society,

a public conspiracy,

an instance of anonymous subjectivation, 

whose name is everywhere and headquarters nowhere,

the experimental-revolutionary polarity of the Imaginary Party

The Invisible Committee: not a revolutionary organization, but a higher level of reality,

a metaphysical territory of secession with all the magnitude of a whole world of its own, 

the playing area where positive creation alone can accomplish the great emigration of the

economy from the world.

IT’S A FICTION THAT’S MADE ITS REALITY REAL.

All the elsewheres that we could have fled to have been liquidated;

we can only desert the situation inwardly,

by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric with a participation 

on a more intimate, 

and thus unattributable level,

in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee,

where an infiltration of society on all levels is being plotted.

This desertion is 

a metamorphosis.

The Invisible Committee – the concrete space where our attacks, our writings, our acts, our

words, our gatherings, our events circulate: 

our desertion –

transfigures the totality of what we’d accepted as a trade-off,

of what we’d endured as our “alienations,”

into a infiltration strategy.

The Other ceases to possess us:

and indeed, 

possession itself is reversed

and becomes gentle.

We will conceal our act

within a relationship

that our powers have not yet attained to.

A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ACCESS TO EXPERIENCE

Experimentation:

the practice of freedom,

the practice of idleness,

opposing the design of 

a process of emancipation separate 

from the existence of men,

and sending back to their desks all the learned plans and projects of liberation.

A kind of Contestation

whose authority

and methods are not

in any way distinct

from experience.

Taking the possibilities that my situation contains all the way.

Revolutionary experimentation,

collective-revolutionary experimentation,

revolutionary-experimental collectivity carrying out the assumption of finiteness, separation

and exposedness as the ecstatic coordinates of existence.

The life of he who 

knows that his appearance and his essence are identical to one another, but not identical to

him,

cannot be in the world without remembering that he is not of this world,

cannot accommodate himself to a community which would be a simple amusement of his

solitude in the face of death,

-dancing, in total precision, to the death with time, which kills you – 

THAT’S EXPERIMENTATION.

Language,

words and gestures:

that’s the common home of the placeless.  

The bond between those that cannot be reduced to the lie of belonging, to a certain plot of

land, a certain birthplace.  

A journey into dispersion and exile,

communication 

that acts upon

our essential separation.

“Once we’ve spoken, to remain as close as possible in line with what we’d said, so that

everything won’t be effectively up in the air, with our words on the one side and ourselves on

the other, and with the remorse of separations.”

This text is a pact.

The protocol for an experimentation now open

among deserters.

Without anyone noticing,

Break ranks.

NOW

1. Elser, an “exemplary” Bloom in many respects, committed a bomb attack on Hitler on the

8th of November 1939, with the simple motive that he thought that Hitler was a “bad

man.” This attack only failed because of a surprising stroke of bad luck. A second, equally

incredible stroke of bad luck, gave rise to his arrest on the Swiss border in the course of

his escape. He was never tried for his crime; instead he was detained in various camps,

with the unique status of Führerssonderhaftling (exceptional prisoner of the Fuhrer).

Eichmann’s trial, that of a Bloom who splits himself into a subject of the law and a real,

veritable, interior man, and thus claims to have himself not been the subject of his acts,

shows quite clearly the impossibility of judging Bloom, that is, of fathoming him within the

terms, and according to the principles, of justice.

2. Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungGirl [http://younggirl.jottit.com] is found in issue

number one of Tiqqun.