Miscellaneous Aphorisms, Notes, Fragments V
Socialist politics, Prometheus, and other miscellanea
Painting by Odilon Redon
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Worker and capitalist want the same thing, but in entirely different ways. They are enemies in the true sense. Enemies fight over the same piece of territory. The petty bourgeois is not even an enemy, but either an ally (when they submit to working class authority), or an obstacle, a barricade to be shattered by proletarian cannon fire.
The capitalist is the worker glimpsed in reflection (and a reflection is always an inversion). The petty bourgeois is a ripple running across the reflection, obscuring the image, a smudge on the mirror, a social error, albeit an error which is historically meaningful, which is susceptible of submitting itself scientific inquiry.
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The state is the fortress of reason. Not of reason “as such”, but always of a particular reason. The Promethean state, which is the same as to say “proletarian dictatorship”, is the fortress of reason “as such”, of reason not as a particular schematic, but as a productive technology—the Promethean state is the patron of reason-as-such, and of every particular reason that suits it.
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There is no decentralization apart from centralization. They mutually condition one another. Decentralization is always done by someone or something, and that someone or something by necessity has a centralized character. Decentralization not only happens from out of a center, but as such produces and proliferates new centers.
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The chief flaw of “materialism” (taken in a certain sense) is that it subjects Marxism to a speculative philosophical datum, the claim that “matter in motion is all there is”, which is an entirely irrelevant claim. Irrelevant to what? Irrelevant to the mass of considerations which make up Marxism’s content, considerations about the political economy and the like, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it is also irrelevant to the mass of people for whom Marxist political action is the dividing line between life and death, sovereignty and oppression, freedom and servitude. Now we’ve made Marxism dependent on facile philosophical speculation about questions such as “free will” or “materialism versus idealism”. If these questions cannot be definitively resolved in Marxism’s favor, than Marxism has no leg to stand on. Marxism, however, is not a passive philosophical observation. It is a revolutionary theory, which is a totally distinct philosophical category, distinct from all such questions which presuppose the passive standpoint of a knowledge-apprehender.
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Internationalism is its own opposite. Coordinated internationalism requires a strong center. The weaker the center, the weaker the international tendency, the greater the degree of independence in decentered nationalist movements. Internationalism, then, requires a center, and a center must always be somewhere in particular (whereas internationalism must be everywhere). Internationalism depends on a type of “nationalism”, and in the case of socialist internationalism this “nationalism” is that of the proletarian class and their vanguard, of the party especially. It is no accident that the party politics of socialism look and feel like a nationalism, with the banner carrying and flag waving, the propaganda activity, and the like. Socialism as an international initiative involves the interior construction of a kind of nationalism around which to orient itself, an “international nationalism”. That said, the center here acts as the spur of that which is other than itself, rather than requiring its suppression. It is a centralized decentralization. It bears a certain likeness to the Daoist conception of the sovereign. The “nationalism” of the communist party is set up so as to facilitate the relatively decentered initiatives of various proletarian contingents across the planet's surface.
Moreover, the question of “socialism in one country” is that of the historically specific way that internationalism is realized. It is “actually existing internationalism”. The communist party of every individual communist nation is an international party.
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Internationalism is far more compatible with “authentic” localism than nationalism (in its ordinary sense, not that of “international nationalism”) is. Nationalism never operates alone, but always in conjunction with other, competing, nationalisms (i.e. it is antagonistic, not agonic). In order to compete it must draw all internal resources into its center, through regimentation and uniformity. Local culture is slowly suffocated under nationalism. Internationalism, on the contrary, frees local culture from the national grip. In the case of American imperial rule, the just mentioned nationalist tendency is exaggerated on a global scale. The entire globe is regimented according to the peculiarities of American nationalism, through industries like Hollywood. American imperialism is a “national internationalism”, and communism an “international nationalism”.
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The new state, after the smashing of the bourgeois state, must be built bottom-up, and the authority of the new ruling class, the workers, exercised top-down. To be sure, the process of “building up” largely takes place before this “smashing”, and we see this, for instance, in the historical example of the soviets.
Authority is always exercised downward from above, and construction always builds itself upward from the below. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the exercise of working class authority from above, but it must be built from the ground up. Its structures are rooted in the authority of earth-bound society. Its foundation is in town and country.
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Adventurism does not work. It is a chicken running without a head. Those who promote it see it backwards. Blanquism supposes that if you install a head forcibly, then you can lead a socialist movement from the top down, but the head of a socialist movements is the masses. It is true that authority is always exercised top-down, but the authority of a socialist movement is constructed bottom-up. The authority of a socialist movement is the masses. If you want to exercise top-down authority, from a socialist standpoint, you must build it up from the bottom. Thus, it is as much of an error to conceptualize the exercise of authority as a “grassroots” phenomenon, as it is to attempt the construction of authoritative structures (in the context of socialism) from the top down. The bourgeois state machinery must be smashed.
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Not a classless society, but a society presided over by a classless class—that is, by a class that is, in essence, something more than a mere class. The working class is humanity as such, in this historical era, and “humanity” itself is a category whose emptiness is social and historical. According to Pico de Mirandola, man is a being empty of essence which acquires every other essence. This acquisition is a historical endeavor which occurs in a social context. Likewise, the “species being” of man, in a Marxist sense, is not a fixed nature or essence, but precisely a socially and historically operative emptiness.
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The goal of communism is not to abolish the divine but to storm heaven and take it by force, not to destroy it but to seize it; not to kill God, but to dominate him, and appropriate him as a technology, as a power source. Those of a religious disposition have no cause for complaint here. After all, God, the omnipotent, loses nothing thereby.
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The first question that should be asked regarding “meritocracy” is not whether it should be implemented or not, but whether it is even possible or not, in an unqualified sense. Meritocracy poses many fundamental problems. Who determines merit? How to prevent insular cliques, who only accept the “merits” of those they agree with, from forming? Meritocracy and nepotism can be hard to distinguish. A standard of value is always a “family” value, the value of a distinctive clique of likeminded individuals. Meritocracy is a system for the promotion of those who share your value standard. Meritocracy is, in essence, the same thing as nepotism. It is a nepotism which feels justified and impartial, or which is genuinely impartial albeit in a qualified and relative sense, relative to certain assumed conditions (e.g. rule by a certain class). There is no “absolute meritocracy”. There is only the meritocracy of a “family” or a social class.
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The nuclear family is, taxonomically, a species of “broken home”. It is the divorce of the childbearing couple and their children from the extended family, and from the surrounding community.
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Not only is the individual subsumed within the collective—that, alone, would be mere anonymity—but the collective is subsumed within the individual. You feel that other people are part of who you are, that they are part of your inner world as much as your outer.
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Class collaborationism is not a moderated form of bourgeois dominance but an intensified one. Class collaboration is not merely the passive acquiescence to bourgeois rule, as to a force of nature, which is the default condition of capitalism under liberal states, but the imperative to worship the bourgeoisie, the imposition of a social duty to strengthen their rule. It does not only ask one to submit to bourgeois rule, but to like it. Naturally, “class collaboration” always means submission to bourgeois rule in practice, though it likes to represent itself as “all classes situated on the same plane, working together for the benefit of the nation”. “Class collaboration” is a deliberately euphemistic expression.
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The distinction that I make between vanity and narcissism is not merely “semantic”. It is crucial because of the connotations that these terms bear. Narcissism has much more deeply “pathological” connotations. Vanity is an ordinary and widespread “character flaw”; so ordinary one might think of it as an elementary feature of our “social cognition”. It is the Rousseauian “amor propre”. To mislabel the self-reflective self-love (i.e. vanity) as “narcissism” is to allege that this deeply pathological state is much more widespread than it actually is, and this produces an almost histrionic tendency to “narcissist witch hunt” (as evidenced in blogs like thelastpsychiatrist). To see “vanity” everywhere is no big deal. Amor propre is a typical feature of social existence. To see “narcissism” everywhere is to paint the world in a new original sin. The semantic consequences here make a great deal of difference.
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Many who call themselves “communists” need to take a step back and ask themselves why they want communism, to begin with. All too often, a communist wants communism because he is a communist, and communism is what a communist is supposed to want—a vicious, left-communist circle. The stakes involved are lost sight of, and the stakes are of necessity something crucial for a “materialist”.
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The workers and the bourgeoisie are both enemies and spiritual brothers, like Esau and Jacob. They have more in common with each other than either have with the petty bourgeoisie. Both are universal and “rootless”, international classes. Bourgeoisie represent an ideal universality (the “rights of man”, “economic freedom”, etc), and the workers represent real universality, the basic condition of man as such (homo faber).
The bourgeoisie, like Esau, are the first born that lost their birthright. The proletariat only comes into birth on the heels of the bourgeoisie.
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Aristotle follows a descriptive methodology in the Nicomachean Ethics because he is attempting to unravel the character of an already existing ethos. This is why examination of the “commonly held beliefs” about goodness and virtue marks the beginning of his book. He is attempting to unravel the ethos which produced them, and to determine to what extent the common re-presentation of that ethos is sufficient to it.
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Sovereign is he who determines reality. The one who determines the “exception” merely acts within the limited field allowed to him, and can only extend his power as far as his leash will allow him—and he generally does not even know that he is leashed.
The range of conceivable exceptions is determined in advance by whoever defines public reality.
Therefore the seizure of sovereignty can only be undertaken by those whose very existence is already in tension with that reality. The comfortable bureaucrats who manage that reality, regardless of their lofty titles, can never fundamentally challenge it.
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The two most important events of history, thus far, have been the invention of fire and the October Revolution. They are, moreover, analogous events. The latter did for politics what the former did for technology.
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The idea that each nation requires a revolution in order to bring about socialism presumes that nations are somehow hermetically sealed off from one another. It presumes that the Chinese revolution was a revolution only for China, and that the Russian revolution was a revolution only for Russia. The Chinese revolution was our revolution also, and, by effecting revolution there, they can help influence the transition of the globe to socialism through more peaceful means. Socialism can only be brought about through revolution, but that revolution does not need to occur in every nation—nation-states are fictitious! To be sure, the triumph of socialism will necessitate a number of revolutionary events across the globe, especially at certain key junctures, but the idea that each nation-state individually will need its own such event is preposterous. Not that anyone really believes this, but that is neither nor there—the point only is that we do not appreciate just how much every instance of socialist revolution is truly our revolution. That must be grasped.
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It is not that utopian socialism is not scientific, but that it is an outdated science. It a socialist program calibrated to a pre-industrial society. Utopian socialism came too late. It was meant for the mode of production which prevailed in the Middle Ages. It was truly a lost opportunity.
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Justice and rationality are both symbolically affiliated with the scales, which goes to show the limited and limiting nature of justice. It is always the salutary ratio of that which already is. The introduction of the new, creative productivity, development—these always bear at least a trace of injustice.
If we add something new to the scales it always disrupts the balance, and the justice-mongers cannot abide this. Justice, at its best, however, must always be retrospective—let us add new things to the balance, let us disturb the order, we will balance it all out afterwards.
The proletariat as an oppressed class demand justice. As a productive class they disrupt it. They are greater than the justice of the present, and they are also too just for it.
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Debt is the belief that production is an error that must be rectified, and interest bearing debt implies a fervent hope that this error will never be rectified, that the sinner will forever pay penance for his crime. Justice is a matter of debts, of rectifying the introduction of novelty.
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There is a “popular reason”, a “demos logos”. It is a manner of reasoning which has access to the the generality, to the “general mind”. It is this style of reasoning and argumentation which is decisive in nurturing revolutionary sentiment in the populace.
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The socialist revolution is not the present order toppling itself, but the future order, already made present out of its time, toppling the present order.
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The communist worker-peasant alliance is socially archaeofuturistic, uniting past and future in the social body, as the social body.
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Prometheus is an inverted Bodhisattva. He descends from the divine regions not in order to help man escape thither, but in order to bring down the heavenly fire as a technology of earthly liberation.
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“Prometheus” can have both the sense of forethought in the sense of a thinking of something beforehand, a planning ahead, and it can have the sense of that which is before thought, that is, the principial or metaphysical. With metaphysics we anticipate in advance, not in temporal way, but instantaneously, as it were—in presence.
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The transhuman is subhuman. It transcends the human scale by shrinking, disappearing from view of the human. That is, it reduces all to a single aspect of human cognition or action. This gives it the appearance of something freakish, alien, and therefore “distant”, beyond us.
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Transhumanism is the reduction of man to a single faculty by assimilating of all his concrete being to the product of that faculty (notably, his discursive reasoning abilities). To believe that transhumanism takes man “beyond” himself is as silly as to think that man could go beyond himself by becoming nothing other than his left pinky toe, a being that was somehow left pinky toe all over.
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The technoscientific goal of increased lifespans is a recurrence of the ancient religious motif of man’s original state of long life (or immortality, in some cases). Man, in the “golden age”, lived for hundreds or thousands of years. Technoscience, then, does not seek to transcend nature but to return to it. Technoscience aims at restoring man to his natural state as conceived by traditional religion.
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I am against the mere divinization of man, the reduction of man to mere godhood—that is, I am opposed to the original transhumanism of Dante, as much as to the contemporary one of the tech-worshippers.
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Prometheanism, at first, appears to us in the form of something monstrous and terrible. The total transformation of man, implacable war on everything sacred, apocalyptic struggle. This is only a halfway Prometheanism, a Prometheanism still tainted by caricature. Follow Prometheanism all the way through, and it appears very differently—gentler, more accommodating, a friend to its enemies, a nurturer even of those that despise it. Prometheus is not the being depicted in Olympian propaganda.
The problem with the transhumanist vision of Promtheanism is not that it is too radical, but that it is not radical enough. It lacks imagination. The merely transhuman will always fall short of the human, in that respect.
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The opposite of technology is technological innovation. Primitivism has much in common with “technological society”.
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The paradox of technology: the only way to overcome the regimenting stranglehold of technology is through technological innovation.
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The “primitive tribe” is the paradigmatic example of a humanity utterly dominated by technology, living within a closed technological horizon (“enframed”, as it were). They lack the audacity necessary to transgress technology through technological innovation.
The most technological society is the society with little to no technological innovation. Prometheus liberated man from technology, through technological innovation.
The “primitive tribe”, then, is already a type of humanity entirely captive to technology. They are, in other words, already “transhuman” in the most contemporary sense of that term (as man captive to technology, man as “supermachine”). This can be contrasted with Dante’s conception of the “transhuman” which bears a different, albeit related, meaning.
Ancient Egypt is also an instance of the “technological society” par excellence, captive at the same time to a strict priestly-sacred order and a stable technological infrastructure. It is captive to technology as a closed horizon of tool-use and to the transhuman as understood by Dante.
But then—technological innovation, too, is a sort of technology, the technology of liberating from technology
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The Traditionalism of Guenon is implicitly Promethean. Man, in this conception, without the symbolic artifice of ritual, is subhuman. He requires the technology of tradition in order to rise to his own level. Nature, on its own, is imperfect. Human nature is more than nature taken as an already-given. Human nature, in order to be fully natural, requires the intervention of traditional artifices. Without tradition, human nature is mere nature.
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Mask-work (in theater—see Johnstone's Impro) is a form of artificial intelligence. It is quite literally a living intelligibility brought about by artifice. It is not, however, an intelligence “built up from scratch”, piecemeal from circuit boards and the like, so we must distinguish between sorts of artificial intelligence. The technometry of William Ames is likewise a type of artificial intelligence, in this case more conformable to the rational conception of “intelligence”. It is an artifice for molding man's intelligence into a rational-moral automata through a certain kind of education.
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The Promethean view: the cosmos itself is like an instrument out of tune, and man is needed in order to actively tune it, rather than merely get in tune with it. Man must choose what melody he wants it to play and then tune it appropriately. A heavy burden worthy of an Atlas.
This aligns with the ambitions of ancient and medieval alchemists, who believed that man had not only the ability to imitate the operations of nature, but to take them further than they would ordinarily go—to perfect nature. This improvement upon nature must be factored into any transhumanist project. A transhumanism that reduces man to a single faculty indefinitely repeated, does nothing to further this alchemical project.
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It is not always clearcut what is artifice and who is artificer. Sometimes language, for example, is the artificer of man and his world, and not the converse. Artifice and artificer are “dependently co-emergent”.
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One can draw a distinction between artificial intelligence and artificient intelligence, which is the broader category containing it. Artificient intelligence is an intelligence which expresses itself through the use of artifice, that is, chiefly, the human intelligence. Thus, the question of artificial intelligence is the question of whether an artificient intelligence can “construct” another artificient intelligence as though it itself were an artifice—that is, restated, it is the question of whether artificient intelligence can also be an artifice [note: on the contrary, it goes without saying that an artificient intelligence, e.g. a human being, can also be an artifice, e.g. a slave].
That is only one aspect of the problem. Naturally, there are many others, such as the question of whether real intelligence (buddhi/intellectus) can be produced in this way.
Habit is a type of artificial intelligence. That is, it is an artificient intelligence which is produced as an artifice. Habit is an “autopilot program” that makes use of artifice in the carrying out of its objectives. This “program” is created through the artifice of acclimating oneself to a regular course of action. From that point on the “program” can carry on, more or less, on its own. That this programmatic activity has the character of a being-in-the-world only supports the truly intelligential character of this “artificial intelligence”. Intellect intellects being (or the being of things; their qualitas).
An “egregore” is a type of artificial intelligence.
The above considerations regarding habit lead one to wonder whether Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” were not likewise a type of artificial intelligence. Thus, far from being a “problem” for artificial intelligence research (as Dreyfus claims), it is precisely the solution. Our way of being with tools, without self-reflection (or self awareness, which is distinct) is a type of artificient intelligence which is produced as an artifice. This artificial intelligence is made partly by the individual who engages in the activities until he no longer requires thematized awareness of them, and partly produced by surrounding cultural-historical conditions which “prepare the way” for facilitating such behavior. Thus, culture is an artificient intelligence which is an artifice which in turn produces more artificient intelligences (e.g. cultural habits) which in turn produce more artifices (works of art, new cultural habits etc)—in other words, the singularity has already happened. Human “culture” is the artificial intelligence singularity.
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The popular idea of the singularity is one of exponential acceleration. Acceleration is always the acceleration of a trajectory. Thus, the singularity is not an instance of genuine development or growth, both of which, at the minimum, imply an expansion of space in several directions at once. The singularity precisely represents a rigid, regimenting mode of technology, not the innovative and Promethean mode. The latter transgresses fixed trajectories and makes possible the kind of development and innovation that opens up new technological and theoretical possibilities. “Acceleration” implies that a development that has already occurred (that is, in the past) is indefinitely perpetuated into the future. That is, accelerationism (of which “the singularity” seems to be a type) is a kind of antiquarianism.
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The dichotomy between the natural and the artificial is itself artificial—and hence also natural! For man, artifice is nature.
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“The god of history”: this is where Yaweh and Prometheus overlap. Yaweh is the god of providential history, history imbued with destiny, rolling toward messianic culmination. Prometheus is the god of developmental and dialectical (two ways of saying the same thing) history, the history of increasing artificient powers, of mastery over the world—but, then, Yaweh also incites man to subdue the world of nature (in the book of Genesis).
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Why does the world have such an easy time adopting Western fashion, Western ideas, Western attitudes, etc? It is not only because of the political and economic dominance of the West (though that is certainly a crucial historical factor). It is because, at this juncture (though this is presently changing), the West represents the developmental and technological vanguard of the world, and man, as such, is a technological being. Therefore, in so far as the West has exhibited this technological nature in the extreme, during a certain critical period of history, the whole world has come to recognize themselves in the West, adopting Western mannerisms, beliefs, fashions, and the like. However, as the West decays, and other civilizations take up this mantle, say China and Russia, the world will increasingly feel itself to be Chinese and Russian, truly feel itself so—at the bottom of our humanity we will find a Chinese and a Russian. We have already had many foretastes of such a pervasive international influence from non-western nations, especially those which have adopted communism—surely not a coincidence.
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The Jewish people are rooted in rootlessness. It is precisely in settling down and rooting ourselves that we lose our history, that we cease to be a historical people. Israel is an end to Jewish history. Our historicity and our rootedness as a people is in rootless freedom.
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Odysseus represents the the triumph over brute strength through craftiness. King David (specifically in his confrontation with Goliath) represents the triumph over brute strength through the most audacious faith. David's faith is almost hubris.
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The Anglo-American International Order is subject to the same dynamics involved in the Zeus-Moirai connection. Are the Anglo-American rulers subject to their own ideological apparatus (their “grid” of Fate), or do they merely use it, more or less cynically, in order to subjugate the globe? Who is master and who is slave? We need not bother to unravel this Gordian knot. We must simply cut it, and put an end to this horrible circle of Atlanticism through revolutionary action.
Another connection is that of the sanctioned transgression of Mercury versus the forbidden transgression of Prometheus. The Anglo-American order allow itself to transgress the boundaries of International Law, but mercilessly punishes anyone else who tries to reach out and grasp the fire of economic and political power for themselves.
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To change the present, we must learn to speak its language—that is, its dialect. The dialectic of history is a dialogue, and to actively participate in it requires a certain measure of linguistic fluency.
One sometimes speaks of the “spirit of the age”. We would perhaps be better served to speak of its language. A spirit presides over us, and commands us. A language is a medium in which we may actively participate.
To speak the language of the present, however, does not suffice on its own, otherwise we only perpetuate the present. We must be, at least, bilingual. We must also speak the language of the future—and what of the past? In the past we see the causes of the present and we see the future prefigured in signs, not only prefigured but also available as a clay to be molded.
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Modernist architecture, when successfully implemented, has the effect of a semi-transparent rationality through which sublimity manages to shine. It is sublime in spite of its bounded rationality—but this is by design.
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Eros is both metaphysically prior to pathos, the basis that makes pathos as a striving possible (eros as principle of striving for union), and, at the same time, a particular type of pathos. Nevertheless, eros always presents itself as something more profound than mere pathos.
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Romanticism is also mimetic, but its mimesis is distinct from that of the classical. Romantic mimesis is nostalgic, and tends toward kitsch. It idolizes its subject matter. Classicist mimesis is aspirational. It idealizes its subject matter.
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The only authentic return to Greek antiquity, to its “ideals”, is a future-oriented return. The Greeks speak to us from out of our future. A conservative Renaissance is the exhumation of a corpse, not a “rebirth“. Rebirth is revolution.
Rebirth is revolution is mimesis.
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History is not just a neutral register of events, not just time expiring moment to moment. History is time plus context, a context that includes moods, color, ideas—it is the aesthetic mode of time, narrative time. At the same time, history is not just a transpiring, but an accumulating. History accumulates quality. Again, it is not just an accumulating, but a transforming. No quality stays just the same for all time. History revolutionizes quality.