fragilekeys

I can remember many years ago when I began a concerted effort to erase the word “God” from my vocabulary. And not only from my written work: in daily conversation, using this word “God” often led to nothing but misconceptions and arguing. It seemed to keep any of the real fruits of the spirit from blossoming; and this is what I cared for above all. To use it, especially among my young peer group, was to alienate people from one another, and it often led to the worse types of unkindness. But I also felt that to speak of “God” was intellectually lazy, insofar as many invoked God’s name as an answer to the problem, rather than the question or impetus par excellence. Furthermore, by then I was old enough to see how those who used the word most often really had no idea what they were talking about. They used “God” as a way to impose their worldview on others, or to pander guilt-trips, or to nourish their superiority complexes. I wanted nothing to do with them, and it seemed to me at the time that just to utter God’s name put me in their company. So I stopped– for all these reasons and more. Quite frankly, it was the only ethical thing I could do at the time, given the world I was just then realizing I lived in. I still live in that world; and so even now I am as careful as possible not to be in the company of those who are not careful with their words. And yet, evangélion simply means “bringer of Good News,” and one cannot remain with one’s youthful reservations forever…

Of course it was never quite as cut-and-dried as abandoning a word. While disillusioned with the rote forms of worship and the boring forms of talking about God (I was raised in a Lutheran church), I was not inattentive to the workings of grace in my life as they continued even after I began my effort to speak purged of that ominous signifier, and to head in a direction that had already been imposing its will upon me– that is, the direction of poetry. I’m speaking about a time in my life when I was sixteen or seventeen: already my mother had been diagnosed with melanoma, and I was in the middle of my own battle against cancer, my lymphoma. Through the chemotherapeutic haze, and then after I was “cured” and my mother had passed away, I saw how the community around my family (including many wonderful folks from church) helped to lift all of our spirits with their prayers, gifts and kind words. I saw how my father’s attitude toward my mother, toward our family, and toward life itself was transformed by the ordeal of our illnesses. And at her death bed, when my father and I held her two chilled hands, and gripped our own free hands together across her legs, I felt the strength of a bond of love between the three of us that nothing could ever destroy, especially not her death. For nothing can take away the legacy of love: legacy is always, immediately, reality. As I wept and wept on the hospital couch of room 421 that October night, 2003, my father clarified the scenario for me when he, also crying and rubbing my back, said with an obvious sense of uncertainty, “Tim, it’ll be alright, we’ll be okay.” Despite the fact that I was the one huddled up like a baby, I knew right when he said it that inside of me something very confident was burgeoning, something that made his words of condolence almost disappointing in their disavowed doubt. But of course we were going to be okay! God was with us, wherever we had next to go. All we had to do was believe (and this, I tell you, is no more difficult for us than breathing!).

Fast forward a few years to 2006, my first year in college, to another life-changing event. This one was condensed to one short week, and to this day I wonder if anything that intense will ever “dawn” on me again. It marks the beginning of my adult life as such. I had been very sick for about a week, perhaps purging something ugly and deep (and of all things to be reading between sessions of vomiting, there in my hands was Atlas Shrugged!). As my sickness was departing, I visited Barnes and Noble and read Saul William’s book Said the shotgun to the head for the very first time. Well, it was as if one veritable Shotgun of God had gone off in my head, and the reverberations sent me out to teach something with an unheard-of spontaneity of heart. I was both oblivious of everything, absolutely without concern for myself, and yet fully aware of every passing sign, feeling, and intention all around me. While I cannot describe the level of understanding that came over me that day (and again today?), I knew that it was a sudden rapturous enlightenment, something felt only deeply in the bones. It could not have been feigned: I tasted of Buddhamind, Love itself had taken hold of me. You can read what I wrote that initial next morning here, on my old xanga page. I have yet to complete or revise the major document that came out of this episode– a poem of about 80 pages that deals playfully and joyfully with God, life, spirit, nothing, etc. But this moment of dawn came with its pains, as with childbirth. I all but stopped eating and sleeping to focus on prayer and writing (Matthew 4:4). Needless to say, I was scaring the hell out of my family and my girlfriend Maree. I was acting exceedingly strange and definitively “not myself.” My words and my demeanor were sending the ones I loved crying from me, even though I knew that I had not simply lost my mind, and more importantly, that my words were flowing forth from a place of impartial love for them and for all beings. Truth be told: impartial love can hurt. Perhaps that alone dawned on me, is still dawning today…

Long story short, I ended up in the emergency room, where my stream of consciousness insight into the workings of God and the universe landed me a stay in the psych-unit. The next day I was transported to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and was released with a diagnosis of bi-polar and schizophrenia (after a rather crazy overnight stay, during which I swear to this day I heard the man on the radio say, “Well everyone, today was the big day: all seven wonders of the world have fallen”; my father was asleep by my side that night).  Later, reading the work of Stanislov Grof, I learned that I had had what he calls a “spiritual emergency” — a very tender time that can easily be misdiagnosed as the onset of something bad by medical professionals who have no way of “detecting” it. Needless to say, the doctor’s reactions, along with my family’s, made me doubt the real status of this event, and sent me into a giant pit of confusion. I regressed back to childhood; I asked my step-mom if I was autistic; and one night, with my head buried on his lap, I asked my dad what we were watching on television. “Basketball,” he said– a game we had played together our whole lives, his and my favorite sport. But the thing was: I knew exactly what I was watching. I knew full well that I wasn’t autistic. And yet I was asking, and watching myself ask, perplexed as could be. I was never trying to fool or hurt anyone. Truth be told, I don’t know. Really. All I can is: something was being fulfilled…

Of course, this giant pit of confusion was also a part of the event, and necessary. I only took the meds they prescribed for about two days and was back in school by the following week. But I was magically back, gratefully back. Nothing has ever felt the same. In the days and weeks that followed, my passions cooled and I got some much-needed rest; but I knew that a fire had been set, and there was no question of pursuing it further or not. After all, it had pursued me, as God’s Love is wont to do! In a certain sense, every word I say henceforth is a footnote to that experience, which is why I say it was the beginning of my adult life; but at the same time, I have come to know that sense of exuberance and joy countless times. I might even say that it’s become normal, become practical, become the very life-bread of my existence, even if it is not as flashy as it was for that one week. Which makes sense: impartial love does not boast in its actions, lest it hurt someone it loves. At any rate, I say with full confidence that God was leading me on in that “emergency,” and that He has continued to do so through all the thousands of emergencies since then that have felt like that first one. He saw to it then that I was surrounded by the most loving bunch of people on the planet: my father, his new wife Susie, and Maree. To this day, I owe these three everything for their patience with me and for their love. Without them, I’m not sure I would have “come back,” especially not without the direct command issuing from Maree to do so. Perhaps everything I do is ultimately in honor of that, of that simple but pure gesture of human love. It meant and will always mean everything.

Nevertheless, the truth is this, and now I know it better than ever: I came back to save everyone. Which only means one thing: I did not come back from that emergency, no more than I survived cancer, for my own well being, nor for my own proclivities in love. I came back because love itself needed me, because it needed me to keep speaking. What infinite grace, what powerful hands of the Almighty, that I am preserved solely for the sake of Love, alive solely on the hope that my measly little life might kindle in your heart some of the Love that God always already has for each and every one of us! This “God” that your heart and my heart and each heart is! And so let me hasten to add that my situation is in no way unique. We are all “still alive” for this very same purpose, to fulfill this very same duty to love and to be loved, and to give thanks all along the way. To say hello to one another and to realize: we are all already saved, if only we live love…

To return to my narrative, about a year later my father was diagnosed with cancer, and one of the most painful types there is: pancreatic. I was still an “undecided” major at college and took the semester of Fall 2007 off to be with him in his final months. This was also a time of deep spiritual growth for me, not necessarily due to an overload of personal study, and perhaps due to the very opposite. I was spending almost all of my time with him or with friends, sometimes meditating, sometimes discussing the ideas of Eastern philosophy and Ken Wilbur, sometimes watching Planet Earth. Whenever I was driving, I would repeat a mantra supposed to bring good health (“Om Shri Dhanvantre Namaha”) and spin my mala beads in my lap, hoping (perhaps a bit superstitiously, I admit) that it would bring help and healing to my dad, or at least to me. In the meantime, I watched my father undergo an almost total transformation from who I remembered as a child. My mom’s death, and then his life with Susie, had already softened him quite a bit; but the idea of his own death brought a halt to the mind that had been dedicated for 25+ years to being a stellar electrical engineer and department manager at Rockwell Collins. He fell in love with a book called Conversations with God, which he said answered many of his questions about the relationship between science and spirituality. (I never read it; despite the fact that he was handing it out like candy to all his family and friends, I knew it was not for me.) He and Susie also read Ken Wilber’s account of his struggle with his own wife’s cancer, Grace and Grit. And so while all of this was an immensely difficult time for us, I felt all along like we were being guided by some unseen hand, like it wasn’t an accident or simply a bad turn of fate. Strange as it sounds, these were some of the best months and moments of my life, sharing tears with my father, seeing this amazingly courageous man face up to the harshest pain without complaint. And then to see him tear and dissolve when he realized that no cure was going to be possible. I didn’t write too much at this time, but when I did, it was usually dedicated to someone, and most often to my father. I wrote to understand myself, but also to bring understanding and comfort to him. It was my long-form of “We’ll be okay,” my own rendering of the Good News.

In the end, I’d never felt as connected with my own personal responsibility and obligation to the living as I did on January 3rd, 2008 and the days following immediately afterwards. Perhaps other men feel the same way when they lose their fathers: now it is time to take it all upon oneself; now, your shoulders are the broadest that there are. For anyone who knew my dad, those are some broad shoulders to take handle of, much broader than my own! But his presence goes with me– my Father’s, I mean– just as his gravestone inscription says (Exodus 33:14). Again, this is not some hypothetical conjecture. I’m telling you this with absolute certainty. My Father goes with me wherever I go.

Where I went after that, however, was no glorious and pretty place. Between these traumatic events and college life at the University of Iowa, my drinking and pot-smoking habits went up considerably (including the addition of regular cigarette smoking). Furthermore, I was torn between what I felt was my duty to myself (which required much time “alone”) and the social activity that I also needed and enjoyed so much. I never felt orphaned, first because of my step-mom, Susie, and second because of the wonderful community of friends that was around me, even if our activities together weren’t always the best thing for my mental, physical, and spiritual health. But this half-decade had truly thrown me back upon myself, me who had always been independent to begin with. I now entered every “social” situation with a new-found sensibility of how it was really affecting my spirit or, in many cases, keeping me from it. And slowly I learned how to navigate both interests. I threw myself into my studies and designed my own major, entitled “Pneumatology: study of the Human Spirit.” This allowed me to take all the courses that I wanted, and so I was able to include courses on trauma and death (which I took the semester of my return), anthropology and literature, as well as all the many religious studies courses, independent studies, and writing workshops that I was diving into headlong. While the balance between public and personal was often difficult for me, I knew that my heart and spirit resided in my work, for if there is one activity that I can do “by myself” that keeps me in communion with God and all of those I love, it is this: reading, thinking, and writing. Of course, for me this forms a continuous bond with all of my living, all my daily speech and conduct, all my love. Today, I can read and write and think at full capacity wherever I am, no matter who I am with. With a little help from sobriety, and a lot of help from God’s guidance, I will continue to do this, and rejoice in it for you, all the way until the end of days.

In sum, my college experience after my father’s death amounted to a perfect mix of despair and delight, sociality and isolation, debauchery and purity. I’d long ago intuited the “need” for self-voidance, and while reality had dealt me enough death-experiences to know that there was no avoiding this voidance, college gave me the chance to pursue this as an adult in every way imaginable. Drugs, including psychedelics, played a part in this; but so did their supplement, works by Aldous Huxley and others. Drinking played a part in this; but so did the poetry of Jack Spicer and Paul Celan. Mediation played a part in this; but so did the words of Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi. Of course love played a part in all of this, romantic or not, foolish or not, wasted or not. And all along: vast expanses of time filled with uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness, and every breed of feeling helpless and alone that one man can experience. I am not ashamed to admit that it took all I had in me to not give up, and that this time in my life (which extended quite a ways after graduation, and in part up to this very day) was filled with what I can only regard as mistakes, misconceptions, and missteps. But all along, I was sustained by my desire to write and by the duty I knew I had to live up to as a survivor: I had to do with the legacy I inherited from my parents everything I could for the cause of Love. Of course, only now can I articulate it that way; but I believe that this was the underlying factor that kept me from jumping out of my window some nights. The worst thing we can do in life is fail to heed the call to exist, even if we do not know where that existence is headed or what it is making of us. To this very day, I do not know “whither”; and yet, as always, whither itself runs.

And so here I am, again, kneeling before the altar of God, which I tell you unequivocally and without hesitation is the whole of existence in all of its aspects, attributes, avatars, and auras. Am I still afraid to use this word, “God”? Yes and no. But now when I use it, I know for certain that I am not “defining” anything, certainly not setting any restriction on its meaning.  I know that I am and conduct only the fruitfulness of the Spirit. Those who put their stock in arguments will have their arguments. Those who need a reasonable “proof” of God will pursue their (a)theistic ontologies. Those who need God as a guarantee of their unloving motives and as the justification for imposing their own beliefs on others will continue to lie (see Revelation 22:11). And those kind people who can do without any mention of “God,” well, let them go on being kind, never doubting, and never thinking twice about not mentioning Him (thank God they don’t!), since the Art of Kindness is all that any talk of God is meant to each us. Because the truth is, “God” is not a word. “God” is the “name” of and behind everything that is being said insofar as it relates to, or can potentially relate to, everything else that has ever existed, or will exist. For me, “we relate to one another” means “God exists”‘; and so wherever we relate to one another, there God is (Matthew 18:20). Put it as simply as you like: where there is love, God is there, and where there’s no love, there’s no God. This simple axiom, I hope, simplifies whatever dilemma you might have over the usage of this “term.” In my eyes, understood this way, in God there can only be growth, for any liar can be immediately recognized and called out; and that growth can only be the growth of impartial love in the heart, even when it is terribly difficult. Trust me, you will know it when it is working and it will be unavoidable. Do nothing drastic about it, just listen. It is that Higher Voice within you. But we must choose to listen to it, vigilantly. And almost immediately, we can rejoice, give thanks, and move forward…

One can try to run away, one can try to avoid it, and hell, one can even try to die, but existence itself embraces us from before and beyond everything, including the grave. And this embrace has only one characteristic: love. Obviously, from all that I have just told you, this love is not without its suffering; in fact, Christ proclaims to us that true and impartial love for all beings suffers everything for the good. Those of Buddhist inclination will note an exact parallel in the Bodhisattva vow. I write this piece today, kneeling at the altar of God, to confess to you and to my God that I desire to, I will to, and I will will to, suffer everything for the good. No more now than during these trying times of my past do I know exactly where this long-suffering love is leading. But once again, whither runs, and any of us can chose simply to run with it– to “surrender to love” as my good friend Adam often puts it. But who among us doesn’t need reminders, and daily ones at that, of the need to suffer for love impartially, of the need to surrender totally to what existence is bringing to us constantly, to open ourselves to one another as wide as possible without sacrificing our own sense of decency and conscience, and to be patient through whatever is demanded of us, to see everything through to the end with courage and an infinitely forgiving heart? Yes, we all need to remember God… 

Today I stand before you, with a realization that is both timeless and yet revealed only in this moment: I write (live?) because that is how I remember God. That is how it has always been and how it will always be. I have said much, and I have much left to say; but all in all, I can only say the “unsaid” itself– in remembrance of God, done in the remembrance of Him. I can only offer myself up as a kind of mirror for This, or perhaps (with God’s grace and help) set an example of what is possible, of what it can mean to remember God, or rather, to remember that God remembers you. He always has, always does, and always will. God does not forget us, no matter what tribulation we are going through; and He loves us more than we could ever imagine ourselves being loved. Truly, He is everything in this sense, because He loves, and existence is love. And in another sense, He is very simple. For I am He– and after all, I am nothing very much!

Kneel before the altar, no matter what your suffering. Confess what you have done wrong to all people, every day. Let go of whatever ill notions you hold of other people or of other groups of people, for these are the things that breed pain in your heart. Let go of what is merely transitory and hold to what is eternal; then all your conceitedness and hesitation will melt away like dew in the spring. Forgive yourself for how you have harmed yourself and others in thought, word, and deed; immediately you yourself will be and feel forgiven. Pray for the strength to stop doing all these things that bring harm to you and your fellow man. Pray for the strength to do what “God” demands of you. Because of course there is no “God” that demands anything of you; but we are talking about that which exceeds all thought (St. Anselm’s majus quam cogitari possit), about that which is more intimate to me than I am to myself (Augustine’s interior intimo meo), and so about that which is always running ahead of us, within and without– absence and excess in one sense. And so we are talking about what demands everything of us, but in doing so, simply asks us to be our very best and better person. Personally, I can find no better word for this than “God,” even if it turns you off. Surely some will use Santayana, Avalokitesvara, or Christ. I believe that once we cede the reservations in our hearts surrounding these words, reservations which are almost always due to what someone else said or our fear of being put in the same group as those who corrupt these words in rash and unreasonable ways and for perverted purposes– once we seek the proper place of these words, they awaken like a tree already half-grown within our souls (see James 1: 19-25). However you conceive of it– or rather, don’t conceive of it, cannot conceive of it– release yourself to IT, release yourself to love and to your highest Self-esteem. For God is with you, wherever you go. Pray to Him and He will purify everything, right before your very eyes. Be quiet and you will hear Him. Believe in the love that exceeds all things, and all things will be transformed. Seek in all you do the comfort of the Lord our God — this Heart, my Heart, ours, our own.

And at the very least, remember this: the degree to which you forgive others is the very degree to which you are forgiven. I promise: we can feel a sense of the infinite overcome us, and at that point we know, not only that we are “real,” but that we are and participate in something much realer than anything that is “real.” Because when we commune in love, we participate in it not as a “part” of it, but totally, radically, each time “as if” the entire thing. I promise: to taste one moment of love is already to taste the everlasting. Oh my Beloved, I cannot slip away… I am filled with you, and you fill me forever… Thank the Good LORD for YOU!

And so, to conclude, let us be very clear about the purpose behind my current and future usage of the word “God.” The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, nor is it really even to share my ideas. The goal is to give us (myself included) a taste of the everlasting, and to encourage our hearts to maintain themselves within that space, where all is equal and good. We can feel that infinite sense of donation and forgiveness come into our hearts. We know what it means to converse with the flip-side of our “self.” We can feel the outside of the world open up smack-dab in the middle of this world, as Jean-Luc Nancy would say. And I say: “Rejoice! Existence is Love, Hallelujah!” For I believe that God has made us this way– or, if you like, that our Mind has as its highest purpose to learn to feel this way, that the whole design of “evolution” is to lead us to this “involved” point where we feel the whole of existence arising within each of us as love, where we can feel that there is no separating us from it– not even at “death” (which, I promise you, has always already come and been defeated). For He has made us to feel Him within ourselves, as Ourselves, and to share this feeling with others in a spirit of friendship, forgiveness, and compassion. Of course everything is yet to be said, but that itself is to be praised, for “God” is the very act enunciating His joy, the very movement of existence’s self-expression and self-exposition, the very “being” of Our Love. ”God” is no idea, no being, no nothing whatsoever not at all. “God” is what I am before you right now, or your self inside of you instigating this wrenching truth, just as you are “God” in what you are for me, right now and always. In God there is only receptivity to Godself: sharing, beatitude, resonance. And all of this because I love you, because we love each other, and because Love loves us with love eternal– here, right here where I stand, we alone or all together, kneeling before the altar of God.

With love,
Yours, forever and always,
Tim.

(By the way, the logic of “with” often requires a heavy-handed syntax in order to say “being-with-one-another.” You may suffer from it as you read these pages. But perhaps it is not an accident that language does not easily lend itself to showing the “with” as such, for it is itself the address, and not what must be addressed.) –Jean-Luc Nancy

An interesting discussion has come up between me and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (here and here). It seems to get at a genuine differend between Levi and me, which I would like to explore. The topic, broadly speaking, has to do with entities/beings and how they relate, how they are or are not in a world, and additionally, if there is any sense to the expression “the world.” His position is that unless a being is in relation with something, it doesn’t share the world with it; and each things’ “world” is its mass or mesh of relations. My position is that even when something is not related to something else, they still share this world, sharing in the coming of the world, our world. (I might also challenge anyone to show me something that isn’t related to anything else…) If I could have kept my response to the space of a comment, I would have, but since not, I’m posting it here. Insofar as the following piece is part of an on-going discussion (and so partly addressed directly to Levi or those familiar with object-oriented ontology (“OOO”)), I hope my readers will forgive me for writing a bit looser, a bit less fabulously and free than usual.

As a preliminary remark, I am never more challenged in the area of expression than when it comes to these direct questions of ontology. I have no less than five drafts trying to relate my position (informed by Nancy, as you all would guess) to object-oriented ontology. None of them have ever satisfied me; and yet I know the link is there, or I would have long ago given up. Thus, I hope that my words are not reduced to “my position,” insofar as I’m testing waters more than I’m advancing theses. In any case, I don’t wield the kind of theoretical prowess that Levi does; I only hope that this does not betray an immaturity on my part. As Nancy writes, “The strict conceptual rigor of being-with exasperates the discourse of its concept,” and I believe I know this exasperation well. (Perhaps this is what I share with Levi more than anything; but this very exasperation is our being-in-common.) If ontology becomes an explicit theme here, it can only do so at the cost of a kind of general confusion, a general going-haywire in my discourse; and on the other hand, all of my posts have to do with “fundamental ontology,” because ontos is always a question of ethos and praxis. In that sense, the tone of a thing tells us more than anything else what it is, for its tone is its ethic, its practice, its ontology, its rapport.

1 – “co-”

Fundamental to any adequate expression of ontology is the prefix “co-.” We can think what we will of Heidegger, but his philosophy in Being and Time registers a profound shift in our thinking of Being, precisely at the point where he discovers this: to be WITH is not a categorical but an existentiel of being-there. This means that the “with” is not “added on” to a being encased in itself, but that “being-with” [Mitsein] precedes or founds “being-there” [Dasein]. Simply put, to be oneself is eo ipso, precisely thereby, always already to be in-common. In a word, to be-there is already to be-with. But let’s be quick to emphasize that this does not determine anything about whatever being is in question. It is a statement regarding the structure of being-the-there as being-with. Whatever is there is with, with itself and/or with others, even in the absence of all relation (if that is possible), even in utter withdrawal (I’ll return to this).

Where Nancy comes in here is very precise. Heidegger, as we know, never developed his existential analytic into a co-existential analytic, he never developed this Mitsein to its full extent; and where he did return to it, it was always in the form of a “people” [Volk] endowed with destinal qualities, etc. For Heidegger, this would mean that every being is a unique expression of some With that transcends it, a race, a people. But in making this move, Heidegger mistakenly transfers the structure he uncovered (being-there exists in being-with) into a kind of communal substance that each being would then express. This is how Heidegger registers both facism and communism, the whole rupture of his age, an age that felt the demand of the “social” more than any other, but did not know how to think this social without the idea of a common Subject, Substance, Nation, or Group. But we shouldn’t give up on the coexistential analytic or a thinking of being-with because of the mistakes of Heidegger and his age.

While I can’t take much time with it here, Nancy both starts and takes his distance from here, when he first differentiates “common-being” from “being-in-common” (see The Inoperative Community). I can only emphasize that when he and I write “with,” and if I say each thing or being expresses “with” equally, this means that each thing expresses this common structure of being-with as being-in-common simply in its being-(the-)there. It never expresses a common-being, substance, essence, world, etc. There’s nothing behind it, and this “with” is “nothing at all,” “nothing in particular.” This is where we take leave of Leibniz if we take him to mean that each thing is one particular view point of the whole world, or of God. No, I couldn’t agree with Levi more here, because there is no “the world” that each thing expresses. In my view, however, the focus or locus of the matter is on this being-in-common of each thing, which does not take anything away from the fact that each thing is absolute (or withdrawn), but rather makes it so. Each thing is in-common insofar as each thing is “with,” but precisely to the extent that each thing is the origin of the whole world. This is the idea I will try to develop here.

What makes this so difficult to discuss is that this “being-with” does not negate the “ownness” of a thing, but in fact even makes it what it is. This coexistential analytic is only the next step in a long process of being withdrawing into the intimacy of “its own.” All of this talk of withdrawal in objects is not unconnected to the idea that the gods themselves have withdrawn. Furthermore, there is a certain type of theology that says it is only through withdrawal of the gods that something like “the world” or “existence” can begin in the first place. Christianity mobilizes this most radically in the notion of kenosis: God’s absolute withdrawal totally empties Him of absolutely everything; and this emptying-out-of-God literally “is”… “the world.” We won’t get into that, but simply note that the emergence of the “subject” is tied to this withdrawal (and also note in passing: there is a historicity to this emergence). At the heart of any “ownmost” we discover the structure of being-with. The point applies most readily to what we call the subject, ego, or self, but it applies likewise to any object. It is a question of the structure of that ownness, or how ownness is not an egoity but rather a hidden intimacy that draws the thing deeper into itself than it imagined it could go. Object-oriented ontology says: object are withdrawn. The question for me simply has to do with the “with” in this “withdrawn.”

This would be the heart of the differend, perhaps: For me, everything is “related” because we all share this common structure of being-related-to, even if this just means being-related-to-myself. Because we are all there, we are all also with something else, even if that something else is myself! Not “related” in some scheme of interconnection, not “forged together” in some purposeful collaboration between humans and/or nonhumans, but simply being-related-there by dint of the fact that being-there is structured (“internally,” if you want) as being-with — as being-with-its-(other-)self (withdrawn, subtracted, split, divided, etc.). This is a “with” that cannot be destroyed, since its always literally there wherever any being is. The implications are deep (ontologically and politically), because it is only by dint of sharing this common structure (which says nothing about “what” we share but only that we share this structure “in that we are there”…) that we can speak for ourselves as “us,” the only reason we can have a discourse like OOO to begin with, which aims to speak for neutrinos, airplanes, etc. In other words, for me and Levi and OOO general, what’s at stake is this commonly-shared-structure of being. Theoretically, my only stated aim is to inject Nancy and my understanding of him into this discussion and to suggest that others do the same.

2 – “world”

Now to move on to the question of “the” world more specifically. When I say “Right now, I’m in the world, sharing in the world’s coming, etc.,” I’m not saying anything radical. When taken theoretically, however, it’s easy to read that “in the world” as if I meant “in this big container called the universe/world.” I do not mean that. I mean that I am in a place where beings and things touch and depart, come close and separate, obviously without ever making a unity but always doing so commonly, in-common. I am in a place that we all share (even the inanimate, the distant, the dead). As for what “sharing” means, French comes much closer with the verb partager which means “to share,” “to distribute,” but also “to part” or “partition,” or “to set apart.” So when I say that I’m sharing the world with everything and everyone else in the world, I don’t mean that we make “one” or that there are fixed borders, not at all, but that the part of the world apportioned to me is not for all that just a “part.” It is (for me and for each thing) “the whole thing,” “the whole deal,” “the whole world,” each time. But this each time happens in-common. This “it is absolutely there” of each being or thing is what we all share in-common. Strange way to say it, but it is as if each thing is “a part apart” without for all that being “apart,” since each thing nevertheless shares this common structure of with, and so shares in the common coming of (the) “world(s).”

In being “a” world unto itself, each thing or being is “the whole world.” Worlding is what each being does, but not as if it were acting out some essentially or forging relationships. Again, this is not Leibniz insofar as there is not some Something preceding “things themselves” that each thing then expresses. No, it means that each thing is an origin of the whole world, infinitely withdrawn from “the” world and yet in it — but only in it because making it or making it up, as its “one and only” origin, each time. (Strangely enough, it is as if each thing, just by being-itself-there, expressed the Christian motif of “being in the world but not of the world”; again, we have to set this aside for now.) There is only world insofar as everything in it withdraws from it, is subtracted from it, and yet subtracts itself from it “in” it. In this sense, I’m in total agreement with Levi: “the” world is what never takes place and never could take place. If it did, it would simply be another totalizing or transcendent God, Subject, or Nation, fully interpellating its subjects and all things, etc. Levi and I are in total agreement contra any omnipotent common-being of this sort. As I see it, “the” world is only the taking-place of this plurality of origins/worlds/things, and this “that it all takes place”… never itself takes place. “The” world is mediately/immediately a plural articulation of worlds, with no common demoninator save for the “fact” that they “are.” But this facticity, this “are,” means “with,” “are-with.” And so the thought of “the world” is even more demanding, the question of the creation of the world no less enigmatic.

So if I continue to speak of “the” world, it is to address the non-totalizable rather than to define a totality. When I address the world (you, anything), I address it from one outside the world (“me”) to another outside of the world (“you”). Clearly the world is not a container for us outsides, no more than a casket can contain a person. Here, world = spacing, dispersal, deposition. Here, every “thing” is not only withdrawn, but in its withdrawal it is itself an absolute origin of the world. There would be no “the” world that mediates all these origins; but neither would “world” be something added on to “things.” Each thing or being is the origin of the world and thus not related “secondarily.” Worlds don’t come secondary: we might say they are existentiels of objects, not categoricals. This is what we all have “in-common”: we are all equally absolute and priceless origins of the world, so absolute and priceless that the world we seem to take place in never, itself, takes place.

All of these disparate (or disappearing) worlds/things/origins share in the coming of the world, or in the becoming-world of the world (yes, whatever this means, our world). Each outside of the world (each entity, being) divides the world from itself in coming. They each partition the world infinitely, making it a world that is “definitively” there in being not-all, in always being to-come and in never stopping with coming. The very facticity of the “that it is there” of anything whatsoever is its absolute “relationality” (on the one hand, because where there is one thing, there are always many other things also; and on the other, because even when utterly withdrawn and in the absence of all external relations, I am still “with myself”). There is no thing that is not with other things, no world that isn’t exposed to other worlds, exposed as an origin of the world, in-common. This doesn’t mean that relations precede or succeed relata, that interconnectivity precedes or succeeds things, but rather that no matter what, each “relata” instantiates relation as such, each thing instantiates the/a whole world, each time for the first time. We’re all in the same boat in doing this, and we are all singular-plural origins of the world. We “relate” qua our subtraction-from-the-world, which we are (in the verbal sense); and nevertheless this subtraction makes a world, makes it come.

3 – “with-drawn”

In that sense, the question, “Which comes first, being or relating?” can no longer hold up. To be is to relate-to, even if this means to withdraw-utterly-from. There’s no mandate or obligation on relating, but neither is there any escaping it, since to go into exile (or die) is also to relate, even if it means to relate-away. In withdrawing, the “with” is still drawn to it, even if it is drawn to it in drawing away. If I stopped responding, if I turned off my blog, shut off my G+, Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, this would sever countless relations. But I’d still be relating nonetheless, relating in being absent. Admittedly, some would miss me more than others; but missing isn’t a relation? and what about those who only stumble upon these words years later? If I stopped editing this post, or if you stopped reading it, that’s still relating. I don’t see anyway that anyone can jump out of being-with anymore than one could jump out of being-there. I am (or each instant is) a unique origin of the world in being totally withdrawn from every world (or in being totally withdrawn from every spatio-temporal matrix). To stop reading here changes nothing about the ontological composition of the world. Withdrawal cannot help but open up the world ever more, opening it up to the “outside of the world.” To exist is to go into exile, so go, if you must. From time to time, perhaps instantly, it demands that we stop articulating this ontology, despite the fact, or even knowing that, wherever we go, we are articulating it – with, with-drawn.

Even stranger: I can only “stop” insofar as I’m represented to others or to myself. Death itself only happens in representation, because no one can ever take away the origin of the world that I am. This is a bit like Graham Harmon saying that even when a cotton ball is devoured by flames, the fire only touches the flammable part. Thus even in utter obliviation and death, the fact that “I” am an origin of the world cannot be taken away. And insofar as I am an origin of the world to the very extent that I’m withdrawn from the world, “death” would only seal up the enigmatic nature of me-as-origin even more. Therefore, I am totally unafraid: death has been conquered, vanquished, resurrected insofar as the origin that I am cannot be erased, because it never existed anywhere save in my withdrawal from the world and all things. Paradox of all paradoxes: withdrawal is genesis! 

I am immortal (escaping whatever spatio-temporal matrix) because no one can take away the fact that I am being: “subtracted” (Badiou), “withdrawn” (Heidegger), “inscribed” (Derrida), “exscribed” (Nancy). The uniqueness of “me” is this “immortal” origin. Personally, I am indebted to OOO for bringing to light the fact that what I say here about “me” also applies to any and all things (but trust me, OOOer’s, this is also in Nancy); and that’s all I have been developing here, despite the difficulty I am having. From this perspective, OOO is a discourse about the immortality of objects, or the material immortality in or of all things. Whether or not you jive with that lingo matters little. For all of us, I think it is a matter of giving the respect due to each thing, as it is, before it gets caught up in any “worldly” scheme, including space and time itself.

Immortal: each sentence exscribes a body or a thought that can’t be represented; each paragraph tries to get at what cannot be gotten at; each book reaches toward a common sense of being that cannot be represented but only sensed in the trust of the exasperated thought; our world like an instant of writing such that the writings vanish into cyberspace despite the instants’ going-nowhere; nothing can be represented, the instant is absolute, endless in its never-having-started; for there is only meaning in the sharing of this unshareable, this common ontology; the only meaning of all our words in being-sharing-being, where sharing meaning always shares the fact that each thing or being is co-essential in co-existing, or even in being “coexistence” itself, existing the very “co-” it is; co-origination of meaning, things, and world. –Stress, coffee, backlash, epiphany; origin and/in disappearance; sense, non-sense, absence; laughter, love, loss, separation… isn’t it all there? there in this enigmatic world from which nothing can ever be erased, insofar as it wouldn’t be there as it is without us and what we’re bringing to it, constantly, as inexchangeable origins of this, this world always coming/never coming?

Clearly, there is no outside of the world. Industrialized, technologized, computerized, globalized, increasingly we know that we all share this world, without back-worlds, without afterlife-worlds, etc. And yet in another sense, every thing, every being, is outside the world, removed from it. And absolutely so: to the point that I am withdrawn even from myself, withdrawn from my age, my looks, my words, from everything, withdrawn into the inaccessible origin that I am. Inaccessibly immortal. And that each thing is: the outside of the world that makes the world itself come, without any unified border, without any finality, without any accomplishment in meaning or destiny, but being itself the spacing and spacing-out of all things, and thus never even “being” itself. This is why the world, when we feel it, or when we sense it, is pure gift, gratuity, excess, grace. The feeling of being going far beyond itself, yet going there with itself, subtracting itself from the orders of the world, meaning, sense, perhaps even from being itself…

Let me come to a close with these final remarks and leave this disorderly text as it is, surrendered to your careful or careless reading, in any case, it won’t matter much, since everything about being-with exhausts us, even as it renders us such fine joys. Levi mentions the homeless and other entities that “do not share a world with other entities at all,” by which he means that there are no relations between those entities (homeless people) and the world they could be related to and share (their locale, their city, etc.). But isn’t it true that they are nevertheless in that world? Isn’t it true that they’re excluded from the world only from the viewpoint of the world that excludes them? Isn’t it true that from their point of view, they are still in “the” world, still “in relation” to it, even in the absence of any relation and despite the world’s utter indifference to them? And don’t they talk more than anyone about about how terrible the world is, about how cruel the world is, and about the end of the world as such? Don’t they know “the world” in all its callousness better than anyone?

So, Levi, the crux of our disputatio seems to be that, for you, where there is an absence of relations, there is no world, whereas for me, even where there is no relation at all there is sharing, there is an in-common, even if it is cruel and dispassionate, if only because everything, no matter what, is an equal origin of the world, and “the world” only means the common exposure of origin to origin, world to world, inside and out — not a mediator, but the mediation (with) and dispersal (withdrawal), always juxtaposing, always altered. Both of us want to do justice to the excluded entity, whether they be homeless people or endangered sharks, this is sure. My claim is simply that the biggest reason for this is because each person, each thing, is an absolute origin of the world. Hopefully my remarks have made some sense to you, and that they will sink in despite their admittedly unmanageable length. I am finally publishing a text having to do with OOO, and for me, that is something. Cheers my friend.

Addendum: Although I have drawn, always tangentially, from Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, I would hope that my readers extend him the courtesy of attributing every idea expressed here to me and my articulation of the truth, and not to his. It would kill me if, in reading a response, someone used it to make a statement like “Nancy thinks that…”, etc. For both of us, to read is a matter of experience, not a matter of truth-claims, and my articulation is nowhere near to Nancy’s on many levels, stylistically and substantively. And furthermore, without spending some time immersed in someone’s tone, it’s impossible to converse with them on any relevant level, that is, on any level beyond the merely representational (which amounts to heresay). Those interested in Nancy’s texts on ontology and the world would do best to reference Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World; or Globalization, and definitely in that order, unless you’re interested in starting at the very beginning with The Inoperative Community on the topic of common-being vs. being-in-common.

A subtle, little book by Jean-Luc Nancy came to me in the mail today, L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima), which condenses quite nicely Nancy’s “outlook” on the state of the world and the task of thinking today.

First of all, Fukushima represents the interconnection of levels: technology and nature, politics and military, economics and social life, local and worldwide. A natural tremor in the ocean sets off a catastrophic tsunami; this tsunami causes the catastrophic crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant; combined, these natural and technological disasters put a whole region of people at risk (incalculable); this agitates a socio-political crisis in Japan between their centralized power and subjugated peripheral regions; all of this combined disrupts economic markets in Europe and elsewhere and renews the conversation regarding “safe” nuclear power and regulation, etc. Fukushima thus stands for a world increasingly wound up in itself, increasingly bound to the endless proliferation of technologies, strategies, discourses, and “ends.” But it also stands for a world whose human calculations, decisions, and preventative acts no longer safeguard it from the most devastating catastrophes, which needn’t even be sparked by human hands. In other words, it stands for a technologized world that has, in a sense, made every existent of the world, human or otherwise, subservient to it in a mode of generalized catastrophe, the effects of which can never be calculated, even though the system seeks to reign in this incalculable.

The phrase “generalized equivalence” or even “generalized catastrophe” is the hallmark of such a civilization. It is a civilization at war with itself — partisan wars, guerrilla wars, economic wars, etc. It is a world where action requires a reaction: the car is built, and soon highways must be built, speed limits must be set, laws against drunk driving must be written, regulations for emissions must be set, petroleum markets must be created, etc. This circulation of “ends” is endless, such that ends becomes means and means become ends — just as one crisis becomes the unforeseen catalyst for another crisis. This equivalence is what forces every element of our existence to circulate “equally.”

The hallmark of this general circulation, where everything is equal to everything else, is money, which this general interconnection depends on. It makes our world function the way it does, subsuming everything under the regime of fabrication, exchange, distribution, and profitability. Everything is absorbed in to it, from iron ore to pop music. As I see it, it is a world where any and everything gets roped in – and it gets roped in, most generally, to the regime of profitability, accumulation, progress, and advance. To predict the coming ‘alternative’ to all this, in this regime of generalized equivalence there is no room for, or attention payed to, the singularity of each thing; everything is simply evaluated in light of some other end, some accomplishment or goal. For example, oceans are no longer oceans, but simply routes for cruise ships and oil tankers to take, regions to be excavated for oil and fish, nemeses that bring us hurricanes and tsunamis. But the same thing happens to everything: everything enters in to a calculation that makes it measurable and manageable, and therefore fixed — “itself,” but equivalent.

There is no sense in such a world, which now does little more than constantly go to war with itself — even though there are no longer “opposing sides” but simply the generalized manufacture and maintenance of a terror (or competition, rivalry, etc.) that prevents any and all relation between sides. In this erasing of sides and the maintenance of generalized terror, everything is more and more interconnected while also being less and less related in the proper sense of the term, for relation always has to do with the incommensurable — namely, with what in each of the terms of the relation are, no matter what, “inequivalent” to each other. We have to think how this inequivalence-between is what makes them or lets them relate in the first place.

For Nancy, it’s not a question of looking to our civilization to solve the same problems that it has created. In fact, it is perhaps not even a question of “solution-problem” anymore. Nor is it a question of changing this civilization, or of some transformation or regeneration of humanity that Marx once spoke about, according to some model or dream of utopia. Nothing less is at stake than discovering a civilization entirely other than this one, it is true, but only through a “difference” that is absolute, and each time absolute — something totally subtracted from the regime(s) of generalized equivalence, for which the indifference of money gives us the paradigm — some mode of relation proper, which does justice to the singular-inequivalent value of each and every thing. The only way to subtract ourselves from this regime of interminable equivalences is to avoid the regime of “finality” itself — the regime of goals, projects, aims, gain, realization, and accomplishment. We have to learn to look otherwise, to escape from the “look to the future” as such. Only when freed from this regime of “finality” and “projects” will we be able to perceive the singularity of each thing, subtracted from both its technological-economic “ends” and/or its natural “roles.” Stated otherwise, it means liberation from the whole regime of necessity as such, whether it be political, economic, natural, or technological.

Therefore, the keyword in the title — “After” Fukushima — has nothing to do with “what comes next,” in the mode of succession or anticipation of a new civilization that would come from our progress in this one, but rather with the order of an absolute rupture with this one, a suspense of generalized equivalence as such — all of which proceeds from a kind of stupor at the lack of sense of our globalized-monetized world. Again, it has less to do with finding “solutions” for this world, ones that would come from this world, than it does with developing our capacity or sense for a world entirely otherwise in this one — a world utterly incommensurable with the whole regime of generalized equivalence.

It is with this intent that Nancy tells us, “What will be decisive… will be to think in the present and to think of the present… the present as the element of the neighbor, the nearby.”   Now, the “neighbor” here is not merely our human neighbors, but all our neighbors, all nearby presences, in their radical singularity and incommensurability with any order or hierarchy in our technological world; beyond that, it is the “nearness” of the absolutely other within myself, which is what opens my relationship to infinity. So this is not the “immediate” present of some frenzied reason looking for solutions, nor of some headlong desire anticipating later fulfillment, but rather this present without past or future, the present without an “eye” to anything but itself, for the present is always its own end, its own finality, a finality “without end.” This is the present in which something presents itself, where something unheard of occurs, where something utterly foreign comes close and is allowed to come close: the present as or of a singular, “incommensurable” occurance, never to be absorbed by any scheme of value, meaning, representation, or signification, for each is absolutely valuable “in its own right.”

Here, every thing, every moment, every motion, every person, every address, every hour, every wave — is radically “inequivalent” and singular in or as what it is or is happening to be. The singularity of a voice, of a color, a look, a shape or a smell. To think the present is to gain an appreciation for this: the inappropriability of each as the incommensurability of each as the singularity of each. And then, from my own or our own locus of incommensurability within, to relate ourselves to this and to these and to all the singularity about — each, impossible to be absorbed in the regime of generalized equivalence:

Each time, it has to do with one particular consideration, with an attention or a tension, with a respect, or even with what we could go so far as to name an adoration turned toward singularity as such.

What is at stake, therefore, is an esteem that goes infinitely beyond any estimation, where the former has to do with the height of the singular, or the height of a singular mode of coming or presenting, and the latter has merely to do with the regime of generalized equivalence, calculation, and circulation (such that estimation amounts to monetization). Here, the worthiness of each thing and each one is inestimable, the esteem of and due to each. This esteem turns vigiliantly away from any evaluation having to do with past and future time, with the accumulation of social capital or social goods, with the construction of projects and goals. Here, the present, or the present of whatever singular, is not roped in to anything; on the contrary, it is liberated from being a mean or an end, that is, it is liberated in to relation. Here, the present is the approach and point of passage of a singular presence, which is and which remains incommensurable, be it a starfish, a star, or a day of fishing. All in all, it has to do with what is without price, the irreducible value of each thing as it is, valuable simply because it is a present point of passage and presence, or even a present point of the passage of presence.

To sense the world in this way is already to let “another” world enter this world, even if it is a world that “this world” will never be able to recognize – at least so long as it adheres to the regime of valuing-according-to, of estimating-with-an-eye-to, of pricing-in-relation-to – because it implies its incommensurability with it. This is the “radically other” of our civilization that, perhaps, is already “here” in some sense. Perhaps we can already sense it, detect it, feel it coming close. Perhaps it is already “here.” The task of thinking, therefore, would be to think this way, subtracted from projects and goals of consciousness, subtracted from equivocal estimations, turned toward the singularity and the “sans prix” of each and every. To think, quite simply, an unprecedented mode of being-here…

Notes:

Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima). 2012. Paris: Galilée.
Photos: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/Sea_Change

Famous adventure of art: Robert Rauschenberg  knocks on Bill de Kooning’s apartment door and presents him with an idea, to erase one of his masterpieces. He had been experimenting with erasing his own drawings, but realized that it would never work as art that way. De Kooning said he understood but didn’t like the idea. But if he was going to give something away to erasure, he said, he wanted it to be something he cared about, something of his own that he liked. The project went through: it took Rauschenberg four months to scour away the charcoal, oil paints, and pencil scratches on the drawing de Kooning gave him. He titled it “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” — “traces of ink and crayon on paper.”

No surprise that after working on this post for an hour or so, the computer reboots and erases most of what I’ve written. What I had drafted was an attempt at describing Simone Weil’s notion of grace in light of this strange encounter. I’m left with the sinking feeling that, like Rauschenberg, all I can do is erase the spiritual masterwork she presents to me, erasing her and myself. After the loss, I’m left wondering, “Isn’t this a signal that sharing insight is not as simple as scratching out all its colors and re-presenting it as your own? Aren’t you making the key mistake Weil warns against: using your imagination to side-step the real ordeal in the void?” Consider me guilty. Again and again I return to this point, conceding to God that all of this writing is superfluous in comparison to the ordeal the likes of which Simone Weil orders up. What good is it to explain it, to order it up myself, to try and say something about it? To do so, it requires words that, free in themselves, carry certain divisive connotations that no precaution of mine will get my readers past. So I force myself to believe that if I confess, they will confess with me: that we use the words without knowing what they refer to. This doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re meaning when we say things. It’s just that we’re also saying things whose meaning is more than we know:

To be willing to go as far as possible is to pray to be impelled, but without knowing whither. –Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil’s conception of grace is perfect. It conceives of a humanity that is free to choose to live within God’s ambit or not. To choose to live outside of it is to live in the realm of opinions and imagination, of power and will-power. To choose to live within God is to live in the realm of grace, where something very specific happens to me: I accept the void. This puts an end to the religious hope of saving my soul: “I” am precisely the thing who must be thrown off, uprooted. Grace makes this possible, and God is the only thing that can fill this hole in me that I choose to accept. It means that my efforts of intention come to a sudden halt, and that, insofar as I was a conceptual or conscious thing, I’m dead. This saturates us with our proper human humility and shows us our cross. “Withdrawing from our own soul,” we become the pure sensory apparatus of God — like the tip of a blindman’s walking-stick.

These days, we are not easily assuaged by such a story — which, if we paid close attention, proves to be the most perfectly anguished-and-glorious story of no-consolation possible. Personally, I’m attracted to it: don’t all of my writings ultimately point toward this point of self-voidance? I don’t have the faith, really, to assert that God fills the void thus created; but nevertheless I’ve run my voice dry articulating all the spinnings-round that this évidemment du soi (or kenosis) orders up; and I’ve admitted along the way my unsureity regarding it. Perhaps it was God — you? — filling it up all along. Despairing over the consequences of “arguments” (the dead-ends of inspiration) are what have brought me this far intellectually; but in reading Weil, I’m reminded of the fact that there is no getting anywhere. There is no “progress” when it comes to self-voidance, since this can only obscure the paths of grace. God is infinitely far away: to come a step closer is to find oneself one step further away.

A faith stripped of all assurances might establish itself in such a vortex; but what can I attest to? I think many of us writing today feel the heat to rely on what someone else has said. Anxiety forces us away from speaking in our own name — especially on topics such as self-voidance! (Perhaps “God” is the general reference for what fills the void in us without being an object, fulfillment, or purpose, but simply a drive, an impelling…) On my own blog, you can find countless ‘studies’ where I read and re-express what I find to be at issue in a certain author’s work, trusting in their name and their body of work to “back” for my own words. Meanwhile, I freely co-opt and extend their vocabulary, doing what I can to tend to their thought. In this post, free extension is interrupted and I’m summoned to self-confession. I confess that in all my studies, I comes as close to my subject as Rauschenberg comes to de Kooning. Everything has been rubbed out, and what you read are the traces of my eraser. Behind that, God who in your void is further away…

When I’ve spoken on my own behalf, here and elsewhere, — and this is really something I am telling to myself! — one has got to remember that I speak Being, I do not speak on my own behalf alone. Dare I say I speak in God’s name, if only to indicate to you that, in this passage, I have one hope: to recognize how infinitely distant I am from God, how far away my being and my work is from God’s work. Grace is in the fact that, somehow, my work and God’s Being coincide. But to no use: there’s no evidence in our experience of this coincidence anymore. To proclaim such a coincidence is delusion, megalomania, fanaticism. The era of raptures are over: the God’s have withdrawn, along with the reasons for the world. We’re suspended over the nothing that we/God are. And yet, we assert an expression of Being that knows its vacuum and grace. The revolution of the spirit, once having traveled inward, is now erupting in the streets until each voice is heard in all its fumbling. This indicates that the traveling-inward never ceases, or that the surprise of existence always fills us, inevitably.

And this is what we can try to affirm today, including this: turning-inward amounts to opening-up. Jean-Luc Nancy writes, in a moment of great concision, that a “sinner” is something closed in upon itself, a self not open. Divine is the self at its limit, where its suspension-over-nothing is divined. –But once again, we’ve stepped into a de Kooning’s house and asked for the artist’s artwork. We’ve erased to reveal solely a reference to something beyond, whether we’re talking about Nancy, Weil, or God. We are trying to come close to what is real:  to follow Krishnamurti beyond thinking, to follow Adi Da beyond the self-contraction, to follow Weil beyond the imagination and toward grace. How we are going to get there is precisely what withdraws from the consciousness of a self voided in it.

This line packs me in the stomach. I look around my room — the drink containers, the lights that are on, the open books. Someone’s sweater lying there. Feeling in my socks.

***

Below are scraps of thought that correspond to Simone Weil’s conception of grace as I have borrowed it, not after knocking on the door to her room, but after knocking on the door to God’s. Just as I say this, and during my saying of it, I feel the pain and stupidity in this expression: it leads you to believe so many things that I don’t, and can’t, believe. Likewise, the door, and I hope this is obvious, exists nowhere in thought, belief, text, or practice. It’s tradition is either manifest in me as my cross to bear, or it is manifest nowhere. The painting God, or Simone, hands back to us is, come to find out, something of “our own” creation — not in the sense that we as “I” made it, but rather, we as “we” all came to it, together, and it came to us all all at once, even when it comes to just us as “I” in the form of an exchange with some partner “you,” some companion in “art.” But this stealing, this bringing across, does not have to be violent. The erasure can be as soft as a simple correspondence. Patience can come; and open to the interruption of God.

We get nowhere along the paths of grace, since, by definition, grace only draws us away from the specified paths. In this sense, grace individualizes to the very degree it empties. Faith amounts to the belief that, despite all distances, some kind of correspondence will be kept between what is emptied (me) and what comes to fill it (God). I pass from the register of individuated beings into the register of All-Being without losing anything of the individual status of my lone being: abandoned but opened to infinity. By grace, me in my lone being comes to express the All-Being which is in each being and thing, thus expressing knowing Being.

Grace first opens the space in me to choose between what is fake and what is real. Life outside of God is fake: the life of the imagination, opinions, and actions. Life inside of God is real: the life of grace. What does this require? The surrender of everything to nothing, to the point that we are only doing what we cannot stop ourselves from doing: expressing Being. In another register, this means communication with the whole of Being: ecstasy. Continual rupture of the self-enclosure. Breath, touch, movement of something different. To the limit: divine cohabitation of bodies and their vocabularies.

To concede to grace is to accept the void within us. To concede to this void within us is to concede to God, who is the signal of the most different/distant. God is everything that is lost to us, everything that will remain “far away.” Which means, God is everything. God measures the proximity between us and our being, between us and all other beings. God is that measure in me. With you, I cannot share it. I can only choose to recognize that, in handing it to you, I lend it to be erased. This actually starts from the minute I am conscious, and surely from the minute I go to write. The immediacy of this kenosis is what drives you to try and choose your best artwork to have erased. You know that, even erased, the trace shares your name. Without that and the back-story, it would truly be nothing, but not a distinct nothing like a name is. A name as unconventional as God, Nancy, Weil…

To pray is to come into contact with the most distant by detaching oneself, allowing oneself to identify with the lowliest, and so to identify quite literally with nothing. It is to become a vacuum, non-self-created, and to “wait” indefinitely for grace to arise in the heart, the will to act that is then not my will, but God’s. This is where the Being of beings gets expressed in expressing the distance between them, but expressing it as One; one whole-part of Being.

God’s will is not known or realized, quite to the contrary. We think of it wrong if we think of it as having an intention, or a direction, or even a purpose. God’s will, quite simply, is to will perfectly, to be a perfect will. This will is real: not imaginary, not an opinion, not, in the end, “willed.” This perfect will is the will that acts from necessity: “inactive action.” Less a trust in the fortuity of chance (although perhaps this is close), than a trust in God’s freedom from necessity. To be free myself means making necessary my trust in this freedom from necessity. For God’s will does nothing preordained, it heads only in the direction of sharing.

God, in effect, remains absent, most distant. So does God’s will. But then again, aren’t there traces of it? How can we learn to perceive these only spiritual rewards, which we can only expect to the extent that we rely on the surprise of the event in God? Our only hope is to love this distant God to the point of acknowledging God’s inexistence. On the limit, God’s will only comes into existence to the extent that I match my inexistence with his. This double vortex or inexistence makes Weil exclaim:

The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!

This kind of effort cannot be summoned from within oneself. Christ’s singularity itself registers the fact that I cannot “match my inexistence” with God’s: only Christ can adequately measure the distance between God and creature. Which also means that only Christ did and could have stared in to this horror. Only Christ was motionless. The Cross is the limit-image of a desire-without-object, impelled-not-knowing-whither, withdrawn and trusting only in the infinitely distant. Weil’s grace is a kind of vigilant receptivity to the sharing of this desire: it is to be exposed to the fullness of the surrounding universe, a fullness whose coming is gauged only in proportion to ones acceptance of this void — including the degree to which one detaches from the products of the imagination, opinion, and the will. Being grace, it comes only where a void has been accepted within you, where a vacuum has been received — a vacuum that grace has created within you. Turning my attention on what cannot be conceived, I disappear altogether.

This vacuum that you are is what makes you human (or divine); but I believe it is also what we have in common with every being and thing. The void-heart withdrawn in each thing is the mark in its present of its present impermanence, which displays the thousandfold traces of permanence as appearances.  Grace means surmounting this materiality by nothing. Grace activates the void that drives the will to life, or if you prefer, expresses Being.

This kind of love, along with the kind of life the void-I corresponds to, in moving toward humility — our natural condition faced with the nudity of others –, thinks in connection with the living and the dead the conditions on which this nudity of existence might be found. And it finds no adequate ground. It finds itself in “substantial emptiness”: the finitude of Being. Whose finitude is exaggerated in that the “how” of God’s infinite has long irrevocably withdrawn (the cry on the cross is an apt analogy). One finds this “no adequate ground” on the body, to be the body. Hoc est enim corpus meum: all of a sudden, I’ve given over my painting to you, my body whose canvas I never bought, whose lines I never once dictated.

If there is one, I’m not sure what the purpose is for ingesting all this, for letting it course through your veins. I assure you, there are not my indications. Today, they’ve seethed from a certain disgust with myself — a certain boredom, during which I’d asked for God to do something with me. As this post closes, I know that nothing has been done in this sense: there’s been no proof of my being-put-to-use. Art looks further away than ever. But perhaps we have, at least, addressed this void at the heart of the world, which you can call God, or death-in-things, or the omnipresence of the Other-in-the-Same, whatever. Perhaps we have drawn it closer to ourselves, and you, and also knowing that this means drawing into the ambit of something still more distant. We are climbing to the highest mountain top, where we make confessions and pledge ourselves beyond our waking, reasonable mind, in the stratosphere where human language articulates the truth of all beings as its own-unique-own — where everything then collapses in one sense. We needn’t be concerned with where we land.

In a dialog entitled “Something’s Missing,” Ernst Bloch and Theodore Adorno agree that there shall be no positive conception or vision of utopia. Adorno even links this interdiction to the biblical one against graven images. Utopian thinking then consists in the “determinate negation” of the structures in society as they currently exist (much like Marx’s project was a criticism of capitalism before it was a positive vision for communism). Utopian thinking ought to emphasize the “u-”: that utopia is “n0-place” and that revolutionary consciousness derives its most urgent creations from this “no.” In a similar vein, Fredric Jameson speaks of “The Future as Disruption“: the difficulty of translating Utopias into a viable political-practical alternatives to the current system forces us to “concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, the unrealizable in its own right”:

The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.

A somewhat different picture emerges in the work of Herbert Marcuse: for him, utopia is no longer just “no place,” but rather “that which is blocked from coming about by the power of established societies.” With the advances in science, technology, and food production, utopia — the diminution of basic suffering to the lowest possible levels — is potentially within our grasp. However, the very same forces that make utopia possible now inoculate the masses from the very desire for it, through the mechanisms of mass media and generalized complacency. Such are the symptoms of the affluent society: merchandise, consumerism, satisfaction, competition, complacency, distraction, and profit; which are supported by mostly invisible exploitation in the productive arena: exploitation of resources (including people), mental repression and aggressiveness, and the whole catalog of brutalities waged against marginal populations in the name of corporate capital. Thus, although technology and transport could minimize competition for resources, make basic needs available for all, and free up time for humans to determine themselves according to their own needs (and not those of production, exploitation, etc.), what should be our noblest desires are sabotaged through various mechanisms of mental and cultural control. We unwittingly defend a system that consolidates wealth and power in the hands of the few, and we find our very being defined by the ideals of affluence which sustain the same system that oppresses us all.

Of course, it is easy enough to recognize this, while the question of application, change, and reversal remains tough to handle, both in theory and practice. Marcuse says that the revolutionary strategies employed in the 19th and 20th century — namely, the model of a revolutionary avant-garde seizing power through collective force — can no longer apply. Why? Because the working class is no longer impoverished to the point of heated revolt. Quite to the contrary, the working class, or the middle class, has become the agent for conservativism and stability of the exploitative system (through ideals of consumption, values of work ethic, etc.). Here, we must remember that Marcuse is writing in 1968, when the working class opposed the student revolts in France– and so effectively defended the technocrats and overlords who should have been their common enemy. Of course, Marcuse still affirms that struggles driven by the “underclasses” will continue to be primary in the ghettos and impoverished areas of the world, and that these class driven struggles will always underpin the biggest changes in society (for example, the Arab Spring); but at the same time, he comes to the conclusion that there is a new work of preparation that must be undertaken. These preparations imply the task of producing new cultural subjects, fashioned from within the affluent capitalist society as its internal disintegration. (Note: one could link this disintegration to the idea of introducing entropy into the system, or of making room for everything –  thus of writing, spacing, life, difference in general.)

This is the preparation of a “new historical Subject of change” whose arena of praxis is driven away from picket lines and the streets, toward the slower work of creating new desires for freedom, of tapping into a new sensibilities of human solidarity, and of imagining new aesthetic forms – sensible forms that present us with an image of freedom, and so develop within us an awareness of our desire to be free. The vital need for us, then, is to emphasize the need for a transformation of consciousness that is freed from “conservative interests and aspirations” of the prevailing society and its norms. It means nothing less than the preparatory, prerevolutionary work of radical enlightenment.

I

Preparatory Moves

The goal of this post is to list some of the perogatives this preparatory work implies for Marcuse. Despite his optimism that certain technological advancements make utopia actually possible for us, and that it simply remains for us to make the potential actual, we can still see in his own words and in the form of his thinking the same interdiction mentioned at the beginning: the impossibility of giving a positive conception to utopia or to any tangible alternative to the given Establishment. His effort, for all its positivity, remains “negative,” even if this negativity has a positivity of its own. Culled from Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation, here is a tentative catalog of moves which ought to guide any preparatory attempt at utopian thinking:

• Qualitative transformation
• Exiting the sphere of divided labor
• Transcending the shame of the past
• Transcending affluent satisfaction 
• Refusal of the Establishment
• Destruction of language
• Revolution in perception itself
• Limits on Freedom
• The priority of Aesthetic Form
• Form as Subject
• Limits on Socio-Political Participation

Qualitative transformation — The means and the end of utopian speculation. It corresponds to the step-by-step, initial leaps out of society as it is, and to the total shift from a quantitative-capitalistic society to a qualitatively different, socialist one — changes also appear to characterize capitalism as a political and economic process as a whole. The ground level operation for this transformation is the active production of new needs and modes of production that radically differ from those associated with capitalist society: the production of new possibilities. (See posts on Peter Osborne & Time and Lefevre on Socialist Action.) Marcuse’s thesis is that affluent society constantly reinforces needs that pattern the behavior of the populace and alienate them from what they really want.  Capitalist society stifles and adjusts our faculties of imagination and consciousness to serve its own exploitative and quantitative purposes. It represses their real urge to break free, exploiting our capacity to adapt to rough circumstances. People become competitive, stylish, or “in the know” because they have been inculcated with these values, such that they become second nature. To undo this knot is tricky, but qualitative transformation requires it: the creation of new needs that are radically heterogeneous with respect to the old system. Paramount in this creation is to reinvigorate, or simply invent for the first time, a longing for free and open spaces.

Exiting the sphere of divided labor — Marcuse tries to think of a necessity that is wedded to freedom such that freedom reveals itself as the true necessity; such that the “freely necessary” begins to assert a causal force in reality unlike any ever seen before — as if one form of freedom were the contagion for the next. Here, free development of my faculties necessarily takes place outside of the division of labor, the sphere of “socially necessary labor,” where I’m forced to be “divided from myself” and sell myself for a wage. To drive possibilities for freedom into conscious awareness (through aesthetic or utopian Forms, as we’ll see) prepares the imaginative soil for larger revolutions. In this new vision of human activity, “creation” and “productivity” would be directly linked to the shared production of images of freedom. In this utopia, freedom and necessity coincide like self-determination and solidarity: “Socialist solidarity is autonomy.” (Note: this is not unlike Wilde’s idea that Individualism could only truly thrive in man’s soul under socialism.)

Transcending the shame of the past – Qualitative transformation implies the rejection of aggressive and brutal practices associated with exploitative societies of the past, both by acknowledging the injustices committed in history and by not allowing these evils to recommence today. In distancing ourselves from our forefather’s practices, we will also distance ourselves from their guilt, thus delivering man from ressentiment and moralizing him through a common sense or sensibility of “biological” solidarity with all other men– a solidarity characterized by the rejection of exploitation, repression, and aggressiveness. Perhaps the limit to the expiation of collective guilt might also show us the limits of this transformation (cf. Benjamin’s Theses on History). Marcuse’s study is oriented toward social expiation, but I would suggest that this transcending of the shame of the past is also required on the personal level: solidarity with a shared sensibility and shared rationality that takes me beyond myself has to be supported by my own transcendence of my past (my reluctance, shame, fear, etc.). But despite not emphasizing it, this “short-circuit” between the universal and the singular is implied– especially since none of this gets off the ground without it.

Transcending affluent satisfaction – Qualitative transformation of perception implies the overcoming of the Pleasure principle altogether, where happiness is thought to be something consumed and not produced (as it must be, if it is really to be happiness); and where there is pleasure in gratification and satisfaction (relaxation of desire), instead of in the endless circling-around-the-impossible (intensification of desire). The former would denote the delusions of contentment in the affluent society, whereas the latter would denote the creation aesthetic or utopian Forms: a new kind of productivity that would never stop transforming the one who produces them (or who at least perceives herself to be at the center of a production coming from within and without).

Refusal of the Establishment – We must reject and disengage ourselves from the rigged game at all costs and on every level; we must deny our reliance on the “Good Will in the Establishment”; we must free words from their subjugation to advertisements, abstract theories, and political propaganda; we must abolish our very existence as consumers and combat the regime of “profitable exchange”; we must transvalue all values (Nietzsche is cited at least twice). Again, this drives right to the heart of our own being and daily practice: “people cannot reject the system of domination without rejecting themselves, their own repressive instinctual needs and values.” This not only means shrugging off the “moral values” condoned by the system of domination, but also its pretension to being totally functional and operational, to being useful and helpful: the myth that the Establishment is good for us, which is only a screen against our fear of social chaos and disorder.

Destruction of Language – Implicit with this qualitative transformation would be a “rupture with the vocabulary of domination.” This includes most notably the vocabulary that, for example, makes heroism out of American tactical strikes and turns violent outbursts of the Iraqi oppressed into “acts of terror.” This is the vocabulary that condones violence against the Enemy while blinding itself to the injustice it distributes, while proclaiming loudly the corruption of anyone who would challenge the prevailing social systems (like OWS). More generally, it includes the destruction of all “instrumentalist language.” Paradoxically, revolutionary language “cannot be… an instrument of revolution.” Marcuse links this to the dada-surrealist project to be as non-conformist as possible, to the point of “a methodical reversal of meaning.” This theme of a non-instrumental, useless, worthless language is a language that cannot enter the chains of exchange as they are. It cannot be commodified: it has attained an absolute value by being intentionally valueless. It can only head toward free and open spaces. (Note: See Jean Baudrillard’s Impossible Exchange, but more importantly, Georges Bataille’s insistence on the need for an insubordinate language that would throw off all hints of servitude in The Absence of Myth. See also Silence-writing. This need manifests itself at every level of Bataille’s discourse, which objects constantly to its own signification and meaning. Incidentally, this need to cast off all forms of servitude and to reject all instrumentalist language is the motivation behind my polemic against theories, their productivity or “use,” systematic closures, the invention of concepts, and definitions in general.)

Revolution in perception itself – Only on the level of perception can the “continuum of repression and domination” be broken once and for all. The cultivation of new possibilities and the emphasis on solidarity freed from aggressiveness can only lead to this revolution in perception itself. This revolution (transformation, intensification) of perception is meant to dissolve the old structures and to make room for the new. But whatever this new “is,” again, we cannot say. Why? Because they very process of the transformation of perception is what gives rise the transformed reality (u-topia). The utopian act cannot be dissociated from the utopian outcome, no more than the aesthetic perception can be dissociated from the aesthetic Form. But right away we must emphasize that this “outcome,” this “form” is never given. ”Reality has to be discovered and projected.” (Note: we could link this to Bloch’s vision of utopia as an “Ontology of the Not-Yet” and the initial idea that “Something’s Missing” — which cannot be overcome by any social outcome or any final closure of Form.)

Limits on Freedom – This is the paradoxical freedom of the senses to share in the imaginative production of new Forms of freedom. But the key word here is share: the exercise of my freedom of imagination is limited, and can only produce new free images when my exercise is invested with this sharing and its truth (which is freedom). (Note: This sharing is what Marcuse is getting at when he discusses the “biological” solidarity of man with man as a species; but we should extend this beyond the human to all things and existents. I share this freedom of imagination with mountains as much as with humans– or at least, everything is infinitely valuable in itself before it’s related to anything else, and so implies the same element of solidarity-in-diversity that Marcuse applies to socialistic autonomy.) Marcuse references Kant to explain the limitations on freedom, which happens on the side of sensibility and reason: (a) my sense contents and their forms are necessarily shared with me by others (on the edge of skin where things touch me and I touch things); and (b) reason itself is the articulation-in-common through concepts, words, ideas, etc. (which is corrupted by the instrumental, competitive, and utilitarian uses to which it is put in the affluent society). The senses provide the (shared) raw material and reason the (shared) order; this takes place within us. The imagination is the “sensuous power” of harmony and unity between these two seemingly heterogeneous levels. (Note: in connection with the limitations on freedom, we should cite Levinas, for whom the “Other-in-the-Same” not only calls my arbitrary freedom into question, but upon welcoming the Other invests its with its true purpose.)

The priority of Aesthetic Form — In all this, Marcuse is led to the position that the “ascent of Form,” of the aesthetic Form alone reaches utopian heights. In the art form, consciousness goes as far as it can possibly go toward the negation of the given reality: “Their time is not the present; they preserve their truth in their hope, in their refusal of the actual.” As with utopia, the object of art is never “given” beforehand: it must be found out. And it is impossible, immeasurable. This “not-given” is always found out in the process of perception, which is an (unending) end-in-itself. As the end-in-itself of art, the process of transforming-perception becomes actual insofar as the process itself becomes an object. And this object is hardly an object: it is the aesthetic form, an aesthetic process in consciousness capable of transcending the actual. The art object, no more than the utopian society, has never become itself, for its attitude toward all of given reality requires that it always be becoming, actively transforming our perceptual apparatus. This is why the transcendence of the art product can be total, for it must develop a language that is totally subtracted from ordinary language and experience. Its meaning transcends its content (or its objectness) through the Form (which in the end is just a shattered and displaced object), since it cannot simply be engaged at the level of contents (this would miss the whole point), but on the level of movement, transformation, and perception: form.

Form as Subject — Art as an end-in-itself, as total transformation of the contents of consciousness through a wholesale revamping of the form of consciousness (pushing it to the very limits of unreality, we should add; but also of sharedness), is a perfect analog for the revolutionary conception of a self-determining humanity. The form of both the artwork and the new revolutionary Subject breaks with the familiarity of known practices (including revolutionary ones) and with the “automatism” of immediate perception: it prolongs and extends the duration of this perception, thus making possible something that was previously impossible in terms of the former system. In this way it attains the utopian point — a point that nevertheless trembles between the former system and the unprecedented new form. This takes place in/on/as the very border between reality and unreality: ”The aesthetic necessity of art supersedes the terrible necessity of reality” and has to “abandon the direct appeal, the raw immediacy of [its] presentations.” The link between the unreal self and the unreal utopian landscape or language asserts itself here most forcefully as both urgent and infinite. More complicated yet is the fact that production is well underway. See, for example, Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, which emphasizes that the rightness of an individual is not in his “reality” (as both nature and history would argue), but in his unreality, his nothing, his impossibility.

Limits on Socio-Political Participation – Marcuse adds that all of this involves a “refusal to mature” and “perform efficiently” in society. This involves the strategies of laziness at work, of indifference to social trends and mores, and a refusal to work in support of the oppressive divisions of labor to the greatest extent possible. It involves satire and irony, laughter and ridicule against the Establishment and its minions. It takes the stance that “the general will is always wrong” insofar as the status quo is something produced by the Establishment. Change is thus always opposed to the “rationalizations of the status quo,” which generally only “reproduce the repressive system.” Therefore, while democratic society is preferred to other forms of repressive society, it is constantly opposed. The radical is forced into anarchic and non-political modes of action and rebellion, forced to be “illegal” in the eyes of Law and Order; but this is because the existing society has invalidated itself. Only the individual, illegal and unsanctioned, can make the judgment call — and the criteria for judgment is lacking, but common: we are never prepared for it. “In radical political practice, the end belongs to a world different from and contrary to the established universe of discourse and behavior.” (Note: Lytotard, “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’ètat naissant.”)

II

Producing Potential in Freedom

By this point, it’s clear that Marcuse comes awfully close to refusing any positive conception of utopia, since it’s obliged to rely on the coordinates of thought and language at its given historical moment. (In another sense, this is the impotence of the dead to speak, of silence to say anything that can be heard by anyone.) By defining utopia as the thing the Establishment represses, Marcuse deepens the necessity of its wholesale negation while trying to maintain its scientific and technological features. . He even goes so far as to say that the external revolution can only take place if the “internal structure and cohesion of the capitalist system begin[s] to disintegrate” — and this disintegration begins with the radical effort of the individual to undermine the Establishment and the repressive ways of society at any and all levels (including the satirical and apolitical). “Negative thinking” is practiced to prevent the bad infinity of society and the perpetuation of its system of definitions and oppositions; and to uncover its inconsistencies, its inaccuracies, and its difference. Interestingly, this rapport to society is not unlike the rapport to the aesthetic or Utopian form: we can never rest content that the object has “become”; we can only pursue the becoming-object of a transformation in perception, imagination, solidarity, freedom, aesthetics…

Marcuse is right to point out that we cannot reject everything that has come along with the affluent society. It’s developments make utopia much more possible in potentia, such that we cannot reject outright any positive speculation. We should advocate and create models for the collective ownership of resources already available. We should advocate that all resources be mobilized for the abolition of poverty (which even Oscar Wilde knew was the goal of socialism). Our society has led us to these possibilities: now it’s time to end its self-propelling productivity for profit’s sake, and reinvent it for our own sake. And nevertheless, affluent society is based on an aggressiveness that will not take kindly to this sharing of resources overnight. As an apparatus in consciousness, it represses the poverty it requires to survive: thus the need to abolish the known forms of consciousness. Which means that, today, we ought to start practicing new forms of creating and sharing new forms of language and consciousness that cannot be swallowed, commodified, sold and consumed complacently. Practicing our new found capacity to give shape to the refusal to take shape for good, thus giving shape to Jameson’s “break” or Nancy’s “suspension,” giving form to the tension and pleasure of the infinite, impossible, u-topic not-yet.

In the end, it is as if the need to be free was the very thing that needed to be produced. Marcuse repeats across his work: “the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.” This invention takes place “subjectively” from the get-go. It means the production of a new historical Subject: new aesthetic Forms. It means the abolition of the attitude of private property and the economic-social apparatus that supports it, a practice of collectivization and sharing in work and deed, a constant struggle toward transformed perception, new rationalities, and singular forms of aesthetics (as sensibilities and as arts), all undertaken with one basic question in mind: “what are we going to do now and for whom?” It is an injunction to rethink humanity and its place in all of existence: “the collective practice of creating an environment: level by level, step by step…”