The clear difference between our use of the word “death” and the normal use: Normally, death is the end of biological life. If we read this normal use through Hannah Arendt’s lens, death is the end of productive years, such that the prematurely dead are those who don’t labor--hence “deadbeat,” “dead weight on the economy.”
For us, death is only the surrender of potentials, and it arises to various degrees: Constraint is a mode of death which finds its highest form in morality, and the final death is a fundamental shift in which the body turns from facilitator of entropy into that upon which entropy acts.
That is: Chaos reigns, and the Eunuch aspires, always, to be its viceroy.
***
Jesus: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” → Nietzsche: “The free spirit will, at first, perceive his freedom as a form of weakness.”
The meek shall inherit the earth because their inner sense of power has not yet been diverted to serve institutional power. “The meek” is the set of those who, rather than being devastated by the collapse of institutions, can finally express their full-to-bursting wills when institutions collapse.
***
It feels as though something about Gertrude Stein’s destruction of meaning should go here, how her Tender Buttons attains Dionysian frenzy in a way that opera can only dream about, how she cut all Burroughs’ word lines before he called it cool, how her project has been started and restarted ever since, to go, finally, where? But I am not the mouth for such a proclamation; someday, someday, slowly it creeps up from my anus, neon crustacean of knowledge on the balcony of a Houston hotel, and I preach, and I preach, and it beats on...
You tell me I tell me you I me tell you tell me.
***
The thirst for truth only subverts itself: Fuck Kant. For truth to preexist and to be sovereign, we would have to subjugate all life to it, and in that case, who cares if it’s right, and what does it matter? The only truth is what we can defend: Here’s the great insight of Hitler against himself. From the third chapter of Mein Kampf, I paraphrase: The power of an assemblage of people comes not from any common blood, but from a common fist.
***
The system’s neatest trick: Anything that stirs the blood will immediately be converted to marketing slogans. Subversive, revolutionary, resistance all have become cotton-candy punches thrown by planted actors, watch them spit out the dirty sides of dentured grins. Where is the new revolutionary, the new subversive? Precisely where identity breaks down: Bring me your conservative anarchists, your genderfluid, your mixed-race and mixed-spirit, etc. Only one who is exuberantly Legion, who is aggressively self-contradictory, may lay claim to the title “revolutionary.” The Brooklyn primitivist, the aristocrat in poverty. The one who must breathe “problematic” with their oxygen or else suffocate.
***
All this separatist talk, the talk of moral circles, of xenomigration, it only implies malice to those still laboring under the delusion that “indifferent” = “malignant.” Legion blasts apart the line between nature and artifice: As nature has always acted of her own accord, so, now, do artificial systems. Fredy Perlman was right in this sense: Civilization, that pesky sea-monster, has wriggled out of our control. The powers that be (note the subjunctive: we’re really dancing in the dark) have been acephalic for...but no one knows the day or the hour. We claim that large-scale institutions and processes have leaders the same way that those same pseudo-leaders required that Occupy Wall Street have a leader: Who can negotiate with a headless beast? Who is not disgusted by the still-just-as-intelligent scuttlings of a headless cockroach?
The one who just leaves. Sounds unreasonable, I know. But we are not talking about a time-outside, a distance. We are talking about an outside-within, Eunuch planted in a sea of breeders, an organic aqualung. Lazzarato and Alliez have established that what we might call a “state” is a series of foldings-in and foldings-out: The drawn borders are not the active borders. Invasions and colonizations are often internal operations. The same applies on micro-scale: The Eunuch among roaches will immediately consider themself weak because almost every social formation tells them they should become more roachy. We have found the necessity of community, though that word is so viscous is almost makes me gag: Even Jehovah needs a trinity to be whole. If we assume that the Eunuch is above Jehovah, we must still concede that a pair is the lowest constituent group of selfhood, even if that pair happens to inhabit the same body.
***
Activists and reactionaries are two sides of the same coin: Both eating the same chewy Zeitgeist, shitting the same sludge in opposite directions, see the big moat that shuts all others out of the Zeitgeist’s nougaty center, they squeeze their nostrils and flee…
If they’re two sides of the coin, we’re tryna be zinc, tryna be nickel--cool, calm, collected by only the most de-institutionalized of mystic numismatists. Cry of “That ain’t legal tender!” shrieks from the back of the assembled readership. Well...okay. We said it once, we’ll resay it: This is not sound philosophy. This is pressing-hard-on-the-prostate-if-you-got-it shit.
***
Why the Eunuch and not the castrato? We know why the caged bird sings. That, and every post-postmodern dick is a strap-on. “Wutcha got under thar?” Slurs the beer-breath breeder coming up behind us out the back of Friends Sports Bar & Grill. Extinction. Freedom. [Eagle screeches, shits across the fresh-waxed hood of a luxury SUV.] A dildo like a battering ram, take out a whole city block with enough umph behind it. Dip spit dribbles in overheating short-circuit, in the distance a herd of cops runs off a Middle Eastern cliff, and the schizo whistles “Dixie” and “Lemonade” as simultaneous overtones.
***
The main obstacle to Eunuchdom, to the amoral summit? The fear of solitude...that one should be locked forever inside one’s own head, doomed to beat it against spiked walls that one calls “friends” in the futile hope that they will become such; but no, the Eunuch is too heterogeneous, too unpredictable, and friendship is made for comfort, for mutual defense--social circle as folded outward, as paranoid phalanx, as eternal game of Red Rover in which the only newcomer who can break through the ranks is the one so quiet and unobtrusive that no one notices them until they’ve already locked elbows with the team.
This, while the Eunuch frets in internal exile: The interleaved shields of the paranoid phalanx do not serve to keep the enemy out, but to keep the Eunuch from becoming the group’s mascot: Only once the Eunuch is branded can they be let out into the world, and the brand only invites another brand within another phalanx, and so the Eunuch hides it: How to find the others so branded? Like any other marginal population, dog-whistles and ciphers, and the branded ever doubt their hearing, their calculation…
***
The Eunuch as congenital masochist: The will is born of physiology before it is accessible to reflection, and in the schizoid, multiply aborted physiologies of the Eunuch there is born a will that tears itself apart, a constant scrapping, dogs leaping over a threadbare tire, teeth unsheathed; with nothing to which to subordinate themself, the Eunuch shoots off the plane of the supposed-real, the supposed-possible in all directions, “like a innaresting sex arrangement”--the most banal moments of the Eunuch as orgy, as ecstasy in the sense of dissolution, as sublimation: Thus is the isolation necessary to the Eunuch not only survivable but craved, if only intermittently.
***
What a surprise to find, at a point I thought was total exhaustion, that I can take another breath, another step...Is it necessary, as Bataille wrote, to alternate between evil and good, between summiting and descending? Is it necessary that one cease to immolate in order to hoard fuel for future immolations? Bataille conceived a summit where the Eunuch only sees a fog-darkened mountainside: We are not so cynical as to assume that there are no others, that we may only commune with the dead. Yes, he’s right, one stick can only burn so long before it must be replaced, and so we send out this dog-whistle into the digital dark, that such an ever-compounding faggot of Eunuch will congregate that it may burn incessantly.
***
That last, in other words: We seek to appropriate the techniques of capital, to turn the system’s neatest trick back over against itself. Blindness, oblivion, shit one moment into the next by way of its sheer inertia...There is no humanity in such a conception, certainly no humanism except insofar as one may refer to all corn generally as “corn” because one has found a kernel in one’s excrement.
The “state of things” is thus as much a matter of indifference to us as it is to capital. Unlike Jacobi, who critiques “hopelessness” with an optimism that must seem pathological to Jacobi himself, we revel in “hopelessness” regarding the general state of the world, not in the sense that we feel our hopes defeated, but in the sense that we are indifferent: The world may do what it will, may do what arises from its own mixed inorganic/organic physiology. To attempt to alter its course, we must erase ourselves and become organs of that world, and what does it matter? What is such an abstraction to us? The world is a Eunuch: To attempt to change it, to ameliorate it, is only a masked moralism, a betrayal, a hypocrisy.
And what of Jacobi? What of his claimed “egoist nihilism”? We applaud his self-contradiction but not his servile subordination to such illusions as humanity, nature, etc. In his depths we see a foiled romanticism, a more extreme version of “I should have been born in the ‘20s lol” syndrome, which is frightened to death of the nihilism with which it lives and which directs its expression like a puppeteer. If only that nihilism would win out! Then we may see in Jacobi a real elevation past Kaczynski rather than a worshipper.
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