On Love: Hiram, Superposition, and Immolation

“That which I love in the Loved One--to the point that I want to die of love--is not that One in particular, but rather the shard of the universal that resides in it. Insofar as that part is in play, I put myself in play.”

“It is not the pure Unified Being that is the object of love, but the separate being, who is only nearby by sheer luck, who has fallen from the Unified insofar as it is a separate being, through the power that it has to deny separation. But this negation supposes an encounter with the Loved One. The negation has no effect but when one stands before the other, when one supposes an equal presence of chance in this other.”

-- Georges Bataille, Sur Nietzsche

If we can jive, more or less, with the above, we enter into a murky, idiosyncratic thread in the history of the theory of love: Though this thread certainly contains more chords than these three, I’ll limit my discussion, for the most part, to Georges Bataille, libertine author Dominique Vivant Denon, and the North Carolinian country duo Hiram.

***

Vivant Denon’s novella Point de Lendemain, in its 1812 version, begins with a form which will echo, in various permutations, throughout the work:

I was twenty, and I was naïve; she betrayed me, I got mad, and she left me. I was naïve, I regretted it; I was twenty, she forgave me: And because I was twenty, and I was naïve, ever betrayed but even more abandoned than betrayed, I thought myself the best-beloved lover of them all, therefore the happiest of men.

That is, there is no simple valence here: Abandonment is as much an indicator of love as a kiss: Love is a spiral which, when entered, turns everything into a sign and points all these signs toward it: The lover is fundamentally paranoid, and it is tempting to say that they vacillate accordingly. But there is no vacillation. Only superposition: Love is woe, as read through the Book of Isaiah 5:20:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, for they are as good as dead; woe to those who turn darkness into light and light into darkness, who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.

Love is the action of the philosopher’s stone: The lovers are at once lead and gold and, upon exiting the spiral, can be neither: Love places them on the heights of despair and of joy, which two heights, we may confidently say, are the same summit.

***

William S. Burroughs, when asked to define love: “Well, I suppose it’s a kind of mixture of sex and liking.”

Burroughs, that greatest of polemicists, could never have written a line like that with which Vivant Denon concludes Point de Lendemain: “I searched all over for the moral of the whole grand adventure, and I found nothing.”

***

“I melted a cold, cold heart, you know

and I was so surprised:

It froze right back into place again

right before my eyes.”

The final chorus of Hiram’s “Black Widow Waltz.” Such a freeze is the confusion which serves as love’s vehicle: It is as constant as the melting, it must be. Says the narrator of Point de Lendemain to his lover, “Love wants to multiply itself forever: It thinks it has obtained nothing when it ceases to obtain.” 

“Black Widow Waltz” should be played on repeat: Melt, freeze, melt, freeze, melt...And then played from two speakers at once, starting at different times, like a canon: 

“{I fooled her into falling in love/It froze right back into place again}

right before {her/my} eyes.”

***

“And the two shall become one flesh,” Christianity’s famous phenomenology of marriage. As echoed by Bataille some millennia later: Communication--the making-permeable of the borders of the self--is the height of evil: It destroys the individual: Love becomes a sacrificial rite: The lovers self-immolate so that their ashes may mix, and a single bird may emerge.

Of course, the bird must combust at intervals, and so the process is extended ad infinitum, love must constantly be decided: Death must constantly be decided: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, for they are as good as dead.”

What extremity of spirit, to be among the mythic polyamorous! One amorous superposition, one such lethal risk, can be accepted, even enshrined as a social norm: Marriage, though dangerous in its own right, is the minimal form of love’s evil. The constant descent, Bataille might say, from the summit of love. If we want to burn in perpetuity; to remain beyond good and evil, which is to remain on the climb, for the summit ever shifts, ever grows, above such volatile tectonic states that the earth’s own skin crawls; that is, if we want to take full advantage of the liberties of childlessness, to affirm life ardently, to test its most precarious peaks; then traditional monoamory is the coward’s escape hatch, though it allows some glimpse of the heights, albeit a glimpse filtered through layers of trees, fog, a cataract willingly suffered so as to receive a handicap parking pass…

***

The heights of despair and of joy: To take another into oneself and to insert oneself into another, it is a release of power. It is a fundamental opposition to the rationalist desire for “self-control.” This is no self-help tract. There is no self-mastery here. There is only self-immolation or, at the very least, the willingness to burn: Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo, we leap into the fire, unsure whether we will burn but ambivalent--no, not ambivalent, but ecstatic at each possibility.

We become Hiram: “I got a switchblade knife, and I really care about life, but I ain’t afraid to lose it in a fight.”

We see Hiram in conversation with Bataille:

H: I don’t know if I ever could be true. Sucking love through a cocktail straw…

B: I never cease to rejoice: Such is the condition of a drunken heart.

H: I might up and run, or I might pull out some gun, but I highly doubt it, ‘cause I’m ready to die.

B: But that is to measure the nauseating foundation of things: To rejoice is to press against the limit, to go as far as possible and to live at the edge of the abyss.

***

Melt, freeze, melt, freeze: Each is a midpoint: The melting point of any material, at the right pressure, is the same as the freezing point. At any moment that one of the two processes occurs, some part of the material is melted, some part is frozen. 

Simultaneously we may say, “I never cease to rejoice,” and “It’s the same old Blue Moon, the same old sad tune that I’ve written ‘bout a million times before.” Each applies to the same moment: To consider love the blissful goal of a comfortable life is to confine the burning sacred within a romcom-esque delusion-cage.

Let us take ourselves seriously. Let us talk gravely when necessary. By all means, let us emerge from the sea of irony into which we were born, exploding as flying fish into the clarity of earnestness. But let’s not be a bunch of goddamn cornballs.

***

“In love, chance is foremost among the things a lover seeks in the Loved One. But chance is also given as soon as the two encounter each other.” Elsewhere, Bataille expands: “I hate a lie (that poetic tomfoolery). But our desires never lie. It is simply a disease of desire that, often, we see a gaping abyss between the object we imagine and its real counterpart. The Loved One differs, it’s true, from the concept I love in her. The worst is that an identity of the real with the object of desire requires, it seems, an unheard-of type of luck.”

Note that, though the Loved One may differ from their conception, this does not mean that the love itself is not real, or that it is illusory. Does Hiram not express an undoubtable love in “Runaway,” when they sing, “These are the only words I hope to hear you say: Take me away from this town...Our love is the only thing we need.” Though the object of desire says nothing but, “No,” does Hiram’s love cease? Does is dissolve, having been proven illusory? Having declared itself, in the end, in opposition to God? 

If so, they would not repeat this chorus thrice. Though it be a Kierkegaardian love, the love of a Knight of Faith, a concept to which many Eunuchs may declare themselves allergic, “Runaway” offers a reappraisal of faith: If the goal is to burn, all tools may be useful in the correct contexts, though such asymmetric love may not precipitate nearly so much self-immolation or perforation as its symmetric counterpart. Nevertheless, Hiram takes the imagined lover’s words into their own mouth in the final chorus…

***

Love permits no definition: No critique may describe its boundaries but that which describes the ever-shifting boundaries of human experience en masse. Bataille: “To speak of the absolute, that ignoble, inhuman word...It is the aspiration of larvae.”

To ask, “What is love?” is to deny the very existence of the constantly ascending summit upon which we seek to burn.

***

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is gentle: Love does not boast. Love is evil. Love is hellfire and brimstone. Love is self-immolation: Love is constant torturous death: Love is sadomasochism. Love is being pierced in the side and having no blood left to spill, for the lance was tardy and superfluous. Love is “the infinite misunderstanding: That which I love, over which like a lark I cry my joy to the sun, that I should speak of it in demoralizing terms.”

Thorn in my asshole, by Claire Bug

Thorn in my asshole considering the

issues I had shitting after you stuck your

dick up my ass

The third time that night

if you fucking my ass means you love me

Or consider this

If god said the ONLY way to fuck was dick

to pussy 

And if God knows love

Which I’m here to assume because he’s

god

Then anal is sacrilegious

And thus there is no way you love me

And thus since I am a woman of faith

I must quit you

And anal

Although all this talk of ass really got me

wet.

Loneliness & Friendship | Self-destruction & Communication

Jacobi, in conversation, summer 2017: “Writing is a disease. In a social arrangement that was not pathological, there would be no writers: Primitive man wrote no books. Yes, we say this is because he did not have the technology to do so, but he had symbolic systems, he had language: All the materials were there, and he would have written if he had need of writing.”

Bataille, paraphrased from Sur Nietzsche: If I had ascended to the summit of which I speak, I would not be writing this book.

Henry Miller, loosely remembered from Tropic of Cancer: Loneliness is essential to an artist. Not just solitude. Loneliness.

In each of these, the presupposition of a particularly impoverished type of individualism: Jacobi and Miller may be forgiven for this, but Bataille already lay the groundwork for a better notion before he made the absurd statement paraphrased above: 

Communication: Non-metaphorical melding of two selves: Personal boundaries made permeable, piel picado: Fundamental action of evil, of the longing to burn of which Bataille speaks so often and which is so apparent in his every word.

***

Bataille’s idiosyncratic burning, image of wild-eyed evil determined to sacrifice itself to itself, highest height of life-affirmation: He himself provides the cipher by which this notion may be dismantled: He has no community but Nietzsche. He writes, like Nietzsche, to “all and none,” that is, to free spirits, of which he assumes there are none but himself. All is none: Writing in such a framework can only be self-immolation. Remember Jacobi, above. 

But even Zarathustra, god of fire, must come down from the mountain. The central question: When Zarathustra descended to gather disciples, did he also descend from Bataille’s metaphorical summit, that mythic Beyond Morals? Or was his physical descent also a metaphorical ascension?

Bataille’s “descent”: Gathering resources to fuel one’s immolation.

His “summit”: Burning, ecstasy beyond moral, aimless expenditure, sublimation.

Zarathustra gathered himself atop the mountain, that he may ascend to the village below and burn there, just as Jesus accumulated in the desert the spiritual self-sureness that he needed to set fire to himself and his disciples, a process which culminated directly after his death, in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit descends to the disciples as fire and makes their tongues into fire.

Zarathustra and Jesus understood this fundamental rule of fire: One stick cannot make nearly so large a fire as a faggot arranged in a cone, the tops leaning together, air funneled from bottom to top, primitive ascension-machine.

***

According to an acquaintance, Bataille laughed constantly, and his laughter was often tinged with sarcasm, though he angrily swears off such laughter in Sur Nietzsche. Imagine him sitting alone in a third-floor flat on the Rue d’Ascension, he chugs a jar of brandy, he screams into the empty room, “May the arrow shoot farther than the bow!”, he grits his teeth futilely against the echo, he leans out in the darkness and refills his jar…

***

Bataille: “Nietzsche wrote ‘with his blood.’ Whoever wants to critique him or, better yet, to test him, must bleed as well.”

The Crucified: “Wherever three or more are gathered,” wine will become my blood.

Image of the blood-circulation-machine, bleeders gathered in a circle, bowl of rum in the middle, they bleed, they drink, they bleed again, ever more blood is spilled and taken, hotter with each cycle, it burns in their stomachs, incites them to multiply it, blood begets blood begets…

***

Which ascends to higher frenzy: The solitary drunk, or the blood-circulation-machine?

The resignation to loneliness in Bataille, Nietzsche, Jacobi implies a slavery to the very morals they denounce, a self-imposed inability to ascend to the very heights they praise. The position of prophet--see Zarathustra, see the beginning of “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” see Jacobi’s constant future tense--is the saddest position that any of these three could inhabit: Who better to enact their ideas than the creators themselves? But no: “Those of whom I speak are not yet alive, may they one day find this and do what I cannot.”

Do we not cringe at the shame that oozes from such pronouncements; do we not feel ourselves at the edge of a sob? The implication: “I am diseased, but someday one will come who is not diseased…” That special shame of the isolated Eunuch: 

The solitary stick burns faintly, is easily blown out by wind, splits in half with unburned ends. The faggot-cone burns completely, with every gust of wind the fire grows. To cause a forest fire is the worry of the solitary stick: It does not want to infect its surroundings. To the faggot-cone, a forest fire is an orgy.

***

Hyperstition: The faggot-cone spreads its flame with each unpredictable gust, and each new flamer intensifies the fire, speed on speed, gathering space and strength unto desertification, and the morel mushroom and the aspen, which can only grow after fire, emerge from the atoms of the faggot-cone writ large…

***

The diffuse Eunuch, scattered over the world in Germany, France, Ukraine, Peru, Mozambique, India, when its various fires touch…

***

Ironic distance is sand to fire. The flaming bowel wants to erupt: Sardonic embarrassment is the gluten-free cereal to its burning Celiac. It is a straitjacket. It is the shell of a hermit crab. It is the repetition of a dead prayer. It is ankle weights, earplugs, polarized sunglasses, decaf coffee, filter to life’s cigarette.

Irony is the disgusting screaming baby of Shame. Born wearing a pair of knock-off RayBan aviators, pack of clove cigs soggy in afterbirth...Shame had to get a C-section because Irony was leaning against the wall of the womb, joking sarcastic about any overeager baby that would dare curl up in the middle...

***

As I stand at the threshold of leaving everyone I love, leaving the language I love, I prepare for a descent, for the death of this iteration of me, for hypersensitivity: Now I will have to worry about breezes. Though you burn inside me, stacked in a cone, I will have to worry about breezes.

***

“A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunk girl that vomits onto the floor and neglects the bowl provided for that purpose, a sobbing accountant, a pot of mustard represent the confusion which serves as love’s vehicle.” 

A fine list, Georges. I must add: A plane, a car, the funereal procession of good-byes, talk of the future. Friends offer to cook me dinner as a warden offers a last meal, all indulgent: Tomorrow comes to play the role of death’s door, and “I’ll see you on the other side” becomes life’s chorus. Such faith...there may be atheists in foxholes, but there are none in airports.

Talk of the future…the prophet plays the saddest role...one cannot become a prophet but by complete hatred of the present, hatred to the point of disembodiment, to the point of reverie. We try to pour as much of ourselves into each other as we can, revelry to the point of insanity, so that there will be something of the past in its future, something detectable...one cannot become a prophet but by complete love for the past-to-be; hatred for the fact that it must be, for a while, the present; love, that is, for the present, and hatred for its trajectory. Parting celebration as butt-plug in the anus of time...

What is love? Baby hurt me, hurt me more; refuse to see me, reject me; show some faith.

***

Love is mutual destruction in the creation of a third, a fourth, a fifth; the duo conceived as a room walled with mirrors; have you noticed that, when you begin to love someone, their face changes? That it never stops? 

The distant, the ironically cocooned: By their unchanging face shall thee know them. What is this but the stability of breeder virtue, but the new form of oldest moralism, but hatred of life--not simply negation, but hatred--to the point of retreat; what is it but constant descent, grovelling in defensive neutralizing numbing delusions of superiority…

***

“I’ll miss you” == “I’ll miss who I am in conjunction with you; to leave you is to be pressed down, to descend; I know that I will grow colder in your absence.”

***

How sad these lives must have been, how full of horror and despair, of anguish, to be filled with convictions which require love, which require communicative immolation, and to have locked themselves in shameful isolation, in deceptive guilt, on illusory heights! Doomed to dream of all-consuming fire, to be capable of it, but to be covered in sand exactly as the flagellant covers over with scars…

***

My throat tightens, so I must write this rather than speak it; soon my eyes will cloud, and it will be locked inside me, so I must write it quick: What anguish to know, as one with no such illusions, that I will have to take on their role, that I am at waiting in the wings of that dim-lit stage, not in any sense which implies a brilliance similar to theirs, but in a sense which only implies their loneliness, their solitary burn, their incubation...if only I can ensure that my incubation is temporary in a way that theirs was not...oh, in a way that Jacobi’s could be, can be, while Nietzsche’s and Bataille’s were terminal...to be a prophet is the saddest of roles, and worse: It is the prophet’s own knowledge which births that sadness. How much more when one can be prophet of nothing but that sadness? There is no divine promise, no coming generation that may be conceived as a palliative; there is no goal, no hope: How funny that the preconditions of immolation are met at the threshold of its impossibility, how perfect, how stupid…

One cannot predict the Übermensch, the summiter, the revolutionary. What could be more idiotic than the messianic nihilist? The prophet must enact their prophecy or else accept that they are a deplorable liar, a self-deceived opiate obliviously masquerading as the apomorphine of the masses, a guilt-crippled delusional cockroach.

The Way we Live Now, by Junius

Adam speaks: Glory to God I am King of Creation. My lips shape the clay of things. There are birds and clouds and leaves. My hands make my bread and move the oceans; my body makes Woman. 

Caliban replies: I do not like my face in this glass. It is too 
soot-smeared and shattered. My eyes cover all things in their skin. It 
crawls. Yes, there are rivers, there is erosion. There are stars. I do not 
want to be steward even of stars.   I will rage at the dusk. I will vomit 
on the glass and sleep.

Three Paintings, by Claire Bug

Aphorisms for the Aspiring Amoralist

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.