edenism

Lithe Adam descends from the olive tree with a fist of fruit.

What do I mean by the unity of man? What is the disunity of man? The split subject, the dividual, the Freudian discovery, the Fall. And what is the project here? To show that the split subject is not just what Freud discovered, but what Freud discovered, not for the first time, but for the last. To show the missing ingredient, the je ne sais quois, but more specifically the joie sans jouissance, that separates pseudo-dialectics from their real counterparts. To be at once without the myth and within, but without paradox, and in doing so to collapse the structure of infinite reflection into a unit. And if we unify man, then what is man? Fecund in thirst, wordly rebirth.

The Disunity of Man

A great transformation took place: Saturn, the bounty of the earth, became time. Ba'al became Beelzebub.

Time, not other men, is what splits man from himself. The 0th action that comes to mind is the locus of unity. Every hesitation, contemplation, reconsideration is both the knife and the scar of division. This unity in 0 means that the task is one of elimination: the complete elimination of the temporal element. But this is not a matter of not thinking. Thought must be in instantaneous accordance with action, like the boxer, the quick chess player, the agile predator.

The great myth of modernity is that the thirst of man is for his own destruction: through opiates, recklessness, plastic foods, theft. But this is not true. Unity is found not in the repression of desire, but in its realization. In short: there never was a happy thief. Even the dumbest animal quickly learns what it truly wants (not to steal from the bigger beast). So why is it so hard for man? If nothing from bacteria to rats has a desire to eat Twizzlers, then should we believe that any human truly wants to?

This is the greatest lie you've never been told: that you want the things that poison you, fracture you. You've been (never) told this because this is the only way to make you want it. Without the guilt, where's the pleasure?

This logic is the logic of a perverse world, and this perversion has been the most important aspect of your education.

The other aspect of the disunity of man is a non-problem that disappears under scrutiny; that man is not self-transparent. For one, it could never be otherwise: a conscious and verbalized understanding of yourself won't be achieved both because of the limitations of language and the limitations of introspection. But even if you could achieve full introspection, it would be at the cost of action. The system always lags behind the skill. A corporation's organization is not a description of how it should solve future problems, but a description of how it solved past problems. Criminology is not the study of how to catch criminals, but the study of how criminals were caught.

For this reason, the Freudian discovery should not bother us.

The Western Mind

Notice the acceptable, commercial solutions to the disunity of man; Buddhism, New Age, etc. Not only are these not solutions, they are but further perversions. The annihilation of the body, of the self, of pride: these are the religions of death drive.

Not every religion is a religion of death. Not every spiritual truth is rooted in paradox. This is the heart of the Western spirit.

The strong, capable body, not the withered monk.

Architecture, not shelter.

Avoiding the secular to nurture the spiritual is like a diet without nutrition.

Those who fear the pursuit of Beauty, sword-in-hand, are still footsoldiers in its war. They should be thankful they have been placed in the back, to see its destructive force.