"A person of high character and sound education might fortuitously have been exiled, and so have remained true to his nature and faithful to philosophy by being out the reach of corrupting influences..."
—Plato
"He to whom the real had just presented itself, with an appearance that shone forth as the very skin of being, is being made game of."
—Levinas
(Swans - March 28, 2011) What follows is a strange accounting of how certain philosophers have acted in formulating the ideas that have ordered revolutions. I despair of all its implications. A charge of idealism would shame me, if not for the fact that the indirect dissemination of texts instanced here as the central mechanism of transmitting orders to enthuse and orient the revolutionary masses is far more obviously and tangibly material than something else from the materialist bible of Marx-like validation of truths through practice, for whatever practice this entails outside the automatism of early industrial capitalist production I haven't the faintest idea.
If I am a general and I say "fire," and you die in the ballistic hail affected by this statement, then is it merely some gray and abstract theory I bark? No, I am affecting death in giving orders to my military subjects. Charges of naturalizing a supra-historical or eternal State and its mode of subjection are accepted as good reformulations of what I have already written below. Does not the Spider's web enact a State in the subjection of Flies to its Order in Death? More, is not Historical-Dialectical-Geographical Materialism an implicit doctrine of an absolutely invariant state of warring among the forever structurally identical, but also so very concretely, concretely differentiated "contradictory forces"?
Language is slippery, indeed, and our hemming every phrase to the line of even the living Marx's did not succeed in either of his grand scenarios. Or am I not concrete enough?
Philosopher-Kings actively facilitate at the heights of all discourse that abomination of historical eternity, which is open war between Slave and Master, in the generically abstract form of order-words philosophy is the study of, and thus hath their words becometh flesh "in concretion" rather than merely ponderous aggregates of fact nobody but the failed philosophers and scribal subjects to the State and its Philosopher-King will ever impact in their glorious muck and gloom of snails-speed generalizing into the same abstractions as have already been available to thought for centuries and millennia.
The Theory of these Kings and, please excuse their former absence, Queens is what has ever "gripped the masses." These Masters are the "heads" of Leviathan, which is not the executive of state, but the master signifier. Truth, I myself am already ravaged by everything being written here, and would prefer never to have born to such a world for which Death itself I now even doubt contains the remedy for my afflictions.
Philosopher-Kings are not exceptions to any subjection by the State, unless in this exception their subjection to its will is infinitely and oppressively intensified. Once I knew madness, and was free, now all is already failed and the horrors of the future haunt my presence outside their proper history.
Extinction soothes none neither.
Negotiate is my order, write up these stupid covenants of mortal deferral and taxing circulation and let us be released from its spell weaving "out of my own control."
"Messenger. The sum of all I can I have disclosed... Queen Elizabeth. ... I see (as in a map) the end of all." --Shakespeare, Richard III
I am sorry these words wish death upon you.
I know such mastery is not madness.
Pure madness is silent and without interpretation, it does not enter signification.
I am not mad as I write; I am rather a free murderer and slave-herder.
I am ashamed not to be really in madness, as reason and justice compel.
My assignment to madness in the clinic, my minoritization, as when reason is a statement of fact, seals a neutralization of my intelligibility in injustice.
Being thus made unjust is unlimited freedom.
In thus enslaving the object of my world, my subject was dissolved in an impersonal will.
In this universality of the same was faith and pleasure.
I know doubts now though because the naming of the event was impossible, or rather a trick, and subverted our hopes in its happening.
The Other as an ordering unnamable in this manner and subsequent alternative then?
Being in me more than I am in myself is the Other of justice whom I now welcome in its limit that cannot be named, nor represented.
Naming the event as universal means abolishing our subjection to the state (of the situation) in this name.
This emblem yet reinstates as a representation the universal in the state of the situation, through subtracting its subjectivity, and annulling the novelty of their event in its statalized faith as a redundant forgery.
We were "made game of" in an idolatry.
I felt the skin of the real, however.
Any preemptive swearing on the atheism of the subject to the Other is yet questionable.
I hate the shame of violence its texts preach.
Absolute war is also machinery without subjection, unless there is a Master to subject to, who is not oneself subject to mastery.
Is there real atheist subjection?
Is there truth in a terminable subjection?
The questions will order the Philosopher-Kings in future revolutions.
Fascism is the confession of their eternal tyranny in Heidegger, whose truth makes me pine for private death, as a flight from the consequences.
Lenin was a king of philosophy too, as Marx, although Marx undoubtedly less so after the failure of 1848.
Ideas order revolutions.
Abstract ideas.
Abstract begins the cognitive map for sailing to Atlantis or Drexciya.
No more sailing into the sun!
Mastery and slavery are eternal to absolute war.
Negotiating a revolution, because enthusiasm exhausts too quickly, or because it is betrayed in hallucinations of a terminable subjection, means only a new Mastery within Death. Confessed.
A revolution from below is never "spontaneously" purified of the disseminations of the Philosopher-Kings whose reach in this highly informal dispersion of order-words across many, many hands of private subjectivity is again and again massive in number.
Philosophy is of the life of the State, whose unconscious censorship moulds the Philosopher-King, installing the most complex tricks in his order-words, as we have seen in my interpretation of the event as fiasco, in spite of his truths and desires.
I suppose there have been Philosopher-Queens as well. Joy.
The State is Nature, inheriting its structures of absolute war.
A terminable subjection is not given in our species-being. Human and spider subjection, for example, in their governance by death are structurally invariant.
Absence of subjection, as Utopia, would thus not even be an evolutionary overcoming of the human species-being in its subjection of itself to itself.
Evolution preserves vestiges.
I doubt our absolute war is the ontological universe capable of overcoming subjection.
Word is order, son, Negotiation is the only big order-word I can summon.
A careful murdering in negotiation then, careful to moderate between the Master and the Slave another lousy peace and thus suffer the abominations of little slaves who think me reformist and whatnot.
Abolishing a state, here and there, perhaps even an entire sequence, superb!
Although after this the question of the new Master will obviously vex everyone.
Abolishing the State and its mode of subjection, nay! Its treason to both Master and Slave think such given I can now think no other than eternally negotiating their stupid and dissatisfying truces.
Revolution is disappointing insofar as it would abolish the State and all subjections.
Subjection is the Slave and State is the Master, neither ever die nor dream of anything else than death.
Insofar as I am writing, and writing gives order to the Slave in dissemination, and therefore I assume the role of Master, we are all fucked.
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Maxwell Clark is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut. He is also a digital musician working under the moniker Smojphace (http://soundcloud.com/smojphace). (back)