There was no longer any reality, only its caricature

-Gottfried Benn

We are the cause of the universe, its creation and its future destruction.
-Baudelaire

It does not escape us that metaphysical- exactly like abstract and even thinking- has
become a word before which everyone more or less takes flight as before a plague victim.
(Hegel). And it is certainly with a shiver of wicked joy, and the worrying certitude that were
going right to the wound, that we bring back into the center what the triumphant frivolity of
our times believed it had forever repressed to the periphery. In so doing, we also have the
effrontery to claim that were not just giving in to some sophistical caprice, but to an
imperious necessity inscribed in history. Critical Metaphysics is not just one more piece of
blather about the way the world is going; nor is it just the latest piece of heady speculation
with some particular intelligence to it it is the most real thing contained in our
times. Critical Metaphysics is in everyones guts. Whatever we might protest about this,
there is no doubt that people will try to say we were the inventors of Critical Metaphysics, so
as to hide the fact that it existed already before finding its formulation, that it was
already everywhere, in the state of emptiness behind suffering, in the denial behind
entertainment, in the motives behind consumption, or, obviously, in anxiety. Its clearly a
part of all the sordid spinelessness, the incurable banality, and the repugnant insignificance of
the times called modern that its made metaphysics the apparently innocent leisure activity
of learned men in stiff suits, and that its reduced it to the sole exercise proper to insects like
that: a kind of platonic mandibulation. Merely by virtue of the fact that it is not reducible to
conceptual experience, Critical Metaphysics is the experience that fundamentally denies an
inept modernity, and, with open eyes, celebrates more each day the excesses of the
disaster.
Act the First: When the false becomes true, truth itself is but a mirage. When nothingness
becomes reality, reality in turn falls into nothingness.
(The inscriptions at either side of the entrance to the Kingdom of Dreams and Immense
Illusion in the Dream of the Red Chamber)

Western civilization is living on credit. It thought it could last forever, and get off without
paying the outstanding debt it owes for its lies. But now its suffocating under their crushing
dead weight. Thus, before entering into more substantial considerations, we have to start by
clearing the air, and unburdening this world of a few of its illusions. For example: the fact is
that modernity has never existed. Were not going to linger over indisputable facts. That the

term modernity now just evokes a bored irony, no matter the progressivist senility
accompanying it, and that it has finally appeared as what it always was -- just a verbal fetish
that the superstition of shitheads and simple spirits, ever since the supposed Renaissance,
have decorated the progressive rise of commodity relations to a state of social hegemony
with, in favor of interests we understand only all too well -- hardly merits any critical
explanation. This is just another vulgar brutish use of labels, whose elucidation well leave to
the priests of tomorrows historicism. Weve got far more serious things to deal with. In fact,
in the same way as commodity relations never really existed as such, i.e., as commodity
relations, but only as relations between men mutilated into relations between things,
everything that is said to be, believed to be, or held up as being modern has never really
existed as modern. The essence of the economy, that transparent pseudonym with which
commodity modernity always tries to pass itself off as eternally obvious, has nothing
economic about it; and in fact, its foundation, which is also its program, can be expressed in
these rude terms: it is THE NEGATION OF METAPHYSICS -- that is, the negation of that the
transcendence of which is for humanity the effective cause of immanence; to put it in other
words, it is the negation of that which makes sense of the world, of the imperceptible
appearing within the perceptible. This fine project is wholly contained within the aberrant
but effective illusion that a complete separation between the physical and the metaphysical is
possible - a fallacy which most often takes form as the underlying reality behind the physical
reality, setting itself up as the model for all objectivity, and logically commanding a myriad of
local ruptures, between life and meaning, dreams and reason, individual and society, means
and ends, artist and bourgeois, intellectual work and physical labor, bosses and workers, etc.
- which are not, by and large, any less absurd - with all these concepts becoming abstract
and losing all their content outside of their living interaction with their opposites. Now, since
such a separation is really impossible, that is, humanly impossible, and since the liquidation
of humanity has so far failed, nothing modern has ever existed as such. What is modern is
not real, what is real is not modern. Thus there is indeed a realization of this program, but as
it perfects itself at present we also see that it is just the opposite of what it thought it was, in
a word: the complete de-realization of the world. And the whole extent of the visible now
carries within it with its vacillating character - the brutal proof that the realized negation of
metaphysics is in the end but the realization of a metaphysics of negation. The functionalism
and materialism inherent to commodity modernity have produced a void everywhere, but this
void corresponds to the primordial metaphysical experience: where there is no longer any
response that goes beyond mere being-there, which would permit a position within the latter
to be taken, anxiety surges forth, and the metaphysical character of the world blossoms in
plain sight for everyone. Never has the sentiment of foreignness been so pregnant as it is in
the face of the abstract productions of a world that had intended to bury it under the
immense, unquestionable opulence of its accumulated commodities. Places, clothes, words
and architecture, faces, acts, gazes and loves are nothing anymore but the terrible masks
invented by one and the same absence to put on in order to approach us. Nothingness has
visibly taken up residence in the intimate depths of things and beings, and the smooth
surface of spectacular appearances is cracking everywhere as a result of its growth.
The physical sensation of its proximity is no longer the ultimate experience reserved for a few
mystical circles. On the contrary it is the only sensation left to us by the capitalist world, the
only sensation still intact, and indeed increased tenfold, as all the others are slated to

disappear. It also happens to have been precisely the one it had explicitly proposed to
eliminate. All the products of this society- whether the hollow conceptuality of the YoungGirl, contemporary urbanism, or techno- are things that the spirit has gone out of, things that
have outlived all their meaning and all their reason for being. These are all just
interchangeable symbols that replace each other moving about on one plane; its not that
these symbols signify nothing, as the kindly morons of postmodernism like to think indeed
they signify Nothingness itself. All the things of this world live on in a perceptible state of
exile. They are the victims of a faint and constant loss of being. Indeed, this modernity, which
claims to be free of mystery and thought it had liquidated metaphysics, has instead realized
it. It has produced a dcor comprised purely of phenomena, of pure beings-there that are
nothing beyond the simple fact that they are there, in their empty positivity, and which
ceaselessly push humanity to feel the marvel of marvels: that being-there is
(Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?). In this ultramodern hall of ice, marble, and steel weve
wandered into, a slight relaxation of our cerebral constriction suffices for us to be brutally
confronted with seeing all that exists slip away and be inverted into a simultaneously
oppressive and floating presence where nothing remains. Thus we get the experience of Total
Otherness even in the most common of circumstances, even in newly renovated bakeries.
Before us is spread a world that can no longer hold our gaze, a world that can no longer look
us in the eye. Anxiety is on guard duty at every street corner. Now this disastrous
experience, wherein we are violently expelled from all that exists, is the experience of
transcendence and of the irremediable negativity contained in us. In that experience is the
whole of the asphyxiating reality that all the great machinery of social deception works to
make us take for granted, that suddenly and in so cowardly a way collapses, into the vast
chasm of its nullity. This experience is the birth of metaphysics, where metaphysics appears
precisely as metaphysics, where the world appears as the world. But the metaphysics that
arises again there is not the same metaphysics that people had hunted down and banished,
because it returns as the truth and negation of what had defeated the old metaphysics: as
a conquering force, as critical Metaphysics. Because the project of capitalist modernity is
nothing, its realization is but the spreading desertification of everything that exists. And we
are here to ravage that desert.
Enthroned on its rickety stilts in the middle of the mounting catastrophes, commodity
domination no longer feels at home in the singular state of things that it itself nonetheless
produced, every detail of which contradicts it more. And by domination we mean specifically
the symbolically mediated relation of complicity between the dominators and the dominated;
so for us there is a little doubt that the torturer and the tortured are one, that the former is
fooling himself believing hes not himself tortured, and the latter believing hes not
participating in the crime: go sit at the back of the class, Bourdieu! To convince ourselves of
this, we can merely take a close look at the steps taken by our contemporaries, who are
reminiscent of a band of deserters running after themselves, spurred on by their own
metaphysical disquiet. Its a full time job now for Blooms to get themselves out of the
fundamental experience of nothingness, which destroys all simple faith in this world. The
mockery of things threatens to overwhelm his consciousness at any given moment. To not
know the forgetting of Being, the retreat of which closes in on us in every metropolitan slum,
every vagina, and every gas station, now requires a daily ingestion of almost lethal doses of
Prozac, news, and Viagra. But all these temporary fixes dont suppress the anxiety, they just

mask it, and banish it to an obscurity that only spurs on its silent growth. And in the end, in
order to sell their lies and disease, womens magazines all the same end up having to
convince their readers that the truth is good for your health, cosmetics multinationals are
decide to put things like metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology on their packaging, TF1 sets
up the quest for meaning, as a profitable principle for its upcoming programming, and
Starck, that enlightened counterfeiter, gives La Redoute information about its competitors a
few years in advance by putting together for it a catalogue of non-products for use by nonconsumers. Its hard to imagine how so totally at a loss domination must have been
internally to get to such a state. In these conditions, critical thought must stop waiting for a
mass revolutionary subject to constitute itself to show how imminent social upheaval is. It
must rather learn to see this in the formidable explosion of the social demand for
entertainment/distraction in recent times. That kind of a phenomenon is a sign that the
pressure of essential questions which were for so long left unanswered, so profitably, has
crossed the line into the intolerable. Because, if people distract themselves so furiously, it
must be that theyre getting their minds off something, and this something must be becoming
an very obsessing presence. If man were happy, he would be all the happier the less
distracted/entertained he was. (Pascal).

Lets suppose that the object that spreads such a significant terror everywhere,
which people can deny the effective action of only so long as it is unnamed, is Critical
Metaphysics- and this is a definition, perhaps the clearest and most comprehensible one well
give ourselves. The harmless sociologists are naturally not gifted with the proper endowments
to comprehend what this is about, no more than is that handful of poor aesthetes, who in
vain indignation denounce the misery of the times from the lofty heights of their profession as
writers, and who see its mere consumption as its consummation. We would never dream to
protest against the extent of the disaster, but its meaning. The generalized fear of getting old,
the charming anorexia of women, the official takeover of all life, the sexual apocalypse, the
industrial management of entertainment, the triumph of the Young-Girl, the appearance of
unprecedented and monstrous pathologies, the paranoid isolation of egos, the explosion of
acts of gratuitous violence, the fanatical and universal affirmation of a supermarket
hedonism, make an elegant litany for paroxysts of all kinds. The trained eye sees nothing in
all this to lend credit to some eternal victory of the commodity and its empire of confusion;
rather it sees the intensity of the generalized state of patient expectation, a messianic waiting
for the catastrophe, for themoment of truth which will finally put an end to the unreality of a
world of lies. On this point as on many others, it is not superfluous to be Sabbatean.

From the perspective weve taken, the resolute plunge of the masses into immanence, and
their uninterrupted flight into insignificance- all things that could make us lose hope for the
human race- cease to appear as positive phenomena containing their truth within themselves,
and come to be seen as purely negative movements, accompanying our forced exile from of
the sphere of meaning, wholly colonized by the Spectacle, from all the figures and forms in
which one is permitted to appear, and which expropriate from us the meaning of our acts, and

our acts themselves. But this escape is no longer enough, and it must sell off in individual
packages the void left by Critical Metaphysics. The New Age, for example, corresponds to its
infinitesimal dilution and the burlesque travesty by which commodity society attempts to
immunize itself against it. The fact of generalized separation (between the perceptible and
superperceptible as well as between humans), the project of restoring the unity of the world,
the insistence on the category of totality, the primacy of the mind, and intimate knowledge of
human pain combine themselves there, in a calculated fashion, as a new commodity, as new
technologies. Buddhism also belongs to the mass of hygienic spiritualities that domination
must put to work to save positivism and individualism in whatever form it can, so as to go on
a little longer still in its nihilism. In any case people resort even to taking up the moth-eaten
banner of religions, and everyone knows what a useful complement these can be to the reign
of all miseries down here on earth - it goes without saying that when a weekly magazine of
bigots in sneakers ingenuously worries in covering whether Will the 21 st century be
religious? one must read instead: Will the 21st century manage to repress Critical
Metaphysics?; all the new needs that late capitalism flatters itself that it can satisfy, all the
hysterical agitation of its employees, and even the expansion of consumer relations into the
whole of human life -- all that good news that it believes it can give itself that its triumph will
be a lasting one thus only show the profundity of its failure, of suffering, and of anxiety. And
it is this immense suffering that inhabits so many gazes and hardens so many things, that it
must always race breathlessly to put to work by degrading into needs the fundamental
tension of human beings towards the sovereign realization of their virtualities, a tension that
grows in proportion to the distance of their separation from them. But their evasion gets
exhausted and its underlying effectiveness quickly wanes. Consumerism can longer manage
to wipe away the excess of held-back tears. Thus it must put into place selection apparatuses
that are ever more ruinous and drastic, so as to exclude from the gear-works of domination
those who were unable to destroy any propensity towards humanity in themselves. No one
who effectively participates in this society is supposed to fail to know just what it might cost
for them to let their true pain be seen in public. But in spite of these machinations suffering
nonetheless continues to grow in the forbidden night of intimacy, where it stubbornly gropes
for a way to pour out. And since the Spectacle cant prevent it to manifest itself forever, it
must ever more often give in and allow it to come out, but only while misrepresenting its
expression, by assigning one of its empty objects to the worlds mourning, one of those royal
mummies it alone holds the secret recipe for the preparation of. But suffering isnt satisfied
with such doppelgangers. And so it waits patiently, almost as if lying in wait, for a brutal
interruption in the regular course of the horror, where human beings would own up to
themselves with an unlimited relief: We miss everything unspeakably. Were dying of
nostalgia for Being. (Bloy, Gladiators and Pig-Keepers).

It should now certainly be clear to the reader that we are not in any way the inventors of
Critical Metaphysics: all we had to do was open our eyes a bit to see that it is plain on the
very surface of our times, sketched out in the hollow imprint its left. Critical Metaphysics
manifests itself to anyone that decides to live with their eyes open, which only requires a
particular stubbornness that people usually just pass off as madness. Because Critical
Metaphysics is rage to such degree of accumulation that it becomes a viewpoint. But such a

viewpoint, one that has recovered from all the beguilements of modernity, does not know the
world as distinct from itself. It sees that in their typical forms materialism and idealism have
had their day, that the infinite is as indispensable to man as the planet he lives on
(Dostoevski), and that even where people seems to be flourishing in the most satisfied
immanence, consciousness is still present, as an inaudible feeling of decay, asbad conscience.
The Kojevian hypothesis of an end of History where man would remain alive as an animal
in accord with his given Nature and Being, where the post-historical animals of the
species Homo Sapiens (who [would live] in abundance and total security) [would
be]content in virtue of their artistic, playful, and erotic activity, since by definition they
[would be content in it], and where discursive knowledge of the world and the self would
disappear, has proved to be the Spectacles utopia, but has revealed itself to be unrealizable
as such. There is manifestly no access to the animal condition anywhere for human beings.
Naked life is still a form of life for them. The unfortunate modern man well let the
oxymoron slide who had such a virulent need to liberate himself of the burden of freedom,
is now starting to perceive that this is impossible, that he cannot renounce his humanity
without renouncing life itself, that an animalized man is still not an animal. Everything, at the
end of this era, leads one to believe that man can only survive in an environment that has
meaning to it. Nothing shows the extent to which the possibilities that mankind contains
themselves tend towards mankinds realization as does the effort our contemporaries put into
distracting themselves from them. Even peoples crimes are dictated by their desire to find an
outlet for their capacities. Thus, thinking is not a duty of man, but his essential necessity, the
non-fulfillment of which is suffering -- that is, a contradiction between his possibilities and his
existence. Human beings physically wilt when they negate their metaphysical dimension. At
the same time, appears clearly that alienation is not a state that mankind has definitively
been plunged into, but the incessant activity that people must engage in to remain alienated.
The absence of consciousness is but the continual repression of consciousness.
Insignificance still has meaning. The complete forgetting of the metaphysical character of all
existence is certainly a catastrophe, but it is a metaphysical catastrophe. And the same
affirmation, even though its thirty years old, still reigns in the domain of thought.
Contemporary analytic philosophy is out to exorcize such myths or metaphysical ghosts as
Mind, Consciousness, Will, Soul, Self, by dissolving the intent of these concepts into
statements on particular identifiable operations, performances, powers, dispositions,
propensities, skills, etc. The result shows, in a strange way, the impotence of the
destruction- the ghost continues to haunt. (Marcuse, One-dimensional Man). Metaphysics is
the specter that has haunted western man over the past five centuries, as hes been trying to
drown himself in immanence and has failed to do so.
Act the Second: The Truth must be said and the world must be shattered by it. (Fichte).

Even so, the act of acknowledging the forgetting of Being, and thus escaping nihilism, cant
be taken for granted and couldnt have a rational foundation; it is a question of ethical
decision. And its not abstractly, but concretely ethical: because in the world of the
authoritarian commodity, where the renunciation of thought is the first condition for fitting in
socially, consciousness is immediately an act, and an act for which the typical punishment is

that people will starve you out, whether directly or indirectly, by the gracious service of those
you depend on. Now that all the repressive courtrooms where ethics were alienated into
morality have fallen to pieces, it has finally become clear what ethics means, in all their
original radicalness, which designates it as the unity of the morals of human beings and their
consciousness of them, and as such the absolute enemy of this world. This could be explained
in more decisive terms as follows: youre either fighting for the Spectacle, or for the
Imaginary Party; theres nothing in between. All those who could accommodate themselves to
a society that accommodates itself so well to inhumanity, all those for whom it already sits
well to give the alms of their indifference to their own suffering and that of their peers, all
those who speak of disaster as if it were simply another new market with promising prospects
- are not our brothers. Rather we would find their deaths highly desirable. And wed certainly
not blame them for not devoting themselves to Critical Metaphysics, which, as a mere
discourse, could constitute a particular social object to decide to take up, but for refusing to
see the truth in it, which, being everywhere, is beyond any particular decision. No alibi holds
up in the face of such blindness; a metaphysical aptitude is the most common thing in the
world: you dont need to be a shoemaker to know whether a shoe is going to fit you
(Hegel); in the present conditions, refusing to exercise this aptitude constitutes a permanent
crime. And this crime, the denial of the metaphysical character of what exists, has enjoyed
such a lasting and generalized complicity that it has become revolutionary merely
to formulate the a priori principles on which all human experience is based. And here we must
recount them; our times should be ashamed of the fact that we have to.

1. Like a disease is obviously not merely the sum of its symptoms, the world is manifestly
not the sum of its objects, of the case at hand, nor of its phenomena, but rather it is a
characteristic of humanity itself. The world exists as a world only for mankind. Conversely,
there is noworld-less humanity; Blooms situation is a transitional abstraction. Each person
finds himself always already projected into a world which he experiences as a dynamic
totality, and he necessarily goes out into it with a prior understanding of it, however
rudimentary it may be. His mere preservation requires that.

2.The world is a metaphysics, that is: the way it presents itself first of all, its supposed
objective neutrality, its simple material structure, are already part of a certain metaphysical
interpretation that constitutes it. The world is always the product of a mode of disclosure that
brings things out into presence. Things like the perceptible only exist for man relative to
mans superperceptible interpretation of what exists. Obviously, this interpretation does not
exist separately; it cannot be found outside of the world, since it itself is what configures the
world. Everything visible rests on the invisibility of this representation, which is at the root of
that which lets itself be seen, which conceals even in its disclosure. The essence of the visible
is thus not something visible. This mode of disclosure, imperceptible as it may be, is far more
concrete than all the colorful abstractions that people would like to pass off as reality. The
given is always the posed, its being comes from an original affirmation of the Mind: the

world is my representation. At their bottom, that is to say in their emergence, humanity and
the world coincide.

3.The perceptible and the superperceptible are fundamentally the same, but in a different
way. Forgetting one of these two terms and hypostatizing the other renders both of them
abstract: to dispose of the superperceptible is also to suppress the purely sensible and thus
the difference between the two. (Heidegger).

4.Primitive human intuition is but the intuition for representation and imagination. Whats
called perceptible immediacy comes only after that. Men start by seeing things only such as
they appear to them and not such as they are; by seeing not the things themselves but the
idea they have of them. (Feuerbach, Philosophy of the Future). The ideology of the
concrete, which in its different versions fetishizes the real, the authentic, the everyday,
the little nothings, the natural and other slices of life, is but the zero-point of
metaphysics, the general theory of this world -- its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in
popular form, its spiritual point of pride, its moral sanction, its ceremonial complement, and
its universal grounds for consolation and justification.

5. By all evidence, man is a metaphysical animal (Schopenhauer). By that it should not only
be understood that he is the being for whom the world makes sense even in its insignificance,
or whose disquiet does not let itself be appeased by anything finished, but quite eminently
that all his experience is woven in a fabric that does not exist. Thats why materialist systems
properly so-called, as well as absolute skepticism, have never been able by themselves to
have a very deep or a very lasting influence. Certainly, man can for long periods of time
refuse to consciously engage in metaphysics, and thats most often how he deals with it, but
he cannot completely do without it. Nothing is so portable, if one wants, as metaphysics []
And what would be difficult, and even totally impossible, would be to fail to have would be
to not have a metaphysics of ones own, or at least some metaphysics But its not just that
not everyone has the same one, which is only too obvious, but not everyone even has the
same kind of metaphysics, nor the same degree of metaphysics, nor a metaphysics of the
same nature, nor of the same quality. (Peguy, Situations).

6. The metaphysical is not the simple negation of the physical; it is, symmetrically, also its
foundation and its dialectical transcendence. The prefix meta-, which means both with and
beyond, does not imply a disjunction, but an Aufhebung in the Hegelian sense. Hence
metaphysics is in no way something abstract, because it is the basis for all concreteness; its
what stands behind the physical and makes it possible. It goes beyond nature to get at what
is hidden in it or behind it, but it considers this hidden element only as something appearing
in nature, not as something independent of all phenomena (Schopenhauer). Metaphysics is

thus the simple fact that the mode of disclosure and the object disclosed in a primordial sense
remain the same thing. Thus all together it is experience as experience, and is only
possible on the basis of a phenomenology of everyday life.

7. The successive defeats that mechanistic science has for a century ceaselessly mopped up
and repressed, both on the battlefront of infinitely great matters and on the battlefront of
infinitely small matters, have definitively condemned the project of establishing any
physicality without metaphysics. And once again, after so many foreseeable disasters, we
must acknowledge along with Schopenhauer that the physical explanation which, as such,
though it refuses to see it, needs a metaphysical explanation to give it the key to all its
presuppositions [] clashes everywhere with a metaphysical explanation that suppresses it;
that is, one that takes away from it its explanatory character. The naturalists try hard to
show that all phenomena, even spiritual phenomena, are physical, and in this, they are right;
their error is that they dont see that all physical things equally have a metaphysical side to
them. And we read the following lines as a bitter prophecy: The greater is the progress
made by physics, the greater it will make felt a need for a metaphysics. In effect, though on
the one hand, a more exact, more widespread, and more profound knowledge of nature
undermines and ends up overturning the metaphysical ideas ongoing up to then; on the other
hand it will serve to give a clearer and more complete perspective on the issue of
metaphysics itself, by removing it ever more severely away from its physical environment.

8. Commodity metaphysics is not just one more metaphysics among others; it

is the metaphysics, that denies all metaphysics and above all denies itself as metaphysics. It
is also why it is, among all, the most null of metaphysics, the one that would sincerely like to
pass itself as simple physicality. Contradiction, that is, falsehood, is its most durable and
distinctive character, the one that affirms so categorically what is but pure negation. The
historical period of this metaphysics explanation, and its nullity, is one of nihilism. But this
explanation must itself be explained. Once and for all: there is no commodity world, there is
only a commodity perspective on the world.

9. Language is not a system of symbols, but the promise of a reconciliation between words
and things. Its universals are the primary elements in experience; they are not so much
philosophical concepts as they are real qualities of the world as we confront it every day.
Each substantial universal tends to express qualities that surpass all particular experience,
but which persist in the mind, not as fictions of the imagination or as logical possibilities, but
as the substance, the matter our world is made of. From this it follows that the operation by
which a concept designates a reality is simultaneously the negation and the realization of that
reality. Thus the concept of beauty encompasses all the beauty not yet realized; the concept
of freedom all the freedoms that not yet attained. (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man).
Universals have a normative character, which is why nihilism has declared war on them.

The ens perfectissimum is at the same time the ens realissimum. The more a thing is
perfected, the more it really is. (Lukacs, Soul and Form). What is excellent is more real,
more general than the mediocre, because it realizes its essence more fully: a specific concept
does indeed unify a specific variety, but it unifies it by aristocratizing it. Critical thought is
thought that brings about an exit from nihilism, starting from a profane transcendence of
language and the world. What is transcendental to critical thought is that the world exists,
and what is unspeakable is that there is a language there. There is an uncommon faculty of
conflagration to a consciousness that spends its time on the edges of such nothingness,
gazing into its abyss. Every time it finds that language to communicate itself, history will be
marked by it. Whats essential is to concentrate our efforts in that direction. Language is
both whats at stake and the stage that the decisive part of this will be played out on. It will
always only be about knowing whether we can reconcile speech and life, and how. (Brice
Parain, On Dialectics).

10. The basis for the categorical imperative to overturn all the conditions in which man is a
humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, and contemptible being (Marx) can only be a definition of
man as a metaphysical being; that is, a being open to the experience of meaning. Not even
Hans Jonas, that earthworm of intelligence, who will remain one as long as he exists, has
failed to recognize this: Philosophically, metaphysics has fallen into disgrace in our days, but
we could not do without it -- so well have to risk going into it anew. Because only
metaphysics is capable of telling us why man must exist, and thus does not have the right to
provoke his disappearance from the world or to permit it by simple negligence; and
also how man must be so as to honor and not betray the reason by virtue of which he must
exist. . .thus we have a renewed need for metaphysics, which must, with its vision, arm us
against blindness (On the ontological foundations of a ethics of the future).

11. We mention in passing that reality is the unity of meaning and life.

12. All that is separated remembers that it was once unified, but the object of this memory is
in the future. The mind is what finds itself, and thus what had gotten lost (Hegel).

13. Human freedom has never consisted of being able to go, come, and pass the time as one
pleases- this is more suitable for animals, whichpeople thus say, very significantly, are at
liberty - but in giving oneself form, in realizing the figure one contains, or wants. Being
means keeping your word. All of human life is but a bet on transcendence.

People could, in the past, treat such pronouncements with the special and amused contempt
that philistines have always reserved for considerations apparently deprived of any
effectiveness. But meanwhile, the metamorphoses of domination have conferred upon them
an unpleasantly quotidian concreteness. The definitive and historic collapse of really existing
liberalism in 1914 cornered commodity society; revolutionary assaults were making manifest,
in all western countries, the incapacity of the economic perspective to fathom the whole of
man, and finally to ensure the abstract reproduction of its relations. Thus in order to keep
the fiction of that liberalism feeling obvious, it had to colonize all the spheres of meaning, the
whole territory of appearances and finally, as well, the whole field of imaginary creation, at
first in a state of emergency and then methodically. In a few words, it had to infest the whole
of the continent of metaphysics in order to ensure its hegemony over all of the earth.
Certainly, the simple fact that the very moment of its apogee, the 19 th century, was
dominated not by harmony, but by an absolute, and absolutely false, hostility between the
figures of the Artist and the Bourgeois, was in itself sufficient proof of its impossibility, but it
took the great disasters that washed over the first decades of this century to fill its absurdity
with enough pain to actually make the whole edifice of civilization itself appear to shake.
Commodity domination then learned from those who were against it that it couldnt content
itself anymore with seeing man simply as a worker, an inert factor in production, but that to
remain what it was, it was going to have to organize the whole of everything that stretched
outside the sphere of material production as well. However repugnant it may have seemed at
the time to it, it had to impose a brusque accelerando on societys socialization process, and
lay hands on everything it had denied the existence of up to then, all that it had disdainfully
written off as non-productive activity, private fantasy, art and metaphysics. In the space
of a few years, and at first without significant resistance, Publicity had entirely given itself
over to the arbitrary power of the spectacular protectorate - it is a general fact that the
undertaking of ancient offensives is rarely recognized when they make use of totally new
means. Since the commodity interpretation of the world had been revealed in acts to be
insane, people undertook to put itinto the very heart of all acts. Once commodity mysticism,
which formally and externally postulated the general equivalence of everything, and the
universal interchangeability of all, proved itself to be a pure negation, a morbid official
takeover, people resolved to make all thingsreally equivalent, and
beings inwardly exchangeable. Since the systematic liquidation of all that contained a hidden
transcendence in its immediacy (communities, ethos, values, language, history) put humanity
in a place where it was dangerously likely to make demands for freedom, people decided to
industrially produce cheap transcendences, and to hawk them priced like gold. We stand at
the other extreme of this long night of aberration. Because even as it was its failure that in
the past created the basis for the infinite extension of the world of the economy, the
contemporary accomplishment of this universal extension carries the announcement of its
upcoming collapse.

This critical realization process of the ever-impoverished commodity metaphysics has been
referred to variously as Total Mobilization by Junger, as the Great Transformation by
Polanyi, or the Spectacle by Debord. For the time being the lattermost concept remains
indisputably one of the war machines it pleases us to use, as a Figure that transversely
penetrates all the spheres of social activity -- one where the object revealed merges with its
mode of disclosure. Though the Figure cant be deduced simply from its manifestations, since
it is at their very root, it could nonetheless be useful to take note at least of some of the most
superficial of them. So in the 1920s, advertising took it upon itself to inculcate the Blooms
with a new philosophy of existence, in the terms of its first ideologues, Walter Pitkin and
Edward Filene; to present to them the world of consumerism as the world of acts with the
declared intention of thwarting the communist offensive. The adjusted production of cultural
commodities and their massive circulation - the lightning deployment of the movie industry is
a good example of this was responsible for tightening up the control over joyous behavior,
spreading lifestyles adapted to the new demands of capitalism, and above all spreading the
illusion of their viability. Urbanism was responsible for building a physical environment
commanded by the commodity Weltanschauung. The formidable development of the means
of communication and transportation in these years began concretely abolishing space and
time, which had put up such annoying resistance to the universal putting into equivalence of
all things. The mass media then initiated the process by which little by little they
concentrated together into an autonomous monopoly on the production of meaning. Then
they had to extend over the whole realm of the visible a particular mode of disclosure, the
essence of which is that it confers upon the ruling state of things an unshakeable objectivity,
and thus models on the scale of the whole human race a relationship with the world based on
a postulated approval of what exists. It should also be noted that it was at that time that the
first literary mentions of the repressive function of the Young-Girl were made, by Proust,
Kraus, or Gombrowicz. It was among their contemporaries, after all, that there began to
appear in the productions of the mind the figure of Bloom, so recognizable in the work of
Valery, Kafka, Musil, Michaux or Heidegger.

This terminal phase of commodity modernity appears in a necessarily contradictory light,

because in its process it denies itself while realizing itself. On the one hand, at this stage each
of its advances contributes a little more to the destruction of its own foundation -- the
negation of metaphysics, in other words the strict disconnect between the perceptible and the
superperceptible. With the virtually infinite extension of the world of experience, the
speculationstend to obtain an increasingly realistic content; on technological grounds, the
metaphysical tends to become physical. (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man). The separation of
the perceptible and the superperceptible is ever further undermined by the new productions
of industry. the marvellous and the positive (contract) an astonishing alliance, the two old
enemies swearing to engage us in a race of unlimited transformations and surprises ...The
real no longer has a clear end. Place, time, and matter permit unanticipated liberties.
Precision breeds dreams. Dreams take body. . .The fabulous is today to be found in business.
The manufacture of marvel-making provides the livelihood of the thousands, remarked
Valery in 1929, with all the disarming naivety of a time when the meaning of life had not yet
become just another consumer product in the shopping cart, just the most hackneyed sales

pitch. Even when the total realization of abstraction - in the mimetic behavior of hip youth,
the televised image, or the new city makes obvious to everyone the clearly physical
character of metaphysics, Biopower, a differentiated moment of the Spectacle, shamefully
admits the political character - and there is a metaphysical nugget present in all politics
(Carl Schmitt, Political Theology) of the rawest physicality, of bare life. Underneath this
relationship is a process of reunification between the perceptible and the superperceptible,
meaning and life, the mode of disclosure and the object revealed; that implies commodity
societys complete disavowal of its very basis, but at the same time such reunification only
operateson the terrain of their separation itself. It follows that this pseudo-reconciliation is
not a passage of each of these terms through each other and onto a superior level, but rather
their suppression pure and simple, which brings them together not as united, but as separate.
So much so, that on its flipside the Spectacle presents itself as the realization of commodity
metaphysics, as the realization of nothingness. The commodity here effectively becomes the
form in which all manifestations of life appear, the objective form itself both of object and
subject - love, for example, appears from now on as a regulated exchange of orgasms,
favors, sentiments, where each contracting party is ideally to benefit equally. The Spectacle is
no longer content to externally tie together processes independent of it by monetary
mediations. The commodity, that superperceptible yet perceptible thing (Marx), transforms
into something perceptible yet superperceptible. It imposes itselfin reality as the universal
category of total social being (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness). Little by little, its
ghostly objectivity comes to drape itself over all that exists. At this point, the commodity
interpretation of the world, the only content of which is the affirmation of the quantitative
replaceability of all things, that is to say the negation of all qualitative differences and all real
determinations, reveals itself to be the negation of the world. The principle according to which
everything has a price was certainly always the morbid refrain of nihilism before it became
the global hymn of the economy. Also, and this is an everyday experience that no one can
escape, putting this interpretation of the world into acts would consist exclusively in taking
away all the qualities of everything, purging every being of all particular meaning, and
reducing everything to the non-differentiated identity of general equivalence in a word, to
nothing. Theres no more this or that; and singularity remains but an illusion. What appears
now no longer arrogates to itself any higher organic nature, but gives itself over with infinite
abandon to the simple fact of being, without being anything. Under the effect of this rising
disaster, the world has ended up starting to look like just a chaos of empty forms. All the
pronouncements made above, which people thought were safely cut off from having any
possible effectiveness, take form in the ensembles of a tangible, oppressive, and, to put it
plainly, diabolical reality. In the Spectacle, the metaphysical character of existence is taken as
a obvious, central fact: the world has become visibly metaphysical. Even the narrowest of
minds, whose custom it always was to hide in their comfortable sense of objectivity - whether
its rainy weather or nice out cant even be spoken of without immediately evoking the
decline of industrial society. There, the light has solidified, the incomprehensible mode of
disclosure that produces all being-there has become incarnate as such, that is to say
independent of all content, in a sprawling sector of social activity all its own. That which
makes things visible itself becomes visible there. Phenomena, by autonomizing themselves
from what they manifest, that is by manifesting no more than nothingness, immediately thus
appear as phenomena. The surroundings man exists in, the metropolis, itself proves to be a

mere linguistic formation, a constituted framework comprised above all of objectivized

discourses, pre-established codes, materialized grammars. (Virno, The Labyrinths of
Language). In the end, since communicative action is becoming the very material used in
productive activity, the reality of language falls among the number of things that can be
experienced in a mere leisurely way. In this sense, the Spectacle is the final figure of
metaphysics, where it objectivizes itself as such, becomes visible and shows itself to man as
material evidence for the fundamental alienation of the Common. In these conditions, mans
metaphysical dimension escapes him, confronts him and oppresses him. But just as well,
before man becomes completely and totally alienated he cannot concretely comprehend it, or
consequently hope to reappropriate it for himself. The darkest days give us the greatest hope,
precisely because they will come on the eve of victories.

It would be ridiculous to reproach chewing gum for being an affront to metaphysics good
taste, but one could probably show that Wrigleys profits and their Chicago palace were due
to its operation of a social function consisting in the reconciliation of men with their
impoverished conditions of existence and dissuading them from criticizing them. Its a
matter of explaining that chewing gum, far from being harmful to metaphysics, is
itself metaphysical.
(Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms)

As soon as the economy becomes flesh, it must perish like all living things. It falls under the
hard law of the mortal realm, and knows it. In the overthrow of all things, in the chasms that
we see opening up everywhere, we can already see the hints of its impending shipwreck.
Commodity domination has now embarked upon an endless, hopeless war to put up obstacles
to the necessity of this process. Its no longer a question of whether it will die, but of when it
will die. Life within such an order, which has as its only ambition anymore just to last a little
bit longer, is distinguished by the extreme sadness attached to all its manifestations. Here,
the survival of commodity domination, which is but the prolongation of its death agony, is
hanging from a thin thread: it must ensure that the visible not be seen, and thus must carry
out an ever more brutal takeover of the totality. It can only exercise its sovereignty under
the constant threat that people might make its metaphysical character explicit, and that it
might be recognized for what it is: it is a tyranny, and the most mediocre tyranny that ever
was -- the tyranny of servitude. Everywhere, dominations efforts to maintain a particular
interpretation of the world that when realized finds that it is itself subject to interpretation
end up more and more tending towards brute force. Certainly, the naturalization of the
commodity mode of disclosure required a constant dose of violence towards humans and
things in the past. It had to raze, intern, enslave, confine, brutalize or imprison in camps the
whole mass of phenomena that contradicted commodity nihilism. For the others, suffering
teaches everyone how to see them only from the point of view of reification, utility, and
separation, and generalized equivalence, over the whole course of their lives, in an
uninterrupted manner. But now a new configuration of hostilities is coming about. Commodity

domination can no longer limit itself to merely keeping its contradictions in a frozen state,
getting alienation, corruption and exile taken for granted by everyone, and repressing any
aspirations Man might have to Being. It must make its progress a forced march, though every
step it takes towards its perfection only brings it closer to the moment of its collapse. With
Biopower, which, under the cover of ameliorating, simplifying and extending life, form, or
health, leads to the total social control of behavior, it has played its last card: by supporting
its whole weight on the cardinal illusion of common sense, the immediacy of the body, it
ended up destroying it. After that, everything is ambiguous now. Blooms own body appears
like a foreign jurisdiction that he inhabits against his will. By buying its further survival at the
price of putting the metaphysical to work for it, commodity domination has robbed this terrain
of its neutrality, which alone guaranteed its victorious advancement: it made metaphysics
into a material force. Every bit of progress it makes must henceforth be responded to by a
substantial rebellion that will oppose its faith head on, and which will proclaim in one tone or
another that humanity can only be revived by a metaphysical act of reawakening the
spiritual element that created or maintained it in its earlier or ideal existence (Lukacs). And
so the commodity order, which is taking on water everywhere, will have
to physically eliminate, one by one, all extremism or sects, every independent metaphysical
universe that may manifest itself, until the unification and victory of the Imaginary Party. All
the individuals that refuse to wallow in its half-starved immanence, in the nothingness of
entertainment, all those who are too slow to renounce their own most human attributes, and
in particular to renounce any concerns beyond mere being-there, will be excluded, banished,
and starved out. For the others, they must be maintained in an ever more vicious fear. More
than ever, the holders of power live haunted by the terrifying idea that not only some
handful of loners, but entire masses might one day free themselves of their fear: this would
be their certain downfall. Its also the real reason for their rage in the face of any and all
doctrines of transcendence. Theres a supreme danger hidden there: that man might lose his
fear. There are places on the earth where the word metaphysics itself is hunted down as a
heresy. (Junger, Crossing the Line). In this final metamorphosis of the social war, where its
no longer mere classes, but metaphysical castes (Lukacs, On the Poverty of Mind) that
enter into conflict with one another, it is inevitable that men - first a few at a time, and then
in their vast numbers - will gather together with an explicit project: to POLITICIZE
METAPHYSICS. From now on, those that do so are signals of the coming insurrection of the
Mind.
Act the Third: It is necessary to take a position where destruction is not seen as the end
goal, but as the precursor. (Junger, The Worker)

At the moment in the spectacle when commodity domination reveals its metaphysics, and
reveals itself to be metaphysical, its real past and present contestation comes back onto the
stage and reveals itself as such. It is then that its relatedness to messianic movements,
millenarianisms, mysticisms, the heresies of the past or even with Christians before
Christianity appears. All modern revolutionary thought settles before our very eyes into the
encounter between German Idealism and the concept of Tiqqun, which in the Lurianic
Kabbalah refers to a process one of redemption, of the restoration of unity between

meaning and life, the repair of all things by the action of human beings. As for its supposed
modernity, that in the end it was but the repression of its fundamentally metaphysical
character. Thence the ambiguity of the work of a Marx or a Lukacs, for example. As a rule,
the Spectacle, where we saw the conceptual violence of idealism change
into real,even physical violence, repudiates as idealist this very aspect of the thinking of
those it didnt manage to suppress soon enough. That is a solid criteria to judge pseudocontestations consequent criticisms, which are always allied with this society in their
relentless evacuation of all the Unspeakable out of the politically expressible. Such bastards
can unfailingly be recognized by their rage to understanding nothing, see nothing, and
understand nothing. As long as they live, anxiety, suffering, the experience of nothingness,
the feeling of foreignness to everything as well as the innumerable manifestations of human
negativity - will be expelled from the gates of Publicity, either with a smile or with a team of
riot police. As long as they live, people will consider them null and void. The historic window
opening at present is the psychological moment that will bring to light the content of truth,
that is, the power of devastation, in all past and present critique. Since commodity
domination has come to fight openly on the metaphysical battlefield, its contestation will have
to place itself on that battlefield as well. This is a necessity which has as little in common with
the good will of militants as it does with the resolve of their cardboard theoreticians: it has to
do with the fact that this society needs that conflict in order to have something to employ all
its accumulated technological powers in. Once again were in a high-speed chase where we
cant just be content to apply critique, but must begin by creating it. Its about making
criticism possible, and nothing else. Thus, Critical Metaphysics isnt just another object
jumping up on the world stage in all its definitive splendor; it is what elaborates itself and will
elaborate itself in the fight against the present order. Critical Metaphysics is the determined
negation of commodity domination.

Whether this negation manifests itself without betraying itself or whether its forces will be
hijacked once again to serve the calculated spread of disaster has nothing to do with
necessity; it depends on the melancholic decision made by a few free elements bound
together by their determination to make a practical use of their consciousness, in other
words, to sow in the world of the Spectacle a Terror that is the inverse of the terror that
reigns at present. However, the simple fact that, faced with a reality that has taken such a
perfectly systematic turn, it can no longer be contested in its details, leaves no room for
ambiguity about the terrible radicalness of our era. Critique has no choice but to seize things
by the roots; and the root of man is his metaphysical essence. So, when domination consists
in occupying Publicity, building a world of facts piece by piece, a system of conventions and a
mode of perception independent of any relations other than its own, its enemies recognize
one another in their double ambition to destroy the aura of familiarity in what still passes for
reality by revealing it to be a mere construct, and to set up symbolic spaces in the recesses
of the present semiocratic tyranny, autonomous from the state of public explanation and
foreign to it, but with as much a claim to universal validity as it has. We must everywhere
contradict People. And thats what were working on, according to our own penchants, when
we reveal the Young-Girl as a political coercion apparatus, the economy as a ritual of black
magic, Bloom as a criminal saintliness, the Imaginary Party as the bearer of a hostility as

invisible as it is absolute, or the corner bakery as a supernatural apparition. It is above all

about bringing out, in everything people say, in everything people do, and in
everything peoplesee, its natural unreality factor. This world will cease to be so monstrous
when it ceases to be taken for granted. And so the whole of our theory is written in everyday
life, where it must obtain, still and forever, all the familiar things that is our duty to render
disturbing. Our maniacal interest for miscellaneous events could be related to this, because
in them is the habitual itself uprooting itself from normal habit, the varnish on which thus
suddenly fades away. The lucid and blind violence of a Kipland Kinkel or an Alain Oreiller is a
testimony what happens when one takes a lethal doses of the negative truth of man, that a
well-planned, everyday banality is invariably asphyxiating. Up to a certain point in this
offensive language comprises the field of battle; what were doing is burying mines all over it.
This isnt an arbitrary choice; its based on the observation that domination, which
was forced to infest it, will never be at ease there. Though in certain aspects the economys
present effectiveness and its apparent durability are based on a free manipulation of signs,
and their operative reduction to signals, it is just as clear that the definitive success of this
reduction will be its death. So that domination can still handle them as its vehicles, the signs
must contain some meaning, that is to say a transcendence which in one way or another goes
beyond the present state of things and the threat of nullity. And there is a contradiction there,
an open wound, that if it were exploited malevolently enough could bring about the downfall
of domination. Well provide for that.

Critical Metaphysics, in many aspects, pursues and completes the steady undermining
successfully carried on by nihilism for five centuries. The consistency with which all simple
faith in reality found itself, piece by piece, to be first shaken, then damaged, and finally
destroyed, is not unfamiliar to it; it feels no regrets about helping that process. Critical
Metaphysics has no vocation for procuring a new and refined type of consolation for
humanity. Rather, its watchword is: GENERALIZE DISQUIET. Critical Metaphysics itself is this
disquiet, which can no longer be understood as a weakness, or as a vulnerability, but as the
origin of all strength. It is not there to bring security to the weak in need of help, but to lead
them into battle. It is like a weapon; whoever seizes it can decide who its going to serve. In
each life that remains in contact with Being there is a devastating power; and people have no
idea just how intense that power can be. The struggle against the real, taken up before us by
so many others, is getting close to being won, but by the enemy. Thats why, on our wrongheaded path, we consider the preliminary to everything the pulverization of the last palpable
structure for the apprehension of what exists: the quantitative abstract form of the
commodity, which for the reified has become the form in which its own authentic
immediacy becomes manifest and as reified consciousness- does not even attempt to
transcend it. On the contrary, it is concerned to make it permanent by scientifically
deepening the laws at work (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness). Rendering the
wisdom of the world insane is indisputably part of our program, but thats only the first step.
Critical Metaphysics, rather, is the spiritual movement that takes nihilism as its terrain and
models itself on it, reflecting it into Being, (Junger, Treatise of the Rebel), that necessary
force that intends to reverse commodity hegemony by revealing it to be metaphysical. Only
that act of reflecting reality and manifesting it as a mere interpretation, a construct, by

merely showing that the essence of nihilism is not at all nihilist, already
advances beyond nihilism. Everywhere it exposes its viewpoint, Critical Metaphysics marks
being-there with signs contrary to the dominant convention. All reality which it is brought to
bear upon brusquely changes its meaning, and its proportions are inverted: what had always
appeared to be a few mere remains on the margins of the Spectacle proves to be the most
real thing, what people had always thought of as the very world itself is rendered to its
miniscule misery, that which appears firmly established begins to totter, what seemed to be of
such airy consistency acquires a rock-hard presence. Thus Critical Metaphysics reveals the
insignificance to which all being-there is reduced in the Spectacle, that false unity of meaning
and life (false because it is abstract) - not as an insignificant fact, but as a political situation
of servitude, a concrete form of social oppression. In so doing, it puts this insignificance into
possession of a multiplied reality that nothing in this world can lay claim to. But what it
pushes into presence, and makes audible and thus real, is really all the non-identity that had
been repressed to the feeble light of the infraspectacular world, everything that was neither
expressible nor admissible in the dominant mode of disclosure. By starting from nothingness,
Critical Metaphysics creates a truer, more compact, and looser fullness than the apparent
fullness of the Spectacle: the fullness of dereliction, the absoluteness of disaster. In revealing
to human suffering its political significance, it abolishes it as such and makes it the harbinger
of a superior state. This goes equally well for anxiety, where what exists itself goes beyond
what exists: once this experience is driven into the heart of Publicity, the finite as such falls
apart and comes back together as a sign of the infinite. But the transfiguration that Critical
Metaphysics is synonymous with operates first of all in man dispossessed of all that hed
believed was his own, in Bloom, who thus recognizes the nothingness left for him to share in
as the only thing really of his own that hes ever had: his indestructible metaphysical faculty.
The idea of the Imaginary Party, hence, gives form to that residue, to that remainder, to noncoincidence, to everything that falls outside of the universal plane of the economy, forced
takeover, and Total Mobilization. Thus, Critical Metaphysics is the doctrine of transcendence
which alone permits a liberation from and annihilation of this world, draws up the prologue for
all future insurrections, and affirms itself as the determined negation of commodity
domination, and simultaneously it already contains, in its present manifestations, the positive
transcendence that goes beyond the zones of destruction. Each man, it says, exercises a
certain intellectual activity, adopts a vision of the world, follows a conscious line of moral
conduct, and thus contributes to the defense and victory of a certain vision of the world.
(Gramsci, Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture). Consequently Critical Metaphysics
will come to impose itself as an always more inflexible and virulent injunction to each Bloom
to become conscious of the worldview underlying his lifestyle, then, either rejecting or
appropriating it, to recognize his peers and adversaries, and thus, fundamentally, to awaken
to the world. We wont grant anyone the leisure of failing to understand the importance of
their existence. Everything is bound to everything else. We will make people lose even
their taste for consumption. Critical Metaphysics is thus not content to consider everything
from the point of view of Tiqqun, in other words of the unity of the world, the final realization
of all things, the immanence of meaning in life; it produces that unity, this realization and this
immanence in its practical and exemplary character. It is itself part of the world of Tiqqun. In
its everyday existence, Critical Metaphysics is the perspective from which the Beautiful, the
Good and the True have already ceased to be contradictorily perceived. Because nihilism is

the provisional loss of the opening where a certain interpretation of being-there constitutes
itself as interpretation (Junger) and Critical Metaphysics presents itself as a general
injunction to determine oneself starting from the metaphysical character of the world, it
constitutes by its own trajectory the fulfillment and the transcendence of nihilism; that is, in
the words of Heidegger - that old swine - The Appropriation of metaphysics, The
Appropriation of the forgetting of Being. In the first place its about distancing yourself from
the world as it is in representation; it appears at first as a transcendence of metaphysics...
But what happens in the appropriation of metaphysics, and there alone, is rather that the
truth of metaphysics comes flooding back, the lasting truth of an apparently repudiated
metaphysics, which is nothing else but its henceforth reappropriated essence: its Dwelling.
Whats happening here is something different from a restoration of metaphysics, (Heidegger,
Contribution to the Question of Being).
On Saturday, shed left work while saying to her colleagues, as if it were a joke: Im leaving
a little early today, Im going to go throw myself into the Seine. The body of this resident of
Villeneuve-Le-Roi (Val-de-Marine), 45 years of age, was recovered from the river yesterday
morning by firemen. (Libration, Monday November 30, 1998)
For the community of critical metaphysicians, there is now nothing more concrete than this
Appropriation and this Dwelling, even if they still provisionally present themselves in the form
of problems to solve, rather than as immediately given solutions. To whatever extent they can
within the constraints imposed on them by this society, they are doubtless now building,
somewhere in the crevices of the metropolises, a really that is, collectively
practiced ethos where Metaphysics (is) part of the everyday practice of life (Artaud). One
would be wrong to see this as a comfortable alternative to taking up arms and going on the
attack. Contrary to what certain hasty leftists would have us believe, in the current
conditions, the immediate issue for revolutionary practice is not direct struggle against
commodity domination, since that unavoidably crumbles away, and what crumbles away may
crumble away, but it cannot be destroyed. (Kafka) Thus one must instead leave that old
whore to decompose insipidly, and prepare for the moment to come to deliver a fatal blow it
cant recover from; this means uniting, by any means necessary, all the particular forces
currently confronting commodity hegemony -- in other words, building the Imaginary Party.
Solely because of the fact that in a world of lies, lies cannot be eliminated by their opposite,
but only by a world of truth (Kafka), those whose vocation is but to destroy have no choice
but to work for the formation, in the infra-spectacular space, of such worlds of truth if
nevertheless they intend to become something other than the sworn professionals of social
contestation. Among the ruins, the positive elaboration of forms of life, community and
affectivity independent and superior to the icy waters of spectacular morals is an act of
sabotage where the power capable of defeating the imperium of abstraction acts without
appearing. It thus comprises the sine qua non condition for all effective contestation, because
unless they gather into mental families, those opposed to this society have zero chance of
survival. Nevertheless, nothing will be able to prevent the critical metaphysicians from
rallying to all agitation that explicitly attacks commodity domination, and fomenting some of
their own too. We will never give up disrupting the dreary ceremony of the world. But such
acts on our part will be falsely understood if without the understanding that they make sense
only in the broader construction of a lifestyle that war has a place in. The peaceful

coexistence of universal mutual ridicule, which makes our times such a strong emetic, is one
of those things we intend to bring to a bloody end. It is intolerable that truth and falsehood
go on living at peace with one another. The mutual compromise of so many viscerally
irreconcilable metaphysics, in the baroque pay-toilet of the Spectacle, is one of the means at
the enemys command for breaking down even the liveliest of minds. Human beings will have
to agree to express their disagreements, trace out the clear borders between the different
metaphysical homelands, and thus put an end to the world of confusion, where no one can
recognize their brothers nor their enemies anymore. The interminable disputation of
theologians comprises a model for social life. The utopia of Tln does not displease us. We
grant no laurels to the love of those who were never able to hate, nor to the peace of those
who have never done battle. Therefore, in daring to act in such a way as to make the
utopian rejection of the conventional world objectivizes itself in a likewise existent reality, so
that polemical refusal actually becomes the central form of the work (Lukacs, Theory of the
Novel), our search for chances to quarrel with those whose metaphysics are objectively
adverse to ours is no less important than is our quest to find our brothers dispersed in Exile.
The object of authentic community can only be the conscious construction of the Common
itself, that is to say the creation of the world, or, to be more exact, the creation of a world.
This is why critical metaphysicians are so particularly concerned with
composing, together, the true alphabet whose application gives meaning to things, beings,
and discourses; in other words with reconstituting a hidden order within reality, where what
exists would cease to drown them and at last present itself in the familiar form of figures,
rather than as faces, in Gombrowicz sense. Its about elevating elective affinity up to the free
construction of a common mode of reality-disclosure. We must make our individual
perceptions and our moral sentiments a collective creation. Such is the task. But here we can
already feel - along with an objective feeling of evil - an inexorable shiver of vice, like one
gets when fucking a Young-Girl, or shopping in a supermarket. In each of our enemies, the
postmodernist, the Young-Girl, the sociologist, the manager, the bureaucrat, the artist or the
intellectual, all defects that can easily all come together in just one scumbag, we see only
their metaphysics. Our power of voluntary hallucination has gone beyond such a degree of
coherence to where now everything speaks to us of what we are doing and thats just what
our messianic era is all about: the re-absorption of the element of time in the element of
meaning. Those who believe they can build a new world without building a new language are
fooling themselves: the whole of this world is contained in its language. Ours does not hide
its imperialist vocations any more than any other does: all poetry, all thought, all imagination
that doesnt manage to become effective, when that becomes possible, doesnt even rise
above the pathetic rank of cutesy crap. Roger Gilbert-Lecomte gives this observation an
expression we find perfectly suitable: the birth of concrete thought (experimental
metaphysics), by drawing upon the vision in its artistic expression, will transform its
knowledge into power. He has also remarked that the experimental metaphysician bets on
his disequilibrium, which gives him various different perspectives on reality. Quite true. A
world made of ideas is also a world at the mercy of ideas, as long as they rule arbitrarily. The
matter that absorbs us, in sum, is the realization of the concrete utopia of a world where
each of the great metaphysics, each of the great languages of creation, among which there
can be no overtaking nor doubling (Peguy) can finally and in the full sense of the
word inhabit the world, come into a kingdom of its own, and lose itself unrestrainedly in

inexhaustible holy wars, schisms, sects and heresies, where the immanence of meaning in life
will be rediscovered, where language will draw upon Being and Being language, where the
metaphysical will no longer be a discourse, but the fecund tissue of existence, where each
community will be another unique space within a reappropriated common, where man, giving
up disguising his insoluble relationship with the world with the stupid and crude lie of private
property, will truly open himself to the experience of anguish, ecstasy, and abandon. Life does
not delight in our consciousness of it and its form is still experienced as suffering; this shows
that we are living in times nearing their end. As for us, we announce a world where man will
espouse his destiny as the tragic play of his freedom. There is no life more properly human
than that. Doubtless the critical-metaphysicians carry in their unreason the outcome of the
disaster. And even if we must succumb to the powers that this world will have unleashed
against us, we will have at least presaged that happy time when there will be no more
metaphysics, because all men will be metaphysicians, living bearers of the Absolute. Then
well understand that up to now nothings happened.

Bloom Theory
tiqqun

Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek
hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to
her, his hands on his knees.
Milk for the pussens, he said.
Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them.

James Joyce, Ulysses

At this hour of the night

The great watchmen are dead.

Doubtless THEY killed them.
The weak glow of their solitary stubbornness disturbed the party of sleep too much. That, at
least, is what we think, we guess we whove come so late in light of the perplexity that
their name still stirs up at certain times.
Every living trace of what they did and were has been erased, it seems, by the maniacal
obstinacy of resentment. In the end, all thats left of them for this world is a handful of dead
images that it still haloes with the villainous satisfaction of having conquered those who were
better than it is.
So here we are, orphans of grandeur, marooned in a world of ice where no fires light the
horizon. Our questions have to remain unanswered, the old ones assure us; then they say,
all the same: theres never been a blacker night for intelligence.

Who Are You Really?

The pretty, snow-blanketed countryside slips fast across the window. It wont be long now
until the trip between V. and R., which in the old days wouldve been a matter of weeks, will
be over. For less than an hour, youve been the occupant of some seat or another in one of
the twenty identical cars of this high speed train, one of so many. The regular - doubtless
optimal - arrangement of the seats spreads out in an abstract harmony of gentle neon. The
train follows along its rails, and in this train car, so seamlessly in harmony with the idea of
order, it seems that human reality itself travels along invisible rails. A clean and polite
indifference inhabits the space that separates you from the lady sitting in the seat next to
you. Neither of you will have your trip disturbed by the superfluous need to even say a word,
much less strike up a conversation. That would disturb your distraction, and, in the case of
your neighbor, her applied study of the feminine press (how to sleep with a guy without him
knowing, soft flirting, gifts with meaning, is he a good lay? who are you REALLY?
etc.). And when her cell phone rings, the young woman doesnt think it necessary to get up,
either: hello? listen, what do you mean youre not there? are you shitting me? listen,
Ive been stuck with the kids for the past three weekends, I work all week, and its already a
bitch finding time to live, man no, no, no, I just cant, thats all deal with it, its not my
problem everyones gotta have their own social life; Ive already wrecked mine enough
how many times do I have to tell you: Im going out with Jerry this weekend, and thats all

there is to it oh yeah, is that so? With the kid putting me through his freak-outs all day,
sniveling about wheres daddy? well come on, cause youre his father! its out of the
question I dont give a fuck, youre taking care of them this weekend well too bad for her,
all you had to do was find a little more of a peacemaker Im warning you, if theres no one
there, Im leaving them with the doorman well hell yes; Im being completely
reasonable thats all, then; ciao.

The scene repeats itself in all its banality. More obviously of the same. Its like a slap in
the face when it happens; its brutal at first - but we shouldve been preparing for it for years,
after all, considering how scrupulously weve worked to become perfect strangers to each
other: blank existences, indifferent presences, no depth. At the same time, nothing in this
situation could be so easily acceptable to everyone if we werent absolutely intimate in this
foreignness. So, that foreignness also had to become the figure of our relationship with
ourselves; and really, from all angles we are Blooms.

If Bloom is also found in a certain book, its because all of us have already crossed paths with
him in the street, then, later, in ourselves. This just confirms it.
One day you pay more attention than usual to the collective silence on a metro line, and are
overtaken by a deep shiver, a primal horror, coming out from behind the shared fakery of
contemporary morals and suddenly plain for all to see.
The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses, mass-man; thats
how THEY represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes,
as the catastrophic child of the industrial era and the end of all enchantments. But even
there, no matter the name, theres still that shiver; THEY shiver before the infinite mystery of
ordinary man. Each of us feels a pure force growing behind the theater of our qualities,
hiding out there; a pure force that were all supposed to ignore.

Whats left is the necessary anxiety we think we can appease by demanding of one another a
rigorous absence from each others selves, and an ignorance of a force which is common, but
is now unqualifiable, because it is anonymous. And the name of that anonymity is Bloom.

Kairos [the right moment]

In spite of the extreme confusion that reigns on its surface, and perhaps precisely because of
that, our era is by its nature messianic.
What should be understood by this is that very old distinctions have now been effaced, and
that many thousand-year-old divisions have now in turn been divided.
Our era is reducing itself to one single, basic reality, and to amusement in that reality. More
and more visibly, our contemporary non-societies - those imperative fictions - endlessly
populate themselves with pariahs and parvenus. And the parvenus are themselves merely
pariahs that have betrayed their condition and would like to make it forgotten by all means -but it always ends up biting them in the ass. One might also say, following another line of
demarcation, that theres nothing left of these times but idlers and the disturbed, and that
the disturbed are in the end no more than idlers trying to cheat on their own essential
inaction. Will the pursuit of deep feelings, of intense life, which seems to be so many
desperate peoples last reason to live, ever really distract them fully from the fundamental
emotional tone that inhabits them: boredom?

The reigning confusion is the result of the planetary deployment of all these false
paradoxes, under which our central truth nevertheless is born. And this truth is that we are
tenants of an existence which is a kind of exile, in a world which is a desert, that weve
been thrown outinto this world with no mission to accomplish, with no place assigned us, and
no recognizable filiation abandoned. That we are at the same time so little and already too
much.

True politics, ecstatic politics, begins there. With a brutal and all-enveloping laugh. With a
laugh that undoes the pathos oozing out of the so-called problems of joblessness,
immigration, precariousness, and marginalization.

Theres no social problem in unemployment, just the metaphysical fact of our own idleness.

Theres no social problem in immigration, just the metaphysical fact of our own foreignness.
Theres no social problem in precariousness or marginalization, just this inexorable existential
reality that were all alone, dying of it alone in the face of death,
that we are all, for all eternity, finite beings.

You decide whats serious about that and whats just social entertainment.

The era that opened in 1914, where the illusion of modern times completed its
decomposition while simultaneously metaphysics completed itsself-realization, saw the
ontological burst out into history in its pure state and on all levels. Such tectonic upsurges of
truth appear in those rare moments where the lie of civilizations starts to crumble. Our times
are part of a curious constellation, which includes the decline of the middle ages and the first
Gnostic centuries of our era. The same Mood [Stimmung] expresses itself everywhere, with
the same radicalness: finiteness, perdition, separation. Modern times and the Christian
west were born before that from such outbursts, as a reaction.
This kinship keeps us from considering the emotional tone that dominated the twentieth
century as simple malaise in civilization. And its not about subjective dispositions, nor
some capricious propensity towards despair or disapproval: no, this tone is, on the contrary,
the mostobvious one of our era, one that THEY work ceaselessly to repress, at every stage in
its advancement.
Its not that men have - negatively - lost their bearings; its rather that they have positively
become Blooms.

BLOOM IS THE FINAL UPSURGE OF THE NATIVE.

From now on theres nothing anywhere but Bloom and Blooms escape.

He saw no more future before him, and the past, in spite of all his efforts to consider it
explainable, resembled something incomprehensible. The justifications were scattered about
like crumbs, and the feeling of pleasure seemed more exhausted every day. Travels and long
walks, which long ago gave him a mysterious joy, had become strangely odious to him. []
He was neither truly a man without a country, nor did he feel honestly and naturally at home
anywhere in the world. He would have liked very much to have been an organ player, or a
beggar, or a cripple, so as to have some reason to ask for mens pity and charity; but even
more ardently than that he wished to die. He was not dead, and yet he was dead; he was
not poor to the point of having to beg, and yet was indeed a beggar, though he did not beg;
even now he still dressed elegantly, even now he still humbled himself before people like a
mechanical, annoying girl, uttered clichs and got upset about and horrified by them. How
atrocious his own life appeared to him, his soul false, and his miserable body dead, the whole
world foreign, and the movements, things and events that surrounded him so empty.

Robert Walser, Short Essays

Stimmung [mood/tone]

Kafkas characters are in a fundamental sense the same thing as Kafkas world.

Understanding the figure of Bloom doesnt just require renouncing the classical idea of the
subject, which is no big deal; it also requires abandoning the modern concept of objectivity.

The term Bloom doesnt in some exotic way fill the need for a word in the current lexicon to
designate a new human type that has recently appeared on the surface of the planet that we
should defend ourselves from.

Bloom, rather, is the name of a certain Stimmung [mood], a fundamental tonality of being.

This Stimmung doesnt come from the subject, like a kind of fog clouding perception, or from
the object, as a liquefied version of the Spirit of the World; rather it is the basis upon
which the subject and the object, the self and the world, could exist as such in the classical
age, i.e., as clearly distinct from one another.
Because its how every being is the way he or she is, this tonality is not something unstable,
fleeting, or simply subjective; rather it is precisely what gives consistency and possibility to
each being. Bloom is the Stimmung in which and by which we understand each other at the
present time, without which these words would be no more than a succession of meaningless
phonemes.

Historically, Bloom is the name for an uncommon Stimmung: one that corresponds to the
moment the subject retreats from the world and the world from the subject, the moment
when the self and the real are suddenly suspended, and just might have been abolished. For
that reason Bloom is the general stimmung where nothing but Stimmungs are apparent,
where the primacy of the stimmung over all other realities manifests itself as such.

Since it always impregnates beforehand all the conceptual instruments by which PEOPLE
might claim to understand it, the Stimmung cannot be understood, circumscribed, or
analyzed "objectively," no matter how much one might be able to feel it. The best we can
draw out of it is the Figure that corresponds to it, in the sense where a Figure is a human
power to configure worlds. What we're aiming at with this "theory" is therefore indeed a
Stimmung, but we're doing so by seizing upon a Figure.

Bloom also refers to the spectral, wandering, sovereignly vacant humanity that can no longer
rise to any other content besides that of the Stimmung that it ex-ists in, to that twilight being
for which there is no more real, no more I, only Stimmungs.
Mundus Est Fabula [the world is a fiction]

Because Bloom is he who can no longer separate himself from the immediate context
containing him, his gaze is that of a man that does not identify. Everything blurs under the
Bloom effect and is lost in the inconsequential wavering of objective relationships where life is
felt negatively, in indifference, impersonality, and the lack of quality.
Bloom lives inside of Bloom.

Spread out all around us is a petrified world, a world of things where we ourselves, with our
"I," our gestures, and even our feelings figure in as things. Nothing can belong to us as truly
our own in such a landscape of death. We are more and more like exiles, never sure of
understanding what's happening all around.
In spite of this gigantic relinquishment, in spite of the inexplicable suspended-animation that
now strikes everything that exists, the overall mechanism continues to function like it was
nothing, processing our isolation.
In this perpetually renovated empire of ruins, there's nowhere for us to take refuge, and we
don't even have the ability to desert it all by withdrawing into ourselves. We've been
delivered up, without appeal, to a finiteness with no landmarks to orient us, totally exposed
across the whole surface of our being.
Bloom is thus that man whom nothing can save from the triviality of the world. A reasonable
mind might conclude: "Well, then, in fact, Bloom is alienated man." But no, Bloom is man so
completely mixed up with his own alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate him
out from it.

Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we wander among
the abysses. Our path, which could easily have come to an end yesterday or years back, has
no reason and no necessity outside of that of its own contingency. Its a wandering path, one
that carries us from the same to the same on the road of the Identical; and wherever we go
we carry within ourselves the desert that we're the hermits in. And if some days we might
swear that we are the "whole universe," like Agrippa de Nettesheim did, or more ingenuously
that we are "all things, all men and all animals," like Cravan, it's just that all we see in
everything is the Nothing which we ourselves so totally are.
But that Nothingness is the absolutely real, in the light of which everything that exists
becomes somehow ghostly.

[fragrance]

Nothing's more impenetrable to Bloom than those men of the Ancien Regime who claim to
participate fully and immediately in life and have such a firm feeling of their present
incarnation, of their existence, and of its continuity. For us, wherever we look, we never find
this solid, massive "I," this substance of our own that we are so generously given as soon as
we claim to exist.

In the same way as all harmonious moral philosophy which might have given consistency to
the illusion of an "authentic" self is now lacking, everything that could have made one believe
in the unambiguousness of life or in the formal positivity of the world has been scattered as
well. In truth, our "sense of what's real" never ends up as more than a limited modality of
that "sense of the possible which is the faculty of thinking through all the things that might
as well be and give no more importance to everything that is than one gives to what is not."
(Musil,The Man without Qualities). Under commodity occupation the most concrete
truth about everything is the truth of its infinite replaceability.

All the situations that we find ourselves engaged in bear, in their equivalence to one another,
the infinitely repeated stamp of an irrevocable "as if." We collaborate in the maintenance of a
"society" as if we were not part of it; we conceive of the world as if we didn't ourselves
occupy a specific situation within it; and we continue to grow old as if we had to always
remain young. In a word: we live as if we were already dead.

And that's certainly the most painful paradox of Bloom's existence: he can no longer hear the
voice of his living body, the speech of his physiology. And this at the very moment that
PEOPLE want at every instant to make them mean something sexual.
Whether Bloom's flesh is the body of a woman or of a man, or even a body with indiscernible
form, it is always the prisoner of the non-sensual sexualization its riddled with. But this
sexualization, which is omnipresent and at the same time never really lived, is but the source
of a deaf and persistent suffering, like amputees feeling their phantom limbs. From this
comes the essentially spectral character, the sinister aura of contemporary mass
pornography: it is never more than the presence of an absence. In Bloom's world a world
made fully semiotic a phallus or a vagina are but symbols referring to something else, to a
reference that can no longer be found in a reality that never stops fading away. Bloom's flesh
is sad and has no mystery to it.

It's not sex that has to be re-invented: we're already living among the ruins of sexuality, and
our bodies themselves are but relics therein. Bloom cannot transform the gender roles that he
has inherited due to the shortcomings of traditional societies, frozen as he is in an
unstoppable pre-pubescent phase. Both male Blooms and female Blooms thus go through
the same old tired dance, to the tune of the classic gender roles. But their gestures fall
apart. Their dance is awkward. They stumble. And it's painful to watch.

A thing among things, Bloom keeps himself outside of it all with an abandonment identical to
that of his world. He's alone in every kind of company, and naked in all
circumstances. That's where he rests, in extenuated self-ignorance, away from his desires
and the world, where life rolls the rosary-beads of his absence day after day. All lived content
is indifferently interchangeable for him, as he passes through it in a kind of existential
tourism.

We've unlearned joy like we've unlearned suffering; we've become emotional illiterates; we
only perceive diffracted echoes of feelings. Everything's worn out, in our late-in-coming eyes;
even unhappiness. And that, in sum, is perhaps the real disaster: that nowhere do we find
support, doubt, or certainty.

Everything I do and think is but a Specimen of my possibilities. Man is more general than his
life and acts. More possibilities than I could ever imagine fit perfectly into the expected. Mr.
Teste says: My possibilities never abandon me.

Valry, Monsieur Teste [Mr. Head]

For a being who feels attached to life no more than by so tenuous a bond, freedom has such
an incomplete and yet final meaning that it can no longer be taken away from him: the
freedom to carry into his becoming a certain sense of the theatrical uselessness of
everything, a terminal manner of spectatorship on the world, even of being a spectator of
himself. In the eternal Sunday of his existence, Blooms interests thus remain forever
emptied of any object, and thats why Bloom is himself the man without
interest. Here, disinterestedness, in the sense where we dont manage to have any
importance in our own eyes, but also in the sense where the bourgeois category of interest
can no longer strictly account for any of our acts, is no longer an expression of individual
idealism, but a mass phenomenon.

Assuredly, man is something thats been transcended.

All those that loved their virtues have perished at the hand of their virtues.

Everyone is more foreign to himself than to anyone else.

Blooms fundamental experience is that of his own transcendence of himself, but this
experience, in spite of how nice it sounds, is above all one of impotence, an experience of
absolute suffering.

Whatever high esteem wed like to hold ourselves in, we are not subjects, finished products,
autarchic and sovereign even in our allegiances.

We evolve in a space that is entirely sectioned off and policed; a space occupied, on the on
hand, by the Spectacle, and on the other, by Biopower. And whats terrible about this
gridding, this occupation, is that the submission it demands of us is nothing that we could
rebel against with some definitive break-away gesture, but something that we can only deal
with strategically.

The regime of power that we live under in no way resembles that which could have run its
course under administrative monarchy, that expired concept which up until recently, that is,

even within biopolitical democracies, remained the only enemy recognized by revolutionary
movements: a simple restriction mechanism, a purely repressive mechanism of coercion.

The contemporary form of domination, on the contrary, is essentially productive.

On the one hand it rules all the manifestations of our existence the Spectacle; on the other,
it generates the conditions for it Biopower.

The Spectacle is the kind of Power that wants you to talk, that wants you to be someone.

Biopower is benevolent power, full of a pastors concern for his flock; the kind of Power that
wants its subjects to be safe, that wants you to live. Caught in the vise of a kind of control
that is simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, walled into a double constraint that
annihilates us by the same stroke with which it makes us exist, the majority of us take up a
kind of politics of disappearance: feigning an inner death and keeping our silence, like
captives before the Grand Inquisitor. By subtracting all positivity and subtracting itself from
all positivity, these specters steal from a productive power the very thing it might have
exerted itself upon. Their desire to not live is all that they have the strength to counterpose
to a power that intends to make them live. In so doing, they remain in Bloom, and often end
up buried there.

So this is what Bloom means: that we dont belong to ourselves, that this world
isnt our world. That its not just that it confronts us in its totality, but that even in the most
proximate details it is foreign to us. This foreignness would be quite enjoyable if it could
imply an exteriority of principles between it and us. Far from it. Our foreignness to the world
consists in the fact that the stranger, the foreigner, is in us, in the fact that in the world of the
authoritarian commodity, we regularly become strangers to ourselves. The circle of situations
where were forced to watch ourselves act, to contemplate the action of a me in which we
dont recognize ourselves, now closes up on and besieges us, even in what bourgeois society
still calls our intimacy. The Other possesses us; it is this dissociated body, a simple
peripheral artifact in the hands of Biopower; it is our raw desire to survive in the intolerable
network of miniscule subjugations, granulated pressures that fetter us to the quick; it is the
ensemble of self-interested contrivances, humiliations, pettiness; the ensemble of tactics that
we mustdeploy. It is the whole objective machine that we sacrifice to inside ourselves.

THE OTHER IS THE ECONOMY IN US.

Bloom also means that each person knows for himself that he is not himself. Even if
momentarily, faced with such and such a person - and most frequently in anonymous
interactions - we might get an impression to the contrary, we still retain at bottom that
feeling that this is an inauthentic existence, an artificial life. The internal presence of the
Other takes shape on every level of our consciousness: its a slight and constant loss of
being, a progressive drying-out, a little death doled out continually. In spite of this, we
persist in assuming the external hypothesis of our identity with ourselves; we play the
subject. A certain shame accompanies this shredding process and evolves with it. So we try
evasion; we project ourselves ever more violently to the outside, towards wherever is as far
away as possible from this terrifying internal tension. We feel the need to let nothing about it
appear, to glue ourselves to our social identity, to remain foreign to our foreignness: TO
KEEP AN AIR OF COMPOSURE before the field of ruins.

This lie is in our every gesture.

Thats the essential thing.
Its no longer time to make literature out of the various combinations of disaster.

Up to now, too much has been written, and not enough thought about Bloom.

Ens Realissimum [the most real being]

The Ptolemean, when looking inside of himself, only found two phenomena: sociology and
emptiness. And we must begin there: not from what we think we are sociology but from
what we intimately feel ourselves to lack, because thats the most real thing, the ens
realissimum. Bloom doesnt mean that were failed subjects compared to the classical subject
and its superb sufficiency; rather it revealsthat there is a principle of incompleteness at the
very basis of human existence, a radical insufficiency. What we are is precisely this failure,
which can, if it so desires, choose to put on the mask of subjecthood.

Whats certain is that were nothing, nothing but the nothingness around which spins the
movement of our ideas, our experiences, our miseries, and our feelings. Whats certain is
that we are the empty axis of this pit without walls, an axis that does not exist in and of
itself, but only because every circle has its center. But this hopeless deficiency itself can be
understood as an ultimate positivity, which is expressed as follows:

I AM THE INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN WHAT I AM

AND WHAT I AM NOT.

Bloom is indeed such an intermediary, but hes a passive one; hes the witness to his own
desubjectivation, to his endless becoming-otherwise. He conceals within him a primordial
differentiation: knowing that we are not what we are, and that none of our particular
attributes can really exhaust our potential.
Incompleteness is the mode of being of everything that remains in contact with potential; the
form of existence of everything devoted tobecoming.

The Most Disturbing Guest

Because he is the emptiness in all substantial determinations, Bloom is indeed the most
disturbing guest within man, the one who goes from being a simple invitee to becoming the
master of the house. Ever since he took up residence inside us, weve found ourselves
saddled with a purely sartorial being. Whatever we undertake to try to buy back some
substantiality, it ends up only ever being just something contingent and inessential relative to
our selves. Bloom is thus the name of a new, ageless nudity, the properly human nudity that
disappears under every attribute and nonetheless bears it, which precedes all form and
renders it possible.
Bloom is masked Nothingness. Thats why it would be absurd to celebrate his appearance in
history as the birth of a particular human type: that there are such men without qualities is
not a certain quality of mankind; but on the contrary this is mankind as such, as mankind;
the final realization of a generic human essence which is precisely a deprivation of essence,
pure exposedness, pure availability: larva.

The bourgeois republic can flatter itself that it was the first historical expression of any
magnitude of this controlled ecstasy, and in the end the model for it. In it, in an
unprecedented manner, the existence of man as a singular being finds itself formally separate

from mans existence as a member of the community. Thus, in the bourgeois republic, where
man is an acknowledged, veritable subject, he is abstracted from all qualities specific to him,
and is a figure with no reality to it, a citizen; and where in his own eyes, as in the eyes of
others, he passes for a real subject in his everyday existence he is a figure with no truth,
an individual. The classical era has in a way established the principles whose application
has made man what we know him to be: the aggregation of a double nothingness: that of a
consumer, thatuntouchable, and that of a citizen, that pathetic abstraction of impotence.

But the more the Spectacle and Biopower perfect each other, the more autonomy is obtained
by appearances and the basic conditions of our existence, the more their world detaches from
men and becomes foreign to them; and the more Bloom draws back into himself, deepening
and recognizing his interior sovereignty relative to objectivity. And as he detaches ever more
painlessly from his social decisions and from his identity, he gets stronger as a pure force of
negation, beyond all effectiveness.

The condition of exile in the unrepresentable that men and their common world are in
coincides with the situation of existential clandestinitywhich befalls them in the Spectacle.
That condition is a manifestation of the absolute singularity of each social atom as the
absolutely anonymous, ordinary social atom, and its pure differentiation as pure nothingness.

It is assuredly true that, as the Spectacle never tires of repeating, Bloom is positively
nothing. But as to what this nothing means, interpretations vary.

- Having come to this point, all sane minds would conclude from all this that it would be
constitutionally impossible to come up with any kind of a Theory of Bloom and would leave
this path, as they should. The cleverest will probably cough up some fallacious reasoning like
Bloom is nothing; theres nothing to be said about nothing, and therefore there is nothing to
be said about Bloom, QED and will then surely regret having wasted their time on the
present writing to the neglect of their fascinating scientific study of the French intellectual
world. For those of you who in spite of the obvious absurdity of our topic of discussion here
continue to read on, you should always keep in mind the necessarily vacillating character of
all discourse regarding Bloom. Really dealing with the human positivity of pure nothingness
can only mean exposing the most perfect lack of qualities as itself being a quality, and
exposing the most radical insubstantiality as substance, even at the risk of ending up giving a
face to something thats invisible. Such a discourse, if it does not wish to betray its object,

must let its object emerge only so as to let it disappear once more the very next instant, and
so on ad infinitum.
A Small Chronicle of Disaster

The I has a content that distinguishes it from itself, because it is either pure negativity or a
splitting movement; it is consciousness. This content, in its differentiation, is also the I,
because it is the movement of self-suppression or that same pure negativity which is I.
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind

Although Bloom is the fundamental possibility that man never ceases to contain,
the real possibility of possibility, and has for that reason been described, felt out, and
practiced many times over the centuries both by the Gnostics in the first centuries of our
era and by the heretics of the end of the Middle Ages (the brethren of the Free Spirit, the
kabbalists, or the Rhenan mystics), by Buddhists as much as by Coquillards [large bandit
groups of 1450s France] Bloom nevertheless only appears as the dominant figure within the
historical process at the moment when metaphysics reaches its completion, that is, in the
Spectacle.

The generation that perceived the face of the Gorgon, squinting through the steely storm the generation of expressionism, futurism, constructivism, Dada, surrealism was the first to
bear this terrible secret all together at once. There it experienced some thing whose
radicalness and white-hot calcination could not find any suitable expression even in all the
vertigo of the 1920s. The whole history of the century can be interpreted on that basis as a
succession of reactions against what was perceived at that point and in which we still
remain. Because since 1914 its not that civilizations have come to know that they are
mortal, as PEOPLE have said: it is commodity civilization,as it has been spread from the West
to the rest of the world, that knows that it is moribund.

In reality its been more than a century basically since our exposure to the fall-out plume of
symbolist radiation that Mr. Bloom has been the near-exclusive hero of all literature, from
Jarrys character Mr. Sengle to Michauxs Mr. Plume, from Pessoa himself to the Man without
Qualities, from Bartleby to Kafka, of course forgetting Camus-The-Stranger and the New
Novel, which well leave to the undergrads. Even though he was most precociously
approached by the young Lukacs, it was only in 1927, with the treatise Being and Time, that
Bloom, dressed in the transparent rags of Dasein, became the central non-subject of
philosophy its legitimate, one way or another, to see vulgar French existentialism, which
had an impact that came much later and went much deeper than anyone could have

suspected by looking at how short a time it was in vogue, as the first thinking made
exclusively for the use of Blooms.

PEOPLE have been able to ignore for a long time now the massive evidence of Bloom in all
these manifestations, writing it off as simply a literary phenomenon, as a purely
philosophical exaggeration. For the rest, PEOPLE still train themselves to do so: it relaxes the
atmosphere. Its just that, in passing, PEOPLE would like to forget what THEY
are politically the contemporaries of, to forget that Bloom first appeared in literature at the
very moment when literature as an institution was disrupted, and in philosophy at the
moment when it began to crumble as a system of truth.

In other words, when Valery wrote: I felt, with a bitter and bizarre pleasure, the simplicity of
our statistical condition. The quantity of individuals absorbed all my singularity, and I
became indistinct and indiscernible,
he was not adding another suppelementary object to the venerable contemplation of
Aesthetics: he was expressing politically what it means to be just one more body in the
aggregate of a population managed by Biopower.

Uprooting

Every new stage in the development of commodity society requires the destruction of a
certain form of immediacy, the lucrative separation of what had been one and united into
a relationship. It is this split that the commodity then takes over, mediates, and extracts
profit from, clarifying a little more each day the utopia of a world where every person will be,
in all things, exposed on the one market. Marx admirably described the first phases of this
process, though only from a labor bureaucrats perspective, the perspective of Economy:
The dissolution of all products and all activities into exchange value, he wrote in Grundrisse,
presupposes the decomposition of all frozen (historical) relationships of personal dependence
within production, as well as the universal subjugation of producers to one another. The
universal dependence of individuals indifferent to each other constitutes their social
bond. And this social bond is expressed in exchange value.

It would be perfectly absurd to consider the persistent devastation of all historical

attachments and of all organic communities as a short-term defect in commodity society, one
that it would only take the good will of men working for reform to deal with. The uprooting of
all things, the separation into sterile fragments of each and every living totality and the
autonomization of those fragments within the circuits of value are precisely the essence of the
commodity, the alpha and omega of its movement. The highly contagious nature of this
abstract logic takes on the form of a real uprooting sickness among men, which makes the
uprooted ones throw themselves into an activity that always tends to uproot those who are
still not uprooted or are so only partly, often by the most violent of methods; whoever has
been uprooted will uproot others. Our era has the dubious prestige of having brought to its
apex the proliferating and multitudinous feverishness of this destructive character.

Somewhere Out of the World

Be like passers-by!
- Gospel of Thomas

Bloom appears inseparably as the product and the cause of the liquidation of all
substantial ethos as a result of the eruption of the commodity into all human
relationships. He himself is thus the man without substantiality, the man who
has really become abstract, because hes been effectively cut off from all milieus,
dispossessed of all belonging, and then thrown out to wander. We have come to know him as
such, as that undifferentiated being that does not feel at home anywhere, as that monad
who comes from no community at all in a world that only gives birth to atoms
(Hegel). Naturally, to admit the universality of the pariah status, of our pariah status, would
mean admitting too many comfortable lies, both for those who claim to be part of this
society and for those who integrate themselves into it while claiming to criticize it. The
famous doctrine of the new-middle-classes or alternatively of the vast-middle-class has
for the past half-century corresponded to the denial of our bloomitude, its total
perversion. PEOPLE would thus like to try to reapproach the total dissolution of all social
classes in terms of social class. Because Bloom is not only todays neo-bourgeois, who has so
pathetically failed the confidence of his bourgeoisie; he is also todays proletarian, who now
no longer even has the slightest vestiges of a proletariat behind him. At the extreme limit, he
is the planetary petty-bourgeoisie, the orphan of a class that never even existed.

In fact, in the same way as the individual resulted from the decomposition of the community,
Bloom results from the decomposition of the individual, or, to put it plainly, that of
the fiction of the individual - the bourgeois individual has only ever existed on the freeways,
and there are still accidents there. But we would be mistaken to see the human
radicalness that Bloom sketches out by seeing him merely in light of the traditional concept of

the uprooted person. The suffering that all true attachments/commitments now expose one
to has taken on such excessive proportions that no one can even allow themselves to feel
any nostalgia for their origins. In order to survive its been necessary to kill that off too. And
so Bloom is, rather, the man without roots, the man who gets the feeling that hes at home in
his exile, who has laid down his roots in the absence of a place, and for whom the idea of
uprooting doesnt evoke any kind of banishment, but on the contrary an ordinary
situation. Its not the world that hes lost, its his taste for the world that hes had to leave
behind.

A totally new kind of poverty has swooped down upon men with the colossal development of
technology What good is all our cultural heritage now if no experience ties us to it?

The

last centurys horrible mish-mash of styles and visions of the world showed only too clearly
where hypocrisy or abuse in such matters gets us in order for us not to consider it honorable
to own up to our misery. So, then, let us confess it: this poverty of experience is not just the
poverty of private experiences, but a poverty of human experiences. So is it a new kind of
barbarism? In effect. And we declare it to be such in order to introduce a new concept, a
positive concept of barbarism. Because where does a poverty of experience lead the savage
barbarian? It brings him to begin at the beginning, to start over from the start, to pull
himself out of it with the little he has, to build with the little he has, and in so doing to look
neither to his right nor to his left We have become poor. We have sacrificed the heritage of
humanity, bit by bit, and often we have pawned it off for a hundredth of its value in order to
receive in return the petty coin of what exists Humanity is preparing itself to survive
culture if need be. And the essential thing is that its doing so while laughing about it. It is
highly possible that here or there such laughter might have a really barbaric sound to
it. Thats great. So couldnt individuals thus give up, some time or another, a little bit of their
humanity to the masses, which would one day pay it back plus interest on capital and interest
on the interest?

Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty

The Loss of Experience

As an observable Stimmung, as a specific affective tonality, Bloom is in touch with the

extreme abstraction of the conditions of existence that the Spectacle fleshes out. The most
demented, and at the same time the most characteristic concretion of the
spectacular ethosremains - on a planetary scale - the metropolis. That Bloom is essentially
the metropolitan man in no way implies that it might be possible by birth or by choice for him
to remove himself from that condition, because there is no outside of the metropolis: the

territories that its metastatic extension does not occupy are always polarized by it; that is,
they are determined in all their aspects by its absence.

The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most
eloquent symptom of which is the formation in it of the very category of experience in the
restricted sense where one has experiences (sexual, sporting, professional, artistic,
sentimental, ludic, etc.). Everything about Bloom flows from this loss, or is synonymous with
it. Within the Spectacle, as they are within the metropolis, men never have the concrete
experience of events, but only of conventions, rules; a wholly symbolized, entirely
constructed second nature. There, what reigns is the radical split between the insignificance
of everyday life - called private life - where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a
frozen sphere called public which no one has access to.

But all this looks is starting to look more and more like ancient history. The separation
between the Spectacles lifeless forms and the formless life of Bloom, with its
monochromatic boredom and silent thirst for nothingness, moves aside at numerous points to
make way for indistinguishability. The loss of experience has finally attained to such a degree
of generality that it can in turn be interpreted as the primordial, original experience, as
the experience of experience as such; as a clear disposition, that is, towards Critical
Metaphysics.

The Metropolises of Separation

Metropolises are distinct from the other grand human formations first of all because the
greatest proximity, and usually the greatest promiscuity, coincide in them with the greatest
foreignness. Never have men been gathered together in such great number, and never have
they been so totally separate from one another.

In the metropolis, man experiences his own negative condition, purely. Finiteness, solitude,
and exposedness, which are the three fundamental coordinates of this condition, weave the
dcor of each persons existence in the big city. Not a fixed dcor, but a moving dcor; the
amalgamated dcors of the big city, due to which everyone has to endure the ice-cold stench
of its non-places.

The hip, plugged-in metropolis-dwellers here comprise a rather remarkable type of Bloom not
only in terms of intensity but also in the numerical extent of their legions: Blooms imperialist
fraction. The hipster is the Bloom that offers himself up to the world as a tenable form of life,
and to do so constrains himself to a strict discipline of lies.

The final consumer of existence, stricken by a definitive incredulousness concerning both

people and language, the hipster lives on the horizon of an endless experimentation on
himself. He has circumscribed the volume of his being and has decided to never get out of it,
if not to ensure the self-promotion of his own sterility.

Thus, he has replaced the emptiness of experience with the experience of emptiness, while
waiting for the adventure hes always ready for but never comes: hes already written out all
the possible scenarios. In a deceived ecstasy, the solitary crowd of hipsters, always-already
disapperared, always-already forgotten, pursue their wandering path like a raft full of
suicides, lost in a depressing ocean of images and abstractions. And that crowd has nothing
to communicate, nothing but conventional formulas for absent enjoyment and a life with no
object within a furnished nothingness.

The metropolis appears, moreover, as the homeland of all freely selected mimetic rivalries,
the sorry but continuous celebration of the fetishism of little differences. PEOPLE play out
all year-round a tragicomedy of separation: the more people are isolated, the more they
resemble one another; the more they resemble one another, the more they detest one
another; and the more they detest one another the more they isolate themselves. And where
men can no longer recognize each other as the participants in building a common world,
everything only further catalyzes a chain reaction, a collective fission.

The teachings of the metropolis show, from different angles, the extent to which the loss of
experience and the loss of community are one and the same thing. It must however be taken
into account, in spite of the nostalgia that a certain romanticism so enjoys cultivating even in
its enemies, that before our era there had not, and had never been, any community. And
these are not two contradictory affirmations. Before Bloom, before separation perfected,
before the unreserved abandon that is ours-- before, then, the perfect devastation of all
substantial ethos, all community could be but a hummus of falsehoods a false
belonging, to a class, a nation, a milieu and a source of limitation: and anyway, if it were
otherwise it would not have been annihilated. Only a radical alienation from the Common
was able to make the primordial Common burst forth in such a way that solitude, finiteness,
and exposedness - that is, the only true bond between people could also appear as the

only possible bond between them. What PEOPLE call a community today, while gazing out
upon the past, obviously shares in this primordial Common, but in a reversible way, because
its just second-hand. And so its up to us to have for the first time an experience of real
community, a community based on the honest assumption of our separation, exposedness,
and finiteness.

Following Blooms example, the metropolis simultaneously materializes the total loss of
community and the infinite possibility of regaining it.

The elucidation of the possibilities contained in our times depends exclusively on whether we
consider the Bloom figure. Blooms eruption into history determines, for our party, the
need to completely rebuild our foundations, both in theory and practice. All analysis and all
action that does not absolutely take Bloom into account will damn itself to eternalizing the
present exile, because Bloom, since hes not an individuality, doesnt let himself be
characterized by anything he says, does, or manifests. Each moment is for him a moment of
decision. He has no stable attributes whatsoever. No habits, no matter how far he pursues
his repetition of them, are susceptible to conferring any being upon him. Nothing adheres to
him, and he doesnt adhere to anything that may seem to be his, not even society, which
would like to support itself upon him. To cast a light on these times, we must consider that
there is on the one hand the mass of Blooms and on the other the mass of acts. All truth
flows from this.

A Genealogy of Bloom-Consciousness

Bartleby is an office employee.

The diffusion of mass intellectual labor within the Spectacle, in which conventional knowledge
counts as exclusive competency, has an obvious relationship with the form of consciousness
that is proper to Bloom. So much so that except in situations where abstract knowledge
dominates over all vital milieus, outside of the organized sleep of a world produced entirely as
a symbol, Blooms experience never attains the form of a lived continuum which he might add
onto himself; rather it just starts to look like a series of inassimilable shocks.

Thus he has had to create an organ to protect him against the uprooting that the currents
and discordances of his external milieu threaten him with: instead of reacting with his
sensibilities to this uprooting, Bloom reacts essentially with his intellect, and the
intensification of consciousness that the same cause produces ensures its psychic

preponderance. Thus the reaction to these phenomena is buried in the least sensitive psychic
organ, the one that is most distant from the depths of being. His pure consciousness is,
then, the only thing that Bloom manages to recognize as his own, but it is a consciousness
that has become autonomous from life, that no longer feeds it but merely observes it, and in
its lapse, muzzles itself.

Bloom cannot take part in the world in an inner way. He only ever goes into it in exception to
himself. Thats why he has such a singular disposition towards distraction, towards deja-vus,
towards clichs, and above all why he has such an atrophy of memory that confines him in an
eternal present; its also why hes so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer
him abstract sensations we should here mention speed and sliding, which are also
bloomesque enjoyments but this time only insofar as they are abstraction itself arising as
sensation.

Everything that Bloom lives, does, and feels remains something external to him. And when
he dies, he dies like a baby, like someone whos never learned anything. With Bloom, the
relations of consumption have extended themselves over the totality of existence, and over
the totality of what exists. In Blooms case, commodity propaganda has so radically
triumphed that he effectively conceives of his world not as the fruit of a long history, but like
a primitive man conceives of the forest: as his natural surroundings. A number of things
become clear about Bloom when hes looked at from this angle. Because Bloom is indeed a
primitive man, but hes an abstract primitive. It would be enough to summarize the
provisional state of the question in a formula: Bloom is the eternal adolescence of humanity.
The Replacement of the Worker Type by the Bloom Figure

The recent mutations in the modes of production within late capitalism have done much to
move things towards universal bloomification. The period of the classical proletariat, which
ended at the dawn of the 1970s, itself made a proud contribution to this
bloomification. Statute-regulated, hierarchical wage labor in effect slowly replaced all other
forms of social belonging, in particular replacing all the organic, traditional ways of life. It
was also then that the dissociation of singular man and his social being began: all power
being no more than simply functionaltherein, that is, delegated anonymously, each I which
attempted to affirm itself never affirmed anything but its anonymity. But although there was
in the classical wage system only power deprived of a subject and subjects deprived of power,
the possibility remained because of the relative stability of employment and a certain
rigidity in the hierarchies that the subjective totality of a large number of men could still be
mobilized.

After the 1970s, the relative guarantee of stable employment, which allowed commodity
society to impose itself as the replacement for a particular social formation the traditional
order whose primary virtue was this guarantee of stability, lost all necessity upon the
annihilation of its adversary. So then a process of introducing greater flexibility into
production began, of giving the exploited an ever more precarious status; this is a situation
we are still in and which has even today still not attained to its final limit. It has now been
almost three decades that the industrialized world has been in an autonomic involution phase
where the classical wage system is dismantling itself step by step, anddriving itself on the
basis of such dismantlement. We have since then been watching the abolition of wage
society on the wage societys own terrain, that is, within the domination-relations that it
commands. Work here ceases to carry out its function as a powerful substitute for the
objective ethical fabric, and no longer holds the place of the traditional forms of ethics, which
anyway have for a long time now been emptied out and dissolved. (Paolo
Virno, Opportunism, Cynicism, and Terror). All the intermediary screens between the
atomized individual, owner of no more than his labor power, and the market - where he
must sell it - have been liquidated to such an extent that now each person stands in total
isolation before the crushing autonomous social totality. Nothing from then on could prevent
the so-called post-fordist forms of production from becoming generalized, and with them
flexibility, tense flow, mobility, project based management and enhanced tasks for
polyvalent agents. Such an organization of labor, the efficiency of which rests on the
inconsistency, autonomy, and opportunism of the producers, has the merit of making
impossible any kind of identification on the part of men with their own social function; in
other words, it is highly Bloom-generative.

poor substantiality

Born of the acknowledgement of a general hostility towards wage labor that manifested itself
after 1968 in all industrialized nations, the present organization of production was devised to
work on the basis of that very hostility. And so, while its flagship-commodities cultural
commodities are born of an activity which is foreign to the narrow-minded framework of
wage labor, getting it into a totally optimal state requires tricking everyone; that is, it rests
upon the indifference, the repulsion, even, that people feel towards their activity Capitals
present utopia is a society where the totality of surplus value comes from a generalized
coping phenomenon. As you can see, its labors alienation itself thats been put to work.

In this context, a mass marginality begins to take shape where exclusion is not, as PEOPLE
would have us believe, the short-term drop in status of a certain fraction of the population,
but the fundamental relationship that each person has with his own participation in social life,
and above all the one the producer has with what he produces. Work has now ceased to be

bound up with man as something specific to him; it is now only perceived by Blooms as a
contingent form of the general social oppression. Unemployment is but the visible concretion
of the foreignness of each person to their own existence in the world of the authoritarian
commodity.

Bloom thus also appears as the product of the quantitative and qualitative decomposition of
wage-labor society; Bloom is the humanity that corresponds to the mode of production of a
society thats become definitively asocial, and one that none of its members feel in any way
connected to anymore. The fate prepared for him, to have to adapt himself without respite to
an environment in constant upheaval, is also his apprenticeship in an exile in this world,
which he must nevertheless act like hes participating in, in the absence of anybody really
participating in it at all.

But beyond all his forced lies, he discovers himself little by little to be the man of nonparticipation, as well as a creature of non-belonging.

To whatever extent the crisis of industrial society heats up, the livid figure of Bloom peeks out
from under the titanic magnitudes of the Worker.

The World of the Authoritarian Commodity

One drives the beasts out to pasture with whip lashes.
- Heraclitus

For domination and by this term we cannot properly understand anything other than the
symbolically mediated relations of complicitybetween the dominators and the dominated in
proportion to the autonomy that the Blooms acquire relative to their assigned social positions,
there is a strategic need to extract ever more appropriations, and to constantly carry out
new subjugations.

Maintaining the central mediation of everything by commodities thus demands that ever
larger sections of humanitys being need to be brought under control. From this perspective,
one cannot fail to note the extreme diligence with which the Spectacle has burdened Bloom

with the heavy duty of Being, the prompt solicitude with which it has taken charge of his
education, and of defining the complete panoply of conforming personalities in sum, one
cannot fail to notice how its been able to extend its grip over the totality of what may be said
and seen, and the codes according to which all relationships and identities are to be
built. The development of Biopower since the 18th century, a development whose qualitative
leap took place with the Total Mobilization of 1914, can only be understood strictly in light of
this. The taking of control over men as living beings within biopolitical democracies, the
application of the social forces of integration even to bodies, the ever tighter management of
the conditions of our existence, comprise dominations response to the disintegration of
individuality, to the erasure of the subject within Bloom. Its response, in sum, to the fact
that it has lost its grip.

The productive character of power as it circulates in the world of the

authoritarian commodity can be illustrated, among other ways, by the manner in which the
control of behaviors operates therein: most often it is enough simply to master the
organization of public space, the arrangement of dcor, the material organization of
infrastructure so as to maintain order; and to maintain order by the simple power of coercion
that the anonymous mass exerts over each of its elements, so as to make that mass respect
the abstract norms in force. In a downtown street, a metro train aisle, or among a team
of collaborators, the perfection of the apparatus of surveillance resides precisely in
the absence of any surveillance watchmen.

Panoptical control is only all the more operative when its faceless. In the final analysis, it
doesnt care at all whether its subjects reject it or accept it, as long as they submit to
it outwardly.

Militarization of Disaster, Concentration of Domination

Since 1914, commodity domination has only been able to respond to the enormity of its
disaster with the use of Total Mobilizations. It intends, with the use of a state of exception sometimes manifest, sometimes latent, but always permanent - to contain the overflowing
flood of its inconsistencies.

The first of these inconsistencies has to do with the fact that its development demands in the
same movement both the production of ever more extensive possibilities and the general
prohibition against making them real. Commodity domination must thus simultaneously
produce both an overabundance of resources and the overabundance of terror necessary in
order that no one make use of them. Bloom is the man of this terror, the one that spreads it
and the one that suffers through it: he is the collaborator.

The recent period, over the course of which brutal crises of control have claimed to put whole
sectors of what exists into step with a categorical imperative of transparency and traceability,
is marked by a rapid movement of the concentration of domination.

Only a minority of conformed subjectivities, from whom PEOPLE require a new fusion between
life and work, personality and function, are co-opted into the really vital positions, which
meanwhile have become ever fewer. The formation of this Praetorian Guard of Capital, whose
elements are not interchangeable (contrary to the situation of the large mass of wage
workers), is part of this concentration of domination, which is inseparable from the
militarization of disaster. As for the excess people, they essentially are set to work keeping
each other busy, reciprocally dispossessing one another of their idleness, which indeed takes
some real effort.

At the moment of dominations general restructuring, Bloom finds himself hunted down
everywhere and in everyone, since he is just as much the idle person as he is the foreigner or
the pariah. Thats why he has to camouflage himself under so much artificiality,
because Bloom is the civil figure at the heart of the universal militarization of disaster.

Poor Substantiality
All that you are, you are through me; everything that I am, I only am through you.
Hitler

Bloom lives in a state of terror, above all in the terror of being recognized as Bloom.

Everything happens as if the mimetic hell we suffocate in was unanimously judged preferable
to our encountering ourselves.

Biopower organizes itself ever more visibly as a directed economy of subjectivations and
resubjectivations.

There is, thus, a certain inevitability about the feverish enthusiasm for the industrial
production of personality-kits, of disposable identities and other hysterical
temperaments. Rather than really examining their central emptiness, the majority of people
recoil before the vertigo of a total absence of ownership, of a radical disinclination, and thus,
at root, they recoil before the yawning chasm of their freedom. They prefer to be engulfed
ever more deeply in poor substantiality, towards which everything pushes them, after
all. And so it must be expected that, hidden in some unequally latent depression they will
discover some buried root or other, some spontaneous belonging, some incombustible
quality. French, outcast, woman, artist, homosexual, Briton, citizen, fireman, Muslim,
Buddhist, or unemployed person anythings fine as long as it lets one moo out that
miraculous I AM in some tone or another, eyes glazed over and gazing off into the infinite
distance.

It doesnt matter what empty and consumable particularity gets taken on, or what social role
is at hand, because its only all about warding off your own nothingness. And since all
organic life fails in light of these pre-chewed forms, they never take long to quietly reenter
the general system of commodity exchange and commodity equivalence, which reflects and
pilots them.

Poor substantiality thus means that PEOPLE have put all their substance on record within the
Spectacle and that the latter operates as the universal ethos of the celestial community of
spectators. But a cruel ruse makes it so that in the end all this does is accelerate even more
the process of the collapse of all substantial forms of existence. The man of poor
substantialitys primary non-resolution inexorably spreads itself out underneath the waltz of
dead identities, where he always successively leads the dance. What should mask a lack of
individuality not only fails to do so, it also increases the mutability of what could have lived
off it.

Bloom triumphs above all in those who flee from him.

Bloom is the Positive Reality Pointed Towards by the Empire of Simulacra

It is vain to claim substantiality within the Spectacle. Nothing in the final analysis is less
authentic or more suspect than authenticity. Anything that claims to have a name of its
own or claims to adhere to itself can only be usurpation or stupidity.

By imposing upon each living singularity the need to consider itself as specific - that is, from
a formal perspective, from a point of view outside of itself - the Spectacle tears it apart from
inside, and introduces an inequality, a difference into it. It forces the I to consider itself as an
object, to reify itself, to understand itself as an Other. Consciousness thus finds itself pulled
into a flight without respite, into a perpetual split stimulated by the imperative for anyone
who refuses to let himself be won over by a lethal peace to detach itself from all
substance. By applying to all the manifestations of life its tireless work of denomination,
which is thus a work of anxious reflexivity, the Spectacle wrenches the world out of its
immediacy with continual blasting. In other words, it produces and reproduces Bloom:
the thug that knows hes a thug is no longer a thug, hes a Bloom playing the thug.

Many of the things that we call by names that are thousands of years old ceased to exist long
ago. We dont need neologisms to replace the old words: we should just replace them all
with Bloom. For instance, theres no such thing anymore as that supposedly substantial
reality that used to be called the family. There arent even any more fathers, mothers, sons
or sisters; theres nothing but Blooms playing family, Blooms playing dad, mom, son or
sister. And these days one finds so few philosophers, artists, or writers: theres hardly
anything but Blooms anymore in these extras roles, just Blooms producing cultural
commodities and striking the standard poses becoming of their position. To top it off, even
farmers themselves have ended up by deciding that theyll have to play farmer. It just
seems like that would be more profitable.

Its forbidden to us under the present regime of things to durably identify ourselves with any
specific content, only with the movement of tearing ourselves away from it.

Man is the indestructible being

that can be infinitely destroyed.
Blanchot

The Indestructible is one; it is each man in full,

and all of us have it in common.

It is the unchangeable cement
that bonds men forever.
Kafka

Ah, this night of the world,

this empty nothingness that contains
everything in its abstract simplicity,
this form of pure disquiet
Hegel
Sua Cuique Persona [to each his own mask]

In the present reality, the question of whos masked and who isnt is moot. Its simply
grotesque to claim to establish oneself outside of the Spectacle, outside of a mode of
disclosure in which everything manifests itself in such a way that its appearance becomes
autonomous, that is, as a mask. Its costume, as a costume, is the truth of Bloom; that
is, theres nothing behind it, or rather and this unveils much more casual horizons behind
it is the great Nothing, which is a potential power.

That the mask comprises the general form of appearance within the universal comedy from
which only hypocrites still think they can escape doesnt mean that theres no more truth,
just that truth has become something quite subtle and biting.

The figure of Bloom finds its highest and most contemptible expression in the language of
flattery, and in this ambiguity theres no room for whimpering or rejoicing, just for fighting.

Here the Self sees its certainty of itself as such become the thing most emptied of essence;
it sees its pure personality become absolute impersonality. The spirit of its gratitude is thus
just as much the sentiment of this profound abjection as it is that of the most profound
revolt. Since the pure I sees itself outside itself, and all torn to shreds in this shredding of

everything that has any continuity and universality to it, what we call Law, Good, and Rights
is disintegrated in one fell swoop and falls into the abyss.
(Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind)

The reign of travesty always just slightly precedes the final death of a given reign. Wed do
wrong to take off dominations mask, since its always known itself to be threatened by the
element of night, savagery, and impersonality that are introduced when masks are
worn. What isevil about the Spectacle is rather that faces themselves are petrified until they
become like masks, and that a central authority sets itself up as the master of
metamorphoses.

The living are those who are able to fathom the words of the maniac tremblingly proclaiming:
Happy is he who in his disgust for empty, satisfied faces decides to cover himself with a
mask: he will be the first to rediscover the raging drunkenness of all that dances to its death
over the waterfall of time.

Alienation also means being alienated from alienation.

Hegel

Historically speaking, its in the figure of Bloom that alienation from the Common attains to its
maximum degree of intensity. Its not so easy to imagine the extent to which the existence
of man as a singular being and his existence as a social being have in appearances had to
become foreign to one another in order that it become possible to speak of social bonds,
that is, to grasp mans being-in-common as something objective, as something exterior to
him, and as something confronting him.

The true front lines pass right through the fine milieu of Blooms, and determine their schizoid
neutrality. The militarization of disaster spreads out like a final warning, given to him so that
he will choose sides: he must either endorse in an unconditional manner whichever social
role,whichever servitude, or starve to death.

We are dealing here with a kind of urgent measure taken quite ordinarily by regimes in
desperate straits; one that simply allows Bloom to be hidden, but not suppressed.

But, for the time being, thats good enough. The essential thing is that the eye that sees the
world in a different way than the Spectacle does can be sure that PEOPLE have never seen
any such thing this side of the Pyrenees whats that you say? A what? A Bloom??? and
that its just a metaphysicians chimera; and thus that will make its critiques on that
basis. All that matters is that bad faith can become a clear conscience, and that it can
counterpose to us its time-stamped improbabilities. For the rest, how could that which
PEOPLE have essentially dispossessed of all appearance ever appear as such in the Spectacle?

It is Blooms fate to never be visible except to the extent that he participates in poor
substantiality, that is, only to the extent that he disowns himself as Bloom.

All the radicalness of the figure of Bloom is concentrated in the fact that the choice he finds
himself permanently faced with has on the one side the best and on the other side the worst,
with no transition zone between the two accessible to him. He is the neutral core that casts a
light on the analogical relationship between the highest point and the lowest point. His lack
of interest can comprise a great opening toagap, or the desire to simply operate like a gear
in a technocratic extermination enterprise, for instance. In the same way, an absence of
personality can prefigure the transcendence of the classical petrified personality, as well as
the terminal inconsistency of the metropolitanhipster.

There is the me ne frego [I dont give a damn] of fascism, and there is the me ne frego of
the insurgent. There is the banality of evil, and there is also the banality of good. But in
circumstances of domination, Blooms banality always manifests itself as the banality of
evil. Thus, for the 20th century, Bloom would have been Eichmann much more than Elser (1);
as for Eichmann, Hannah Arendt tells us, it was obvious to everyone that he was not a
monster, and that one couldnt help thinking that he was really a clown. It should be
mentioned in passing that there is no difference in their nature between Eichmann who
identified purely and completely with his criminal function, and thehipster who, unable to
assume his fundamental non-belonging to the world, nor the consequences of an exile
situation, devotes himself to the frenetic consumption of the symbols of belonging that this
society sells so expensively. But in a more general sense, everywhere PEOPLE talk about
economy, the banality of evil prospers. And it is there peeking out from under the
allegiances of all kinds that men swear to necessity, doin alright, to the thats the way it
is by way of all work is honorable.

And it is there that the extreme reaches of unhappiness begin, when all commitments are
replaced by the commitment to surviving. And commitment / attachment is thus stripped
naked. With no object but itself. Hell.

The Inner Man

The pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also form the illusion of pure interiority.
Bloom is that being who has taken up into himself the emptiness that surrounds him.
Hunted out of any place of his own, he himself has become a place.
Banished from the world, he has become a world.
It was not in vain that Paul, the Gnostics, and later on the Christian mystics drew a distinction
between the inner man and outer man, because in Bloom this separation has taken
place historically.

The marginal condition of those who, like Ruysbroeck the Admirables inner man, feel more
inwardly inclined than outwardly inclined, who live anywhere at all, and among anyone at
all, in the depths of solitude sheltered from multiplicity, sheltered from places, sheltered
from men, has since then become the common condition.

However, it is a rare person who, having experienced it positively, has had the strength
to want it. Pessoa:
To create myself, I destroyed myself; I exteriorized myself so totally within myself that
inside myself I only exist outwardly. I am the living stage over which various actors pass,
playing various theater pieces.

But for the time being if Bloom resembles this inner man its most often only in a negative
manner. The non-essential interior of his personality hardly contains more than the feeling
that hes found himself to be pulled along on an endless fall towards an underlying dark and
all-enveloping space, as if he were ceaselessly jumping off into himself while
disintegrating. Drop by drop, in uniform beads, his very being oozes, rushes away, and
bleeds out. His interiority is less and less a space or a substance, and more and more
a threshold and its passage.

And this is also what makes Bloom fundamentally a free spirit, because he is an empty spirit.

Whoever would thus leave himself behind shall truly be returned to himself
Meister Eckhart

The ecstatic essence of Bloom is expressed as follows:

IN EVERYTHING THAT HE IS,

BLOOM IS OUTSIDE OF HIMSELF.

In the empire of Biopower and autonomous publicity the tyranny of the impersonal, of what
PEOPLE say, do, or think the ecstatic structure of human existence becomes manifest in the
form of a generalized schizoid state. Each person now distinguishes between his true self,
something pure, detached from all objectifiable manifestations, and the system of his false
self, social, acted, constrained, inauthentic.

In each of his determinations in his body, in his qualities, in his gestures, in his language
Bloom clearly feels that he is leaving himself behind, that he has left himself behind. And
he contemplates that egress. And he is that wandering among those attributes, in that
contemplation.
His becoming is a becoming-foreign.

Lon Bloy, in his time, compared the capitalist to the mystic; his The Blood of the
Poor dedicates a good number of pages to a rather free interpretation of the fetishistic
character of the commodity:
This money, which is but the visible figure of the blood of Christ circulating through all his
limbs, far from loving it for its material enjoyment, which he deprives himself of, (the
greedy man) adores it in spirit and in truth, like the Saints adore the God that gives them
their duty of penitence and their martyrs glory. He adores it for the sake of those who do
not adore it; he suffers in the place of those who do not wish to suffer for money. The

greedy are mystics! Everything they do is done in view of pleasing an invisible God whose
visible and so laboriously sought-after simulacrum showers them in tortures and ignominy.

If the capitalist is similar to the mystic in his activity, Bloom is similar to the mystic in
his passivity. And in fact, nothing resembles Blooms existential situation better than
the detachment of the mystics. His reified consciousness effectuates upon it a definite
propensity towards contemplation, whereas his indifference corresponds to that honorable
detachment (that is) none other than the fact that the mind remains immobile in the face of
all the vicissitudes of love and suffering, honor, shame, and outrage. Until paralysis sets in.

In the end, Bloom reminds one of Meister Eckharts God, a God that is defined as he who has
no name, who is the negation of all names, and has never had a name, like the pure
nothingness for whom all things are nothingness.

Under its perfection, Blooms alienation conceals a truly primordial alienation.

CLOWN

One day.
One day, maybe soon.
One day Ill pull up the anchor
that keeps my ship far from the high seas.
With that kind of courage
one needs to have in order to be nothing and nothing but nothing,
I will let go of everything that had seemed to be so indissolubly close to me.
Ill cut it off, Ill overturn it,
Il smash it, Ill make it collapse.
Disgorging in one fell stroke my miserable prudishness, my miserable passwords and
sequences, with them dropping like dominoes.

Drained out of the abscess of having to be someone, Ill drink of life-giving space once more

With ridicule, by debasement (what is debasement?), bursts, emptiness, and with a total
dissipation-derision-purging, I will expel from myself the form in which I was believed to be
so attached, made up of, coordinated by, and well-matched to my entourage and my peers,
so worthy, my ever so worthy peers.

Reduced to a humility evoking catastrophe, a perfect leveling like after being intensely
frightened.
Brought back immeasurably to my true rank, the lowly rank that I dont know what
idea/ambition made me abandon.
Annihilated in my haughtiness, my esteem,
lost in a far away place
(or not even), with no name, no identity.
A CLOWN, tearing down in roaring laughter, guffaws, and grotesqueness
the sense of my own importance that I had
in spite of my seeing myself in such a clear light;
I will take the plunge,
with no stipend, into the underlying
Infinity-mind open to all,
and myself open to a new
and incredible dewdrop
because of my being null
and blank,
and laughable

Henri Michaux, Paintings

Let Us Share Our Poverty, Not Our Misery!

For Meister Eckhart, the poor man is he who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has
nothing.

Eventually dispossessed and deprived of everything, mutely foreign to his world, and as
ignorant of himself as of what surrounds him, Bloom realizes, at the heart of the historical
process and in all its fullness, the truly metaphysical magnitude of the concept of poverty.

Indeed, they needed every bit of the dense tackiness of an era where economy has served as
metaphysics in order to make an economic notion out of poverty (now that this era is coming
to an end, it becomes obvious once again that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but
misery, and that of those three, only poverty has any perfection about it. Poverty means the
state of he who can make use of anything, having nothing specifically his own, and misery
means the state of he who cannot make use of anything, whether because he has too much,
or because he doesnt have the time, or because he has no community).

Thus, everything that the idea of wealth has been able to carry through history, all the
bourgeois tranquility, all the domestic bliss, all the immanent familiarity with the readily
perceived reality here below, is something that Bloom can appreciate, out of nostalgia or
simulation, but that he cannot experience. For him, happiness has become a very old idea,
and not only in Europe. Together with all interest, and all ethos, the very possibility of
use value has been lost. Bloom only understands the supernatural language of exchange
value. He gazes upon the world with eyes that see nothing; nothing but the nothingness of
value. His desires themselves are only roused towards absences, abstractions, not the least
of which is the YoungGirls ass (2). Even when Bloom appears to want something, he never
ceases to not-want, since he wants emptily, since he wants emptiness.

Thats why wealth, in the world of the authoritarian commodity, has become something
grotesque and incomprehensible, merely a cluttered form of miserable poverty.

Wealth is now merely something that possesses you; something PEOPLE restrain you with.

Agap [non-erotic, benevolent love]

ja wohl, alles scheisse! [yes sir-ee! Its all shit!] Your conscience is clean. We were right,
all youve got to do is take a look at them! You are more mystified than anyone, and by us,
we who are taking you to the endpoint of your error. Relax, we arent going to set you
straight; well just take your outrageous remarks to their necessary conclusions. Well let
ourselves go along with it even to the death, and youll see the vermin dying.

We dont need to wait for the liberation of bodies or count on them to be resurrected for us to
be right. Our reasoning triumphs now, living and like waste. Its true that it isnt plain to
see. But were just as right as you are unlikely to understand anything about it, anything at
all. Not only do we have reason on our side, we are the right thinking that youve pushed into
a clandestine existence.
And thus less than ever can we admire any of these apparent victories. Understand this well:
you have transformed reason into conscience. You have remade the unity of man. You have
manufactured the most diehard conscience. You can never again hope to manage to make
us simultaneously take your place and remain in our own skin, which would condemn
us. Nobody here will ever become his own SS.
Robert Antelme, The Human Race

Bloom is the man in whom everything has been socialized, but socialized as private. Nothing
is more exclusively common than what he calls his individual happiness. Bloom is ordinary
and characterless even in his desire to stand out as a singular individual. For Bloom, all
substantial differences between him and other men has been effectively abolished. All that
remains is a pure difference without content. And everything, in the world of the
authoritarian commodity, aims to maintain this pure difference, which is pure
separation. And so Bloom may still answer to a particular name, but that name no longer
means anything.

All the misunderstandings regarding Bloom have to do with the depth of the gazes that
people allow themselves to stare at him with. In any case, the award for blindness has to go
to the sociologists, who like Castoriadis talk about a retreat into the private sphere without
clarifying that this sphere itself has been entirely socialized. At the other extreme we find
those who have let themselves go so far as even to go into Bloom. And the stories they bring
back all resemble in one way or another the experience that the narrator of Monsieur

Teste had upon discovering what that character was like at home: Ive never had a
greater impression of the ordinary. It was an ordinary, characterless dwelling, similar at any
given point to the theorems, and perhaps just as useful. My hosts existence took place
within the most general home, the most common of interiors. Bloom is, indeed, the man that
exists in the most common of interiors.

It is only in those places and circumstances where the Spectacles effect is temporarily
suspended that the most intimate truth about Bloom comes out: that he is, at bottom,
in agap. Such a suspension arises in an exemplary manner in uprisings, but also at the
moment when we talk to a stranger in the streets of the metropolis, and in the final analysis
anywhere that people must recognize themselves, beyond all specifics, as simply people; as
separate beings, finite and exposed. It is then not rare to see perfect strangers show us their
common humanity, by protecting us from some danger, by offering us their whole pack of
cigarettes instead of just the one cigarette wed asked for, or by spending a quarter-hour
helping us find the address wed been looking for when otherwise they are usually so stingy
with their time. Such phenomena are in no way explainable by an interpretation using the
classical ethnological terms of gift and counter-gift like a certain kind of bar-room sociality, on
the contrary, might indeed be. No hierarchical rank is in play here. Theres no glory being
sought after. The only thing that can explain it is the ethics of infinite gift, which, in the
Christian tradition, and specifically the Franciscan, is known as agap.

Agap is part of the existential situation of man that has informed commodity society in this,
its final age. And thats the state commodity society has left mankind in, by making it so
foreign to itself and its desires. In spite of all indications to the contrary, and as disturbing as
it may be, this society is coming down with a serious kindness infection.

Be Different Be Yourself!
(an underwear ad)

In many respects, commodity society cant do without Bloom. The return to effectiveness of
spectacular representations, known as consumption, is entirely conditioned by the mimetic
competition that Blooms inner nothingness impels him towards. The tyrannical judgments of
the impersonal, of what PEOPLE will think, would remain just another item in a universal
mockery if being did not, in the Spectacle, mean being different, or at least making an
effort to. So its not so much, as good old Simmel put it, that a persons personal, special
importance comes about through their having a certain impersonal trait, but rather that the
special importance of impersonality would be impossible without a certain labor on the part of
individual persons.

Naturally what is reinforced with the originality that PEOPLE give to Bloom is never his
singularity, but the impersonal PEOPLE-ness itself, in other words, poor substantiality. All
recognition within the Spectacle is but recognition of the Spectacle.

Without Bloom, therefore, the commodity would be no more than a purely formal principle
deprived of all contact with becoming.

I Would Prefer Not To

I walked amongst them as a foreigner, but none of them saw that I was one. I lived among
them as a spy, but none of them not even me suspected that I was one. All of them took
me for one of their relatives: no one knew that thered been a change-out when I was
born. And so I was a peer of the others that in no way resembled them, the brother of each
and all but without being from any of their families.
I came from vast lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself, but I never
mentioned these countries. My footprints on the theater-floors and pavements were similar
to theirs, but my heart was far away, all the while beating quite near, the fictive master of an
exiled, foreign body
No one really knew me underneath this mask of similarity, no one even knew that I was
wearing one because no one knew that there are masked beings here in this world. No one
ever dreamed that there was always someone else standing beside me, which in the final
analysis was actually me. I was always believed to be identical to myself.
Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disturbances

At the same time, one things for sure Bloom carries within himself the destruction of
commodity society. In Bloom we find that same ambivalent character seen in all the realities
in which the transcendence of commodity society on its own terrain manifest itself.

In this dissolution, it is the foundations themselves, which have for a long time now been
deserted, rather than the great edifices of the superstructure that are the first to be
attacked. The invisible precedes the visible, and the basis of the world changes
imperceptibly.

Bloom bears the end of the world within himself, but does not declare its abolition; he just
empties it of meaning and reduces it to the state of a left-over husk awaiting demolition. In
this sense one might affirm that the metaphysical upheaval that Bloom is a synonym for is
already behind us, but that the bulk of its consequences is yet to come.

With Bloom, for whom all the self-intimacy that gave rise to private property is lacking, the
latter has lost all substance: what is really left that is truly proper to anyone, that is really
anyones own? What is left, a fortiori, that is private, in the proper sense? Private property
now subsists merely in an empirical manner, as a dead abstraction gliding along above a
reality that escapes it ever more visibly.

Bloom doesnt contest the law, he lays it down. And how could the law not have been
definitively outdated with the appearance of this being who is not a subject, whose acts bear
relation to no particular personalty at all, and whose behaviors are no more dependent on the
bourgeois categories of interest and motivation than they are on passion or responsibility?

Faced with Bloom, thus, the law loses all its competence to deliver justice what could
justice mean to a totally indifferent being? and it is only when PEOPLE leave it strictly to
police terror that it can be applied at all. Because in the world of the always-similar, we
stagnate just as much in jail as we do at Club Med: life is everywhere identically absent.

Thats why its so important to domination for prisons to become places of prolonged torture,
and for that to be well known by everyone.

But it is the economy itself, and with it all notions of utility, credit, or instrumental rationality,
that Bloom has above all made a thing of the past. Thats the reason for the well planned
and public constitution of a lumpen-proletariat in all the nations where late capitalism reigns:
the lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from abandoning his essential detachment by the
abrupt but frightening threat of hunger. Because from the economic point of view, this non-

practical man (Musil) is a disastrously clumsy producer, and a totally irresponsible

consumer. Even his egoism itself is in decline: it is an egoism without ego.

If Bloom hasnt failed to devastate classical politics in its very principles, its in part only by
default (there can be no more imaginable establishment of equivalence between everything
within the universal than there can be senatorial elections among rats each rat is an equal
and inalienable representative of his species, primus inter pares [first among equals]) but
also in part by excess, because Bloom moves spontaneously within the un-representable,
which is Bloomness itself.

So; what can we think, then, of the troubles that this ungrateful son causes the Spectacle,
from under which all characters and all roles slip out with a little murmur saying I would
prefer not to?

Tiqqun
For the awakened ones, there is a world that is one and common to all,
whereas for the sleepers each turns away from it towards their own.
Heraclitus

Tiqqun goes to the root of things. It is still only crossing through purgatory. It carries out its
work methodically. Tiqqun is the only possible outlook for revolution. Not the revolution
that must be waited for, much less the revolution that we can prepare: but the revolution
that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a temporality operating
internally within history.

Tiqqun is not a determinable point in the future, with a validity period more or less short,
even if it is also that, but rather it is the real movement that abolishes the existing state of
things.

Tiqqun is always already there; that is, it is but the manifestation process of what exists,
which also entails the annulment of that which does not exist.

The fragile positivity of this world has to do precisely with the fact that it is nothing, nothing
but the suspension of Tiqqun. This epochal suspension can now be felt everywhere. And
there really isnt anything else that can truly be felt at all anymore.

Bloom is a part of Tiqqun. Precisely because he is the man of full-fledged nihilism, his fate is
either to make his escape from nihilism or perish. The intuition of the proletariat, for Marx,
aims at that, but its trajectory ends up warped before it reaches its target. So we read,
in The German Ideology: The productive forces are confronted by the great mass of
individuals, from whom these forces have been torn, and who, all the real substance of their
lives having been frustrated, have become abstract beings, but precisely for that reason are
able to establish relationships with one another as individuals.

But it is precisely to the extent that he is not an individual that Bloom establishes relations
with his peers. The individual carries within his deceptive integrity, in an atavistic manner,
the repression of communication, or the need for its artificiality. The ecstatic opening of
mankind, and specifically of Bloom, that I that is a THEY, that THEY that is a I, is the very
thing that the fiction of the individual was invented to counter.

Bloom does not experience a particular finiteness or a specific separation; he experiences an

ontological finiteness and separation common to all men. Furthermore, Bloom is only
alone in appearances, because he is not alone in his being alone; all men have that
solitude in common. He lives like a foreigner in his own country; non-existent and on the
margins of everything but all Blooms inhabit together their fatherland: Exile. All Blooms
belong indistinguishably to one and the same world, which is the world of forgetting
forgetting the world. And so, the Common is alienated, but only in appearances, because it is
even more alienated as the Common; the alienation of the Common only refers to the fact
that what is common to them appears to men as something particular, something of their
own, something private.

And this Common, issued from the alienation of the Common and formed by it, is none other
than the veritable and unique Common among mankind, its primordial alienation: finiteness,
solitude, exposedness. Here the most intimate coincides with the most general, and the most
private is the most shared.
Did You See Yourself When You Were Drunk?
They say hes dead since he has no taste for earthly things.
Meister Eckhart

As PEOPLE can easily see, all this sketches out a catastrophic possibility for commodity
domination, the realization of which it must ward off by all means: the possibility that Bloom
might come to want what he is and reappropriate his inappropriateness.

This society, that is, the set of situations that it authorizes, fears nothing more than Bloom,
that condemned man that has no business, no feelings, no attachments, no property, and
not even a name of his own. (Nechayev). It must be considered, even in the most miserable
of its details, as a formidable apparatus set up with the exclusive purpose of eternalizing the
Bloom Condition, which is a condition of suffering. In principle, entertainment is no more than
the politics devoted to such ends; eternalizing Blooms condition starts by distracting him
from it. Thence, as if in a cascade, come certain absolute necessities the necessity of
containing all manifestations of the general suffering, which presupposes an ever more
absolute control over appearances, and the necessity of painting pretty makeup on the alltoo-visible effects of that suffering, to which the totally disproportionate inflation of Biopower
is the response. Because at the confused point things have gotten to now,
the body represents, on a generic scale, the last performer of the irreducibility of human
beings to total alienation. Its through the bodys illnesses and dysfunction, and only through
them, that the demand for self-knowledge remains an immediate reality for each person. This
society would never have declared such an all-out war on Blooms suffering if it didnt
constitute in itself and in all its aspects an intolerable attack on the empire of positivity; if it
didnt go hand in hand with an immediate revocation of all the illusions of participation in its
flowery immanence.

Maintaining in everyday life the use of representations and categories that long ago became
inoperative; periodically imposing the most ephemeral but renovated versions of the most
gappy asses bridges of bourgeois morality; maintaining, beyond the intense obviousness of
their falsehood and expiration, the sad illusions of modernity; such are just a few chapters
in the heavy labor that the perpetuation of this total separation among people requires.

The impersonal THEY decides in advance on what is comprehensible, and what must be
rejected for its incomprehensibility. Bloom and his ecstasy are incomprehensible; they must
be rejected. His poverty is also reputed to be a pretty shady thing in alienated Publicity it is
quite true that capitalism has done all it can to make poverty identical to misery at its heart,
the property of a given thing always being essentiallythe right to deprive others of its
use. PEOPLE are even ready, in order to keep Bloom shameful of his poverty, to allow Bloom
to subjectivize himself in this shame. The executive failure will thus, in the panoply of
fashionable writers, find a lot to identify with and be reassured by: yes, abject man is
indeed on its way towards becoming an honorable form of life. Otherwise, he may turn
towards Buddhism, that nauseating, sordid, corny spirituality for oppressed wage workers,

which sees as already quite the excessive ambition the idea that it might teach its fascinated
and stupid faithful flock the art of wading in their own nullity. It is of absolutely primary
importance from dominations perspective that we never recognize ourselves as having all the
traits of Bloom, that we appear to ourselves and each other as opaque, terrifying objects. At
all costs Bloom must be given ideas, desires, and a subjectivity by the impersonal force of
PEOPLE. THEY give him everything he needs so that he can remain that mute man in whose
mouth the Spectacle puts the words it wants to hear. THEY arent even averse to wielding
Bloom against Bloom, turning his own impersonality against him, precisely by personifying
him, in society, the people, or even the average joe.

All this converges in a social sum that always puts an ever more exorbitant price on being
yourself, that is, it all converges in a strict assignment to a residence within one of the
identities recognized by autonomized Publicity.

Parallel to this, the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation become more and more
violent and their control more and more measured to the millimeter. And since this control
cant operate other than in a strict economy of time, in a synchrony, Bloom is henceforth
regularly exhorted to be proud of this or that, proud of being homo or techno, secondgeneration north African, black, or even a gang-member. No matter what, Bloom absolutely
must be something, anything, rather than nothing.

Mene, Tekel, Peres.

[your kingdoms days are numbered;
it has been weighed and found wanting;
and it is divided.]

Adorno speculated, in his work Prisms, that those men that no longer exist except through
others, being the absolute zon politicon, may certainly lose their identity, but they would at
the same time escape their grip on self-preservation, which ensures the coherence of the
best of worlds, as well as that of the old world. Total interchangeability would destroy the
substance of domination and show some promise for freedom.
Meanwhile, the Spectacle has had all the time in the world to test out the truth of such
conjectures, but has at the same time victoriously applied itself to wrecking the fulfillment of
that incongruous promise of freedom. Naturally, that wouldnt work out too well without

taking a tougher stance, and the commodity world thus had to become ever more implacable
in the exercise of its dictatorship.
From crises to recoveries, from recoveries to depressions, life in the Spectacle has since
1914 never ceased to become ever more stifling. A look of terror hangs on all gazes, even in
would-be popular celebrations. The planetary watchword of transparency explains the
present context of permanent war against Blooms opacity, as well as the deferred character
of the existence that arises from it.

As a first response to this situation we see appearing among Blooms not only a certain taste
for anonymity, but at the same time a certain defiance towards visibility, a hatred for things.
Theres a metaphysical hostility coming back again, a hostility towards that which exists, and
it threatens to burst at every moment and in every circumstance.

At the origin of this instability is a disorder, a disorder that comes from unused strength, from
a negativity that cant eternally remain unemployed, on pain of physically destroying those
experiencing that negativity.

Most often, that negativity remains silent, though as a result of its being so bottled up it
constantly manifests itself in a hysterical formalization of all human relationships. But here
already we are looking at the critical zone of totally disproportionate backlash against
repression. An ever more compact mass of crimes, of strange acts comprising a violence
and destruction with no apparent motive, besieges the everyday life of biopolitical
democracies in general, the Spectacle calls violence everything that it intends to handle
by force, everything that it would like to be able to wield all its arbitrary power against; and
this category only has any validity within the commodity mode of disclosure, which itself has
no validity, and which always hypostatizes the means relative to the ends, which here is all
activity itself, even to the detriment of its immanent significance.

Incapable of preventing them and even more incapable of understanding them, commodity
domination claims to be committed to not allowing any such attacks on the social control of
behavior. So it broadcasts its habitual saber-rattling about video-surveillance and zero
tolerance, the repression of uncivil behaviors and of the feeling of insecurity, as if the
surveillers themselves didnt need to be surveilled, as if the feeling of insecurity had not
been ontologically assigned to Bloom!

A socialist cop, high up in the bureaucracy of some Japanese teachers union, expresses in
the following passage his disturbance about the little Blooms under him: The phenomenon is
all the more concerning because the authors of these violent acts have often always been
such good kids. We used to get problem children; but today the kids dont revolt, they just
ditch out of school. And if we punish them, their reaction is totally disproportionate: they
just explode. (Le Monde, Friday April 16th, 1998). An infernal dialectic is at work here, one
that will tend to make such explosions become ever more frequent, fortuitous, and
ferocious as the massive and systematic character of the control necessary for their
prevention is ever more emphasized. It is a rarely disputed fact: we know from experience
that the violence of explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.

In Bloom, domination, which thought it prudent to impose the economy as a morality so that
commerce could make men soft, predictable, and inoffensive weve seen a number of
centuries worth of this now sees its project flipping over into its opposite: to wit, it appears
that homo economicus, in his perfection, is also what makes the economy outdated; and he
makes it outdated as that which, having deprived him of all substance, has made
him perfectly unpredictable.

The man without content, has, in the final analysis, the hardest time of anyone trying to
contain himself.

The Unavowable Enemy

In which every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party.

Faced with this unknown enemy in the sense that we can speak of an Unknown Soldier, that
is, a soldier that everyone knows to be unknown, singularized as an anybody, who has no
name, no face, no epic history of his own, who resembles nothing, but is present under his
camouflage everywhere in the order of possibilities dominations disquiet becomes more
and more clearly paranoid. The dedication it has now undertaken to carrying out its
decimation, even in its own ranks and against all odds, appears to the detached viewer as
rather a comedic spectacle.

Theres something objectively terrifying about the sad forty-year-old who, up to the moment
of the outbreak of total carnage, had been the most normal, the flattest, the most
insignificant of average men. No one had ever heard him declare his hatred for the family,
work, or his petty-bourgeois suburb, up until that fine morning when he wakes up, takes a

shower, and eats his breakfast, with his wife, daughter and son still sleeping, and then loads
his hunting rifle and very discreetly blows all their brains out. Confronted by his judges, or
even by torture, Bloom will remain silent about the motives of his crime. Partly because
sovereignty doesnt need to give reasons, but also because he senses that the worst atrocity
he could subject this society to would be to leave his act unexplained.

And thus has Bloom managed to insinuate into all minds the poisonous certainty that in each
and every man there is a sleeping enemy of civilization. Quite apparently he has no other
purpose than to devastate this world indeed, its his destiny, even but hell never say
so. Because his strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce silence.

Because what crime and madness objectivize

is the absence of a transcendental homeland.
Lukacs, Theory of the Novel

To the extent that the desolate forms we are intended to be contained within tighten their
tyranny, some strikingly curious manifestations come about.

Runners-amok, for instance, adapt to existing in the very heart of the most advanced
societies, in unexpected forms, and take on new significance.
In the territories administered by autonomous Publicity, such disintegration phenomena are
rare things that expose the true state of the world nakedly, the pure scandal of things.

And at the same time as they reveal the lines of force within the reign of apathy, they show
the dimensions of the possibilities were living in. Thats why even in their very distance
they are so familiar to us.

The traces of blood that they leave behind in their trail mark the last steps taken by a man
who made the mistake of wanting to escape alonefrom the grey terror in which he had been
detained at such high cost. Our tendency to conceive of that is a measure of what life is left
in us.

The living are those who understand for themselves that at the moment when fear and
submission attain, in Bloom, to their ultimate figure as a fear and submission that
is absolute because it has no object, the liberation from that fear and that submission means
an equally absolute liberation from all fear and all submission. Once he who had indistinctly
feared everything passes such a point, he can never fear anything again. There is, beyond
the most far-flung wastelands of alienation, a zone of total clear and calm where man
becomes incapable of feeling any interest in his own life, nor even the slightest hint of
attachment to his place in the world.

All freedom, present or future, which departs in some way or other from that detachment,
from that serene calm/ataraxy, can hardly do any more than expound the principles of a
more modern servitude.

The Possessed of Nothingness

Im sorry. Like Shakespeare says, Good
wombs hath borne bad sons.
Eric Harris, Littleton, April 20th, 1999

There arent many ways out from under the universal crush.
We extend our arms but they dont find anything to touch. The worlds been distanced from
our grasp; PEOPLE put it outside our range. Very few Blooms manage to resist the
disproportionate enormity of that pressure.
The omnipresence of the commoditys occupation troops and the rigor of their state
of emergency condemn most projects of freedom to a short existence. And so, everywhere
that order appears to have firmly set in, negativity prefers to turn against itself, as illness,
suffering, or frenzied servitude. There are some invaluable cases, however, where isolated
beings take the initiative, without hope or strategy, to open a breach in the well-regulated,
smooth course of disaster.

In them, Bloom violently liberates himself from the patience that PEOPLE would like to make
him languish in forever. And since the only instinct that can tame such a howling presence of
nothingness is that of destruction, the taste for the Totally Different takes on the appearance
of crime and is experienced in a passionate indifference where its author manages to hold
steady when confronted with it.

This manifests itself in the most spectacular way in the growing number of Blooms, big and
small, who, for lack of anything better, lust after the charm of the simplest surrealist act
(recall that the simplest surrealist act consists in going out into the street, revolvers in hand,
and firing at random, as much as possible, into the crowd. Whoever has not at least once
had the urge to finish off in this way the wretched little system of degradation and
cretinization in force belongs in that crowd himself, with his gut at bullet height.
(Breton). Recall as well that this inclination, like many other things, remained among the
surrealists a mere theory without practice, just like its contemporary practice is most often
without theory).

These individual eruptions, which are doomed to proliferate among those who have still not
fallen into the deep sleep of cybernetics, are indeed desperate calls for desertion and
fraternity. The freedom that they affirm is not that of a particular man assigning himself a
particular end, but the freedom of each, the freedom of the human race itself: a single man is
enough to declare that freedom has still not disappeared.

The Spectacle cannot metabolize characteristics bearing so many poisons. It can report
them, but it can never strip them entirely of the unexplainable, the inexpressible, and the
terror at their core. These are the Noble and Generous Acts of our times, a world-weary form
of propaganda by the deed, whose ideological mutism only increases its disturbing and
somberly metaphysical character.

Paradoxes of Sovereignty

I am NOTHING: this parody of an affirmation is the final word of sovereign subjectivity,

liberated from the influence that it would like to or that it must have on things Because
I know that I am, at bottom, this subjective, content-free existence.
Georges Bataille, Sovereignty

In the Spectacle, power is everywhere; that is, all relations are in the final analysis relations
of domination. And because of this no one is sovereign in the Spectacle. It is an objective
world where everyone must first subjugate themselves in order to subjugate others in turn.

To live in conformance with mans fundamental aspiration to sovereignty is impossible in the

Spectacle except in one single instant: the instant of the act.

He who isnt just playing around with life has a need for acts, for gestures, so that his life can
become more real to him than a simple game which can be oriented in any given
direction. In the world of the commodity, which is the world of generalized reversibility,
where all things merge and transform into one another, where everything is merely
ambiguous, transitional, ephemeral, and blended together, only acts cut through it all. In the
splendor of their necessary brutality, they carve an unsolvable after into what had been
before, which PEOPLE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.

A gesture/an act is an event. It cuts open a wound in the chaos of the world, and installs at
the bottom of that wound its shards of unambiguity/univocity. It is a matter of establishing
so profoundly in their difference things that have been judged as different that what
separated them out from each other can never have any possibility of being erased. If theres
anything in Bloom that thwarts domination, it is the fact that even dispossessed of
everything, even in all his nudity, man still has an uncontrollable metaphysical power of
repudiation: the power to kill others and to kill himself. Death, every time it intervenes, rips
a disgraceful hole in the biopolitical tissue. Total nihilism/nihilism fulfilled, which has really
fulfilled nothing but the dissolution of all otherness in a limitless circulatory immanence,
always meets its defeat right there: upon contact with death, life suddenly ceases to be taken
for granted. The duty to make decisions which sanctions all properly human existence has
always been in part tied to the approach to that abyss.

On the eve of the day in March 1998 when he massacred four Bloom-students and a Bloomprofessor, little Mitchell Johnson declared to his incredulous schoolmates: Tomorrow I will
decide who will live and who will die. This is as far from the Erostratus-ism of Pierre Riviere
as it is from fascist hysteria. Nothing is more striking in the reports on the carnage brought
about by Kipland Kinkel or Alain Oreiller than their state of cold self-control and total vertical
detachment relative to the world. Im no longer acting out of sentiment, said Alain Oreiller
while executing his mother. Theres something calmly suicidal in the affirmation of so
omnilateral a non-participation, indifference, and refusal to suffer.

Often the Spectacle uses this as a pretext to start talking about gratuitous acts a generic
qualifier with which it hides the purposes it doesnt want to understand, all the while making
use of them as a fantastic opportunity to reinject some life into one or the other of bourgeois
utilitarianisms favorite false paradoxes - as long as those acts arent lacking in hatred or
reason. To prove this all one needs to do is watch the five video tapes that the monsters of
Littleton filmed in anticipation of their operation. Their program appears in them quite
clearly: Were going to set off a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed.
Here hatred itself is undifferentiated, free of all personality. Death enters into the universal in
the same way as it emerges from the universal, and it has no anger about it.

This isnt about giving some revolutionary significance to such acts, and its hardly even about
treating them as exemplary. Its about understanding what they express the doom of, and
grasping onto them in order to plumb the depths of Bloom. And whoever follows this path to
the end will see that Bloom is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is a nothing that is sovereign,
an emptiness with a pure potential.

The contradiction between Blooms isolation, apathy, powerlessness, and insensitivity on the
one hand and on the other his dry and brutal need for sovereignty can only bring about more
of these acts, absurd and murderous as they may be, yet still necessary and true. Its all
about knowing how to deal with them in the right terms in the future: like [in
Mallarms] Igitur, for instance: One of the acts of the universe has been committed
there. Nothing else but the breath remained, the end of speech and gesture united blow
out the candle of being, by which everything has existed. Proof.
The Era of Pure Guilt

Men dont have the option of not fighting; the only choice they have is which side theyre
on. Neutrality has nothing neutral about it; it is indeed the bloodiest side there is to take.

Bloom, both when hes the one that shoots the bullets and when hes one that succumbs to
them, is certainly innocent. After all, isnt it true that Bloom is but dependence itself on the
central farce? Did he choose to live in this world, whose perpetuation is the result of an
autonomous social totality that appears ever more extraterrestrial to him every day? How
could he do otherwise, stray Lilliputian confronting the Leviathan of the commodity? All he
can do is speak the language of the spectacular occupier, eat from the hand of Biopower, and
participate in his own way in the production and reproduction of its horrors.

This is how Bloom would like to be able to be understood: as a foreigner, as something

external to himself. But in this defense, he only tacitly admits that he himself is that fraction
of himself that sees to it that the rest of his being will remain alienated.

It matters little that Bloom cant be held responsible for any of his acts: he remains
nonetheless responsible for his own irresponsibility, which he is at every instant given the
opportunity to declare himself against. Since he has consented, negatively at least, to being
no more than the predicate of his own existence, he is an objective part of domination, and
his innocence is itself pure guilt.

The man of total nihilism, the man of whats the point? who cries on the shoulder of the
man of what can I do about it? is indeed quite mistaken to believe himself free of fault just
because he hasnt done anything and because so many others are in the same situation hes
in.

The Spectacle, in so regularly admitting that the murderer was an ordinary man, a student
like any other, is suggesting that the men of our times all participate equally in the
unappealable crime that our times really are. But it refuses to recognize this as
a metaphysical fact: as the case of the gas-chamber operators in Auschwitz shows, the fear
of responsibility is not only stronger than conscience, it is in certain circumstances even
stronger than the fear of death.

In a world of slaves without masters, in a world of collaborators, in a world dominated by a

veritable tyranny of servitude, the simplest surrealist act is governed by none other than the
ancient duty of tyrannicide.

Homo Sacer [sacred/accursed man]

One day or another the bombs will drop, and people will finally believe what theyd always
refused to admit; that words have a metaphysical sense to them.
Brice Parain, The Trouble with Choice

The possessed of nothingness begin by drawing the consequences from their Bloom
condition. And thus they expose the dizzying vertigo of it: Bloom is sacer, in the sense of the
word used by Giorgio Agamben; that is, a creature that has no rights, who cannot be judged
or condemned by men, but who anyone may kill without being considered to have committed
a crime. Bloom is sacer to the exact extent that he knows himself to be possessed by bare
life, to the extent that, like a Muselmann in the concentration camps, he is the simple witness
to his own becoming-inhuman.

Insignificance and anyonymity, separation and foreignness - these are not the poetic
circumstances that the melancholic penchant of certain subjectivities may tend to exaggerate
them as: the scope of the existential situation they characterize Bloom is total, and it is
exceedingly political.

Anyone that has no community is sacer.

Being nothing, remaining outside all recognition, or presenting oneself as a pure, non-political
individuality, is enough to make any man at all a being whose disappearance is
uninscribable. However inexhaustible the obituary eulogies may be eternal regrets, etc.
such a death is trivial, indifferent, and only concerns he who disappears; meaning, that is - in
keeping with good logic - nobody. Analogous to his entirely private life, Blooms death is such
a non-event that anybody can eliminate him. Thats why the expostulations of those who,
sobs in their voices, lament the fact that Kip Kinkels victims didnt deserve to die are
inadmissible, because they didnt deserve to live, either; they were outside the sphere of
deservingness. To they extent that they found themselves in the hands of Biopower, they
were already the living dead, at the mercy of any sovereign decision-making, whether that of
the State or of a murderer. Hannah Arendt:
Being reduced to nothing anymore but a simple specimen of an animal species called
Mankind; this is what happens to those whove lost all distinct political qualities, and who
have become human beings and that alone The loss of the Rights of Man takes place at the
moment when a person becomes just a human being in general without profession,
citizenship, opinion, or any acts by which he identifies himself and specifies himself
and appears as differentiated only in a general way, representing no more than his own and
absolutely unique individuality, which, in the absence of a common world where it might
express itself and upon which it might act, loses all meaning. (Imperialism)

Blooms exile has a metaphysical status to it; that is, it is effective in all domains. And that
metaphysical status expresses his real situation, in light of which his legal situation has no
truth to it. The fact that he can be shot down like a dog by a stranger without the slightest
justification, or - parallel to that and conversely - that he is capable of murdering innocents

without the slightest remorse, is a reality that no jurisdiction whatsoever is capable of dealing
with. Only weak and superstitious minds could give themselves up to believing that a verdict
of life in prison or some orderly trial could suffice to sweep those facts into the limbo of null
and void-ness. At the most, domination is free to attest to the Bloom condition, for instance
by declaring an only slightly-disguised state of exception, as the United States did with its
1996 adoption of a so-called anti-terrorist law which allows the arrest of suspects on the
basis of secret information, without any count of indictment or any limit to its
duration. Theres a certain physical risk to being metaphysically nil. Doubtless it was in
anticipation of the truly glorious possibilities that such nullity was to give rise to that Unesco
adopted the oh-so highly consequential Universal Declaration of Animal Rights on October
15th, 1978, which stipulates in article 3: 1 No animal should be subjected to mistreatment
or to acts of cruelty. 2 If it is necessary to kill an animal, it should be carried out in a
manner that is instantaneous, painless, and does not cause it fear. 3 Dead animals must be
treated with decency.

Tu non sei morta, ma seismarrita

Anima nostra che si ti lamenti.
[you are not dead, but merely lost,
o ever-lamenting soul of ours.]
Dante, Convivio [Banquet]

That Blooms kindness still expresses itself here and there in acts of murder is a sign that the
dividing line is near but has not yet been crossed.

In zones governed by nihilism in its final stage, where the ends are still lacking though the
means abound, kindness is a mystical possession. There, the desire for an unconditional
freedom gives rise to singular formations, and gives words a value full of paradoxes. Lukacs:
Kindness is savage and pitiless, it is blind and daring, In the soul of a kind person all
psychological content is erased, all causes and effects. Their soul is a blank slate upon which
fate writes its absurd commandments. And said commandments are carried out blindly, in a
reckless and pitiless manner. And that this impossibility becomes an act, that this blindness
becomes illumination, that this cruelty is transformed into kindness thats the real miracle,
thats true grace. (On Mental Poverty)

But at the same time as these eruptions bear witness to an impossibility, they also, in their
proliferation, announce a speedup of the flow of time. The universal disturbance, which tends
to subordinate itself under ever greater quantities of ever more minute activities, brings to a
glowing intensity in each man his need to make his choice. Already those for whom this
necessity means annihilation speak of apocalypse, while the vast majority content themselves
with living under it all in the swampy pleasures of the last days.

Only those who understand the meaning they themselves will give to the catastrophe will
remain calm and retain the precision of their movements.

In the magnitude and the way in which a given mind gives itself over to panic, one can
recognize its station, the ranks it falls in. And this is a mark that is valid not only ethically
and metaphysically but also in praxis, and in time.

Etcetera.

But the world that were born into is a world at war, all the dazzle of which comes from its
sharp division into friends and enemies. Naming the front lines in that war is part of crossing
the line, but thats not enough to really do it. Only combat can really cross the line. Not so
much because it gives rise to such grandeur, but more because it is the deepest experience
of community, the one that permanently mingles with annihilation and only measures itself in
extreme proximity to risk. Living together in the heart of the desert, with the same
resolution to never reconcile ourselves with it; thats the proof, thats the light.

Etcetera.
.
Theory is not
about thought,
A certain quantity of coagulated,
manufactured
thought.

Theory
is a state,
a state of shock.

A Theory of Bloom,
Where Bloom is not the object of theory, where theory is but the most familiar activity,
the spontaneous penchant of an essentiallytheoretical creature,
of a Bloom.
Theory is WITHOUT END.
thence
the need
to PUT AN END TO IT,
decisively.
The weariness of speech

Whats the way out of Bloom?

The Assumption of Bloom,
for instance.
- You can only really liberate yourself from anything by reappropriating the thing youre
liberating yourself from.

What does the assumption of Bloom mean?

Making use of the metaphysical situation defined by Bloom, the exercise of the self as
a prankster.

Not fighting against the dominant schizoid state, against our schizoid state,

but starting from there, and making use of it as a pure power of subjectivation and
desubjectivation, as an aptitude for experimentation.
Breaking with the old anxiety of who am I really? to the benefit of a real understanding of
my situation and the use of it that I could possibly make.

Not just surviving in the constant imminence of a miraculous departure,

not forcing ourselves to believe in the jobs we do, the lies we tell,
but starting from there, to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee
through Tiqqun for example and silently coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage.

To detach from our detachment through a conscious, strategic practice of self-splitting.

BREAKING WITH THE WORLD, FIRST OF ALL INWARDLY.

The Invisible Committee:

an openly secret society,
a public conspiracy,
an instance of anonymous subjectivation,
whose name is everywhere and headquarters nowhere,
the experimental-revolutionary polarity of the Imaginary Party

The Invisible Committee: not a revolutionary organization, but a higher level of reality,
a metaphysical territory of secession with all the magnitude of a whole world of its own,
the playing area where positive creation alone can accomplish the great emigration of the
economy from the world.

ITS A FICTION THATS MADE ITS REALITY REAL.

All the elsewheres that we could have fled to have been liquidated;
we can only desert the situation inwardly,
by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric with a participation
on a more intimate,
and thus unattributable level,
in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee,
where an infiltration of society on all levels is being plotted.

This desertion is
a metamorphosis.

The Invisible Committee the concrete space where our attacks, our writings, our acts, our
words, our gatherings, our events circulate:
our desertion
transfigures the totality of what wed accepted as a trade-off,
of what wed endured as our alienations,
into a infiltration strategy.
The Other ceases to possess us:
and indeed,
possession itself is reversed
and becomes gentle.
We will conceal our act
within a relationship
that our powers have not yet attained to.

A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ACCESS TO EXPERIENCE

Experimentation:
the practice of freedom,
the practice of idleness,
opposing the design of
a process of emancipation separate
from the existence of men,
and sending back to their desks all the learned plans and projects of liberation.

A kind of Contestation
whose authority
and methods are not
in any way distinct
from experience.

Taking the possibilities that my situation contains all the way.

Revolutionary experimentation,
collective-revolutionary experimentation,
revolutionary-experimental collectivity carrying out the assumption of finiteness, separation
and exposedness as the ecstatic coordinates of existence.
The life of he who
knows that his appearance and his essence are identical to one another, but not identical to
him,

cannot be in the world without remembering that he is not of this world,

cannot accommodate himself to a community which would be a simple amusement of his
solitude in the face of death,
-dancing, in total precision, to the death with time, which kills you
THATS EXPERIMENTATION.

Language,
words and gestures:
thats the common home of the placeless.
The bond between those that cannot be reduced to the lie of belonging, to a certain plot of
land, a certain birthplace.
A journey into dispersion and exile,
communication
that acts upon
our essential separation.

Once weve spoken, to remain as close as possible in line with what wed said, so that
everything wont be effectively up in the air, with our words on the one side and ourselves on
the other, and with the remorse of separations.

This text is a pact.

The protocol for an experimentation now open
among deserters.

Without anyone noticing,

Break ranks.
NOW

1.

Elser, an exemplary Bloom in many respects, committed a bomb attack on Hitler on

the 8th of November 1939, with the simple motive that he thought that Hitler was a bad
man. This attack only failed because of a surprising stroke of bad luck. A second, equally
incredible stroke of bad luck, gave rise to his arrest on the Swiss border in the course of
his escape. He was never tried for his crime; instead he was detained in various camps,
with the unique status of Fhrerssonderhaftling (exceptional prisoner of the Fuhrer).
Eichmanns trial, that of a Bloom who splits himself into a subject of the law and a real,
veritable, interior man, and thus claims to have himself not been the subject of his acts,
shows quite clearly the impossibility of judging Bloom, that is, of fathoming him within
the terms, and according to the principles, of justice.

2.

Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungGirl [http://younggirl.jottit.com] is found in

issue number one of Tiqqun.