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Title: Hello Author: Anonymous Date: 2013(ish?) Language: en Topics: hope, insurrectionary, organization, strategy, analysis Source: Retrieved on August 19th, 2014 from [[http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/hello-a-greeting-from-nowhere/]] Notes: For more copies: mailto:hellofriend@riseup.net
It is impossible to be everything we are supposed to be and to do
everything we are ordered to, and when we try the failure we are doomed
to is neither interesting nor enjoyable. To take the path of breaking
with everything is the only worthwhile end, even if it is hopeless.
Everything is what is ordinary. It is hard to find a glimmer of anything
else in life, anything that would suggest an Outside. Everything is the
way that things are organized, but it is also a command. An order to do
and to be. Everything is ordinary in the sense that everything is
ordered. And Everything is ordinary in the sense that everything tends
to act as an order.
The order is that you must be Everything. So you fail at everything. You
endlessly work towards the monstrous goal of accomplishing everything.
You will never get there.
We will never get there, and yet we are still here, still doing and
being. Still ordered: organized and ordered around; organizing and
ordering others around. That is all that Everything seems to be.
Everything is the way we talk. Everything is the way we sleep and eat.
It is the way we stand in line, but also the way we confess our love. It
is in our intimacies that we fail most desperately, but we also fail
(easily enough, brushing past each other every day and mumbling “hello”)
in our attempts at the most basic forms of communication. Many have
given up on greeting others; many others have gone for a speech so
ritualized and regulated, so well ordered, that it says nothing at all
(and so, in some way, says everything to those who know how to hear it).
Everything is waiting and being waited on. Everything is apparent.
Everything is visible, set in bright relief against everything else.
Everything is saturated with light, cameras, directed activity, and
sight without seeing. In Everything we learn confusion – we learn to be
afraid of the dark.
In Everything, most of us experience ourselves in a kind of darkness.
Wandering alone, reaching out for others who are just out of reach, just
out of sight. This cinematic blur of countless frames per second, light
and dark, confuses us. It casts a gloom onto our deep perception, our
ability to see shade and nuance. It deceives our sense of sight and
muddies our other senses.
One night you might find yourself speaking out loud. You might hang out
of a window or peer down a shadowy alley, saying “hello?” to no one in
particular. This is an odd gesture. It is not the “hello” you mumbled as
you brushed past a stranger with everything there is to do on our mind;
it is not a bored “hello” to your bored friend… it is a kind of cry. A
question-call. A question-greeting-call.
Without knowing it, you might be using the utterance “hello?” in an
archaic sense. As if speaking from an old place, an originary place that
is no longer visible, its sound no longer audible. In the past, in a
past we are removed from by much more than the passage of time, when one
would meet another person on the street, the proper greeting in English
was “Good day” or “Good evening”. Our now familiar greeting “hello” was
something else, a kind of question-call one might cast into the woods,
or a question-greeting-call uttered in the direction of a noise in one’s
home: “Hello? Is there anybody there?” The invention of the telephone,
its invasion and reconstitution of everyday life, changed affairs. It
was so unnatural to speak into the machine that people were more
inclined to say “Hello?” than “Good day”. Since the presence of another
could no longer be assumed, it seemed appropriate to call a question
into the void. And that question-call is what we have unknowingly
inherited.
The call into the void has since grown to inhabit all of social life.
One index of its spread is the fact that the question-call “Hello” is
now the most ordinary of greetings. It even has a cute form: “Hi!”
“Hello” is the call into the void, the greeting of an era of
telepresence, of ghostly pseudopresence. Ordinary greetings for an
ordered life of loneliness shared with other people.
We said that everything is apparent, and that in everything most of us
experience ourselves in darkness. It is really a question of the
interplay between darkness and a terrible visibility. Better to say the
most of us experience ourselves in a void. Most of us wander and reach,
and most of us call out almost involuntarily, and not only at night.
Usually nothing happens. Usually you just hear your own voice and it is
terrifying, or boring, or terrifyingly boring.
Obviously we no longer just talking about the telephone – but we are
talking about a world in which people talk at length about their
telephones.
Usually you just hear your own voice. But sometimes another answers. We
are those who have called “hello” and found others who answered. We
still are not sure entirely what this means, but it feels very
important. The uncanny cries that have come in response to our initial
question-greeting-call are the only hints we have ever known that
suggested an Outside. We called back and forth, we shouted for real, and
as we did so we drew closer to each other. Close enough to sense depth
and nuance.
That is the condition of our saying “we”.
We reject everything together and call into the void.
We would like to know who else is out there.
Someone said that all friendship is political, but in Everything
friendship is impossible. You do not have five hundred friends, almost
certainly do not have a dozen, and chances are you don’t even have one.
If you have a lover, yours is probably the kind of passion that is
always sure to keep the door closed. Friendship isn’t having experiences
together or having things in common. The rare moments are just that and
not proof of anything.
To be skeptical about everything, even friendship, is to invite a kind
of hopelessness. We do not turn away from such hopelessness.
Indeed, our project is difficult to the point of hopelessness. This
doesn’t mean it is without focus or intensity – quite the opposite. It
means we will be agile. Agility is in the stops as well as the starts:
we claim as our own the ability to experience failure without illusion
and then to have the capacity to move on or to remain motionless. As
long as our next step is hopeless… To the extent to which ends can be
achieved they are likely to be disregarded or rejected if they reflect
the security of Everything.
Our hopelessness is at once fleeting and urgent; ever present, it calls
for great patience.
Everything is hopeless, and yet Everything is always telling its story
in a way that sounds desperately hopeful. Many do the same with their
stories of how we might change everything. To shake off these stories
and look hopelessness in the face, one comes to a real choice, maybe
even the only choice that really matters: wallow in despair or dare the
leap for a vastly different life.
Let’s begin again. All we have are some stories; we don’t know if we
have friends, if we are succeeding in being friends when we think
ourselves sober or enthusiastic enough to do it. We said that in
Everything friendship is impossible; and if there is an Outside, the way
there remains shrouded in confusion. Things are a mess. And in this
mess, this ongoing crisis, sometimes we end up in a circle of people and
someone tries to situate all of this, all of our diurnal and nocturnal
conversations. Someone starts to tell a story…
Now and then someone invokes history. It is always an instructive
moment, when someone addresses the circle and reminds the circle that it
is a circle and asks the individuals at its edges to cede, to concede…
To finally belong. For us this is a kind of theater. Our first encounter
with history was pure nationalist indoctrination. Later, we witnessed
someone further from the center of the circle turning towards the center
and beginning to speak of something less monumental: the history of
people like us, whoever they think we are. It is a smaller history in a
smaller circle and perhaps with more audience participation. In the
indoctrinating as well as the supposedly radical sense, history is
Everything telling its story, telling itself, but in this it is a
deceit.
Let’s admit it: for us these historical feel-good (or feel-bad) tales do
not have the great importance they claim. We live in the now, today.
Today is like yesterday and probably like tomorrow. Time goes on,
history is said to go on.
This is the story of everything: Everything repeats. This is the history
of Everything: Everything reproduces itself. Nothing happens.
We live in the now. We cannot get rid of the nagging sense that history
is a deceit, and that the stories we tell ourselves about what we are
doing are just little tales vying for the status of historical truth.
Whatever else this condition may be, it is disheartening. It has driven
many of us to despair. Hopelessness shapes power and resistance –
laziness, lashing out, and looking for love as acts of hopelessness…
In fact, is seems at first as though there are only two paths open to
us. One is despair as madness: not inaction so much as helplessly random
or automatic actions. The other is a false overcoming of despair, a
return to hope, a reaffirmation of our small stories: not so much bold
new actions as ritualized repetitions of something we believe worked
once upon a time. The first leads to solitude, sometimes to a frenzied
publicity; the second is public as well, but within the contours of
spectacular activism. This is why we don’t think we are doing something
exotic by having no hope. We believe many have no hope and don’t admit
it to themselves, let alone to each other.
But hope and fear are just different aspects of the same submission to
history. Sitting and listening to the same story, one can hope for a
happy ending while another fears a tragedy. Neither is free.
We choose another way. We act on our lack of hope fearlessly – though
sometimes this means refusing to do anything. Admitting you have lost
everything means that you have the possibility of something truly
awesome in each new moment. Aware that you have something to obtain or
to do, you maneuver every situation towards your particular end, your
project.
This allows us an insight: there are two senses to hopelessness. One
tends to point towards solving the problem of hopelessness through
security solutions, PR campaigns an self-help programs. This is the
terrorizing cynicism of power; and its flipside, the terrorized
motivation of the political subject. Both despair and its false
overcoming (hope) belong to this approach. The other approach to
hopelessness, which is ours, is the relentlessness of finding the
limitations of what we are capable of and pushing past them. We do this
with our pleasures, with our bodies, and,if we are lucky, with our
friendships.
The exception tests the rule.
This means brushing aside what is impossible, hopeless in the first
sense, and grasping, even enjoying, hopelessness in the second sense.
This is our power.
Our hopelessness has this one great virtue: it is a marvelous purgative.
It will cleanse you of layer upon layer of everything piled upon you,
everything you are coated with, all of these clumsy masks stuck to your
face as history and stories. Politics, first of all: political solutions
to crises and breakdowns too intimate to ever be addressed in a mass
way. Ans as for that specialized politics crystallized around the
intimate, the politics of identity, hopelessness has nothing but a shrug
and a laugh: good luck with your history of defeats… But perhaps the
strongest,the most needed purgative is the one that will forever cleanse
you of the sense that it is possible to express who you are without
deceit.
We could keep going, but let’s be clear: if we are against everything,
we should say so. We are the only ones who say so, the ones who greet
you in the nighttime, who cast you a wink in broad daylight. We are
staking our lives on this open confession of faithlessness… that we do
it anonymously and from behind a very different sort of mask is just
evidence that we are not stupid, but seductive.
Because everything is order and organization, it is foolish to look to
the order and organization of politics for ways out of our condition,
out of Everything.
Recently there has been a moment of occupation. It has inhabited our
minds, the media, and a few town squares. This political moment has been
surprising because it has alluded to a question rather than assuming a
set of answers.
Until it was decided what this moment’s real intentions were in
Everything, be it endless meetings, street fighting, or a kind of
negotiation with banks, it was the freshest breath of air in a lost
decade.
But once Everything’s web-spinning began, the protagonists of the moment
became trapped. Trapped in old patterns of protest politics, in
negotiations that had been avoided heretofore, they drifted further and
further into Everything. The web-makers, as necessary evils who enabled
visibility into certain recruiting moments,used the logic of recruiting
as a frame, then shrank the frame and proceeded to eat the host.
We are familiar with this digestive strategy. This is the operation of
politics, the lack of conversation necessary to manage bodies and
stultify minds – which amounts to pretty much everything we know. To
escape politics isn’t possible, but it would be fantastic. As fantastic
as a trip to the moon or a carnival ride. Recent activities against
politics as usual have lacked enough of a fantastic orientation to
escape gravity. They have crashed back to reality as more-of-the-same,
reflecting less truth about Everything than about their own fuel, which
was far less corrosive than necessary.
Let’s return to the question of politics. We would like to have
dismissed politics as rapidly as we did above, but we know better. It is
a malady of the soul, an addiction. It is our little problem. You quit
one day and start again the next. You abandon it one week and reinvent
it the following. You do it in denial of doing it. To return to politics
and thoroughly cast it off is another way of saying “hello”, of letting
the greeting from nowhere find its way. Because when we reach out, when
we go for the gesture of friendship, we end up entangled in cliques,
groups, scenes, milieus, subcutures… so many so-called communities
populated by the usual suspects.
There is terror in discovering that we, too, are the usual suspects for
others. Friendship is impossible.
We begin by setting aside any sort of participation in representative,
parliamentary, democratic politics. We are all familiar enough with
those meetings where we talk about Everything. We are concerned rather
with the way in which everything tends to reflect that sort of politics,
especially when Everything claims to oppose itself. the eternal return
of representation, the thousand and one names for what always amounts to
speaking for the others.
We wrote: when Everything claims to oppose itself. There is a limited
range to any discussion of extra-parliamentary power: from desire to
participate in near-parliamentary formations like committees or
collectives to the rejection of anything short of temporary ad hoc
groups. On this spectrum, to do-the-good means to make a better and more
sincere effort towards more democracy and more participation by a
broader and broader section of the population. This oath is guided by a
belief in who we want to be as a people. It replaces the utter lack of
transparency and accountability in normative politics with a watered
down clear slurry of toxicity. Everything is made transparently and
responsibly mediocre.
The desire to create our own societies is perfectly comprehensible. We
create something that fills the role that life used to fill. History
never ceases to remind us that community was once possible, and politics
never ceases to produce increasingly artificial recreations of
community. For most of us this means consuming an ideal that we believe
we can be part of, enlarging the sense of belonging that we get from
history and stories into a semblance of life. Telepresence, ghostly
presence. We participate in the creation of exactly the experiences that
we desire and the ideal sort of people who conform to our desires and
expectations. We choose the style, color, quantity, and definitional
characteristics of our category; then we click BUY.
We said that we found each other, but we still have no idea as to the
way Outside; we are in the breakdown, in the crisis. But we know that to
turn against everything, to think ourselves against Everything and live
accordingly, we must embody the most corrosive skepticism towards any
political formation, and perhaps the most where it is most likely we
outcasts are being managed in our discontent (or worse, managing it
ourselves): the sphere of so-called radical politics.
Politics always opaquely drags us back to compromises with everything.
Hopelessness is transparently antipolitical.
If we try to get out of the grips of what we are ordered to do a be, we
are defeated before we begin unless we do away with everything we
believe about good and evil. To push beyond history, politics,and the
moralism that subtends Everything, we will commit to commitment itself.
Everything is coated in moral colorations, usually with very little fine
shading. The order to do is the order to do it right; the order to be is
the order to be good. When we say “hello” we are greeting those who have
begun to step away from the cruel moralism that characterizes everything
about our culture and its subcultures.
Our rigor, our guilt, our fear all have their origins in the great
monotheistic religions. Yes, let’s cast the net wide on this one. If
living in North America means anything these days, it means living in
spaces defined by a Christianity more cultural than faith-based. Maybe,
as Christianity fades, Christendom is strengthened – in any case, we
call its pervasive influence moralism. This moralism is the very fabric
of Everything, believe it or not. Think of it as an emotional form of
surveillance, a camera in your head.
There never was an angel or devil on your shoulder, a voice of
conscience telling you what’s right and wrong, or a serpent of
temptation hissing in your ear. But their was a reason someone would
have you believe they were real.
We have good reason to feel undermined by our leader-priests. At least
priests have the minimal good taste of being transparent about what they
think they are doing.
If you want to grasp moralism in politics, when you see a leader
speaking imagine him wearing priestly robes, and when you see one of the
leaders who say they are not leaders, imagine her as the preacher on the
street corner or bus. And conversely, if you want to grasp the politics
in moralism, observe as those who would set up themselves up as moral
and religious leaders, advisors of every sort, cynically make it their
business to cut corners and conceal their infinite hypocrisies.
Liars in everything.
This motley array of characters each has their own way of draining our
vitality. They weaken our flesh by managing our pleasures, so we are
lost in our own bodies. They train our souls as well, but believing in
salvation or redemption does not lead to either.
---
In Everything community means that our behavior is not our own. But
neither are our actions and beliefs merely prescribed by figureheads.
They are ordered by anonymous agents of a secular culture that grows
intertwined with them all. Everything is not a religion, but it can wear
religion as its mask, and most relate to everything religiously. This is
what we mean by moralism. Most of us carve it into our own bodies. We
pride ourselves on the scars that show how much we have suffered – how
good we are.
It is at this personal and intimate scale that one can grasp the cruelty
at work in moralism. It is the guilt-before-guilt of being ordered to be
everything, and always failing. Moralism is the monstrous guarantee that
we each lay our life bare before some god in all of our activity. In
exchange, we are offered a story according to which we are redeemed
through pain. Most people’s self-understanding begins here. And most
so-called communities are ordered around the repetition of some minor
variant of this story which they call their history, radical or
otherwise.
Beyond these stories of redemption through pain, no other kind of
salvation is possible. No one else can save you, and you can’t save
yourself.
In Everything, our pathetic desires to do good for others, be saved from
our mistakes, and achieve our ends are ordered into monstrous rituals.
With enough repetition of these rituals, ordered desires secrete stories
and beliefs. History is built on these stories when they graduate and
become myths, spoken in epic, important tones.
But belief is more about who we are than about what we do.
Everything binds us to it through our belief in the way everything
works. So, in Everything, our belief comes to shape what we are able to
do. This is belief as the realistic, simple faith in god, in the World,
in Everything. For us, on the other hand, belief is a test, a matter of
going beyond the hope-and-fear matrix. Going Outside everything.
That is why we no longer believe in anything – in everything, that is.
This is how we discovered that we never really believed in god, in the
World, in Everything. We know all of the exits are blocked by our
age-old fallibility and by the crises of our time. The result: our
endlessly repeated confusion about the connection between means and
ends.
In the forms of history, politics, and moralism, the confusion will
repeat. But we suspect we have found a way to think more clearly. More
importantly, we think we have a way to say of a feeling or a passion
that it is our own. In this way the disconnection between means and ends
is momentarily unbound. And our game is to chain such unbinding moments
together, to destroy the separation between means and ends every time we
know how.
We said that Everything repeats, that nothing happens. What would it
take for something to happen? That the hints or secret glimpses of an
Outside would expand like holes in a deteriorating reel of film, would
take on nuance and depth, and grow to become panoramic. That is what it
would mean for something to happen beyond history. Outside everything.
Our name for what it would take for something to happen is commitment.
Commitment has long been out of style; like loyalty, and honor, it is
one of those values of the past that lost most of its meaning in its
incorporation into Everything. It was, it still might be, a way of
selecting those passions and relations that are excluded in Everything.
A way of knowing who and what is ours beyond of the prejudices of
moralism and politics.
Commitment is what there is to do and what there is to think about. To
be realized, it must be torn from Everything. And when we say that our
game is to chain unbinding moments, hopeless moments together, what we
are calling for is in fact a commitment to commitment.
In a world of motivational posters and self-help books encouraging us to
strive, excel, and be ourselves, we still want to speak of a kind of
striving for excellence that lies Outside all that. This commitment is
what is lacking in Everything and in its opposition. Without it, any
supposedly radical rejection of the world we know ends up, whether by
compromise, repentance or surrender, arriving back in the huge and
welcoming arms of social participation, the suffocating embrace of the
all.
A world of half measures and moral relativism haven’t proven more
sensitive to people’s different experiences, values, or beliefs, nor has
it transformed us into more than nervous calculators of demographics and
feelings. More and more tolerance has pacified our manner of
disagreement; but what is even more disastrous is that it has pacified
our disposition to friendship and love, rendering them impossible.
In many places everything depends on being nice. Everything is everyone
coming together to suffocate each other. No one may escape the group
hug.
Many beg for the crushing embrace to cease, but everyone hears this as a
plea for a more complete hug. Someone is always willing to listen,
listen, nod, and perhaps give you some pills. In the end, most simply
succumb. After all, it is said that suffocation is a peaceful and
pleasant way to die.
So when we call “hello” – is there anybody out there? – we do in the
midst of a crushing mass of bodies. We do so with what little breath has
not been squeezed out. If the cry is weak, it is because everything
muffles it.
You can’t be friends with everyone. To be true to another is to be an
enemy of the group. To have space to breathe, to think clearly, to have
solitude and silence, one must make space. And to make space one must
destroy what takes it up. Only then there is anything worthwhile to
occupy by oneself or with a friend.
Grasped beyond moralism, violence, like love and sorrow, is ultimately a
passion suffocated by the demand for mediation and pleasantries.
---
There are all sorts of commitments that we are uninterested in. Every
worthless cause congeals around its committed people. TV shows, idiotic
pop stars, obscure musicians, middlebrow intellectuals, all of the
social, cultural, and political garbage of Everything finds its
adherents. And in their arbitrary commitment the adherents mistake their
act of consumption for a self-defining, self-asserting, and perhaps even
liberatory act.
(But let us not be so naive as to think that the idea of liberation
enters the consciousness of most.)
If it is to be anything but joining in the big hug, commitment itself
requires commitment. It requires attention and care on one hand, and
corrosive skepticism on the other. We said that our project is difficult
to the point of hopelessness. We also said that everything involves an
order to do and to be; we should add that Everything separated
everything into two orders – the order of thought and the order of life
– and the only point at which they are legitimately to meet in a society
such as this one is in an expressive act of consumption. Get yourself
something nice.
To violate this order to do and to be is probably to face misery,
poverty or prison time.
And yet that is what we are committed to risking, because we crave the
intensification of the link between life and thought. Between what we
say we do, and what we do; between what we say we are, and what we are.
Commitment is that link; the commitment to commitment is its
intensification.
We could go even farther and say that what we are committed to is the
annihilation of the separation between thought ad life. And this is
necessarily to say we are committed to the annihilation of Everything.
When we invoke commitment to commitment, we are speaking of a form of
organization that is far from all the boring clubs and pseudo-military
formations. The strength of this form is entirely dependent on the
intensity with which one enters into it and how well it shrouds itself.
You do not have to believe that you are doing something more serious
than playing a game to play it seriously, to win.
Another way to approach commitment to commitment is to ask ourselves why
projects fail, why people sell out or give up, or why movements either
go mainstream or implode.
We respond that Everything makes it impossible to keep promises. There
is a kind of built-in dishonesty or hypocrisy to everything we do. It
seems to us that Everything’s order interferes precisely where one
might, on one’s own terms, keep a promise, swear an oath, or be
transparent with a friend. We only understand swearing an oath, for
example, in terms of loyalty to an institution: the court, the army,
marriage… We only understand keeping promises or being honest in terms
of morality.
Our sense of the oath is not so much the moral question of telling the
truth, but the question of true joy, the hopeless possibility of
achieving an ecstatic bond between thought and life. Or, in another
register, true friendship.
A hopeless affair.
We might even invoke that archaic sense of being true to another, where
to be true meant to be intertwined. The intensity of a friendship
understood as an immanent quality rather than something referred to a
command from on high.
We are writing about friendship, again. We are still and perhaps only
writing about friendship. We are writing about a rupture, a leap from
commitment to commitment-to-commitment. This is not something that
happens in private, but neither it is something that happens in public.
It does not happen in or as Everything and so it is hidden in plain
sight. If you are doing it right, you and yours will be illegible in
Everything.
About the rupture as it happened – as it happens – in our lives, we can
report two things. It happened once (we cried out “hello?” into the
void) and it is endlessly repeated (it began when someone responded in
the dark). Every conversation, all our intercourse, is a repetition of
this first and originary event.
Every time we see a project fail, hear of another betrayal, think of a
movement imploding, we are back in the original void, saying “hello?”,
wondering who is there. We will never abandon the psychic distance that
our first awareness of separation, of everything brought us. We are
familiar with impossibility.
The fact of the rupture, our enjoyment of its accident and of its less
than accidental repetition affords us this insight: your sense of
belonging to a group or a party, to a team or a crew, can drift off into
belonging to everything. Nothing is easier, nothing is more available,
more possible, than this resuturing to things as all recognize them and
know them to be. No one can successfully be something – claim some
identity – and not have that identity equal its assigned place in
Everything.
The Outside is not the inside’s outside. It is another side. The chain
links together accidents, non-accidentally; it is a series of moments of
attention and passion, and of lessons learned with no confidence that
our fallibility has been overcome. Commitment to commitment is the will
to make the next link, hopelessly. We are free to participate in
countless activities, and withdraw from countless more, insofar as some
true response issues forth there.
Having abandoned history, we have no interest in waiting for the end of
the world. We have realized we cannot live our lives except by being the
world’s undoing. In the end, there is nothing to wait for and nothing to
fear. What’s more, we have all the time in the world to undo it.
We who would like to not be deluded,who hold a certain dis-illusion as a
criterion of life, know that everything comes to an end. At least we
know it sometimes. Sometimes it is as simple as knowing our friend will
die, or that we will die for them.
You know about death because you are surrounded by it. But, even as
Everything manages and orders the death that surrounds, it conceals
death. It has to do so constantly, and cannot ever do so entirely. And
when it fails, you see that you are surrounded by death.
When we spoke of hopelessness, we meant a disregard for everything, but
also an attitude toward the certainty of death. When we spoke of
fearlessness, it was to distinguish ourselves from everything that lives
as though it should not die. So, without fear, without hope, we are
playing a game with time and death. Our project, to which we will have
been true, will come to an end as well. The game, which comes in several
variants, is to know this and remain committed – without illusions.
Commitment to commitment is to know how to communicate the dis-illusion
and the game. This is what we are doing when we say: “hello.”
---
The world too will end; this is certainty and not hope. In fact,
countless worlds already have ended, are ending as we speak.
We are committed to the annihilation of everything and so to the end of
the world.
Someone said than many worlds are possible, as if we could save the ones
that are ending, or as if we could resuscitate all of the ones already
extinguished, restoring traditions, cultures, and languages back to
life. We think not even one of these worlds is inhabitable. Everything
is the single, colossal World that orders every subordinate world. There
is room in everything for your private world, for your particular
culture, and your commitment to it behind closed doors or in the
political sphere. There is no room for commitment to commitment, the
unbinding of our faith in the World.
The end of the World depends on us.
True friendship is the end of the World, the beginning of our play
together.
The secret is to begin at the end.