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Title: Silence and Beyond
Author: Tiqqun
Date: 1999
Language: en
Topics: insurrectionary, post-situationist, capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 3/7/21 from https://dehiscence.noblogs.org/resources/

Tiqqun

Silence and Beyond

A man that wants to take a fortress by assault can't do it merely with

words, but must dedicate all his forces to the task. Thus must we

accomplish our task of silence.

— Jakob Frank, Words of the Lord

PEOPLE write a lot about these times, and PEOPLE talk even more. And it

seems that the more PEOPLE write and talk the less they want to be

understood. Their reasons for that are pretty sparse, yet there

certainly are reasons. There have to be. What's clear is that the

majority of them are hardly avowable. As for those that are, in the end

they always give in to the need to make themselves heard, and then are

met with laughter. The only exception to this rule is Critical

Metaphysics in the broad sense, in the sense that we, like so many

others, submit to it; in the one sense that is appropriate, in sum, to

the enormity of its object. It even mixes the fiercest severity in with

its demand to be heard; you have to use a kind of imperious tone when

you’re dealing with overthrowing an order that’s based on and

perpetuates the suffering of human beings. It is strictly to the extent

that they contribute to defining an effective practical critique for the

new conditions, modalities and possibilities at hand that the conscious

fractions of the Imaginary Party can exercise their most insolent right

to humanity’s attention. Capitalism produces the conditions for its

transcendence, not that transcendence itself. The latter depends,

rather, on the activity of a few people who, having adjusted their eyes

to discerning the true geography of the times beyond domination’s

glaring illusions, concentrate their forces at the right moment on the

most vulnerable point in the whole. Among those we encounter, we

appreciate nothing more than such cold resolution to ruining this world.

Put the surrounding cretinism to the test with a bit of dialectics;

you’ll most likely hear some insolent praise for the incredible

plasticity of capitalism, which was able to use the defeat of

contestation itself as the basis for its latest modernization. When

their approach to the subject immediately shows a kind of reconciliatory

fury, a fury of “Logical ruses,” you can clearly see what the real

object of people’s fascination is. Even contestation proves daily how

incapable it has been of supporting itself on that modernization’s

uninterrupted avalanche of defeats. Over the course of the last twenty

years, the mechanical renewal of inoperative methods and poorly

clarified aims in successive social agitation campaigns has everywhere

won out over “critical-practical activity.” It has in many cases even

ended up able to make a simple avant-avant-garde variant of social work

out of it. People have even condescended to grant a name of its own to

this special sector of general production, whose participants are so

scantily remunerated: the “new social movements.” But this expression is

more than just a reference to the spongy Monsieur Touraine; there’s

actually a particularly cruel irony in it, since it designates something

so totally old, and the qualifier “movement” in the phrase is applied to

a kind of agitation that has no real meaning or direction. It wasn’t

humanly possible to see the degree to which the monstrous effect of

commodity subsumption has extinguished all the negativity in social

critique until Toni Negri, with an enthusiasm that wasn’t even fake,

described the militant of the future as an “inflationist biopolitical

entrepreneur.” Nowhere among domination’s enemies has any evaluation

been made of the reforms it has put in motion with its vast range of

metamorphoses. The fact that our tyrannical enemy no longer draws its

power from its ability to shut people up, but from its aptitude to make

them talk – i.e., from the fact that it has moved its center of gravity

from its mastery of the world itself to its seizure of the world’s mode

of disclosure – requires that a few tactical adjustments be made.

Because, indeed, that’s precisely how, little by little, it has deprived

the opposition forces of their sense of direction. Let all those who

thought they could change the world without even going so far as to

interpret it - all those who have refused to see that they are operating

in radically new conditions - deign to see things for a moment from our

perspective: they’ll realize that in the final analysis they are merely

serving what they think they’re challenging. Look at the few hysterical

groupuscles working to maintain the low-intensity social guerrilla war

that buzzes stubbornly around the various issues, like the “illegal

immigration” issue or the “anti-National Front” struggle. That shows

well enough how the negation of the Spectacle, inverted into the

spectacle of negation, can act as the basis for a collective catharsis

procedure without which the present state of things could not survive

itself. By triggering within and against itself its Scourge of

denomination, domination has made even its pseudo-contestation into the

spearhead of its ideal self-improvement. To such an extent that there’s

no real difference anymore between these two camps that, at bottom, want

the same world; it’s just that one of them has the means to make it and

the other just dreams of doing so. There’s no place for moralizing in

this matter, just lessons to be drawn, the first of which is perhaps

that the Spectacle only recognizes as a truly existent opposition the

opposition that is willing to speak; that is, to speak its language, and

hence to subscribe to the alienation of the Common. In all discussions,

the listener imposes the terms, not the talker. Thus the real hostility,

the metaphysical hostility, which allows neither the language nor the

moment it will express itself to be controlled, and which moreover

prefers silence to any speech, has been pushed back into the shadows of

what does not appear and hence does not exist. By means of this

offensive in the form of a retreat, organized capitalism has derailed

all the forces of effective critique, drowning it out in its resounding

chatter and adapting to it with the language of flattery, not without

first having deprived it of any real point at which it could apply

itself. Everything that prolonged the classical workers’ movement within

it had to succumb to these new conditions, where now the true is no

longer limited by the false, but rather by the insignificant. Quite

quickly, it ceased to exist in fact as practical contestation beyond an

unanimous parrotlike repetition on the one hand (“let’s all chant

together now!”) and the a mute autism of direct action cut off from all

substantial life on the other. Once the latter part had been liquidated

– perhaps the past tense verb “exterminated” would be more appropriate

in certain cases, like in the case of Italy for example, where the

savagery of the repression had something really exemplary about it – the

former abandoned itself to its natural inclination: repetition to mask

its aphasia and aphasia to mask its repetition. By deteriorating into a

pitiful practicalism of resentment, practice has just as consciously

discredited itself as theory has by taking refuge in theoreticism and

literature. After that nothing remained to oppose the restoration

process that since the 70s has swept away everything that was

consciously hostile to commodity society. With time, the Spectacle has

managed to circumscribe the possible by what is permitted to be said

keeping it in terms that it alone now has the authority to define. In

spite of a formidable primitive accumulation of frustration, suffering,

and anxiety among the population, over the course of all this time

critique has never really manifested itself. It has remained voiceless

in the face of the advancing disaster. It has even had to allow the

enemy to impudently play on its own failures. This was how the Spectacle

was able to turn the progressive crumbling of Nation-States and the

universal discredit of systems of political representation into the

farce we see today, which every day adds a new episode to its endless

infamy. It has gotten everyone to permit it to exercise its symbolic

violence, and it has gotten each person to submit to enduring it as

something simultaneously natural and chimerical. Sure, there are a few

local eruptions from time to time that disturb this tired mimodrama, but

domination is so sure of itself in its course that it can even allow

itself to look with scorn at those tactless few who, by forcing it to

repress them too visibly, require it to echo what everyone already

knows: that the rule of law rests on a permanent state of exception, and

that at present it rests on that alone. In this context of mute social

war, where, like “in any transitional period, the riff-raff found in all

societies rises to the surface, not only having no aims but without even

the slightest ideas, expressing only its disquiet and its impatience”

(Dostoievski, The Possessed), all “social struggles” are ridiculous.

From the chaos of 1986 to the “unemployed workers’ movement,” for those

that experienced them from within, not a single one of them wasn’t

emptied of all substance and removed from all contact with reality by a

sub- policelike para-trotskyist activism that repeatedly “let itself be

carried away by the trend it intended or pretended to oppose: bourgeois

instrumentalism, which fetishizes means because its own form of practice

cannot tolerate any reflection upon its ends.” (Adorno, Critical

Models). And yet, somewhere within the total wreck and ruin of

institutions and their contestation, there is still something powerful,

new, and intact: an existential hostility to domination.

Beyond the carnage, suicides and miscellaneous irregularities, beyond

all these strange gestures that provide us with so much encouraging news

of commodity civilization’s decomposition, and consequently of the deaf

advancement of the Imaginary Party, we place a high importance on the

form of the manifestations of negativity that invent a new active

grammar of contestation. Among those manifestations, there was in recent

months one that was particularly touching for us: the “Turin

Antagonists.” The events we’re referring to here lasted a whole week, in

which Turin was plunged into a terror of a nature totally different from

that of the planned, profitable, gray Terror typically running rife

through the metropolises of separation.

It all started Friday March 27th, 1998, the day after the evening when

Edoardo Massari, a 34 year old anarchist, hanged himself in his cell in

Turin prison, where he had been duly incarcerated on the 5th of March

along with his fiancée and another comrade. They were presumed to have

been guilty – which after all is irrelevant, when you’re dealing with

anarchists – of a number of attacks on the construction sites of the

Italian TGV [high speed train], all acts of eco-terrorism which made the

mistake of seriously irritating a certain number of business and mafia

lobbies whose interests were deeply tied in with this grandiose project,

a project which, as everyone so obviously knows, is of the utmost

necessity. This “suicide” should have quietly gone to take its place in

the long list of State murders; people would prefer to leave the

establishment of such a list to the scrupulous care of next century’s

historians, but we already know that Italy will be able to proudly claim

an honorable number of outstanding contributions to it. Unfortunately,

said Massari belonged to the little community of Turin social centers,

and their reaction wasn’t exactly as expected in domination’s simulation

models. Thus, the next day, the citizen-consumers were presented with

quite the motive for complaint: a silent and hostile procession of many

hundreds of anarchists-with-knives-clenched-in-their-teeth and other

autonomists-with-iron-rods, who showed up to upset the colorful

frolicking of a laughter-filled Saturday afternoon festival of

consumerism, insisting all too seriously on striding through the

downtown area carrying a banner saying “murderers,” and getting up on

the roofs of some public buses to read out a communiqué seeming to

insinuate that every Bloom within earshot was an accomplice to that

murder, and even promising that “within one hour (from then), life in

this city of death isn’t going to be the same anymore, and it’s their

fault.” Besides the animosity-filled invective they addressed to the

innocent, terrorized passers-by, they even gave a hiding to a cameraman

from Rai TV, and to a photographer and columnist from Repubblica

newspaper, taking even the instruments of their labor from them, which

they methodically reduced to their primitive state of scattered

electronic components. Not content with having thus reminded a finally

pacified Italy of the darkest hours of its years of lead and urban

guerrilla warfare, which everyone was doing their best to forget, in

Brosso on Thursday April 2nd they lynched the journalist who had ratted

Massari out, grabbing him while he was on his way to go listen to what

was to be a heavily biased sermon by the bishop of Ivrea comparing

Massari to the Penitent Thief from the gospel of Luke. On that day they

really did go beyond the limits of the reasonable, indifferently

attacking both right wing and extreme left journalists, and all the

representatives of the media without distinction as to party, even

taking to pieces one of their cars. But the high point was really the

April 4 manifestation where seven thousand of these “antagonists,”

without scruples and out of nowhere, went for another march. With the

same, evil silence about them as at first, but now with an extreme

tension, they went calmly and wordlessly smashing windows, cars, and

cameras, smudging up the walls with inane stuff like “We’re gonna burn

you, McDonald's,” attacking the Palace of Justice with paving stones and

spreading fear among the honest citizens. The sociologist Marco Revelli

can claim all he wants that “the city should communicate with them,

consider them as a resource and not as enemies» (La Repubblica,30

March), but how can you talk to people who don’t say a word, and take

recourse to violence and terrorism? People who as minister Piero Fassino

commented quite justly, “detest this society but don’t even propose to

change it”? The majority of the media and the Blooms basically reacted

to these new manifestations of “disorderly youth” like this. Deputy

Furio Colombo faithfully summarizes the atrocious amazement the good

people fell into: “It’s my city, and I saw what happened here, and I

just can’t explain it. There was this procession of strangers, young

people we’d never seen before and no one had ever talked to, going

around the city streets, and it was plain that they were dangerous… The

march was totally silent, but it had these unexplainably threatening

physical signs about it;… words that passers by didn’t always understand

the meaning of, but it felt hostile. Anyone who saw them up close would

have said they were ‘young people,’ but they certainly weren’t ‘our’

youths. They came down here but they weren’t from here. It felt like

they’d come from far away. How far? You can’t measure that kind of

distance in kilometers. It was like an inner distance, something that

you can only feel… My own city; it was impeccably clean, freshly

painted, and then it was terrorized, with this march by these unknown

invaders... » (Repubblica, April 2nd).

Men’s moral values can doubtless be seen in the way they react to news

about acts like this. Exploding with their slave’s resentment, they

certainly won’t be able to make even an imperceptibly small sign of

intelligence. For our part, this was one of those joys that come up from

such a depth that you don’t just hear it, you understand it from within

you, as if it were something that had happened in your body. We, the

others, the critical metaphysicians, intend to found on the basis of

that psychopathology a method of analysis that, while radicalizing the

meaning of certain manifestations and by removing them from their

temporal element, strips nude the truth of our times. It is only insofar

as they too undergo such a broadening of vision that people will be able

to recognize that with what happened that week, a Veil of Maya was

pierced in the world of the Spectacle, or that with “antagonists” like

this we are entering the time of wordless revolts, the time of illogical

revolts, which must in turn be massacred. The enemy has let himself be

seen, he has shown himself and has been recognized as such. Now this

society knows that it is flanked by men who, although they are certainly

doing something, are doing nothing to participate in it, and who,

rather, are collectively questioning its right to exist. The Spectacle,

at that moment, was brutally forced to face up to the defeat of its

pacification campaign. It was torn from its façade of neutrality by the

very people that it thought it had definitively entombed in its

profusion of conditioning, and for whom it had even prepared a whole

prison so full of privileges that people even dream of being confined in

it forever: “youth.” And it discovered, on its familiar map of cities

arranged according to its plans where it had even been able to

accommodate “self-managed social centers” and other “liberated zones”

for “rebellious individualities,” an interdependent chaos of ruins,

spread over with innumerable enclaves where people aren’t just content

to live with it, but also conspire against it. It had thought that it

would be enough to hide negativity in order to suffocate it, but all

that did was free it from mimetic behavior control and make it take to

the shadows where free forms of existence can blossom. But the most

disturbing aspect of these new people of the abyss – since that’s how

they were depicted – was that the critique they were carrying out was

above all the affirmation of an ethos that is foreign to the Spectacle,

that is, a heretical relationship to lived experience. It appeared that

in this section of territory it thought it had gotten squared away,

there were recesses where relations were not mediated by it; that in

other words its monopoly on the production of meaning was not just being

contested but had even been locally and temporarily removed. And it’s

clear that those who – and this is a rare event in these “autonomous

zones” – succeed in tying together a critique of commodity society and

an effective experimentation with free sociality are an immeasurable

danger for the Spectacle, because they are the partial realization here

and now of a concrete and offensive utopia. When a few individuals

remove themselves from the corset of codes and reified behaviors

prescribed by the tyranny of servitude, domination starts to talk of

genius, madness, or criminal deviance, which all boil down to the same

thing. But let that kind of phenomenon present itself in the form of a

whole community, and domination is brutally without recourse and has to

fight the battle according to the non- rules of absolute hostility,

where the enemy is always non-human. And this procedure will in this

case be more painful than otherwise, because it’s their own children

they’ll have to exclude from humanity – because they wouldn’t let

themselves be sold on the market. And so, in Italy, where the conditions

for it are the least propitious of anywhere, the Imaginary Party

manifested itself as such. It was an event not without import, because

in light of it, all the traditional forms of contestation appear somehow

provincial and polite.

Those who are simply happy because such a state of war gives them faith

once more in the possibility of new epic sagas of struggle are not going

beyond a superficial comprehension of what happened there. Because these

Turin “antagonists” gave rise to much more than damages, lynchings, and

frightened people: they laid open the way for crossing the line, the way

towards the exit from nihilism. At the same time, they also forged the

weapons that lead beyond it. We recognize the passage over the line in

the fact that a protest like all the rest, like people are so used to

seeing, was suddenly changed by the introduction of new factors. And so

the silence of the antagonists was no longer the traditional aphasia of

the leftist protestors, nor that of Bloom, but something qualitatively

new. The remarkable and mute tension that they gave rise to throughout

the course of their marches must be essentially understood as the

confrontation between two types of silence that are radically different

from one another. On the one hand, there is the natural, negative, and

to put it plainly, animal silence of the solitary crowd of Blooms who

never really express anything of their own at all, anything that the

Spectacle has not already said; the silence of the inorganic mass of

consumers on their knees, who are not supposed to speak, but just

respond when they’re spoken to; the silence of the bleating flock of

those who think they can peacefully go back to being simply the

representatives of the most intelligent of animal species since there

are no real human beings to denounce their degeneration. And on the

other, there is strategic silence, the full, positive silence of the

“antagonists,” deployed as a tactical device so as to manifest the

existence of negativity, so they could erupt into visibility without

allowing themselves to be frozen into any petrifying spectacular

positivity. (Perhaps we should clarify here that for them there was a

vital need to appear out in the open: the need to break the encirclement

that domination had subjected them to, which was threatening them with

the same fate that Massari had, the same fate suffered by those who

Nanni Balestrini calls the invisibles: the discreet physical

elimination, in unanimous indifference, of those whose existence

Publicity never recognized.) Perhaps we sound like we’re saying that the

“antagonists,” after some mature deliberation by an omniscient general

staff, chose that silence. But nothing could be more false: they were

cornered into it by the objective modalities of domination. And it is

precisely because these modalities have generalized themselves

throughout the whole of all industrialized societies that the way

silence took on a new character in their hands and became an offensive

tool/weapon deserves our attention. All reality’s mode of disclosure and

Publicity, all mankind’s linguistic essence, have been radically

alienated into an autonomous sphere which holds a monopoly on the

production of meaning, i.e., the Spectacle. And in such conditions, when

anything is explained or shown it is by that simple fact immediately

exposed to being metabolized by said Spectacle, as long as that serves

its ends. The “antagonists” are the first – and it hardly matters

whether they’re consciously aware of this or not – to draw the practical

consequences from this situation. By refusing to take any recourse to

any of the codes, to any of the accepted signifiers or meanings, which

are all managed and controlled by the occupier, and by manifesting that

refusal, they established in acts that wherever the Spectacle reigns,

silence is the necessary form in which true contestation - the Imaginary

Party - must appear. They brought into existence what lucid minds, like

Jünger in his Crossing the Line, had already observed: “the tyrants of

today,” he wrote, “no longer fear speechifiers. Maybe they used to in

the good old days of the absolutist State. Silence is much more terrible

– the silence of millions of men, and also the silence of the dead,

which the drums cannot drown out and which gets deeper every day until

it sparks off the Judgment. As nihilism becomes more and more the norm,

the symbols of emptiness spread much more terror than those of power

do.” Silence on its own, however, can only become a war-machine by

becoming conscious silence. All its effectiveness is suspended until it

recognizes itself as a critical-metaphysical sabotage device directed

against the triumph of positivity and the defeat of Being by its

forgetting. “In order to be able to be quieted, Dasein (being-there)

must have something to say; it must have a veritable and rich openness

to itself. Then the silence it had kept bursts out, and quiets the

impersonal voice of the ‘people say,’” said the old swine [Heidegger] in

his jargon.

The silence of infinite rage has a frightful power that has still not

even begun to appear, and in the coming years we would be foolish not to

hope to give a few good examples. For the case at hand, this power so

shocked the Spectacle that it made that philosopher-for-Young-Girls,

Umberto Galimberti, immediately begin to blather on about “this

squatters’ silence,” and greatly bemoan the “collapse of communication”

– as if communication had ever really existed in the framework of the

modern world; and as if such silence was not disturbing to it precisely

and only because it acknowledges the former’s nothingness – and to

pompously predict the poverty of the era and the indigence of “politics”

– as if politics, as a separate moment, had ever been anything but

another kind of poverty. Sociologists and elected officials also came

out to call, suicidally, for “dialogue” with these “new barbarians.”

What these rotting corpses had gotten an inkling of, with the keen

instinct of someone who knows he’d have everything to lose were

alienation to come to an end, was that in their very silence, these

“antagonists” hit upon something that in the right hands would be able

to blow the whole worm-eaten social organization to bits: the

unspeakable. Because by manifesting their silence, they brought out into

Publicity not just some thing or other, but a pure potential speech, a

statement liberated from the said, and more original than it is, i.e.,

the unspeakable itself: the fact that language is. By making the

nothingness heard and seen, they managed to render visibility to

visibility as visibility, or, in Heidegger’s terms, to “render speech to

speech as speech.” They forced the dictatorship of presence, which

claims: “that which is, you are not,” to admit that that’s reality

itself as it is really lived. Thus they forced visibility to come out at

its very limits; they ruined its illusion of neutrality. The Spectacle

was forced to recognize an exteriority, even a kind of transcendence,

perhaps; people overheard it make the fatal confession, “the

inexpressible certainly exists. It shows itself.” (Wittgenstein). It

simultaneously became visibly what it was essentially: a party to the

unfolding of the social war. By imposing silence upon it, by shutting up

its inexhaustible babbling with their fists, the “antagonists” rendered

it questionable, and that’s its downfall. From the moment the alienation

of the Common is projected as such into the very heart of the Common

itself, its days are numbered. – The press can squawk and complain that

a few of its henchmen got beat up and cry foul about freedom of

expression being sacrosanct all it likes, but no one’s listening, since

there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind anymore that that freedom long ago

became merely the tyrant’s freedom, and that expression merely that of

its baseness. -

But the parable of Turin also contains other good news, like the defeat

of domination right where it had concentrated all its forces: in keeping

all the important issues in suspended animation. And of course it has to

have had a confused intuition about this possibility; otherwise it would

not have donned the ingenuous and diabolical trappings of an ever more

frenetic proliferation of cultural commodities and distractions it has

over the last decades. In fact, it appears that the neutralization of

social contradictions has no other effect but to push them little by

little onto a higher plane where they become radicalized into

metaphysical frenzies. But then there are no more important issues left:

those who have found the answer to the question of life recognize

themselves in this, since for them the question has disappeared. These

“antagonists” are just the tip of the iceberg of immeasurable violence;

to them belongs the terrible glory of having brought the unspeakable to

the very heart of politics. Between the two parties that they provoked

the immediate crystallization of by their simple presence, between the

Imaginary Party and the Spectacle, nothing can be resolved with words,

nothing can comprise a subject for any kind of discussion, and there is

only a total, existential hostility. In every sense, the existence of

the one is the absolute negation of the existence of the other. These

are two camps between which there is not so much a difference of opinion

as a difference of substance; what happened in Turin made that obvious

fact perceptible. The one is the anomic heap of monads that “have no

windows through which anything at all can enter or exit” (Leibniz); the

nothingness accumulated of humanity, meaning, and metaphysics; the

desert of nihilism and pure indifference where “the idea of death has

lost all presence and all plastic force” (Benjamin, The Narrator).The

other is the community in mourning, the community of mourning, for which

the act of dying is “the most public act of individual life, and a

highly exemplary one” – only animals fail to accompany their own in

death – which experiences the loss of one of its constituents as the

loss of a whole world and where each takes “the death of others upon

himself as the only death that concerns (him)… that puts (him) outside

of himself and is the only separation that can open him up, in all his

impossibility, to the Openness of a community” (Blanchot, The Unavowable

Community).The one falls short of nihilism, and the other already stands

beyond it. Between the two there is the line. And that line is the

unspeakable, which imposes silence. The greatest possible demands don’t

allow themselves to be formulated.

The years pass, and we see the Spectacle burden itself with a growing

quantity of strange and brutal displays whose meanings it proves

incapable of aligning, and for which it cannot find a name suitable to

satisfy its spirit of classification. This is a sure sign that this

world is little by little in the process of crossing the line.

And it’s not the only sign, either. Hence, the latest bewitchments of

the commodity fail more and more to maintain themselves for more than a

few weeks, and new ones constantly need to be found which are already

surrounded by skepticism at their birth. No one can believe their own or

anyone else’s lies anymore, even if that is the best kept and at the

same time the most shared secret of all. Ageless enjoyments shed their

millenarian attraction, and what not long ago was the object of

universal longing now inspires no more than weary scorn. To recover a

speck of the dust of past pleasures, forces and effects must now be

unleashed that no one had ever thought to devote to such mediocre ends

before. Consumption’s own inevitability pushes it to ever more extreme

forms, in no way distinct from crime anymore besides in the name people

give it. And at the same time, a landscape of catastrophes is

unrelentingly forming in which even participating at all in the final

metamorphoses of nihilism has ended up losing its charm. The old feeling

of security is crumbling everywhere. Blooms live in a state of terror

that nothing can match, except perhaps the monstrous hodgepodge of

metropolises where asphyxiation, pollution, and embittered promiscuity

seem to be the only things that give them any feeling of safety. When we

look at them separately, we see that Bloom’s trembling has attained to

such heights that it has put him in a general state of paralysis and

incredulity that forever excludes him from any contact with the world.

Even when there is nothing anymore in the zones still held in the grip

of the empire of nihilism that is not driven by a secret desire for

self-destruction, we see the army of those that have crossed the line

and are applying nihilism to nihilism itself appear here and there,

detachment after detachment. They still retain, from their prior state,

the feeling that they are living as if they were already dead; but from

this state of indifference concerning the raw fact of being alive, they

draw the formula for the greatest possible sovereignty, a freedom which

is incapable of trembling in the face of anything anymore, because they

know that their lives are no more than the meaning they collectively

give to them. Domination fears nothing more than these purely

metaphysical creatures, these maquis of the Imaginary Party: “today, as

ever, those that do not fear death are infinitely superior to the

greatest of temporal powers. Hence they must ceaselessly spread fear.”

(Jünger, Crossing the Line). In the glassy eyes of the Spectacle, this

renaissance, this new influx of Being presents itself as a fall back

into barbarism, and it is true that we are indeed dealing with a return

of the elementary forces. It is also true that all this is operating in

the context of a universal cybernetic alienation, the mode of expression

proper to such a context is the most unintelligible brutality. But this

violence is distinct from all other criminal manifestations, because it

is in its essence a moral violence. And it is precisely to the extent

that it is moral that it is also mute and calm. “Truth and justice

demand calm, but only the violent attain them.” (Bataille, Literature

and Evil)– there was no shortage of old roadies of abjection surprised

about how even a guy that was witness to all the political violence

1970s and worked for the good cause, for Manifesto newspaper, even, got

beat up by the “antagonists”; and concluding from that in one sitting

that it was just some banal “apolitical violence.” Clearly certain lives

would be hardly predisposed towards getting an understanding of what a

hyperpolitical violence might mean. That once again it is possible to

designate with certainty who the real scum and their accomplices are

shows clearly enough just how far beyond nihilism we have come. When

Lynch law reappears among men who will not deign to listen to anyone but

the bishop of Ivrea, then we know that the gravity of history is making

its bloody return. The time is gone when a Sorel could observe that “the

old ferocity has been replaced by trickery,” even if there are still

“plenty of sociologists around who think serious progress (was) being

made.” That remark was in regards to the deformation that the very

concept of “violence” has undergone over the last decades, which

presently designates in a generic manner anything that pulls Bloom out

of his passivity, starting with history itself. As a general thesis,

insofar as the arbitrariness of domination is more and more threatened

by the arbitrariness of freedom, it will have to label as “violence”

everything that opposes it in practice which it is preparing to crush,

all the while proclaiming itself to be open to “dialogue” between three

carloads’ worth of riot cops. And it is precisely because there is no

dialogue except among equals that the complete liquidation of the world

of closed discourse, the spectacular infrastructure, and all the relays

of alienated Publicity is the necessary prerequisite for even the

possibility of true discussion being reestablished. Before that happens

it’s all just empty chatter. Also, contrary to what a certain Jacques

Luzi wrote in issue 11 of the magazine Agone, it’s only when mankind

will be free from the grip of things that they will really be able to

communicate, and not just by “communicating” their intent to free

themselves from that grip.

Here, though only partially, we have hit upon an enormous truth which we

doubt will be recognized as reasonable before it becomes brutally real:

we cannot transcend nihilism without realizing it, nor realize it

without transcending it. Crossing the line means the general destruction

of things as such, or in other words the annihilation of nothingness. In

effect, at the moment when society’s socialization attains completion,

each existing being fades away into what he represents in the totality

that he can then come to occupy a place in materially, with his whole

being absorbed by what he’s participating in. Hence there is nothing

that must not be destroyed, no one that can be guaranteed pardon,

inasmuch as they are part of a real order, a Common, that was designed

only to separate us. In the Sabbatean tradition, the moment of the

general destruction of things was given the name Tiqqun. In that

instant, each thing is repaired and removed from the long chain of

suffering it underwent in this world. “All the subsistence existence and

toil that permitted me to get there were suddenly destroyed, they

emptied out infinitely like a river into the ocean of that one

infinitesimal moment.” (Bataille, Theory of Religion) But the “perfect

silent ones” that carry universal ruin within them also know the paths

that lead beyond it. Jakob Frank, the absolute heretic, handled this

truth in his usual abrupt style: “Everywhere Adam went, a city was

built; but everywhere I have set foot everything will be destroyed. I

came to this world only to destroy and annihilate, but what I will build

will last eternally.” Another heretic said likewise, a century later:

“no matter what you want to undertake, you have to begin by destroying

everything.” Whether Tiqqun will bring life or death depends for each

person on how much of his illusions he has been able to lose: “it is to

the extent that clear consciousness wins out that the objects

effectively destroyed will not destroy mankind itself.” (Bataille). It

is certain that those who have not been able to throw off their

reifications, those who persist in putting their whole being into

things, are doomed to the same annihilation they are. Whoever has never

experienced one of those hours of joyous or melancholic negativity

cannot tell how close to destruction the infinite is. What we’re saying

here is in no way reverie; events such as these can be found scattered

throughout history, but since the world was still not unified in a

substantial totality, they remained mere local curiosities. The

laughable Ortega y Gasset tells, in his The Revolt of the Masses, how

such a catastrophe came about in Tijar, a village near Almeria, when

Charles III was crowned the king, on September 13th, 1759, as follows:

“The proclamation was made at the town’s Central Square. Soon

afterwards, drink was ordered for the whole enormous crowd, which

consumed 250 gallons of wine and 13 gallons of brandy, and the

pernicious vapors warmed their spirits in so fine a manner that the

crowd spilled over towards the Town Granary all yelling ‘viva’

repeatedly, went inside, and threw all the wheat that was in there and

all the Treasury’s 900 silver coins out the windows. Then they proceeded

over to the City Hall, and made them throw all the tobacco and money out

of the doors of the Tax Collector’s office. They did the same in the

shops, to spice up the festivities, scattering all the edible and liquid

goods that were inside. The ecclesiastical State contributed in a lively

manner as well; then, with great cries, the women were called upon to

throw out everything they had in their houses, which they did with the

most total selflessness because there was nothing left: bread, wheat,

flour, barley, plates, kettles, mortars and chairs. These rejoicings

went on until the village was completely destroyed.” The imbecile then

concludes – oh bitter irony – “Admirable Tijar, the future belongs to

you!”

We must work to make that future come about, and aim for a world-wide

realization of Tijar. We would be quite upset if one of these universal

High Mass events that the Spectacle is so fond of, like the year 2000

for instance, did not one day turn disastrous. So many people gathered

in the streets can only herald the storming of new Bastilles. Not a

stone upon a stone must be left of this enemy world.