The Besieged Thinker: Political Thought at the End of Man

Death is the one thing fate gave our kind.
……– Leopardi

The thinker of today, besieged elitist, who regards himself as being set apart, more fragile, more learned, more perverse, and certainly more sensitive than his contemporaries wanders the byways of discourse like a faulty troubadour seeking that strange knowledge that will save us from ourselves. This fragility has nothing to do with the buzz of our endless charade of sound bites that perversely haunts the echo chamber of our external dataclaves. No, the global mapping of the cultural mind within our electronic hives has nothing to do with thought, but is rather a superficial and mindless escape from all thought, a world where thought dies in the shadows of a mass burial chamber, a necromantic consuming machine where death finally gains the upper hand and the mind feeds on its own entrails like a dog gone rabid. Ours is an age set adrift, lost among its own self-imposed engorgements of an excess it will never be able to absorb, it smirks at its own festival of sacrifice, a victim not so much of its own blind lust for life as it is of its triumphant victory in insipidity.

We repeat each other mirror by mirror as the circular logic of decay sets in and we maximize the lobotomies of our forbears with each scribbling motion of the keypad upon the blank of our current malaise. Unable to set things right, we enter our mazes like ambulatory denizens of the last thought. Without goal or purpose we sink into that annihilating light where the acedia of things neither moves nor remains still, but is rather bound to the anodyne of political correctness. No longer able to offend each other we become policeman of thought gathering the waste into a final pyre of the world. The fires in the echo chambers of this void cannot recover the purity of being, but instead deepens the morbidity of each carefully crafted soundbite as if the fragmentary substance of life were nothing but an anarchic cry in the machinic gaze of some impersonal and faceless algorithm.

Disgusted with our own tremulous excess we seek out those solitary beings who harbor that strangeness and perversity we so crave. Like members of some forgotten cult we wander these silences casting furtive glances into the shadows as the apparitions of the future break over our ghostly lives. Here and there we discover a lonely voice singing in the void, a member of that tribe of intellects that once brought us a momentary respite from this hellish paradise. Few and far between are these voices now, having been imprisoned for crimes of freedom, atheological students of sacrifice and ecstasy.  Twisted souls robbed of their place within the sun they are now locked away in the night of a distant black star.

Blind artifacts of despair, agitated by the blindness of our self-reflecting nothingness, we harbor visions of transgression to fill the aporia in being as if we could know what cannot be known by flesh and blood. Tempted and lured into oblivion we follow our own decaying thought into the silences of the brain’s manufactured dreams, a false transcendence that leads to nothing but that endless infinity of inner doubt – a skepsis beyond which all thought fails. Shifting in the listless gaze of self we beg the question if life is worth it, not realizing that the nothingness we are is less than what we think or can think. Thought begins to fail us at the limit of our known boundaries, and we laugh to know more.

Even now I listen carefully as those unrecognized thoughts escape the dark lairs of their endless night among the shattered vessels of the Void. Anarchists, socialists, utopians, Uranians, feminists, radical vegans and those broken beings drowned out amid the anomalous arts of hidden desire: heretics of the anomalous; cenobites of catastrophe and erotic thought. Those who think against time – the untimely ones, who seek exit from this dilapidated world where wealth and profit plunder the last fundaments of human degradation and its formidable logic. Seekers of oblivion, annihilators of vein days. Each of these forlorn creatures bound within the gulags of lost nights harbors only a keen sense of derision and laughter, of being elsewhere.

The Anthropocene, an age of forgetfulness, to be forgotten among the mineral wealth of time; an age where naked apes once inhabited thought’s secret realms, but now edge into extinction. “There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.” (Nietzsche) Let us say that our cows are not of that “Night of the World,” but rather of that electric dream that shoots past all stars. Transhuman angels seeking to bypass the circuitry of desire, plunder the dark energy below the threshold and surpass the designs of ancient archons as they bid us emerge from our black chrysalis and enter an artificial paradise. Cloven fictions of demented minds, screaming for release into bloodless dominion, monks of a fetid thought they seek an immortal shore beyond flesh and find only the dreams of steel and a final enclosure, a prison for desire.

Wild imaginings of futurity escape the bitter fruit of human need and necessity. Egoists of a broken promise that seek salvation by way of immortal steel, caged desires filled with treacherous armature. Agon of the mind, weaponry of the soul, unbidden and uncharmed from the erotic zones of this fabricated myth our future bids us bask in the sun of deathly light. Autochthons of nightmares unknown to the ancients these questers of exit seek a final solution in transcendence, a victory in the immolation of flesh and metamorphosis into a New Genesis, a Book of Nightmares for the children of a sinking world.

Hollowed out by time’s last myth, the secret discourse of unbounded heresies, we fall against the light of this age’s unearthly dreams. We who have for so long fed on the bitter dregs of entombed desires once again begin our ancient tryst, dance to the music that escapes the clans of profit and power. Knowing what we know we travel abroad in the night touching here and there each other, acknowledging the kiss and hand of fate. We know as we are known by that timeless knowing that seeks freedom from the prison of this ideological crime-World. The labors of the negative send us into darker climes, register us on the stones of endless tears, bleed us of that gift – each to each to know and be.

We lead a counter-life, against the grain of political despair, moving in inverse relation we invent out of our own necessity heterotopian enclaves of desire where human freedom is not some promise of a gated thought, but rather a surplus, an excess that is the given out of the Sun’s black heart. Crossing the threshold we enter the liminal spaces of alternate dimensions of thought and feeling, where the shadows shift among the folds of new and dangerous heresies. In the spaces of desire, under the banner of uncertainty we begin to raise new questions at the edge of things, navigating the give and take of new valuations, opening ourselves to the incompleteness of ourselves and the universe.

Martyrs of melancholy, dark divers of that inner tension that leads underground movements, revolutionary collectives, and secret societies against the torpor of enchained desire, we situate ourselves in this counter-world where we inhabit the shadows outside those blind assemblages of social dominion. Here we meet in the silences between things, hidden from view by the lightworld of Capital. Amid the ruins of modernity we fold ourselves into these shadows like demons from a formal system of anguish. Anchorites of collapse we travel the deserts of modernity like secular mystics of sovereign ecstasy, members of the crime syndicates of subversion and inversion. Our eyes full of ash and death we speak in the tongues of the newly risen dead, creatures who have walked away from the Dead Cities. Our only habitation is in the wild places of time, outside the cloned orders of this world’s Law.

The bittersweet politics of desire goes under the sacred sign of pain and sacrificial excess; an economy of pure waste. We are the last of our kind, awakening that which in its final gathering will blend the world into a new and unbidden change. Those who seek only exit will walk through the stones of fire like children in a festival of laughter. Hand in hand they will emerge from this long night into a greater war, an endless war of desire and imagination. Only here in this place will they discover that movement of the world that brings the utter darkness they so heartily crave, realizing it is the place they never left and never will; negating that which is negation life subtracts itself from zero. Sovereignty devoid of use rattles us awake.

The acknowledgment of Death is trivial when the power to decreate a world is in one’s hands.

Even as this earth marshals its own war against the indecency of Man we must know beyond doubt that she labors under no illusion that this child of time exists. Impersonal and oblivious of our thought she reconciles her endless cycles toward that apocalyptic change which brings with it the sun’s own distant plan, the gravity of a thought without thought. The politics of time is blind to human ways and means, the economy of stars requires only the last payment be remaindered.  The Book ended, all chapters slowly fed to the fires, only the final page left blank with one word scored in the burnt edge of its white silence: Zero.

The quivering void shatters the silence of being.

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– Steven Craig Hickman ©2015 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.