@version guess the morbidly curious edgelord philosopher…
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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.
This manifests itself in the most
spectacular way in the growing number of people, 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 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.
At the origin of this instability is a disorder, a disorder that comes from unused strength, from a negativity that can’t eternally remain unemployed, on pain of
physically destroying those experiencing that negativity.
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… An infernal dialectic is at work here, one that will tend to make such eruptions 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.
There’s 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, this man will remain silent about the motives of his crime. Partly because sovereignty doesn’t 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 this figure 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, it’s his destiny, even — but he’ll never say so. Because his strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce
silence.
To live in conformity with man’s fundamental aspiration to sovereignty is impossible in the Spectacle except in one single instant: the instant of the
act.
He who isn’t 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 there’s anything in man 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 students and a professor, little Mitchell Johnson declared to his incredulous schoolmates: “
Tomorrow I will decide who will live and who will die.” 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. “
I’m no longer acting out of sentiment,” said Alain Oreiller while executing his mother. There’s 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 doesn’t
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 utilitarianism’s favorite false paradoxes — as long as those acts aren’t 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: “
We’re 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 isn’t about giving some revolutionary significance to such acts, and it’s hardly even about treating them as exemplary. It’s about understanding what they express
the doom of, and grasping onto them in order to plumb the depths of humanity. And whoever follows this path to the end will see that man is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is a nothing that is sovereign, an emptiness with a pure potential.
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. 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.
