Negazine — 2 — 2018

Editorial

The second issue of a magazine like this is, for us, a great success. Not only are we pleased, which would be obvious, we are also a little surprised. We were under no illusions, and still do not have any. The list of the problems we found incomprehensible, drawn up in the article “And now?” in Issue One, is still valid, although we have tried to give some answers here. Not that these answers are not satisfactory in themselves, but as we were putting them down other doubts appeared, even more complex and numerous.

The instruments used for going into them, basically the ones we have discussed many times with comrades in different places at various encounters, led us to fresh doubts as we went into some questions more deeply. Just to give an example, we were asked more or less explicitly why we never used the word “State” in the first issue although we were dealing with topics concerning problems of social and revolutionary organization, to use comrades’ current terminology.

Enough of codifications. Perhaps in our desperate attempt to do away with them we have construed just as persistent and inextricable others. The life we bring about in this world is full of duplicity, the appearances we avail ourselves of and the roles we are constrained to play are there for all to see. Many are those who live and breed this sickness within them, double beings, Januses able to flip the mask one way or the other at a moment’s notice. In order to do this they must conceal their true face, which has nothing to do with to the roles they are called upon to play. Yet they also feel a restless sense of absence and are not happy basically, which is why they tend to offload their malaise and disillusion on to others. Not only do they not experience happiness, it doesn’t even come near them. In the face of death the possessions they have accrued will fail to represent a life truly lived and they will realize that they have been chasing all kinds of ghosts, pitiful substitutes for reality.

They dissect life because awareness of unity, too strong for them, would sweep them away. The graceful dance that appears to grasp them at times is never free of fear of exhaustion. No formal harmony is possible. I live waiting to experience the rare happiness of a moment of abandon. A flower opens at dawn and my intention permits itself to be grasped, just like a flower. I slowly drag myself along the imaginary line of least exposure, a snake emerging from the sea. Poor Laocoonte, he cannot escape it.

A twofold slant. On the one hand derealization, which we are trying to understand in its aspects of coverage, emptying, flattening, overlapping and everything else. On the other hand technique in all its many forms, in a continual state of collapse, reciprocal conquests, destruction of the adversary, affirmation of self.

There is something unacceptable in the poor conception of reality that clashes with the parallel one that wants it to be improved, albeit progressively. If the latter is destined to be disappointed, like the former moreover, at least it contains the idea that the dominant logic can gradually improve relations of coexistence, it’s not just an abstract accumulation of knowledge. The first hypothesis refuses this logic, seeing acquisition as good in itself no matter how it comes about, at whatever cost. Moral condemnation of such an alternative is self-evident. But who pronounces this condemnation? Who is the moralist? In the eighteenth century formal progressivism was upheld by philosophers who invested their assets in the slave trade. The pedagogue Rousseau let his children die in orphanages. You cannot wish to improve things without taking risks, putting yourself on the line, believe the right-thinking with all their goods, their stuff to be defended. Not absolute reactionaries but those who choose the path of compromise and an illusory but less dangerous progressivism. Morality is not a collective construction, it only changes and spreads in such a way in the rotten version of productivism; but then it is a wicked epidemic not a respectable, albeit unattainable, ideal.

And we, in any case, are not moralists.

Derealization

If technology encompasses the techniques all fighting against each other, if the economy supports these techniques, both in their flattening by the technological process and in the thick of the technical clash, and if economic goals, both micro and macro are now almost completely divided between the world of technique (to be derealized) and technology (which derealizes), the whole process is quite devoid of meaning. At least for those who still see the world as a reality against which to struggle in order to guarantee, in a more or less distant future, the gradual birth of a society that is slowly improving.

The ithyphallic yogi represents sexuality and chastity at the same time. That this road is fraught with danger cannot be denied. The authority of the law is always slacker in the border areas. But why should that scare us? Past and present, through internal relations, are both in act in the comprehensive movement of reality. We are vaguely aware of this, but only able to build daily life by referring to conventions in the field. In hieroglyphics, Sacred writing, the image of the object represents the word that it designates. The human heart is represented by the emblem of the vase. We are not speaking from the pulpit. None of that. This is not a clash of sanctities, nobody cares about that. Our endeavour is practical, aimed at finding the way pointing to the transformation of reality, towards action. Only this road is not direct, it denies the superficial mechanism of production but does not replace it with some other equally simple hypotheses. With regard to the totality of reality, technique sounds insufficient, so it is necessary to replace it with another vision of life in order for the complexity of reality to be understood. Plato and the androgynous shaman. Whenever you are troubled by the need to justify your choices you end up dwindling into the sunset, burying yourself alone. Metaphysics is the flattest aspect of love. I, from the height of my claims as irreducible fighter, would have the courage to admit that everything in the tragic reality that surrounds me, ever less comprehensible under the veil of uniformity due to flattening, retains some legible meaning, if not directly, at least decodable after the expropriation of certain cultural means? It must be admitted that this hope is somewhat implausible. Reminiscent of the Platonic myth of the cave perhaps?

In an attempt to explain it, among the many things that could be said of derealization is that it a process of exhaustion and slow death of the world produced by technique. In the broadest sense of the term, therefore measurable in millennia not decades, our human history has displayed a panorama built on massacres and wars that horrifies us as soon as we look at it. Not one period of this history exists that has not been hammered out of the blood and tears of millions of poor wretches in order to foster an illusion of power and domination, to the extent that we should be ashamed to proclaim ourselves “human beings” so often with that unjustified pride. Yet deep inside each of us is buried that sense of superiority that our species has not yet proved itself worthy of, but which we know exists, albeit submerged and almost dissolved by our cannibalistic ferocity. And it is on this confidence that we stand when we dream of a different world produced from a revolutionary evolution, albeit progressively, capable of transformations such as to erase the idiotic claim to continue killing in the most atrocious activity that man decided to exert: war. From the develoment of technology, and so of the resulting derealization, we become aware that a different destiny for all the techniques would seem possible. A sort of liquifaction capable of giving life to a world clouded in an exhaustive fluidity capable of absorbing all our attention, now reduced to a minimum by a movement of flattening and emptying of cultural substance which, albeit powerless, even amidst savagery and massacres persisted in proudly reappearing almost as if it wanted to fight against the idiocy and ignorance of the warrior muscles.

Does the coverage of reality, its destitution of meaning, the zeroing of every known point of conjunction, signify absence of criteria? In all conscience it is a matter of taste. Nothing can be extreme to the end. There is always a footing for recovery. And this is important if we think that order is related to the different ways of understanding the difference, in repetition, modification, compromise. From the darkness of one fading one arrives at the darkness of another, there is no absence on either side, just a completely different presence, and so on, everywhere. Every presence is therefore modification from the very beginning, without absolute identification or change being imaginable. Totality is present in all relationships. And this is a discipline that subverts the order that has always been something imposed here and desired elsewhere.

Maximum distancing is the primary condition for the subsequent process of approach in the same way that the extreme rarefaction of the artifice corresponds to a yearning for naturalness blocked only by the limits of human possibilities. With this I am not advocating an empty naturalist pantheism. The rediscovery of reality in the interweaving of the processes of approach is a risky affair, even if only to discover that this fantastic journey is no more than a void of imagination, a further more refined and consolatory ambiguity. Symmetries are always meticulous. So, following Gadda, the terrible gravity of the morgue record dispels the marvellous ambiguities of every human cognition in advance.

Even rejection, the accepted return to order, adds a small stone to the construction of the dramatic event. Refusal seals the artifice but draws the boundaries of fear at the same time. The unnamable is named, made accessible to annihilation. But refusal is a word, so it is a game and deception, a context of guilt. It never presents itself intact in the statute of technique, it chases itself into the judiciousness of saying, but does not erase the sport of pain. The absolutely foreign is now an intimate part of ourselves surging in the enclosure of reality. By saying it we deny it, of even specifying it, admitting it as part of ourselves. The tragedy lies in having to speak about it, the law that inevitably produces the object, the battle with ourselves, the silent dialogue aimed at preserving from destruction even when it sets limits and weaknesses. Becoming restless within immediate rules does not allow any specification other than a promise of a passage towards technical construction, accumulation of doing sufficient in itself. But this program of unspeakable adventures must constantly be reformulated, nothing is decided once and for all, the virtue of great battles slips away like oil before the capricious reappearance of never-tamed identity. Indeed, being consistent, it leads to the perfection of the accumulative mechanism, a sort of oath without a sacramental formula, but no less challenging for that.

Reality brings everything to the forefront of the sayable, continuously, where everything must correspond,and correspond in doing, with rules and protocols. There is nothing that is not an object, even the mask and the trap are born objects, deformative incidents but as such destined for a purpose, therefore objects. To derealize yourself completely you need fear and desolation. Progressive spoilation never quite reaches the bottom line of an original core. Behind each appearance is another, and so on. Consistency cannot hide the fear of absence of rules. Every artifice strangles the idea of the absolute other. Breaking the circle of one’s uniformity with the avowal would break the deception and open up, but the cost always seems higher than the gain. Compliance with agreements is consumable material so it wanders around the world in search of buyers, complete with price. Modesty vis-a-vis oneself reveals the depths of virginal fear, and is violent repression of any other intention. Restless desire runs adrift, does not admit correspondences or appointments on street corners. There might and there might not be. No chance for it to be calculated in advance, no easy rhythm to follow. Wandering in search of something I do not know, that is what seems to be facing me; a goal that is not a goal, a purpose without purpose, coherence that has no correspondence. I do not know what is right, and that is precisely why I am seeking it. If I look for it I can find it with the method of the coherent relationship between means and ends, but as soon as I hold it in my hands and question it, I realise in horror that I am looking at a decomposing corpse. I should let myself be seduced by transient rivulets, not impassively watch the great river of life flow by. But to do this I would have to be without restraint, a big old man watching himself dance in the agile body of a small girl. What do I need of horror and fear? And respect for others? I might be able to lay down my restless head. I am brave enough. The will brakes sharply, puts the crumbs aside, gets to the point, proposes acronyms, takes upon itself the responsibility of details, forces restlessness into order, strengthens the soft yawns of possibility or the cunning mask. Every sanctity to be respected is the flag of a new sacrificial order. The holy hand that rises to strike the tyrant, the eye quick to identify blame, while everything else must carefully safeguard itself. What sense would there be in striking out blindly? What would become of the sanctity? The order of doing thus closes over me like the placid waves of a sea, now calm on the head of the castaway tired of swimming. But the function of the mask could be precisely to repeat this sanctity to infinity, reflecting it in the clear mirror of convention to be honoured. The immediate responses pain and contempt. Also curious wonder of the artist in the bystanders, all shipwrecked long ago in the corridors of correspondences. Overcoming is letting go, not opposing these investigators of souls. Modesty glues the interstices of action, conceals the imperfections. We are all alike in the restraint that arises from the abyss. Instead the restless stimulous that shakes me up is irrepressible and regulates my misfortune, not that of others. Masks on the roadsides and in the fields, hung on trees or placed on other elevations like macaws, were familiar spectacles for the people of the Roman imperial era. To inhabit a different planet, a healthy place while clenching one’s lips so as to not talk, not to die strangled by one’s own words, would be unthinkable.

What can I do with the equilibrium that seems to support the world of the already done? How many impassive killers get on the train to go to the office every morning? Habit and normality is their violence, it contains the significance of the world, the sense of time. In the vacant looks of those around them there is only the fear of the beaten dog, the memory of the chain and the whip, the need for protective fencing. Give them a stamped mandate and they will slaughter the world for you. The horrors of balance are covered by modesty, defended by restraint. To break all this means to oppose oneself, compromise oneself in the shamelessness of a choice which in itself is not enough, it must also be said, this choice. But the speaker is played by his own word, he produces and is produced. It is necessary to drive immediacy on to unpredictable paths where the word becomes enemy, indirect trap, forced by role playing to support a role that the parts have not agreed upon. Say something different? But how if the only object of saying is the immediate archiving of life?

The technological process is opposing itself to the techniques with all their conflicts and at the same time it is incorporating them by assisting their development in a culturally active way. What does this definition that we are now trying to introduce mean, in order to reach further clarifications? In a sense the growth and proliferation of the techniques has produced modern civilization, which however does not just consist of technically significant doing, but also of thinking, which is reflexive doing, doing that includes the thought and spirit of the times as well as the development of the technically signifiant production that is produced. Culture, in the widest possible sense, consists of the level of development of the techniques, but also the level of thought that makes such development possible. Technology, to honour its etymological sense, is therefore technique and reflection on technique. This combination has given rise to a dazzling, but not all that much, awareness of the horrors that technique abandoned to itself is capable of producing, far beyond the obscene spectacle it has offered so far.

Derealization is therefore a kind of exhaustion of culture, a lessening of the stormy bond that has always existed and continues to exist between culture and technique, a bond so intimate as to consider this distinction valid up to a point. By trying to reduce techniques, i.e. reality as a whole, to a vague, perhaps even voluptuous, hallucination, technology is trying to address its contribution to the marriage of technique and knowledge to a lowering of the latter term and thus towards a reduction of the former to a function of mere service. By this we mean production, gradually controlled and brought back to within the limits required for the continuation of the existence of the species and for the reduction of the dangers inherent in the latter’s deadly tendency towards self-destruction. Reality is imbued with a hallucination of violence that also ruins the active substance of technique, annihilates it in continuous postponement towards global possession, conquest without borders, not finally free but without anything to stand out from. Now, distinction being the very basis of conquest, or rather, possession, it follows that technique wants the destruction of itself, so is profoundly contradictory. The torturer that details and realizes this antinomy of possession is the word, it gives life to the hallucination of appearance and condenses the totality of power that possession confers, unsatisfactory totality that it puts off to further conquest in a hunger for death and destruction. The cruelty in this procedure is a mere detail, a smudge. The participatory appearance of those who suffer, also possessor, is the general rule. We are all attacked and raped, we are all massacrers, even the raped and the massacred. The more awareness of this grows and my negative criticism tears strips of flesh from the appearance that is suggesting a better world to me, albeit in perspective, the more I call myself out of the endless crowd of accomplices. But this does not lessen my responsibility, nor does it relieve the deep sense of guilt that permeates my stay in the world.

The concept of exhaustion affects not only culture but also technique, for many reasons. First, a clear, net distinction between these two aspects of reality is impossible. Second, self-defence against the destruction that dwells deep within the human species is not possible by simply resorting to an opportune attenuation of cultural availability as manipulation of the spirit of the time. Third, cultural hallucination would render technique useless as it is available today because binary logic could prevent the construction of a direct control of intelligences, etc. The flattening in question, i.e. the exhaustion that we can see in act even today, albeit at uneven levels, once completed would throw the human species into a sort of generalized dreaminess which would render us only able to think in pre-established modulations, selected not exactly uniformly but in a sufficiently acceptable way, certainly able to lower the level of conflictuality by producing what we called “social peace” a long time ago. Approaching such a condition would make us more and more stunned, oppressed by an unbearable darkness where acceptance of a permanent direct contact with a centralized model based on a no longer binary but multiple logic, would be possible.

Would the fact that reality can allow such a technological mechanism that is capable of advancing (we do not know when and how far), of subtracting sense, meaning, life, from it, not be an indication that suffering and nothingness are the foundation, support and justification of this reality that has hosted us for millennia, that we have considered shaped by blood and horrors, clearly, but at least in the intention of an improvement? Handfuls of belligerents impose apparent choices that force endows with the facility to impose itself, but not for this is a form of resolution regrouped in such a place, on the contrary, it lays bare the inconsistency of technique. By considering theoretical analysis a neutral element it is transformed into an instrument that reduces man to simple worker, bringing about a perfecting of economic alienation that is strengthened and becomes difficult to eliminate. Techniques, for their part, can only transcend this subjection of the instrument by becoming part of the historical process, therefore by adapting in order to participate in the construction of a society that is better than the present one.

And if instead, we realize in guilty amazement that this improvement does not exist, that there is no intention to reduce massacres, which are increasing everywhere, and that bestiality will eventually reduce us to idiotic ghosts. Of course, we can still make our heart beat in our chest again, believe the will to put the knife between our teeth and pass to the attack is possible. But till when? Might our youthful enthusiasm come to be silenced for ever by the derealizing abilities, whose poisonous alea we are barely catching a glimpse of?

The vital need to rise up, breathe, find space in the face of the technological pressure that is killing us (attention, I am not referring to the techniques, let’s not get the words mixed up), cannot resist for long. The other pressures are annihilating it, crushing it and, eventually, will kill it. The more the torment grows and the closer one feels to incomprehension, the more absurd it seems that a mechanism such as we have been describing be allowed to proliferate, the closer one is to collapse unless one makes a decisive change of route. A consequence of the possible misunderstanding of all the clarification of existence (where there could be confusion between existence and the empirical individuality of the single being therein, or seeing existential interiority merely as subjectively) is the fear of seeing, in this philosophising, the dissolving of objectivity into subjectivity, the loss of the world and all its wealth, the burial of must be and the destruction of norms and their obligating value. In order to maintain the truth of the philosophical clarification of existence, a clear appropriation of the sense of objectivity in this truth is necessary. Before philosophising man sees objectivity aproblematically, forgetting himself in his own stable technical fixity; through philosophising objectivity is put in question. This reflection risks dissolving all content, because by asking, founding and rejecting, he experiences his own strength and his own abyssal depth either in the form of nihilism or in the arbitrariness of sophistic questions. The purpose of philosophising, on the other hand, is to acquire a new possession of objectivity that allows it to be held in suspension, and for existence to dominate it. In this way objectivity becomes a means for the manifestation of existence which, having overcome its naivety, comes to understand the forces of destruction.

Having to deal with this radical contradiction either tempers or destroys, there are no alternatives. Here it is taken for granted that we are preparing ourselves for the leap, not for the supine acceptance of incredible acquiescence. There is something repulsive about the breakdown of “normal” life, but it is presented as the only possible alternative, when it is nothing more than a bow to the colourless tasteless garment that everyone wants to remake for us from top to bottom, providing us with plausible perspectives whereas for a long time now we have chosen the unlikely, incredible upturning of the world into something worth living. I do not want to take up the specific psychoanalytical argument here, especially the part concerning differences and types, just as the fundamental difference between consciousness and the unconscious does not concern me. I have always thought the latter is an attempt to bring back at least part of consciousness to within an objective mechanism that could be considered a reservoir to draw on to give meaning to official conscience, bringing the restlessness back to order and possible diversity to the sacred image of technique. If it were true that everything that reason cannot assimilate within its own sphere is sent back to the sphere of the unconscious, into irrationality, some extremely serious things would have to be admitted. First, the subject’s belonging exclusively within the framework of the mechanism of rationality, with some escapes into another territory that you either have to correct by derealizing it, or use to reconfirm the primary value of the rational mechanism. It would then have to be admitted that everything that does not belong to reason immediately, both individually and collectively, enters a condemnable field, even if the aseptic specialist can get involved here as this is, after all, his job: to put things right and restore normality where before there was hysteria and deviance. Finally, one would have to admit to a purely formal objectively unknown, subterranean, process inserting itself into those deterministic mechanisms that must be unmasked, not only because of the possible negative consequences it could continue to have, and not only in the field of psychoanalysis, but also because they could only fuel research based on suspicion and not on the totality of possible relationships. In fact, it seems evident to me that we cannot speak of an objective mechanism starting from the point of view of the whole of the techniques.

Why limit yourself to just complaining about how bad humans are? We have known for a long time that the inglorious bandages of religion, any religion, did nothing but hide the putrescent sore that lay underneath them. Let’s look reality in the face. It is uglier than we thought; the agony that inhabits it can neither kill it once and for all, nor heal it. There is nothing that can be “fixed”, we must go further, and this is only possible by killing the ancient man who still inhabits it like a gentleman, and give space for the new man that technology is trying with all means to prevent coming forth. Hypocrisy, ungratefulness, ruthlessness and the desire to kill cannot be erased, just as all the massacres and wars cannot disappear all in one go, all this is too inherent in the innermost fibres of this extraordinary beast that is man.

The search for action is an extraordinarily “other” gesture, it does not belong to the orthodoxy of doing, that is why it could save the world by proposing an absolutely different life. Not that of an impossible pacifism that has shown its limits and hypocrisy on many occasions, but precisely by attacking that very process of flattening that we are talking about in these pages. The purpose of knowing is not quality. I can fervently want to build on the immense vastness of my knowledge yet remain forever alien to the absence that dozes next to me. My partialities are useful, so they have one purpose that feeds them and pushes to their production; unattainable diversity, no, it is not useful and does not move according to my mollusc-like desires. The other, absolutely different, sleeps their dreams in the silence of desolation and needs nothing. Being the one who is, the last thing he needs is me. My factual strength cannot compel quality to its service, nor even the contrary, without my abandonment, my giving in to the possibility offered to me by the destiny of being intuited and to intuit the existence of other, that, which in doing, I live as absence. I cannot use my will as my aim of doing its overcoming, there is the very obstacle of the will that prevents me. I have to build a labyrinth to overcome this obstacle and unwittingly find myself at the opening. My will is strong, but it can be circumvented, this is the great hypothesis of which I know only the first steps. The inexpressible put into words is not absolute absence finally revealed but is a rambling without substance, much more realistically, a remembrance of the one and of the experience I could have had of the latter. Suddenly, despite all the flattening that I am gradually undergoing, I realize that beyond derealization there is still something concrete, real, and I use this something as a shield to go towards freedom. I thus speak of what I am unable to speak of and see what I am unable to see, stammering and contours of course, but still something more than simple appearance to which the world of rules that kill has basically been reduced to. Only with a whole new involvement might I have a different experience to that which I called unspeakable, capturing its other nature and its qualitative essence that is, the tension that informs me of the intensification of quality in course. And so on. The different movement that realizes itself with the effort of overcoming is all here. The incompatibility of the self who is with the world created by me is another creation of my limiting fantasy, if it were not so, the self would not be what it is. The problem is to withdraw in the face of the shocking possibility that I too can become what I am. Bruno’s vestige is my residue, the mirror, always his, are my occasional interstices, my unrepeatable destinies. Here a sad reality concerning the wickedness of man announces itself. Saying, being also production, differentiates itself in its recollectional expression by its impossibility to produce, that is, it remains word but has no place in the production process, does not give life to objects defined by technique; in this web of words there is a non-perception that takes one far away from perception and its orientations. The fantastic construction that emerges uses only part of the building material, the interrogation of the acted out is not directed from word to silence, but from silence to word. The desolate world of the disappearance of the real begins to speak, but its relating is not done by the correspondences that we have always known, many aspects elude and contribute to the disindividuation of the message arriving from destiny.

From its first page “Negazine” has had an absolute yearning for the upturning of any acquiescence, any consenting to practices of death and adjustment. It is not the “dimension” of attack against the enemy that counts, it is not the resounding gesture that impresses the bleating dormant under the lash, but the consciousness of going against what is producing the drowsiness that is flattening and killing us by simple inertia, habit, weakness and all this shit that is about to choke the world.

Derealizing intensity

As we have seen, it is not easy to identify the extent of the coverage of the technological process. After all, as the human being is the privileged recipient, the main target, we could just look in the mirror and ask ourselves how far our level of subjection has reached. This is the greatest drama of history, a course now devoid of meaningful content, an essential condition in order to be able to endure the ongoing situation of massacres and every kind of violence.

The extension of the flattening process that we have defined derealizing has many levels, its very movement allows us to make a fairly accurate evaluation without seriously compromising the meaning of what we are saying. But the intensity of the phenomenon is something else. The intensity of derealization mirrors the underlying technical process in a negative sense, even if it cannot reproduce it the same way, i.e. modify it quickly. It is not simply a mirror, passive repetition, as it is itself transformative action, but it is not just all the old reality concealed from itself. There is still a safe distance covered by intuition and overcoming. We advance in desolation but are not desolation itself, even if solitude grabs us by the throat. We are no longer dependent on a process that captures and dominates, intensification does not provide rules, it proposes a journey that we could also refuse, even though it is never rejected because of its incomprehensibility, but only out of fear. The more this intensifying moment gets violent and the more our action receives impetus from the transformation of reality, the more audacity cuts the bridges with hesitation within the limits of every kind of logic, and one is also no longer subjected to the latter’s comprehensive claims. We start stammering. We keep moving our journey’s horizon and end up eliminating it altogether, even if we will never accept the final leap, a leap with no return, we will not wait for the qualitative intensification to tell us what to do, we ourselves will be our action.

The search for intensity in derealization throws an oblique light on the great staging of the world at the basis of technology. The same frenzy that ensures productive relations justifies failures of comprehension, explains them and distances them from the few remaining illusions. The more we think about it, the more we can see how little the convictions of a young rebel can be rooted, at times leading them throw everything up in the air and how in their full adult life the attenuation of their vigour leads them to accept possession. Old age brings with it weakness and fear, and it is certainly not there that one will find points of support to rebel. So what about me then? I don’t know, it is certainly not easy for me to understand why against all reasonable expectations of calm the demon still roars inside me. The undefined and unattainable still occupy my thoughts, action still makes my heart beat like before, the hardships of the incredible journey are still the sights towards which I steer the prow while keeping my subtle thoughts. I have no nostalgia for the acquiescence of flattening.

Yet derealization’s proposal gives one many opportunities to silence everything, like being in front of a precipice unable to scream out in fear, you stand there petrified, afraid even to breathe. The vertigo of the abyss recalls the way in which the infinite seduces and stiffens us, throwing us into an endless void. That which the flattening of what we ultimately are, that ferocious villain from whom we learned to have no illusions about any possibilities of improving, now covered with a blanket of mere appearance and stripped of the substance that stirred our hearts a thousand times, is throwing us into the blackest despair. Not that we regret the world of massacres and tyranny, nor that of the ones quietly decided by the holders of capital that supports the bloody adventures of the techniques. But when faced with the possibility of being something like a ghost, an essence so feeble that any goal worth living disappears, we miss what we once were. As for the intensity of the flattening still in course, it would be more fruitful and enlightening to understand the foundation it derives from. No longer emptiness and sacred separation, desired but basically impossible, as the transfiguration makes one giddy even before it becomes sayable. A burning stimulus to penetrate the flesh is needed however, not a decision made around a table, even a well-designed one along the lines of a labyrinth equipped with the usual surprises. There are various considerations concerning the appearance of the derealized world, ranging from total acceptation to total denial. In fact, many perceptive levels operate differentiated separations, so find themselves facing different worlds. In turn these differences correspond to different evaluations and perceptions that it would be superfluous to submit to an organisation chart of assessment or intensity. Being a question of direct experience, each intensity cannot be accentuated at will, but is based on the correspondence of the moment between the perceived object and the cone of perception. The separation of quality thus procures other residues that contribute in various ways to giving meanings to the part of the world perceived.

As soon as derealization gets hold of me it is no longer my decision that is governing me. Once I was able to rack my brains about the presence of the absence of the world, not any more. I am unable to catalogue the new conditions. Immersing myself in reality completely I do not decide for this definitively, I have been circumventing the will for a long while, otherwise it would have been able to catalogue and dissect previous intuitions. I must not forget that the world is hostile to this passage to the limit, which is a question of self-defence and resistance concerning absence. I am about to understand flattening and its intensity, the most profound modification of reality is about to take place, yet I am out of step with the entire world.

The underlying clash, which includes the productive marvel of the techniques armed against each other, conceals tragedies that are not directly legible with evidence capable of grasping the multiple inner dramas. A stable statute cannot be remembered, it develops in a reticular way, moving back and forth to the beating of my heart. In pulsating the distancing becomes more detailed, recalls the tale that dissects the imaginative function, tying it to details that appeared in action, sucked in without being detected to the punctual qualitative intensification. In the pulsating of the approach, up to the boundry of the still bleeding actual traces, detail disappears, absorbed by the dramatized whole of the covering function that is accentuated as totality seen in the light of the justificatory logic. In this second phase the aspect of the whole that can lead to fictitious imaginative hallucinations undermining the real foundation prevails. But what was this foundation? Why should I keep pursuing it if I am well aware that I am out of line and out of order? The labyrinthine construction is accentuated on one side by the pulsating approach to the derealising secret, the structure that wants to defend itself and hide its deadly flaws always resorts to more complicated expedients to mislead the constant pursuit of technology. To attack this result with a negative criticism, is to subject it to interpretation. If one is honest with oneself, one cannot but emphasise the validity of the method of criticism. Becoming positive again, the cognitive light of reality, the very realising power of technique recedes a step.

The spirit and technique

The human being is essentially a technical animal; over hundreds of thousands of years it tried to offset the thumb to the other fingers of the hand and finally succeeded. The stimulus for this profound genetic transformation came from the constant manipulation of stones, the only tools available for rudimentary manual processing through the use of other stones, opportunely shaping them roughly into tools suitable for survival. While the hand was perfecting itself the brain was also undergoing profound modifications and an overlapping of thoughts, at first monotonously addressed towards the technical production of stone objects, it gradually managed to “think” other connections and translate them into a different model of daily living. There is a way of thinking about qualitative experience that remains up in the air, almost one with the experience itself. It is a kind of fear that these particular conditions bring with them, what I have sometimes referred to as the desert wind that hovers in solitude. Immediacy produces this kind of dream but in reveries that are turned into objects, something artificial, an artistic product like any other artefact: a piece of music, a statue. Derealization is other. However, in initiating, in turning its hand to words it has my words facing it that are starting to branch off, a kind of intuitive purity of impression. To be more specific, it knows what to live off and who to refer to. Then it goes ahead.

The spirit was about to be born. The spirit that has made us dream so much with its ability to give life to the inscrutable heights of art and culture over the past few thousand years, was simply the ability to think about the best way to model a stone for a specific use at first. That this use was aimed at producing firewood to burn, seedlings to sow, posts or barricades to mark out one’s territory and little else, was just the start of a long journey. Art and action resemble each other as a photograph resembles a person in the flesh. Starting from this basic reflection, art can enrich its product, no differently to technique, adding acquisitions not strictly related to the word, such as music or painting, sculpture and architecture, etc. without ever reaching the intuition of absence. In what I define an artistic masterpiece it is I who sense the painful presence of absence in it, a presence not actually such but which was also uselessly sensed by its maker at the moment of the artistic creation. Here lies an opening into the uselessness of art that is nearly always crushed by the productive mechanism trying to take the primacy of the object back to the rules laid down for its fruition, i.e. so as to be able to enjoy it as a useful fictitious prosthesis. But that ancient intuition of absence, even if barely touched upon, existed, and within the perfect canons suggested by technique gives the produced object a different aura that is often confused with absence, or rather the presence of absence. This is a great risk as far as the most deadly of all the arts, music, is concerned and what I expect from it. Enamoured of these productions of extremely high sensual content, I attribute them with the few residuals of quality that my culture gave me. My restlessness calls on a very effective doctor to intervene, put his holy hand on my heart and attempt to cure me. I know that no cure for completeness is possible if I do not remain tied to possession, but I can charge the object before me with such beauty of content that I no longer see it as mere residue. Under the dominion of the ancient rules the chains seem a little lighter now, and this pleases me. I no longer fear the immense emptiness that might suddenly open and swallow me up. But reassurance is not the same as strength, on the contrary, it is more a sign of blindness and mental dullness. Of the dangers and adventures all I see now are prison walls, and this reassures me.

Technique is soon adapted to making weapons capable of killing the enemy. Here the spirit intervenes, able only to identify this enemy, connoting it roughly and superficially. The formation of groups, nomadic bands, small temporary settlements, more or less large families, in short of the first shoots of “civilization” some would say, could not prevent the immediate identification of other nuclei, which, not being part of one’s own group, were considered enemies. To arrive in front of a smooth wall with no holds at the end of a dead-end, pursued by those out to get you and want you at any cost, a situation with no escape, can happen to anyone. You can always turn and face the enemy, lean your shoulders against the smooth wall and turn it into a point of strength in a strategy of desperation. It is not despicable to hate. To die fighting is the only road possible for me. What words swollen with pride. What if they aren’t true? If desperation reaches the point that I end up dying of renunciation? The terrible preliminaries of renunciation are logical and seem immediately practicable.

The concept of enemy goes hand in hand with that of solitude. The other, indispensable in order to define a living human being, is seen as only the one belonging to one’s own group then, later, to groups come together in view of a common objective, then to newly arrived groups subordinated to accepting inferior social positions. All the rest goes back to the level of animality. Solitude and the means of defence (and above all, offence), with chilling awareness, quickly produce the drama of innate wickedness that is immediately essential in order to ensure the safety of one’s descendants and the slave labour indispensable for guaranteeing the above.

The philosopher has long travelled to the borders of madness. So he knows that all this accumulated wisdom will explode in a catastrophic embrace sooner or later. He just doesn’t know where or when. The doing is in the saying, they are the two faces of reality. There is no saying that does not do or doing that isn’t said. Saying is at the origin of doing and the precondition of saying is in one’s being a cultural fact, element of a complicated process of understanding in relation to certain presuppositions. The validity of simply sayable doing, were it not visible, could not be realised in a deed, it would remain poised on the opening, continually threatening to plunge into absence, that is, not to stay but to take me with it, robbing me of what remains of my capacity to resist. An abducted, carried away, immemorable involvement. But that does not happen when the word forms a bulwark and claims to clarify, defend me from the unknown, reveal the source of the fear that I try to represent so as to keep it encapsulated within something tangible, possessable. What surrounds me is vain chatter but I dream of silence, the extreme obstacle, absence, desolate terrain of the thing that brings me quality as reference before the necessity of saying. Man’s smallness appears here for the first time in all its frightful destructive capacity. Fear coordinates the respective forces and sharpens the wits. The spirit that will then build the cathedrals of the future and the art galleries that blow our minds, for the moment only feeds improvements in weapons for defence and attack. The adventure towards new territories, derisory conquests when seen with hindsight, are realised through the persistence of the sense of isolation that characterises this part of our past so vast in time as to have carved itself deeply into our soul. Culture, if we consider it correctly, is the fruit of a few thousand years, a trivial thing for changing to the root behaviour based on ancestral fears easily awakened at the sound of a trumpet never heard before, the sight of behaviour, movements, words or anything else seen as a threat to our safety.

Doubts

I push my body through the slippery paths of existence as thorns keep appearing to gouge out my eyes. Distinct and indistinct mingle, the view blurs and the confusion is great. In a macabre dance I move a few steps, discovering that life must be grasped in one gasp and that reality is much more than life itself.

In front of me is the reflection of the macrocosm of human and inhuman relations, facts and conditions, forces organized and not that spill into reality, binding and dominating it. The reverberation, as though reflecting along dense mirrors, reaches the microcosm of a daily life that chases itself in which cohabit a kind of poor peace that counterbalances me in the immobility of taking to the extreme consequence the infinity of these tensions aimed at destroying everything, and the effort of comprehension to relate the macro, difficult to grasp in its entirety, with the all too easily recognizable micro. If every effort is made to understand and the disgust for the misery that we touch more or less directly every day are valid in the perspective of the attack, wanting to overcome any purely resistential logic, why does it constantly stumble into a sort of paralysis? Evaluating what reality is becoming we cannot avoid questioning what we ourselves have become. We cannot slice up the existent, yet we tend to think of things separately. Ideas from life, needs from dreams, what passes under our nose with its load of death and stupidity, from that complex set of elements, sometimes far away and broken up everywhere, tangible or virtual, which seem to dissolve as you try to understand them.

I still cannot classify the nebulosity of derealization in some category of the mind, the definiteness of technique continually in conflict with itself. I try to touch, try to catch the most immediate, obvious, identifiable, attackable aspect of the enemy. I feel the continuous drive of a kind of materialism, directed to understanding and then to attack, that continually escapes me.

It has been clearly stated that it is essential to attack technique, not only due to its very essence, but also because as a fundamental element of reality it is gradually being covered by the veil that has been called derealization. This veil is taking away meaning from reality, and therefore from technical reality (the whole of the techniques, the economy and the physical and mental models that technique itself produces) and could do so to such an extent as to make it impossible to identify and attack the techniques themselves.

In light of the anything but certain and clear hypothesis that we are trying to develop in this magazine, I ask myself not only how to attack technique, but also why.

Because in its continuous development, the degree of sophistication in which it seems to be evolving, it is threatening to irreversibly overturn us and our world? Technique has already littered the world with disruptions to the point of changing its relations, functions, capabilities and destiny. For example the advent of TV, cars, industry, pesticides, mobile phones, facebook. One could argue that facebook, mobile phones, like drones, are taking away additional human abilities and increasing their degree of mental and physical subjugation.

The individual experiences these changes, of which they are both subject and object. Certainly the drone has an incisive impact in today’s society, but perhaps we could say that the drone is to the present society, like the airplane that surprised the skies of Guernica with the first aerial bombardments, such as to determine the fate of the wars to come. So, I ask myself, I attack technique because the more it develops, the less will be my ability to intervene? Because of the level of control and the reduced possibility of intervention or also because it could be covered by that veil of derealization that will lead me to no longer be able to distinguish the object of my attack? And what will this difficulty of distinction be due to? What I have become, what have technique and reality become, both?

The possibility and ability to understand appear more and more reduced, not only in the attempt to penetrate the overall meaning of reality and of the forces and relationships in the field, but also concerning the awareness of what one is. The first product of technique is the human being. What is the image of a smiley face between one phone and another? The deadly synthesis of an extended expressiveness, the redimensioning of a communication without boundaries, but first of all the projection of a being who is a technical place into which holograms of life, perspectives, passions are condensed.

I realize that in each of the objects we commonly use, in the needs that surface as a result of the storm of solicitations that affect us constantly, in the habits in which we bask and in the illusory nature of our choices, there lurks the rot produced by the technical world in which I live. I myself am a technique. Man evolved into a warmonger, he created the techniques and these are continually creating new conflicts by gradually poisoning the world as we know it today. I am a part of what I want to attack, I myself am what I want to attack.

Immersed in the enemy, I can hardly distinguish those numerous faces and places, always changing and continually new, which would have considerable importance as objectives of criticism and attack. They are everywhere and with the idea of striking everywhere you lose yourself in a sort of condition of real impotence. Where you grasp, you always catch up, someone said. But I am not sure I understand what’s ahead of me, what is happening.

Alongside the importance of taking account of the need for immediacy, I feel the need to question myself about my loss, about the risk that we run of resisting and struggling against the most obvious attempts at subjugation and not noticing those that are acting on more subtle, less palpable, more invisible levels.

Every awakening is a leap into a life that offers us its load of frivolities and comforts that can provide us with more or less playful shelters and yet we smell the acrid smoke of distant wars, exterminations, exploitation and injustice nearby, a smell intolerable for continuing to carry on resting in peace.

Unacceptable is the indifference you read in the dull eyes of those who walk in the street immersed in a world that does not belong to them, but suffocates them in their conscience, in their awareness of every stimulus of ephemeral pleasure. A momentum of life capable of jumping into the quality of a clash, with disturbingly uncertain consequences, is surely the only road we feel like travelling.

Is this road still possible? Who knows, certainly we feel like trying to explore with Negazine there, anyway. In the future, with the continuous flattening and depletion that is advancing will it still be possible?

Doing belongs to technique, to quantity. I necessarily start off from doing to go towards the act. Faced with an impoverishment of doing what I can take with me into action if not poor and silly doing? Action requires a qualitative transformation of the individual, but transformation implies a continuous restructuring of their gaze on the world. But in a world that has been emptied of meaning, in which interpetative tools, language, the ability to understand has been lowered to such an extent that it is insignificant, what gaze on reality can an individual ever have? What can a derealized one see ahead of them?

Education to oblivion

We will never be able to reach a justification of what surrounds us, no matter how or at what price. Beauty was marred by human depravity as soon as it surged forth free and uncontaminated. Studying the disastrous effects, causes, referring back to old justifications, the reciprocity of damage, the stupidity with which the adventitious goodness of the heart is cast aside and condemned to the stocks and the vile ability to harm, destroy, kill, torture, overwhelm to the point of death that is exalted as the substratum and guideline of history, cannot find any justification. Any reason given for the crime is groundless. The human being is an absurd animal that glows in chaos continually capable of producing from a demonic light, which would tell us many things if we were able to question it, look at its unattainable sources without recoiling in fear and disgust.

Moral, religious, aesthetic, social, cultural etc. orders, are simply superfetations , dreams of unhealthy minds erected in support of the torture and death of the weakest, accepted as the ultimate gift with the least possible risk of a revolt that could jeopardize world domination. It is not true that great minds have strained to find a solution to the social problem, to find meanings for a life continually wasted in contempt for oneself and others, in short, to save it from the abyss of nothingness. Great philosophical minds have nearly always been the heritage of poor deluded who with their absurd theories went to great pains, i.e., from blood and guts continually turned to straw, to see, if not a solution, at least some improvement. Nothing is possible without destroying human nature, without upturning in revolt the incessant stimulus that urges humanity to kill itself in every latitude right to the end in the name of ghosts and for the satisfaction of bloody suggestions put forward by even worse minds than those who undertook the execution of such projects. Thus each one’s responsibility was added to that of the other and the final product has been death, torment, enslavement of the weakest. And when, by chance, the situation was attenuated by exhaustion from killing or the incongruity of continuing to let oneself be killed, and all this is called—what does it matter? defeat, victory—it matters little, not much time passed before the resumption of the conflict in other forms under other skies. Always with the general aim of exploitation, domination, the annihilation of the weakest while waiting to identify larger and larger bands of “weaker” and ever fewer “stronger” bands, making sure the first are destroyed by technical means possibly devoid of “humanity”, so without even having to be convinced of the necessity of the massacre.

It is the spectacle of all this that requires great courage and an uncommon ability to absorb, in any case a long education in abomination. Something must be done to disguise the horror with the makeup of normalcy; everywhere, no matter what, there must be a carnival when new human beings are thrown into the obscenity of a life of horrible barbarism. You are pushed to close your eyes to all this, and not only. Sexuality’s solicitations cannot be curbed by demonstrating their absurdity. Animal instinct always gets the upper hand. There are no minds so rarified as to lead to erotic inaction if within such guided and controlled bodies the trumpet of the erotic call rings loud.

Certainly, after millennia of more or less ignored reflection, the innate conflictuality of lineage could make itself understood in the long run, even if only at the level of ferocious useless outlets as ends in themselves more than in terms of generative productivity. And this would correspond to an agreement on the always possible reduction of damage. Are these pacifist dreams? Perhaps. In any case, in the current state of affairs, self-righteous nonsense.

The same could be the dream of an intervention in the sexual sphere, and, specifically, in the field of eroticism. Erotic models as ends in themselves, detailed with a thousand unproductive outlets, all enticing but not wholly satisfactory, could be built in laboratory, and in fact many such ravings are in progress, but all incapable of constituting a valid alternative to horror and slaughter. But, one could answer, what has horror to do with the beauty of a sexual relationship that stirs the fibres of our body making us feel the sweetness and thrills of erotically stimulating feelings. Here lies the problem, remote and insoluble: deep in the entrails of this strange animal, be it male or female, lies the stimulus for the continuation of the species. That this procreation then be directed to fuelling future controversies (what a beautiful word!) worldwide, or at best serve to fill a planet already on the verge of biological collapse, matters little at this point. It is sufficient that these needs be met and so, on the other side of the assembly line, the need for destruction and horror can be fueled.

An absurd theorem is thus developing before our eyes and only makes sense if we see that the game is over, the hideous transfigurations are mere deductions of a potentiality that has always existed: that life is a tragic farce. The processes in course are waiting for nothing other than to find a technically satisfactory way of providing a decent appearance, putting on a slightly less granguignolesque show of the massacres and filth that is, basically, acceptable to men and women doted with the dominant cultures and don’t want to soil their hands with blood other than in exceptional cases or by a third party.

We can forget our foul past, we must educate ourselves to do so. We can present ourselves as bearers of a less ferocious world (in appearance only, of course), giving everyone the illusion of a fraternally shared agreement. May the cult of beauty, justice, the sacred, come back more deeply rooted in order to silence our consciences of embellished Pharisees. As soon as we scratch a few millimetres of rouge away the filth will still be the same, but at least we will not feel disgusted the moment we look one another in the face. Such a scene will never find a playwright capable of writing it or actors great enough to play it. Autonomous processes, yes, they could give us enough glaze for any illusion.

Technology might perhaps be able to conceal the great human madness, making life bearable. The sacrifice would be considerable, we would all live the life of good zombies lined up quivering with borrowed joy, but at least that would reduce the massacres and the horrors.

Would it be worth the risk?

On a journey to madness

More than anything else, the inexorable decay from the various processes in the impoverishing flow of derealization will prevent any real resistance meticulously aimed at counteracting all the flattenings distinguished from the various cognitive types of movement that are destined not only to be weakened but to disappear altogether. As we see here and there, at times almost without realizing it, not only the cognitive standards are emptying but the nuclear contents are also weakening. The lucidity of the molar contents, no matter how extensive and containing various sectors of past and present knowledge, blazes in with detailed insight or provides an almost explosive exaltation, a kind of total intoxication upon which nothing lasting can be built, in any case nothing capable of effectively contrasting the flattening. Nervous tension reaches a maximum and projects of cataloguing are no longer able to impose the old pace of doing. The emptying goes ahead in its more or less linear project and the relationship between technical chaos on the one hand and technological order on the other is maintained, excluding us completely.

It is very difficult to contrast this movement, first of all because it involves us intimately in precisely the field in which we have to look for our instruments of struggle. Flattening is not just something precise, it strikes the spirit of the times, it lowers and uniforms feelings and knowledge as though we had been overcome by a kind of inverted giddiness. We vascillate. We are not sure of what we are doing, we need some kind of support no matter what, a source of security. A never before felt weight seems to be compressing our brain, reducing to illusions the various thoughts that it continues to produce uninterruptedly, and it is here that is the source of the terror, the extreme fear of no longer being able to manage our struggle, the resistance against those who want to conquer us definitively, right inside our every fibre. It is a fear that is different from that of death, a fear that advances suddenly, intermittently, catching us in the face of the supervening inconclusiveness of certain references to nuclear and molar contents that we believed we possessed and have now discovered we no longer do. The exposure that we see in perspective is a form of madness from which we seek an escape route. That’s the point, what to do?

But before finding this route and ascertaining its existence we should be asking ourselves why we see, clearly and unequivocally, in that sleep-inducing uniformation, an irremediable loss concerning our life ? Have I accepted this loss without batting an eyelid in order to safeguard my biological functions, eating, drinking and everything else? Am I capable of reaching such dullness of mind and baseness of soul? These are the wrong questions. In fact, technology is chopping up our brain, reducing it to a sectorialised pulp in whose chaos we have lost our human specificity, we have gone mad, so we can no longer ask for a new individualisation of the world within the world. We are at a crossroads where the human path in the true sense of the term is a tiny part of the great sleep-inducing road being opened wide to us by technology. Our little path in the forest has nothing soft and welcoming about it, nothing that can contrast the many benefits of vis dormitiva that derealization is offering us. The beauty of madness is that the great road that it gives a glimpse of is renunciation, so it does not require the lucidity indispensable for advancing further along the impervious path we were talking about. What we see when we enter renunciation has lost the intuition of chaos, so we mistake the latter for the maximum sign of order and tranquillity. The rest is simply a question of habit.

What did Céline find in that extreme place at the end of the night? I do not know, nor is it easy to discover. Even he was unable to tell us. Did he perhaps go beyond the point of no return? Being a reader of all his writings, I can say, no. On the other hand, how to devote oneself to reflection while facing a drama such as the melancholic acceptance of abomination? The metaphysical tortuous justification of the horrible? Perhaps it was a naive attempt to escape death, given that everywhere the facile jaws of those who always arrive the day after were wide open ready to swallow him up? I don’t know that either. Pride and the intimate certainty of impending madness, although not established by one’s consent, played their part. A man’s leap into the absolute void is always silent and does not attract the attention of the plebia who only stare at the clouds and the signs of the whirlpool that certainly don’t indicate what has happened.

The struggle is a reawakening of strength, all the strength we possess, even that rendered latent by the recuperative work of technology. The construction of a fake world, where figures perfectly acceptable for their substitutive behaviour of our inopportune and difficult transformative commitment, effortlessly open up the path of madness to us, even when all around there is something that seems to clash with the astonishingly unobstacled conception that we have of this access to madness. The calling card is usually depression. The kind of acquiescence produced by the reorganisational work of derealization does not just flatten us, it depresses us at the same time. Depression and madness are linked by a narrow corridor with no need for danger signs, because the problems do not need be seen in perspective but began long ago when we decided to accept the softness of the technological proposal. The madman who laughs from morning to night for no apparent reason laughs deep inside himself, and in this way dialogues about the advantages of his condition. Open to supinely accepted annihilation, from the balcony of his private room he talks to the world acquiescent to his words, a world that understands him perfectly, of which he is the perfectly coordinated counterpart. As a rule the immediate conclusion of this hallucinatory dialogue is depression leading to a smooth transition to acception of the final condition of derealization.

In order to fix something, it must have functioned at some point. If it has never given any sign of itself I see no basis upon which it could be forced to function. The moment I steal a flash of knowledge I cannot hold on to it other than as simple reasoning otherwise I would rule the world, be capable of dominating the universe, blinding it with that light I have taken from eternity. Instead, I am left with the stammering of a deaf man claiming to explain something he has no visual recollection of, that he stays far away from afraid that the mortal ghosts, usual inhabitants of the forest, jump on him and burn him alive. Yet that dream that keeps coming back to me puts me in debt to everyone as no one has ever dreamt it like me, a dream of destruction and death but still a unique, beautiful dream, that of truth, which if lived to the full would set the world alight like a match. That is where my debt is, inside me, in feeling possessor of a wealth that I cannot share with others and which I recognize belongs to everyone. Am I therefore an unworthy owner? No. At least, not entirely. The dream continues, and will continue among the grains of sand of a coastline destroyed by human recklessness.

Reality that has been thought and said shrinks in the minimal formulation of the research confirmed by technique. In this way I am informed of the limits of doing, a world I believed completable turns out to be cracked because of the presence of absence, but nothing is said to me about this absence. I cannot say that this research dictated by the classic module of logic is a waste of time, I can always go beyond it, but I have to get rid of everything, even the comforting results of this very research. I am alone in the face of this adventure, which involves me so much that I cannot submit it to the derealizing process, bring it back under the control of the will. This is what betrays my intentions, nips them in the bud, suggests to me all the inconveniences, disadvantages, of such an undertaking. The example of the few others who have come forward is considered something exceptional, or simply madness. A thousand forces fight against me, and the more equipped I am for the adventure, the more effective my cultural possessions, the more it is to them that appeals are made to dissuade me, to avoid cruelly sacrificing myself.

Breaking the reductive engineering and jumping away, throwing away one’s possessions, even keeping silent before the path for struggle, is unsayable as experience and empty as perspective. What paradoxical conditions lie ahead? Have the imitations I have nourished myself with until now ended? Is what I am going towards not just more imagining of something that is merely appearance? Reality, my experience against the flattening, is certainly a good thing, but this goodness does not belong to me, I cannot make it mine, so can I only sense it, then have to leave it—vain conclusion of a vain effort? Questions that make you think. There is no proof concerning the strength to engage in the clash. All that I see and touch is mere reduction and flattening. I compare and coordinate differences and improvements, but the word, even the word saying, this word devoid of truth, tends to give useful indications for justifying reductive paths. Beyond the intuitive reach everything becomes banal difference to be positioned again, not diversity to be faced and tackled. I know that strength in my involvement and the determination to set sail are not enough, I too must be carried away, accepted into a different condition that cannot go on forever other than by accepting absolute madness, an advance into the territory of derealized uniformity with no going back. If I were to throw this option away I would no longer be able to reflect on either quality or quantity, I would be just myself, naked and without frills, nothing to say, nothing to do. Forever darkness, its voice now deafening.

Action is anything but madness.

The details of technology

We said we don’t know how technology proceeds in its particulars. This brusque declaration of ignorance right at the start of a piece in the last issue, intended as a kind of inventory of what we know and don’t know, should silence any desire to respond on the subject. Yet we do want to say something.

The sensation that one is without arrows for one’s bow is scary. The unknown is for ever knocking at the door like a cold wind and cannot be accepted like a wierd commander, the stripes on his helmet making you laugh. There is no precise order to obey, better to listen to the thistle that splits open to release the few hidden drops of water, or the impossible voice of the mind, rather than the official actor, tall, somewhere, with his mouth glued to his microphone.Be alone and fend off anxiety with fury. Reflect on individual shortcomings and not give in to dismay. Suspended above the world, far from everything, a game of mirrors wasting away inside us to the end like a reflection of global solitude, that of an unacceptable cosmos where superimposable ghosts are acting a long-outdated script.

I have found myself locked up in a fetid hole marking time to the monotony of endless repetition, silence and the electric light, mortal enemies, friends nonetheless compared to the dissonance of prison chatter and total darkness. Tortured, forlorn, abandoned, but with one fixed thought: nothing can defeat me other than myself, that self that can always decide to pull out the plug now and not tomorrow. And so a sort of twilight emerges from the annoying glare or terrifying darkness, it comes forth showing me a new road, that of action, goes into details, the accumulation of the errors of doing and the non-existent claims of total knowledge, unsustainable illusions, carelessness and presumptions, a proficuous and immense exercise, unattainable in its immensity.

Fixing my gaze on the derealizing process does not give me any new information, or does so so sparingly as to leave me disheartened, crestfallen like an old pilgrim on the last lap of the journey with no strength left. Day after day, moment by moment rather, as at a certain point the days become opinions and time flows inside the mind rather than in the arid absoluteness of the clock or the calendar. The only satisfaction accessible in time is illusion. The flag of technique is a stubborn symbol that kills desire by enforcing colourless obedience. The glares it encloses always contain the blood of massacres. Silent suffering repeating itself everywhere, always the same, with no logic or justification other than that of the philosophers in the confines of their cowardice, sewing shrouds and sealing coffins as pertains to their craft. We should be screaming this abomination, not wrapping it up in a few lines, a sudden flush claiming to set the world on fire without succeeding. We should punch in the belly to the point of twisting the guts in unforgettable rebuke.

Instead, again the craving for certainties leads me to count the grains of sand I clutch in my fist as though that were the most important thing. I need to shut off my life, crash it somewhere with all its contradictions, put an end to this mediocrity that is oppressing me. A society reduced to the police mould exacerbated by unconfessed, uncontrollable impulses. There is no logical justification for pain, perhaps below logic in that scary world where there is lack, some kind of justification can reign. I don’t want to accept it, no matter how things go. Everything goes then returns; complaining is comforting but there is no way to unravel the enigma of the future, better to stick to what I know with sufficient force: this is the logic I hate. Quality impregnates me without unveiling all its secrets to me. A swan tries to fly, it doesn’t succeed, a symbol cannot take its place, that’s why everything comes back to repeating itself in intensification. Does it suffer because of this lack? Perhaps it thinks it is the only one that suffers? I don’t know. Existence itself is doubtful if one accepts pain as the backdrop to all perspectives. What is the point of everything that stands there before us? Why do we accept and justify it? Does it derive from necessary human bestiality, antecedent to any reflection of more or less acceptance or condemnation? But when this fertilisation arrives why am I incapable of grasping it fully? I separate categories and specifications, I am good at keeping a balance between extenuation and the agony that returns knocking at the door. Yet the mutism of the technological process persists.

Grasping the remote existence of derealization seems to be something exceptional for the normality of the considerations that beset life. The problems related to the relationship with technique cannot be faced directly by a long shot, you would eventually run the risk of being ridiculous. For as long as the ideal of science concretized truth before everyone’s eyes with its successes in celestial and earthly mechanics, Marxism, and with it also anarchism, although from different viewpoints, had to deal with the determinism that emerged from it. This is truth, they said to themselves, with a hand on their pocket. The matter of the marxian attempt to dedicate is not something of no significance, just like the long militancy of Kropotkin and Reclus in the ranks of the science of their time. There is a lot of scientific naivety in both the attempt to separate history from biological evolutionism, saving from it the destinies of liberation, as in that to superimpose an evolutionism based on mutual aid on conflictual evolutionism. Interpretations of the problem in an historical key in the Kropotkinian sense reveal the limitations not only of the seed under the snow but of the wider, similar attempt to justify man’s vicissitudes starting from technique.

Not everything can be closed up in the cynical game of reason, there is something beyond that which I am not prepared to leave out just for a little comfort. Anguish is fine, but not completely. There is a final stop signal here, the one provided by death, the definitive nothing. Extenuation, as far I can imagine it complete in all its details, is still life. An ignoble ghost reduced to a minimum, but still life. I am not defending slavery here and there is no need to read me from beneath my intentions. We often bow down before an inexistent ineluctability when we could go beyond the threshold that stands before us rigid like a barricade. Is the struggle illusory? I do not give up before a barrier that only has the appearance of inevitability, it is always possible to fight back. Of course it would be better to have a map of the enemy’s intentions and movements. And even if this were unavailable should you just look away and contemplate the clouds?

Man is evil, says the philosopher and when he says it, it rings true. Abandonment is not annihilation of life but preparation and instrument for its qualitative completion, not suppression of desire, that which more than anything simmers away in life, calling for liberation from the chains. And if it were not so? If the thinker is always up the clouds? The wise man can wrap himself up in his wisdom like in a dusty old blanket but he will never know these despairs and joys, his detestable world is surpassed only by his detestable need for certainty. Meanwhile ignorance persists, derealization is developing as technology advances in its coverage bent. Basically it is precisely this school that the thinker should attend, at the risk of their life, of course. The creation of the world and its rules would be impossible in the current variety of technical modifications were there not a wide intuition of lost quality unable to refer to anything precise in the technological mechanism’s intentions but which, all the same, seems almost to permeate its active components. I am not talking of a presence that can be drawn from absence but of a trace, a residue, and also a presence of transformations not easy to explain with the simple logic of doing.

In order to be decided each object refers to a part that seems to have no play in its actual decision, but remains there, albeit in a way that cannot be proposed directly as object and nothing else. It is in this sense that I am speaking of availability to past, present or future derealization. In the world, this movement is softening towards an equilibrium that excludes all the intermediate possibilities once solidified, thought as object. But this can still be called movement because it corresponds to the dominant rules, and also project in so far as the correspondences have been domesticated more violently on something not identifiable in this respect whenever, that is, adapting the will to a net radical judgment able to insert itself into that action that requires courage and acceptance of the clash. Technology is placing a covering over reality, a shell that is concretizing the flattening we have been talking about, without rules that would render it conceptually a fabricable and reproducible residual. In the adventure of derealization the interruptions and reestablishing of contact are usually only identifiable in retrospect when they grow like the desert under the moon. The techniques require greater productive zeal. All imaginary products are apparent, as is technique, but these are imaginings that work to produce other objects.

The exhaustion we are talking about is reducing life to the absolute minimum; the more the details come to average cultural attention, i.e. become visible to some extent, the more we are heading towards decomposition and general collapse. That is why these pages always have the taste, I was about to say smell, of an obsessive return of the non-sayable, of the stubborn intention to keep on saying, in spite of all the failures. “ Negazine” has all the air of an insolvency bulletin published by the Chamber of Commerce.

If the old idea of centralized order, theoretical and practical consequence of the idea of God, has been cast aside, this has came about because it was no longer suitable for explaining and supporting reality. Limited to the need for explanations, which however are not closed up in themselves but linked to the function of support, technique entered a series of doubts opened not only with the research into the infinitely small or the infinitely large, but also with the theoretical reflections related to wider arrangements such as the theory of indetermination or the theory of relativity.

As for the need to support dominion after the failure of its so-called democratic forms on the other hand, followed by the equally cruel and no less resounding failure of the totalitarian ones, it has now turned its claims to a simpler management based on a debasement of content. However, this apparent tolerance of the technological project should not be confused with weakness. The old way of reasoning is no longer adequate, it could become so again under different conditions, present itself under new forms of irrationalism because there is nothing progressive in history, nothing that can give concrete indications that something is objectively moving towards better and more just forms of social coexistence autonomously.

Modification of the techniques is leading to a modification in individuals. From here, right to the simplest expressions of reality, it moves with succcessive transformations to the level of the more complex structures. It is in the weaving of these structures that one grasps the intent to resort to participation rather than repression, but it is enough to reflect for a moment on the ways in which this participation comes about, i.e., how the conditions for radical difference are being created, perhaps so radical as to be absolutely inconceivable in the analytical optic of the past, to understand how it is participation always aimed at maintaining dominion. Reducing the possibility of understanding (not that of knowing, we must bear this difference in mind) modifications are produced that will make the world of technique more homogeneous, avoiding the intolerances typical of capitalism that characterize it today.

Ultimately there exists an unspecifiable series of variations applicable in a way not discriminable to many conditions. These processes constitute derealization, but not only. The infinity of details that we continually presuppose, even scratching our nose, is practically infinite, certainly not enumerable exhaustively. Only by cutting this indispensable but incompletable sequence will we be able to approach the substitution of knowledge with comprehension, if we find the courage.

Technological derealizing movement

As we tried to clarify in the last issue, derealization is the objective that technology reaches by subtracting reality from itself, i.e., by rendering it unreal. From what we understand from some responses and critiques, not always in respect to what we had written to be honest, this seemingly obscure as it was reckless affirmation requires further going into.

Subtracting reality from reality means covering it with a substantial veil, i.e. depositing over it a sense that can soften the judiciousness of content, immerging it in a kind of opacity where only the form of the real remains, the substance, the intimate meaning, that which we usually recognise as a point of reference both for our daily affairs and, in the extreme, for our action that is qualitatively capable of transforming the world, therefore in the first place reality, abandoned. Now, clearly by removing some of the meaning that characterises reality, doing will gradually take on the ghostly indefiniteness of a piece of theatre, whereas action will abandon transformation into the arms of ecstatic purification far from the profound sense of upturning the world that has been referred to as “quality”.

This coverage could be seen, but not in the determinist sense, as the irritating conclusion of a project that we had been pursuing only partially in our daily doing, full of interpretative glimmers. In any case, no one could imagine such arrogance and shabbiness of intent, not even in the most obtusely wretched government of all the Russias.

The whole of the techniques, each competing against the other, is assisted by the presence of the economy both in its theoretical and practical guise (a distinction cunningly no longer made today), and possesses sufficient folly to reset the significance of reality thanks to the intrinsic senseless conflictuality.

For its part, the main characteristic of the derealizing movement is its self-production, that is, the reproducing of itself determined neither by an a priori project managed by some ‘control room’or other, nor by programs of political and economic dominion elaborated in some part of the world more or less backward from the so-called democratic point of view. It is not this or that person, this or that doctrine of power, this or that structure of dominion that wants to blind humanity, but a derealizing technological movement produced by the generalization of technique and the economy itself.

That this is already in act It is an established fact, otherwise it would not be possible for the economy to be present inside the technical apparatuses. The clash within world production would be stuck in the primitive state of one against all and vice versa.

The economy, which is present in the technological process, inserts itself into the conflicts of and between the techniques, thereby maintaining the indispensable contact for obtaining a constantly appropriate process of derealization inside the technical development in its various shades over the whole planet. It remains to be seen how this derealizing movement is materialising, i.e. the way in which the coagulation of the unlikely is covering the real, changing it into unreal. There can be no doubt that this process also pertains to control, but this control is indirect, it is not realised by training teams of specialists to identify misbehaviour and eliminate it, even by force if necessary, but by deforming vision, proposing a different reality, metaphorically different from that old hard firmness that was once the substantial power of the enemy, willing, as we have seen many times in the streets and elsewhere, to shoot and kill so as to avoid the risk of any change too dangerous to be allowed.

We need to be aware of the immeasurably different reach of what we are saying. A derealization (only partial at the moment), completed as far as it can go, would prevent dominion itself from seeing the thing to be dominated, therefore of developing itself and blindly concluding its task, right to the point of annihilating itself due to lack of active and passive material, i.e. of means, human and practical, with which to strike and the now impossible individuation of what to strike. That is why in the previous issue of our magazine we never used the word “State”. The present working hypothesis that we are putting into the field as something that needs to be discussed and if necessary modified, also radically, or thrown to the winds, has the extraordinary possibility of forcing us to critically review all the clichés and mummified idiosyncrasies that have accompanied us on our way over the last thirty years.

The movement of derealization thus takes on an undulating aspect, that is, it advances then stops again, it proceeds swiftly to subtract reality and is sometimes forced to restore the dully persistent forms of the old structure due to excessive resistance offered by still unsolvable clashes between the techniques. We thought of using the example of the sessa,i.e., the constant movement of the lakes’ surface, to illustrate it, but obviously this is a comforting depiction rather than something capable of solving what we are unable to present as the possible upsetting of the existing set-up of reality. The more the economy is introjected by the techniques, the more its correspondence within the derealizing movement becomes a stimulus to the zeroising capability of technology.

If we consider this description of the derealizatory movement significant within the aforeseen limits, we immediately see that the coverage is far from complete, given the present state of distribution of power. We know little of the technical forces that are opposing this completeness, and economic theories have too few of the characteristics of scientific validation to be able to give much of a contribution. It is no coincidence that economy has been defined more an art than an actual science by specialists in the sector. So we see that there there is still an exposed band, either greater or lesser, where reality persists with its traditional connotations, and relations with technique are still, more or less, substantially those of domination. [The idea] that this band does not provide the necessary completeness to consider dominion in its formal-substantial combination that would allow the use of the ‘State’ model in the more or less traditional sense, seems faultless and we subscribe to it fully. Ultimately, we are faced with a model of transition, so cannot be sure about why there is the need to maintain a prevalence of substantial dominion, or to have full knowledge of the boundaries of derealization.

The condition we have described makes affirmations in circulation that reproduce the tedious analyses of the various forms of economic and political domination in a somewhat modified way according to the new conformations of technique, plausible but not acceptable as they almost always have to ignore the most profound transformations of technical conflictuality so as to stand up logically. At the head of everything, the derealizing mortgage which has been inscribed for some decades on the readability of each technical project as it appears in increasingly aggressive forms, with different nuances making it almost impossible to grasp the boundary between what has disappeared in the mists of derealization and what is still on the battle line, the subject of an undecidable confrontation, at least for the moment.

The opacity of a reality submitted to non-real coverage has led to acquiescence, relieving us of many of the responsibilities that objective analysis of what we are facing normally imposes on us. We accept as incontrovertible everything that should be making us doubt and criticise, but we too have become opaque, not just our ability to look far ahead, so we are melancholy and fully consider the human condition which is that of the mortal animal. The hope of a life capable of transforming the world is becoming ever more tenuous to the point of disappearing. In place of it death rather than enthusiasm pays us a visit, awareness of the futility of everything we do while action and quality are being returned to the world of dreams and imagination. The more the derealized condition extends and the penetrative horizon of technology widens and radicalizes, the more we close up in ourselves, every desire to act or any kind of exasperation withered away. We are becoming beings built like the artificial products on the market, obedient and credulous, to the cry of attack and conflict we prefer a hazy sigh of regret for something that is about to disappear forever.

Acting, on the other hand, deals with what stands before us, it is exactly like love, it presages the content behind the attempt to nullify reality by reducing it to a symbol of something that is slowly drowning in the clouds. But we are that sign that is about to die, we do not want it to disappear but persist and return to the ancient vestiges, the undefined splendours that the exaltation of the beginning let us glimpse at times, albeit for a moment, or even our whole life. Each one is maker of their own fortune, let’s not forget. We love that sign and foresee for it, and for us, a different destiny, an overwhelming future capable of demolishing all the obstacles that the supreme order of the unfinished intends to finish once and for all. And in the heart’s beating are omens of a discourse that concerns life in general, not just ours or that of the schema that is about to disappear. We want to be the ones to determine the latter’s substitution, upturning the world that lies before us our way, not on the basis of calculations that a headless monster is putting into action and against which we rally our forces, even if ridiculously insufficient and unsanely uncoordinated at times. And this struggle reaches its peak precisely in its encounter with love, sexuality above all. Here is the fullness and perfection of the love experience to resist the ordering intentions of conscience intending to set it aside as something strongly vivifying but dispersive. Everything in its time and a time for everything. Here sober-mindedness becomes the penal code in place providing support for the disappearance of the world, to its derealization. And the ecstatic paroxysm of sexuality, where did it end up? In what way, with what dreams and with what thrusts of the heart, we will ever be able to sustain the attack, the struggle with all its difficulties and fears? After all we do not so much need brave warriors and even less heroes, but beings who are passionate and, why not, in love, at least with life, in case we had forgotten. Love purifies, makes obsessive what would risk becoming a muscular routine, the heart gives strength to the struggle, transcends it and takes it to the threshold of an intimacy that nothing can take the place of. Those who are unable to love are unable to put their life on the line but always tends to safeguard their commitment in a positive balance sheet. Far away from Pharisees, please.

This is precisely what they want to take away from us by putting everything at the level of convenience, profit, productivity, in a word, technical benefit. After all, man is a technical being and technique can satisfy him, but also make him arid. Love brings the other to within the beloved, extreme union far from any chatter, material full union, totally satisfying, to the end, so that the other becomes part of you and grows in your flesh to the point of becoming one single person with you. Only in this condition can the flesh really face what awaits it beyond all attempts at derealization.

But what is really happening within us concerning the lack of reality in the representation that is facing us? Can we grasp what the derealizing process is producing to dazzle us, to make us see what in fact does not exist? But can we not close up in ourselves instead, bring to fruition those territories of knowledge and sensitivity that we still manage to cultivate deep within ourselves and thus escape depauperizing capture? No. For the simple reason that we do not exist other than projected outwards, towards others, towards that multiplicity which in one way or another constitutes us, and it is here that it awaits us at the opening of the incredible staging of poverty and disguised emptiness. Different experiences dilate the primordial fullness, poor and compact, to the point of making us become similar to the gods, and here we are ready to fall into the trap specifically built to debase our combativeness, opportunely suck us up where everything corresponds to nothingness and appearance takes the place of reality. The final fusion of the multiple and the undifferentiated would make us dream peaceful dreams, producing an actualizing fiction of what is a remote fable, arabesque centenary, drunkenness of the soul, inept labour of the pride of knowing everything in the undefended fullness of ignorance. Technology intends to make us full of ourselves, filled to the brim like a camel wineskin, in an extreme tension of nothingness that everything manages to justify, considering it already drowned in absence and the insignificance of the contents. Then, and perhaps definitively, the sign will mean absence and not presence, the acceptance of inanity instead of the final stimulus to pick up the weapons and keep on fighting. The death of the word would become known as the birth of new means of expression, perhaps real new means of communication, essentialized and petrified, in short adequate to the few who still want to fool around in throwing the testimony of their existence in life to the other. No tension would have the strength to manifest itself any longer, to stir something up, but would immediately flatten itself into the arrangement of the corpses in the appropriate niches, and order would reign in Warsaw.

To reject all this, let’s equip ourselves for an adequate response when necessary but possible if we maintain a sufficient level of vigilant industrious presence, if we do not confuse the intelligence of quality, indispensable in action, with the repetitive dullness that comforts unabated, but stupidly circumscribed, in doing. The life we must defend in action could reduce itself to rarefied conditions due to derealization, to appearing bizarre, almost incomprehensible, so much so as to give the impression, at times, of being meaningless, of not being worth the effort of risking one’s existence to maintain a trace of it worthy of this name. This means realising, here and now, what might have been derealized, it is not a question of reassigning roles and skills to something that has stopped making its existence palpitate for a long time. This is the meaning of a struggle against death. Technology has covered reality with the shroud of the exhaustion of meaning, in this way giving unpredictability and dreams the glaciation of uniformity and well-balanced monotony. To accept this covering means to die, even if an abysmal form of life would continue to subsist beneath a tormented obsession of perfect adequacy.

Imagining a struggle against complete derealization is a dangerous mistake as it would suggest that the transformation into banal receptors of a recital on a faraway stage perfected in all its parts, could be called back into question, upturned and thoroughly mastered. Even the undulating motion of the technological process that we spoke of before exemplified with the phenomenon of the ripples, cannot be borne in mind in the eventuality of total coverage. What would remain has nothing to do with what there was before, i.e., with the reality we were used to. That world, which we wanted to transform through the revolutionary upheaval, will have disappeared forever and we will be able do nothing with our life of zombies, now accustomed to responding perfectly to the objective and codified doing that the derealized signals of technology have the courtesy to send us.

De profundis.

Reflections on how to build slaughterhouses

Man is an extremely creative animal ever open to extreme solutions, the only ones capable of silencing his more or less bred and deliberately grown fears at a certain point. He recoils from nothing, strives impeccably to educate his conscience and finally completes the construction of places suitable for eliminating those who, precisely, scare him. Skin colour, the smell of the body, the shape of the lips and skull, mythological levels of sexual prowess, all come into play to incite to destruction. It is not necessary for these fears to be well founded although basic logic and the history of one’s own centuries-old sufferings should teach the opposite; just a few tales recounted in public by persuasive politicians and the seed grows and develops alone, that of the different who must necessarily be an enemy, precisely because “he’s not like us” who don’t eat children. Fairly recent history should show us that we are not inventing this, it is something real, is almost upon us.

The tragic meltdown of not only parties and unions, right and left, is of no importance because what remains from both sides, anything but right and left, is there to document us abundantly. The left has been replaced by clowns that cannot find the slightest trace of an ideological path with which to compact residual hopes and nostalgic memories of what once really did touch people’s hearts, even if confusingly and often in ways that were far from liberating. The right has been split up into populist movements that use the fears mentioned above and by specific organizations of fascist thugs, nothing new under the sun, that for the time being are miming the old glories of the SA or the SS, not to mention other miseries of the Ustascia kind or other national fronts. Everywhere, at least in Europe, they are preparing to adequately greet those disembarking on our shores more or less officially. Then numbers will play their part, a tragically decisive one.

Those who can carry this concept through to the end are few: large masses of foreigners at the gates of our walls and our ridiculous host organizations, to seriously think about what to do, apart from the cold determination of the thugs, who, it seems, are keeping themselves somewhat out of the way for the time being, not openly expressing their programmes other than to launch appeals to the military forces in charge to be prepared and not be swayed by all the old democratic propaganda. And this, for fascists, is absolutely normal.

Unfortunately also the people, the same who supinely accepted the populist crap of the old left, are now coming to accept the crap of the new right so are putting at the disposition of horror not so much an availability of labour, a discourse far more complicated than is imagined, but at least their own concerned attention, now clearly awakened.

We must not put aside the dangers of conserving well identified elements of hatred that have opportunely undergone critical attention for the identification of points where these contents can be made to appear again. In this way an explosive energy is retained and cultivated which it will become impossible to control. This fine balance of hatred and intolerance will collapse at a time of overload due to excessive numbers so vast as to strain the eye, strike one’s taste for normality and reaffirm the teachings of all the obsessions carefully cultivated by the manufacturers of fear.

Unfortunately there are certain obsessive states and conditions that it is impossible to live with. Every element of daily life turns out to be deformed and it is too late to educate oneself on the importance of cohabitation, the need for the harmonious development of multi-ethnic societies, the fact that colour and odour are reciprocal in humans and that we smell too (like corpses, for example, as we have been told). All this is not enough when the person next to you is glaring at you because the one next to them is whispering that the enemy is now here among us and who knows when they will decide to rape their daughter.

Of course, we could say a lot: how we are also enriched by their presence, how it is precisely them, those different from us, that are saving what we were begining to lose in our dullness; that encountering different cultures is an enrichment, not a lack; that in this way we are not weakening our subjectivity but are acquiring an effervescence that is continually demanding new expressions from us. That’s all very well but it might not be enough.

Many, and not the worst, object that we are losing our culture, our roots. A mistaken but plausible affirmation which it is not easy to fight against as all around you the world you know has suddenly started to dance too differently from the way you do and this touches you deeply, often makes you feel inferior, not always easy to admit when there is some truth in it, especially in the physical form of some of those dancers who seem to be from another planet. And others could object, even in good faith, that in this new condition, unthinkable a decade ago, we cannot remain closed up in ourselves when an extreme need for personification arrogantly pushes us to suppress that intimate lyricism which at times (ever more rarely now) we were able to grasp “alone”, in a deep concentrated way. If we lived the old suffering, lived love and many other feelings a little, it was up to us to stay whole, these were our things that we mustn’t dissect so as to become comprehensible to distant cultures that we never dreamed we would see right there in front of us. Others still, even more dull but not insensate, could ask us how they can protect their subjectivity, given that we are talking about feelings that start off from that prime mover, without everything becoming faded, mixed up and to quote the neighbour, contaminated and no longer enjoyable.

It has become essential to learn to develop our personality by including the absolutely other experience , we can no longer consider ourselves superior and distant, look stubbornly down on those who bear the same misery as that which is gradually oppressing and weakening us. Even after a first shudder of fear the arrival of this diversity could make another rhythm pulsate inside us, synthesize the way we see things in a multiform way unimaginable up until now. It is the universal, the elusive, that is approaching, penetrating us, making us other than ourselves and elevating us above our ancient fears. It does not cease to make hearts beat fast in the face of the unexpected, but it does seek wider cohesion in view of the possible, and easier this time, individuation of the eternal enemy. This interiorisation of diversity will lead—must lead if we do not want to kill ourselves in a collective holocaust—to an otherwise inaccessible universalization. We are not appealing for a superficial permissive attitude, a kind of ecumenical universalism so as to find other forms of domination than those that our past as hairy colonialists accustomed us to. We really have come to the end of the course here.

The death throes of a thousands of years old civilization is not all that different from the death throes of a single human being, at this point the whole past is realised and pours out like a torrent in flood. The first pulsation of those who were blind and the impostors, aiders and abbetters of endangered power, is to take up arms and eliminate the enemy. But it is not a question of the warlike instinct of the Teutonic knight, rather a rash gesture of defence which, as a rule, ends in reciprocal carnage and a return to the established order based on the previous vile regime, modified where necessary. Thousands of years of experience witness this impressive decanting of civilization and history. The secret should be in avoiding pointless massacres so as to arrive at a coexistence without predators or slaves.

I know very well that this could sound like a fantasy repeated over and over again. But I truly believe that the decisive blow for the birth of a slightly better world than that imprisoning us now could come from the combined efforts of the tormented past and present, along with those causing so much fear which would disappear if they would just stop and think and ignore the squawkers of the regime.

Taking everything away

There is a point of arrival in life where you can stop and ask yourself: why go on beyond this experience that I am having here, now, eyes burning, face flushed. If you take away everything from who is in front of you, even your worst enemy, there is still something inside you, right down there in the most remote obscurity of subterranean subterfuges that you never thought you could catch a glimpse of without recoiling in horror. And in fact you are about to leap back at the sight of who is lying at your feet in the extreme embrace of death.

If this happens, and it cannot fail be borne in mind if you don’t want to limit yourself to simply barking, what will have become of our aspirations and dreams? It is an extreme decision to rise up like a judge and decide, on the spot, to precipitate a human life into nothingness, one certainly desired and sought with equal responsibility by two opponents armed one against the other. But had I been the one to succumb, things, for me, the profound reflection that the event cannot fail to generate within me, would not have taken place. Instead I must shudder, turn away from the world for a moment, demand that this moment be given me, whenever and for however long, so that I, I alone can understand the echo of the abyss into which my convictions have led me.

At that moment I call upon myself to weigh up my culture, my ambitions, my dreams, everything, because I could have been the one to have lost everything and wasn’t out of pure luck. In that instant my solitude is close to me, my companion and silent encouragement. The world is silent, the same deafening world that had filled my head until now, making me sure and strong in my convictions of high philosophical learning. Then I start to dream of air, not breathe it yet, dream it in its vital entanglements, the air that some can no longer breathe, paying here, as one could better specify, the full price of their crimes. Of course, I am very good at commensurating these entanglements, and from this skill to the certainty that I am pleased with myself, the step is a short one.

And even if I were able to complete the whole double-entry of the above atrocities right down to the smallest details of debit and credit, adding the algebraic balance of their opposite, prowess and nobility of soul, a horrendous thought considering the latter possible and, even worse, teeming in myriads under my sharp eyes, until recently sharply capable of reading the incriminating debit column, what would I do with it? How could I really delude myself into throwing light on the impropriety of my doing?

The moment I was referring to is about to shrink into its end tail, soon my caustic skill will supply me with the whole elaborate justification of what I have been able to convince myself of from this moment—I am still engulfed by the now too soft caress of my secret moment—in its absolving, even glorifying, ability. My chest swells with satisfaction deep inside my ribs in the face of my skill, even though I know for sure not to expect any medals, but the conscience of having been up to the task that I have given myself for decades is enough and more for me. I am now beyond the magic moment and starting to think like a perfect flag-waver of ideological faith, now I see myself for what my comrades expected me to be, depositary of a deadly skill, companion of death right to its recipient, preparer of what needs to be done where appropriate without batting an eyelid, within the required timelines, fulfilling the indispensable gestures codified over thousands of years.

I cannot think of the fractions of a second that preceded my own magic personal one closed off from the understanding of others, fractions to which I could have had access, even dwelling on what would have seemed to me a yielding to my weaknesses, approaching the life that I was writing off, forcing myself to read into the depths of his dreams, his weaknesses and even his horrors. The solitude of that agony seemed to me to be so similar to the solitude of the life of all of us, without hope, without reason, without beauty. To die is certainly a sign of serious weakness, it is for everyone, but wanting to live is too. You cannot escape this alternative.

But at the instant one realizes one has reached the end, the instant in which the decisive sign of death reaches its objective, are there any consolations? I don’t think so, but regrets neither. What would be the point of choosing between one and the other? Death always takes one by surprise and those who when dying try to send a signal of strength and courage, adopting glorious attitudes, are disgusting. Just as I cannot accept the attitude of professional slaughterers typical of those have turned their periodic encounters with death into a job like any other.

Closing the book

Yes, precisely the book that we opened to find the knowledge necessary to attack. In fact, exactly such elements, and culture (roughly summed up here in the idea of the book) could act as a brake, when not an obstacle, in the supreme moment that we must go beyond the psychological threshold of attack. And that is exactly what we seem to be understanding when someone rolls their eyes in dismay after reading the first issue of our magazine here and there, with a worried question on the tip of their tongue: is that all? Is that all we need to know in order to venture further along the intricate path in the forest that had been glimpsed elsewhere? Is that all we need to tear away the veil that technology is casting over reality, derealizing it, preventing us from seeing it for what it is, a horrible sequence of exploitation, ignorance, poverty, massacres and the whole incredible concoction of evil that man has brought about throughout his history?

Closing our eyes and giving ourselves a pretty doll to amuse ourselves with could be a way of surviving like any other, a reduction not of the evil so much as our capacity to suffer because of it. Such a perspective would not deprive individual perception of meaning as this could possibly be corrected through recourse to doses of destructive violence, whenever, perhaps not even all that far away. On the other hand the derealization that we are desperately trying to talk about would take away all meaning from reality, so nothing would ever make any sense again. After touching horror directly due to some unimaginable cataclysm, we could raise our heads again and see beyond the dreadful doll that fascinates us, but this is not a credible thing. Our condition as slaves could go on for ever, and take the illustrious name of ‘freedom’.

Hence the fundamental importance of knowledge and the subtly treacherous way that the process of derealization is trying to manage it, that officially produced in schools and universities, so that it becomes part of the doll we were talking about and not, as instead it should be, a tool of liberation. To steal knowledge, subtract it from the deadly management that wants to derealize it, is at best turning it into a pastime for collectors of rarities or a dawdle tailored to the reduced intellectual capacities of idiots.

If anyone remembers the examples in the last issue of our magazine concerning the superfetations of fashion and the car industry, they will know better what we are talking about. Just as no woman would ever really wear a dress identical to any of those worn with such aplomb by professional models, who don’t dress but simply use their bodies as billboards, nobody would be able to use the knowledge deadened by the universities to turn it into a tool of liberation. In referring to a hypothetical book to shut in order to pass to the attack, it was certainly not a product of this dead-in-advance knowledge that we were referring to. We are making an effort to find the knowledge of fraud and mystification in order to piss on it and move on, let’s find our own, within the limits of common sense and accessibility, but not be put off if mysterious signals from specialists try to bar our way. They are there on purpose to discourage our resourcefulness. Let’s move on, throw to the wind what, after all, is simply a pastime of bums paid to demonstrate how exploitation has been consolidated. When knowledge comes alive, freed at last from all the excrement that suffocates it, when the essential is there before the eyes of all who want to see it, it is still possible to save oneself from intellectual death.

Of course, the commitment isn’t insignificant and many could be discouraged by the task of separating the wheat from the chaff, but we must go ahead. In going ahead we are filled with joy. We almost explode feeling life inside us as more and more complex and wonderful meanderings open up, and one could despair thinking of how many horrible crimes are committed by the damned mechanism that is taking this possibility away from us, forcing us to play with the usual despicable doll. The solitude of the derealized residuals, once fully understood, would make me go mad with impotence and I would shut myself up in despair, hatred and dullness if I were to keep feeding off the cultural shit that the academy squeezes out for the use of imbeciles who believe that it alone is the food of intelligence. I cannot even seriously accept the alibi of better preparation, a specialisation while waiting to attack because, after all, it is still a question of knowledge. No, this illusion would be ridiculous and criminal. But what to do? How to find the exact point at which to shut the book and look ahead? How to decide for the attack here and now?

To find an answer to this question we must turn to the heart, logic does not contain the means to understand. As Pascal stated, the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. As soon as I start to become aware of the deadly stench of what lies before my eyes my mind expands to the point of madness, I surpass all limits, any sanction seems ridiculous, even death seems a weight to throw on my side of the scales to make them tip right to the edge of the light that shows you everything that until then, in the uncertain feeble equilibrium, remained in the shadow of the night like a lurking enemy. Now that I am about to snatch that incredible gesture of deep understanding, the wild whirlwind that suddenly threw me into the fullness of quality, I can put the book aside, close it, because on the other side of the threshold that I am crossing it would be an unbearable burden and a pointless obstacle.

The adventure leading to transformation is based on quality and has nothing of the doing that imprisoned me, derealized, in my eternal acquiescent dialogue, clutching the doll. It is a wild whirlwind that pushes me over the threshold of action. The old foundations now obscured by the derealizing mantel would seem distant and incomprehensible to me if they could return to the persuasive force of the past. Life itself crunchs inside my heart and explodes in its fullness, happiness and also disequilibrium in a gesture very similar to the intimate and omnicomprehensive one of love. The step over the threshold that we are talking about, no matter how the action goes—and there are times when long years of inaction or other radical calamities await the disadventured—introduces you to a different world, where forces incompatible with any known dynamic abound. We need to pluck up our courage and go ahead, not be discouraged by the incomprehensibility of what we ourselves have unleashed, not ask for explanations that no one will ever fully be able to give us. At the end of life there is the joy of the action accomplished or the nothingness of death. Many have reflected on the partial elements that clutter the path far more than these two hypotheses—prolonged sojourns in the enemy’s clutches, extreme physical punishment—but I don’t agree, even in such eventualities, which are part of action and cannot be excluded, there is joy, the same joy as in the accomplished action. No one can take what is ours away from us, no one can prevent us from listening enraptured to what our heart is singing. After all, what was our experience if not a leap into the void? Perhaps we wanted to gain something good and done, here and now, immediately, without half measures, something similar to the wooden building blocks that marked our childhood as model makers. We die of everything we have desired, also the overwhelming dream of social transformation, and also die of that which to the eye of the outsider is considered never to have happened.

The flames of such an experience, the action that, precisely because it was realized in quality with no regard for its purely quantitative aspect, that which remains within us after the adventure into the supreme anarchist tension, makes us give a background to all our previous experiences, nothing is the same any more, we no longer see the world as before. Confrontation with the flattening that the derealizing mechanism is stitching on to us also takes on a different perspective. We are no longer prepared to calculate how much space we have left within which to act, how much time we have left before we exhale our last breath. We are in the action, are acting, so have not been deprived of our decision-making faculty to carry out the attack, we ourselves are the attack, every single fibre of our body knows how and why we are acting, it feels it as deeply rooted, and all the memories, the beautiful or bitter experiences that life has inflicted on us, are no more than a distant cortege. Those who have never lived this experience live at an exterior level, do not delve deep into themselves. They are, unfortunately for them, sometimes able to save their life, not always, but what life are we talking about? They have saved themselves, but from what? If they have never taken even the slightest risk? Instead quality can lead to the paroxysm of transformation. The world appears as the place of horrible fog, the condensation of human evil, the unleashing of all that man should not be but is. Existence is not worth living, and gradually as this awareness begins, derealization, instead of being opposed is accompanied, indeed urged, towards its completion.

We must move in other ways, on other shores.