x ≠ xPamphlet/Lampoon Part I

PreludeThis is a farewell, a farewell to the illusory, a farewell to life. Life has its truths. Every moment has its truth that is negated by a new truth every next moment. These truths are far from true, as for example faith. A kind of escapism in the general accepted that works as a framework to function within—Likeminded for the defensive support. It also de-prives the blame. Everyone is guilty, as Albert Camus states in his novel La Chute (The Fall), but by creating ones own truth and having this truth affirmed within a particular group, one find oneself in a delusional innocence, where no one is accountable.In todays highly conceived world this phenomenon is widely spread. This conceived world of politics and economics is fed by and main-tained through power and force; objectifying subject. Guilt undermines this. Guilt speaks to the conscience that therefore must be lulled by a truth that is collectively found in the conceived world. Everyone does it. And if one doesn’t, then one is an obstacle for those who do, a nuisance, who has to be cleared by the truth.

There is no escape from this collective phantasm. There is no truth; there is only the inadequacy of language we cling to, which leaves us nothing but the judgment.

…Enlightenment is burning. One could call it post-rationalism; neo-ra-tionalism or ultra- even, whatever suits one. Precisely this property to provide labels for everything illustrates as no other the major fire that is raging.

One [fear]Transfixed he stands in the middle of his room. Naked. It’s four o’clock in the morning and he just turned out the already subdued lightning so slowly that it is impossible to observe. The room on the first floor has eight windows without curtains. Two doors on either side of the room lead to the rest of the building, into dark corridors where no one lives. It’s quiet. The only audible is the rapid beating of his heart. His ears are pricked to pick up each possibly other sound. The orange glow of the streetlamps shines through the windows provided of life by the wind that lets the branches of the trees slowly swaying back and forth reflect-ing their shadows in the room. For hours, he wanted to sleep, rest, to be left alone. Defenseless in the dark and lonely in the light he is on the run, forever.

YHWH

Two [indifference]Following on… It’s time for war. Prosperity turns the for meaning looking man into a rational object, a machine, a robot without volition left behind in the conceived world, who denies itself and who derives its identity from something outside itself which is thought of as itself. In other words, man negates ones body and hides behind ones ration-ality by projecting ones identity on something that is outside of him. War clarifies by forcing man to consider oneself as a mortal being. It forces to self-reflection and destroys the conceived world. There will be fatalities, no doubt. Most of them will go unnoticed and are hardly re-grettable. Those are the ones who were unaware in the first place. Who let themselves objectify. The believers, the mass, the herd. A few will be missed though okay, but only within the bigger picture. Man is insensi-tive to the individual. War, goddammit, I want to get laid.

…Lost are those who understand. Condemned and abandoned.Blessed are the lost, those who suffer. Rejected of joy, shrouded in emp-tiness.

YHWH

Three [ignorant]‘It’s a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, or Toller for short. It’s ex-tremely rare to find, but here, in this neighborhood there are at least six of them. She was the first though.’

Thánatos, the daemon personification of death, son of Nyx (goddess or personification of the night) and Erebos (personification of darkness) and twin of Hypnos (personification of sleep) and Eros, god of sexual passionate love, son of Chaos (‘gap’ created by the original separation of heaven and earth) or Aphrodite (goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation) and Ares (god of war) or Aphrodite and Hermes (Mes-senger of the gods God of commerce, thieves, travelers, sports, athletes, and border crossings, fish, guide to the Underworld), or Iris (personifi-cation of the rainbow and messenger of the gods) and Zephyrus (god of the west wind), the forces of life and death, will prevent the disappear-ance of man at the end of history, rejected by knowledge and replaced by religion.

The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, or Toller for short, embodies everything that makes man happy, because it’s extremely rare to find and she was the first though.

X‘The disappearance of Man at the end of History is not a cosmic ca-tastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eterni-ty. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called—that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History—that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so called or of the free and historical Individual—means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strong sense of the term. Practi-cally, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man no longer changes himself essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his knowledge of the World and of himself. But all the rest can be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything that makes Man happy.’ 1

1 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 158-59; original in Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947; Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 434-35.

X26 Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ 27 So God created man in His own im-age; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ 2

2 Genesis 1:26-28. New King James Version (NKJV)

Four [death]dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood

dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood dood

YHWH

Five [poop]Sitting on the toilet bowl, not knowing whether one defecated or not…

Six [most beloved]In the letter you wrote to me you show your entire self. You speak so candidly, that I only can think of it as a beautiful letter. I feel closer to you than ever before and I’m aware of the fact that you never before had the courage nor felt the need to show yourself in such an open manner. I’m really pleased you now found the ability to do show your-self. The letter is vehement, confronting and sometimes very painful, as you have already said before. Many of it indeed already has been said, more than once. Some of the thoughts and feelings you describe I wasn’t aware of and they are completely new to me, but the vast major-ity of them I can clearly understand and agree on. There is however one passage where I’m outraged by and I think you overstepped the mark by far. On almost all the questions you set yourself in the letter, you don’t have an answer or as you describe it, you don’t know yet. I think I do know the answer, but before or even if I’ll ever tell them to you, figure them out yourself first. But, first and foremost, like you, know that I love you.

XThere are people so wretched, they don’t evenhave a body; their hair quantitative, their wise grief, low, in inches;their manner, high;don’t look for me, the oblivion molar,they seem to come out of the air, to add up sighs mentally, to hearbright smacks on their palates!

They leave their skin, scratching the sarcophagus in which they are bornand climb through their death hour after hourand fall, the length of their frozen alphabet, to the ground.

Pity for so much! pity for so little! pity for them!Pity in my room, hearing them with glasses on!Pity in my thorax, when they are buying suits!Pity for my white filth, in their combined scum!

Beloved be the sanchez ears,beloved the people who sit down,beloved the unknown man and his wife,my fellow man with sleeves, neck and eyes!

Beloved be the one with bedbugs,the one who wears a torn shoe in the rain,the one who wakes the corpse of a bread with two tapers,the one who catches a finger in a door,the one who has no birthdays,the one who lost his shadow in a fire,

the animal, the one who looks like a parrot,the one who looks like a man, the rich poor man,the extremely miserable man, the poorest poor man!

Beloved bethe one who is hungry or thirsty, but has nohunger with which to satiate all his thirst,nor thirst with which to satiate all his hungers!

Beloved be the one who works by the day, by the month, by the hour,the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame,the person who goes, at the order of his hands, to the movies,the one who pays with what he does not have,the one who sleeps on his back,the one who no longer remembers his childhood; beloved bethe bald man without hat,the just man without thorns,the thief without roses,the one who wears a watch and has seen God,the one who has one honor and does not die!

Beloved be the child, who falls and still criesand the man who has fallen and no longer cries!

Pity for so much! Pity for so little! Pity for them! 3

3 César Vallejo, Stumble between two stars, trans. Clayton Eshleman César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, 1937, 141-43.

X‘Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been ne-glected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things. […] The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights, which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for aban-doning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the fac-ulty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were other-wise, what would it avail? The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’ Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? […] The time will come when hu-manity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.’ 4

4 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, second edition, 1823.

X‘After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.’ 5

5 J.G. Ballard, Crash, London. Jonathan Cape, 1973.

Seven [body]The body, we abandoned it a long time ago and now we see it as an extension of our being which eventually will kill us. Post-or transhu-manism tries to overcome this by extending to body with technology in order to be less vulnerable to all the limitations the body puts on us. We can’t accept the fact that we are helpless regarding nature and that our lives are limited in time and space. We want to control and become the omnipotent itself, the superior one we already pretend to be.The return to nature, to animality, if there already is a distinction, might be the other solution to our problems with our bodies.Posthistory can be seen as a symptom of that, or as an irreversible and necessary cause and effect. It vanishes our identity and what’s left… What’s left is nothing else than a body.

X‘[…] a theory of posthistory that foregrounds discursive practices that undermine notions of authorship and identity, employ bricolage to collapse time, space, and hierarchy, and assert that the past is not some-thing we discover as much as it is a signifying formation we construct retroactively, a botched product of memory and desire. While history provides a form of sadistic pleasure dependent on control, posthistory ultimately endorses a form of ironic masochism brought about by our submission and passivity.’ 6

6 Barry E Laga, Posthistory: Negating and negotiating representations of history, 1997.

Eight [artist statement]Action not object, actual not represent nor document.

XMein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,ich kehrte gern zurück,denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,ich hätte wenig Glück.–Gerard Scholem, Gruß vom Angelus*

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contem-plating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned to-wards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Para-dise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress.

*My wing is ready for flight,I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time,I would have little luck. 7

7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1969, Schocken Books, New York.

XOn my way home

I should never have learned wordshow much better off I’d beif I lived in a worldwhere meanings didn’t matter,the world with no words

If beautiful words take revenge against youit’s none of my concernIf quiet meanings make you bleedit also is none of my concern

The tears in your gentle eyesthe pain that drips from your silent tongue –I’d simply gaze at them and walk awayif our world had no words

In your tearsis there meaning like the core of a fruit?In a drop of your bloodis there a shimmering resonance of the evening glowof this world’s sunset?

I should never have learned wordsSimply because I know Japanese and bits of a foreign tongueI stand still inside your tearsI come back alone into your blood 8

8 Ryuichi Tamura, The Four Thousand Days and Nights, 1956, Tokyo Sogen-sha. Translation Takako Lento, 2007.

Nine [man]Now this is us, you, me, all of us, the so-called superior species. Supe-rior because we are civilised, cultural, political and use verbal, written and body language. We teach and learn, believe and defend. We use reason and intelligence and see it as the most important attribute of a life form and we use it to measure all other life forms value. We are consumers and are on the top of the food chain. We have the ability to kill all other life forms, to discriminate and to hate and even to kill members of our own species, just because they are being different. But most of all we are consciousness and autonomous. We are humans. We are the rational animals.