Oh Good, The War – Tiqqun

The Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party Exercies in Critical Metaphysics

One begins with principles. Just action follows.

When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt.One does not tidy up in a home falling off a cliff.

Ends are not lacking, nihilism is nothing. Means are cleared in advance, impotence has no excuse. The value of means correspond to their end.

All that is, is good. The world of the qelipoth1,the Spectacle, is bad, through and through. Evil is not a substance, if it were, it would be good. The mysterious effi cacy of evil resolves itself in that it has no being per se, existing rather as nothingness become active.

Evil consists in failing to distinguish the good. Indistinction is its kingdom, indifference its power.

Men do not love evil, they love the good that is in themselves.

In the Tiqqun2, being returns to being, nothingness to nothingness. The fulfillment of Justice is its abolition.

History is not finished, for that, it would require our assent.

A single free man suffi ces to prove that liberty is not dead.

The question isn’t whether or not “to be of one’s time”, but rather to live for or against it. No argument.

Anything which boasts of some temporal innovation declares only its own inferiority to time.

The new, the original, so many alibis for mediocrity. Up until the present, progress has only connoted a particular accumulation of trivialities. The essential has remained in infancy. Men have moralized, but they’ve yet to think. Negligence for which they no longer posses the means. Here, history begins.

The catastrophes of history demonstrate nothing against the good. Revolutionary movements have not suspended “the normal course of things.” To the contrary. It is the normal course that is the suspension of the good. In their linkages, the revolutionary movements constitute the tradition of the good, up until now: the tradition of the vanquished.

This is our possession.

All of history is encapsulated in this, that a great city had been besieged by little kings. The rest remains unassailable.

Before time, absolutely, there is sense.

A clock that sounds nothing. To which, the crown.

We must act as though we were the children of no one. Men are not given to know their true descent. It is the historical constellation which they succeed in grasping. It is good to have a pantheon. All pantheons are not to be found at the end of Rue Soufflot.

Platitudes are the most beautiful things in the world. They necessitate repetition. Truth has always said the same thing, in a thousand manners. At a given moment a platitude has the power to make worlds oscillate. Besides, the universe itself was born of a commonplace.

This world is not adequately described because it isn’t adequately contested, and vice versa. We do not seek out a knowledge of accomplished states, but a creative science. Criticism has nothing to fear, neither the weight of foundations, nor the grace of consequences.

The age is furiously metaphysical, tirelessly striving to forget itself.

By casting off Critical Metaphysics, one embraces it.

Some have put forth that truth does not exist. For this they are punished. They do not conceal themselves from truth, rather, truth conceals itself from them. They bury not that which will bury them.

We have only to groan, there will be no charitable tailor-made revolt. You will have to put everything back together yourselves. This world requires truth, not consolation.

One must critique domination because it is servitude that dominates. That there should be “happy” slaves is not a justifi cation for slavery.

They are born. They wish to live. And they follow out their moribund fate. They even wish a bit of rest, and leave behind children, so as to birth other deaths, other destinies of death.

Here then, the time of larva, they even write little books in which they speak of their geneology. Since there have been men, and men who’ve read Marx, one has known that it’s a question of the commodity, but one has yet to be fi nished, practically, with all that. Those there are who, of other times, have made a profession of its critique, going so far as to propose that the commodity would constitute a second nature, more elegant and more legitimate than the first, to whose authority we ought to bow.

Their metastasis spread to the ends of the earth; one does well to recall that an organism riddled with cancer collapses in little time.

The old alternatives and the erstwhile disputes have been bled dry. We reimpose them.

Reject one side as you reject the other. Love only the rest. It alone will be spared.

Men are responsible for a world which they did not create. This isn’t mysticism, it’s a given. Let the satisfied feign surprise.

Hence, the war.

The enemy does not posses the intelligence of words, it tramples upon them. Words desire to be avenged.

Happiness has never been synonymous with peace. One must wield happiness offensively.

For only too long sensibility has been a passive disposition for the experiencing of pain, it must become the very means of combat. The art of recasting suffering as a force.

Liberty does not accommodate itself to patience. The former is the practice of history in deed. Inversely, “liberations” are merely the opium of naughty slaves. Critique is born of liberty, and gives birth to the latter.

One is more certain to fi nd liberty in the self’s undoing than to fi nd happiness in receiving one.

“Once, a certain society had attempted, through innumerable means, repeated endlessly, to annihilate the most living among its children. These children have survived. They desire the death of this society.”

Pursue liberty, with it you shall have all the rest. He that wishes to keep himself shall loose himself.

As everything whose existence must be proved a priori, life, as it’s accorded by the age, is of little value.

An ancient order survives in appearance. In truth, it only subsists so as to be documented in all its perversity.

One says that there’s no danger as there isn’t any unrest; just as one says that the absence of material disorder at the surface of society implies that the revolution is far from us. But the forces of annihilation gather upon a path very different from that where one had once thought to find them.

Burgeoning imbeciles, wee cads, obtuse realists, understand that there are more things in heaven and earth than you might dream in your inconsequential solipsisms.

This society functions as an incessant appeal to the restriction of one’s mental faculties. Its best elements are completely estranged from it. They rebel against it. This world turns around its margins. It knows nothing of its own decomposition. All that continues to live, lives against this society.

Abandon ship. Not because it’s sinking, but to make it sink.

Those who don’t understand today have already exhausted all their force so as to not have understood yesterday. In his heart of hearts, man is quite familiar with the state of the world.

All things radicalize. Stupidity, like intelligence.

Tiqqun draws out the lines of rupture in the universe of indifference. The element of time reabsorbs itself in sense. The forms take life. The fi gures are incarnated. The world is.

Every new way of being ruins the preceding way of being, and it is only then, on the ruins of the old, that the new begins. It is known as “the pains of birth”, signifying a period of great upheaval. The old way of being in the world will be ruined, things will be altered.

Once, a certain society had attempted, through innumerable means, repeated endlessly, to annihilate the most living among its children. These children have survived. They desire the death of this society. They are without hate. It’s a war that was never declared. We do not declare it either, we simply point it out.

Two camps. Their disagreement turns around the nature of the war. The party of confusion would like there to be but a sole camp. It directs a military peace. The Imaginary Party understands that conflict is the father of all things. It lives dispersed and in exile.

Outside of the war, there is nothing. Its war is an exordium where forces are composed and weapons are found.

Leave it to the century to combat its specters. We do not fight against phantoms. We brush them aside to lure the target.

In a world built upon lies, lying cannot be vanquished by its contrary, but only by a world of truth.

Complacency engenders hatred and resentment, truth assembles friends.

“We,” which is to say us and our friendships.

Intelligence must become a collective affair.

And the rest is silence.

Venice January 15th, 1999

1. Kabbalistic term meaning “husks of the dead”, the condition of a body that has outlived its soul.
2. A concept issuing from Judaism, often used in the kabbalistic and messianic traditions, which indicates all at once reparation, restitution, redemption, and which covers in large part, among others, the Jewish conception of social justice. “The tiqqun is the becoming-real, the becoming-practical of the world; the process wherein everything is revealed as practical.” (Introduction to Civil War)

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  1. Pingback: November 24th and beyond! | Berkeley Anarchist Study Group

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