The Horror of the Suppressed Animal

If they scorn, dread, and tyrannize animals, it’s only because there’s an animal inside them that’s been beaten down, and because they invented roles for themselves by means of which they could subdue a Free Spirit within them that was destined to govern the body and the world.

They do not attribute their superiority to animals to the art of pushing beyond natural freedom, to a science of harmony which would free them of the dread so universally present among animals of being eaten or starved. No, what distinguishes them from their “inferior brothers” is a mysterious substance, a Spirit.

Deprived of such privilege, the bear, the dog, and the groundhog fall into the disgrace of having to seek out their pittance randomly across the savannas, forests, and streets; humans, on the other hand, having inherited the earth from the gods, don’t get off on happiness, but on gold, that symbol of preeminence which permits them to acquire anything and everything.

The honor conferred upon them in such a way by means of a subtle and volatile power sets them up to treat as brutal beasts those who elevate themselves in any small way in the hierarchy of mind. They look down on the leaderless herds, and call them dimwitted asses, enraged sheep, pigs, or baboons, because they are untamed by peasants, proletarians, colonized people; because they do not live beneath the rule of any shepherd, king, priest, general or bureaucrat. The same discrediting otherwise goes for the unproductive, the women, and the children, all ceaselessly tempted by the demons of luxury and amusement.

The mental evaluation that situates men above women and places “bestial” man below “essential” man works in the same way as this investment society, the dividends of which are paid in resentment and bullying. And this principle, as monarchist as it was at its origins, doesn’t inconvenience democracy. No one is effectively so rough-mannered, so abstract, so deprived of goods and of power that he doesn’t use as a pretext his “quality” of being a “man” to thrash his wife, beat his cat, string up negroes, and enthralled children. Whoever wants to be an “angel” needs “demons” to put down.

What an admirable justice, this waterfall of contempt that flows from individual to individual, from the supreme leader down the aqueduct to animalness, a canal whose channels, by means of scapegoats, free those who pose as the masters of creation from their guilt, their fears, and their powerlessness.

The Reign of the Spirit/Mind

They have instituted a subtle distinction between intelligence and mind. Sure, an elephant might have an intelligence, but what a mindless thing it is that there’s no more honorable end for it than to fall under the bullets of a creature inhabited by the divine spark, whether a ivory trafficker or a head of State. And such was, elsewhere, the fate of the negro or the indian, before the religious leaders deigned to admit that they were gifted with a soul and excluded them from the range of commonly hunted game.

Spirituality has survived the gods, who were passed off as having long ago given it to men, in exchange for a great machinery of rituals, sacrifices and “salaam aleikums”. It was only desacralized by means of its passage from the handkerchief of the priests into the hands of the ideologues, politicos and psychoanalysts, who have weakened it greatly. Its state of decline permits us today to conjecture as to what it was before some mythical fart propelled it out over the earth and up into the kingdom of the gods, from whence it began to stink up the heads of men.

The marsh which flows into a waterfall ends up a marsh again. Spirit-mind was born from the function in which it died thenceforth: the intellectual function produced by the division of labor.

There’s nothing more earthly than this supposed emanation of the heavens, nothing more easily located in history than this transcendence lodged in the beyond. It flows forth prosaically from the separation of society into masters and slaves, from the corporeal separation that rises against the instincts of nature, a mental instance charged with repressing them to put them to work.

Only an imposture could have claimed to oppose spiritual values to the low appetite for profit. There’s no other spirit but the spirit of an economy which economizes the living. There is no other spirit besides that which presides over the creation of a universe of dead things.

The Beast, Subdued by Work

The slave is present in the social body as he is present in the individual body. It’s a bestial nature that makes it the work of masters to make people work.

Sweat has been the dominant perfume of their civilization. But curiously, their noses weren’t accommodated to the odor of armpits bitterly emanating from the manual laborers, and smelled only roses and violets in the perspiration of the kings who killed themselves with State business, generals hounded by defeat, tribunals slaving over the chessboard of political calculations, bureaucrats clinging to the ladder of power that tomorrow, they hope, will elevate them to power. Could it be that, unlike the porters, these notables, these aristocrats, these rich people, who speak of workers like they were residue scraped up from the prison floor, don’t stink of effort and of the pain of spending hours and hours to earn their keep? What were they if not merely the slaves at the helm, the crowned exploited, the laborers of the military helmet, of the pope’s cap or the top-hat?

And only then do we see manual labor cover the beast of burden in flowers, because it is fixed to its body, to the magma of muscles, of blood, of nerves. While they deal with a budget, tape things onto a royal cassette, make a chunk of capital bear fruit, extract a surplus value, this isn’t branded with the name of “work,” but rather it participates in a world of pure exchange value, where money reigns and can’t be felt.

Work. The word has a stink of executions and of slow agony. It’s the coat of mud and pus that soils the hidden side of the gold coins: the decimated slaves, the flayed serfs, the proletarians sliced in two by fatigue, fear, and the oppression of the passing days, life broken into pieces by the wage. The truest monuments to its efficient glory are the glassed in balconies looking out over gates saying “arbeit macht frei”, a message that expresses the quintessence of commodity civilization: work will free you... from life.

Other than that all they had to do was stigmatize as a useless barbarism the concentration-camp industry of Buchenwald and Kolyma, in order to keep going down those same paths; they save the workers the extravagant luxury of the gas chambers. Were they not advised that it would be useful to honor the proletarians, to deodorize manual effort, to sing praises of the factories and of the beauty of dockworkers, which means to intellectualize the worker in the way Allais did, since he saw in the mailman a “man of letters” working with his feet?

Work has become a good thing now that they’ve realized that almost everywhere and always, almost everyone is working.

There have never been so many proletarians as there are now, now that the proletariat has disappeared. Will the power of the imagination have to ally itself with the power of numbers in order to banalize the obvious fact that to begin living liberates you from work and the death it produces?

A Semi-Human Civilization

Their so-called humanity is nothing but a socialized animalness.

They forbid themselves the summary freedoms of beasts, but they behave more ferociously than wildcats. No other proof of this is needed besides the turpitude that has, in all eras, been simmering beneath the lid of heroism, holiness, good conscience, and humanism.

The spirit that transcends animalness is worse than the animalness itself. To kill, the tiger needed no mandate from God, no reasons of State, nor did it need concepts of racial purity or of the good of the people; it was free of the hypocrisy of a society that whips people with its cruelty, imitates the predators’ ruses, counterfeits its tyranny, and appropriates, like the tiger, the females and the territory.

After having announced everywhere that men, though stunted physically, were great mentally, they gave the name “superman” to these beasts more stupidly aggressive than nature would ever give rise to, and took as their social model an economic jungle of divergent interests wherein the strongest crushed the weakest.

Not even thirty years ago, the alliance between the commodity-ruse and military violence still passed itself off as the most accomplished model for honest men to follow. To stiffen up, to stick out the chest, and march resolutely in step with a cadenced thinking; to hide one’s weapons in order to strike a more brutal blow — these are the things they called “character-building”. The busts of Alexander, Cesar, Brutus, saint Augustine, Voltaire, Bonaparte, and Lenin decorated the educational pantheon where children fell to their knees for the promise of one day equaling those big tadpoles, transfigured by the spirit of the mercenary soldier and the slave-trader.

And so the generations learned that working to destroy oneself, denying one’s creativity, repressing enjoyment and bursting out occasionally with bitter compulsion means becoming a man.

Seeing reality totally upside down, they made of the body a plot of the king’s territory, where people became imprisoned; they made “time” out of an ephemeral existence, a pure fragment of celestial eternity. Now the trap is not the body but the mind — thought separated from living and which closes up upon itself when its desires are castrated. Torn from its enjoyments and trained to put up with life on the death-row of work, the body sanctifies its martyrdom; the thinking mind denies its carnal nature, without which it is nothing, and gives itself a halo, a mythical crown, with a shine that reflects the whole lie of this upside down world.

The mind has muddied the body with an “ontological” suffering which puts on the front that it gives relief in a spray of ethereal flourish. Repressed into the eternal “before” of a spiritualist existence, life doesn’t seem to let itself be discovered if not in a “beyond” of death.

The Men of Survival...

Animals adapt themselves to natural conditions, and men adapt themselves to a system that denatures life. That’s why some don’t progress, and others progress by regressing at the same time.

Looking on as animals survived by adapting themselves to the law of the land, they inferred that they had adapted to them in order to survive.

They saw in them a spirit of conquerors and market promoters.

Animals knew no other care besides nourishing themselves, protecting themselves, satisfying their impulses of ruts and games. The school of nature initiated them into the practices of seduction, being on the look-out, taking refuge, and wandering. They acquired from this an almost epidermic knowledge of the rhythms of the seasons, of fauna and flora, of the surroundings, of the territory; they gained more advantage in the great combat wherein existence was prolonged from day to day, from instant to instant.

The only species that adapts only in order to survive is the human species. The whole of its genius has been put to the task of disfiguring the beast in order to appear human, of passing from an uncertain survival to a programmed survival, which is often worse.

...are the Men of Economy

The exploitation of nature by agriculture and commerce first produced obvious advantages. It got rid of the threat that climate changes and demographic growth posed to the resources for hunting and gathering which were up until then guaranteed.

The wheat silos, the development of technologies, the circulation of goods — these would have given credit to the good name of their civilization if the price paid for them hadn’t been the exorbitant fatalities of war, famine, harvest-destruction, and the subjugation of the many for the profit of the few, which, in its prime, posed the risk of our ending up exhausting natural resources by transforming them into abstract riches with no real use.

Are we not constrained to admit that humanity has gotten the wrong ideas about evolution, which it has renounced in order to submit itself to a system of survival wherein it has suppressed its animalness for the sake of the spirit of economy, and that it has degraded the human quality par excellence, which is to remake the universe according to its insatiable desires?

Such is the recent opinion, which frightens some and excites others. For the former, the part has been played and the game lost, and it’s now a question of going from disgust to hopelessness without losing face. For those who feel the birth of a new life within them, the last pages of archaism have been turned and the next pages must now be written, with the pen of every destiny. Beneath appearances, their great nonchalance covers up a matchless violence, and when the specter of wars and traditional revolutions moves away, a secret confrontation between the resolutions of death and the uncontrollable exuberance of living begins.

The Mutilation of History

They thought to change the world for profit, but it ended up that it was profit that changed them, as well as the world.

By stretching the limits of the empire of the economy to the limits of the earth, they made human beings into the most beautiful conquest of inhumanity. From the moment it started, following on the heels of the civilizations of gathering, nomadism, symbiosis with nature, etc., commodity civilization has interrupted the process of the creation of man by man. It’s the fault of this civilization that we’ve seen the paving of a cyclical course comprising nine to ten million years, wherein the appropriation of material and spiritual goods pursued a passion for living that it exhausted and prohibited itself from attaining. Its frenetic course proceeded parallel to the only really worthy progress — the combined expansion of enjoyments and of the situations that refine them.

They created the commodity and the commodity defeated them — that’s their whole history. The economy they produced reproduced them in its image. They lived through representations, and the representations have changed, passing from the divine to the earthly, from religions to ideologies, from pomp to ruin, and have abandoned them, leaving them plagued by broken reflections. That’s the whole of their “progress”.

They were very proud, in the 20^th century, to have dragged down from the skies the last of the gods, in order to promote the cult of humanism. But in doing so, the commodity did nothing but change packaging and take on a more human face. Solicitude, for men, women, and children, guaranteed promotional sales much better, from then on, than could the soldier’s bayonet and the priest’s crucifix. Where everything has been vanquished, there’s nothing to do but try to convince everyone.

Progress

Commodity civilization has economized men, and created this deplorable “economy” out of a mutation towards the human. Its triumph is manifest, since it’s everywhere; its ruin is too, because life is foreign to it and the well being it dispenses is paid for with a lack of life that is incessantly growing.

The progress of commodity expansion has functioned like a developing polaroid picture — it basically waved in front of the noses of the blindest among us the original discord wherein evolution has found itself to be lost.

The drama of separation isn’t played out anymore between earth and heaven, but between the will to live of each human being and the piece of death which governs them. At the dawn of history, like at the daily sundown of life, the human denies itself, and is denied as a carnal reality in order to be reerected in an abstract form, to be ruled by the mind.

It was the responsibility of humanity’s creative intelligence to transmute the materia prima of animalness. But intelligence separated off from the body, engendering divine monsters and terrestrial hybrids, half beast, half man.

The gods of the economy have damned them, disguising this damnation as a blessing of good health; like the God of christian mythology (which is particularly exemplary), who crucifies his son, saying it was for his own supreme good. What each of us kills in ourselves and is resuscitated in the cruel counterfeit of angels, is our fundamental animalness; the exuberance of our primary needs in which only the will to transcend can take root.

Halfway towards their destiny, men have remained caught in the trap of their collective animalness. Their freedom has imposed upon them the limitations set by a contract that regulates the maximum levels allowed for repressed animalness and for its compensatory releases. Walled in to the dissatisfactions of an oppressed body and the moroseness of a mind that cannot perfectly constrain it, they live a joyless existence, dreaming of ridding themselves of it by means of death instead of making the animal into the source of the development of the human.