The End of Judges and the Judged-Guilty

Fear and aggressiveness diminish along with the price society puts on prohibitions and their transgression.

Free trade manages to dismantle the old walls of agrarian structure, and every newly opened breach in the wall brings up new ideas of openness and of freedom.

Archaic societies surrounded their fields, property, cities, and nations with protective and oppressive walls. Commodity modernity is tearing them all down.

The cities have lost their enclosing walls, the borders are being abolished slowly. Have they become the last bloody pages of this commodity-saga?

The war of 1914 and the rekindling of its poorly-extinguished embers in 1940 mark, so far as it seems, the last ubuesque vociferations of protectionism, that regression from the commercial spirit back to the agrarian mentality.

The tumultuous passage of private capitalism to State capitalism has seen the building and crumbling of the totalitarian citadels of nazism and bolshevism.

The roads that are open today, as foggy with illusions as they have remained, cut across Europe freely, and a new liberty of movement, duly patented, is now making all the old prohibitions and the violence that traditionally went down those roads start to look like the purest derision.

The Peace of Exchanges

A market that is more and more “common” celebrates the freedoms of a commerce that excludes no direction nor object and lends the extent of its vision to opinions and consciences. A peace of exchanges little by little comes to fill our social and international relations, over-ruling, pell-mell, the confrontations between peoples and over-ruling the old-style revolutions, drowning the fish of revolt in the water-glass of talk.

Everything seems to bathe in an apparent conjunction of interests so deliquescent that they even discourage the idea that people could kill each-other even more in order to defend or demand them. What is incarnated in this highly industrialized community, where the clash of arms makes way for dialogue and the toilet paper of chauvinism meeting the hygienic standards of the Red Cross, is the triumph of commodity universalism, the empire of exchange value, the triumph of happy thoughts reigning over a non-existent happiness.

The transparency they’re so proud of isn’t the transparency of the human, but of the mechanisms that denature the human. Yesterday I might have denounced such an imposture in order to make the shame more shameful still. But since today it’s denouncing itself, I rejoice, rather, that it is putting the impulsions of life face to face with the economic reflex that kills the living of it.

The Price of Sin is Democratized

What they call “laxity” is merely the sinking of the threshold of prohibitions beneath the pressure of a hedonism-market that legalizes transgression.

Immoral acts which seek power and profit are not immoralities at all, but are instead lucrative transactions. The economy has never let anything lag behind which it expected to get a material and spiritual benefit from.

Religion was the first enterprise to prosper by means of a crafty control over the compression and decompression of impulses. Once the freedoms of nature are submitted to the demands of daily work, it’s an offense to give in to them, an offense against the economic spirit. The priests knew early on how important it is to make themselves the controllers and accountants of “human weaknesses”. They watch for man’s fall into animalness and then place themselves at the chute’s exit to negotiate the price to be paid in penitence for redemption. Would anyone really be so shocked to hear that the Roman Church, which inherited the thrift-shop virtues of the Empire, insists so frenetically on the fallible character of men in the face of temptation? The more the sinner succumbs and the more he acquires in the way of money, obedience, and resigned weakness, the more he is taxed on the toll road to a “healthy soul”.

Alas, since, the earthly economy has devoured the celestial economy, religious affairs have fallen into profane hands, which care much less about spiritual succor than they do about monetary reality. It was enough that the pleasures be introduced into the democracy of the supermarkets in order for us to see the falling into disuse of the more ascetic forms of redemption, wherein one would spit blood into the bassinet while beating the guilt out of himself.

It’s not scientific logic that has swept away religious obscurantism, but rather the peremptory “logic” of the numbers of business. And those numbers have the power of giving privilege to anything and everything, except for freeness. It has put happiness, cut up into consumable commodities, on sale and within the reach of every purse. It has come up with a whole gamut of artificially modeled desires, based on a dazzling technique of well-being and satisfaction at a low price — it has preprogrammed the triumph of automated autonomy: sex shops, fast food joints, vibrating dildos, peep-shows, TV s, pink cell phones, social, cultural and psychological self-serve pumps.

It’s vain quarreling to decide and decree that all this is good or bad, since life is elsewhere. What’s for sure is that the old agro-religious tyranny has been supplanted, in Europe, by a formal and commercial ‘freedom’ that has brought commodity-humanism to a high degree of development, that is, a conception of the world that gives to men the same rights that priced objects have, no more no less. That’s a lot if you think about all the sacrificed generations of people, the masses with cut off existences only because they were worth less than a stroke of bad luck to the state. And that’s way too little for those of us who think that our lives are unique and cannot be bought nor sold, paid off or exchanged.

In the wake of all this, however, a large number of fears, frustrations, and styles of aggressive and conniving conduct are on their way to disappearance. Openly and almost in a Statist way incited to seize in passing, without scruples nor shame, whatever they can get of eroticism, quantified passion and computerized encounters, the hedonist clientele learns to get rid of the anguish and their guilt-feelings with which the religious and moral gangrene had blackened the least satisfactions with not very long ago.

On the other hand, these freedoms, which are now freedoms of the market, are paid for. The majority of transgressions enjoy an official recognition; it’s enough that the bill gets paid.

However, the fear of orgasm has not disappeared, but has rather only been ventilated a little wherever it fits into debt-payments, into the budget — and at the same time the rigor of prohibitions was waiting for someone to be able to transgress them on an installment plan. At the end of all the accounting you always have to deal with the taxes, the absolute tax, the unpayable debt of an economized-on life that hangs over you until there’s nothing left of you but death hanging on bones.

Openness

The less they feel the need to protect themselves from themselves, the more they can do without the protection of others, without protecting against others.

The citadels in which peoples and individuals were locked up for so long have been seen with mix of fear and assurance. The fate of nations, cities, and men wobbled between confidence and suspicion, sincerity and lies, betrayal and loyalty. The men of economy now incorporate into themselves and their societies the ruses and disquiet that once reigned endemically among the beasts.

The refugees in the detention centers cannot any longer be fundamentally distinguished from the foreignness that their captors feel within themselves; their captors themselves have in them the menacing nature that they impute to the foreigners: that movement of the body towards orgastic enjoyment, a movement that is repressed because it threatens the civilization of work.

The “protection” they felt they received from gods and masters, which they called upon themselves with screams of prayer and sacrifices, were never anything but a protection against themselves, a defense against natural desire. Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott! (A mighty fortress is our God)

The flood of commodities has razed the walls of the old agrarian, protectionist mentality. There’s nothing, not even character armor, that doesn’t crack and open in good time. We know that another circle is being formed, to protect the empire of the commodity across its new borderlines. However, fear has for a time loosened its grip.

Nothing that closes up on itself and into itself has ever protected anything but things, at the expense of men and women. There’s no family, no society that doesn’t work like a mafia gang — it’s always a question of propagating the fear of “what might happen” in order to sell, with a maternal solicitude, the condoms which protect against the dangers waiting for children, citizens, and the nation.

The majority of tyrannies began by improving the common fate, only to give way to the typical reign of protective power and protected imbecility. If the phenomenon is more widely perceived today, that only happens at the same time as the protection from the so-called hostility of nature that the economy once guaranteed to people is appearing more and more suspect. And if it is really being more understood today, that’s only happening at the same time as a better knowledge of infancy is showing us how the affection that helped it sustain its autonomy is being chiseled down and economized on little by little: is being lent out at interest, and granted only in exchange for submission, transforming tutelary solicitude into a neurosis of power.

When emotional commodification subjugates the freeness of love to the law of supply and demand, the separation of enjoyment and work reproduce in the child’s mind the origins of hierarchical power.

The Decline of Fear

While the power of kings and republics still had any credit, he survival off the species and the security of existence served usefully as a pretext for propa gating a fear that deposited impositions and submission into the drawers of the State’s cash registers. The seeds of fear will fall on sterile soil from now on; they grow with vigor whenever a press propaganda campaign starts up, and then they perish.

See the disarray there is in the puppetry of the armies. There they are, with no war to prepare for, no insurrection to quash, not even a general strike to put between their teeth. Reduced to serve like mannequins in the shop-windows for a arms-market that the absence of serious conflicts threatens more and more, their forces of dissuasion can’t even hide their ridiculousness anymore.

There’s nothing, not even the police-function, that doesn’t sometimes dare to dissipate the stench of death with which armed men “secure” the unarmed crowds.

The idea that the criminal and the cop are two complementary and interchangeable roles, carved out from the same repressive will, has made a good contribution to cleaning the hate and admiration off them, feelings that those roles caused in their respective partisans and adversaries. The killers of tyrants, ministers, prison-guards, and military brass, which was still applauded yesterday by the rebellious factions, have seen their side diminish in size at the rate with which their image is mixed with that of their victims. It’s not that they were thought to have been seeking, in one regime or another of obligatory freedom, the post that they’d just vacated — no, it was the reflex of murder that offended people; they had the same contempt for life that their opposition had.

One must be dead to oneself in order to clamor for the death of other people. This is true above all in an era that has come to a point of such great power and weakness before the omnipresent agony of life propagating itself throughout consciousnesses and behaviors as though it were the only truly human reality, the only reality that had any use-value.

Don’t think I’m saying that I foresee, hoping for the liquidation of all power, all armies, and all police in all their forms, some great disappearance of them all by means of a wave of a magic wand. I’m perfectly aware that the fall of the economic empire risks taking down along with it those whose customary behavior, and whose laziness when it comes to “looking elsewhere,” hangs on the rotted realities of the old world. Whoever can’t face the reality that it’s all coming to an end will only ever keep bringing up the phantoms of the past; the only thing that can happen for them is that they’ll choose an imminent death over making an effort to demand the rekindling of a will to live.

I, however, am hoping on the birth of a new innocence, and don’t spend a single day without putting myself to its creation with either wisdom or madness, and I devote myself to being satisfied with seeing the signs that assure me of my convictions, sometimes mistakenly, often correctly. So, then, it’s not an unimportant matter for me when parents give rise to oldness in their children, or when a logic from the heart wins out over business-sense. I hear with pleasure the voices that make demands, the voices that refuse bosses, the new autonomy taking root at the heart of conflicts traditionally controlled by union bureaucrats — those voices, still unusual to hear, that are going up into the magistratures and police stations to demilitarize their functions, not to propose to criminals a punishment to suffer but to offer them a way to correct, in the sense that the living understand, what has been committed by ignorance and contempt for life.

It’s not by heckling them, but by holding them to their word that we will stop the calls for an authentic humanity from turning back to abstract discourse and being denied a life by facts and acts.

Against the Recourse to Fear in Ecology

Fear penetrates into men’s hearts from the instant they find themselves prevented from being born to themselves. I mean to say that man cannot escape the terrors inherent in the animal universe except by sinking into the terrors of a social jungle where it’s a crime to behave with the free generosity of a truly human nature.

The economy distills an essential fear in the threat it brings to weigh upon the survival of the whole planet — on the one hand it is a threat made in the name of a “guarantee of well being”, and on the other hand, it snaps shut like a mousetrap on every attempt to choose a different path, whether it’s a question of the independence of children or of the promotion of natural energies.

Fear, as an economic argument, consists in closing the doors and windows when the enemy has already gotten in the house. It accrues danger in the guise of protecting from it. To bring up the fright of an earth transformed into a desert, a nature systematically assassinated — is this not just another way of walling oneself up in the vicious circle of the universal commodity-spectacle only to perish therein?

By destroying the walls of the agrarian enclosure only to reconstruct them further out towards the limits of marketability, the commodity’s expansion has brought to heel the flock of terrors at the frontier between a moribund universe and a nature to be rejuvenated.

What’s most fearsome about the fear of death, which stupefies men even in their suicidal temerity, is that it is originally a fear of life. To die a natural death, to cross death’s path, belongs so completely to the logic of things that men, reduced to the objects they produce, paradoxically find more security and assurance in the hope that they will die a natural death than they find in a resolve to begin living and be guided by their enjoyments.

Natural Fear, Denatured Fear, And the Human Handling of Fear

The fear of ecological apocalypse hides the chances nature and human nature still have.

Fear has in common with sickness the fact that they both belong to the language of the body. It warns the body of the dangers it is to be exposed to. However, isn’t it a strange way to behave to exaggerate the causes and effects of the routs and “courageous” flights forward, instead of learning how to be on one’s guard for known risks?

Those who live in familiarity and love with savage beasts know to what an extent fear-reactions increase the chaos of fear, and at the same time, the aggressiveness of animals that approach them; when they speak calmly to them, with the voice of their hearts, they make them peaceful at the same time as they diminish the disturbance of an encounter so traditionally marked by incomprehension and contempt.

Such is Orpheus’ secret: poetry is the emotional language that creates harmony, because it gathers together the elementary rhythms that nature’s heart beats with, in order to make them its own.

Such is the secret, accessible to all those who look deeply, today, into the familiarity with which children behave, those little animals on the road to humanization that have known, up to the present, only the reign of the hunter and hunted, the tamers and the tamed, the crash of the whip and the scratch of the claw.

The end of emotional commodification — that is, the end of economized love, placed beneath economic tutelage — has a good chance of getting rid of the stomach-centered fear that gnaws at one’s existence from the moment animal impulses are repressed within it instead of being refined in a human way.

To conquer fear is still only to make it reasoned, and, most often, to exorcize it from oneself only to project it onto others. It’s much more important to deny it its neurotic anchorage, and to extirpate from the body the anguish born from the uncertainties of love and the denials of total, orgastic enjoyment.

We know now just how much fear provokes danger, accrues it and attracts it by way of the powerlessness and weakness that it brings everyone to, as if it were plunging it back into the nocturnal terror of early childhood. What fine wisdom, which knows all about lightning and the way it works, and yet, still immersed in existential anguish, runs beneath a tree to protect itself from the storm.

Fear will disappear along with the dependency that hypertrophies it, since power finds all its support therein. Only autonomy, which is only partially offered in childhood for refining children’s enjoyments, will reduce fear from being a signal for the death-reflex to being a signal that the will to live will be the first to see and react to instead.

Justice

Commerce and industry have given a human form to the rough justice of agrarian societies.

It would be very surprising if — having made their public and private existence dependent upon a system where everything’s paid for — they could subtract their customs, thoughts and gestures from the budget of credit and discredit, on the balance sheet of activity and passivity, from the accountancy of merits and demerits.

Justice and the Arbitrary

Their conception of justice is completely held to the principle of exchanges.

The battle between equity and arbitrariness follows the same road as the guerrillas, whose clear consciousness of commerce has always delivered them over to the obscurantist capacities of power.

The caprice of tyrants, the refinement of tortures, the ferocity of sentences, and the reign of injustice embed, in the ties of blood spilled in atonement, the history of these societies of agricultural predominance or of agricultural survival. The oriental despotisms, the feudalisms, the modern dictatorships advocating a return to the earth, the protectionisms without “lebensraum” (living space), the peasant communities strangled by mental archaism, all the martial-law delirium of nations, the identification with a territory, the withdrawing into “property rights”, all the character armor — all these things have built up frustrations, fears, rage, and fantastic hatreds that have overflowed from century to century in waves of massacres, holocausts, genocides, burnings at the stake, pogroms, takings of revenge, and everyday barbarities.

On the other hand, there has been no era “haloed by the glory of commerce and crowned with the palm fronds of industry” that didn’t make a rational need to conserve human capital prevail over the rituals of mass expiation, making use not of human nature, but of the force that work extracts from it in order to assure the progress of commodities. Justice becomes humanized with the increase of humanism, and humanism is the art of economizing men in order to draw a lasting profit from them.

The Economy Economizes Repression

If the funeral procession of judicial horrors is slowly going away with its tortures and death sentences, you can thank the empire of marketability for it; it has little to do with sensible souls taking hold of judicial power.

Why machine-gun thousands of insurgents when putting ten of them on a firing line is enough to reestablish order? In the same way as the mafia does, the justice of the Enlightened only punishes people reluctantly, and only does so in the name of business interests.

And anyway, solicitude towards the guilty accrues from the moment the work of consumption is superimposed upon the work of production. The steel rod of necessities strikes us donkeys a lot less than it shakes the carrots of seduction before our noses. Since the neon glow of the supermarkets does a better job bringing workers back to the factory than the bayonet does, justice starts looking like a service-desk, an office for the contentious to do their business at.

The guilty are clients that have failed to comply with the deals officially made at their birth, and who are being offered easy payment plans. The inherent guilt involved in exchange has lost its drama, which was only really an indignity that the individual suffered long ago for never having been able to pay off enough of the debt owed to God, the king, to the causes, to honor, and all the other frivolous inventions of little men. Although the celestial pomp of sacrifice and redemption still dyes with ermine and purple the puppet-parade of the courthouses, the feeling prevails that the judicial machine is no more and no less than a cash register where crimes are made up for by paying fines and doing time, just like wage work rules over the bill to be paid for one’s consumable pleasures.

Compared to the countries where one finds gulags where people sit in the “hole” forever, (“in pace”), when we look back upon the eras of crematoria and butchery, progress is manifest. But how can we be satisfied with a “democratic justice” that allows hopes for clemency to exist only on the implicit condition that one feel guilty? Inhumanity is set up in such a way that the majority of acquired goods replace disadvantageously the evils they suppress. And so, to the extent that justice attenuates its rigors, we see the economy-men punishing themselves for faults they incriminate themselves for in secret, substituting suicide for the scaffold, sickness for torture, anguish for pillory.

Humanist justice is born from the progress of “an eye for an eye” over scapegoating.

Exchange relations are the carriers of civilization insofar as they limit the right of the mightiest to profitably exploit the weakest. The survival-time accorded to the slaves is never any greater than the duration of the profit they assure their master.

The ubiquity of exchanges is the specter of immanent justice which surges forth between the worst of tyrants and the most insignificant of their subjects to temper the excesses of power and the excess of indignity. What they attributed to the goodness of the gods and the clemency of princes was really just a part of a well-tempered economy. The history of the emancipation of humanity has never adopted those freedoms that weren’t sources of accrued revenue.

The Benefits of Commodity Expansion

Justice has been democratized along with the price of commodities.

The contradiction between the archaism of working the land and the modernity of commodity-expansion governed the evolution of some 10 thousand years of civilization.

The peasant community is at the heart of the original sacrifice, like the eye of a cyclone. Never has self-renunciation — without which work wouldn’t be able to exploit natural material to draw from it material for exchange — ceased to propagate around it a rage to destroy exacerbated proportionally with the proliferation of prohibitions upon the desire to create and to create oneself.

Gold, ideas, bread, wine — these things all belong to the commerce of beings and things, which dispenses them. They have been paid for with blood, with a daily castration of desires, with the application of a utilitarian torture to nature. Would anyone expect that such a handling of things would incite to love, tenderness, or generosity? Is it inexplicable that men and women, in their very foundations cut to pieces, would seek to satisfy, on the back of some propitious victim or of some scapegoat, the displeasure that their work condemns them to? Would anyone be surprised that those who the face-slaps of rebuke and whip of sermons manage to bring back around to order and orgasm-anxiety stone themselves to death, lynch each other, torture themselves, and give in to bullying, racism, and exclusions, every time the sting of austerity, the sting of losing, the sting of threats to the fatherland, the stinging of threatened privileges, burns in their genitals?

Who gets indignant in the face of such a state of cruelty, barbarity, and obscurantism? The men of lucrative dialogue, of marketable openness; the men of modernity. It’s profit, more than generosity, that requires that prisoners of war be either exchanged for a ransom, or instead sold off like slaves, rather than being tortured to their last breath in order that the torturers might make them into installment payments on their urge for vengeance. Humanism is born right there.

The talion, the absolute “justice” of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” marks upon the blind sacrifice of scapegoats and of fallen peoples the progress of the rationality of exchanges beyond the brutal compensations of decompression — that’s because, being different from agrarian resistance to change, it is a part of the logic of trade to evolve towards more primitive forms to the extent that money invents a principle of universal reason, stamping prices on the active and passive, a homologous balance scale where pros and cons are weighed.

Justice repels expiatory massacres since it only sees in them a senseless waste. Is it not pleasant that criminological language judges murders that yield great profits to be interesting and interested, villainous murders of vile profit-seeking, and at the same time considers to be gratuitous — with the horror that word implies — the assassinations by means of which their authors put upon the weaker their frustrations and humiliations, as if it was just another irrational and bestial form of exchange?

Praises of Humanism

The humanists have made it their duty to ignore a most fundamental exchange, which is the very principle of denaturation: the imperative transformation of the life-force into work-force. On the other hand, they are inexhaustible when it comes to the comfort and developments that trade and its philosophy introduced, across the centuries, into the inhuman sacrifice of men to the economy.

Filled with the light that the universal commodity brings to the four corners of the world, they celebrate everywhere the grandeur and excellence of men who work to perfect it. In one sense, which is their own, they aren’t wrong.

Undeniably, the idea of an equitable profit for all has consolidated the acquisition of democratic rights, its law substituting itself for the law of the mightiest, and attenuating the injustices and the dissatisfactions, bringing peace back to the social torment of divergent interests.

Who would think to complain about the freedoms in the shadow of which, without too much fear being involved, it is permissible to love, drink, eat, talk, think, express oneself, move about, and breathe? Do I not know well enough that without them I couldn’t write, at least without risking censorship and being burned at the stake?

I do not mock them within the realm of what their limits authorize, I simply refuse their frontiers, which are not those of the human but those of the lucrative. I reproach them for not being given nor won — regardless of how it seems — I reproach them for being born, setting themselves up, and imposing themselves only to go through the motions necessary to make the economy run. I hold it against these freedoms that they’ll never go beyond the free circulation of goods, never stop narrowing themselves to the right to sell, buy, and serve, according to supply and demand. To know that such goods are paid for is to recognize to what extent they are denied.

It becomes clear that there is an imposture involved in condemning scapegoat-politics, which is so vigorously in play in authoritarian and bureaucratic behaviors, xenophobia, racism, and sectarianism; that is, when one deigns to break the economic hold over life that smashes desire at its roots.

As long as this wound in our being does not heal, this wound which is our degraded enjoyment of life, the great exorcism of death will only make all the tears and blood that each of us spills splash upon others. Be careful not to forget that in the festival palace where commodity conviviality celebrates the Rights of man, there is a room that at any moment could become a gas chamber.

The Battle Against Injustice

Death is the real egalitarian justice, like the commodity is the end of man, who produces it. What is alive escapes “justice” and “injustice” because it escapes economy.

The struggle against injustices can no longer hide what it always was: man’s conquest of a commodity that conquered him, and replaces with a human form — an abstraction — the living reality that it exhausts.

Should one go out into the streets armed to make demands? What for? To demand rights that will only be accorded to me at the price of new renunciations, will enrich me at my expense, and will only make a poorer life for me?

People have killed themselves and each other for centuries trying to get equality, and today they’ve become conscious that the only effective equality is the duty imposed on everyone to sacrifice themselves in order to become workers, to work for nothing or almost nothing, since having is in decline, power is ridiculous, and survival is boring.

I only feel concerned with the creation of a world where there would be nothing to pay for anymore.

Work and Death

Long ago they would console people for the torments of injustice by invoking for everyone, rich and poor, big and little, lucky and unlucky, the powerful and the miserable, the common obligation everyone has of dying. The dream of egalitarian justice was realized when one died a natural death.

Now that work is felt to be a daily and universal loss of life, it seems that between equality in the face of death and the equal obligation to sacrifice every day there is no difference except the difference between paying in cash or credit. Our era is so favorable to euphemisms that payment extensions are easily arranged.

Their justice stinks of euthanasia; their equitable distribution of rights and duties is like a lethal overdose injected bit by bit. And what a “cosmic” consolation it is, when commodities, those dead things that suck the blood of the living, embrace and exhaust simultaneously the ensemble of species as well as the earth that fed them!

Self-Punishment

To find oneself alone with the shadow of a death that no longer comes from God, nor from Themis’ daughters the fates, nor even from a natural law, in the shadow of a death that comes from a reflex, conditioned into people by economic necessity, seems to take on a happy character, seems to be a blessing to make the most of.

Is it not permissible, in effect, to untangle from the mess of performed gestures those which mortify existence with routine and those which serve to revive that existence? But what a stubbornness that requires! And not many people have the sincerity to admit that they most often carry out, themselves, the sentence passed upon them, which is to die to themselves, leaving themselves with only a derisory, vain hustling of beings and things.

A militant in the struggle against torture and the death sentence one morning realizes that he has never stopped feeling killing himself and torturing himself on the scaffold of guilt. Another, who spent his time calling for the abolition of prisons, realizes upon getting out of bed that he’s never stopped putting himself in the prison of his character-armor.

The economy knows so well what its essence is, now that it took it from “celestial transcendence” and translated that into earthly immanence, that it’s concretized itself in the economized existence of every unique individual. Consciousness becomes clarified, choices become precise. One must choose — either, feeling oneself to be judge, judged, and executioner, one must schedule heart trouble, cancer, thrombosis, or accidents for oneself, as if one were handing down a sentence upon oneself, or instead one must take hold fully of every pleasure in order to claim, without a basis for doing so, an innocence which answers to nothing and no one.

All Justice is Guilty

The economy-men have no other recourse outside of this immanent justice that was created only in order to economize them in the last days of the planet, which has ascended to the state of pure commodity. You will recognize them easily.

Fear and oppression has brought them so completely to their knees that they don’t even know how to stand up for themselves without bringing others to their knees, imputing their misery to others, and punishing them with the punishment they inflict upon themselves all day long. The vocation of sacrifice feeds upon the sacrifice of others.

They atone, and so they judge. Their judgment is made in order that the agony they impose upon themselves might spread over the whole world. That’s why they snicker when death pulls out of its hat such things as the Chernobyl disaster or AIDS. Every cry of alarm is good for them if it adds shrill sounds to the rumors of the final judgment. If they denounce air pollution, it’s only a pathetic attempt to ventilate a bit the atmosphere of guilt they vegetate in.

Beneath the indifference of businessmen and the indignation of the revolutionaries the same stench of a scorned existence, a defunct life, is festering. Death’s side of things has the greatest respect for unhappiness, since there’s no better way to draw to oneself great misfortune than to resign oneself to putting up with the whining of the little-man. The only thing that is really fated is the fate we predispose ourselves to suffer.

Against Anti-Terrorism

There is a condemnation of terrorism as repulsive as terrorism itself. This is not to blame the ordinary cynicism of the state, which praises peace and sells arms when it is not killing a student in the name of security and public order. The state-henchmen know too much about the violence they use to be truly outraged when a killer, who has rendered outstanding services to the army, guns down a general whose profession is, after all, to murder with a calculated risk of retaliation.

No, I am thinking of the hypocrisy and cunning that is in most people’s disapproval. After all, if there is anything to condemn, it is difficult to understand why the humiliation does not affect both private terrorists and state terrorism, that creates terrorists in competition, so to speak.

In whose name are the rights which the state imposes on the citizen — right to scaffold, prison, fine, registration, confiscation, control, enforcement, remuneration — denied to embryonic states, such as drug lobbies, interest groups, private militias, mafias, supposedly revolutionary factions, terrorist storm troopers, individual profiteers of crime and resentment? In the name of the protection that the state grants in return? Unfortunately, this protection is also the product offered by competitors, and their extortion usually only has the disadvantage of illegally supplementing the extortion legally practiced by the state.

I have no interest in consorting with circles that are better prepared to massacre each other than to give life to cities and forests. The question, however, deserves to be asked: Who are those noble spirits who hate bombers and firearm-ideologues? Mostly domestic and family terrorists, rash and haphazard bringers of death, spreaders of fear and blackmailers, who give and refuse love in order to obtain power and stifle the impulses for independence of their relatives. Under the banner of humanism, these people are cut from the same character-cloth as the culprits of the illegal power.

Against Terrorism

In the all-powerfulness of their inhumanity, the States of the past have engendered heroes who, daring to stand up alone to Leviathan, have been haloed with the black lightning of an oppressed humanity.

Coeurderoy, Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio, Bonnot, Soudy, Raymond-la-Science, Libertad, Mecislas Charrier, Pauwels, Marius Jacob (who never killed anyone), Sabate, Capdevila, and so many others; I no longer have the same admiration for you, but my affection for you has increased, since now I understand how hard it must have been safeguarding your own lives when you pushed the knives away from your throat and turned them against those who had threatened you.

It is no longer true, today as we witness the precipitous decline of every form of authority, that the weight of servitude and degradation makes surges of life take up the weapons of death.

On the other hand, I see to what a point the suicide-reflex and the necessity of dying for some cause gave new credit to the State, which is more and more discredited, and re-carve the faded coat-of-arms of Power. Besides, it would be sufficient to examine to what point terrorism has gathered from the barrel of the gun the weakness of the last ideologies to recognize what must be done. Sexism, racism, marxism, sectarianism, nationalism, mysticism, authoritarianism, and business-ism give us a good reflection of what’s left on the stage in the political theater; it’s enough that the onlookers give a few whistles and hoots for the ham actors of order to rediscover a semblance of conviction.

The European State has already been disgraced by the fact that it maintains armies that go jobless when there aren’t any wars or riots for them to fight in; what would happen to its justice, its magistratures, its police, its bureaucracies, if it didn’t have political terrorism and the typical giving up of rights?

Repression has always fed itself upon people having a typical inclination to repress themselves; that’s what gives governments their power. And now we see, at the moment when the side of guilt is losing out, droves of suicidal activists have drawn from their lethargy a system of final judgments wherein everyone kills themselves by killing others. Cui prodest? (who profits off this?)

To throw down what is collapsing on its own is to offer one’s own agony a bed amid the ruins. Let the dead associate with the dead in one in the same cult of decay, in that refusal of life which is the spirit of all religions.

Life Above All Else

The new innocence abolishes guilt with the sovereignty of the living.

If the old cry, “Death to the exploiters!” no longer rings through the cities, it’s because it’s made way for another cry, which comes from childhood and from a serene passion: “Life above all else!”

Let that cry spread, not in heads, but in hearts, and you won’t be bothered anymore by the apathy in which the archaisms of submission and revolt get bogged down.

The joy of belonging to the incessant renewal of nature is the best antidote for the daily constraints of exploitation and denaturation. It’s the moment of innocence when children reveal themselves to themselves, before education makes the pleasure of being born be paid for with the obligation of working. There lies the secret that undoes the chain of remorse, sacrifices, sicknesses, frustrations, and aggressiveness that forges, chain-link by chainlink, the free trade of guilt-feelings.

Clemency

What motivated the gestures of clemency, which the hagiographers attribute to some potentate, monarch, general, or statesman or another? It was discounts on spiritual profiteering; a moral profiteering that is to their surplus-value system what power is to money. However, did they not sweep under the carpet of their calculating coldness a true generosity, a sparkle of authentic freeness, that bursts forth constantly as if the breath of the human only needed a crack in the authoritarian character armoring to regain its inspiration?

Now, the crack is accentuated with the dismantling of authority. The price of a pardon sinks proportionally with the sinking of the price of offenses. And that happens in such a way that the effusions of natural generosity find themselves more and more frequently cleared of the accountancy of their ancestry. That now we worry less about being paid in return means that the ideas of compensation and punishment are being washed away bit by bit, faced with the exuberance of tenderness, affection, and love.

To learn how to hold up in oneself the grace of love and of being friendly dispenses with all this waiting for favors from anyone or anything.

Against Punishment

Punishment doesn’t dissuade people from committing crimes, it stimulates their commission. It gives rise to competitive overstatements where the guilty passes down upon others a justice that others passed upon them. Don’t criminals act like implacable judges? They condemn, punish, pardon, or execute their victims without deferring to the laws of a universal justice. His tax on his victims is his wage, and he knows that if he’s arrested he’ll settle his accounts.

Such is the unstoppable logic of exchanges; it reproduces itself endlessly. But it’s not a human law, it’s merely the law of an economy where everything’s paid for.

To condemn violence, rape, and bombings and to call instead for a legalism that kills, imprisons, rapes, and tortures is to take part in the inhumanity of a market called “justice”, it is to resign yourself, with a secret urge for revenge, to behaving like a judge and like a criminal.

No matter how constrained I feel by working to survive, and, in the same instant, to react violently to defend myself — since I won’t tolerate threats of any kind — no one will make me give in to believing in the “virtue” of work nor the “justice” of “taking an eye for an eye”. A civilization that has the pretension of creating a new humanity of its own negates itself unless it puts all its energies into breaking the cycles of crime and punishment, and thus doing away with justice.

Although I’ve been drawn at certain hours of the day and night into a game whose rules belong to the mercantile universe, I never made a choice to enter willingly into it, and so I don’t really care if I’ve won or lost, and all that will suit me is to get out of it. He who, gathering the randomness of pleasures, avoids the beaten paths of self-punishment and its exorcisms, mocks the concepts of judging and being judged.

Guilt Feeds Violence

Let there be no more culpability, but only errors, since there is no error that does not contain its correction within itself. Even that most irreparable of criminal acts, the assassination, has more of a chance to efface morality if it takes on an attitude that favors life, starting with that of the murderer, than it does if it perpetuates the poisonous shadow of punishment, redemption, atonement.

Put as much energy into pushing away guilt feelings as you do into maintaining them, and you will much more surely turn away the violence of death, whether it is brutal or underhanded, than you would by repressing them. And that violence is nothing but the inversion of the will to live; it does not participate in human nature, but in its denaturation; it does not enter into the creation of man by man but into the system of generalized exploitation which imposes the supremacy of work over orgastic enjoyment.

Abolish the Prisons

The disgusting reign of prisons will never be stopped until everyone learns how to stop imprisoning themselves in behavior economized by the reflexes of profit and exchange.

The less animalness is trapped within the character-armor, becoming enraged by perpetual frustrations, the more it will open the doors of enjoyment as well as of progressive refinements, and the more the horror of enclosing the condemned in cells will become obvious to everyone, since they are in the prisons not for their misdeeds but because they have exorcized the demons that up until then had imprisoned the honest people in them.

For all the progress that humanism calls for in its vows, they are quite reasonably shaken by all this. If the prisons were to disappear right now, when enjoyment has not had its rights restored, they would merely be making way for aerated psychiatric institutions, as is desired by the therapists, who anesthetize the violence of frustrations in those condemned to everyday slavery.

Isn’t it time yet by now that we put enough of ourselves into loving ourselves that we want nothing more than great happiness at the bottom of our hearts and attach ourselves to others for the echo of our happiness in them, and love them for the beauty of the love they give us?

I refuse to be surrounded by roles, functions, character; I hate to be fixed and trapped in what isn’t me. What real, authentic encounter could occur in a place where the obligation to appear as representation keeps me from ever really being me?

All that matters to me is the presence of living people, in which all the freedoms that can’t be shut down by judgment converge.

Untie the Ties

Questions without response are most often knots that only time can untie, because, tangled in the twists and turns of an upside-down world, they come undone on their own the moment Life readjusts.

Since the unsolvable obeys a logic which has no final solution except death, there is in every question an unheard resonance that carries emotions of joy and happiness. In this sense, nothing is less futile than the tenderness of a glance, the taste of a morning coffee, a Boccherini trio, a Mozart aria, a ray of sunlight between palm fronds, the bloom-like opening of a lover’s hand, the smell of love which is more eloquent than the words of love. It is from there that so many desires, discouraged by circumstances hostile to their accomplishment, regain force; it is from there that they are liberated from the contortions of bitterness and of the dissatisfaction that comes of all the questions that every day poses when one suffers from an inextricable self-doubt, demanding to no longer be renounced, demanding to desire endlessly.

Pleasure smashes linear time, wherein life flows according to the rhythms of the economy, according to the chain of exchanges, along the lines of installment payments on an imminent justice. What is done out of constraint and necessity can only be understood, and, inseparably, transformed, by means of the freeness of enjoyments.

Pleasure is at the source of an inexhaustible self-confidence, which is the opposite of faith in Gods and Causes, that is, faith in the economy running the world. One satisfied desire engenders ten more, each with the promise of a singular happiness.

That’s why happy people find within themselves no reason to wish death or punishment on anyone.

Against Respect Being Owed to Life

Do you want to perpetuate contempt for life? Then, impose “respecting” it! The old imperative, “thou shalt not kill” — is this not the cornerstone on all the butcher’s shops?

Every time adults set themselves up as authoritarian guides for children, they communicate to them nothing but their incomprehension. I need see nothing more to prove this besides the cruelty which has been for such a long time imputed to children as though it were “human nature” and which has never been anything but the product of education.

To slander 2 year old children by calling their behavior sadistic when they crush an ant colony willingly shows numerous aberrations in the dominant thought-process, which is so separated from the living that it sees the mark of death precisely where life is groping to make its uncertain way.

By crushing the beasts that come and go, the little ones are in fact being initiated into the mysteries of movement and immobility. Underneath their feet, the moving trails stop, and are scattered into a series of little specks. The same ludic approach to learning incites the child to seize the cat by its tail, to tear the leaves off a plant. So then how does that rhyme with the concert of reprimands, reproaches, and saddened indignation? It has the effect of changing an experience which only lacked that discretion in the face of malaise, wherein guilt slides away along with the secret come-ons of the forbidden.

The pleasure of innocent discoveries petrifies the child suddenly beneath the cold stare of medusa-like reprobation. And so we see, that one ceases to love at the moment that new notions have need of love in order to be interpreted and to enter into a vaster knowledge. Sudden repression sets off a reflex of transgression; pleasure gets stuck in anguish, a stone is added to the neurotic citadel of the years to come when enjoyments will be imprisoned and tortured, destroyed and satisfied negatively. Ordinary sadism begins there.

The commodity logic of competition always implies the intelligence of that which, placing itself in opposition to this well-established idiocy, is nothing, in its modern state, but the same idiocy a contrario. That the authoritarian and repressive attitude of adults gives rise to duplicitous and unpredictable children has, in that way, brought back into style for a time the “laissez-faire” theory popularized successfully by american pediatrics. As if to give the child the freedom to let off steam by tormenting animals didn’t implicate that the child would undergo at the same time the effect of parental guilt and frustration. It’s true that a frank and necessary cruelty served quite well the designs of a generation that occupied itself with experimenting with the effect of napalm on the movement of vietnamese ants. Every time “nature” is used as an excuse to justify a social behavior, it is curious that plants and animals are always used to illustrate appropriation, the law of the strongest, competitive confrontation, and everything else that might be useful to the economy. If the experience of beings and things carries a risk of cruelty, isn’t it proper that a human education would deal with that? To demonstrate the existence of universal gravitation, it is not necessary to throw a man out the window from the fifth story; nor is it necessary to have recourse to killing things to explain movement and immobility. Like going hunting with your camera instead of your gun does away with killing and helps you learn the pleasure of wandering through the woods, to lay in wait, and to seize an instant of life, in the same way a consciousness of being alive propagates itself little by little and weaves a subtle network between self-enjoyment and so many other things — plants, crystals, animals, the shape and lines of landscapes, the forms of clouds, pieces made by people’s creative genius.

A child who throws his glass of milk on the ground is testing the limits of the material the cup is made out of, and at the same time he is testing the guarantee of affection. The brutal reprobation constantly given to the child about the fragility of the glass does not open the doors of knowing and enjoyment, but rather it opens the doors of anguish and a morbid desire to destroy to attract attention.

On the other hand, the feeling, which to the child is easily perceptible, that it was an error and not a fault, that it gets from reassuring sympathy, makes for a comprehension which is eminently human: the quality of the glass, its form, its light, the secret life revives the pleasure of concretely helping itself to everything, which concretizes a presence which is in fact that of the ubiquity of the living, of Life; a ubiquity long ago usurped by the gods, by heaven, by spirit, by intellect.