The Alchemy of the “I”

The alchemy of the self is the conscious creation of individual destiny.

The rationality inherent in mercantile practice has rejected traditional alchemy, in the long night when it burned the lamps of a secret science. However, its parallel language and its operations are most often narrowed to transpose the economic process in a field of coherence where the salt of the earth engenders the celestial gold and spirit. When they weren’t looking to enrich themselves, the alchemists of the past aspired to the power that commands beings and things (except for the most discreet among them, who doubtless landed on the shores of a totally different reality).

Denatured Alchemy

In a particularly vulgar sense, alchemy is taking place all the time these days. The transmutation of lead into gold and of libidinal energy into intellectuality is now effectuated by means of a hygienic treatment of trash and excrement which the operation called “marketing” purifies, appropriates for consumption, and transforms into stock quotes. All that’s left of the Great Work is a promotional product with a high exchange value and no quality at all.

Such a derisory fate would never do justice to the oeuvre of doctor Faust, who performed a dissociation of mind and body, which the duality of manual and intellectual labor imposes on everyone today. What is denied by all that is the natural alchemy of the body, spontaneously and originally founded on the conception of the infant in the maternal womb and to which amorous ardor gives birth in the world for that universal transmutation which is the realization of what is truly human.

A still honored prejudice says that everyone pulls themselves from the comet of plans for success and happiness which the gods of doom crush malignantly. We know that such a doom doesn’t exist outside an order of things secularly imposes on the earth and on people; an order of things which is now so outdated and so fragile that it can’t maintain itself anymore without a resigned obedience, without the inertia of mechanically acquired morals and behaviors.

The rupture between what the living decides, towards and against everything, and the economy, which makes decisions for the living, has definitively lost the mystery with which it perpetuated itself, hidden beneath an eternal damnation. The alchemy of creation and of self-enjoyment has been trapped and flipped upside down by a civilization where work governs pleasures. Every time they give birth to producers, human beings prohibit themselves to be born unto themselves.

Such is the banality of an involute alchemy: our own living substance is transformed into dead matter, at the cost — full of irony — of greater efforts.

The Treatment of the Negative

The treatment of the negative is the daily dissolution of the corpse in the cauldron of enjoyments.

The expression “To stew in your own juices”, which goes so well with the balance sheet and critical examination of a world preprogrammed to perish, translates exactly the negative finality of an existence sickened by money, caught in the trap of a dead infancy, surrounded by its own rotting desires.

Like in all alchemy, what is within is also without. A bilious humor embitters the tincture, while the noxious smoke stifles the irisation of the forests; cancer seizes both the tree and the logger. Bitterness and aggressiveness have stunk up gestures and thoughts so much that nature sometimes responds, with a merciless fury, to its organized pillage, as if it were shaking off, with jolts of ecological catastrophe, some vermin stupid enough to prefer to life the profits that pollute it. Seen from the perspective of the irremediably dominant economy, the individual, society, and the earth, all secrete unanimously a spirit of death. In this case, the negative phase does not take on the meaning it does in traditional alchemy, of a fermentation from whence arises the positivity of the philosopher’s stone. These are only sticky states, bringing bad luck everywhere, and fabricating an identical unhappiness at the heart of the planet and of humanity.

One can most often plainly see that those who complacently call themselves “mortals” nourish certain intentions for themselves in the positions they take in their reveries, their predictions, and their prophecies. How many of these scenarios constantly elaborating themselves in the mind will get worse and worse, how many will principally end up getting dealt the cards of failure and disillusionment? And if it so happens that a sudden overflowing of optimism causes them to see a possibly happy outcome for an undertaking, it is only with a certain reserve, an intimate reticence. It is rare that the heart weighs enough to counterbalance the misfortune which is fatally calculated into everyone.

To believe in omens, whether good or bad, as signs of some fate or another — isn’t this merely to have already abdicated in the face of the uncontrollable, and to hit the road towards total decline? After all, it’s quite true that to have so many disenchantments at your disposal doesn’t help to make events go your way.

We Who Desire Endlessly

Is there anything presumptuous about thinking that an energy that works to destroy both me and the world can in some way spin around and take the direction of the life we must create, with the same firmness and more agreeably? I feel that when I dream intensely about a happiness that would really fill me out, it mixes in with my desires a kind of ‘go by yourself’ that gives a certain favor to that happiness, a kind of “es muss sein”[7] torn from the gods and given over to the universal attraction of the living, a fate where the whirlwind of pleasures and displeasures enters into the effervescence of life and never into the fatality of dead enjoyments. There’s no room there for conceit, for success, for failure, or for competition.

However, nothing is more awkward than the return to the self and on the self in which this upside down world flips again. I know too much how the taste for living is ordered to weaken and abdicate for me to neglect the importance that must be given in the years to come to the education of children according to the pleasure-principle.

The attention given to enjoyments at every instant is a surer way to nourish the will to live than all the objurgations of intellectuality are. To only perceive, in given circumstances, the agreements that can be gathered therein installs a priority where the omnipresence of work disappears, where the necessity of which is reduced to an ensemble of mechanical gestures accomplished without ever putting any passion into things. If the heart is elsewhere, not in losing heart, there’s something to save and save yourselves with, the heart of life: the exercise of pleasure wherein you commit yourself to desiring endlessly, whatever obstacles and reversals might present themselves to oppose you.

The Real Test Will Come when It’s Hatching-Time for the Enjoyments

The refinement of desires requires tests that don’t give any hint, in a courteous vein, of the prowess of the knight when he loves his lady. Still, we must strip the tests of the economic sense given them by the knightly spirit. Passionate truth needs no proof of bravery or of particular merits; above all it excludes renunciation, sacrifice, and that repudiation of the self by means of which the squires come to power, to a healthy soul, to that spiritual purity that the lover pays for with favors.

So much is patience odious in resignation and in the taste for suffering, so much does it discover its positive nature in the quest for enjoyments and for refined desires. The obstacles to this are are like rocks are to saxifrages; something that must be broken, something that must be gotten around, something to come together around, something to digest; something that becomes an element of one’s passions. Patience settles the violence of desires, it refines it and reinforces it in the feeling of an irresistible progression. One learns at every instant that to avoid changing desires represses desires in a suspended animation.

The test is the inevitable dragon of the negative, from the depths of the self, which the absence of every fear, or the ignoring of fears, mollifies and makes into an appreciable companion. Thus the being of desires restores to the reality of life the old imagery of the knight wandering alone between death and the devil.

The Refinement of Impulses, Basis of a New Society

Only the thread of pleasures which weaves the everyday can catch the end of the negative like the spider catches the fly.

It’s not a question of renouncing the comforts and pleasures that the well-being market puts at the disposition of whoever resigns themselves to paying for them, and for undergoing the necessary discomfort of sacrificing themselves in order to satisfy themselves. It’s rather a question of never renouncing, and transcending the dissatisfaction of consumable pleasure by creating the conditions for a natural freeness.

Here, Fourier’s teachings are of exemplary value. The economic reality is his point of departure. He doesn’t condemn the denatured nature of the passions, he starts from their degraded state to end up with the sole dynamic of pleasure in the emancipation of trapped enjoyments. He leaves from the economy, and leads it not to its destruction but to its dissolution.

Rallied to the support of the phalanx system, the rich preserved their money, their privileges, and their rank in it. They abandoned none of their social prerogatives, but the tables, the company, and the passions of the poor didn’t abandon their delicateness nor their voluptuousness. The poor, moreover, showed themselves more natural, less stiff, less formal in their style. Little by little, the distinctions disappear, the hierarchies are abolished. Once it’s sovereign, the quest for passionate harmony bases itself on the dialectic of accords and discords, affections and disaffections, sympathies and antipathies, radically new social relationships.

Fourier conceived the project of dissolving functions and roles into the predilection of enjoyments. His cause was only inconvenienced by the fact that it was born during a time when the great leap forward of the economy was nourishing the illusion of the imminence of everyone’s happiness. Capitalist development let us start to make out, like daybreak on the infernal night of production, a society of well being where technological progress will take care of our needs and inaugurate paradise on earth.

The hope for a commodity empire where the producers would assume the right to consume the fruits of his labor thundered with a prophecy which was more in accord with social struggles and with the economy than was the phalansteries’ clarion-call gathering together of the passions with a hint of a certain authoritarianism and with a passion that was altogether quite mechanical.

It has become necessary for us to realize in the second half of the 20^th century the utopia of well-being imagined by the promethean thinkers of the first capitalist boom, in order that people realize that the paradise of consumption is only an air-conditioned hospice, sweating with boredom, anguish, and dissatisfaction.

The movement of May 1968 wasn’t just the countersigning of the bankruptcy of the economy and of happiness on credit, it mostly brought to consciousness that the vital minimum — the right for everyone to be able to feed themselves, to express themselves, to move, to communicate, to create, to love — did not constitute the final goal for humanity but its point of departure, that it was merely the raw material for a transcendence without which the only society there is, is an inhuman society.

The transmutation of the I contains the transmutation of the world.

Each individual is the whole of the world, with its disasters, prosperity, massacres, births, wars and peaceful havens, seasons, climate, intemperateness, cyclones, earthquakes, and humid, dry, cold, sultry, and temperate zones.

Is there any more important wisdom than the wisdom one finds in the will to make use of oneself by making use of circumstances in one’s own favor? To feel yourself to be in agreement with everything living permits you most surely to learn how to hijack and divert the effects of death. It sallies forth from the negative, as though from a storm, so well appropriated by the human genius that a mere lightning rod takes away its danger; its model has inspired the electric arc, and its energy will one day enter into the circuits of natural freeness.

The magma of an everywhere-present life discovers itself and recreates itself beyond the fragmentation of economic categories, which took their profits from it. Foolishly imputed to the gods and to God, the ubiquity of the living is reborn in the new symbiosis in which the individual founds the unity of human nature and terrestrial nature on enjoyment. Sliding from the heavens to the earth, the center of the universe has followed the movement of the celestial economy to the terrestrial economy; if it is now situating itself at the heart of individuals aiming at emancipation, then that’s because a mutation is taking place, which will assure the growing sovereignty of enjoyment over economy, creation over work, affection over profit, the will to live over the will to power, a psychosomatic unity over the separated body, living nature over exploited nature, freeness over exchange.

For the first time in history, the well-being of nature rests on the individual will to live: each person’s enjoyment of life determines the creation of the world, in the context of an incessant quest, as the totality of enjoyments to be created. The alchemy of the “I” is nothing more than the stubborn urge to desire endlessly, the game of satisfaction and of the insatiable, nullifying the old damnation of sacrifice and renunciation.

Many of the pleasures to which I aspire will not be realized; nonetheless, I persist in wanting them without respite, and I draw from the satisfaction of some of them the force that nourishes the others. I feel that — right here, and without the delay that makes for bitter destinies — a desirable existence is slowly assuming the power to supplant this economized existence.

It doesn’t matter much to me if the future proves me right or wrong. I will have lived, and based my lifeline not on what destroys it, but on a heart-line which, from gathered pleasures to sown pleasures, sketches out for me a luxurious landscape — the only one in which I feel myself to at last be truly present.

Raoul Vaneigem
16^th October 1989

[1] useful even as a corpse – tr.

[2] “affection” in french could be translated as affliction as well as affection/emotion — tr.

[3] changer son fusil d’épaule is the expression used here, which means to “change your mind”; I have literally translated the french here to retain the allusion — tr.

[4] here now and forever — tr.

[5] no more than flowers — tr.

[6] amor fati: wanting nothing altered for all eternity; fatum amoris: finding the necessary in the desirable. — tr.

[7] “it must be” — tr.