“Dancing with a Ball and Chain”
“All that is important is that each group or individual should construct the plane of immanence on which they lead their life and carry on their business. Without these conditions you obviously do lack something, but you lack precisely the conditions that make a desire possible. Organizations of forms – formations of subjects – incapacitate desire: they subject it to law and introduce lack into it. If you tie someone up and say to him, ‘express yourself, friend,’ the most that he will be able to say is that he doesn’t want to be tied up. The only spontaneity in desire is doubtless of that kind: to not want to be oppressed, exploited, enslaved, or subjugated. But no desire has ever been created with non-wishes.” Dialogues II: 96.
Dialogues II (1977/1987), Deleuze’s philosophical/conversational exchanges with Claire Parnet, assembles a cross section of flows, fluxes, movements, and speeds that mirror those of A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987), which was published three years later. Like topological excavators, Deleuze and Parnet map a terrain of concepts, flows, and fluxes through Deleuzian topics like desire, utterances, and assemblages, while applying them to Anglo-American literature, psychoanalysis, and the State and revolutionaries. The book functions as a how-to manual, clearly showing the possibilities and proper demands contained in Deleuze’s methodology.
It is the book that I’ve been reading exclusively for two months, and I will continue to do so until it is complete. Apart from Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962/1983), it is the most important of Deleuze’s books that I’ve perused. The deep philosophy books are magisterial, but one must adopt ascetic practices to get the most from them. This one, like the Nietzsche book – and Nietzsche’s own books – is closer to a bomb-making guide. “Use this sentence to destroy assumption A, that one to render laughable 1/8th of the bourgeois form of life, etc.” It is becoming my world, allowing me to destroy any lingering unexamined modern assumptions that a few years in the New Right did not uproot.
Silence usually means production, and this period sub silentio is no exception. Aside from the upcoming publications mentioned below, I am working on an essay intended for only the most radical men and women of the revolutionary Right. I will submit it to either Counter-Currents or Attack the System later this month. It is a scathing continuation of my series of papers on Deleuze and Guattari, addressing the necessary distance between revolutionaries, their derelict spaces, and the bourgeois form of life. Part of it might look something like this:
“Of course, anyone who’s read my recent work knows that the North American New Right (NANR) has a revolution problem. While the core of the phenomenon is bourgeois – seeking a nationalist movement-based solution to contemporary America – there is a fringe on its farthest distant edge – an edge that overlooks an icy precipice; accessed only by continual self-overcoming, by thought and action freed of any Logocentric restraints, by the sweaty muscular precision that comes with properly using one’s inheritance – that no one desiring to merely rehabilitate the bourgeois form of life can reach. From that precipice, the utterly bourgeois notions of State, movement, and mass appeal become evidence that bourgeois constitutions are still at work, and give off the hint of a desire to ensure that any movement that is possible amongst the radical Right is squashed.”
The essay will wonder aloud at the implications of a Right that avoids the possible at any cost, choosing instead to laud “the real” and its comforting embrace; asking if bourgeois solutions to modernity are self-crippling for the sake of the enemy still within us – like “dancing with a ball and chain, like a butterfly around a flame,” unable to justify ones existence in any terms but those given us by our captors.
Ultimately, instincts and physiological constitutions provide us with the Right that we deserve.
Multiculturalism and Nietzschean Paganism
I was honored to write the Foreword for Kerry Bolton’s next book Modern Babel: Multiculturalism, Globalization, and the New World Order. My little essay, “The New True Enemy,” is a super-fun read. It’s neither manifesto nor polemic, but instead a simple call to arms – another call to become-revolutionary, or as a Guattari put it, to become homo insurrectus. As a writer, I couldn’t be happier to have my name connected with Dr. Bolton’s book. Even though he posits racial and bio-genetic reasons for resisting global capitalism, he nonetheless provides the revolutionary Right with a rented Ryder truck full of affective energy to be directed against capitalism.
As I was writing that essay, I was also revising my Homeric Gods review essay for publication in the Traditionalist journal The Initiate. I suppose at this point being associated with Traditionalism is no less awkward than being part of the North American New Right, and no less problematic. As the revised essay explains, replacing the One True God with Several True Gods is not paganism, but a mummification of the myriad pre-Christian forms of life and a lowbrow subcultural form of bourgeois comfort seeking. Instead I promote a Nietzschean paganism that is less concerned with Logos than with affect and ethics.
Revolutionary Becoming in the Loveliest of Places – Dust to Dust
Being in the company of one of my raptorous men and his lovely wife always awakens in me a desire to listen to The Civil Wars. That I saw said raptor this week was fortunate, since The Civil Wars released their latest LP on 06 Aug. In deep listening this morning I discovered some lyrics that contain something of the distance that separates me from my contemporaries – those who think that their current physiological and conceptual states are adequate enough to buttress the creation of a new form of life; those who believe that science and State-sponsored thought will free them from liberalism; those who would build walls at this moment, instead of at the conclusion of war.
Let me in the walls
You’ve built around
We can light a match
And burn them down
Let me hold your hand
And dance around
Around the flames
In front of us
“The revolution will [indeed] be a festival.”
