Of Course You Know, This Means War!

In everything one must begin with principles. The correct course of action follows.

When a civilization is ruined, its bankruptcy must be declared. There’s no point cleaning house when the house is falling apart.

Goals aren’t lacking; nihilism is nothing. It’s not a question of means; powerlessness is no excuse. The value of the means has to do with the ends.

Everything that is, is good. The world of the Qlippoth, the Spectacle, is all entirely evil. Evil isn’t a substance; if it were it would be good. The mystery of the effectiveness of evil comes down to the fact that evil doesn’t exist; it’s just an active nothingness.

What’s evil is not distinguishing evil from good. Indistinction is its kingdom, indifference is its power. Men do not love evil, they love the good that’s within it.

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

History isn’t over; it needs our consent first.

As long as there’s one single free man, that’s enough to prove that freedom isn’t dead.

The question is never how to “live with one’s times,” but for or against them. That’s final.

Whatever boasts of moving forward in time only shows that it isn’t superior to time.

Newness is just an excuse for mediocrity. Up to now, progress has only meant a certain growing insignificance. The essential has remained in its infancy. Men had morals, but they still haven’t thought them through. It’s a neglect they don’t have the means to correct anymore. History starts here.

The catastrophes of history prove nothing against the good. It’s not revolutionary movements that have suspended the “normal course of things.” Reverse that. That ordinary course of things is the suspension of the good. In their successive occurrence, revolutionary movements comprise the tradition of the good; up to now, that’s been the tradition of the vanquished. It’s ours too.

All past history comes down to this: a great city has been besieged by little kings. Indelibly, the rest remains.

Meaning comes absolutely before time.

There’s a clock that never chimes. All true royalty is hers.

We must act as if we were no one’s children. Men are not given to know their true filiation. It is the constellation of history that they manage to steel themselves with. It’s good to have a pantheon. Not all pantheons are found at the end of Soufflot street.[1]

Commonplaces are the most beautiful things in the world. You can say that again. Truth has always said the same thing in a thousand different ways. When the time comes, commonplaces have the power to rock worlds. The universe was born from a common place after all.

This world hasn’t been adequately described because it hasn’t been adequately contested, and vice-versa. We aren’t seeking the knowledge that takes account of the state of the facts, but the knowledge that creates them. Critique must fear neither the weight of foundations, nor the grace of consequences. Our era is furiously metaphysical, and it works incessantly to make that forgotten.

Some people think that truth doesn’t exist. And truth punishes them for it. They don’t unveil the truth, even as the truth unveils itself to them. They do not bury it, even as it buries them.

We don’t have to wail and cry; we’ll give to no one the charity of a tailor-made revolt. You’ll have to start all over yourselves. This world needs truth, not consolation.

Domination has to be criticized because servitude dominates. The fact that there are “happy” slaves doesn’t justify slavery.

They were born. They want to live. And they pursue their deathly destiny. They even want to rest, and they leave behind sons so that other dead men and other deathly destinies can be born.

This is the time of larvae; they even write little books that chronicle their breeding. As long as there have been men, and men have read Marx, we’ve known what the commodity is, but we’ve always ended up practically taking sides with it. Some people who once made it their profession to criticize it even say that it’s a second nature, more beautiful and legitimate than the first, and that we ought to fold to its authority. It’s metastasized to the far reaches of the world; it’s useful to remember that it doesn’t take long before a totally cancer-ridden organism collapses.

The old choices and disputes are bloodless. We’re imposing new ones.

Reject both sides. Only love the remainder. Only the remainder will be saved.

Men are responsible for a world they didn’t create. That’s no mystical idea, it’s a given. And the satisfied are shocked by it.

Hence the war.

The enemy lacks the intelligence of words; the enemy tramples upon them. And words yearn to be avenged.

Happiness has never been a synonym for peace. It is necessary to make happiness a plan of attack.

Sensibility has for only too long been a passive disposition towards suffering; it must itself become a means for doing battle. It’s an art of turning suffering back into strength.

Freedom has no truck with patience; it is the practice of history in acts. Conversely, “liberations” are but the opium of bad slaves. Critique is borne of freedom and gives birth to it.

Men are far more certain to get free by escaping than they are to attain to happiness by having it handed to them.

Pursue freedom; the rest will come naturally. Whoever tries to stay safe will just come to ruin.

Just like anything else whose existence needs prior proof, according to our times, life has very little value.

An ancient order lives on here, in appearances. In reality it’s only there anymore so all its perversions can be followed through on.

People say that there’s no danger at all because there’s no riot going on; people say that since there’s no material disorder on society’s surface that revolution is a far-off thing. The forces of annihilation are just traveling down a completely different road from the one that people expected it to.

Know well young imbeciles, little realist boors, there are many more things under the sun and in the heavens than your inconsequential little solipsism could imagine.

This society operates like a constant appeal to mental restriction. Its best elements are foreign to it. They rebel against it. This world revolves around its fringes; its decomposition infuriates it. Everything that is still alive lives against this society.

Abandon ship — not because it’s sinking, but in order to sink it.

Those who today fail to understand already expended all their strength yesterday trying not to understand. In his inner conscience, man is aware of the state of the world.

Everything’s getting radicalized — both stupidity and intelligence.

Tiqqun exposes the cracks in the world of homogeneity. The element of time is reabsorbed into the element of meaning. Forms come to life; figures become incarnate. The world is.

Each new mode of being ruins the mode of being preceding it and it’s only then, on the ruins of the old, that the new can begin. And this coming time of great tumult is the “labor pains” of that birth. IT appears that the old mode of being in the world will be destroyed; that will change various different things.

Once there was a society that tried by innumerable and endlessly repeated means to annihilate the most lively of its children. Those children survived. They want the death of this society. They are free of hatred.

This is an undeclared war. We aren’t declaring war; we’re just revealing it.

There are two camps; their conflict is over the nature of the war. The party of confusion says there’s only one camp – it’s waging a military peace. The Imaginary Party knows that conflict is the mother of all things. It lives scattered and exiled. Outside of the war it is nothing. Its war is an exodus, where forces constitute themselves and weapons are discovered.

Leave behind to this passing century its battles between ghosts. We’re not fighting against ectoplasms here; we’re pushing them away to make the target clear.

In a world of lies, the lie cannot be vanquished by its opposite, but only by a world of truth.

Complacence engenders hatred and resentment; truth gathers brothers together.

“We” means us and our brothers.

Intelligence must become a collective affair.

And the rest is silence.

[1] Street of the French pantheon.