Herewith a brilliant, provocative, obstreperous essay outlining ten reasons why we should burn books. Yes, yes, this seems vaguely counter-intuitive, Numéro Cinq being a literary magazine and all. But two things need to be said at the outset. First, book burning and books, together, have always been the signal marks of an emerging modernity. They co-exist as sign and substance of the new. This is why, of course, there is a book burning in Don Quixote; Cervantes had his finger on the pulse. In my book The Enamoured Knight, I make a side argument that, in fact, book burning is one of a “basket” of themes that supply the discourse of the novel as a form. And, second, inversion is perhaps the most elegant of rhetorical devices; instead of arguing (tediously and correctly) for the right, you take the opposite view and find occasions for wit, comedy, and trenchant critical thought. In this case, our author, Noah Gataveckas, uses inversion, his own wide reading, and a radical logic born of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to mine the contemporary chaos of our late literate age and say very smart and inflammatory things (which is the point, right?).

Noah was born in Oakville, Ontario, in 1985, and educated at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. After moving to Toronto to work as a DJ in the entertainment district, he rediscovered his love of reading and writing. He is the author of poetry (“Silence”, “The King of the River”), journalism (“Hijacked: The Posthumous Reinscription of a Socialist in Canadian Consciousness”, “Digital Theft in a Digital World”), polemic (“Why Occupy? An Approach to Finance Capital”), theatre (Five Star), and a book-in-progress entitled Symposium: A Philosophical Mash-up. He lives and works in Toronto.

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Why do we burn books? or,

The burning question of our movement

By Noah R. Gataveckas

Prologue

The “we” in question refers specifically to the Angry Young Readers Anonymous (AYRA) book club. You know who you are; you know what’s at stake. In order to commemorate our one-year anniversary of successful self-pedagogy, we have dared to consider the inconsiderate: a quaint little book burning, with drinks and snacks being served around 8. This has – understandably – unnerved some of us. After all, Hitler. Enough said. So, to help us understand why we are doing this, I have prepared a list of ten possible reasons why one might justifiably “commit it then to the flames”, as David Hume once put it.[1] Be aware that they are inconsistent: that is, at least one reason presumes some form of spirituality (3), while others are specifically atheistic (4 and 7), and so on. We don’t need to have the same reasons; de gustibus non est disputandum. This is just a compendium of some of the answers that have been given over the years to explain why some books got fired.

(1) Kill what you love.

We bookclubers—we love books. Do we not? Why oh why are we setting (some of) them on fire when they’re what we’re about?

After all, we more than most people should see their value: think of the many excellent texts that we’ve had a chance to read and discuss this past year, and how these readings and conversations have enriched our lives. Starting with Findley’s The Wars, including Horkheimer and Adorno, Žižek, “Junkspace”, Reality Hunger, Chinua Achebe, To the Lighthouse, Baudrillard, Ondaatje, “The World as Phantom and as Matrix”, Serge Guilbaut, “Politics and the English Language”, The Wretched of the Earth, Melville, The Master and Margarita, Chekhov, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, McLuhan, and so many other texts that I can’t even remember, we’ve learned a hell of a lot this year from books.

Furthermore, they have provided us with the grounds for having excellent conversations. We have applied Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, Žižekian, etc., theories to them in our efforts to maximize our minds. Note that theories apply to their texts like bees to blossoms: once pollinated, they bloom with mucho meanings, full of information and insight. This literary entomophily has rewarded us, nudging us ever closer to Enlightenment.

So how can we turn our backs on them now? They’ve been so generous to us in the past. Why oh why burn books?

Kiki Gounaridou writes: “‘To kill what you love’ is the attitude that Alcibiades describes in the Symposium: eros and the wish for annihilation of the object of desire go hand-in-hand”. [2] Indeed, Alcibiades’ dream[3] of the twin dragons can be read in this way. So can Plato’s Symposium: in describing his adoration of Socrates, he claims, “Sometimes, believe me, I think I would be happier if he were dead. And yet I know that if he dies I’ll be even more miserable. I can’t live with him, and I can’t live without him! What can I do about him?”[4]

What indeed? But perhaps we should ask ourselves: why is Alcibiades attracted to Socrates in the first place? Socrates is not an attractive guy.[5] Still, Alcibiades tells us that “if you go behind [his] surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make any sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great—no, of the greatest—importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man”.[6]

In other words, Socrates represents education pure and simple. Like a book, he is not to be judged by his cover. Moreover, it is through education (read: books) that we learn how to be virtuous: that is, good and useful and knowledgeable. But what Socrates has to tell Alcibiades is nonetheless frustrating: “the moment he starts to speak… my very own soul started protesting that my life—my life!—was no better than the most miserable slave’s… He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention. So I refuse to listen to him; I stop my ears and tear myself away from him, for, like the Sirens, he could make me stay by his side till I die”.[7]

Recall that Alcibiades is a child of fortune and would have stood above the large slave population of Athens. For Socrates to suggest that the great Alcibiades was equal to a slave was unthinkable. Furthermore, suggesting that being a good person is more important than the unabashed pursuit of political power was unacceptable. Back then, the political class would have agreed with Thrasymachus’ dictum: “I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger”.[8] But Alcibiades could not tear himself away from Socrates. Why?

As education personified, Socrates occupied the paradoxical position of a truth-teller: on the one hand, he’s “the greatest orator… the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face”[9]—and this is what seduces us along with Alcibiades. On the other hand, he reminds Alcibiades of his imperfections, blemishes, and essential ignorance. Socrates gives him the truth, and the truth is not flattering. In doing so, he returns us to the site of that which we repress: that we do not really know what we are doing. Our cosmic hubris is thorned by the finitude of human knowledge.[10]

“Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame… Yes, he makes me feel ashamed: I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to his old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd”.[11] Are we not like Alcibiades at the end of the day? Do we not find ourselves lapsing into the indulgences of permissive late Capitalism against our will? We know that what Socrates teaches is true, that virtue ought to be sought, even at the highest cost… that we should be good citizens, environmentalists, revolutionaries, etc., and take steps to make a difference in the world around us… but still…

We’re only human, after all. Aside from pursuing the path of virtue all of the time – which means reading and having serious discussion at least some of the time – we still have to find the time to eat, drink, and screw, too. Not to mention labour, suffer, sleep, and so on. We are creatures of procrastination: we desire most to have and not have, to do and not do. In response to the Dane’s eternal query, our cheeky reply is ‘both’.[12] Like Alcibiades, we dare not get too close to the object of our adoration, lest the seductive siren’s song sung silent in bound typeface pull us in definitely to its wordy whirlpool…

Alcibiades loves Socrates but hates him because he jeopardizes his time, his lifespan. Socrates threatens to suck Alcibiades in and transform him. We love books but we hate them because they jeopardize our autonomy. Just as the ultimate horizon for language is that “signifiers signify signifiers”[13], books lead to better, harder books, in greater numbers, on and on, endlessly. They threaten to interrupt us from our life-projects, leading ever down the rabbit hole into the nth circle of hell: the dismal abyss of critical theory, where everything is described as “false” and a threefaced Adorno chews for eternity on the bones of belated Marxists like ourselves. Our books force us to confront the sad truth of reality, and how it’s quite rightly ‘fucked’. And, as Sara Beardsworth observes, if “destabilization is not to lead to the collapse of the subject, a boundary moment must be restored to it”.[14]

So we must take a stand. No more being spat upon by books! No more getting bullied by roughneck essays! We add page to flame in order to establish our independence from the horrible (depressing) truth that threatens to sweep us “away… like a sea wall by ocean breakers”.[15] This way we can maintain our independence from what we read, keep our distance from the instance of the letter, even in its unconscious insistence…

In other words, we kill (burn) what we love (books) because of love, not in spite of it. We mean this in two ways. The first is that in order to keep loving books, we must not allow ourselves to get too close to them, like a junkie chasing the perfect high, who risks overdose with every escalatory hit. To keep our sanity, our subjectivity, and our sense of hygiene, we must keep some books just out of arm’s length. Thus it only makes sense then to put them in a place where we’ll dare not reach, like the hearth of a fire.

The second meaning is that, in burning books, we are committing ourselves to them all the more as objects of desire. We admit that they can exert the kind of control over us that Socrates has over Alcibiades. We also admit that violating the hallowed prohibition ‘Thou shalt not burn books’ is a decadence from which we cannot abstain: such is our libidinal investment in the book as it has been built up over time as a sacred bearer of value.[16] But besides providing the gateway to wisdom, enlightenment, virtue, truth, and knowledge, the book has also subjected us to the trials and tribulations of advanced literacy. We have spent hours upon hours racking our brains, imagining meanings to so much postmodern, poststructural, postnarrative, postsignifying prose, without fit or form, rereading and rerereading, lalalanguage, etc., all the while wondering what-the-hell-is-going-on? To cut a long story short: we have experienced ambivalence about books, insofar as they have brought us both knowledge and nonsense, elation and frustration, joy and pain. Our object-cathexis[17] is inconsistent: castration and jouissance, in alternating rhythms and meters, dancing down the page…

So one can understand why – one night a year, to celebrate – we might want to get together with a few choice texts to toast and roast. To enact a revenge best served barbeque, against that malignant medium that has claimed our innocence and stolen most of our youth. But in an age where ‘innocence’ is alienation and ‘youth’ is a product of the culture industry, we know we shall return to the page tomorrow with sober remorse: ‘Oh, I can’t stay mad at you!’ To be sure, we’ll make amends, but until then, don’t let’s give in to this duty just yet. Tonight let’s transgress, to settle a score for every time we’ve tried to read and were instead fed a mess of blahbhaesque incoherence. Dare ya, da!?

Let our libraries enlighten us tonight only insofar as they ignite!

(2) Psychological self-significance.

But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. After all, we have not yet even discussed the dynamic of our proposed book burning. Who burns what? Which burns why? To answer these questions is already to set ours apart from those of the past, which have given such a bad name to the sport/hobby/lifestyle-activity that, in our postmodern late Capitalist society, book burning presents itself to be.

For example, when Heinrich Heine claimed that “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings”[18], he was addressing the Spanish Inquisition when they carried out a mass extermination of the Qu’ran in parts of Europe through systematic acts of incineration. Suffice it to say that we are not the Spanish Inquisition. This is a simple fact: our worldview does not resemble the primitive (pre-Galileo, pre-Darwin, pre-Marx, pre-Freud) dupedness[19] of the Spanish Inquisition. Neither have we the resources to become the Spanish Inquisition, even if we wanted to. We are not a network of tribunals under the election of the monarchy; not an agency dedicated to the suppression of heresy, witchcraft, blasphemy, sodomy, and – most importantly – censorship. We are but a handful of friends, who are not even lucky enough to get funded by the government: unlike some priests, we have to work for a living. Judging by our relative class positions, to suggest that we are ‘censorial’ is absurd. Is censorship even possible today? If governments have trouble enforcing it (China, for example), how are we – ragtag scruffians who have difficulty in booking time off work – to even pretend that we have the power to censor books in general? Try as we might, we shall never approximate the chaos and violence of the Spanish Inquisition. At least not without securing federal funding first.

But I suppose it could be said: although no one expects (themselves to end up like) the Spanish Inquisition, in following their lead we are slowly sliding down the slippery slope to become them. Today books, tomorrow bodies! As if we had no say in the matter! As if it were a mere matter of mechanical causation! Even if we accept Heine’s (dubious) claim, we should note the three fundamental factors that separate the dynamic of our proposed book burning from those carried out in the past by the Spanish Inquisition (or, for that matter, the Nazis, or the Pentagon’s recent foray into the field of cēnsūra qua ignis[20]: design, scope, and motive. Our book burning is neither systematic nor selective (it consists in burning no book in particular, and falls well short of calling for the burning of all books), not mass (ten of us will likely burn less than fifty books, at best once a year, kind of as an afterthought, like All Saints’ Day), and not motivated (by concerns for ‘lewdness’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘protecting children’, etc.). This last point is unusual: what is our motivation? If not censorship? Could we – is it possible – burn books to signify something besides censorship? That would be fresh. What could we possibly be saying?

This is where we break off into individuals, with our own (idiosyncratic, contingent) reasons for why we are burning our books; let us tell our little anecdotes, our histories with our respective texts, assuming we even have these, and are not just burning books, as it were, for the heat…

I was thinking of burning Ayn Rand, to signify my emancipation from her yolk of lies (imagine: living in Galt’s Gulch, passing pieces of gold back and forth, building engines, under the projection of a mountain, with the rest of the supermen! While the rest of the world falls apart in your absence! What total fantasy!), but I decided the saucy bitch[21] provided too perfect an architectonic of (American) ideology to let her go to flame. She reads as a reminder of Einstein’s true fact: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former”.[22]

Waitaminute. According to Einstein, there is really only one thing that is truly infinite, and it is—human stupidity!? Stupidity is an element of our experience that is, in a way, more infinite than the universe itself! According to – of all people – Einstein! We should dare to take his judgment seriously, as if it were a physical law, like some of his prior smash hits.[23] This would mean never underestimating the possibility that people – ourselves, even – are, in acting, acting out of stupidity.[24]They (we) don’t even realize it. Never doubt the efficiency of the defense mechanisms to keep the ego from recognizing the extent to which one’s actions endanger oneself and others, and tend to foil one’s interests, despite their often assuming this very guise (of protecting one’s self or others, pursuing one’s interests, etc.). We should get into the habit of reminding ourselves that, in all cases, at any point in time, it is indeed possible that, in being, we are being – very – stoopid…

I know this sounds, well, stupid—and it is. In this case, stupidity is elevated to a kind of ontological principle, such that it is the one thing that you can count on to definitely be the case. (As I write, I can know with absolute certainty that someone somewhere is doing something stupid.) This view is also implied by Socrates when he reasons thusly: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”.[25] In other words, wisdom consists in identifying its opposite: since stupidity abounds, one can only approach wisdom through the inverse process of recognizing one’s own capacity to err. The best we can do is to beware, keep it in mind, in an attempt to limit the impact that stupidity will exact upon our lives. The fact that we have to remind ourselves ‘not to be stupid’ should say a lot. It’s almost as if our natural tendency is to bellyflop, and we have to try to not. We need to remind ourselves of what is obvious, which is what we tend to forget. So in the same way that the medieval scholar places a skull upon his bookshelf to act as a memento mori (i.e. a reminder of the ultimate futility of one’s struggles in relations to one’s mortality), I keep a copy of For the New Intellectual on mine, to remind me of Einstein’s punchline and why I – in spite of my pride – will not see myself survive some of the worst of the worst literature of all-time…

But what does one burn, if not Ayn Rand?

In lieu of nourishing the flames with her dense pulp, I shall nominate two texts of my own: a unique, a science fiction short story called ‘Sinah’s Assignment’; and a copy, one of the original self-published editions of Book I of my Symposium: A Philosophical Mash-up. In doing this, I will lose one document forever, in order to see what, if anything, this might feel like; and experience what it’s like to see something upon which I’ve laboured (excessively) go up in flames. Surely it is PC to burn one’s own writing, right? Anyways, either way, those are two of the texts that I will burn for the purposes of self-significance: to see what it would mean, how it would feel.

What book(s) do you wish to burn? What are you reasons? Would you be able to go through with it? How would you react upon burning? What, in the end, could it mean? How might it feel? Would it even?

Consider the possibility that there is only one way to find out.

(3) Your God demands a sacrifice.

The prior section brought up the logic of sacrifice: in stead of Ayn Rand, I burn X (in this case, two of my own books). Why not just abstain altogether? Who are we trying to appease?

God, of course. He spoke to me[26] in a dream, and said: Take your Ayn Rand, your only copy of Atlas Shrugged, which you have made little notes in, and go offer it as a burnt offering, so I can stop you from burning it at the last second by giving you something else in its place.[27]

And I said: okay. You got it, God. But then I figured I would make it easier on everyone by just bringing some other books to begin with. That way I could spare God the trouble of having to provide a sacrifice, keep my books from getting dirty, and so on. Besides, it shows initiative! If God did not provide for himself some other book for the burnt offering, then he wouldn’t exactly be breaking character. The guy is notorious for leaving you hanging!

Oh, I forgot to add that God asked me to burn a copy of the Bible as well. I know, I was surprised, too. But according to Him, it was okay for a multitude of those who had practiced magic thinking to bring their books together and burn them for all to see.[28] He said it was cool. I must admit it was a strange moment.

To break the awkward silence, I asked: why oh why would you want to burn your own book? He remained mute. Only after asking did I realize how dumb I must have sounded. What right do I have to question God about why he wants to burn his own book? I could understand, say, if you had never burnt any books, were opposed to book burning in general, and would thus get pissed off if God decided to torch his own text. In this case, you would have the moral high ground, what with not being a book burner and all. But I was not in such a position. Like God, I had also planned to burn my own book—what right, then, had I to question or criticize the Lord? He was entitled to have His own beliefs, as we all are.

But does this mean that we should follow in His footsteps?[29] What would this entail? In all likelihood, what God wanted to make was a sacrifice of Himself to Himself. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) He wants to see something that is uniquely of His own making, like the Bible – sacrificed – to the testament of His greater glory, and so on. It is because He wrote the Bible (not to mention edited, translated, etc.), He inevitably desires to see it crucifried. It’s a little perverted, I know, but that’s just good ol’ God for you. What a card!

Nonetheless, let’s not deny the old man his fix. Whatever gets Him off should be good enough for us. Only let’s not waste the opportunity: although I hear He can be sort of a ‘hater’ at times[30], I’m sure He wouldn’t mind a little company if we decided to throw a mixer with some of His super best friends. That is: while we’re at it, we might as well ‘worship’ some other deities alongside Him…

Does your God demand a sacrifice? Why not appease Him/Her/It with a thick, juicy book? (Consider sacrificial logic: you give up something that is of value, because of its value, to appease your God. And are not books of the highest value?) Why oh why not burn books? Especially when your God expects it of you?

(4) Better yet—for the purposes of Evil!

Because that would be giving in. According to Slavoj Žižek, “In its most fundamental dimension sacrifice is a ‘gift of reconciliation’ to the Other, destined to appease its desire. Sacrifice conceals the abyss of the Other’s desire, more precisely: it conceals the Other’s lack, inconsistency… Sacrifice is a guarantee that ‘the Other exists’: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of sacrifice”.[31]

In other words, sacrifice presumes the existence of the big Other[32], when the truth of the matter is that “there is no big Other”.[33] In reality, God did not command me to burn the Bible, because, strictly speaking, God isn’t. Worshipping him would require me to act according to the logic of fetishistic disavowal: “I know there is no big Other, but none the less… [I secretly believe in Him]”.[34] And, in following this Lacanian-Žižekian discourse, we are led to condemn the sacrifice on these grounds: that it sustains the illusion of the big Other, when the truth of the matter is that God is less than[35] dead.[36]

Lacan suggests something interesting, though, when he tells us that “the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God. It is the eternal meaning of sacrifice, to which no one can resist…”.[37] I like that: the dark God. Here we are digging back to those gnostic notions reminiscent of Zoroaster[38] and Mani[39], when God – as an omnipotent omniscient – was outright omniambivalent, sometimes even evil. (Like that wily tetragrammaton which wagers with Job’s life[40] and induces Lot to commit incest with his daughters.[41]) There is something infinitely more interesting about this obscene underside of the divine Law than its official incarnation, insofar as the former exposes the inner contradictions of the latter for all to see…

Consider, for example, the problem of Evil.[42] We are told it has “been discussed throughout the ages by philosophers, religious thinkers of both the East and the West”.[43] Isn’t it solved once and for all when we drop the notion of an ‘omnibenevolent’ god, and in its place adopt a disposition to dystheism?[44] This is what Carl Jung does when, in his Septum Sermones ad Mortuos, he eschews the traditional term ‘God’ for the much more badass Abraxas in describing the Ultimate: “That which is spoken by God-the-Sun is life; that which is spoken by the Devil is death; Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word, which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible”.[45] Herman Hesse provides a similar description of Abraxas: “We may conceive of the name as that of a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of godly and devilish elements”.[46] Is this what Lacan meant when he spoke of the dark God?

The other possibility is that he had the figure of Satan in mind, or some other ‘evil’ deity whose occupation it is to correspond diametrically to the will of the ‘good’ god: whenever God says ‘Nay’, Satan’s responsibility is to respond with a ‘Yay!’[47] His job depends on maintaining this minimal opposition. In considering Satan, then, we recognize a figure that is somewhat at the same height as God (albeit appearing on the opposite shoulder), even if it has been predicted that, post-Armageddon, Satan and his minions will be “thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where… they will be tormented day and night forever and ever”.[48] (A vanishing mediator if there ever was one.[49]) Still, without Satan to stand counterpoint to God, we would be unable to make sense of how we get seduced into sin, even on its original occasion.[50] The figure of Satan “thus bears witness to the fact that God Himself needs ‘deviations’ in order to arrive at His full actuality via their vanquishing”.[51]

We can imagine two reasons, then, why one might want to give shout outs to Satan. The first is that he performs the necessary-but-thankless task of reigning as the Prince of Darkness, which is structurally necessary for God to appear as a King of Light. So, in the same way that we might celebrate Administrative Professionals’ Day[52], once a year we should acknowledge the important contribution that Satan makes to God’s operations, both at home and in markets overseas. And what better way to promote the devil than by offering him a raze?

The second reason runs a little different from the first: one should appear as a Satanist in order to emphasize the absurdity of the doctrine that depends on such a vanishing mediator to smooth over its internal contradictions. The idea here is that ironic Satanism is more effective than self-serious atheism at exposing the ridiculosity of religiosity. Instead of falling into the same old impasses, ironic Satanism “moves the underground”[53] of (Christian) religious belief through engaging “its own disavowed underside, its own obscene supplement”[54] (that is, fantasies of diabolical evil, occultism, magic, exorcisms, etc.). From this point of view, we are atheists in Satanist’s clothing—but what better way to ‘short circuit’ the commonly held prejudice that, whatever the identity of (Christian) religion (however many wars fought, children abused, lives ruined, etc.), it cannot be as evil as d’evil?

In burning the Bible, I will be tempted to say, “Hail Satan!” But then I would only be giving the devil his due, when so many other organizations deserve credit for most of the evil within the world. “To evil (in general)!” would thus be more inclusive. But why not, then, pick out one of the best offenders to honour for high achievements in the field of evil? Such that, in burning the Bible and saying “Hail God!”, the address adequates its addressee?

We burn books to indicate evil where credit is due!

(5) The firelight of the idols.

Yet we should heed the warning that, in acting as if we are Satanists, we risk losing ourselves in our own charade. As Kurt Vonnegut puts it, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”.[55] Next thing you know we are listening to Deicide and reading Anton LaVey—quelle cauchemar! So, to avoid such stale hell, we must keep in mind “that traumatic ‘bone in the throat’ that contaminates every ideality of the symbolic, rendering it contingent and inconsistent”.[56] In other words, whether we make our offerings to God or the devil (or any other Other for that matter), we must remember that, in the end, it is all, how you say, a fiction.[57]

Thus it might be better to reach back to Abraxas, whose awefull immanence already undermines the idea of its own agency. This means that since Abraxas is “God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world”[58], the concept is already outside of the domain in which terms like ‘personality’, ‘character’, ‘disposition’, etc., can be applied and still expected to mean anything. Sure, Pistorius may refer to “Him”[59] in Hesse’s bildungsroman, but part of reaching maturity is having the “courage to use your own understanding”.[60] This means coming to grips with this principle of awing immanence in a way that, instead of appealing to Abraxas as its agency and instigator, opts for Spinoza’s approach when he translates “that eternal and infinite being we call God, or in other words, Nature”.[61]

This equation is suggested by Jung when he writes that “Abraxas is the world, its becoming and its passing”[62]; and “Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to it…”[63]; and “had the pleroma[64] a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation”.[65] So it turns out that Abraxas is apparently everything: it, me, them, you, the rest of the world, and so on. But at this point we can’t help but wonder why Abraxas should receive any special recognition over and above the world itself.[66] Especially if we are to take ‘the world’ in Nietzsche’s sense of the term, which neither skimps on the dread nor lapses into anthropocentrism: “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a… sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence… still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my ‘beyond good and evil,’ without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself…”.[67]

Is this not a profile sketch of Abraxas? Albeit robbed of its will, unless that ‘will’ can be described as “will to power—and nothing besides!”[68] Which is to say: Abraxas is not divine law and absolute mind, but dumb power and anonymous force (and nothing besides). Nietzsche’s conception of ‘the world’ thus helps us transition from mysticism to materialism: in reminding us that the world is “beyond good and evil”[69], “Dionysian”[70], and a “circle in itself”[71], Nietzsche returns us to our animal essence.[72] Underneath our speech and shame there survives an eating/shitting/fucking-machine that is neither immortal nor implaceable on Darwin’s tree of life[73], one degree left of pan troglodytes and the rest of the regnum Animalia. Nietzsche reminds us of this, along with the fundamental ambivalence that Nature has towards tending to its menagerie of creations. Remember the dinosaurs: all it takes is one deep impact to wipe out “the beautiful and harmonious diversity of nature”[74] in its entirety. So much for the prospect of ‘stabilizing’ our society through ‘reconciling’ our ‘relationship’ with ‘Mother Nature’.[75]So where does that leave us? After we have rejected those worldviews “which descend from heaven to earth”, as Marx would put it, for one that sets “out from real, active men… on the basis of their life-process”?[76] Here we find ourselves confronted with ourselves in our environment[77], which is to say back where we started.[78] But with one important difference: we no longer harbor any illusions about the (historico-material) truth of our existence. We can now begin to see things for what they really are: namely, material (economic) relations that are mediated by (mostly false) ideologies. And though this truth might seem, well, miserable, it has the possibility – if you let it – to set you free – at the very least – from the mystifying effects (i.e. ‘false consciousness’) induced by ideological state apparatuses[79] operative today in late Capitalist society.

This is no small relief, to be sure, but we want more than private Enlightenment—we want to change the world. Nietzsche tells us that the “strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity; time and time… again they reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in what is new, daring, unattempted… by toppling boundary stones, by violating pieties – but also by means of new religions and moralities!”[80] In other words, we want to make a fire around which to clap our hands and stomp our feet, in order to shake the temple walls down, tear out the decorating, smash the stained-glass windows, etc., in order to make way for the New…

Who is standing in your way? Which giant, by standing on his shoulders, now kneels into your back? Moreover, which ideological interpellation[81] do you absorb against your will? For the time tonight is right for toppling—into the fiery void texts we’re tossing—so why not send those awful idologies[82] packing, and cast them straight to hell!

We burn books for the benefit of future culture!

(6) “There is no theory.”

Or, perhaps, we burn books just because!

Søren Kierkegaard writes: “The fact of the matter is that we must acknowledge that in the last resort there is no theory”.[83] This is similar to Lacan’s “there is no big Other”[84], but slightly different—Kierkegaard’s quip critiques Lacan, insofar as it reminds us that, once again, “there is no big Other”, not even Lacan’s…

We are brought to see that there is no theory—there is only writing. About as much is suggested by Derrida in his essay about Poe, Freud, and Lacan: while the psychoanalysts would like to think that their texts have “a scientific value” that sets them apart from works of mere “literary fiction”[85], Derrida dares to wonder “what happens in the psychoanalytic deciphering of a text when the latter, the deciphered itself, already explicates itself?”[86] This takes the form of Freud and Lacan finding their teachings “already… placed onstage and represented in itself in the explicated text [i.e. the primary, ‘merely illustrative’ examples of psychoanalytic theory (e.g. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hoffman, Andersen, Poe, etc.)]”.[87] That is to say: “Psychoanalysis finds itself/is found… in the text that it deciphers. More than itself”.[88] Which means: we do not read Freud and Lacan to better understand, say, the Oedipus complex; instead, we read Oedipus the King to better grapple with that complex (of dramatic action) that would come to be so-called by Freud and, following him, Lacan.

This reversal of analytic approach opens up the entire domain of literature (and textuality in general[89]) to the possibility of possessing a sort of significance that is correctly called ‘psychoanalytic’, even if this exercise in branding only took place thousands of years after people had already begun to be guided by its (accumulated) body of teachings, which had hitherto hibernated deep within the (margins of the) histoire, of the signifying chain[90], insisting in secretive silence upon man’s conscious activity from a position of near-perfect anonymity…

Which means the following: though it is true that it was “Freud’s discovery and that, owing to this discovery, the veritable center of human beings is no longer at the place ascribed to it by an entire humanist tradition”[91], it is true only insofar as Columbus can be said to have ‘discovered’[92] America (that is, somewhere which had already been discovered (Vikings, etc.), was already inhabited by people, and misidentified as India). Columbus didn’t so much ‘discover’ America as he crashed into it, like a moose on the highway. It was literally an impediment in his way to the East Indies. More than anything, he represents that moment when America from a Western (European) perspective was born; in turn, Freud didn’t so much ‘discover’ the Unconscious as he represents that moment of self-reflexivity that studied and classified it from a (modern, scientific) Western (European) perspective.[93] It had been there all along, in the shadows of our Enlightenment, but it took Freud to make It the focus of his remarkably modern discourse to turn Its study into the subject of a science (along with Lacan, to his credit). But don’t be mistaken: “Planet X”[94] was there for millions of years before astronomer Clyde Tombaugh tracked it down in 1930, allowing for the subsequent pageant which would adopt a child’s morbid suggestion to name it after Pluto, Lord of the Underworld.[95] We can see that our (self-reflexive) knowledge of its whereabouts neither alters nor impedes the fact that it will continue to go on doing the same thing that it has already done now for millions of years, even notwithstanding its recent demotion in celestial station to the planet-rank of dwarf.[96] All the same, the Unconscious is always out there, circling around us in obscure orbit, exacting unknown forces upon our world, altering its tides and measures just enough to make a significant difference in everything, from our speech to our conduct, and thus ultimately our fates as mortals living in this world…[97]

So, once again, we are brought back to the fact that ultimately, there is no theory—there is only writing. To be sure, there is writing about theory, and theory insofar as there is writing, but the world’s wisdom could get flushed down the toilet and we could still develop an “unerring instinct”[98] into the nature of the Unconscious from exposure alone. Let us render unto Caesar those truths which are Caesar’s: “experience is the best master in every thing on which the wit of man is employed”.[99] Insofar as our goal is both to “interpret” as well as “to change” “the world”[100], we should not confine ourselves to booklearning, as if most of its contents could not also be extrapolated from the complex of social relations that constitutes our “material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises”.[101] Instead we insist on experientialism, the study of and intervention into experience as such, with no less ruthless an insistence than the snakebit[102] student who is driven by the “greed for knowledge”[103] to pour over great terrains of literature, in pursuit of Absolute Knowing[104], as an end in itself…

This is nothing more than the revolutionary notion of Total Theory—which, having seen theories (in the form of literature) sacrificed at the stake, is their rebirth as the wholly encompassing Spirit of (self-)critical analysis that pervades all experience as such. It is the redoubled recommitment to the world we live in, as subjects that are capable of (serious, complex, analytic, (self-)critical) thought, to keep thought alive, against the onslaughts of the culture industry and the ideological state apparatuses operative today in (‘postmodern’, ‘permissive’, over-advertised) late Capitalist society. It is a form of total resistance to ideology as such, in all its shapes and forms, in full recognition that we are “always-already interpellated… as subjects” and thus irrevocably “within ideology”.[105] Thus it is defined by a constant process of beating back stupidity, of not allowing oneself to get caught up in the common ignorance, the festival of idiots, on behalf of promoting le cause cérébral, in the belief that this is the (only) way to the truth and its life, or in any case the only real Truth to enlighten the way of our lives going forward into the future…

This is the task of Total Theory—this is the mission. To make thought live in the minds of men, despite their neglect of this basic duty, due de facto to the disinclination in popular use of its pedagogic supplement: the good book. Recognizing that it is your duty to deliver the contents of good books unto the great unthunk whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, and that this activity is (out of all things!) done out of love[106]—this is the calling of the Total Theorist. A theory which envelops every situation, and has even overcome the obstacles imposed by its origins (in books) to find its ultimate expression and realization in the common discourse (i.e. the “language of real life”[107]) of late Capitalist society. A theory which, grown robust and confident in-itself against the palliatives and smokescreens of official ideologies, acts for-itself by taking up unflinching opposition against them, wherever they might begin to mystify us “to the relations of production and to class relations”.[108] Here we find Total Theory as the realization of Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment – “sapere aude!”[109] – once it has been radicalized and recast to resemble Kant’s other imperative, which, more than mere goading, insists categorically on our fidelity to its law.[110] Total Theory thus becomes the new universal maxim: act always on that knowledge which you could at the same time dare to learn/dare to know.[111]

But what has this got to do with libricide? Here we must recall (and rephrase) Aristotle’s famous reproach to his mentor Plato: “it presumably seems better, indeed only right, to destroy even what is close to us if that is the way to preserve truth. And we must especially do this when we are philosophers, <lovers of wisdom>; for though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first”.[112]Here we follow his lead and say: it presumably seems better, indeed only right, to burn books if that is the way to preserve truth. And we must especially do this when we are Total Theorists; for though we love both the truth and our books, honesty requires us to honor the truth (i.e. the fact that “there is no theory”) first and foremost.

And so, in order to make this pledge, we “destroy even what is close to us” as a way of demonstrating our fidelity to Total Theory. It is on behalf of this eternal calling that, for one day a year, we burn books as a reminder that there is no theory—there is only writing—and, consequently, sometimes not even this. Sometimes we’ve naught but a flame around which to gather, an oasis of light in a desert of darkness, to watch hundreds of pages crumple in fits of combustion, illuminating albeit in a way unintended, but nevertheless nothing in the way of what’s spoken, which, as thought turned to praxis, is “worth more than all the German theories of true socialism put together”.[113] Not to mention all the utopian theories of liberal capitalism, all the articles of bourgeois culture, of false consciousness, etc., that constitute our current milieu of so-called ‘culture’, implemented as it is by the ideological state apparatuses and its eponymous industry. Against this we aim to boldly think new thoughts where few have thought before, out loud and in the open, in opposition to all idologies[114] always, wherever they may come from, for now and for ever, and ever, amen.

Now hark! and hear the good word! of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Poe, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Žižek, Marx, etc…

Such is the power of living thought—such is the mission of Total Theory—and such is (one of) the reason(s) why – when asked to reply – we’d rather burn books than live a false life (a lie).

(7) Damn Nazis!

But then someone said, “What about the Nazis?”

Well, what about the Nazis?

Their book burnings, like those of the Spanish Inquisition, were cruel and unimaginable. So much hatred and racism! How could they be so barbaric? You can take my word for it: ours will be much more polite, much more friendly. You don’t even have to have a uniform—you can just show up, like, whenever.

Maybe you could think of us like a multicultural, tolerant NPO that is pro-equality and, as it so happens, pro-book burning. Our motto could be: Your partner in biblioclasm since 2011. Or: Burning books together since 2011. Or: We’ll burn your books so you don’t have to. (I will come in to your house and take the books off your shelves and burn them in the road, for a small service fee.) Something more or less innocuous, like an advertisement for a landscaping company or a junk removal service. In any case, nothing as outlandish as the Führer’s infantile fantasy of National Socialism, with its propagandas of the ‘fatherland’, ‘people (volk)’, ‘racial purity’, etc.[115]

As with the Spanish Inquisition, it should suffice it to say that we are not the Nazis. We detest the comparison: yes, the Nazis burned books, but it doesn’t make the gesture of book burning theirs for the, um, record books. Aside from the Spanish Inquisition, there are many other evil agencies spread out over the course of history that would dispute the claim that Hitler owned the book burn. In fact, we may very well burn books to reclaim its meaning from its Aryan usurpers, which must have been the idea when “Allies [in 1946] adopted a typical Nazi device” to “re-educate Germany” by reducing “to pulp all ‘undemocratic, militaristic, and Nazi’ literature, museum and library material, newspapers, films and war memorials”.[116] The Allies could not allow themselves to be upstaged by the Nazis – nor could they allow for a ‘book burning gap’ to mount between them and the Soviets – so they arranged to ‘liberate’ more that 30,000 titles (including, among others, von Clausewitz) in their bid to regain worldwide book burning supremacy. But, as fate would have it, although the Allies won the battle, they did not win the war (against books). They could not displace the Nazis’ reputation as the preeminent book burners of recent history, which, to this day, stands throughout the West in near unanimous consent.

Which is why we burn books: to contest fascism. We aim to reclaim what’s rightfully ours—as communists.[117] Žižek writes that “parades, mass performances in the stadia, and so on… are… not inherently fascist; they are not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right—it was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ movement, their original creator”.[118] He goes on to comment that “None of the ‘proto-fascist’ elements is per se fascist, what makes them ‘fascist’ is only their specific articulation… In other words, there is no ‘fascism avant la lettre,’ because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements fascism proper”. This is why “ideological liberalism… misses the point” by postulating “a ‘deeper solidarity’ between the two ‘totalitarianisms’”, and also why “the very predicate ‘proto-fascist’ should be abandoned: it is the exemplary case of a pseudo-concept whose function is to block conceptual analysis. When we say that the organized spectacle… is ‘proto-fascist’, we say strictly nothing, we just express a vague association which masks our ignorance”.[119]

Which is why we are unfazed when, inevitably, someone sooner or later asks, “What about the Nazis?” We reply: Yes, how about them! as we go about our burning. But this does not satisfy: “Aren’t you just like them? Aren’t you, in a way, fascists also?” To which we can only reply: Are we? Let us count the ways, aside from book burning, that we resemble the Nazis…

Everyone should be good enough to ask honestly of themselves this basic question, at least once a year: (in what ways) am I a fascist? Dare to take this question seriously, instead of dismissing it out of hand like a good little Eichmann.[120]After all, this only shows that we take the problem of (racist) fascism seriously, as a real threat that may be operating as we speak, underneath our radar, as it were, interweaved into the very background of our ‘multicultural’, ‘tolerant’, ‘postmodern’ Western lifestyles…

What is the machine doing in other lands, while we drowse cynically in front of our televisions? While we sleep sound and snug in suburban subdivisions? What actions do we authorize overseas, under what conditions, using what means, to what end? Have we fallen into that greatest ‘difficulty’[121], the very same that makes it “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”?[122] These are questions that we all must ask at some time or another, to ourselves and each other, and be prepared to learn the answer, whatever it may be.

With that being said, though, we must admit that there is no real resemblance between us and the Nazis, at least not in the way of their most notable features (such as racism, homophobia, murder, causing a World War, the Holocaust, etc.). So long as we hang to our principles of social justice, solidarity, and – most crucial – Total Theory, we won’t risk resembling the worst and most ruthless mass murderers of the 20th century (whether we consider them to be red, white, blue, or green). However, the same cannot be said for everyone living today, such as the bosses of Capital, whose regime of global poverty is doing its best to grind the proletariat down to nothing, extract what it needs, and use the leftovers to produce – everyone’s favourite! – Soylent Green…[123]

(8) Anti-P.C.

Which is not cool to talk about, I know. I should just shut up. End of discussion.

After all, the Propriety Command may be out in full force, patrolling the present text for remarks of potential offense. (The threat: someone somewhere may take offense.) Words whose mere mention maddens the stewards of the state (of standards, of language, grammar, etc.), who have taken it upon themselves to cleanse public discourse of all elements (that is, signifiers) which, under the decree of bourgeois décor, have been deemed, it would seem, unseemly.

P.C. is so positively chic that we can only refer to it by its initials. As if the very notion of politics (that is, “the political as such, of social antagonism”[124]) is too political to be mentioned in any po-lite conversation (in the home, at work, with friends, etc.). It is a form of anti-discourse that conducts itself through its own disavowal and avoidance, along with an ever-growing grocery list of pseudo-swears, which are themselves taken off the table as a priori insensitive.[125] As if it was the words themselves that were the cause of the controversy, and not the attitudes of people thereto. It is on this basis (that is, the displacement of the assignation of blame from (sections of) society onto an assortment of sacrilegious signifiers) that an effect of censorship is enacted, that often sabotages its own desire to address the problem that it aims to resolve. At some times, P.C. is nothing more than the active misrecognition of political conflict as such, in the form of replacing historically ‘charged’ terms (which, despite their supposedly ‘offensive’ nature, can be used to identify and redress power relations, of exploitation, racism, sexism, etc.) with ‘neutral’ terms which, stripped of their historical register, offer little more in the way of speaking to the situation than Ignatieffesque obfuscation.[126]

Aside from this, the P.C. position also does not acknowledge the other “problem with replacing aggressive with ‘politically correct’ expressions: when one replaces ‘short-sighted’ with ‘visually challenged’, one can never be sure that this replacement itself will not generate new effects of patronizing and/or ironic offensiveness, all the more humiliating inasmuch as it is masked benevolence. The mistake of this ‘politically correct’ strategy is that it underestimates the resistance of the language we actually speak to the conscious regulation of its effects, especially effects that involve power relations.”[127]

Two things can be gleaned from this. The first is that benevolence often amounts to ambivalence, or even inconvenience, when it isn’t thought through (and sometimes even when it is). You might be tempted to say to your political representatives and employer: with good deeds like these, who needs evil! In a way, the same holds for language, in that the act precedes its effects, or the intentions that go into the expression of a signifier do not live up to the repercussions of its enunciation.[128] Once given body, a word takes on a life of its own, due to the ultimately “arbitrary nature of the sign[129] [which] is really what protects language from any attempt to modify it”.[130] This leads us to the second point: what is really missing from the P.C. position is any awareness that the “particular language-state is always the product of historical forces, and these forces explain why the sign is unchangeable, i.e. why it resists any arbitrary substitution”.[131] Which means that words survive[132] themselves – in spite of what fashionable (i.e. bourgeois) “good taste”[133] tends to think in its ongoing, guilt-fuelled frenzy of self-bowdlerization[134] – if only to articulate that wholly viable position that stands antithesis to the prohibition commission, comprised as it is of “both the politically correct left and the morally correct right”.[135]

Which leads us to locate in the gutters of “the official discourse”[136] that language which speaks for “the ‘part of no part’, those who, while formally included within the social edifice, have no determinate place within it”.[137] It is an articulate obscenity that can vouch for the vulgus, those who, without much of their own[138], are consigned to self-refer through the vulgar vulgate imposed upon them by “mass culture under monopoly”.[139] The commonest vernacular is (de)composed[140] of this wasteland[141] that nonetheless abounds with a sort of vegetation[142], and to gather flowers (i.e. memes, insults, jokes, commercial catchphrases, etc.) from such a grot[143] calls for more than a chance gardener. Aside from extensive weeding, the site requires significant ideolandscaping (i.e. demystifying practice), before it can be tilled and made ready for its eventual growth and harvest. Suffice it to say that this is where we come in, as a team to work the fields, and get them ready to reap a surplus the likes of which has never been sown…

And so we burn books to show our solidarity with the lumpensprachen against the encroachments and reproaches of P.C. In this way, we burn books for – not against – the freedom of speech. Furthermore, we take offence to that uncommon denominator that demands to stamp our discourse with its seal, to make sure that we conform to an innocuous and apolitical ideal. But our message is unmistakable: why else would we burn books but to break the rules? To stand against the intolerable regime of “tolerance”[144], i.e. of po-lite company, which is bourgeois ideology that competes for cultural hegemony[145] under the guise of so-called ‘common decency’ and, in the subsequent implementation of its decree, lacks any and all degree of proportionality?[146] Not to mention sanity?[147]

The question stands reversed: why not burn books? Especially when archenemy ideologies are published in abundance, postered all over the place, and writ so dreadful easy to read? When they are issued as state propagandas, pushed onto the bookmarkets, to deluge bestsellers lists with mystifying materials in support of Queen[148] and colony?[149] As the very epitome of false consciousness, as exemplified in exemplum under the emblematic notion of national heredity, i.e. the common fantasy of a shared identity and, owing to it, Destiny? And used to reinforce a cultur-ethico-legal fiction about a regular everyday character that, although imaginary, is to blame for much of the world’s unnecessary anxiety[150], going as it does by the well-known name of ‘normalcy’?[151]

Now you should be able to see why we burn books—most definitely! To ask the burning question of our movement – that is, our reason to be – so as to suggest that – right now, for you and me – we could give no better answer than Anti-P.C.

Don’t you agree?

Now repeat after me:

Anti-P.C.

Anti-P.C.

Anti-P.C.

etc.

(9) Art Matters

Our militant stance on this matter does not exclude us from book burning also on behalf of any of the aforementioned reasons. Just because this last one (Anti-P.C.) “overdetermines”[152] our deed does not mean that we do not also burn books to worship gods and devils, to topple idols, to show that there is no theory, only Total Theory, etc.; or, for that matter, that we don’t just burn books for the art of it, of which we are told it (supposedly) matters.

We take this to mean that art is biodegradable: paintings, books, statues, musicians and their instruments, etc.—any thing (object) to which an aura[153] can become attached. It disintegrates into its mere materials with enough exposure to heat, pressure, and time, leaving the aura to hover aimless over the site of its undoing, in nostalgia for itself, so long as there are doters who still believe and can keep the ghost alive.

But what really survives underneath this plurality of fashionalities is the universal spirit of art[154], once it has been stripped of its (historical, contingent) clothing. It is one voice that cries out in expression, in every tongue, against the procession of a lifeless order that ordains the ordinary as the essential essence of everything and everyone. It is neverending revolution, in other words, against the implementation of official style, which is considered to trickle down from elites, bureaucracies, ISAs[155], and other sources of authority, in the form of one mass culture (and a few mass media) instituted under the economic conditions of monopoly.[156]

Which means that art is anti-‘normalcy’ in its very essence. Its innovation (that is, its novelty, its ability to channel the New) is strictly correlative to its rejection of the former (socio-politico-cultural) scheme, whose meaning – if it ever had one, aside from encapsulating a certain historical tradition’s measurements of efficiency and efficacy – has since been normalized[157] and put out to pasture in Capital’s green fields, working in the employ of the very Beast[158] from whose legacy it once desperately sought to differentiate (through recourse to artistic self-expression), but ultimately – as it so often happens in the afterlife of our youthful intentions – came to embrace with what could be called the indifference of the grave[159], or at least its diggers, who today too often lend their services only to be first in line to collect the effects of an inheritable estate.[160]

But art – for it to matter – cannot afford to be indifferent: there has to be friction, to rub up against it, and so art must resist something bigger than itself: the status quo. In opposition to its static regime and in alliance with the creative capabilities of dynamic subjectivity, art ever seeks to give new expression to our identities, the possibilities thereof, in reality and fantasy (e.g. dreams), and to those “unknown knowns”[161] that are buried just below the surface but all the same uncovered in the accidental apertures of our thought and speech.

According to Marshall McLuhan, it is artistic productions that help us “to grope towards a consciousness of the unconscious” [162], because “the artist… has had the power—and courage—of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world”. He adds that “inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change”.[163] This is why the “power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation or more, has long been recognized”, and why “Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race.’ Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system,’ as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them”. It is for this reason that art “takes on the function [in modern society] of indispensible perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite”[164]; in other words, grappling with art becomes a necessary condition for understanding both who we are and the world in which we live, as well as the nature of that subconscious entity that “ex-sists” somewhere in between.[165]

As artists we thus must learn to trust ourselves to create with a sort of abandon—which means not only to follow Freud’s imperative that wherever It was, so I shall be[166] with my practice in hand to document the scene, but also to be willing to provoke audiences with alarming artworks indicative of those dangers that await us in the future, supposing our society continues to go on living in a way that represses the true scope of its transhumanity.[167] From this perspective, then, we burn books both to reclaim the unconscious as inhabitable terrain, and to send up a smoke signal of distressing content: the future is a funeral pyre upon which all literature might as well be lit, unless we can overhaul an intellectually torpid culture[168] that condones (damns) its children[169] to grow up to be malfunctioning illiterates[170], for one that recognizes why we all should aim to read and write at a level surpassing that of grade six.[171]

Our performance art asks: why not burn books, when otherwise they’ll only turn to dust in dilapidated basements, forgotten storage stacks, anonymous warehouses, dumps, attics, etc.? When they’ll be left out on the curb, only to get kicked down the road and ruined in the rain? To prop up endless tables and armchairs? That is, who really cares, when we can ‘realize our potential’, ‘be happy’, and ‘achieve’ ‘success’ without ever having opened up a book on our own time, and without ever having operated a dictionary to learn what (or whether) these terms mean? Why is it a heresy, in other words, to burn books but not to destroy TVs? I mean, really: whom do we think we are fooling as to where our allegiances lay as a society?

It is the freedom of art to be able to perform a bit of theatre by crowding a fire with some titles if only to elicit a shouting response from an otherwise autistic[172] audience.[173]

(10) The Pact

For we are the ones we have been waiting for to interrupt what’s wrong with the old (way of doing things, based on inherited traditions, institutions, ideologies, biases, castes, codes, etc.) and to replace these with the New.

And yet Žižek writes that “This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement”.[174] But isn’t this the same thing as calling for “a new movement” organized around the ideal of instigating interruptions?[175] The New follows after our actions, even when they are employed in the disposal of those old doctrines that weigh “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.[176] We instigate the future simply by making a space for it to take place, like a location that must first be cleared of debris before it can be cultivated. Thus to initiate the process we must initially accept the situation of the site as it sits this second: “We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny—and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past”.[177]

In other words, “the task is ‘merely’ to stop the train of history which, left to its own course, leads to a precipice”; which would “mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress”.[178] Pynchon gives us a similar description of “the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide…”.[179] This – combined with Žižek’s warning that “Communism is thus not the light at the end of the tunnel, that is, the happy final outcome of a long and arduous struggle—if anything, the light at the end of the tunnel is rather that of another train approaching us at full speed”[180] – is what leads us to advocate on behalf of the interruptive and the obstructionist. We intervene into the operations of late Capitalism, the state of its institutions and ideological apparatuses, in an attempt to prevent the ‘progress’ of its kamikaze nosedive[181]: if it were left to itself, Western civilization would go on “removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid to waste in the process”.[182] To stay us from arriving at such an apocalyptic endpoint, we are forced to imagine an alternative[183] to the end of the world (as we know it[184]), and, at the very least, to insert this into our own lives in the place of any ideologies, first of all, whose (external) existence[185] has the effectivity[186] of excusing/exempting/extolling/exacting the exercise of exploitative and abusive practices in the economic extraction (extortion) of extras[187], at home and abroad; and also any which interpellates (incites/invites) us to ignore the evidence of who we are and what we are doing[188] in favour of following after those imaginary incentives with which we are inculcated constantly in late Capitalist society, which induce us to uncritically conform to those hegemonic habits and norms that “reproduce the conditions of production”[189] with the utmost ease for the bourgeoisie.[190] Or to put it less loquacious: “If we are to break free from the limitations of our current thinking that supports social injustice and hierarchy and move beyond the status quo, we must begin to talk, think, and act differently”.[191]

On this matter we cannot afford to be mistaken: it must (and will only ever) be us who takes the initiative to make way for the New. This is why there “is only one correct answer to those… who desperately await the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for.’ (This is a version of Gandhi’s motto: ‘Be yourself the change you want to see in the world.’) Waiting for someone else to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity”.[192]

This means nothing other than setting out to accomplish the impossible—but when the “true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely, the only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible”.[193] And so we may come to be called utopians, idealists, dreamers, etc., but, aside from the fact that we’re not the only ones, we can rest assured in the knowledge that we are nonetheless different from those delusional cases[194] whose tendency is to endanger themselves and others due to having disavowed the disconnect (that is experienced as daily discord) between their everyday existences and the ‘official’ explanations thereof. What they lack the lucidity to see is that our dreams of the Real have infinitely more truth to them than so-called ‘reality’[195], ‘the real world’, ‘normalcy’, etc.; that is, that commonest delusion, that make-believe mockup of what it means to be human in late Capitalist society, that amounts to little more than the freedom to choose (consume) sixteen different flavours of ‘personality’.[196]

But this does not leave us free to proceed under the assumption of our own inherent infallibility: “the trap to be avoided here is that of perverse self-instrumentalization: ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’ does not mean we have to discover how it is we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to perform the task—it means quite the opposite, namely that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism where ‘history is on our side’ (the proletariat fulfils the predestined task of universal emancipation), in the contemporary constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is, then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity.”[197]

This is what it must mean to accept the pact—we said earlier that our task was to plough the soil, to interrupt its consistency, into a series of furrows, in order to allow for the openings through which new formations of life might break through to the surface. We volunteer our efforts to this collective endeavour, even though it is still yet unclear what kinds of crops shall spring forth when the time comes after the hard rains fall. Still though, we believe[198] in the fundamental justice[199]of our calling as farmers of the future; and we see the necessity of our actions, insofar as growth[200] is today what is needed most, and the only way that this is going to happen is through making a commitment to (the) actual (practice/praxis of) ideoculture (i.e. the agriculture of ideologies, which includes weeding, pruning, mowing, manuring, swailing[201], etc.[202]). In other words,to accept the pact means to commit yourself to the Cause[203], in both thought and action, even when it is taxing, onerous, or in other ways unpleasant. It is founded on the collective recognition that it is only through performing the actual act ofideoculture that our society shall not go on to starve in the future for lack of attention to the grounds[204] that support our world, that sustain our (children’s children’s) lives. This is what the pact entails: nothing more than the awareness of what is going on[205], why it is happening[206], and the will[207] to do something about it[208]—nothing more than being the change that it is necessary to see in the world so that human life can (and will) survive into the future indefinitely, and not without its due degree of “human status and dignity”.[209]

And, like any good pact, ours is signified extraneously[210]—not with a handshake, but with the gift of light, of a blaze that exudes its own ominous portent: a reminder of what’s at stake. Namely, that our world will end up a bonfire unless we hit the breaks. And when alongside this important insight we acknowledge that a taboo is transgressed in using such pulpwood ingredients to fuel the combustion at the center of our ceremony, we are made to feel ill at ease, as we should be. Our pact, like that which was presided over by the band of brothers after having murdered and devoured the primordial father[211], is not without a shared shame at its core. This is to remind us that we owe it to people besides ourselves – each other, and others whom we have yet to meet but are still to be counted amongst those for whom we have been waiting, as comrades in an army of we – to follow through on our commitment to the common creed, and uphold the pact in both word and deed. For without this there is nothing but fictions of the future to tantalize the fantasies of today with what tomorrow could be – that is, even if it won’t – since the only way we’ll succeed the present is through standing together in solidarity, unified against the forces of finance[212] and industry[213] that seek to accelerate us to the final chapter of an autobiography that, as it has yet to be written, need not end up an eschatology.

Which is why we burn books in the last resort: to warn of what’s to come, so long as our society abdicates authorship of its own story, under the pretense that we aren’t free to choose the course of our own destiny.[214] But if the future is a blank page, then its open to any number of possibilities, most of which we should welcome when compared with those that follow from letting capitalism run its course like a terminal disease.[215] What’s important to keep in mind is that in order to decide in what kind of world we want to live (that is, if we want to live), we must inscribe it ourselves into our own words and actions, into the very slipstream and fabric of our still-living lives. Even when it clots the flow, goes against the grain, or otherwise interrupts the procession that would have us believe that the empire is good and in control of the machine[216], it is only through mounting such interventions (into ideologies, politics, operations, etc.) that we might stand a chance to save the world—assuming, that is, that is isn’t already too late…[217]

In which case, we might as well make the most of the fire in our midst

and cherish the last days…

For it may very well be the case that

(aside from our one-year anniversary)

we burn books to celebrate

the end of the world![218]

—Noah Gataveckas

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1An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Commons), ch. XII.