The American Century: An Apocalyptic Denouement
Prologue – America, Violence and the Other
“The Apocalypse is coming”, shouts the unshaven hippie, the soul bastion of a free empire. The wailing grounds, the blooded soil; everywhere in America is a killing field: in Echo Park, in Santa Monica, the Castro, out in the burrows, the ‘burbs, the city ghetto, the broken boulevards, the back alleys, the airports. Everywhere has the geometry for violence, the blueprint for annihilation. Apocalypse is inscribed in the logic of memory.
I believe it. Our day in the sun, the American century is over. The heat of a thousand suns illuminated and forgotten in a flash: the bomb, fascism, neo-fascism, communism, neo-communism, Reaganism, Pearl Harbour, D-Day, the Marshall Plan, the Crash, The Depression, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nixon, JFK, Bush Senior, Bush Junior, Agent Orange, the Civil War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Dresden, the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, the smart bomb, the (dumb) BOMB, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the BOMB, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI!
“I learnt a new word today: ‘atom’ bomb.”
(J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun)
The bomb – the unforgivable act: the beginning and the end of the American century. The memory of ascendance, the moment of crowning, the sovereignty of a superpower, is written in the same logic as that of its future downfall. The moment of triumph is, and already is, a question of denouement.
Where was morality in 1945 when the heat of a thousand suns set upon the Earth, melting the asphalt, the trees, the sky? Roads, buildings, cities annihilated; fisheries, crops, the earth polluted; three generations of food, of wildlife, of human foetuses born malformed and raised malnourished – the retribution of an uncivilized humanity in the name of justice. Inequality done in the name of justice! Violence done in the name of justice!
Isn’t all war ‘in the name of justice?’ The just, the unjust; the civilized, the uncivilized; the West, the East; the North, the South; the rich, the poor; the First, the Third; the developed, the undeveloped; the white, the black, brown, red and yellow; the male, the female; the Christian, the Moslem; the American, the un-American; ego and the Other.
The jurisprudence of the just and victorious always becomes the universal law by which we discern between the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. All patriarchal institutions demand the otherness of the Other, not least the national institution. The nation excludes in order to include. The nation enslaves in order to empower. Power relies on the existence and subordination of the Other: the woman, the black, the poor, the immigrant, the foreigner, the alien, the inhuman, the Other.
America’s Other has always been the world beyond its boarders. We see this in its foreign policy and its legacy of global subordination, however the Other lies deep within the Self also. Descartes taught us that the ego can never fully comprehend the complexities of another’s and mind. Freud taught us that the ego can never even fully comprehend its own mind. America’s ego is splintered, cracking under the weight of itself. The Other reveals itself within the ego, momentarily like an unconscious dream leaving its aftertaste in conscious memory. The black, the woman, the poor, thrust forward across the dividing line illuminating themselves and the truth of an époque. However like a dream, all is forgotten, refused, mistaken, denied. America is not very good at dream interpretation.
…And everywhere the bums will shout, the children rebel; villages, towns, churches, communities, cities and nations; a generation of change in a single moment, a messianic coming. Let the bells ring, in the name of justice, for the democracy to come! For what tomorrow comes!?
“Entire cities rise up in anger…against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain races against other races, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain classes against other classes.”
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Introduction: The excess of apocalypse
The denouement, the last twist, the final season of the American Dynasty. How did we become so beleaguered, marinating in our own intoxications of excess and success? How did we simulate, imperialise, colonize so much of the Other? How did we do such an excess of violence to the woman, the black, the Earth, the Other? The logical end of excess is apocalypse, where all coefficients simultaneously extend towards infinity and nullification.
The promise of apocalypse is relegated to few discourses: religion, politics, economics and the environmental sciences. It arrises from the problem of sustainability: in the sustainability of ecology and psychology. However sustainability is always a weary afterthought – a repentant hangover from excess. (And we drink when we’re winning.) Without sustainability the human psyche crumbles – emotion is substituted for an excess of violence, just as in ecology the environment is substituted for an excess of consumption.
Dual symptoms: excess and repression = freedom and prohibition = transgression and taboo
The Pleasure Principle leads us to strive after that which pleasures us. The logic of pleasure binds us to it and that which provides it. We are addicted to that which pleasures us and that addiction brings upon an ailment of excess. Like the addiction of the drug, we want more of that which makes us forget our own mortality. However the morning-after always brings back that discomforting fact. There is only one solution, more and more, until excess drives away the fear of death. “Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”
Utter and total repression, however, is not the answer, for that brings upon a parallel set of problems, which Christianity has all too well exemplified. Abstinence is a mechanism for violence in itself, as excess too derives from the stalemate of repression. In repression, violence needs a cathartic push, just as in sexuality there needs a cathartic orgasm. The repression of sexuality, the repression of free will can sublimate into an absolute act of violence, just as the repression of the atom in nuclear fission can bring about a force so extraordinary as to level entire cities.
America’s diagnosis is just this: it is simultaneously excessive and repressive. It tells you, do what you want, but don’t do this”; “say what you will, but don’t say this”; “be who you are, but don’t be like this”. Freedom is lined with prohibitions.
America’s excess is not rooted in perversity, but in neuroses. Fear of God and fear of the Other lead to the neurotic. When excess is shrouded by the possibility of death ¬– a cultural exchange that it refuses – it can do no more than peal further into it, like pealing away the layers of the self in order to open it up to pain. “Out, out damned spot!” What begets violence but violence? “More and more weapons lead to more and more weapons until the world is a grenade with a fuse in it.”
Neuroses and paranoia are further fuelled by repressive taboos, put in place in order to keep social anarchy at bay. Repression marks the traditional Christian form in all its maxims and guidelines, whereas excess marks the new religious consumerism, founded under the guise of traditional religion. Consumerism is religion branched out, diversified and horizontally integrated in post-Fordist economics.
The new religion
Human being as a complex existante, imposed with self-consciousness and self-reflection has always been about religion, spiritual connectivity, whether it be found in the reflection of the self, the fulfilment of consumption, the transgression of repression or the totem and taboo. In the 21st century it spreads like a plague, a mystical pestilence upon the mass consciousness. The religion of consumption, the religion of violence, the religion of sexuality, the religion of God: they all have two modes, excess and repression.
The body, the first and a priori symbol of exchange, the most and the least valuable of all commodities was always given in excess, in sacrificial exchange, to the Gods, to the Kings, to the wars. The lover gives her/his body in excess to that which may confer upon it sensuality, a duality with God and transcendence from material existence. However the church represses the culture of the flesh, thus violence is sublimated unto the body and the mind. Violence is given in excess, to the bodies of man and woman; first and foremost to woman from man, because she was the pillow man bit and scratched at, at night lost in his own frustrations, his own impotency in reaching divinity. Violence, excess and religion have always been intertwined.
Today, the indisputable forces of religion, politics and Keynesian economics lay siege to the world of order and reason, claiming their own World Order powered by man’s lust for spiritual, commercial and ideological fulfilment. The shopping mall is more a religious domain than the altar ever was. “The medium is the message” and the new medium has brought about a religion only daringly dreamed of in the exegeses of Marx and Saint Paul. Marx was right: religion is the sedative. It is the opiate. However Nietzsche is wrong. God is not dead. God is a hydra, and cutting off his head merely creates a bastard child.
Just as man has complicated his perversity with the ruse of civilization, religion has complicated itself, has hidden its guise from us amongst our most profane arts and objects. It seeks us out in our most unholy of moments and depletes our inner most beings, calling us to worship in the message, whatever it may be. “The medium is the message” and the message is always religious, thus the medium, religion. TV is the religion. Sports is the religion. Consumption is the religion. The United States of America represents the perfect union between God and a late night shopping channel. Salvation can be grasped for $10.95 plus shipping. The ancient totems; the crucifix, the crescent, even the swastika have been realigned into a new consumer ideology, amalgamating with new symbols of commercial culture.
The rest of the world is to blame also. They have followed suit in the hope for their own salvation from the oppressive violence done to them. The nations of the world have learnt the sermons of excess all too well. The killing fields litter the global highways, inspired by the flashes of red, white and blue. Kim Jung-Il and Saddam loved American cinema but loathed American hypocrisy, so they fashioned an efficient tyranny – religion without totemism. American tyranny is founded in aesthetics, an aesthetics of violence. They have taught the world, the need for the totem: the flag, the Unknown Soldier, the anthem and the just cause, all in order to do violence. The new religion has fashioned the ancient totemism with the nouveau materialism.
The new apocalypse
With every new religion comes the promise of a grandiloquent apocalypse. The disillusioned Marxists, liberalists, atheists, vegetarians and environmentalists look on, pensively eyeing the apocalypse on the horizon; but if only anyone would believe them. But of course they do. They accept this. What is apocalypse but the zenith of a culture of excess? Apocalypse is the most extreme form of excess; exchange taken to its most infinite value, and within it a culture may both define and annihilate itself.
However the concept of apocalypse is old. It arrises every generation, vehemently spouted out by, or to, the irrational and credulous agents of power. It has been with mankind since the beginning, for any comprehension of a beginning comes with that of an end. Birth and death are irrevocably intertwined. Every beginning has an end, every birth a death, and every genesis an apocalypse. Let us trace the etymology of the word ‘apocalypse’:
From the greek word apokalupsis, derived from apokaluptein, which divinely translates as (apo = un; kaluptein = to close/cover) ‘to uncover’, ‘to discover’, ‘to unclose’ and finally ‘to disclose’. That is, ‘finally to disclose’ – to reveal truth.
‘Apocalypse’ is the final disclosure, the end of argument, the end of discourse and simultaneously the revelation and annihilation of truth.
Discourse begins and ends with death. Discourse (from the Latin discursis: ‘running to and fro’) is but the to and fro tennis match of knowledge, life, time and truth. Everything is logos, the search for truth: the word, the idea, the reason. The end of discourse is the end of the end. So at the moment of apocalypse all will be revealed, and alas forgotten, sent to the oblivion of a thousand suns. Truth is disclosed at the moment of its annihilation.
A violent uprising – the logic of dynastic decline
We are finally learning. The American Dynasty is unveiled as the secret plans and malevolent truths are squeezed from the tortured corpse. The corpus of history: a corpus of knowledge, a corpus of violence: violence done to and by itself.
A body is bruised from the outside and the superpower has received its fair share of bruising. However America’s wounds reveal a domestic savagery, a domestic battery, from the inside out. The type of battery that is so predominant in the familial structure, the primordial and a priori¬ (so they tell us so). The structures of power are failing and falling, disintegrating upon the weight of their towering flags. The zeitgeist is crumbling. The body of a nation unravels itself from the inside out like that of a Francis Bacon portrait, yearning to escape its own axes, its inherent aporia; yearning to escape its own birth and death, but whilst ever accelerating towards both.
In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith taught us that every nation is born out of an act of extraordinary violence, and that every nation is defined by such an act. It stays in the gene pool, the unconscious memory from generation to generation, a memory of the past, present and the future. The bomb: the repressed memory, like the ghost of Christmas future, it haunts the American psyche, reminding it that its day will come. “[Nostalgia] remembers the future and dreams the past”, said Gore Vidal. The dreams of the past have been spun and woven into a thick blanket covering the American consciousness from its true legacy. However the blanket is patchy and the threads are coming apart.
The nation, as the human, is born out of a violent surge, a moment of discontinuity. Only such a violent act can call for the undoing of this discontinuity. The undoing is occurring, the unravelling, the unveiling, the unclosure, the disclosure, the final disclosure, the apocalyptic truth. Steadily America is rounding out its legacy of violence, getting closer and closer to the final act, the final bomb – the penultimate act of excess. The synthesis of excessive violence and consumption will bring upon us an extraordinary act, an extraordinary coming, an extraordinary Other.
For what tomorrow?
Alas, let this not be some scathing demonology on America and the world as is. We’re here to hope, to inspire and to transcend discourse in all its forms and amalgamations. Apocalypse is upon us, yet we’ve so many unresolved issues. We have not resolved the inequality between man and woman. We have not resolved the inequality between white and black, white and brown, white and yellow. We have not resolved the conflict between science and religion. We have not resolved the conflict between religion and religion.
But something is coming, brewing, and rising up from the tides of violence and consumption, from the infinite exchange of flesh and commerce. The Other is coming. The Other is rising. But the Other need not be a man. It need not be an act of violence, a person, or a prophet. The Other is an event, a time, a place, a moment, a memory of the future. Like a messiah, the Other comes, from beyond the horizon, from beyond our own calculability. It takes an unknown form. It could be human, inhuman, technological, scientific, political, environmental, economic, or religious. It could herald the new beginning or mark the end in the heat of a thousand suns.
List of thinkers
J.G. Ballard
Georges Bataille
William S. Burroughs
Jacques Derrida
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Margueritte Duras
Sigmund Freud
Michel Foucault
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Emmanuel Levinas
“The Apocalypse is coming”, shouts the unshaven hippie, the soul bastion of a free empire. The wailing grounds, the blooded soil; everywhere in America is a killing field: in Echo Park, in Santa Monica, the Castro, out in the burrows, the ‘burbs, the city ghetto, the broken boulevards, the back alleys, the airports. Everywhere has the geometry for violence, the blueprint for annihilation. Apocalypse is inscribed in the logic of memory.
I believe it. Our day in the sun, the American century is over. The heat of a thousand suns illuminated and forgotten in a flash: the bomb, fascism, neo-fascism, communism, neo-communism, Reaganism, Pearl Harbour, D-Day, the Marshall Plan, the Crash, The Depression, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nixon, JFK, Bush Senior, Bush Junior, Agent Orange, the Civil War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Dresden, the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, the smart bomb, the (dumb) BOMB, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the BOMB, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI!
“I learnt a new word today: ‘atom’ bomb.”
(J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun)
The bomb – the unforgivable act: the beginning and the end of the American century. The memory of ascendance, the moment of crowning, the sovereignty of a superpower, is written in the same logic as that of its future downfall. The moment of triumph is, and already is, a question of denouement.
Where was morality in 1945 when the heat of a thousand suns set upon the Earth, melting the asphalt, the trees, the sky? Roads, buildings, cities annihilated; fisheries, crops, the earth polluted; three generations of food, of wildlife, of human foetuses born malformed and raised malnourished – the retribution of an uncivilized humanity in the name of justice. Inequality done in the name of justice! Violence done in the name of justice!
Isn’t all war ‘in the name of justice?’ The just, the unjust; the civilized, the uncivilized; the West, the East; the North, the South; the rich, the poor; the First, the Third; the developed, the undeveloped; the white, the black, brown, red and yellow; the male, the female; the Christian, the Moslem; the American, the un-American; ego and the Other.
The jurisprudence of the just and victorious always becomes the universal law by which we discern between the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. All patriarchal institutions demand the otherness of the Other, not least the national institution. The nation excludes in order to include. The nation enslaves in order to empower. Power relies on the existence and subordination of the Other: the woman, the black, the poor, the immigrant, the foreigner, the alien, the inhuman, the Other.
America’s Other has always been the world beyond its boarders. We see this in its foreign policy and its legacy of global subordination, however the Other lies deep within the Self also. Descartes taught us that the ego can never fully comprehend the complexities of another’s and mind. Freud taught us that the ego can never even fully comprehend its own mind. America’s ego is splintered, cracking under the weight of itself. The Other reveals itself within the ego, momentarily like an unconscious dream leaving its aftertaste in conscious memory. The black, the woman, the poor, thrust forward across the dividing line illuminating themselves and the truth of an époque. However like a dream, all is forgotten, refused, mistaken, denied. America is not very good at dream interpretation.
…And everywhere the bums will shout, the children rebel; villages, towns, churches, communities, cities and nations; a generation of change in a single moment, a messianic coming. Let the bells ring, in the name of justice, for the democracy to come! For what tomorrow comes!?
“Entire cities rise up in anger…against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain races against other races, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain classes against other classes.”
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Introduction: The excess of apocalypse
The denouement, the last twist, the final season of the American Dynasty. How did we become so beleaguered, marinating in our own intoxications of excess and success? How did we simulate, imperialise, colonize so much of the Other? How did we do such an excess of violence to the woman, the black, the Earth, the Other? The logical end of excess is apocalypse, where all coefficients simultaneously extend towards infinity and nullification.
The promise of apocalypse is relegated to few discourses: religion, politics, economics and the environmental sciences. It arrises from the problem of sustainability: in the sustainability of ecology and psychology. However sustainability is always a weary afterthought – a repentant hangover from excess. (And we drink when we’re winning.) Without sustainability the human psyche crumbles – emotion is substituted for an excess of violence, just as in ecology the environment is substituted for an excess of consumption.
Dual symptoms: excess and repression = freedom and prohibition = transgression and taboo
The Pleasure Principle leads us to strive after that which pleasures us. The logic of pleasure binds us to it and that which provides it. We are addicted to that which pleasures us and that addiction brings upon an ailment of excess. Like the addiction of the drug, we want more of that which makes us forget our own mortality. However the morning-after always brings back that discomforting fact. There is only one solution, more and more, until excess drives away the fear of death. “Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”
Utter and total repression, however, is not the answer, for that brings upon a parallel set of problems, which Christianity has all too well exemplified. Abstinence is a mechanism for violence in itself, as excess too derives from the stalemate of repression. In repression, violence needs a cathartic push, just as in sexuality there needs a cathartic orgasm. The repression of sexuality, the repression of free will can sublimate into an absolute act of violence, just as the repression of the atom in nuclear fission can bring about a force so extraordinary as to level entire cities.
America’s diagnosis is just this: it is simultaneously excessive and repressive. It tells you, do what you want, but don’t do this”; “say what you will, but don’t say this”; “be who you are, but don’t be like this”. Freedom is lined with prohibitions.
America’s excess is not rooted in perversity, but in neuroses. Fear of God and fear of the Other lead to the neurotic. When excess is shrouded by the possibility of death ¬– a cultural exchange that it refuses – it can do no more than peal further into it, like pealing away the layers of the self in order to open it up to pain. “Out, out damned spot!” What begets violence but violence? “More and more weapons lead to more and more weapons until the world is a grenade with a fuse in it.”
Neuroses and paranoia are further fuelled by repressive taboos, put in place in order to keep social anarchy at bay. Repression marks the traditional Christian form in all its maxims and guidelines, whereas excess marks the new religious consumerism, founded under the guise of traditional religion. Consumerism is religion branched out, diversified and horizontally integrated in post-Fordist economics.
The new religion
Human being as a complex existante, imposed with self-consciousness and self-reflection has always been about religion, spiritual connectivity, whether it be found in the reflection of the self, the fulfilment of consumption, the transgression of repression or the totem and taboo. In the 21st century it spreads like a plague, a mystical pestilence upon the mass consciousness. The religion of consumption, the religion of violence, the religion of sexuality, the religion of God: they all have two modes, excess and repression.
The body, the first and a priori symbol of exchange, the most and the least valuable of all commodities was always given in excess, in sacrificial exchange, to the Gods, to the Kings, to the wars. The lover gives her/his body in excess to that which may confer upon it sensuality, a duality with God and transcendence from material existence. However the church represses the culture of the flesh, thus violence is sublimated unto the body and the mind. Violence is given in excess, to the bodies of man and woman; first and foremost to woman from man, because she was the pillow man bit and scratched at, at night lost in his own frustrations, his own impotency in reaching divinity. Violence, excess and religion have always been intertwined.
Today, the indisputable forces of religion, politics and Keynesian economics lay siege to the world of order and reason, claiming their own World Order powered by man’s lust for spiritual, commercial and ideological fulfilment. The shopping mall is more a religious domain than the altar ever was. “The medium is the message” and the new medium has brought about a religion only daringly dreamed of in the exegeses of Marx and Saint Paul. Marx was right: religion is the sedative. It is the opiate. However Nietzsche is wrong. God is not dead. God is a hydra, and cutting off his head merely creates a bastard child.
Just as man has complicated his perversity with the ruse of civilization, religion has complicated itself, has hidden its guise from us amongst our most profane arts and objects. It seeks us out in our most unholy of moments and depletes our inner most beings, calling us to worship in the message, whatever it may be. “The medium is the message” and the message is always religious, thus the medium, religion. TV is the religion. Sports is the religion. Consumption is the religion. The United States of America represents the perfect union between God and a late night shopping channel. Salvation can be grasped for $10.95 plus shipping. The ancient totems; the crucifix, the crescent, even the swastika have been realigned into a new consumer ideology, amalgamating with new symbols of commercial culture.
The rest of the world is to blame also. They have followed suit in the hope for their own salvation from the oppressive violence done to them. The nations of the world have learnt the sermons of excess all too well. The killing fields litter the global highways, inspired by the flashes of red, white and blue. Kim Jung-Il and Saddam loved American cinema but loathed American hypocrisy, so they fashioned an efficient tyranny – religion without totemism. American tyranny is founded in aesthetics, an aesthetics of violence. They have taught the world, the need for the totem: the flag, the Unknown Soldier, the anthem and the just cause, all in order to do violence. The new religion has fashioned the ancient totemism with the nouveau materialism.
The new apocalypse
With every new religion comes the promise of a grandiloquent apocalypse. The disillusioned Marxists, liberalists, atheists, vegetarians and environmentalists look on, pensively eyeing the apocalypse on the horizon; but if only anyone would believe them. But of course they do. They accept this. What is apocalypse but the zenith of a culture of excess? Apocalypse is the most extreme form of excess; exchange taken to its most infinite value, and within it a culture may both define and annihilate itself.
However the concept of apocalypse is old. It arrises every generation, vehemently spouted out by, or to, the irrational and credulous agents of power. It has been with mankind since the beginning, for any comprehension of a beginning comes with that of an end. Birth and death are irrevocably intertwined. Every beginning has an end, every birth a death, and every genesis an apocalypse. Let us trace the etymology of the word ‘apocalypse’:
From the greek word apokalupsis, derived from apokaluptein, which divinely translates as (apo = un; kaluptein = to close/cover) ‘to uncover’, ‘to discover’, ‘to unclose’ and finally ‘to disclose’. That is, ‘finally to disclose’ – to reveal truth.
‘Apocalypse’ is the final disclosure, the end of argument, the end of discourse and simultaneously the revelation and annihilation of truth.
Discourse begins and ends with death. Discourse (from the Latin discursis: ‘running to and fro’) is but the to and fro tennis match of knowledge, life, time and truth. Everything is logos, the search for truth: the word, the idea, the reason. The end of discourse is the end of the end. So at the moment of apocalypse all will be revealed, and alas forgotten, sent to the oblivion of a thousand suns. Truth is disclosed at the moment of its annihilation.
A violent uprising – the logic of dynastic decline
We are finally learning. The American Dynasty is unveiled as the secret plans and malevolent truths are squeezed from the tortured corpse. The corpus of history: a corpus of knowledge, a corpus of violence: violence done to and by itself.
A body is bruised from the outside and the superpower has received its fair share of bruising. However America’s wounds reveal a domestic savagery, a domestic battery, from the inside out. The type of battery that is so predominant in the familial structure, the primordial and a priori¬ (so they tell us so). The structures of power are failing and falling, disintegrating upon the weight of their towering flags. The zeitgeist is crumbling. The body of a nation unravels itself from the inside out like that of a Francis Bacon portrait, yearning to escape its own axes, its inherent aporia; yearning to escape its own birth and death, but whilst ever accelerating towards both.
In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith taught us that every nation is born out of an act of extraordinary violence, and that every nation is defined by such an act. It stays in the gene pool, the unconscious memory from generation to generation, a memory of the past, present and the future. The bomb: the repressed memory, like the ghost of Christmas future, it haunts the American psyche, reminding it that its day will come. “[Nostalgia] remembers the future and dreams the past”, said Gore Vidal. The dreams of the past have been spun and woven into a thick blanket covering the American consciousness from its true legacy. However the blanket is patchy and the threads are coming apart.
The nation, as the human, is born out of a violent surge, a moment of discontinuity. Only such a violent act can call for the undoing of this discontinuity. The undoing is occurring, the unravelling, the unveiling, the unclosure, the disclosure, the final disclosure, the apocalyptic truth. Steadily America is rounding out its legacy of violence, getting closer and closer to the final act, the final bomb – the penultimate act of excess. The synthesis of excessive violence and consumption will bring upon us an extraordinary act, an extraordinary coming, an extraordinary Other.
For what tomorrow?
Alas, let this not be some scathing demonology on America and the world as is. We’re here to hope, to inspire and to transcend discourse in all its forms and amalgamations. Apocalypse is upon us, yet we’ve so many unresolved issues. We have not resolved the inequality between man and woman. We have not resolved the inequality between white and black, white and brown, white and yellow. We have not resolved the conflict between science and religion. We have not resolved the conflict between religion and religion.
But something is coming, brewing, and rising up from the tides of violence and consumption, from the infinite exchange of flesh and commerce. The Other is coming. The Other is rising. But the Other need not be a man. It need not be an act of violence, a person, or a prophet. The Other is an event, a time, a place, a moment, a memory of the future. Like a messiah, the Other comes, from beyond the horizon, from beyond our own calculability. It takes an unknown form. It could be human, inhuman, technological, scientific, political, environmental, economic, or religious. It could herald the new beginning or mark the end in the heat of a thousand suns.
List of thinkers
J.G. Ballard
Georges Bataille
William S. Burroughs
Jacques Derrida
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Margueritte Duras
Sigmund Freud
Michel Foucault
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Emmanuel Levinas
Labels: America, apocalypse, consumption, excess, religion
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