It is always worth drawing our attention back to the fact that no one knows why anyone has ever had an urge to break new ground in any field. Breaking new ground always carries with it an implicit sense that it’s the good thing to do. It’s on the side of truth, authenticity, and reality as opposed to falsehood, error, boredom, and convention. But what this really comes down to is open to interpretation. The idea is just there that this may be headed in a direction that will benefit civilization as a whole, or at least some segment of it. This idea can be refined, accepted or rejected, but can’t be proven or disproven - it can only be commented upon, or perhaps ignored, but in the latter case only imperfectly. .
PERSONAL SINGULARITIES
Creative impulses carry with them the uncanny suggestion that they come from the future. There is a peculiar sense of justice that surges up during a creative process involving arriving at what the work was supposed to be all along. I find this to be the case especially with writing music and poetry, but also to some degree with discursive writing. Just keep pushing, keep wandering in the desert, and something will be coughed up that will make sense of everything that’s been produced so far. It’s as though something has already happened in the future and my creative experience is simply an inverted ripple effect. Maybe this is a platitude, but if we’re to take it seriously it calls the nature of time into question. Based on experience alone, my belief is that time flows both forwards and backwards - there are two currents of time. Reign Array is the figure of the forward flow of time, an active principle. Kel Valhaal is the figure of its backward flow, which is not so much passive as spontaneous and inherently uncanny. The Cardinal of Fervor privileges the latter, but the latter can only really be activated by the former.
HATRED OF PHILOSOPHY
I am developing a strange hatred for the philosophical tradition - of German Idealism in particular. Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling - they are liars. Their whole milieu represents an evil Faustian bargain, a disgusting assault on the divine - hubris. I hate that I am infected by their immanence and their dialectics, the ghastly overdevelopment of ratiocination aiming to devour all of reality in a maw of astral intensities seeking dissolution. They are even worse that the 20th century French tradition that represents their decadence. I hate all of it - consistency just as much as inconsistency, affirmation of reason as much as of libido. I feel its black infection coursing through my veins mixed with my authentic blood, weakening me, causing my skull to grow so that it is too heavy for me to carry. The closer I come to a coherent standpoint of my own .... I do not have words for the disgust; it is indescribable. It is all falsehood. Vast caverns of dense, cerebral nothingness-words obscuring a contingent, all-too-human decision so insignificant that were it to be revealed for what it is in the light of day the caverns would collapse in on themselves opening up giant pocks on the terrestrial surface.
ANALYSIS
Fervor is in principle analysis, the detachment of items from a greater whole. Majesty is the complementary operation: the assertion of a new whole.
ACTIVITY
Fervor represents thought's capacity as a stepwise activity. When one follows through, executes, applies the principles arrived at by catharsis - new necessities appear. And in principle the new necessities are able to undermine the very principles that made them visible. This can't happen on its own, though - it requires a procedure. The exercise of the reasoning faculty, a sort of invisible muscle, is required - and this activity includes affective and ethical components. With fervor the line between thought and life is very thin, in part because it makes use of aspects of them both that we do not yet understand
SUBLIMATION AND ORGASM
These are opposite extremes, and yet they seem so strangely isomorphic. Each represents the death of desire - not just yearning but an entire paradigm, a telos. Orgasm has had its fill, while sublimation renounces and transforms. Surely they have nothing in common? One is a release and another is a new quality of tension. But it isn't so clear. Especially in the case of new cultural forms
FERVOR
It is easy to associate Fervor with the drive and Catharsis with desire. Catharsis aim at a not-yet, an ultimate payoff. Fervor kicks down the old, the weak, renounces. If we strip away the mountains of technical language one can employ for these things: Catharsis makes its way to the sexual act, while Fervor consummates and finishes. Fervor desacralizes, rapacious and cruel, but no less true. Fervor: to be finished. And thereby to be freed from a mandate, available to new horizons
ASSASSINATION
Force climbs up jaws that are made of teeth. Force reaches out to the wind and ties together the incompossible. Force assassinates. The truth of force is always assassination. Force is merciless, even in its holiness. Force desacralizes. It lays waste to everything, even the most secure foundations. This is just one kind of truth - one of four. There are four Cardinals of Truth: Ascesis, Catharsis, Force and Power. How much confusion has there been over the nature of truth? But there is not one truth, nor are there two. There are four. And force is perhaps the form of truth that reigns supreme in 2016 - at least in some sectors of the world. The Four Cardinals ought to be coordinated, because each has its own unique deficiency. Force does not mean very much on its own. It can mean something, to a degree, for a while, for certain people. Take the example of an underground music scene. There is something about these areas where new, as-yet-unnamed styles are forming - in unmarked spaces, basements, warehouses. But the value is always fleeting. It is always tragic - it always comes to a tragic end. Is that the most we can expect? If the Four Cardinals, which are four modes of emancipation, could be coordinated, perhaps a lasting emancipation could be achieved. Ascesis: the truth of ego-death. Catharsis: the truth of compression or ultimate expression. Force: illegal truth. Power: the truth of the master. There seems to be a promise of the possibility of coordination between these four Cardinals
[at the time of this post, and the preceding one, Fervor was named Force]
FORCE AND ASCESIS
The Force that produced rational secularism, Cartesian subjectivity, science and so on is the same Force that allows for artistic avant gardes and new political subjectivities to break ground. Force is always inspired, but always subtractive, always hysterical. Force will always seem illegal, impossible, immoral, uncultivated - but only at first. The product of force is always incorporated eventually. That is party of what distinguishes Force from Ascesis. Whereas Ascesis turns around a paradox that is never resolved and is not new, Force turns around new paradoxes that are temporary.