I’ve been looking at Klossowski’s philosophical writing for the first time (Sade, My Neighbor and Living Currency). I’ve been hearing for a long time that he is the missing link between Nietzsche and Deleuze, but now I’m seeing just how true this is.
I bring this up as an occasion to return to the important distinction I am attempting to make between Ololonic and Transcendental will. As interesting and inspiring as I take the metaphysics of creation articulated in different ways by the above-mentioned philosophers (basically a fourfold picture of becoming - at the highest level is the material configuration of impulses that creates a subject, one level lower is the phantasm, which is the ever-inexpressible infinite creative vision generated by the impulses, one level lower is the simulacrum, which is a series of concrete, finite creations generated as a result of the effort to express the phantasm, and finally at the lowest level there are the stereotypes, socially acceptable imitations of the simulacra whose true source has been forgotten, and which as such constitute a form of evil, or at least a deficient level of intensity, which is the very world of appearance that most of us take to be ‘reality’ most of the time. This fourfold is usefully compared to the “olamot” in the tradition of jewish Kabbalah, which are named Atziluth, Beriyah, Yetzirah and Assiah, as well as to William Blake’s fourfold - Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro.) - I will now get on to the main clause of this sentence, lol: I don’t believe an ethics of creative becoming is adequate in the 21st century, because we now know that simply getting in touch with your phantasm and resonating with peoples who have similar interests is not going to stop humanity from destroying itself. On the contrary, it will help, because anything project that becomes successful becomes capitalism. Or perhaps its better to put it this way: any metaphysics of creative becoming that presents itself as an alternative to reason, representation or rationalism has a strangely conservative quality, despite presenting itself as radical. This is because it can’t help being an account of ‘the way things go in general’, presupposing that this is how it’s always been and will always be.
If OIOIONIC desire connects to a ‘religious’ horizon that is higher, more useful to civilization and more important than Transcendental desire, this should be understood in two simultaneous senses. On the one hand I have in mind the detachment and ascendence beyond the tragic concerns of the ordinary world - like family, commerce, recognition, sex - which we all associate with sages, yogis and mystics. But I also, at the same time - and in some ways more importantly - have in mind the densely cerebral effort to give a detailed and fully elaborated account of the nature of reality, which could be assessed, critiqued, revised by any being capable of discursive reason - in other words a falsifiable theory - using the language of rational theology.
This would be a rational theology that, unlike various theologies tied to different religious in the world, transcends and includes the secular humanist era with its life-as-art, psychoanalysis, marxism, capitalism and consumer culture. It must exist as revision of the qabalistic fourfold, beginning with an account of OIOION, which is the aspect of God that can be spoken of (as opposed to HAQQ, which is the aspect of God that surpasses all description (for now).