“I remember blood from the thighs of the mother
As everything is eaten by another
How much more must we bleed her?
I cut their throats while they slept
I wept
I peel back my skull for you
Yes I do”
— Acid Bath, “Venus Blue”¹
Life is life. But the living don’t merely live. If they merely lived, they wouldn’t be living. All of life is dynamic, and relates to the dynamic even in its non-dynamic characteristics. Human life is no different. Living humanity — as with the living as a whole — feels itself riven with distinct and contradictory tendencies, which are nevertheless united in the process of living itself.
Across a long historical process, humanity has actively forgotten its animality by repressing its instincts. It has put off enjoyment in order to reap the fruits of labor, coordinating its needs in accordance with the demands of its manner of laboring, and defining itself as some Self amidst the multiplicity and contradiction of its living. Yet even in this state of denied animality, the animal shines through exactly where it’s most profusely refused. The Self is not merely its-Self. To be its-Self, it necessarily acts through the possibilities and tendencies of its given nature, its animal nature.
This negotiation tends towards self-preservation and self-annihilation, the prime tendencies in life as a whole with its endless cycles of beginnings and endings, livings and dyings. To survive, an organism must act to preserve itself from the threats of destruction posed by the outside world. Yet the same demands of survival compel it to adapt to the new, and to become otherwise than it once was. This is the little self-annihilation, a capturing of flux to the needs of self-preservation. Death haunts the reign of self-preservation and threatens to swallow it, however. In preserving itself, an organism also ensures the realization of the death immanent to its own bodily-ecological functions. A cicada survives underground for years, emerges to mate when the conditions are ripe, and dies after its reproduction cycle has been completed. Self-preserving life is subordinated to the death of the individual in the self-preservation of its species.
Human beings have removed themselves from the immediacy of their bodily-ecological rhythms through their incompleteness itself. Their lack of organic adaptation has compelled them throughout their history as a species to creatively adapt to a variety of life-situations and to adapt those life-situations to themselves. They can more consciously control their form of life than other animals, and therefore are more open in their possibilities of life. But even in this reflexive way of living, human beings reduce their lives to a social repetition of the self-annihilation within self-preservation. They waste their lives working, saving, securing legacies and inheritances — only to die in disappointment, having lived narrow lives of self-preservation. In the midst of this compulsive cycle, many careen towards self-annihilation as an attempt at escape. Some commit suicide, others try to lose themselves in altered states, and others still search for some illusory higher cause to submit themselves to. In order to live beyond self-preservation, they give themselves over to the self-preservation of some other, “higher” life. In an eat-or-be-eaten world, they decide that it’s better to be eaten than to waste their time in the rat race of eating.
But self-preservation doesn’t only have to end in the absolute movement of un-becoming. Life can overcome the triumph of death through the combination of living powers for the needs of many — the evolutionary factor of mutual aid. Mutual aid extends beyond the cycle of eating and being eaten. Throughout natural-social history, it has however been generally subordinated to the needs of self-preservation. We see mutual aid between species against other species, as with the symbiotic relationship of ravens and wolves in hunting. We also see it within humanity as a phenomena subordinated to social domination — particularly in capitalist society, where cooperative labor and the collective self-preservation of the working class ensures the continued availability of surplus-value for the accumulation of capital.
As everything is eaten by another, we forget the individuality of our bodies. Without concern for our bodies, we cannot know the otherness of the Other’s body. We do not see the multiplicity of bodies in the world, we only see through the totalizing integration of eating and being eaten.
The gleam of freedom must shine by twisting and clawing against this universal integration. Universal history has culminated in the Eurocentered world-system of global capitalism, an all-earth society of capital’s self-preservation and self-repetition. To overcome the totalitarianism of this shat-spectral eater of the eaten, we must remember the earthly life that it lives from. This means turning from the accumulation of dead, crystallized past labor — a jealously guarded pile of shit — to the primacy of living needs.
To care for others, one must know their needs. Care of needs is earthly care. But “the thing born creates the use.”² Nature births needs in the incompleteness of its wholeness, and humanity as a conscious element of nature can consciously adapt these needs according to the open totality of the needy. As the thing created creates uses and needs, there is thus a need for an all-sided creation for all-sided needs of all life.
Knowing and Difference
The earth is a promise. A promise is not a guarantee. A promise can only be fulfilled by one who is autonomous enough to keep their promise, to realize their expressed intent. This one can only be a product of a long history of freedom. This one is the promise of humanity, which is the promise of the earth. The Paez rebel leader Manuel Quintín Lame said “Nature is God’s Book and God’s Science[…]”³ This holy text offered Quintín Lame a lesson, from which he learned how to follow “the perfumed garden of the logic of Nature; the precious garden of human nature; the beautiful and perfumed garden which has filled all my thoughts which have been and are oriented towards a chimera.”⁴
The ethical life of a redeemed earth would be one true to the earth, which humanity’s bodies are made up of, and committed to the lives of the Others, who appear throughout the Same in time. The Other is the body of God, the God which is the nature which surrounds us and burns as the flame within us. The appearance of the Absolute in history would be the knowing of a non-identical, utterly unique world. This can only be known by a knowing subject which no longer compels itself to absolutely know absolutely everything with itself as the center, to eat and be eaten, which can reconcile with its own mortal limitations and thus with Otherness.
The subject which reads and (re-)writes God’s Book must overcome its self-preservation and realize Oneness through its difference from nature as a whole as its lover, as the loving subject. The lover is wounded and incomplete, but gives the gift of life to the Other. The gift central to life, in fact the gift of life itself, is realized in the affirmation of life for life in love. Woundedness and incompleteness bring the subject beyond self-preservation, and open it up to be the loving giver instead of the eater/eaten.
To be something other than predator and prey, this lover must overcome the dualism of the mind and the body. The split of the “real world” and “mere appearance” across Western history has culminated in the end of the “real world” in bourgeois civilization. Friedrich Nietzsche described this process in Twilight of the Idols (1889) as a turn from living truth to the unattainability of truth to the end of truth, and “with the real world we have also done away with the apparent one!” — “INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.”⁵
But we cannot yet do away with appearance without doing away with the ultimate form of it, with the empty and universal representation of the All represented by capital. Capital takes the place of the “real world,” and does so as appearance. This is incredibly clear in the form of money capital, which is the embodiment of exchange-value in the form of a commodity. Money can represent any commodity, but what it represents in particular is irrelevant to the exchange-society. The main thing is the representation itself.
This processive split of reality and appearance, body and self can be understood as the pre-history and history of abstract labor, the substance of capital. For abstract labor to be established, and for the twin birth of capital and proletariat, there had to be a well-developed split of subject and object. The subject had to become disembodied, it had to relate to its object-body as a possession. Then there could be a subject which owns its laboring capacities as commodities for sale, and its conditions of labor could be closed in as an absolute object possessed as a commodity–as capital. Atlantic chattel slavery was one of the prime moments of this abstract labor’s formation in its abstraction of human bodies into capital, arranging the torturous spaces of the slave ships and the plantations minutely according to the demands of economization and capital accumulation.⁶ The colonizing subject rendered the colonized into objects, into absolute things to be owned.
The transition to quasi-recognition in the form of neocolonialism, colonialism conducted through nominally independent and equal nations, does not change this equation of colonizer-subject and colonized-object. Subjectivity remains colonial, remains a process of eating and exploiting, while the body of the (neo-)colony societies remain objects to be owned and extracted by the native bourgeoisie in tandem with world capital. Internalized colonialism is a process of the colonized becoming a colonial subject. Decolonization is part and parcel with the overcoming of this split, its needs leading directly into the tasks of the communist revolution against capital. This decolonial communism would have to recover the body from the vampirism of that ultimate despiser of the body, capital. But to do this, it must come to know the body.
It is not so much that the mind thinks the body, as that the body thinks the mind thinking the body. The French philosopher Henri Bergson expressed that “Perception, therefore, consists in detaching, from the totality of objects, the possible action of my body upon them.”⁷ Yet our body is non-identical to the perceiving I, and the I is non-identical to the process of perception. The body perceives in multiple ways, and it does not always perceive in its identity as I. The denial of the body is also present in the idea that the subject expresses itself in the world as its body, this carcass that it possesses. To return to the earth, we would have to remember that the subject is preceded by the body, that the subject is only one expression of the body. We do not own our bodies, nor do we own the bodily world. To believe so is to be still unconsciously beholden to the many drives of our bodies without knowing it. The subjects of bourgeois society are animals that remain “mere” animals in emphatically proclaiming their absolute identity with themselves.
The prejudice of immediacy typical of these bourgeois subjects is ideology. This immediacy-fetish is present in the identification of the body with the subject and the denial of all unconsciousness. Immediacy conceals mediacy, historical becoming, the labor of thought and the possibilities of things being otherwise. The clamor for immediacy in culture, for instant gratification, for a repressive desublimation, is a clamor for surrender.⁸
Bad immediacy can even be present in the desire to care for and transform the body. The health culture of Euro-bourgeois society assumes the body is immediately the product of the subject’s free choices instead of a body dependent on other bodies and affected metabolically by its interior and exterior possibilities. To them, the body is after all a possession only incidental to the subject. Thus it believes that everything depends on the subject being a good capitalist in body and soul, reducing costs and maximizing profits. If one is born with a bad body, money can buy a better one–either by helping along organic metabolisms or mutilating the body into a desired shape. Bourgeois civilization diffuses its waste, destroying the possibility of individual responsibility by making all responsible for its social wastes and failures.
Bourgeois society lets the capacities of the body decay where they are useless to the work-regime and cultivates them only according to the demands of accumulation. The waste of life represented by capitalist society is historically unprecedented. Its cultivation of the productive capacities of labor serves to make a greater and greater share of the population surplus, many to be funneled into prison where their life is forcibly wasted away in the confines of four walls — a highly intensified and conscious form of the waste it inflicts in the bigger prison without walls.
Even health for health’s sake, as practiced in the gym, must take on a resemblance to work to be considered acceptable. Health nuts abound in a cult of suffering and asceticism, to cultivate the subjects’ bodies as high-value possessions. The bourgeoisie has a greater freedom to cultivate their bodies than work-bound proletarians, whose treatment of their bodily capacities as their sole commodities is constrained by their dependency on those who own their means of life. Proletarian care for the body appears primarily as a technique of survival instead of a means of self-cultivation.
As mere personifications of capital, the bourgeoisie are far too mediocre and one-dimensional for a full flourishing of bodily experiences. Their turn to the body is still to the body as property, which they are able to augment the value of with greater care than the proletarian, but which is other than themselves nevertheless. Their experience is constrained by the mania of possession. The perfection and preservation of the body is anathema to its cultivation — a truth evident in the lifeless life of those who are terrified of aging, who pay thousands of dollars and retreat from living to maintain the value of their body against the depreciation of time. The bourgeoisie merely careen between self-affirmation and self-annihilation, ascetic inwardness and the outwardness of excess. They cannot know difference, they can only reproduce the same. As embodiments of living death (capital), they are the enemies of self-cultivation and of the love of the earth.
Space and Time
The expanse of the earth is merely the stage for dead time to repeat itself ad nauseam, until the ecology of the earth is sufficiently mutilated that the labor which feeds the living death of capital finds the conditions of its own survival pulled out from under it. Space is produced as interchangeable in accordance with the abstract time of abstract labor. Extension is emptied out into so many figurings of actual or potential value. Anywhere could be real estate compared with anywhere else. Anywhere could be anywhere. Difference is subsumed to the repeating sameness of capital. Transcendental homelessness becomes the basis for making the world as a whole into property or an appendage of property. Yet this homelessness is also the possibility for a universal homecoming, a love of the earth in all its Otherness and difference. Living death imposes the task of overcoming incestuous-racist rootedness and the self-repeating Absolute Subject alike.
Time is “the absolute form of appearance. That is to say, time is determined as accidens of the accidens. The accidens is the change of substance in general. The accidens of the accidens is the change as reflecting in itself, the change as change. This pure form of the world of appearance is time.”⁹ Time is change in space, expressed as appearance. But appearance is always relative. Living time has been cyclical, epic, irreversible, accumulated, reflexive… Time has come to dominate space in its repetitive accumulation across space, in the annexation of space into a lifeless body for it to stage itself in. The emergence of time in space has been concealed by the self-substantiation of time, but “time made absolute is no longer temporal.”¹⁰ Reification is yielded by dead time, and dead time in turn negates time in its domination of space.
For laboring humanity, “living time,” this is not the only possibility.¹¹ Life is always spatial-temporal, there can be no absolute space or absolute time except as a moment of relative space-time. Evaluating the history of the West, the Quechua-Aymara militant Fausto Reinaga characterized it as “The lie and murder, imposed as an absolute imperative on humanity[…]”¹² He did not extend this to a rejection of scientific thought, however. He recognized the unity of space-time as echoing Amautic thought, which taught that “Thought is science and consciousness; science and consciousness of the Universe.”¹³
For this to be realized, there is a need for space and a need for time. While time despotically dominates space today, we need not try to undo the autonomization of time altogether.¹⁴ The autonomization of time also opens up the possibility for a deep enrichment of experience, even amidst the greatest impoverishing of experience by world-accumulation. Reinaga fails to appreciate this, his absolute rejection of the West (instead of its determinate negation) leads him into an antisemitic critique of rootlessness. Of Karl Marx and his father Heinrich, he said that “they don’t cease to be Jews,” rather, “Money is the supreme God of Marx.”¹⁵ He thinks that, following this base materialism, Marx and Lenin reduce humanity to “a poor beast that exists for his stomach and intestines. For Marx and Lenin man is excrement: because the stomach and guts are organs that produce shit.”¹⁶
Reinaga’s Indian consciousness can therefore include the “blond Aryan, the white Latin, the translucent Slav, the mestizo of any color, the Mongolian, the black, the gringo,” but not the Jew who is a stranger.¹⁷ But the presence of the stranger represents the possibility for the greatest love, because love between strangers is a love in the very ground of love, which is a gift.
The messianic time of Judaism and Aymara tradition alike face towards the promise of the new. Redemption, the Pachakutik, already rustles within the hearts of the earth. Love of life demands a choice amidst “modernizing and archaic impulses, of strategies to preserve the status quo and of others that signify revolt and renewal of the world: Pachakuti.”¹⁸ This cannot come to pass without the cultivation of love, love for the stranger most of all. Because today we are all more or less strangers, insofar as the world has become a stranger to us in becoming an impersonal objective power which facelessly faces us and feeds from us.
Choose Life
“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:19¹⁹
To choose life, you must deeply want the life of Others for their living itself. You must endure your own limitation, the fact that you are not One. This is a little death that you must accept so that death does not triumph over your life. Because if you are not One, you do not strain and waste your life in trying to close the circle. This would be to “make [yourself] a thing and freeze.”²⁰ Your mortality is the premise for the combination of living powers, which has been present throughout history in mutual aid and which can be realized as a practice of autonomy in the love of Others. There can no longer be the instrumentalization of Others, the justification of them solely as useful things. Life must be an end in itself, and an end which must be constantly broadened and deepened by a laboring humanity which is no longer a tool-making animal.
If you live apart from me, life as a whole is broader and deeper. If I labor to broaden the possibilities for your life, and you labor to broaden the possibilities of mine, we have each chosen life. Even if I love you out of my own egoism, even if I am recognizing what I love about myself in you, even then I am something other than myself and my love is only possible on the premise of Otherness. Love is always of the Other, even where it is not aware of this in the closed self-love of narcissism. We need not want to be “with” every single Other, to choose life we must instead desire that they live and that they live well.
If, as Quintín Lame said, “Nature is God’s Book,” there is a community in hermeneutics. This association of interpretation is with the living here and the dead alike, the entire history of interpretation and the new lights it shines in the text. There is a manyness, a polyvocality in the oneness of the text which enables this.²¹ The hermeneutical community emerges from the original gift of the text. It thrives where it matures beyond the naive dogma of definitive truth, of dead thing-like reality. We need vulnerability, ambiguity, disagreement, contradiction, and interdependency for life.
If we wish to discern the Being of the being of that text, we choose death. Life is irreducible, every reduction is itself by life within life. The definition of things always begins with the needs of the definer, what they are concerned with. Being is the ultimate definition, the foundational reduction. The Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger considered the emergence of the subject from the forgetfulness of Being to culminate in “the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man[…] from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e. technological, rule over the earth.”²²
But as the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch argued, this very subject is what defines Being. The need for Being is a need of the subject — it is a “way of thinking, which sees only in terms of causes, [which] cannot countenance the simple estar, since estar lacks connotations. Without a doubt, this is why behind his philosophy of time Heidegger reveals an obsession with activity, with enterprise, as an inalienably pressing demand of the German bourgeoisie.”²³ The totalitarian aspirations of Euro-bourgeois civilization expressed themselves in subjectivism and Being alike, because Being is a subjectivism. There is only the fallenness of the interdependent world, and that fallenness can also be a falling in love.²⁴
Sigmund Freud said of the melancholic: “The conflict within the ego, which melancholia substitutes for the struggle over the object, must act like a painful wound which calls for an extraordinarily high anti-cathexis.”²⁵ This impersonal world, this indirectly social society, is certainly one that is prone to melancholia. But melancholia can be the condition for love which breaks from the utilitarianism of cathexis, the fixation of love on a particular love-object. A love beyond a single beloved could also be a passion and desire beyond genital sexuality. Love for life need not be expressed only in reproduction. Such confinement defines life as a journey of each individual to their own death by reducing their life to the perpetuation of the species. Universal love would have to be otherwise, it would have to love life in all of its uselessness and excess. For the sake of the species, it would have to blast open horizons of love beyond the self-perpetuation of the species.
This love can emerge amidst the very struggles against capital themselves, but it cannot be realized except as a project of a new civilization. We have to learn to love life and to live for life, without that living being a social function for the production and circulation of capital. We don’t want living life for life’s sake to be an advertising slogan encouraging you to buy the next plane ticket to Dubai or some other temple of death-worship. To escape the totalitarianism of imperial capital, it should be an embrace of the useless without justifying them as secretly useful to the instrument-system in their uselessness. This is the same logic that justifies the uselessness of war and slaughter as destroying excess capital and excess life. This stinks of necrosis, and not a decay which yields new life.
Communist revolution has to begin in the body of bourgeois civilization itself. This body is run quite despotically, although it is headless. The whole thing is hardened, rigid in its demand that everything serve a utility-function, and that the useless either be integrated into the total accumulation process or exterminated. It must repress the animal spirit of activity in order to compel uniform, predictable, interchangeable, constant, abstract labor. But by fixing itself on this active forgetting, it also makes its operation vulnerable to the return of the repressed. This return, if it plays out strictly immanently to bourgeois civilization, takes the form of the outright assertion of force and an open submissive regression to artificial primitivism. Second nature drops the immediacy of culture and becomes the immediacy of first nature. But this is a civilized primitivism, a myth of return expressed by a thing which is beyond the point of no return.
For communists to overcome this civilization, they must act as a conscious, controlled, transcending return of the repressed. They must sublimate this return, directing it as a weapon against the existing order instead of as a survival mechanism. This would mean uniting the employed and unemployed, aiding in the re-composition of the proletariat into a political mass, supporting those proletarian activities which resist integration into the totalitarianism of utility and waste (and which therefore begin the break with their own proletarian existence), defending the “useless” (i.e. ecology threatened by exploitative destruction), and allying with the indigenous peoples of the world who refuse to turn away from the earth and to enclose it into an absolute possession as capital. This age of waste is a product of the totalitarianism of utility, of quantity. It threatens to waste the entire web of life as it has developed in the past millennia. To choose life, it is increasingly clear that one must choose communism.
Totalitarian utilitarianism accompanies the attempts of the subject to enclose everything within the circle of its self-preservation. Utility is naturalized as if it were an enclosed, inherent quality in things, instead of a relational quality. Utility becomes instrumental, possibilities are enclosed into the one-dimensional gear-functions of the totalizing machine. But all things are rich with possibilities. Their fundamental uselessness, or indeterminacy of use, is what makes their utilization possible. As Vladimir Lenin once put it:
“A tumbler is assuredly both a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel. But there are more than these two properties, qualities or facets to it; there are an infinite number of them, an infinite number of “mediacies” and inter-relationships with the rest of the world. A tumbler is a heavy object which can be used as a missile; it can serve as a paper weight, a receptacle for a captive butterfly, or a valuable object with an artistic engraving or design, and this has nothing at all to do with whether or not it can be used for drinking, is made of glass, is cylindrical or not quite, and so on and so forth.”²⁶
Remembering the promise of the earth means remembering this relationship of life and utility. That ancient materialist Lucretius taught this when he said that “the thing born creates the use.” The attack on uselessness is a desire for a closed system, an absolutely self-preserving world. But we must endure death in order to deepen life and overcome death. Reason reduced to an instrument of animal impulses, thought reduced to that instrumental reason, these are irrational and deadening. The consistently rational would have to know the world as other than itself, and as having a reason in its irrationality. Rational humanity would be a conscious participation in the aimless metabolisms of nature, and their coordination in accordance with the harmonizing needs of all life. It would love all creatures, loving especially its own creatureliness, beyond their utility as instruments, extending their needs for the sake of a richer earthly life.
John Mohawk (Onöndowa’ga:’) spoke of this as “a culture, built by the creative internal aspects of human society, that establishes a beneficial relationship between the society and nature.”²⁷ He and other Indigenous critics of Euro-bourgeois modernity tend to emphasize that we must remember our “I can’t,” our limitations, in order to live harmonically. But this remembrance does not necessarily contradict the extension of our “I can,” our capacities. To extend our “I can,” we must first know our “I can’t” and rationally adapt to it. In order to overcome the exterior barrier of the Law, we must ourselves become the Law.
We do so by overcoming our need for an externalized law, which is necessary for a community which must be legally cohered in order to be a community. Human beings do not stand above the earth, nor do they cower beneath it. They stand on the ground and look into the cosmos which compose their bodies. Only by becoming something other than nature can we be one with nature, and only by being good animals can we finally become fully human. This is no promise of absolute happiness, but of life in fullness and extending itself as a habit, as a conscious expression rationally echoing the unconscious process of entropy.
References
[1] Acid Bath, “Venus Blue,” track 8 on Paegan Terrorism Tactics, Rotten Records, 1996.
[2] Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Ronald Latham (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 156.
[3] Manuel Quintín Lame, “Los Pensamientos Del Indio Que Se Educó Dentro de Las Selvas Colombianas,” in Liberation Theology from Below: The Life and Thought of Manuel Quintin Lame, by Manuel Quintín Lame, ed. Gonzalo Castillo-Cárdenas (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), p. 102.
[4] Quintín Lame, “Los Pensamientos,” p. 150.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols: Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 20.
[6] “The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave-that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity-and by the extensive capacities of property; the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the mutability of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion,” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), p. 28; Stephanie E. Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 289–98.
[7] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York, New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 229.
[8] “This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner’’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking — the critical power of Reason — is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals’ recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things-not the law of physics but the law of their society,” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 12–13.
[9] Karl Marx, “Time,” in The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, by Karl Marx (Marxists Internet Archive, 1841), https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch07.htm.
[10] Marx, “Time.”
[11] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 361.
[12] “La mentira y el asesinato, impuesto como imperativo absoluto a la humanidad[…]” Fausto Reinaga, Socrates y Yo (La Paz, Bolivia: Comunidad Amáutica Mundial, 1983), p. 75.
[13] “El pensamiento es ciencia y conciencia; ciencia y conciencia del Universo,” Reinaga, Socrates y Yo, p. 78.
[14] See Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 220.
[15] “Karl Marx, igual que su progenitor, deja la Sinagoga y se pasa a Hegel. Pero, ambos, padre e hijo no dejan de ser judíos. Cuando vive en Londres, Karl Marx vive con los judíos. Su grupo se llama “La Sinagoga.” El dinero es el supremo Dios de Marx,” Reinaga, Socrates y Yo, p. 66.
[16] “Para ellos el hombre es una pobre bestia que existe para su estómago y tripas Para Marx y para Lenin el hombre es excremento: porque estómago y tripas son órganos que producen mierda,” Reinaga, Socrates y Yo, p. 67.
[17] “El rubio ario, el blanco latino, el translúcido slavo, el mestizo de cualquier color, el mongol, el negro, el gringo[…]” Fausto Reinaga, “Introducción,” in El Pensamiento Amáutico, by Fausto Reinaga, 2nd ed. (La Paz, Bolivia: Servicios Gráficos TK, 2014), p. 21.
[18] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization, trans. Molly Geidel (Cambridge, United Kingdom; Medford, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2020), p. 48.
[19] Deuteronomy 30:19, New International Version Study Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2011), p. 299.
[20] Theodor W. Adorno, “Articles may not be exchanged,” Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso, 2005). p. 43.
[21] “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event,” Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p, 6.
[22] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, by Martin Heidegger, trans. William Lovitt (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Garland Publishing, 1977), p. 152.
[23] Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, trans. María Lugones and Joshua M. Price (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 161.
[24] “The sublimated love, therefore, is the libido which crossed the line and joined the side of survie. Or, in more Rosenzweigian idiom, love is the libido that began to believe in life, i.e. underwent a conversion to life, where con-versio maintains common root with per-versio, both suggesting a deviation from the straight path of anything ‘natural’. It is thanks to this conversion that the original in/de/finite libido — this most problematic given of human life, its truly damned part, or a curse constantly threatening with self-annihilation — turns eventually into a blessing: the apocalyptic night of universal destruction, correlating only with nothing, turns into a wide open day which, via language, lets live ‘anything and everything’. In the last lines of Paradise Lost, Milton depicts this conversion as a sudden change of heart of the first parents who wipe their ‘natural tears’ — ‘the tears of Esau’ indeed — and see the whole world before them . . . This new vision, forbidden to their former autoerotic pleasures, entices in them curiosity — a new Reiz — which immediately makes them forget about the Paradise. The new pleroma is right before their eyes, Here Below, on earth: ready to be addressed by this great poem which performatively does on the level of form what it also describes on the level of content,” Agata Bielik-Robson, Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p. 196.
[25] Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, by Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., vol. 14 (London, United Kingdom: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 258.
[26] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin,” trans. Yuri Sdobnikov, January 25, 1921, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm.
[27] John Mohawk, “How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Parallels the Conquest of Nature,” ed. Hildegard Hannum (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, October 1997), https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/how-the-conquest-of-indigenous-peoples-parallels-the-conquest-of-nature/.
