I. Accounting

From American Psycho, the beginning: “I’m resourceful,” Price is saying. “I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.” Price calms down, continues to stare out the cab’s dirty window, probably at the word FEAR sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a McDonald’s on Fourth and Seventh. “I mean the fact remains that no one gives a shit about their work, everybody hates their job, I hate my job, you’ve told me you hate yours. What do I do? Go back to Los Angeles? Not an alternative. I didn’t transfer from UCLA to Stanford to put up with this. I mean am I alone in thinking we’re not making enough money?” Like in a movie another bus appears, another poster for Les Miserables replaces the word– not the same bus because someone has written the word DYKE over Eponine’s face. Tim blurts out, “I have a co-op here. I have a place in the Hamptons, for Christ sakes.”

“Parents, guy. It’s the parents’.”

“I’m buying it from them. Will you fucking turn this up?” he snaps but distractedly at the driver, the Crystals still blaring from the radio.

“It don’t go up no higher,” maybe the driver says.

Timothy ignores him and irritably continues. “I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs. Maybe the ODM III or ORC II dynamic tuning systems?” His voice softens here. “Either one. Hip my friend, very hip.”

He takes off the expensive-looking Walkman from around his neck, still complaining. “I hate to complain– I really do– about the trash, the garbage, the disease, about how filthy this city really is and you know and I know that it is a sty . . .” He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attache case he bought at D.F. Sanders. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet-size cordless portable folding Easa-phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta portable) and pulls out today’s newspaper. “In one issue– in one issue– let’s see here . . .strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally, Mafia boss wiped out, Nazis”– he flips through the pages excitedly–” baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots dropping like flies in the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera, kids who broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more Nazis . . .and the joke is, the punch line is, it’s all in this city– nowhere else, just here, it sucks, whoa wait, more Nazis, gridlock, gridlock, baby-sellers, black-market babies, AIDS babies, baby junkies, building collapses on baby, maniac baby, gridlock, bridge collapses–” His voice stops, he takes in a breath and then quietly says, his eyes fixed on a beggar at the corner of Second and Fifth, “That’s the twenty-fourth one I’ve seen today. I’ve kept count.” Then asks without looking over, “Why aren’t you wearing the worsted navy blue blazer with the gray pants?”

Dogen, in Shobogenzo: When all things are Buddha-teachings, then there is no delusion and enlightenment, there is cultivation of practice, there is birth, there is death, there are Buddhas, there are sentient beings. When myriad things are all not self, there is no delusion, no enlightenment, no Buddhas, no sentient beings, no birth, no death. Because the Buddha Way originally sprang forth from abundance and paucity, there is birth and death, delusion and enlightenment, sentient beings and Buddhas. Moreover, though this is so, flowers fall when we cling to them, and weeds only grow when we dislike them.

Henri Bergson, in Time and Free Will: In a word, we must distinguish between the unity which we think of and the unity which we set up as an object after having thought of it, as also between number in process of formation and number once formed.

II. Cynicism

American Psycho . . . where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or look or a gesture, or receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire? meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. . .

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy: We must now ask why species activity, its aim and its product, are essentially abortive. Why do they only exist as failed? The answer is simple if we remember that this activity aims to train reactive forces, to make them suitable for being acted, to make them active themselves. How could this project be viable without the power of affirming which constitutes becoming-active? Reactive forces, for their part, were able to find the ally that led them to victory — nihilism, the negative, the power of denying, the will to nothingness which forms a universal becoming-reactive. Separated from a power of affirming, active forces can, on their side, do nothing except also become reactive or turn against themselves. Their activity, their goal and their product are abortive for all time. They lack a will which goes beyond them, a quality capable of manifesting and bearing their superiority. Becoming-active only exists in and through the will to nothingness. An activity which does not raise itself to the powers of affirming, an activity which trusts only in the labor of the negative is destined to failure; in its very principle it turns into its opposite.

American Psycho: this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged. . .

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Dark world, growing desert: a solitary machine hums on the beach, an atomic factory installed in the desert. But if the body without organs is indeed this desert, it is as an indivisible, nodecomposible distance over which the schizo glides in order to be everywhere something real is produced, everywhere something real has been and will be produced.

III. Deserted-production

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

And as for Nancy . . . Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly:

“Shuttlecocks!”

And she repeated the word “shuttlecocks” three times. I know what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that those two women used him like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forward like a blooming parcel that someone didn’t want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. . . .

Julia Kristeva, ‘Treatment and its Discontents’: The subject exists only inasmuch as it identifies with an ideal other who is the speaking other, the other in so far as he speaks. A ghost, a symbolic formation beyond the mirror, this Other, who is indeed the size of a Master, is a magnet for identification because he is neither an object of need nor one of desire. The Ego Ideal includes the Ego on account of the love that this Ego has for it and thus unifies it, restrains its drives, turns it into a Subject. An Ego is a body to be put to death, or at least to be deferred, for the love of the Other and so that Myself can be. Love is a death sentence that causes me to be. When death, which is intrinsic to amorous passion, takes place in reality and carries away the body of one of the lovers, it is at its most unbearable; the surviving lover then realizes the abyss that separates imaginary death that he experienced in his passion from the relentless reality from which love had forever set him apart: saved…

(Good Soldier cont’d)

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like society much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward’s gun room, all day and all night in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out.

American Psycho: “But we can’t ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.”

I finish my drink. The table sits facing me in total silence. Courtney’s smiling and seems pleased. Timothy just shakes his head in bemused disbelief. Evelyn is completely unsatisfied by the turn of the conversation has taken and she stands, unsteadily, and asks if anyone would like desert.

Aristotle, in the Eudemian Ethics: Taking note of these things, everyone who can live according to his own choice should adopt some goal for the fine life, whether it be honor or reputation or wealth or cultivation – an aim that he will have in view in all his actions: for, not to have ordered one’s life in relation to some end is a mark of extreme folly. But, above all, and before everything else, he should settle in his own mind, –neither in a hurried nor a dilatory manner– in which human thing living well consists, and what those things are without which it cannot belong to human beings.

D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

“Do you like to be a soldier?” she asked.

“I am not exactly a soldier,” he replied.

“But you only do things for wars,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to go to war?”

“I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would want to go.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883): A thousand goals have there been so far, for there have been a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no gaol [sic].

But tell me, my brothers, if humanity still lacks a goal– is humanity not still lacking too?

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Lawrence, The Rainbow continued:

“Why is fighting more serious than anything else?” she asked.

“You either kill or get killed – and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.”

“But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,” she said.

He was silenced for a moment.

“But the result matters,” he said. “It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.”

“Not to you – nor me – we don’t care about Khartoum.”

“You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.”

“I don’t – but we’ve got to back up those who do.”

“Why have we?”

“Where is the nation if we don’t?”

Kafka, ‘The Great Wall of China’ (1917): Now I have no wish whatever to represent this attitude as a virtue; on the contrary. True, the essential responsibility for it lies with the government, which in the most ancient empire in the world has not yet succeeded in developing, or has neglected to develop, the institution of the empire to such precision that its workings extend directly and unceasingly to the farthest frontiers of the land. On the other hand, however, there is also involved a certain feebleness of faith and imaginative power on the part of the people, that prevents them from raising the empire out of its stagnation in Peking and clasping it in all its palpable living reality to their own breasts, which yet desire nothing better than but once to feel that touch and then to die.

Lawrence, The Rainbow continued: “What do you fight for, really?”

“I would fight for the nation.”

“For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?”

“I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.”

“But when it didn’t need your services in particular – when there is no fighting? What would you do then?”

He was irritated.

“I would do what everybody else does.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.”

IV. Becoming-[full]

Dr. Schreber, in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness: The month of November 1895 marks an important time in the history of my life and in particular in my own ideas of the possible shaping of my future. I remember the period distinctly; it coincided with a number of beautiful autumn days when there was a heavy morning mist on the Elbe. During that time the signs of a transformation into a woman became so marked on my body, that I could no longer ignore the imminent goal at which the whole development was aiming. In the immediately preceding nights my male sexual organ might actually have been retracted had I not resolutely set my will against it, still following the stirring of my sense of manly honor; so near completion was the miracle. Soul-voluptuousness had become so strong that I myself received the impression of a female body, first on my arms and hands, later on my legs, bosom, buttocks and other parts of my body. I will discuss details in the next chapter.

D.H. Lawrence in The Rainbow: He went about at his duties, giving himself up to them. At the bottom of his heart his self, the soul that aspired and had true hope of self-effectuation lay as dead, still-born, a dead weight in his womb. Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all. The Whole mattered – but the unit, the person, had no importance, except as he represented the Whole.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science 356: The result is rather strange. As they attain a more advanced age, almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role; they become the victims of their own “good performance”; they themselves have forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of them when the question of their “vocation” was decided– and how many other roles they might perhaps have been able to play; for now it is too late. Considered more deeply, the role has actually become character; and art, nature.

…the faith of the Americans today that is more and more becoming the European faith as well: The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art.

It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great “architects”: The strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organization become scarce: who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion? For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them– namely, the faith that man has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end he must be solid first of all, a “stone”– and above all not an actor!

Schreber, Memoirs continued from above: Several days’ observations of these events sufficed to change the direction of my will completely. Until then I still considered it possible that, should my life not have fallen victim to one of the innumerable menacing miracles before, it would eventually be necessary for me to end it by suicide; apart from suicide the only possibility appeared to be some other horrible end for me, of a kind unknown among human beings. But now I could see beyond doubt that the Order of the World imperiously demanded my unmanning, whether I personally liked it or not, and that therefore it was common sense that nothing was left to me but reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman. Nothing of course could be envisaged as a further consequence of unmanning but fertilization by divine rays for the purpose of creating new human beings. My change of will was facilitated by my not believing at that time that apart from myself a real mankind existed; on the contrary I thought all the human shapes I saw were only “fleeting and improvised,” so there could be no question of any ignominy being attached to unmanning.

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy: We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it takes to make an affirmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say there is only becoming. No doubt it is also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming.

V. The One-for-Several Goal (or, desiring-subjectivity)

Lotus Sutra: The Buddhas, the World-honored Ones, wish to open the door of Buddha wisdom to all living beings, to allow them to attain purity. That is why they appear in the world. They wish to show the Buddha wisdom to living beings, and therefore they appear in the world. They wish to cause living beings to awaken to the Buddha wisdom, and therefore they appear in the world. They wish to seduce living beings to enter the path of Buddha wisdom and therefore they appear in the world. Shariputra, this is the one great reason for which the Buddhas appear in the world.

Schreber, Memoirs: I believe I may say that at that time and at that time only, I saw God’s omnipotence in its complete purity. During the night – and as far as I can remember in one single night – the lower God (Ariman) appeared. The radiant picture of his rays became visible to my inner eye (compare footnote 61), while I was lying in bed not sleeping but awake- that is to say he was reflected on my inner nervous system. Simultaneously I heard his voice; but it was not a soft whisper – as the talk of the voices always was before and after that time – it resounded in a mighty bass as if directly in front of my bedroom windows. The impression was intense, so that anybody not hardened to terrifying miraculous impressions as I was, would have been shaken to the core. Also what was spoken did not sound friendly by any means: everything seemed calculated to instill fright and terror into me and the word “wretch” was frequently heard – an expression quite common in the basic language to denote a human being destined to be destroyed by God and to feel God’s power and wrath. Yet everything that was spoken was genuine, not phrases learnt by rote as they later were, but the immediate expression of true feeling.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy: This offer is the opening of the libidinal band, and it is this opening, this instantaneous extension and invention that the power-broker, the pimp, and the politician refuse themselves.

Lawrence, The Rainbow: Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before germination, silenced after death. Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transitation of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts, the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will embrace again.

Here in the church, “before” and “after” were folded together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his consummation.

Lyotard continued: We desire the atheism of the libidinal band, and if it cannot be critical, that is to say religious, then it must be pagan, that is to say affirmative.

Lawrence resumed: The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the ultimate confine. His soul would have liked it to be so: here, here is all, complete, eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no illusion of time, of night and day passing by, but only perfectly proportioned space and movement clinching and renewing, and passion surging its way in great waves to the altar, recurrence of ecstasy.

Lyotard continued: …all these situations, in the life (ever since) called the everyday (as if there were another) on the one hand were valued as intensities, could not decay into ‘utilities’, and on the other hand did not have to be connected by a paradoxical, dialectical, arbitrary, terrorist link to an absent Law or Meaning, but on the contrary, being self-sufficient in their self-assertion, never failed to be affirmed as singularities.

Lawrence resumed: So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite in a great mass, triumphant and flinging its own course. She wanted to get out of this fixed, leaping, forward-travelling movement —

Welcome: Go forward don’t go back, go for forth don’t go back.

— to rise from it as a bird rises with wet, limp feet from the sea, to lift herself as a bird lifts its breast and thrusts its body from the pulse and heave of a sea that bears it forward to an unwilling conclusion, tear herself away like a bird on wings, and in the open space where there is clarity, rise up above the fixed, surcharged motion, a separate speck that hangs suspended, moves this way and that, seeing and answering before it sinks again, having chosen or found the direction in which it shall be carried forward. —

Dogen: In this way, though the bounds are unfailingly reached everywhere and tread upon in every single place, the bird would instantly die if it left the sky and the fish would instantly die if it left the water. Obviously, water is life; obviously the sky is life. There is bird being life. There is fish being life. There is life being bird, there is life being fish. There must be progress beyond this – there is cultivation and realization, the existence of the living one being like this.

— And it was as if she must grasp at something, as if her wings were too weak to lift her straight off the heaving motion. So she caught sight of the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested. —

Aristotle, Categories: Animal is predicated of man and therefore also of the individual man.

—These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church. “However much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in,” the little faces mocked.”

Apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very littleness.

“Oh look!” cried Anna, “Oh look, how adorable, the faces! Look at her.”

Brangwen looked unwillingly. This was the voice of the serpent in his Eden.

Welcome: From it, to me, to you, please.

VI. Anti-Thanatos

American Psycho . . . and in the southern deserts of Sudan the heat rises in airless waves, thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, roam throughout the vast bushland, desperately seeking food. Ravaged and starving, leaving a trail of dead, emaciated bodies, they eat weeds and leaves and . . . lily pads, stumbling from village to village, dying slowly, inexorably… a gray morning in the miserable desert, grit flies through the air, a child with a face like a black moon lies in the sand, scratching at his throat, cones of dust rising, flying across the land like whirling tops, no one can see the sun, the child is covered with sand, almost dead, eyes unblinking, grateful (stop and imagine for an instant a world where someone is grateful for something) none of the haggard pay attention as they file by, dazed and in pain (no? there is one who pays attention, who notices the boy’s agony and smiles, as if holding a secret), the boy opens and closes his cracked, chapped mouth soundlessly, there is a school bus in the distance somewhere and somewhere else, above that, in space, a spirit rises, a door opens, it asks “Why?”? a home for the dead, an infinity, it hangs in a void, time limps by, love and sadness rush through the boy. . .

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Death is felt rising from within and desire itself becomes the death instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry the seeds of a new life.

The Rainbow: But he did not consider the soul of the individual sufficiently important. He believed a man was important so far as he represented all humanity. … He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from many, and is not the many themselves.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in Multitude (2003): Political action aimed at transformation and liberation today can only be conducted on the basis of the multitude. To understand the concept of the multitude in its most general and abstract form, let us contrast it first with that of the people. The people is one. The population, of course, is composed of numerous different individuals and classes, but the people synthesizes or reduces these social differences into one identity. The multidude, by contrast, is not unified but remains plural and multiple. This is why, according to the dominant tradition of political philosophy, the people can rule as a sovereign power and multitude cannot. The multitude is composed of a set of singularities– and by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different. The component parts of the people are indifferent in their unity; they become an identity by negating or setting aside their differences. The plural singularities of the multitude thus stand in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people.

Dogen, in Shobogenzo: Acting on and witnessing myriad things with the burden of oneself is “delusion.” Acting on and witnessing oneself in the advent of myriad things is enlightenment.