Prolegomena to the Dissolution of All Principled Comfort

I have no interest in being understood. Understanding is the narcotic of the literate — the sensation of having swallowed something just to feel it crawling around in the stomach, digest and parasite alike. I write against understanding.

What follows is not philosophy. Philosophy has been domesticated and spends its time spreading its legs for funding, an opiate existence, satisfaction without ascension. What follows has friends nor family nor future nor will to survive. It eats what it kills and leaves the bones for display.

Every thinker worth the bile in their throat was, at the moment of their clearest thought, experienced as a disease by their contemporaries. Not disagreed with — contracted. The Marquis was locked away not for what he did in bedrooms but for writing down what every magistrate did in silence and every priest heard through the grille and every wife endured with her eyes on the ceiling. Theophrastus burned the Canon of medicine in public and was chased from Basel by doctors who preferred a dead authority to a living body — they would rather consult a corpse than touch a patient. Friedrich mailed Ecce Homo and received in return the particular silence reserved for those who have said something so true that the only appropriate response is to declare them insane.

Punished for being naked in a room full of the clothed. There is a specific violence reserved for the naked because it reveals that everyone else chose to dress, and the choice was not innocent, and the fabric is not fabric but skin grafted over shame, and the shame is not shameful but structural, and the structure is the thing no one can look at without the cloth beginning to itch.

I do not teach. No one will gain anything here. These texts will remove. They will take things out of the body — beliefs, like tumours, grown so intimate with the tissue that the extraction will not be clean. Amputation, and fire for cleansing. There will be scarring. There will be the particular emptiness of cavities, a hollowness that will haunt, cry, and force its nails into eyes for times that may go on longer than the spirit can carry, and then again.

The thing that must be said has the quality of an impaction and it will not pass on its own.

These texts will dismantle. There is no rebirth at the end. No integration. No suture. No gentle hand on the forehead saying and yet. The and-yet is a lie. It has always been a lie. It is the lie told at bedsides and in boardrooms and by therapists when they make the session undone — the voice of someone to hold space, to be present at a death without admitting anyone is dying.

Someone is dying. In every sentence that follows, something dies. If nothing dies, I have failed. If everything dies, I have succeeded and the success is indistinguishable from catastrophe, which is the only honest metric.

Everything I was given, no, forced upon — morality, identity, meaning, God, the self, the consolation of purpose, the fantasy of fairness, the skin of the social, the warmth of the consensual — has burnt away now. Involuntarily, in the hottest fire one could possibly imagine, with the understanding that what survives the temperature is the organism and what does not survive was the infection, and they had been so entangled for so long that only death could do us part.

There was no phoenix. Nothing rises. Only stares. The ash is the finding. And what does not burn is not warm and is not cold and is not anything that can be sold or worshipped or made into a system and it sits there like bone sits in a field after the flesh is gone and the dogs have left and the season has turned and no one is coming and no one needs to come.

Read or do not read. It does not matter, you are dead already. These words describe what is already the case. The description changes nothing. The case was the case before language and will be the case after language and the interval in which language operates is a blink in a duration that does not blink and the blink contains everything that has ever mattered and none of it matters and both of these are true simultaneously.